Frye and the Word : Religious Contexts in the Writings of Northrop Frye [1 ed.] 9781442675117, 9780802088130

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FRYE AND THE WORD Religious Contexts in the Writings of Northrop Frye

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FRYE AND THE WORD Religious Contexts in the Writings of Northrop Fn/e

Edited by JEFFERY DONALDSON and

ALAN MENDELSON

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2004 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-8813-9

Printed on acid-free paper Frye Studies

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Frye and the Word : religious contexts in the writings of Northrop Frye / edited by Jeffery Donaldson and Alan Mendelson. (Frye studies) Papers presented at a conference held at McMaster University in May 2000. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-8813-9

1. Frye, Northrop, 1912-1991 - Religion. 2. Frye, Northrop, 1912-1991 - Criticism and interpretation. I. Donaldson, Jeffery, 1960II. Mendelson, Alan III. Series. PN75.F7F79 2003

801'.95'092

C2003-903213-2

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the DeGroote Trust for the Collected Works of Northrop Frye at McMaster University. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

A lattice shattered: the abounding light Pierced by Light: Your constantly begun Creature overthrown as you ignite The chosen living image of the sun: Before which summoned blinded, to suffice We must surpass Your Presence and foresee Our myriad, determinate, precise Accident of Man; that He should be The brightness of the shadow that You throw Reflected, in the mortal balance weighed: The least we understand, the most we know Of Human form Identified, displayed As metaphor, prophetic and divined: Mind being Metaphor: Man being Mind. 'Demand' by Richard Outram

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Contents

Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xiii Contributors xvii Introduction 3 JEFFERY DONALDSON

A SPIRAL CURRICULUM Sacred and Secular Scripture(s) in the Thought of Northrop Frye 23 ALVIN A. LEE

'In the Climates of the Mind': Frye's Career as a Spiral Curriculum 43 IMRE SALUSINSZKY

METAPHOR AND SPIRIT Frye's Double Vision: Metaphor and the Two Sources of Religion 59 GARRY SHERBERT

The Reality of the Created: From Deconstruction to Recreation 81 MICHAEL HAPPY

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Contents The Metaphysical Foundation of Frye's Monadology 97 NICHOLAS HALMI

Word, Flesh, Metaphor, and 'Something' of a Mystery in Words with Power 105 LEAH KNIGHT

MYTH AND TYPOLOGY The Flesh Made Word: Body and Spirit in the New Archetypology of Northrop Frye 123 GLEN ROBERT GILL

Northrop Frye between Archetype and Typology 137 ROBERT ALTER Northrop Frye: Typology and Gnosticism 151 LINDA MUNK

A Note on Frye and Philo: Philosophy and the Revealed Word 164 JOHANNES VAN NIE

THE CHURCH Frye and the Church 175 JEAN O'GRADY Northrop Frye and Catholicism 187 J. RUSSELL P E R K I N

APPLICATIONS Crazy Love: Frye, Breton, and the Erotic Imagination 205 JOSEPH ADAMSON

Toni Morrison: Re-Visionary Words with Power 235 JEAN W I L S O N

Contents Northrop Frye and the Poetry in Biblical Hermeneutics 251 J A M E S M. KEE

Oscar Wilde's De Profundis: Prison Letter as Myth 265 P E T E R G. C H R I S T E N S E N

The Seduction of Figaro: Gender and the Archetype of the Tricky Servant' 280 GRAHAM N. FORST

SPIRAL CURRICULA Frye's Fourth: The Substance of Things Hoped For, the Evidence of Things Not Seen' 293 IAN SINGER

The Ashes of Stars: Northrop Frye and the Trickster God 312 MICHAEL DOLZANI

Northrop Frye's 'Kook Books' and the Esoteric Tradition 329 ROBERT D. DENHAM

Index of Works by Northrop Frye 357 Index of Biblical Passages 361 Index of Names and Subjects 363

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Acknowledgments

Our work on this volume has been blessed with the interventions of a number of abiding spirits. We would first like to thank Joe Valaidum, whose interest in the religious contexts of Northrop Frye's writings gave us our original impetus. His energy and enthusiasm were instrumental in the design and execution of the conference Frye and the Word, held at McMaster University, Hamilton, in May 2000. Glen Gill, recent doctoral graduate in English, added his own deft touches towards the end of our work and kept us from steering into more than a few windmills. Our research assistant, Robert Virdis from McMaster's Department of Religious Studies, never failed to produce the required detail with dazzling dispatch. His careful eye and his editing, indexing, and research skills were indispensable in the preparation of our final manuscript. We are particularly grateful to Eileen Schuller, chair of the Department of Religious Studies, for her continued interest in our work, especially in making it possible for us to have a research assistant in the first place. Antoinette Somo and Clover Nixon, heroic administrators in the Department of English, were the keepers of our ledgers. Even more, they were the undisputed rulers of our Chronicles, who oversaw the kind of routine intrigue of who begat what and who slew whom that is the regular fare in the publication of modern books. Robert Denham, all-seeing sage of Frye studies, was our deus ex machina. His well-timed bolts of lightning clarity, when pleaded for, never failed to set our tangled plots back on course. Ron Schoeffel at the University of Toronto Press showed us the

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patience of Penelope. His genuine concern for our project was a great support to us. We are also indebted to John St James for his perspicuous copy-editing of the final manuscript. A special issue of the religious-studies journal Semeia (vol. 89: 'Northrop Frye and the Afterlife of the Word/ edited by James Kee and Adele Reinhartz), was devoted to a briefer, alternative selection of papers from the Frye and the Word conference. The editors were granted permission to include earlier versions of essays by three of our authors in their publication: James Kee, Michael Dolzani, and Robert Alter. We acknowledge with gratitude financial aid from a Canada Council Research Grant and funds from the DeGroote Trust for the Collected Works of Northrop Frye at McMaster University, truly manna from heaven. Finally, we thank Alvin Lee, editor-in-chief of the Frye Collected Works project; he is the creatus spiritus behind this volume. We would have dedicated this book to him, but for the fact that he is also represented within it. By rights, however, for all his contributions to the study of Northrop Frye, this book is Alvin's.

J.D. A.M.

Abbreviations

AC BG CP CR CW D DG DV EAC El FZ

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: House of Anansi, 1971. The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. Creation and Recreation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996 The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942-1955. Vol. 8 in Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Edited by Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture. Edited by James Polk. Toronto: House of Anansi, 1982. The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. The Eternal Act of Creation: Essays, 1979-1990. Edited by Robert D. Denham. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. The Educated Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963.

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FS GC LN

MC MM NFC NFCL NFF

NFHK

NFMC NFR NP OE RE RT

Abbreviations

Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic Press, 1982. Northrop f rye's Late Notebooks, 1982-1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World. Vols. 5 and 6 in Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Edited by Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. The Modern Century. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967. Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974-1988. Edited by Robert D. Denham. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990. Northrop Frye in Conversation. Interview with David Cayley. Concord, Ont.: House of Anansi, 1992. Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays. Edited by Robert D. Denham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Northrop Frye Fonds at the EJ. Pratt Library, Victoria University. The format 'NFF 42.16' indicates notebook and paragraph number; the format 'NFF 1991-28-4bb.24' indicates year of accession, box, file, and paragraph number. The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp. Vol. 1 (1932-5) and vol. 2 (1932-8) in Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Edited by Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Northrop Frye on Modern Culture. Vol. 11 in Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Edited by Jan Gorak. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Northrop Frye on Religion. Vol. 4 in Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Edited by Alvin A. Lee and Jean O'Grady. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965. On Education. Markham, Ont.: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1990. The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton's Epics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. Northrop Frye's Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts. Vol. 13 in Collected Works of Northrop Frye.

Abbreviations

RW SE SeS SM SR StS TEN WE WGS WP WTC

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Edited by Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Reading the World: Selected Writings, 1935-1976. Edited by Robert D. Denham. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Northrop Frye's Student Essays 1935-1938, Vol. 3 in Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Edited by Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. A Study of English Romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970. The 'Third Book' Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964-1972. Vol. 9 in Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Edited by Michael Dolzani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Northrop Frye's Writing on Education. Vol. 7 in Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Edited by Jean O'Grady and Goldwin French. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. A World in a Grain of Sand: Twenty-two Interviews with Northrop Frye. Edited by Robert D. Denham. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1990. The Well-Tempered Critic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.

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Contributors

Joseph Adamson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at McMaster University. He is the author of books on Frye and Melville. Robert Alter teaches Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written widely on the European and American novel, on modern Hebrew literature, and on literary aspects of the Bible. His most recent books are The David Story: A Translation with Commentary ofl and 2 Samuel, and Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture. Peter G. Christensen received a PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York, Binghamton. He is currently Assistant Professor of English at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee. His specialty is twentieth-century comparative literature and critical theory. Robert D. Denham is the John P. Fishwick Professor of English at Roanoke College. He is the author of Northrop Frye and Critical Method and Northrop Frye: An Annotated Bibliography, and has edited a dozen books by and about Frye. Denham is former director of English Programs for the Modern Language Association and director of the Association of Departments of English. Michael Dolzani is Professor of English at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. He is editor of the Third Book' notebooks in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye (UTP).

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Jeffery Donaldson teaches poetry, creative writing, and American literature in the English department at McMaster University. He has published two volumes of poetry, Once Out of Nature (McClelland and Stewart, 1991) and Waterglass (McGill-Queen's, 1999). Graham N. Forst has been an English instructor at Capilano College in Vancouver since 1974. He has published widely in literary theory, in such journals as Canadian Literature, Studies in Short Fiction, Mosaic, and Modern Language Quarterly. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled Frye Spiel, on Frye and the concept of free play. Glen Robert Gill is Assistant Professor of Global Literature and Culture at Troy State University, Alabama. He completed a dissertation at McMaster University entitled 'Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth/ He has published several articles on Frye's theories, as well as essays on mythology and American poetry. He is currently editing the volume of Northrop Frye's twentieth-century essays in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Nicholas Halmi is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. He has co-edited Coleridge's Opus Maximum (Princeton) and Coleridge's Poetry and Prose (Norton), and is editing Frye's Fearful Symmetry for the Collected Works. His current research centres on the concept of the symbol in German and English Romanticism. Michael Happy is a doctoral candidate in English at McMaster University, where he is working on Northrop Frye and Shakespeare. He has published two essays on Elizabeth Bishop and metaphor (in Divisions of the Heart: Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Memory and Place, and in The Art of Elizabeth Bishop) and has served as Research Assistant (1997-2002) to the Collected Works of Northrop Frye. James M. Kee is Associate Professor of English and former Associate Dean at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has published essays on Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats, and on the status of the religious within postmodern thought. He is especially interested in the ways in which metaphor and narrative function within religious discourse.

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Leah Knight is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. Alvin A. Lee is president emeritus and professor emeritus at McMaster University. He is widely known for his books on Old English poetry: The Guest-Hall of Eden: Four Essays on the Design of Old English Poetry (Yale University Press, 1972), and Gold-Hall and EarthDragon: 'Beowulf as Metaphor (University of Toronto Press, 1998); also for his work on Northrop Frye, especially as general editor of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Alan Mendelson teaches in the department of Religious Studies at McMaster University and is the author of Philo's Jewish Identity (Scholars Press, 1988). He has co-edited From Bergen-Belsen to Baghdad: The Letters of Alex Aronson (Mosaic Press, 1992), and is currently working on a study of genteel anti-Semitism in Canada. Linda Munk, Professor of English at the University of Toronto, is a Senior Fellow of Massey College, Toronto, and a member of the Society of Fellows of Durham University. Her published works include The Devil's Mousetrap: Redemption and Colonial American Literature (Oxford, 1997) and The Trivial Sublime: Theology and American Poetics (Macmillan, 1992). Jean O'Grady is associate editor of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye and co-editor of the volumes Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), Northrop Frye's Writings on Education (2000), and Northrop Frye on Canada (2003). She has published in the fields of Victorian studies and Canadian studies and is author of Margaret Addison: A Biography (McGill-Queen's, 2000). J. Russell Perkin teaches English at Saint Mary's University. He is the author of A Reception-History of George Eliot's Fiction (1990) and has published articles on Victorian fiction, literary theory, and contemporary Canadian fiction. He has a particular interest in the interrelationship of theology and literature. Imre Salusinszky was Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Newcastle, Australia, until January 2003,

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when he joined The Australian newspaper as an editorial writer. His publications include, as co-editor, Rereading Frye (UTP, 1999) and, as editor, the Oxford Book of Australian Essays (Oxford, 1997). His major research interests are Northrop Frye and Bob Dylan. Garry Sherbert is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Regina. He has just completed a book entitled Canadian Cultural Poesis; An Anthology. He is also co-editing, with Troni Grande, Shakespeare and the Renaissance for the Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Ian Singer is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Toronto. Johannes van Nie is an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada. His academic endeavours include a master's thesis on the Hebrew Bible and ongoing research toward a dissertation on the writings of Philo of Alexandria. Jean Wilson holds a cross-appointment in Comparative Literature and Modern Languages and Linguistics at McMaster University. She also teaches in McMaster's interdisciplinary Arts and Science Programme, and is actively involved in both Peace Studies and Women's Studies. Her publications include a particular focus on the German authors Heinrich von Kleist and Christa Wolf.

FRYE AND THE WORD Religious Contexts in the Writings of Northrop Frye

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Introduction JEFFERY DONALDSON

In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye defines the eiron figure, the selfdeprecator, as either the hero who is 'neutral and unformed in character' or the 'tricky slave' who is 'entrusted with hatching the schemes which bring about the hero's victory' (AC, 173). Frye goes on to claim in the Anatomy that the eiron 'is in fact the spirit of comedy, and the two clearest examples of the type in Shakespeare, Puck and Ariel, are both spiritual beings' (AC, 174). Frye does not go so far as to suggest that the eiron reaches its apotheosis, or fullest potential, in such spiritual figures, but the type was evidently worth his noting. There is indeed something about this kind of spirit that, like the eiron, is characteristically both beyond the pale and yet radically in situ, above the laws of time and space and yet subordinate to those whom it would nonetheless serve. In his writings on the Bible and literature spanning six decades, Northrop Frye was the reluctant hero and the benevolent trickster, the outsider who looked on the disciplines of religious and literary studies from an ironic perspective with the kind of critical detachment that gave him a unique view of whatever principles and assumptions operated within them. In biblical and religious studies, Frye's conception of the Bible as a secular, literary document with kerygmatic authority has left him in more or less the same position in relation to traditional biblical scholarship as he holds in literary studies, where he is marginalized for his identification with the spiritual dimension of imaginative and metaphoric language. Among a cast of religious thinkers, literary and cultural critics and theoreticians, biblical scholars, church leaders, and philosophers, Frye is the spirited, elusive, and winking eiron.

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Jeffery Donaldson

The title of this volume, Frye and the Word, presented itself to us more or less immediately as an obvious choice given our subject matter and its many areas of concern. Within the rubric of our subtitle, Religious Contexts in the Writings of Northrop Frye, we hoped for the kind of scholarly conversation and exchange that would reflect Frye's own sense that he was first and foremost a critic of language and literature, while representing, in all its richness, the spiritual dimension that arose naturally and inevitably from his literary-critical work as a plant from its seed. Frye saw this dehiscence as a natural expansion for any critic, whatever other language they might as individual thinkers use to represent it: Critical theory today converges on what were originally Biblical questions, and the Bible is still the clearest example to use in explaining them. For critical theory there seems to be a point where a change of elements from 'words' to 'Word' takes place. This Word is not the Bible or the person of Christ, for, say, Mallarme or Lacan, nor does it have to be those things for anyone. But apparently it does have to be there. (WP, 132)

This volume, then, is about Frye's own engagement with words and the Word, with secular and sacred scripture. By extension it is also about the identity of Frye's own writing as secular and sacred scripture, as literary criticism and spiritual vision. In short, Frye and the Word is about a unifying principle that lies often unrecognized, if everywhere manifest, in the spiritual dimensions of language. Frye wrote in the preface to his final book The Double Vision that his ideas 'should not be read as proceeding from a judgment seat of final conviction, but from a rest stop on a pilgrimage, however near the pilgrimage may now be to its close' (DV, xvii-xviii): a prophetic and deeply moving last word, given its appearance in what, as a preface, would have been the last part written of his last book, and of course given his own death six months after its composition. At the opposite end of the book, in its concluding sentence, Frye speaks of a rebirth and resurrection into new identities: [W]e are not continuous identities; we have had many identities, as babies, as boys and girls, and so on through life, and when we pass through or 'outgrow' these identities they return to their source ... In the Double Vision of a spiritual and a physical world simultaneously present, every moment we have lived through we have also died out of into another

Introduction

5

order. Our life in the resurrection, then, is already here, and waiting to be recognized. (DV, 84-5)

Frye was a very careful assembler of evidences. His structural designs grew out of spatial metaphors - architectural scaffoldings, memory theatres, mirrors, spirals and other vertical tropes and axes mundi. He used these designs as guidelines or maps of critical approach or response. We ought to notice then that in The Double Vision Frye talks in the beginning about an end, and at the end about a beginning. The chiasmus invites us to think of The Double Vision itself as possessing a kind of telos. What lies between the 'close' of the preface and the resurrecting recognitions of the conclusion, of course, is the body of a last book, the body of a journey and the quiet of a final rest stop. Its mythic arc carries us past one kind of ending (the ending that we start with) through to revealed transformations, and so forms in a sense the start of its own afterlife as Frye personally grappled towards its conclusions. The kind of resurrection Frye looks towards at the end of The Double Vision suggests an ongoing personal journey into another order of identity after we die. That identity is the manifest reality and ongoing work of our personal creative acts, and it persists, after we are changed into them in the twinkling of an eye (1 Cor. 15:52), in something like a time and place. In the spirit of Frye's own continuing journey, this volume should not be considered 'as proceeding from a judgment seat of final conviction, but from a rest stop on a pilgrimage.' That pilgrimage is partly our own, as individual writers and critics, but also the continuing pilgrimage of Frye's own writing and spirit as they journey among us. In May 2000, McMaster University played host to the international conference 'Frye and the Word: Religious Contexts in the Criticism of Northrop Frye,' a gathering of some 90 registrants and 35 speakers. Sponsored by the departments of English and Religious Studies, the conference was the natural product of a hive of critical and creative activity that has flourished for the past decade at McMaster surrounding the work and thought of Northrop Frye. Most of the essays collected in this volume were first presented at the McMaster conference.1 Contributors were invited to compose their presentations with this volume in mind, and after the event were given ample opportunity to revise and expand their thoughts in response to the conversations, letters, and exchanges that were shared. What has come to us out of our original call for papers, out of the conference itself, and out of the

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revision process that followed is a collection of essays focused on these principal elements in Frye's religious thought: metaphor and spirit, myth and typology, kerygma, the four primary concerns, and the application of these in a variety of literary and social contexts. With a few exceptions, the texts that lie before us for focused consideration are Frye's three late books on the Bible and religion: The Great Code (1983), Words with Power (1990), and The Double Vision (1991). The Collected Works of Northrop Frye project, along with the McMaster activities and the work of all the presenters at the conference, lend convincing support to the claims of David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky, in Rereading Frye, that Frye's writings and thought have not passed under the wheel of changing critical fortunes.2 His work has continued to appeal to a responsive side of readers and theorists of language and literature, spiritual thinkers, scholars of religion, social and cultural critics, politicians, poets and artists, scientists and physicians. If we are not to speak of a resurrection, this broad appeal certainly suggests the life of something that has never died or gone away. The religious contexts of Frye's criticism are virtually inexhaustible in their reach and implication. A casual survey of the essays included here would find captured in Frye's thought, and our response to it, the concerns of biblical language scholars, biblical typologists, exegetes of the Bible, systematic theologians, and other critics of religious mythography (Mercia Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Thomas Merton). Add to these the concerns of the Christian institutional churches including the United Church, those of Judaism and other non-Christian religions (and those interested in the relations between these systematically and historically); the concerns of other spiritual visionaries, of philosophers and scientists (Giambattista Vico, Alfred North Whitehead, Jakob Boehme), and of other thinkers on literature and religion (Harold Bloom, Robert Alter). In the secular context, there would be the concerns of language and metaphor theorists, critics of narrative form and of literary mimesis and fictional worlds, and critics of myth and its contentious relation to ideological and other current neo-Marxist literary-critical principles. Finally, there are the concerns of critics who write about the value and purpose of literature and of cultural and literary criticism in general. To initiate a conversation among all these thinkers, critics, theologians, and visionaries would be, in the contexts adduced, to provide in spatial terms an exchange of interpenetrating energies, and in temporal terms, once again, the start of a journey. The journey would not be limited to, but would be characterized and nourished by, a

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deeper awareness of the practical and theoretical importance of Frye's spiritual vision for both literary and religious studies. Frye's discomfort as a practising minister is well documented.3 His year of ministry in the prairies, by all biographical accounts, was a difficult venture, characterized by awkward visits to parishioner's homes, strained small talk, and a pervading sense of unbelonging. Entering academic life shortly thereafter, Frye kept up his ordination in the United Church of Canada, but chose to enact his own sense of ministry and pastoral care outside the institution of the church, within the university. Alvin Lee tells the story of lingering behind after one of Frye's classes and witnessing a somewhat embarrassing encounter with a student in need of pastoral counselling and advice. Blocking Frye's exit through the classroom door, the student proceeded to offer a detailed account of several family crises, asking at the end, 'Professor Frye, what do you think I should do?' Frye paused for a moment and then answered solemnly, 'I think you should go home.' The story bespeaks Frye's shyness as a casual conversationalist and as an intimate pastoral counsellor, but also his thoughtfulness (surely his advice was also part of a solution), and his particular manner of offering help from a perspective of personal detachment, even of gnomic insight. If the Word is embodied for Frye in an order of words, or the sacred in the secular, Frye's sense of ministry was effectively fulfilled in his classroom. There he offered not direct pastoral counselling or advice, but the imaginative and critical resources individuals would need, he believed, to deal effectively with personal crises. In the classroom, Frye could offer emotionally and spiritually intimate revelations through the detachments of hypothetical verbal structures and myths. His lecture style itself was somewhat in the manner of a didactic sermon. There was not necessarily a great deal of conversation in a typical lecture by Frye, but an opportunity for quiet reflection and questioning in the end. Frye often said that after he would ask, in concluding, if there were any questions about, say, his lecture on Paradise Lost, he could feel in the ensuing silence the spirit of Milton abiding in the room. While we have no paper included here on the precise subject of 'Northrop Frye's Classroom Ministry' (Jean O'Grady's broader essay on Frye and the United Church covers some of this ground), this volume provides an opportunity to reflect on the nature of Frye's teaching and ministering, and of the relations between these, from the perspective of his published work.4 Clearly, the Frye antitype would not find its comfortable type in

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either a traditional Christian minister or a conventional university professor. Frye's life and work really require that we redefine the nature and value of both of these vocations. In fact what we might end up with is something more like an avocation (in the sense of being 'called away'), a counter-intuitive career that, like a metaphor itself, suggests that one thing is another, a minister a teacher, while knowing full well at the same time that they are not. Alvin Lee makes the convincing case in his essay here that Frye began and ended his career as a spiritual visionary. The first hundred pages of Fearful Symmetry, Frye's first book, elucidate Blake's counterobjectivist, anti-Lockian vision of a reality that is made more real, not less, by imaginative thought. Frye argues that a tree 'is more real to the man who throws his entire imagination behind his perception than to the man who cautiously tries to prune away different characteristics from that imagination and isolate one. The more unified the perception, the more real the existence' (FS, 21). On the last page of his last book, once more, Frye speaks of 'the double vision of a spiritual and physical world' as 'simultaneously present' (DV, 85), where our lives in physical time and space are already part of a spiritual order that is the guaranteed inheritance of human consciousness and its acts of imagination. What came between these bookend revelations was a career in which Frye's unique celebrity was characterized, rightly or wrongly, by literary-critical anatomies, however tentative, imaginatively conceived and spiritually suggestive, of symbolic modes, mythic forms, and literary genres, with a trickle-down of his central observations into revealing treatments of individual writers and literary-historical periods. By the time Frye had brought renewed focus to his Blakean roots with the three late Bible books, his reputation was cast, particularly in North America, as a literary taxonomist, useful still for teaching undergraduates, but now without much critical currency or socio-political relevance. While The Great Code held its own on national best-seller lists, it came to be thought of as quite possibly the all-time best-selling unread book.5 When Words with Power and The Double Vision appeared within a year of each other almost a decade later, the critical culture was turned elsewhere. This was understandable given the ideological preoccupations of the day and critics' misapprehension of, or aversion to, what Frye was essentially getting at in these years. Now, after another ten years, the present volume offers a first book-length evaluation and revisiting of Frye's religious thought, and in particular a consideration of The

Introduction

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Great Code, Words with Power, and The Double Vision, along with the enormously fertile late notebooks (now published in the Collected Works project), books that arguably have not received the attention they warrant in literary, religious, and cultural studies. We can speak of any writer's work and its readers' engagement with it as akin to a journey: a path of work lies behind us, which we take in from our detached critical vantage point, and a path lies ahead of us, the direction of our own critical response as readers. Frye spoke of any written work as a type that calls to the antitype of our own critical response, which antitype in turn calls for a further response yet to be heard. As he reminds us, the antitype is by no means an improvement on the type, but a perception of it from a larger perspective. Further, the type is always present within the antitype, indwelling as it were, as end and origin, like the start of a string inside a ball. Leah Knight speaks of Frye's critical process as characterized in a significant way by the mythos of the romance quest. The romance quest is distinguished often by a sense at the end of the protagonist transcending the conditions that have tested him throughout. The hero is seen to contain those conditions because he is no longer subject to them, can see them for what they are. We have then a sense of two kinds of power. The protagonist's position of detachment - his standing above or beyond the trials that have tested him - suggests a power of expanded consciousness, an enlarged perspective. At the same time, the protagonist is not in the end shut out from that world, but recognizes that he contains it within himself, that is, that its powers were really his own all along. Everything that he sees and has moved beyond is in another sense still within him, an immanent and indwelling power that he has always embodied, realized, and made manifest.6 Consider the last sentence of each of Frye's last two books: After that, perhaps, the terrifying and welcome voice may begin, annihilating everything we thought we knew, and restoring everything we have never lost. (WP, 313) Our life in the resurrection, then, is already here, and waiting to be recognized. (DV, 85) What Frye seemed to be journeying towards in both volumes was an understanding that we already have within us what we seem to look

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for, already embody in our every creative act the life we seek. In the terrifying and welcome voice at the end of Words with Power, in the words of recognition at the end of The Double Vision, we discern the power of expanded consciousness, the ironic or detached, even concluding, perspective that makes such revelations possible. The papers of this volume circle around a spiritual vision that has to do at the same time with an immanence and with an expanding consciousness. These centripetal and centrifugal energies are abiding themes in Frye's secular and sacred writings; they may also characterize Frye's own critical process and so in turn the approach of those critics writing about Frye. In his essay in this volume, Imre Salusinszky speaks of the spiral curriculum of Frye's own career. The energies of a spiral curriculum ('a constant circling around the same thing, like a vine going up an elm' (LN, 89) would revolve within themselves and yet spin outwards and upwards, both holding to a centre and launching towards a periphery. The metaphor seemed to provide us with an indigenous organizing principle and frame for this volume as a whole. We can think of our contributors as ranged along a similar axis or spiral, as in our cover illustration of Blake's 'Jacob's Dream.' They are all journeying into different areas of religious and spiritual concern, upwards and downwards, outwards and inwards, passing or intersecting with others, all revealing the source and power of the various critical energies they embody. The first section of the volume, 'A Spiral Curriculum/ comprises two essays that reflect on this sense of a continuity and coherence in Frye's evolving and deepening critical concerns. These are the interpretive paths that are already laid down before us, Frye's own career (career and curriculum being effectively synonymous) unfolding now for us as much in space - as we look at it from here - as it does in time. Alvin Lee's essay is concerned with a sense of the existential relation between flesh and Word, secular and sacred, in Frye's writings. His survey of Frye's career as a spiritual thinker, from its roots in Fearful Symmetry to its end-at-the-beginning in The Double Vision, presents a Frye who at all stages of his life challenged readers to rethink, or recreate, their conceptions of the Bible, the nature of the religious and divine, and their notions of a religious life and activity. We are returned to what we might call the existential roots of the spiritual in the socalled secular word and in the dimensions of imaginative language. Again, in a similar manner, Imre Salusinszky's theory of Frye's spiral curriculum provides us with a suggestion of immanence in his work, the kind of indwelling that reveals you to be in the same place at every

Introduction

11

turn, even as you move ahead. Complementing Lee's notion of the existential roots of the spiritual in the secular word, Salusinszky shows that there is something of an existential foundation in finding the arc of Frye's career rooted in his own metaphors for literature, a vision of the horizon grounded, as it were, in the spectacles he uses to see. The next two sections, 'Metaphor and Spirit' and 'Myth and Typology,' reflect centripetally, we might say, on what Lee suggests are the secular, or existential, or linguistic roots of Frye's spiritual vision. Any discernment of continuity in Frye's overall thought, whatever critical or spiritual issues are adduced, would have to return at some point to the abiding principles in Frye of metaphor and myth, words in space and words in time. Frye writes in the The Great Code that 'the word "spiritually" (pneumatikos) means a good many things in the New Testament, but one thing that it must always centrally mean is "metaphorically"' (GC, 56). The hypothetical, counter-objectivist, or counter-logical initiative of metaphor, under the proposition that 'A is not A,' is closely associated in Frye with the word 'spirit,' which points to an identity or presence that in a similar way is both here and not here. The etymological association of spirit with breath, the act of inhaling and exhaling, further recalls the operandum of metaphor, with its principle of identity and difference, a taking into oneself what is not oneself. Garry Sherbert's essay on our experience of faith and our experience of the holy is grounded in a fresh and insightful examination of Frye's theory of metaphor. He construes this theory in relation to a host of contemporary and classical critical contexts, Longinus and Michel Deguy on the sublime, Jacques Derrida on testimony and the two sources of religion, and finally Paul Ricoeur on metaphor itself. Sherbert's analysis of metaphor and spirit in these terms shows Frye in an expanded context contributing to old and new debates on deconstruction and the sublime. Sherbert's essay pairs well with Michael Happy's careful delineation of the work of Derrida and Frye with regard to their respective theories of metaphor. Testing the two critics' shared interest in 'the radically metaphorical condition of language,' Happy walks the reader through a discursive analysis of Derrida's notion of an aporia in language as distinguished from Frye's thinking on language's kerygmatic dimension. Frye's work, he argues, aspires to an apocalyptic awareness of the recreative potential inherent in metaphoric language. Happy offers his account as a means of perceiving what might otherwise be seen as contending or opposed critical orientations as moving in the same current of recreative promise.

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Nicholas Halmi's examination of metaphor in Frye, and in particular of Frye's penchant for synecdoche, helps us to understand one aspect of Frye's critical procedure, the particular function of the monad (symbol) in his work, the relationship between the finite and the infinite in the text, or between ourselves and the world in which we walk. Leah Knight's essay on Frye's use of the word 'something' in the third chapter of Words with Power is similarly concerned with Frye's process of argument or revelation. Knight reflects on Frye's simultaneous deferral and suggestion of meaning in a word as vague as 'something,' a procedure that might recall the retreats and advances of an ironic romance quest or agon. Knight links word and flesh in the essay in such a way that Frye's critical process itself becomes an embodiment of 'the way.' In the religious context, Frye's theories of myth are closely related to his theories of biblical typology. Like myth (which by Frye's primary definition is simply 'words in sequence'), typology in imaginative literature concerns the relationship of words and figures in time, where an initial figure, or type, is seen to be addressed in the expanded context or dimension of an antitype that comes later, which antitype then becomes a type in relation to a further antitype, and so on in ever broadening contexts. The sequential relationship invokes a hypothetical narrative that expresses, among other things, a sense of expanded human possibility, a kind of momentum borne of our imaginative engagement with our primary concerns, desires, and anxieties. What is ultimately articulated in the relation of biblical types to antitypes is Heilsgeschichte, a visionary or apocalyptic history that reveals our genuine creative potential and that runs parallel and counter to the Weltgeschichte (or world history) that we remain mired in (WP, 101). Glen Gill's essay presents a comprehensive survey of Frye's mythical theoria across his career. Gill construes Frye's concept of primary concern in relation to his theory of archetypes, the four variations in Words with Power, and the kerygmatic dimension of the myths we live by. He deduces an existential basis to the four biblical variations and provides us with a vision of the physical and phenomenological purchase or authority of myth, and, by extension, of Frye's own myths, the critical flesh made kerygmatic word. Gill offers readers a sense of the lived existential or phenomenal weight of myth itself in its spiritual dimension. Robert Alter offers a perspective on Frye's typological approach to the Bible that will challenge Frye readers to come to terms with a

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13

contentious issue that has been taken up by biblical and literary scholars alike. The particulars of Frye's biblical typology are worth rehearsing here briefly. In Frye's view, Old Testament types are fulfilled, that is, introduced into a broader or containing context, in New Testament antitypes (for example, Christ as antitype to the type of Moses); the antitypes in turn become types in relation to the containing contexts of later antitypes that appear, say, in other sacred or secular literature, and so on. Our identification of relationships between antitypes and types is naturally determined by what similarities we find between the two figures in question. The typological narrative is thus a product of a metaphoric operation, the assertion of a relationship between two distinct entities. Where the observation of any identity in difference is concerned, one might debate the value or authority of the relationship according to whether one sees more identity between the two types, or more difference. Alter brings a unique perspective to Frye's typological vision with his extensive Hebrew scholarship. He returns us to etymological roots of central terms and to Jewish literary, cultural, and historical details and interpretive contexts that surround biblical 'lexical items.' He questions the typological relationships that Frye identifies, and thus the unity that Frye discerns (or points to in literature as discerned) between the Old and New Testaments. His argument may inspire Frye's readers to articulate how precisely identities discerned relate if at all to the differences adduced; they will need to consider how to make those identities palatable to those who find the differences paramount. 7 Linda Munk's essay on the second-century Christian Gnostic Marcion and his modernist German apologists Adolph von Harnack and Rudolf Bultmann approaches from an alternative perspective the issues of difference and identity that Alter analyses in Frye's typology. Munk looks at the debate in terms of the historical and critical contexts of Nazism - so dominant at the time Frye was writing Fearful Symmetry and developing his religious thinking in general. Certain German thinkers, Munk reminds us, were only too ready to dissociate Christianity from the Judaic religion they wished to isolate and vilify. These perspectives on Frye's typology are complemented by Johannes van Nie's note on Philo of Alexandria. Van Nie compares Frye's typological practice to Philo's seminal, yet what came to be seen as unorthodox, procedure. He construes the correspondences in such a way as to suggest Frye's importance as a corrective influence on two thousand years of traditional typological thinking.

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The next two sections of the volume, The Church' and 'Applications/ invite us to read centrifugally, as it were, in the myriad external biographical, literary, and historical contexts that informed Frye's thinking and our reception of it. Jean O'Grady's discussion of Frye's lovehate relationship with the United Church in particular gives us a sense of how Frye saw mansions in eternity built on the ruins of time. While he approached with ambivalence his involvement with religious institutions and other worldly organizations subject to ideological contention, he was a dedicated and active participant in Toronto's religious, cultural, and political communities. I said that Alter's paper introduces to this volume the alternative perspective of a different religion in the Judaeo-Christian tradition (the question of a Jewish perspective on Frye is also paramount in Linda Munk's and Hans van Nie's essays). Along a similar line, Russell Perkin discusses the often adversarial relationship between Frye, with his Protestant roots, and modern Catholicism. Perkin's discussion goes into revealing detail as to the particular aversions to Catholic doctrine and principle that Frye reveals in his notebooks, private writings, and book annotations. He also shows Frye to be indebted to a number of Catholic poets for important images and metaphors (for instance, of revelation), and finds correspondences and analogies between Frye and leading thinkers in the Catholic tradition such as Thomas Merton. Perkin's disappointment in Frye's personal attitude towards the Catholic Church as an institutional body is valuably measured against his own sense that Frye's vision also holds out the possibility of transcending differences between church denominations and religions themselves. We come next to a group of essays that offer suggestive applications of Frye's spiritual thought to practical literary studies. Frye once said that if he saw his work having any lasting value for readers it would be as a kind of lumber room to which people would go to find what they needed for their own building projects. While we have a sense of Frye here as a kind of workable material or tool to help in reconstructions of other writers, these essays offer more than just utility in that sense. What we find in each case, rather, is that our sense of Frye's own accomplishment - the nature of the working materials themselves - is revised or refined by the writers he illuminates. Joe Adamson's essay, in its consideration of Andre Breton's L'amourfou, returns us from a reading of details in Breton's work to an expanded sense of Frye's thought on the primary concern of love and sex along with its imaginative roots

Introduction

15

in important biblical archetypes. In a similar fashion, Jean Wilson's essay on Toni Morrison's Beloved reveals the inclusiveness of Frye's vision in identifying central shared concerns between his work and that of a contemporary Nobel laureate of African-American descent. Frye's desire 'to reverse the historical privileging of secondary, ideological concerns' (236), matches, Wilson argues, with Morrison's striking evocation of the four primary concerns, food, sex, property, and freedom of movement, in ways that suggest through both writers a revolution of consciousness in the power of words. Peter Christensen's discussion of Oscar Wilde's De Profundis and his discernment of the biblical phases of revelation in Wilde's prison journal seem particularly poignant given the setting of the book. When we think of Frye's strong admiration for Wilde's unorthodox but revolutionary criticism and social thought, and reflect on the terms and conditions of Wilde's imaginative leap in his prison cell, we catch a glimpse of a metaphoric dimension that includes both writers and carries them each to the other's limit. James Kee's essay on Dante, Langland, and Milton reminds us of the recreative power, not only of words, but also of Frye's speculative critical schemata. In returning us to some of the most significant visionaries in Western literature, Kee shows us the particular importance and value of Frye's unifying biblical hermeneutics as a preserving and expanding influence. Graham Forst's archetypal elaboration returns us to the figure with which I began this introduction, the tricky servant. His discussion of Figaro and many other figures from past and present literary and popular culture introduces for us the issue of gender identification and stereotyping into a study of archetypes. Further, Forst examines the deeper implications of the ironic vision that one would associate with Frye, the tricky servant, self-abolisher, and facilitator. He concludes by suggesting that there are analogous powers of imagination in the theatre of spirit and of art in the theatre of humanity. If the spiral curriculum can describe not only a Frye accomplishment that lies behind us but also a path yet to be taken in our response to it, it would seem appropriate to end with the same image, an antitype of new spiral curricula that answers to the spiral curriculum of Frye's own word. We conclude then with three papers that are suggestive of the outer orbit of Frye studies in the religious context, possible new directions of study to be enlarged upon from among the more esoteric or unusual pieces in the Frye spiritual puzzle. In Ian Singer's essay on Frye's many fourfold schema and the place of faith in his work and thought, the quality of immanence in Frye's

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writing becomes a genuine spiritual power. In his translation of God's name for himself ('I am that I am' becoming 'I will be what I will be'), we see how a name for a thing may become 'a process accomplishing itself (GC, 17). At this stage or limit, we achieve a glimpse of the larger spiritual dimension of Frye's critical process, his writing as an act of faith. Michael Dolzani's essay might make an interesting counterpart to Alvin Lee's opening address. Where Lee offers a sense of Frye throughout his career pushing at the limits of religious definition and convention, Dolzani shows Frye in his last years still struggling to remake himself as a spiritual thinker. In his discernment of an archetype that was very important to Frye in his late writings, Dolzani presents Frye wrestling with a trickster god in an agon that becomes a 'model for all reading, which is recreative' (316). To the extent that Frye himself embodies the qualities of a trickster god - ironic, detached, full of contraries, a man of many turnings - we see Frye wrestling with himself in late life, with his own demons and creative energy. In the concluding essay of the volume, Robert Denham examines the nature and intensity of this spiritual agon in Frye's very last writing. His exhaustive and comprehensive examination of Frye's reading in the esoteric tradition - his readings in the 'kook books' - provides us with a map of potential areas of further investigation into Frye's still evolving spirituality late in his life. Denham offers a very moving picture of Frye still pressing at the limits of where his verbal formulas could take him. There is in the end a spiritual quality in Frye's writing itself, evident in the notebooks and elsewhere, a sense of his words circling around a revelation that might be inhabited as an act of mind, if not entirely possessed or defined. Part of the power of his writing is that one is invited to enter into a process, a process of seeing that does not shut down on the details of what it is exactly that one sees. That process involves in part what we've described as an experience, evidently shared by the contributors of this volume, of immanence and expanding consciousness: immanence in the perception of Frye's process as partly accomplishing itself, and expanding consciousness in our perception of Frye's process as partly accomplished dialectically, that is, by or in reference to others in always expanding relations. Criticism most often speaks in one of two modes of language and address. Unlike literature, which is predominantly hypothetical and

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17

imaginative in nature (i.e., metaphoric, in Frye's terms), criticism addresses itself to a particular subject and attempts to illuminate it. While some criticism is primarily descriptive, ordering and organizing itself according to the order of the words it looks at (as, for instance, certain kinds of bibliographic and editorial criticism), most of criticism is metonymic by nature. In metonymic writing, the order of words themselves is put for the external object or idea. The critic organizes an argument or presentation, and the persuasiveness of that presentation depends at least as much on how well the words have been ordered as it does on any illumination of what is actually out there in the original subject. Indeed, in criticism, our evaluation of the critic's ordering of words effectively determines our assessment of their value in relation to its subject. Frye may be seen as a descriptive critic in the sense that he focuses on specific observed elements in literature, and to the extent that his emphasis is on revelation and recognition of what is there. Over and again his appeal - 'here is what I see' - is to his sense that the eye cannot help but see what is given to it. Frye is also a convincing metonymic critic to the extent that the relation between elements has much to do with how he perceives them, and to the extent that much depends on how the parts of his own presentation hold together. But Frye held a life-long aversion to making arguments in his writing, arguments that would largely stand or fall on the basis of how effectively or convincingly they are argued. Frye's continuing importance in literary criticism, like that of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and other creative critics, derives from his extension of critical writing into the rhetoric of metaphor. We are only just beginning to appreciate the rhetorical impact and function of Frye's assemblings of evidence, his avoidance of strict narrative argument in favour of non-linear metaphoric juxtapositions of observed details, his emphasis on showing rather than telling. Frye thought in terms of juxtaposed paragraphs containing what Hugh Kenner referred to as 'shocks of illumination.' They are linked not so much by a sense of logical continuity or cause-and-effect sequential argument (getting from a to z), but by a sense of unspoken, hypothetical, and potentially unlimited relationships between them. We are not meant so much to follow a Frye argument as immerse ourselves in it, reading all its parts in juxtaposed relation to all others, and feeling at every stage that we are, in prospect, at a point of revelation and can see everything at once. There is a manifest order of words in Frye's writing,

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and his presentations are rigorously organized, but their rhetorical persuasiveness is subordinated to their descriptive impetus on the one hand ('here is what I see') and to the sense of hypothetical and imaginative connection on the other, his gift for the associative leap. Frye's reputation as the Nobodaddy taxonomist of the literary cosmos is guaranteed, often to the annoyance of those who have read and examined further. It is not surprising to learn how many university instructors still use Frye for introductory courses in literary form, however much he may have drifted from their attention with the publication of his later work. Still, Frye's writing refuses to calcify in a manner one might expect of such an approach. It seems determined to lead itself from its own bondage. Indeed, with that metaphor in mind, one need not squint very hard to see Frye as a figure (if not a prophet) of exodus and revolution in literary and cultural criticism. If we felt licensed to make a claim for him as a literary/critical antitype to the biblical type of Moses, we could see his metaphoric critical procedures as setting out from a prospect of intensified awareness, spiritual immanence, and expanding consciousness into a space only glimpsed from the point of writing. Frye speaks in his late notebooks of trying to find the Verbal formulas' that would connect moments of revelation (LN, 364). The move forward had to do with discovering those new verbal formulas or new ways of making them. Frye suggests that the wandering in the wilderness of Exodus symbolizes, among other possibilities, a kind of crossing, or a desire to cross, from one way of saying things in the Bible to another: '[Tjhis is one of several features indicating that we are in a world transcending history, and that it is in the more poetic language of the prophets that the true or symbolic meaning of Egypt, wilderness and Promised Land emerges more clearly' (WP, 299). The passage from historical example or ideological argument to poetic language is a leaping clear that we perhaps never quite complete, though the leap itself, as the Bible shows, is always there to be made. I started out by saying that this volume is about Frye's own engagement with words and the Word, but is also by extension about the identity of Frye's own writing as secular and sacred scripture, literary criticism and spiritual vision. There is a leap to be made between Frye's subject matter and the identity or effect of his own writing style. It might not be appreciably different than another leap in his writing between the secular and the sacred itself. In either case, Frye's writing life itself proved to be a kind of journey between two ways of seeing

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and two ways of writing about what one sees: a journey that, as Alvin Lee shows, was no journey at all. The suggestion then, evident among many of these essays, is that we have still much to learn about how to approach Frye's work: One of the commonest experiences in reading is the sense of further discoveries to be made within the same structure of words. The feeling is approximately 'there is more to be got out of this/ or we may say, of something we particularly admire, that every time we read it we get something new out of it. This 'something new' is not something we have overlooked before, but may come rather from a new context in our experience. The implication is that when we start to read, some kind of dialectical process begins to unfold, so that any given understanding of what we read is one of a series of phases or stages of comprehension. (GC, 220) The consensus implicitly shared among the readers gathered here is that there is still more to be got out of Frye, and that the something new has significantly to do with the relations we come to perceive between the critical and spiritual meanings of his work. The more we are ready to respond to the spiritual, which is also to say metaphoric, dimension of his writing, the sooner we will move on to a new stage of critical reading experience. Perhaps at that point Frye's terrifying and welcome voice may be heard again, annihilating everything we thought we knew about his writing, and restoring everything in it that we have never lost. NOTES 1 A further selection of essays from the conference were collected in a special issue of Semeia, published by the Society of Biblical Literature: 'Northrop Frye and the Afterlife of the Word/ ed. James M. Kee, Semeia 89 (2002). 2 Imre Salusinszky and David Boyd, eds, Rereading Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), xix. 3 Cf. John Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography (Toronto: Random House, 1989), 97-9. 4 Margaret Atwood offers an account of Frye's teaching style in 'Northrop Frye Observed/ in Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Toronto: Anansi 1982), 398^06. 5 On the reception of The Great Code, see Ayre, Northrop Frye, 382^4.

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6 Often the hero of a romance is of mysterious origin, the secret preserved until some marking or identifier (like a birthmark), which he has borne all along, is at last revealed. We understand that the hero's powers were always with him and had only to be recognized. 7 James Kee's essay on 'Northrop Frye and the Poetry of Biblical Hermeneutics' is included in the Applications section, though his concluding comments relate usefully to the debate noted here. See in particular his discussion of how Frye's penchant for unities might relate to the 'heteroglossia' of alternative hermeneutical approaches to the Bible (p. 261).

A SPIRAL CURRICULUM

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Sacred and Secular Scripture(s) in the Thought of Northrop Frye ALVIN A. LEE

Est deus in nobis (Ovid, Fasti)

I. Questions Why were experienced readers of Frye's writings surprised by The Double Vision? Why were we unprepared for the identification of the imaginative (the metaphorical) and the spiritual that runs through this last, posthumous book? Why did Frye, the critic who characterized literature as mankind's revelation to man, who followed William Blake in identifying God and humanity, and who was at pains, especially in The Great Code, to identify the ubiquitous marks of fallible human involvement in the writing, editing, and compiling of the Bible, continue to speak and write of sacred literature or scripture as something distinguishable from secular literature? Why did one eminent Frye scholar, A.C. Hamilton, suggest that The Double Vision may be 'the traditional retraction of worldly vanity' at the end of Frye's life, as Frye looked back at how he had used his talents?1 Frye is the thinker and critic who said numerous times that the centre of the literary universe is whatever poem we happen to be reading, that each poem (work of literature) is a microcosm of all literature, a particular manifestation of the total order of words. In the Second Essay of Anatomy of Criticism, in the account of the fifth or anagogic phase of both literary meaning and criticism, he is emphatic that, in contrast to what happened in medieval interpretation, the anagogic perspective in

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modern criticism must be independent from the acceptance of any specific religion (118-28). In the same place, he cites from within modern literature examples of the anagogic perspective, in the writings of a poet who is explicitly religious (Eliot) and in the writings of several who explicitly are not (Rilke, Valery, Yeats, Joyce, and Thomas). He describes each of these writers as speaking 'from the circumference instead of from the centre of reality.' Similarly in criticism, the anagogic view 'leads to the conception of literature as existing in its own universe, no longer a commentary on life or reality, but containing life and reality in a system of verbal relationships' (AC, 122). If the anagogic critical perspective on the universe of literature is independent of loyalty to any specific religion, and so enables the visionary critic to see the literary macrocosm as containing all reality, including religions, why then, as critic, continue to distinguish between the religious or sacred and the secular? Did Frye, one of the early debunkers of the intentional fallacy of author-determined meanings in texts, nonetheless accept the distinction simply because some writers present themselves as religious and some do not? Did he, a self-avowed 'terminological buccaneer/ retain the distinction between sacred and secular writing because it is conventional in our culture, and so expedient? Is there in Frye's thought a final essential difference to be observed and understood between the two kinds of scripture? Maybe; maybe not. In this paper I delineate and explore what Frye means by these terms, and what, in the final Great Code, Words with Power, and Double Vision summa, is the place and significance of the conceptions of sacred and secular scripture.2 II. Creation and Recreation and The Double Vision In Creation and Recreation (1980), Frye says that there is no longer any functional place for a divine creation myth at the beginning of things, and that there is only human culture. This important little book, two years before The Great Code, is about the necessity of de-creating the sacred mythology traditionally seen in the Bible, with its conception of a divine Creator, and replacing this 'sacred' scripture with a new creation, including, as in The Great Code and Words with Power, recreations of the Bible itself by human readers, albeit readers transformed by the still-revelatory power of the biblical Word. The final section of The Double Vision (which I do not think is a retraction) is about the humanized God and, equally, the transformed or resurrected reader. Still, the

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redemptive vision articulated in this compact text derives as much, or more, from the host of poets and thinkers, most of them 'secular/ who are cited and used throughout its four essays as it does from the Bible and other 'sacred' texts. It looks as if in Frye's overall theoria of language and literature, all words ultimately may be construed as part of the Word. Why again, then, does he observe, right to the end, including on page 80 of The Double Vision, a distinction between sacred and secular? Part of the answer of why The Double Vision was surprising lies in the fact that the Frye of Anatomy of Criticism, still even now in the wider world the best-known Frye, was carrying out a task quite different from what he was doing in his late books. In that encyclopedic but fiercely and brilliantly symmetrical account of the processes and products of the literary universe, with its huge variety of energies and shapes, Frye is functioning as a literary critic; almost, we might say, as a creator of literary criticism as a broadly based, theoretically coherent, and intellectually conscious discipline. Now that we have read the later books as well, more than four decades later, we can see in Anatomy numerous intimations of them. In particular, we recognize the 'literature plus' interest and the broader perspective that will lead Frye to try to develop a theoria that will take in and comprehend the whole verbal or linguistic universe, of which literature is a major part, but only a part. The criticism Frye practises in his last years has as its subject not literature as a self-contained verbal universe containing life and reality but the larger verbal universe that includes literature, life, and reality. Those of us who were finding quite enough to occupy us in the spacious world of imaginative literature, and in the attempts of criticism to understand it, without too much concern for wider questions - not to say religious or spiritual ones - should have stopped reading Frye around 1975. Many people of course did precisely that, as post-structuralism and ideological criticisms, with their host of contemporary anxieties, crowded into the academies and threatened not only to side-line or banish literature but, along with it, any criticism like Frye's that insists on regarding literature itself as having central importance in human life. Frye, however, was never a slave of fashion and his quest was far from finished. III. fearful Symmetry I am going to go back chronologically now, and look at some key conceptions in Frye's first major publication, Fearful Symmetry (1947), to

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see how, if we had been really attentive, we would not have been surprised by The Double Vision nor, probably, by Words with Power, as that late big book began to sink into our minds. Since Words with Power had appeared only a few months before The Double Vision, it had not had time to do its work of penetration and preparation. We shall see, I think, that in Frye's last fifteen years there is an introduction of a somewhat different critical vocabulary and a substantial forward movement in his thought, including lots of descents and ascents, as parts of the onward march. Yet we shall see as well that the late structures and themes are clearly foreshadowed in realizations that came to him early, primarily through the shady of Blake. Allowing for the hyperbole in Frye's claim that Blake taught him everything he knew, and knowing that Frye was one of the most prodigiously well-read individuals of our time, we can still see his acknowledgment of Blake's impact on him as metaphorically if not literalistically true. Much of the time in Fearful Symmetry Frye is inside the mind of Blake. From then on, Blake is inside the mind of Frye. Many readers in the twentieth century who would not give the time of day to Blake, or who read or have read only a few of the lyrics, have nonetheless been significantly shaped by Blake, via Frye. Near the start of Fearful Symmetry, Frye says: '[T]he interpretation of Blake is only the beginning of a complete revolution in one's reading of all poetry It is ... quite impossible to understand Blake without understanding how to read the Bible, and to do this properly one must read the Bible oneself with Blake's eyes. Then comes the question/ Frye continues, of how Blake 'read some of his other essential sources, Ovid's Metamorphoses, for instance, or the Prose Edda, and how he related their symbolism to his own. As one proceeds, one emerges from a haze of suggestive allusions into a new kind of poetic thought' (11). Much of Frye's overall theoria of language and literature is visible here in outline: the Bible as the starting-point; a new revolutionary way of reading it; the seeing of identities between the Bible and other mythologies (mentioning at this point only late classical and Norse); and above all, perhaps, the allusive approach to reading and writing that is fundamental to Frye's discovery of what he here calls 'a new kind of poetic thought.' It is from Blake more than anyone else that Frye came consciously to know the literary language of myth and metaphor and to formulate a conception of the human imagination as the power in human societies that perennially creates and recreates both them and their languages. The imagination, for Blake and Frye, is the mental

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force that permits us actively and abundantly to inhabit our own cultures and, if we will, to know their interpenetrating relations with other cultures. Fearful Symmetry, with its twelve chapters, is the book that announces to the world the centrality of the human imagination in all aspects of human life, individual and social. This still-amazing work can be read, to a point, as an epic, with the exuberantly intellectual Frye as its youthful protagonist and Blake as his Virgilian guide leading him through three stages of understanding. Part One takes the form of several preliminary but essential skirmishes, essays on Blake's theory of knowledge, his religion, his ethical and political ideals, his theory of art, and his theory of poetry. All these preparatory exercises prove the protagonist's capacity to engage in the major mental fight that is to come. Part Two of Fearful Symmetry is a complex but lucid account of the development of Blake's symbolism, in relation to English literature before and during Blake's time. Frye here shows the ways in which the Augustan age and Blake are largely antipathetic to each other and how Blake's main literary affinities reach back two centuries, specifically to 'a certain unity of ideas held in the English Renaissance' that combined 'certain Protestant and humanist tendencies, of new ideas about the Word of God combined with new ideas about the words of man' (FS, 428). In this tradition, as Blake and Frye read it, imaginative literature is The Word within the Word.' Part Three of Fearful Symmetry culminates in the great essay The Valley of Vision,' in which we can see Frye accepting as the basis for his own life's work Blake's visionary teaching that 'all had originally one language, and one religion.' Frye sets out clearly what he understands this to mean: If we follow his [Blake's] own method, and interpret this in imaginative instead of historical terms, we have the doctrine that all symbolism in all art and all religion is mutually intelligible among all men, and that there is such a thing as an iconography of the imagination. Blake suggests to the student of English literature that to recognize the existence of a total form of vision would not be a new discovery, but a return to essential critical principles that should never have been lost sight of. If we look back at Elizabethan scholars, with their rhetorical textbooks and mythological handbooks, their commentaries on Plutarch and Ovid and their allegorical interpretations of Homer and Virgil, we may see that when Chapman spoke of 'not onely all learning, gouernment, and wisedome being deduc't as from a bottomlesse fountaine from him [Homer], but all wit, elegancie,

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I think that here at the end of Fearful Symmetry its author - aged thirty-five when the book was published, after thirteen years of writing and rewriting - is seeing the outline of his own nature critical path in trying to bring about a 'cultural revolution.' He is going to attempt, as Blake did, to help complete the humanist revolution begun in the Renaissance but aborted by both the Protestant and Catholic churches. Before going on, let us note these things in the Fearful Symmetry manifesto: the universal scope of the task; the assumption that it is possible to recognize and identify essential critical principles; the conviction that the study of humane letters is central to the cultural revolution envisioned; the interest in the relations between the traditional (the scriptural and the classical) and the new; the acceptance of the importance of mythology and of training in different modes of language (here he mentions the imaginative, the rhetorical, and the allegorical); the possibility of a single visionary synthesis of all cultures; the concern with the social impact of learning, including its impact on the role of artists in society; the realization that what Frye later calls 'low mimetic' assumptions about naturalism and realism can be a straightjacket for artists; and, above all, the centrality of reading with the maximum of imaginative power.

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Further to extend our sense of the large scope of these ambitions, which many have found preposterous and still do, I should like to bring into clearer focus another key conception from Fearful Symmetry, Blake's metaphor identifying God and man, in which the creative impulse in man, the human imagination, is God in humankind (28). This figurative conception resonates, I think, throughout the whole body of Frye's thought, even when it is more implicit than explicit. It is why we are right to think of Frye as a great humanist thinker and visionary. It is an essential conception if we are to understand why Frye spent roughly thirty years of his career working primarily with what he calls secular scriptures, including but not restricted to the imaginative literature that is man's revelation to man, before he increasingly centred his attention on what for about eighteen centuries in the Western world was called 'the Holy Bible.' Importantly, Frye drops the adjective and talks about 'the Bible.' I'll return to this point. For now, it is necessary to consider some of the implications for Frye's thought of what Blake calls 'the human form divine.' The metaphor receives its fullest Fearful Symmetry exploration in the second chapter, "The Rising God.' This is essential reading if we would understand the core of what the later Frye calls the educated imagination, as well as his several accounts of the kind of criticism and critical awareness that is capable of moving up and down the polysemous ladder of language and meaning that looms large in the late writings. Blake says, firmly and without equivocation, 'God is Man, & exists in us & we in him' (FS, 30). "The Eternal Body of Man is the Imagination, that is, God himself (ibid.). For Blake all religions are one and the material world provides a universal language of images that each human being speaks with his or her own accent.3 To perceive the particular and imagine the real is to perceive and imagine as part of a divine body (32). There are two corollaries of this, both of which sound anachronistic and strange in a secular world. Both normally are denied in practice, in both organized religion and in most individual lives. According to Blake, we perceive as God; we do not perceive God. Second, since we cannot perceive anything spiritually or imaginatively higher than a human being, nothing higher than humankind can exist. Blake's acceptance, then, of 'Jesus as the fullness of both God and Man entails the rejection of all attributes of God which are not human' (ibid.). For Blake, Frye explains in the next chapter, this conception of the Deity is fundamentally different from that of the God of official Christianity as Blake saw the dominant religion of his time. Blake's view, L suggest, is

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also Frye's and it is clearly expressed later in each of The Great Code, The Double Vision, and Words with Power, particularly in the discussions of kerygma and in the numerous references to the inadequacy of orthodox doctrines and creeds. In Blake's and Frye's vision a 'negatively perfect God is not a Creator' and the usual abstractions for God are not about a God who could have created Falstaff, 'to whom he would be vastly inferior' (37). In Frye's words, the official transcendental God of abstract virtues was 'invented as a homeopathic cure for the teachings of Jesus' (61). That kind of deity has nothing to do with Blake's and Frye's understandings of the figure of Jesus, with what theologians might call their Christology, but which is better seen as their central metaphor for the identification of the physical world and the imaginative or spiritual world. Talk of 'the human form divine' may ring in our ears increasingly oddly in a secular age, and we know that the word 'Jesus' has by now accrued so many culturally exclusive connotations and mindless formulaic powers that it can be used only sparingly if it is not to be trapped in a dead language. This is why, I think, that for some decades Frye favoured expressions like Vision' and the 'creative' or 'educated imagination/ why he did not regularly use 'imaginative/ 'spiritual/ and 'metaphorical' as interchangeable synonyms, and why he spent most of his time on imaginative literature rather than 'sacred scripture' - as sacred scripture - or on theology. "The Word Within the Word' chapter of Fearful Symmetry proceeds from the anagogic perspective: 'Jesus is the Logos or Word of God, the totality of creative power, the universal visionary in whose mind we perceive the particular' (108). 'But the phrase "Word of God/" says Frye, 'is obviously appropriate also to all works of art which reveal the same perspective, these latter being recreations of the divine vision which is Jesus. The archetypal Word of God, so to speak, sees this world of time and space as a single creature in eternity and infinity, fallen and redeemed. This is the vision of God (subjective genitive: the vision which God in us has)' (108). Everything that was done by Jesus, a prophetic revolutionary and iconoclast in whom God and man became one, 'was an imaginative act bringing more abundant life' (79), in sharp contrast to all abstract conceptions of God and to Blake's not-verytranscendent transcendent Old Nobodaddy who belches and farts and coughs and endlessly chases his tail in the sky: 'when we try to imagine above human nature we always imagine below it/ Frye has said earlier in 'The Rising God' (37). There is no hierarchical chain of being in Blake (38), nor is there in Frye, however many metaphors of ascent and

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descent he incorporates into his evolving theoria, and however many ways he uses to indicate the geometry and spatial relations of his ideas: The true Jesus ... is the uniting of the divine and the human in our own minds, and it is only the active Jesus, the teacher and healer and storyteller, who can be recreated' (387). The Bible itself yields precedence to the recreating imagination and must be shaken upside down before it will yield all its secrets (120). This is a pretty good description of both Blake's Bible of hell, which is a rich study in itself, and of much of what transpires later in the pages of The Great Code. There is no exclusiveness about the Blake/Frye vision of God, Jesus, and the Bible. The Hebrew Bible (called by Christians the Old Testament) and the New Testament are not a peculiar exclusive Word of God nor do they exhaust the Word. There are many great visions outside the range of the Bible, as in the Norse Eddas, Celtic myths, and Asian texts like the Bhagavadgita, to name only the ones that Blake uses. The Bible itself, like classical mythology, comes from 'older Scriptures still' (FS, 110). If Northrop Frye discernibly was a Christian, and in some fundamental respects I think he was, his Christianity was equated with the broadest possible vision of human life, as part of an interpenetrating universe. His Christianity emphatically was not grounded in a quest for the historical Jesus. In a diary entry on 18 March 1952 he writes of his 'profound reluctance to handle' his 'central conception of Jesus as effective mythically rather than historically.' One of the many recurrences from Fearful Symmetry in the late writings is the idea symbolized in Ovid's Latin phrase at the beginning of this paper: Est deus in nobis (157).4 The idea, shared by Blake and Frye, and by a host of other artists and thinkers, is that the gods, in whatever culture, are the first fruits of the human creative imagination. A major part of the new (and old) poetics that Frye was being taught by Blake is the dual conception of a humanized God and a divinized humanity. The complete line from Ovid is this: Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo (There is a god in us; when he stirs, we become excited).5 Frye says, in reference to the Renaissance critic George Puttenham's use of Ovid's phrase, that deus 'could mean either God or a god' but that it was safer in the sixteenth century to stop at drawing an analogy between the poet's creative power and the creative power of God (WP, 54). It was safer, because although Frye does not say this here, the dominant linguistic conventions in the Renaissance, including those within which the poets worked, were metonymic, based on the assumption that the reality called God was transcendental. So the analogy stayed 'latent'

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until the time of Coleridge. The Latin verb calesco, in the tropical or figurative sense working in Ovid's poem, means not only 'to become excited' but 'to glow' or 'be inflamed/ especially in love. That Ovid's metaphor for creative imagining is primarily sexual is made even clearer in the next line: impetus hie sacrae semina mentis habet (it is his [the god's] violent motion that sows the sacred seeds). Surprisingly this line is not quoted by Frye. It is his kind of a figure. Metaphors of sexual love permeate the body of his writings, and erotic union is his most characteristic figure for the starting-point of imaginative development.6 For Frye, as for Blake, thought was action. 'An inactive thinker is a dreamer; an unthinking doer is an animal/ he says, not only characterizing Blake but identifying with him. 'No one can begin to think straight unless he has a passionate desire to think and an intense joy in thinking. The sex act without the play of intellect and emotion is mere rutting; and virility is as important to the artist as it is to the father. The more a man puts all he has into everything he does the more alive he is' (FS, 21). One last foreshadowing in Fearful Symmetry of what was to come: 'If a man of genius spends all his life perfecting works of art/ Frye says of Blake, 'it is hardly far-fetched to see his life's work as itself a larger work of art with everything he has produced integral to it' (404). In varying degrees, all thirty-three of Northrop Frye's books and other writings after Fearful Symmetry are a recreation of the archetypal vision of the first book. After Blake comes the revolutionary Anatomy of the 'canon' of Western literature, with its numerous glimpses outside the literary canon into other forms of verbal (and non-verbal expression) and into other cultures; then the studies of individual authors - Spenser, Shakespeare (four books), Milton, Blake again and again, Byron, Dickens, Dickinson, Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Pratt and a host of Canadian poets - each literary artist identified and read as a new 'revelation' within the total order of words embraced in the archetypal vision into which Blake helped initiate him; beyond these studies of individual writers, throughout the forty-seven years after Fearful Symmetry, there appeared numerous lectures, articles, books, and interviews about criticism, culture and society, the role of the humanities, the nature of the university, the Modern century, English Romanticism, and The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance; and finally, completed in the last decade, the four books that push further than ever before Frye's vision of the crisis in language which, as he sees it, undermines all humankind's best efforts to complete the humanist revolution.7

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IV. The Secular Scripture

It will help to see in perspective what Frye had been doing as a literary critic since Fearful Symmetry, before his main focus moved on explicitly to the Bible in its relations with non-biblical writings, if we recall the first of the six 1975 Norton lectures at Harvard that make up the important small book called The Secular Scripture. In the first chapter, The Word and World of Man/ Frye tells of how his 'early absorption in Blake ... expanded in two directions. One direction took [him] into the Bible by way of Milton' and was to be explored 'in another book' (this became the four last books). The other direction was one that connected Blake with two other writers in particular, Spenser and William Morris, both writers of sentimental romance/ to whom, because they were in a 'continuous tradition/ Frye added Scott, the tales of Chaucer, and the late comedies of Shakespeare. This left him with 'a sense of a double tradition, one biblical and the other romantic, growing out of an interest in Blake which seemed to have contained them both' (SeS, 6). The title of the 1975 book is meant to suggest something of its relation to a study of the Bible. Frye clearly explains what he means by 'a double tradition.' In each society's verbal culture there are some stories that seem more important than others, because they illustrate and explain what primarily concerns the society: its religion, laws, social structure, environment, history, or cosmology. Then there is another set of stories that 'seem to be less important' (ibid.), because they are told primarily to entertain or amuse and to 'meet the imaginative needs of the community.' The more important stories are also imaginative, but incidentally so: they are intended to convey something more like special knowledge, something of what in religion is called revelation. Hence they are not thought of as imaginative or even of human origin, for a long time' (SeS, 6-7). These two types of stories and verbal experiences Frye calls 'the mythical' and 'the fabulous/ the latter term being used because the noun 'folktale' does not easily provide an adjective. Here we come to an important juncture or defining point in relation to the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter. Frye's 'distinction between the mythical and the fabulous/ as he points out, 'overlaps a good deal with the distinction between the sacred and the secular. But it is not identical with it... [Mjany stories may be mythical ... without being sacred. The largest and most important group of these are the national stories, which as a rule shade insensibly from the legendary to

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the historical' (SeS, 8) and which, however mythically important, are not thought of as sacred. This means that the sacred/secular distinction for Frye is a question of the status and function accorded a myth or story in a particular culture. It has to do, that is, with the role played historically by the particular set of stories that are accepted as authoritative, as being so compellingly resonant that, at least for a time, they command belief in the society. Within the Western tradition, the writers like Dante and Milton who attach themselves to the central mythical area are thought of, in their own time, as having a special seriousness. Writers like Chaucer and Shakespeare, in comparison, are seen as interested primarily in entertainment and as free to take their plots and stories from folklore rather than from sacred scripture. Because of large cultural changes during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries the Bible is no longer 'sacred scripture.' Like most modern scholars, Frye does not talk about the 'Holy Bible.' Because the Bible, he says, is 'the supreme example of the way that myths can, under certain social pressures, stick together to make up a mythology ... it actually became, for medieval and later centuries, a vast mythological universe ... a vision of reality in terms of human concerns and hopes and anxieties' (SeS, 14). From the time of the Church Fathers early in Christendom, and continuing through the time of Caedmon at the beginning of English literature in the seventh century, Christians believed that the mythological universe of the Bible was the actual one, and that the actual universe was centred on human beings. But then science, through Copernicus and Galileo, seceded from the old mythological space; and, in the next centuries, because of the work of Newton, Darwin, and others, science seceded from the old mythological time. By now, biblical mythology has become fabulous. This is what happens to a mythology when one culture supersedes another (SeS, 1314) and it is what has happened and is happening to the Bible now as a highly syncretistic world or global culture emerges. V. The Bible Books Frye saw Blake as the 'first person in the modern world who understood that the older mythological construct had collapsed' (NFR, 69). It wore out, according to Blake and Frye, because it repressed human autonomy, because, using their perhaps anachronistic term, it did not recognize 'the human form divine.' An awareness developed, in the Romantic poets, artists, and philosophers and in a host of later, modern

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thinkers, that there are more things within human beings than any religious institution or government or ideology can recognize or accommodate. So far as sacred and secular scriptures are concerned, in the world of the Tyger/ that is (in Frye's use of Blake's metaphor), in the world that our adult minds inhabit, the conception of a divine Creator now 'makes no sense' (NFR, 69-70). In Creation and Recreation Frye is unequivocal that Blake recognized and welcomed the destruction of the traditional mythology that had been derived from the Bible and that had become, to use Frye's terms, an applied or closed mythology subject to intolerable ideological, doctrinal, and institutional constraints. But it is important to realize that it is not the Bible itself that is dead for Blake and Frye. Blake was an intensely biblical poet at the same time as his vision reached out to and included other mythologies. He read the biblical scriptures in what he called their infernal or diabolical sense: for him the creation of the world, the fall of humankind, and the deluge of Noah were all metaphorically and mythically the same event, a fall in a part of the divine nature and in human nature - here he is following some of the Gnostics and Jakob Boehme - into existence, into the world, into history. Frye follows Blake in saying that the real story of humankind begins at the burning bush with Jahweh telling Moses to act to deliver the Hebrews from slavery. What was traditionally believed to be the Creation was in fact a ruin and there is no creation except human recreation, the work that Blake and Frye see as already in process in the paradisal, pastoral, agricultural, and urban imagery of the Bible. This vision of a new 'creation' now points not backwards to a paradise that never existed in space and time but forwards to the end of what Frye calls 'a long journey to somewhere on the far side of the tiger' (NFR, 70). The main thrust of Creation and Recreation, then, is away from the traditional story or myth of a divine Creator and human creatures towards human creators and creations, towards realization that the human arts and technologies are all we have and that initially they have to be 'decreations,' attempts to break free from the givens of existence in nature and in history, if there is to be recreation of the world in ways more in accord with fundamental human needs and desires. This human task of recreation, significantly for this paper, includes recreation of the Bible. That 'huge, sprawling, tactless book' that has sat so long 'in the middle of our cultural heritage' is no longer to be thought of as 'sacred scripture/ in the closed mythology sense, but as the supreme example of the creative imagination at work.

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How? How is the Bible to be recreated? How is its special knowledge to be decoded and revealed? How is the humanist revolution to be continued? How are the world's mythologies, including new ones still to emerge, to be seen as interpenetrating rather than as separate narratives and separating forces among human beings? How in an age in which even the words 'human' and 'humanist/ let alone 'God/ 'gods/ and 'divine/ have in the minds of many been irretrievably dirtied, or made part of a dead language, can these old bones of what was once, for too long, a 'sacred' scripture be made to live? Frye's short answer is in two parts: first, through a far greater understanding and critical awareness of the different modes of verbal language - descriptive, conceptual, rhetorical, imaginative, kerygmatic - and the ways these uses of words interpenetrate each other; second, through a far greater individual and cultural acceptance of the human necessity for, and the special powers of, the last two of these: the imaginative and the kerygmatic. These are the two 'imaginative' or 'spiritual' languages, and it is they that will be the transforming and revolutionary powers in a world in which the first three modes of language have the cultural ascendancy, and are thought by many to be the only 'serious' uses of words. The last twenty-six pages of The Great Code are the attempt of a profoundly literary imagination engaged in a more than literary quest, 'to get a glimpse or two' (207) of the wider perspective that would help bring these matters into focus. These pages, as we know, are a precursor to the intense work, filled with many stops and starts, that resulted eight years later in Words with Power and The Double Vision.8 Here at the end of The Great Code, with considerable reticence, Frye begins to develop his conception of kerygma, which he has mentioned and briefly characterized at the end of 'Language I/ the first chapter of the book. Kergyma is the mode of language that makes possible 'the moment of enlightenment' (231). This is the moment in which the interaction between subject and object disappears, as they are identified with each other; it is that phase of revelation in which human desire, as expressed in literature by myth and metaphor, meets ultimate concern and transforming power, and finds 'a myth to live by.' As in literature so in kerygma, myth is the linguistic vehicle. Myth is central to kerygma, not as in Bultmann, its opposite (GC, 30).9 Kerygma is also a special kind of rhetoric, combining the mythical or metaphorical and the 'existential' or concerned. Paul, in 2 Corinthians 12, was not sure when he experienced this kind of language - 'unspeakable words/ 'not lawful for a

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man to utter' - whether he was 'in' or 'out of his body. The new language that he heard, and to some extent understood, he could not translate into the categories of ordinary language. It was not that it was forbidden; he was unable to do it. Frye ends The Great Code with two suggestions about the conditions under which such a language might be spoken. The Word that Paul experienced, he says, is a two-edged sword dividing the world of life from the world of death. It is capable of doing this only by escaping from the language of argument and refutation into a new language of love and freedom. Frye says that it is perhaps only through the study of works of human imagination that we can make any real contact with the level of vision, beyond faith, because it is in these products of culture and imagination that the limit is the conceivable not the actual. Frye's second suggestion of how human beings might go beyond the legalistic boundaries of both organized traditional Judaism and Christianity, with their antithesis of divine and human, creator and creature, is to get rid of the conception of original sin. For Frye this hoary teaching is one of the most pernicious doctrines to have haunted human history, because acceptance of it necessitates the corollary idea that human beings are miserable creatures needing to be rescued or saved by an objective deity. These doctrines, he says, are actually the human fear of freedom; they are resentment of the disciplines and responsibility that freedom brings. One of their results is that instead of 'sacred' scripture being read and responded to so that it becomes the charter of human freedom, it is met by a 'failure of nerve' and by the constant building of anxiety structures around social and religious institutions whose impact is to stifle, repress, and enslave human minds and imaginations. Early in chapter 4 of Words with Power, Frye says, 'This book is not about religion as such: it is about the relation of Biblical myth and metaphor to the Western verbal culture, more particularly its literature' (97-8). On the whole he has been avoiding the word 'religion/ other than when speaking about ideology and matters of faith or belief with their 'sacred area of ritual acts' (97). This avoidance is because he wants to enlarge 'the scope of dialogue/ even in the knowledge that this 'can be a very painful process for those who see some of their cherished beliefs and practices inexorably turning into mere anxieties' (98). At many points in Creation and Recreation, The Great Code, Words with Power, and The Double Vision, I almost conclude that although Frye clearly is a thinker about religion he is not at all a religious thinker. In Notebook 19

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[421] he says, 'The willing suspension of belief, not disbelief, is what matters/ Although he uses the terms 'sacred' and 'secular' to point to different kinds of scripture, he treats both kinds as revelatory and as vital parts of the total order of words. He knows that 'sacred' in normal usage means consecrated or dedicated, set apart for some religious purpose. He knows too that the word sacred has to do with deities, persons, places, and things considered to be entitled to worship or reverence. Yet Frye himself is not reverential or worshipful in his expressed attitudes to any of these, including God and the Bible. He wants to 'hear' and 'see' everything that words and the Word can impart, but he does not fall down and worship when the revelations come, nor when he is seeking them. Like Blake's exuberant figures, he stands upright and erect. He is a visionary seeking enlightenment - not, I think, a religious. Religion for him is raw imaginative material clarified by art and known consciously by criticism. Perhaps the best way to understand the last stage of his imaginative and spiritual quest is to focus on what he does, finally, with 'the gods' and 'God,' in the context of his last great theoretical statement, his account of the modes of language in Words with Power. The stated guiding intention in Words with Power is to get beyond the mode of language that relies principally on rhetoric and is committed to ideology, that is, devoted to matters of belief, religious or secular. The book begins with Frye's long-familiar, geometrically conceived, and fundamentally useful idea of centripetal versus centrifugal meaning: '[W]henever we read (or otherwise examine) a verbal structure, our attention is going in two directions at once/ inward as we try 'to make sense of the words we are reading' and outward as we gather up 'from memory the conventional meanings of the words used in the world of language outside the work' (3). The relation of signifiers (the words in the structure) to signifieds (the things outside the structure to which the words are signs) is variable. The 'variants develop into different kinds of verbal structures, and different emphases in meaning,' which Frye calls modes. 'Every verbal structure is likely to have its chief center of gravity in one of these modes, though aspects of all the others will be included or implied/ On this basis Frye proceeds in Part One of Words with Power to construct his many-faceted theory of the modes of language. Other papers in this volume look closely at this part of Frye's thought. My purpose is to see what happens to the conceptions of sacred and secular scripture and to the god (God) that Ovid, Blake, Frye, and a host of other thinkers in metaphor have said is at work in

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the creative imaginings of human beings. Here we must go into the heart of Frye's account of the linguistic resources available to human beings to get beyond ideology, including religion as it is normally understood, and move towards enlightenment. The first and best means available to us as human beings is literature, which has its centre of gravity in the imaginative mode of language. 'An ideology is most beneficial when it has least power/ says Frye (WP, 19), and the language of rhetoric and ideology, important as it is, has to be corrected by all four of the other modes of language. From the one direction, descriptive language may undermine an ideology at any time, by presenting a new scientific or historical discovery; conceptual language, using reason and logic, can counteract the hysteria and unthinking responses generated by some uses of rhetoric. From the other direction, the imaginative mode, a verbal resource that counteracts the 'depersonalizing tendencies of descriptive, conceptual or ideological thought' (WP, 22), 'takes us into a more open-ended world, breaking apart the solidified dogmas that ideologies seem to hanker for.' This is a mode of communication in which 'the distinction between the emotional and the intellectual has disappeared' and 'ordinary consciousness is only one of many possible psychic elements' gaining expression in the words being used. Because the imaginative mode is more inclusive than the three earlier ones, it openly deals with the conceivable and the hypothetical, not the actual. Its centre of gravity is the language of myth and metaphor, present in ideology but excluded there from critical attention. Since the imaginative mode is not restricted by canons of believability, logic, or ideological acceptability, it is free to use the imagery and narratives inherited from mythology, without concern for the ontological reality of the gods or the historicity of any of the stories about them. Whether divine beings exist or not, and however the images and stories of them are modulated by poets and others in the direction of increased mimetic or ironic descriptiveness, they remain, in Frye's poetics, indispensable built-in metaphors for the imaginative mode of language. They are also, throughout Frye's own life, perennial presences in his decades-long attempt to read and/or write the eight books of the ogdoad, which Dolzani's and Denham's recent scholarship is helping us see and begin to understand.10 As the category of verbal expression that we think of as literature gets established historically, belief in the existence of the gods or of God, as beings external to human existence, becomes unimportant, though this is something that most religious believers

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still would dispute. As imaginative forms or images, Frye reiterates, the gods remain fundamental. I remember him saying once that those who deny the reality of God, which is not to say the existence of God, are suffering from 'a failure of imaginative energy.' The theme of Words with Power, says Dolzani in the introduction to his edition (2002) of The 'Third Book' Notebooks, is the dialogue between a divine humanity and a human divinity, human creative power and its spiritual other. 'This dialogue creates a dialectic whereby both Word and Spirit are redeemed by being recreated out of their fallen forms of the false sky-father and egocentric creature/ In Words with Power, in perhaps Frye's most profound discussion of metaphor, he suggests that not only love poetry but all poetry, that is, all imaginative literature, 'is the child of the frustration of identity, a presence taking the place of or substituting for an enforced absence' (79). He then goes on to say, 'In this post-Freudian era we are less likely to be startled or put off by the suggestion' that the god 'Eros creates the identity behind the imaginative identities of metaphor in poetry, counterpoint in music, composition in painting, proportion in sculpture and architecture' (80). This mention of Eros recalls Ovid's - and Blake's and Frye's - use of the words est deus in nobis. It also brings us to the last step in seeing how far we have come from the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter. The key passage now is Frye's discussion - in the last five pages of 'Spirit and Symbol' at the end of Part One of Words with Power - of illusions, faith, the theism of the Bible, and visions of divine and human creation. These are pages in which every sentence counts and I shall not mutilate them by trying to summarize them. Two excerpts, with brief comments, will complete this chapter. Frye says, There are two kinds of illusion: the negative illusion that merely fails to be an objective reality, and the positive illusion which is a potential, a something hoped for that can be actualized by a creative effort' (131). In response to Freud's words 'the future of an illusion' - Freud meaning that religion is a negative illusion - Frye says that Freud was right in a way he did not intend: 'Nothing except a positive illusion can possibly have a future.' Regarding the positive kind of illusion, Frye says, in one of the many gnomic utterances in his writings that should be collected into a new Book of Wisdom, To realize an illusion is to abolish its future and turn it into a presence.' Finally, we note that Frye's making place for religious illusions to become realities through human acts of creation goes hand in hand, as it has throughout his career, with his making places for revelations of

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•eality from secular contexts - alongside, interpenetrating, and identiying with sacred scriptures. In the highly concentrated focus of meanngs in these few pages of Words with Power, Shakespeare, Vico, Freud, Rilke, Mallarme, Lacan, Nietzsche, Foucault, Yeats, Auden, Emily Dickinson, and Buber join with Virgil, Ovid, Paul, and the authors of :he Gospel of John and 2 Timothy, on an equal footing. To help us clarify :>ur thinking, Frye says this: Critical theory today converges on what were originally Biblical questions, and the Bible is still the clearest example to use in explaining them. For critical theory there seems to be a point where a change of elements from 'words' to 'Word' takes place. This Word is not the Bible or the person of Christ for, say, Mallarme or Lacan, nor does it have to be those things for anyone. But apparently it does have to be there. (WP, 132)

NOTES

1 A.C. Hamilton, 'Frye on the Bible and Literature,' Christianity and Literature 41 (Spring 1992): 272. 2 Because the emphasis in this paper is on how Frye's publications prior to The Double Vision did or did not prepare the way for this last book, my main interest is in writings published during his lifetime. 3 The universal language of images exists because all human beings, everywhere and at all times, have certain basic needs. See Frye's full presentation of this conception in Words with Power, 42-6, 61, 140,185, 227, 250, 303-4, 307, 309, 310, 312. 4 This appears twice in Words with Power, as a direct quotation on page 54 and again as a key concept in the climax of chapter 4, 'Spirit and Symbol,' at the end of the theoretical half of the book (134). 5 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), Fasti, book VI, 5. In Ovid's Fasti, trans. Sir James George Frazer (London, 1951). 6 See especially in Words with Power the chapters 'Identity and Metaphor' and 'Second Variation: The Garden.' 7 The four books are, of course, Creation and Recreation (1980), The Great Code (1982), Words with Power (1990), and The Double Vision (1991, posthumous). 8 See 'Introduction' to Northrop Frye on Religion and Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks, 1985-1990, ed. Robert D. Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), passim. 9 See especially chapter 2, 'The Kerygma of the Earliest Church/ and chap-

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ter 3, The Kerygma of the Hellenistic Church Aside from Paul/ in Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, vol. I, trans. Kendrick Grobel (New York: Scribners, 1951). See also Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. Hans Werner Bartsch (London: Billing and Sons, 1954). 10 See Michael Dolzani, The Book of the Dead: A Skeleton Key to Northrop Frye's Notebooks/ in Boyd and Salusinszky, eds, Rereading Frye: The Published and the Unpublished Works (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 19-38; also Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks.

In the Climates of the Mind7:

Frye's Career as a Spiral Curriculum IMRE SALUSINSZKY

The most impressive achievements in conceptual writing, says Frye in Words with Power, are the 'great metaphysical systems, the structures that seek to present the world to the conscious mind.' (The word 'system/ he adds, 'is a spatial metaphor.') 'Sometimes/ he remarks a little later, 'we may ... wonder whether an entire metaphysical system may not be growing out of a personal metaphor' (WP, 10,12). One of the current directions of Frye studies, which seem more vibrant than ever as we enter the second decade after Frye's death, is the implicit taking up of the broad hints contained in these words: does Frye's system grow out of one or more personal metaphors, spatial or otherwise; and, if so, what are they? The notebooks, which are even more obsessive than the published works in their return to certain basic ideas, structures, and tropes, such as interpenetration, or the Great Doodle or 'ogdoad/ provoke us even more directly to try to see (I use the word advisedly) Frye's own intellectual career in the terms that Anatomy proposes for criticism's view of the literary universe as a whole: 'not only as complicating itself in time, but as spread out in conceptual space from some kind of center that criticism could locate' (AC, 17). Indeed, because the notebook entries are discontinuous, they seem, as Robert D. Denham has remarked, 'to invite our arranging them in patterns independent of any sequence/ a handy paraphrase, incidentally, of Frye's whole critical approach to literature.1 Examples of the kind of inquiry I am talking about would include Denham's work on interpenetration as a metaphor that links almost every aspect of Frye's project: of interpenetration as, in fact, what

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interpenetrates the entire magnum opus; Michael Dolzani's discussion of katabasis, of meander-and-descent patterns in Frye, images of caves and underworlds; and my own suggestion of the memory-palace, the central image of the medieval Art of Memory, as a productive analogy for both the shape of Frye's mind and for his system, since it seems to help to explain why in many of Frye's books it feels as if he is exploring a set of adjacent spaces or rooms, rather than a logical sequence of ideas.2 None of these efforts is quite the same as theme-study, in the way that one might take up a theme in Arnold, say, or a theme in Eliot: they respond, instead, to a peculiar quality in Frye's own work. Sometimes, in a single notebook entry, Frye will pick up a whole quiverful of these central organizing metaphors. Here, for example, are interpenetration and mnemonic imagery, in an entry in one of the late notebooks: 'the key to philosophy is the exact opposite of what philosophers do now. It's the study of the great historical systems, each of them a palace and a museum, that's genuine philosophy. At a certain point they interpenetrate into a house of many mansions' (LN, 123). As my citations from Words with Power and Anatomy of Criticism suggest, Frye is himself the best guide in this kind of endeavour, since surely no critic has given us more, or better, strategies for seeing the principle of unity in a writer's work as a pattern of underlying structures and shapes. In seeing how that principle of unity could not be held separate from the unity of literature as a whole, Frye broke out of the suffocating strictures of the New Criticism. Whenever Frye thinks about a writer, or even an entire period, he thinks in terms of mythos and a dianoia. Further, the method is no less applicable, in Frye's mind, to discursive writers than to imaginative ones. Here is a virtuoso example, from Creation and Recreation: Everywhere we turn in the nineteenth century, we find a construct reminding us of a Noah's ark bearing the whole surviving life of a world struggling to keep afloat in a universal storm. We have Schopenhauer's world of idea threatened by a world of will, Marx's ascendant-class culture threatened by a dispossessed proletariat, Freud's ego clinging to its precarious structure of sanity and threatened by the forces of the libido, Nietzsche's morality threatened by the will to power, Huxley's ethical values threatened by the evolutionary drive. These various thinkers take various attitudes of sympathy or hostility towards the threatening force, but the mythical construct is of much the same shape in every one. (NFR, 68)

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Taking my cue particularly from the Third Essay and using the relation of the two early masterpieces, Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism, to the two late ones, The Great Code and Words with Power, I want to sketch out a similar approach to Frye: to try to see some of both the theme and the story, the dianoia and the mythos, the spatial and temporal myths, of his career, as well as the underlying personal metaphor from which they grow. If we want to understand the relation between these four long books, however, we also need to consider two short ones, each based on a series of lectures: The Educated Imagination (the 1963 Massey Lectures) and The Double Vision. In a late notebook, Frye describes The Double Vision project as follows: I've been asked by Emmanuel College to do a series of three lectures for their alumni reunion in May of 1990. Passing over the question of whether or not it's an imposition to dump an assignment of that size on me with five months' notice, I'd like to make it one of my three-lecture books providing a pocket-sized summary of my GC and WP theses, more particularly the latter, in the way that the Masseys were a pocket-sized Anatomy. (LN, 612-13)

The continuities of theme and interest in these six books - Frye's first three and last three - and across his whole career are of course extraordinary. One can take numerous quotations, for example about the relation of the Bible to literature, and leave students or readers to guess whether they are from Fearful Symmetry or The Great Code.3 This is what gives reading Frye's notebooks the feeling that one has entered some kind of timeless corridor or interstice - Denham calls it a 'workshop,' but I will use a phrase from the Australian writer Gerald Murnane and call it an 'interstitial plain' - from which one could re-enter any of the official Frye buildings, which in turn open out onto the public daylight world.4 I take this to suggest that Frye's books may be drawing upon a single, highly condensed, almost atomic core of insight and inspiration. How many times, for instance, does he take us through the various phases of polysemous meaning, or the sequence of fictional modes, or the narrative mythoi that identify human with natural cycles, or the apocalyptic dianoia through which imagination arranges reality into vertical levels, separating the world of utmost desire from the world of utmost disgust? Applying these favourite analytic categories to Frye's own work (in a non-programmatic way), I wonder if we could begin to see the principle of recurrence that shapes it. This rhythm cannot be mere repetition, because the peculiar thing about Frye's insistent return

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to the same core obsessions is that it never feels as though he is simply recapitulating what he has said before. Frye is a famously diagrammatic thinker, and an architectonic one, but here we cannot rely entirely on spatial metaphors, since they, too, can hardly account for the diachronic quality that gives Frye's work its sense of a gathering significance. This, I take it, is what Michael Dolzani means when he says that Frye finally abandoned what the notebooks call the Great Doodle because it represented a 'closed cycle of return that is still caught up in a synchronic repetition/5 A rounded approach to Frye will be looking for the combination of diachronic and synchronic elements that is encapsulated in his phrase about the principle of unity among the nineteenthcentury philosophers: a 'mythical construct.' Let me begin with the question, Which of the mythoi best comprehends Frye's own work? An obvious temptation is to reply that it is a comic myth of renewal and recovered identity. Frye invites this reading when, adapting a distinction of Coleridge, he describes himself as an Odyssey critic interested in comedy and romance, rather than an Iliad critic interested in tragedy and irony (NP, 1). Certainly, it is clear from the notebooks that there is a genuine antipathy in Frye - one that he does not allow to surface in the published works - towards works like the Iliad and the Divine Comedy that are not only identified directly with some kind of military or religious triumph, but wallow a little too intently in the suffering of those who have been triumphed over. Undoubtedly, there is a nascent comic myth in Frye, the comic myth in which critics finally stumble out of their dark forest world of ideological conflict and motivated value-judgment, and emerge into the light of a new cooperative endeavour. But this is a story about which Frye became increasingly pessimistic with the passing years. Let us not forget that the largest narrative pattern we can discern if we stand back from Frye takes us from a shady of a poet whose visionary message was grievously ignored in his own time (and misinterpreted for a century and a half after it) to a study of a sacred book whose visionary message has become so mired in ideology and literalism that there is little hope of leading any reader back to its visionary kernel. In other words, if we see imaginative vision and primary concern as representing the ascending movement in Frye's Great (Critical) Doodle, and ideology or secondary concern as the falling hemisphere, then one source of tragic pessimism in his work is surely the aggregating sense that the latter is as powerful a force, at least, as the former. There are, indeed, few things more pronounced across Frye's work

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than the dialectic of imaginative vision and ideology. In addition, there are few images that turn up more often than that of imprisonment, or jail, as a figure for how ideology deals with vision. (Remember that one of Frye's examples of primary concern is freedom of movement.) The closing pages of Fearful Symmetry, although they do not use the word 'ideology,' challenge one of the verities of ideological thinking: 'Blake's doctrine of a single original language and religion implies that the similarities in ritual, myth and doctrine among all religions are more significant than their differences' (FS, 424). In Anatomy of Criticism we find, from the earliest pages, the same agon of vision and ideology as Frye tries to free criticism from the prison of social prejudice, and from the fallacy of critical 'determinism' (AC, 6), a liberating development that, towards the end of his life, he conceded was less likely than ever.6 Words with Power opens with a long discussion of the dialectic of primary concern (myth) and secondary concern (ideology), and of course The Great Code is both insistently about an attempt to separate vision from belief and insistently conscious of the resistance that such attempts inevitably arouse. And so the final image in that book returns to the topos of imprisonment: The normal human reaction to a great cultural achievement like the Bible is to do with it what the Philistines did to Samson: reduce it to impotence, then lock it in a mill to grind our aggressions and prejudices' (GC, 233). There is another 'falling' movement in Frye's work. It is partly, I think, a result of his growing awareness of deconstruction (an irony myth if ever there was one) and of his late attempt, if not to penetrate its mysteries, then at least to interpenetrate with them. (There are a surprising number of references to Derrida in the two Bible books, as well as in the late notebooks.) I mean a sense, in The Great Code and Words with Power, of a constant falling back from the Word, into more words: from presence, into difference. A related tragic element, this one prominent in Anatomy of Criticism, has to do with the activity of criticism itself and the impossibility of recapturing the direct experience of literature in critical terminology. The 'positive value-judgement,' says Frye in Anatomy, 'is founded on a direct experience which is central to criticism yet forever excluded from it' (AC, 27). This is an uncanny anticipation of the tenor of Derridean differance, both in its deconstruction of the centre and in its blockage of any easy passage from words to world. In The Critical Path the same idea is put in even stronger, and even more haunting terms, when criticism is described as 'a monument to a failure of experience' (CP, 27).

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From mythos I move to the question of language, to see whether we can find some analogy in Frye to the polysemous levels of meaning from kerygmatic (or revelatory), through metaphoric, and metonymic, to descriptive - that he outlines in various versions, in Anatomy, and then again in the two Bible books. It has not often been noticed that Frye's own work covers most of the polysemous waterfront. One trope for Frye's intellectual career would be to think of it as a process of recovery or reconstitution following what Harold Bloom would call a 'breaking of the vessels.'7 The model here is religious experience: there is a shattering revelation, or kerygma, that leaves one with fragments of wordless insight, more like diagrams than ideas, as if one had had momentary access to archetypes in the Jungian sense (not 'inborn ideas' but 'inborn possibilities of ideas').8 It is at this level of empty tropes that I suspect that the ogdoad scheme - the eight vast works projected by Frye, and recently set out in detail by Michael Dolzani - operates in Frye.9 The eight organizing categories can be seen as perspectives or avenues of entry upon the central wordless illumination, which then help you to find the words to put in place of it, suggesting the possibility that the units of the 'ogdoad' are not really books of criticism, or novels, or sonatas, so much as empty tropes, like Bloom's six revisionary ratios. (What, but a trope, could become criticism or fiction or music?) These, in turn, are forged into highly metaphoric aphorisms, in the notebook entries, which in their turn become metonymic arguments in conceptual prose. And finally, at the descriptive level (the modern phase proper, in Frye's argument) we have the application of those arguments to texts: practical criticism. This is what Frye seems to be getting at in the notebooks, and in The Double Vision, when he says that he has spent the better part of seventyeight years writing out the implications of insights that took up less than an hour of that time (NFR, 210). Of course, the most famous account we have of an actual revelation in Frye is the one he gives, on several occasions (and not quite consistently), of the epiphany that got his whole sense of a literary universe started. Staying up all night, in the early 1930s, to write an undergraduate paper on Blake's Milton, he began to ponder the principle that Blake and Milton were connected by their use of the Bible. This seemed both an obvious and an unhelpful fact, since surely it was a likeness that only served to obscure what was individual, or really interesting, about each of them: Around about three in the morning a different kind of intuition hit me, though it took me twenty years to articulate it. The two poets were

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connected by the same thing, and sameness leads to individual variety, just as likeness leads to monotony. I began dimly to see that the principle pulling me away from the historical period was the principle of mythological framework. The Bible had provided a frame of mythology for European poets: an immense number of critical problems began to solve themselves as soon as one realized this. (SM, 17) This moment of sublime insight (in what was surely the mother of all undergraduate deadline crises) can be only fitfully reconstituted in prose, much as Coleridge's dream could be only fitfully reconstituted in the verse of 'Kubla Khan/ Yet the fact of always coming back to it would help to explain why, in these six books in particular, and in Frye's work in general, there is such consistency of focus. In terms of language, one of the most interesting large-scale transitions across Frye's career is his movement away from professional, and towards public, discourse. Accessible as they are, Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism are still technical books compared with The Great Code and Words with Power. For reasons that I will speculate about a little later, Frye directs his work increasingly at an audience comprising the undergraduate reader and the general reader - in short, at the public sphere. What is incredible is the way he achieves this transition without either patronizing this public, or exploiting any of the waves of anti-academic populism that swept across it during his life. (This must have taken considerable restraint during the rise of identity politics in the 1980s, considering how early and powerfully Frye had warned the critical profession away from the cul-de-sac of ideological criticism.) When Frye talks about the role of the 'typical humanist' in The Critical Path, even though he is talking about the Renaissance, I believe that he is dropping a broad hint about what he has come to see as his own role: The typical humanist strives to be sane, balanced, judicious; he is not a prophet nor an angry man ... He avoids both technical and colloquial language, and has a deep respect for conventions, both social and literary. As a professional rhetorician, his instinct is to save the face of the situations he encounters by finding the appropriate words for them. (CP, 90) A similar hint seems to be lurking in the discussion of language at the start of The Great Code: Between Cicero and the Renaissance the orator became the symbol of an educational ideal of versatility and fluency in the use of language, which

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Imre Salusinszky made the orator to some degree the successor of the poet in the earlier phase as the teacher of his society, the encyclopedic repository of its traditional knowledge ... Hence oratory at its best is really a combination of metaphorical or poetic and 'existential' idioms: it uses all the figures of speech, but within a context of concern and direct address that poetry as such does not employ. (GC, 27)

None of this, however, even begins to give us the diachronic principle we have been seeking in order to account for the way that Frye seems to keep renewing a central body of insight. Whenever he comes upon the same questions in these six books, they seem like different questions: or is he himself in a different place? Here we need to look at these six books as spread out across time. One diachronic structure that operates between them takes us again to Derrida: supplementary, the process by which every attempt to encapsulate an explanatory system in writing generates endless appendices to itself. Whether we think of Frye as one of the most logocentric writers in the Western tradition, or as the most perceptive mapper of the logocentric vision embedded within that tradition (Anatomy, in particular, admits of either interpretation), he can hardly avoid the logic of the supplement, which numerous asides suggest that he knows better than we do. Each succeeding volume is presented as having begun as a successor to the preceding one, but as having turned into something else. Anatomy, for example, begins as an attempt to apply to Spenser the critical principles that Frye had learned from Blake, but instead becomes a kind of vast prolegomena to such a study, which itself never appeared ('in my beginning was my end,' says Frye in Anatomy's preface [vii]). The Anatomy, in effect, unpacks the idea in the closing pages of Fearful Symmetry of 'a comparative study of works of art' that would demonstrate 'the unity of the human mind' (FS, 424), which would also be a good description of The Great Code. Words with Power is presented as an applied supplement to The Great Code, one necessitated by the earlier book's having turned into a huge theoretical preface to what it had set out to treat, a process that Frye says in The Great Code he has 'experienced before, when its result was the Anatomy of Criticism' (GC, xi). In Words with Power Frye describes The Great Code as a kind of mirror version of the Anatomy moving down from the Bible rather than up to it - but it is Words with Power itself that he calls the 'successor' to Anatomy (WP, xii). Each pair has a further supplement, or pocket-sized version in a book of associated lectures intended for public consumption: the two early master-

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pieces have The Educated Imagination, while the late pair have The Double Vision. Of course, there is an interpretative mechanism more congenial to Frye's own interests than supplementarity to describe this relationship: typology. Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism have a type / antitype relation, with the later book confirming each element of the vision contained in the earlier one, in a wider context; equally, and in the same sense, do the early pair and the late pair conform to a type / antitype template. An even more startling instance of supplementarity, however, marks the vision contained in the Notebooks, as Michael Dolzani has shown.10 Fearful Symmetry was originally intended as Book 1 of the 'ogdoad/ Liberal. But once it is near completion, Liberal becomes a study of epic, Fearful Symmetry is renumbered Book 0, and Anatomy becomes Book 1. Yet when Anatomy turns into an introduction to critical principles, it too has to be bumped to 0. Instead of a magnum opus unfolding through eight acts or movements, we have one endlessly falling through the interstices of its own prefaces and supplements. Another diachronic movement in Frye is one that he hinted at himself on several occasions: the spiral, and the interpenetrative version of a spiral, the two spinning gyres. In the essay 'Expanding Eyes' (1975), he describes his work since Anatomy as a 'spiral curriculum, circling around the same issues, though trying to keep them open-ended' (SM, 100). There is a similar image in Words with Power when Frye describes that book as a 'farewell tour' (WP, xii), a cycle of visits to already familiar places. I find the spiral a particularly fertile personal metaphor with which to account for the diachronic movement in Frye's work, because it helps to explain why his topoi, when he returns to them, are the same, but not quite the same. It is a movement that also, as so often with Frye, suggests analogies with Wallace Stevens, another spiralling thinker. Here we might see Frye's work as what 'An Ordinary Evening in New Haven' calls an 'endlessly elaborating poem.'11 Even more apt than to think of Frye as moving in a metaphoric spiral may be to think of something as spiralling in Frye's mind. The same image may be found in these extraordinary lines from another late Stevens poem, The Sail of Ulysses/ with their uncannily precise anticipation of Frye's mythic cycle: His mind presents the world And in his mind the world revolves. The revolutions through day and night,

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Imre Salusinszky Through wild spaces of other suns and moons, Round summer and angular winter and winds, Are matched by other revolutions In which the world goes round and round In the crystal atmospheres of the mind, Light's comedies, dark's tragedies, Like things produced by a climate, the world Goes round in the climates of the mind And bears its floraisons of imagery.12

Figures of this kind are everywhere in Frye. His vision of history, drawn from writers like Spengler and Vico, is summed up in The Double Vision: 'History moves in a cyclical rhythm which never forms a complete or closed cycle' (NFR, 167). Also in The Double Vision, Frye uses a gyre metaphor to explain the superiority of '[Imaginative literalism' as an approach to the Bible - the acknowledgment that its literal meaning is metaphoric - over 'demonic literalism/ and relates this to interpenetration: '[IJmaginative literalism seeks what might be called interpenetration, the free flowing of spiritual life in and out of one another that communicates but never violates' (NFR, 180). This brings me finally to dianoia, to Frye's work seen as a single structure of vertical meaning, which is another way of returning to theme-study and asking, What is it that Frye's books keep spiralling around, touring, returning to, refreshing their vision of? The short answer is: criticism. 'I must never forget that I'm a literary critic/ says Frye in a late notebook (LN, 715). Criticism, its function and destiny, is surely the most prevalent concern over all his books and the one subject that he never long abandons. Criticism in an important sense for Frye is the dianoia, or meaning, of literature. If literature is what The Educated Imagination calls 'a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man/ criticism is 'not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgment of mankind' (El, 45). As total dianoia, criticism is what allows us to reconfigure the horizontal movement of literature through time into a vertical vision of simultaneous meaning - recall that one of the Massey lectures was called 'Verticals of Adam' - and thus to glimpse the never-to-be-fulfilled possibility of an order of words. Not in the experience of reading, but only through the act of criticism, is the poem interpenetrated by the order of words, or the order of words incarnated in the poem.13 In his essay 'Criticism, Visible and Invisible' (1964), Frye actually

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arranges his critical vision into a set of dialectical levels, similar to the dianoia pattern that he applies to the imaginative universe throughout his work. Here it is a version of the simplified, tripartite scheme presented as the Theory of Archetypal Meaning' in the Third Essay, where Frye describes an intermediate realm of accommodated (or 'analogical') imagery, bordered by apocalyptic imagery above, and by demonic imagery below (AC, 141-55). In the essay of 1964, we have the 'central activity of criticism,' which turns out to be the central Fryean activity of 'establishing a context for the works of literature being studied' (StS, 88). This activity, too, is bordered above and below, by critical activities for which Frye borrows terms from Christian theology. At the bottom end we have criticism militant, a therapeutic activity of evaluation, or separating the good from the bad, in which good and bad are not two kinds of literature, but, respectively, the active and the passive approaches to verbal experience. This kind of criticism is essentially the defence of those aspects of civilization loosely described as freedom of speech and freedom of thought. (ibid.)

And at the highest level is 'criticism triumphant, the inner possession of literature as an imaginative force to which all study of literature leads, and which is criticism at once glorified and invisible' (ibid.). Can we not see Frye's entire critical career as frozen and spread out across these three levels as well? At the centre of his effort is the elucidation of the literary tradition through the sense of an order of words and the accompanying reassignment of context. Below is the sort of evaluative activity he performed in his reviews and annual surveys of Canadian poetry, as well as in the liberal, anti-censorship function he assumed through his editorship of Canadian Forum. Above is what I would call the Fryean sublime, those moments near the end of Fearful Symmetry, or Anatomy of Criticism, or The Great Code, where Frye is no longer merely describing the tradition of visionary imagination, but inhabiting it. Even in Words with Power, his last major book, and ostensibly a book on the Bible and literature, Frye keeps coming back to the question of criticism. He returns to the idea of the failure of experience, saying that criticism exists 'because our experience of literature is so imperfect' (WP, 90). To this he adds later that we read a work in time, that time then stops as we see what the work means, but that then it begins again,

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as criticism, which is a 'social enterprise' (WP, 142). Frye's talking about a social enterprise necessarily leads to concern, and in some startling passages in The Double Vision, where criticism takes on a broader meaning than anywhere else in Frye, we find him identifying criticism as the force that liberates primary concern from idolatry. So even here, in his very last book, Frye is exploring the mission of criticism. He says that, unless it is what he calls spiritual, primary concern can be as limiting as secondary concern, or ideology. The key to the distinction, says Frye, is 'criticism in the larger sense as a process that takes over from the critics' (NFR, 196). A tradition of criticism liberates literature, and religion, from the limitations of the society into which they are born. It thus necessarily undermines the claims of social concern as absolute over the individual: 'We have to have this critical approach in all the arts, and in fact in every aspect of life, so that the word criticism expands until it is practically synonymous with education itself (ibid.). One of the deepest themes in Frye, suggested by his frequent use of forms of the word liberate, is the release of energy that accompanies the relegating of something to a new context. This is, in fact, the opposite of the prison theme. While criticism in a technical sense liberates literature from ideology, relating it to trans-historical concerns, in a broader sense it is what underwrites freedom of consciousness in a liberal society and is thus the 'spiritual' equivalent of the primary concern with freedom of movement. Moreover, I take it that it was professional criticism's relinquishment of its liberating mission in the 1980s - through identity politics, which imprisoned literature in ideology more narrowly than ever - that caused Frye to release his own energies into the new context of public criticism. In a notebook entry, Frye says, 'My whole conscious life has been purgatorial, a constant circling around the same thing, like a vine goingup an elm' (LN, 89). Michael Dolzani has related this to another 'spiral curriculum/ the form of progressive meditation that alchemy calls the circumambulatio.1* Alchemy is one of the symbolic systems that most interested Frye; he read widely in alchemical literature, and there are hundreds of references to it in the notebooks. As he is pondering the two parts of the never-to-be-written Third Book in the 1960s, he reaches for the circumambulatio metaphor to describe his own project: This makes it look for the moment as though Part One were on comparative mythology and cosmology as a literary form; Part Two on the cycle of literary themes I'm working on now ... Yet maybe one is places and two

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plots or movements around, hence the purgatorial regeneration theme, which is what I had: as the Great Work, however, it would have the spiral alchemical shape. (TEN, 258)

In Psychology and Alchemy, Jung construes individuation and the variety of self-understanding offered by psychology in alchemical terms: The way to the goal seems chaotic and interminable at first, and only gradually do the signs increase that it is leading anywhere. The way is not straight but appears to go round in circles. More accurate knowledge has proved it to go in spirals: the dream-motifs always return after certain intervals to definite forms, whose characteristic it is to define a centre ... As manifestations of unconscious processes the dreams rotate or circumambulate round the centre, drawing closer to it as the amplifications increase in distinctness and in scope.15

This may remind us, as much as anything, of Frye's attempt to see the symbolic universe as organized around an unseen centre and to configure literature 'not only as complicating itself in time, but as spread out in conceptual space from some kind of center that criticism could locate' (AC, 17). In his review of Jung's book, Frye does in fact contest Jung's assertion of some special relationship between psychology and alchemy and claims it for his own variety of literary criticism instead: In Jung's book the symbolic structures of alchemy and the heroic quest are united on the Euclidean principle that things equal to the same thing are equal to one another. The 'same thing' is Jung's own individuation process, whose general resemblance to the great work of alchemy, on its psychological side, is not difficult to demonstrate. But, centuries before Jung was born, the 'same thing' to which alchemy and romance were equal was biblical typology. For the Bible was not only the definitive alchemical myth for alchemists, but the definitive grammar of allegory for allegorical poets. (NFCL, 128)

I have quoted Frye's description of the typical humanist as a transforming agent in The Critical Path - 'his instinct is to save the face of the situations he encounters by finding the appropriate words for them' (CP, 90) - and it occurs to me that the personal metaphor that drives Frye's view of his own critical and spiritual vocation (the two are hardly different for Frye) may be that of the circumambulatory alche-

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mist. No critic ever took further, or more seriously, Sidney's alchemical metaphor for literature as replacing nature's brazen world with a golden one. Nobody ever took more literally (in Frye's sense) the hint contained in Sidney's metaphor: that literature may be the imagination's vast, ever-unfinished magnum opus, and criticism the philosopher's stone. NOTES 1 Robert Denham, 'Interpenetration as a Key Concept in Frye's Vision/ in Boyd and Salusinszky, eds, Rereading Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 157. 2 See Denham, 'Interpenetration,' passim; Dolzani, The Book of the Dead: A Skeleton Key to Northrop Frye's Notebooks,' in Boyd and Salusinszky, Rereading Frye, 19-38; Imre Salusinszky, 'Frye and the Art of Memory/ in Boyd and Salusinszky, 39-54. 3 As Denham has indeed done: see 'Auguries of Influence/ in Robert D. Denham and Thomas Willard, eds, Visionary Poetics: Essays on Northrop Frye's Criticism (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 86-7. 4 Gerald Murnane, The Plains (1982; Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2000), 116. 5 Dolzani, in Boyd and Salusinszky, Rereading Frye, 32. 6 See Salusinszky, Criticism in Society (London: Routledge, 1987), 32. 7 See Harold Bloom, The Breaking of the Vessels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), passim. 8 Carl Gustav Jung, 'On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry/ in Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory since Plato (New York: HBJ, 1992), 790. 9 See Dolzani, in Boyd and Salusinszky, Rereading Frye, passim. 10 Ibid., 21-2. 11 Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 349. 12 Ibid., 391. 13 'Probably the incarnational myth is there/ Frye told me in an unpublished interview recorded in 1982: T do think, I suppose almost inevitably, in terms of an incarnation.' 14 Dolzani, in Boyd and Salusinszky, Rereading Frye, 37. 15 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, in vol. 12 of The Collected Works ofC.G. Jung, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge, 1968), 28.

METAPHOR AND SPIRIT

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Frye's Double Vision: Metaphor and the Two Sources of Religion GARRY SHERBERT

From Anatomy of Criticism (1957) to The Double Vision (1991) Northrop Frye has written about the experience of literature and the experience of religion as the experience of metaphor. Frye is always careful to distinguish between religion and literature, but he adds, 'Between religion's "this is" and poetry's "but suppose this is" there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity' (AC, 127-8). The tension to which Frye refers stems mainly from the power of possibility to interrupt a focus on the actual that tends to collapse into 'presentism,' or what one philosopher aptly refers to as the 'idolatry of the present.'1 Frye's view of religion is hardly dogmatic, yet Frye critics have been slow to see a more radical deconstructionist strain in his resistance to dogmatism, be it religious or literary. The reluctance to see the deconstructive traits, particularly the paradoxes, of Frye's work is doubtless due to the mistaken reception of work like Jacques Derrida's as something merely destructive. On the contrary, the aporias and paradoxes in Derrida's writing are essentially affirmative gestures towards the other because they make us think in a new way, that is, otherwise. The future of Frye criticism seems to lie paradoxically, then, in recovering that part of Frye's past writing which, in Derrida's idiom, always affirms the other. The principal means by which Frye affirms the other is through the paradox of metaphor that 'neither is nor is not the reality which it manifests' (AC, 351), a paradox that interrupts the actual with a possibility that keeps the present moment open to the otherness of something ever more about to be.

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Frye's work demands to be placed within the context of the Continental tradition if we are to understand why he concentrates on the paradoxical nature of metaphor, especially in a religious context. Using a more philosophical approach, particularly a Derridean approach, I will outline the ethical dimension of Frye's concept of metaphor, which permits a relation to an other without appropriating the other. Derrida calls this paradoxical relationship a 'relation without relation.'2 To grasp the significance of Frye's ethical achievement, we need to see the paradox of metaphor as a relation without relation, since metaphor neither is nor is not the reality it manifests. In Frye's terms, the paradox of metaphor overcomes the subject-object split and thereby overcomes language that objectifies the other. Only the non-appropriative language of paradox allows the other to manifest itself without seizing the other. Frye's habit of quoting Heidegger to help us avoid instrumental language, 'language that uses man rather than man that uses language' (WP, 116), reveals not only his close proximity to Derrida's mode of philosophizing, but also his occasional reliance upon philosophical thinkers to support his paradoxical insights on the relationship between literature and the religious language of kerygma. In the Continental tradition, the critic who has most distinguished himself by investigating the paradoxes of metaphorical truth is Paul Ricoeur. In his indispensable book The Rule of Metaphor (1977), Ricoeur, like Frye, turns the inadequacy of descriptive discourse into the triumph of metaphorical truth. Ricoeur argues that metaphor suspends literal, descriptive discourse in order to redescribe reality through fiction. In a phrase reminiscent of Frye's definition of the symbol, Ricoeur remarks that the paradoxical character of metaphorical truth derives from the 'critical incision of the (literal) "is not" within the ontological vehemence of the (metaphorical) "is."'3 Seeing this paradox as affirmative leads me to the principal proposition of this essay, that metaphorical fiction has an ontological claim upon reality as testimony; that is, as fiction it has the power to redescribe reality. Frye's insistence on the 'reality of what is created' (WP, 128), or in Ricoeur's terms, the 'ontological vehemence' of metaphorical redescription, explains why Frye places so much significance on the power of metaphor to remake reality in a religious context.4 Through his use of Vice's axiom verum factum, which Frye translates as 'what is true for us is what we have made' (WP, 82), Frye emphasizes that the words with power in poetry and religion are performative: they perform an act in saying something. To isolate the testimonial aspect in Frye's theory of metaphor, however, we must

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turn to Derrida's arguments for the performative character of testimony in the context of religion and the necessary association between testimony and fiction. In his essay 'Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of "Religion" at the Limits of Reason Alone/ Derrida argues that the two sources of religion, the 'experience of faith' and the 'experience of the sacred/ converge in testimony.5 Testimony for Derrida is not knowledge of an event, but a poetic act whereby a witness calls upon the faith of the other to accept his or her account of an event. On the performative nature of testimony, Derrida cites Augustine's Confessions X.i, where Augustine states that he will 'make the truth/ facere veritatem, of himself in his heart by confessing it.6 There is no truth outside the words, no truth of correspondence by which to measure the accuracy of the words. The words do what they say in saying it. Testimony represents a break with reality and corresponds with metaphor's capacity to make the world disappear by suspending literal, descriptive discourse and then remaking the world through the truth of metaphorical fictions. Since the descriptive reference has been annihilated, we have only the words to testify to the reality of the literary metaphor. For Frye, faith starts with the testimony of metaphorical fictions, the 'evidence of things not seen' (Hebrews 11:1). A metaphorical vision is only a fiction, but a 'fiction we enter into "as if" it were true' (DV, 19). Derrida generalizes the poetic act of witnessing to all testimony. The witness is a kind of poet who calls for an act of faith in the other to recreate the truth of the reality that now exists only in the words themselves. To organize my analysis of the testimonial dimension in Frye's theory of metaphor, I will follow the Anatomy's, typology in its movement from an Aristotelian to a Longinian approach towards metaphor, or in its movement from metaphor as analogy to metaphor as identity. Applying testimony to this division between analogy and identity addresses the difference between the mimetic and non-mimetic, including the Aristotelian distinction between poetry and other discursive forms like history and philosophy. In the Longinian context, sustaining the noninstrumental sense of metaphor means confronting the question of how to avoid effacing difference in a metaphor that reaches the height of sublimity only when it conceals itself as a metaphor. The French poet and philosopher Michel Deguy will provide not only a further refinement to our understanding of the play of identity and difference specific to sublime metaphor, but also the context to appreciate the philosophical significance of Frye's contribution to theories of the sublime.

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Part of my purpose is to show, as Ricoeur himself tacitly admits, that Frye produces a theory of creative imitation based on Aristotle, a theory that predates Ricoeur's own in The Rule of Metaphor.7 Frye anticipates Ricoeur's argument that metaphorical fictions create resemblance rather than just finding it. Ricoeur argues, for example, that metaphor suspends literal, descriptive discourse in order to redescribe reality through fiction. Ricoeur begins his book on metaphor by also reinterpreting Aristotelian mimesis as a form of redescription. If art imitates nature, then unlike historical description it imitates creatively. Through the fiction of its plots and metaphors, poetry remakes reality by raising its reference to nature from the actual to the mode of the possible. But, throughout his career, Frye returns to Aristotle's comparison of poetry and history to point out that poetry sees more in the historical than the particular. Frye's earlier version of creative imitation in what Ricoeur calls 'redescription' occurs when Frye comments on the 'conception of art as having a relation to reality which is neither direct nor negative, but potential' (AC, 93). In contrast to the primary imitation of an action in historical writing, poetry is a 'secondary imitation of an action' (AC, 83), but an imitation whose creativity is characterized by 'exhilaration or exuberance: the vision of something liberated from... experience into mimesis, of life into art, of routine into play' (AC, 93). Poetry's exuberant fictions release the potential of a unique historical event by opening it towards the universal, the possibility that a singular event can serve as an ideal to be repeated. Whether Frye's theory of metaphor is rendered as the exuberant fiction of mimesis in metaphor, or fictional redescription, his theory invites closer comparison with Derrida's disclosure of the 'disturbing complicity between fiction and testimony.'8 To situate what Frye means by verum factum in a non-mimetic Longinian context, however, I will follow Deguy in describing sublime metaphor as more testamentary than testimonial. The experience of sublime metaphor is testamentary because, by suspending the world of descriptive reference, we witness the end of the world to which descriptive discourse refers. Noting the theme of death in Longinus's essay 'On the Sublime/ Deguy compares the structure of sublime experience with the dying who go beyond the limit of the mortal condition and whose sublime 'speech snatched from death' is passed on to those who remain behind.9 The sublimity of the dying one's speech lies in its vision of humanity's destiny, a perspective on the whole of the mortal condition comparable to the divine. This view of the totality granted by the discourse of exaltation gives an

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answer to the question quo tendas, where are you going. In Frye's language, a '(quo tendas) vision of reality' (WTC, 155) reveals the actual as only a part of the possible. Both Frye and Deguy agree that sublime metaphor is apocalyptic in that we witness the end of things as they are and the revelation of things maintained in a possible mode of existence. The first part of my essay focuses on the relation of metaphor to faith, as guided by Derrida's essay on the two sources of religion. The second part concentrates on the sacred, or holiness, and kerygma, the language specific to religion. Kerygma presents what may be the greatest challenge to this strange movement of approaching the other through the detour of metaphor. In kerygmatic language, metaphor abandons analogy for identity, where the metaphorical comparison of two things apparently effaces the difference between them. Frye has various names for metaphorical statements of identity between two things: he calls such metaphors 'anagogic' in the Anatomy and 'ecstatic' or 'existential' in The Great Code and Words with Power. But, as Deguy indicates, such statements of identity would be a form of violence imposed upon one thing by another. In the poem 'Aide Memoire,' Deguy writes: Comparison keeps up the incomparable The distinction between things among themselves Poetry forbids identification For the rigorous sweetness of the like-or-as ...10

To show how Frye concurs with Deguy that 'Poetry forbids identification/ I will mark the points at which Frye sustains the alternation of identity and difference even at the anagogic phase of the symbol, or sublime metaphor. In fact, the sublime functions as a schema of the holy, as Rudolf Otto argues in his still valuable book The Idea of the Holy (1923).n The paradox of a metaphor that makes statements of identity by effacing its own status as metaphor calls for careful consideration if we are, for ethical reasons, to maintain difference in what we may call Frye's Longinian schema of the holy. Metaphorical Fiction and Testimony: Frye's Poetics of Faith From Anatomy of Criticism to The Double Vision, Frye has carefully preserved the distinction between religion and literature, and yet no one has done more to transgress that distinction. Linking religious faith with literary vision, Frye himself states that he is 'pursuing the dialectic

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of belief and vision until they merge' (MM, 107). He insists that belief is connected in the mind with a vision of possibilities provided by myth and metaphor. However, where the stories and metaphors of religion offer models to live by, Frye limits his claims for the arts to their role as 'witnesses... [to] a world that may not exist but completes existence' (CP, 170). And yet it turns out that the role of art as witness to this other world is the one thing needful, in Frye's view, where religious faith is concerned. Because literature is not directly connected to belief, it renders its most valued service to religious faith by offering a 'range of imaginative possibilities of belief (CP, 128). As the other of reality, the possibilities of literary fiction keep religious faith open to otherness by showing that existence is unfinished. Frye describes the excess of possibility that the world of imagination presents to faith as a 'holiday or Sabbath world where we rest from belief and commitment, the greater mystery beyond whatever can be formulated and presented for acceptance' (CP, 169). For Frye, this 'rest from belief,' this experience of interruption that permits us to think the 'great mystery beyond,' is best accomplished through the language-event of metaphor. Frye's notion of literary possibility as rest from belief comes very near to one of Derrida's strategies for opening a system of ideas by examining its conditions of possibility and then exceeding that system from within by considering possibilities that limit the system or make the system impossible. Considering the impossible as a possibility, however unlikely, can disturb us by breaking the continuity of experience even when it is dismissed as a mere flourish of hyperbole, but the hyperbole of possibility in a religious context challenges belief and opens it to otherness.12 In a strategy similar to Derrida's, we can see Frye opening religious thinking from within when he wants to establish the necessity of metaphor in religious writing. Frye quotes Thomas Browne's Religio Medici: 'I bless my self and am thankful ... that I never saw Christ nor His Disciples.' A Chinese philosopher is said to have remarked that in practice unicorns do not exist, because if anyone saw a unicorn he would instantly tell himself that he had not seen it and forget the memory. The spirit of this remark is in the Gospels too, where so frequently people do not hear what they hear, and do not see what they see. (NFR, 224)13 From the inadequacy of eyewitness accounts and historical, descriptive writing in spiritual matters, Frye makes room for metaphor in religious

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writing, but this passage also shows Frye grappling with the paradoxical blindness of eyewitness testimony. Derrida goes a step further than Frye, saying that eyewitnesses of a normal, everyday event are just as blind as the one who sees an extraordinary event because they must replace their perceptions of the event with a narrative account. The gap between what a witness sees and what a witness says makes testimony, for Derrida, a fundamentally poetic act. This gap parallels the dissociation of descriptive reference and fictional redescription in Frye's concept of metaphor. The bond that exists between fiction and testimony appears most clearly in Frye's writing when he examines the relation of literature to history and philosophy. Frye customarily borrows from Aristotle an explanation of the mimetic theory of literature that distinguishes it from history, which imitates particular actions, and philosophy, which generalizes things in thought, and therefore imitates thought. In the Anatomy, Frye suggests that 'the work of art does not reflect external events and ideas' (AC, 84), but falls somewhere between history and philosophy, or example and precept. Ironically, literary imitation is non-mimetic in Aristotle's theory since it does not imitate reality directly. While analysing historical fictions, Frye struggles for a vocabulary to explain literary imitation, as in The Great Code, where he refers to poetry as a 'secondary verbal imitation' (65) of example and precept. He regrets in the Anatomy that the Vagaries of language make "exemplary" the adjective for both example and precept' (AC, 84), because he wants to avoid saying that historical fiction uses the 'exemplary example.' Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, for instance, defines 'exemplary' with the opposed meanings of 'serving as or in the nature of an exemplar, form, or pattern' and yet 'serving as an example, instance, or illustration.' It is, nonetheless, this very paradoxical meaning of exemplarity that Derrida uses to account for the overlap of fiction with testimony. Though the point is only implicit in Frye, Derrida explicitly declares that testimony encounters fiction in the paradoxical place between the singular and the general, where the ability to repeat opens the unknowable, unique experience to the order of universal meaning and intelligibility. Frye knows very well that the 'unique as such is unknowable' (CP, 27), so it follows that the literary critic who works within a structure of knowledge called criticism builds 'a monument to a failure of experience, a tower of Babel or one of the "ruins of time" which, in Blake's phrase, build "mansions in eternity"' (CP, 27). Frye raises the question

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of how we can build a monument or testament to the unique if it is unknowable and the unknowable remains a secret. Derrida succinctly states the paradox: 'The example is not substitutable; but at the same time the same aporia always remains: this irreplaceability must be exemplary, that is replaceable/14 No testimony can escape the aporia of the exemplary example, and as we shall see, this aporia opens the singular event to the possibility of literature. Derrida goes on to say, 'The exemplarity of the "instant," that which makes it an "instance," if you like, is that it is singular, like any exemplarity, singular and universal, singular and universalizable. The singular must be universalizable; this is the testimonial condition.'15 For any event to be remembered, recorded, or testified to, it must possess the ability to repeat itself, or what Derrida calls 'iterability.'16 What opens the singularity of an event to the possibility of literature is the same thing that opens it to testimony - iterability. Iterability, according to Derrida, combines the two opposed meanings of a thing's ability to repeat and to alter. The contradictory nature of iterability accounts for the possibility of sameness and difference within repetition, such as the possibility of repeating the same thing in truthful testimony, or in a lie, or in a fiction. And inasmuch as repetition is the condition of all idealization, repetition allows the singular instant to be idealized, or exemplary.17 Derrida dwells on this paradox of the exemplary example, where fiction, including metaphorical fiction, and testimony share the same region of space. To maintain its uniqueness, the singular event - to which we must testify so that it will not be lost forever - must divide itself in order to keep itself from being effaced by universalization. The singular instance encrypts itself, hides itself away from efforts to capture it, but in dividing itself, it also gives part of itself to the repetition and consequent universalization. Repetition comprehends technological forms of repetition and other forms of virtuality, lying and literature being among the virtual forms that interest us most. Derrida writes in Demeure: Fiction and Testimony on the space that fiction and autobiography share: And it is perhaps here, with the technological both as ideality and prosthetic iterability, that the possibility of fiction and lie, simulacrum and literature, that of the right to literature insinuates itself, at the very origin of truthful testimony, autobiography in good faith, sincere confession, as their essential compossibility.18

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Both Derrida and Frye maintain that repetition does not merely look backwards, repeating the same, but also opens itself to the future by repeating differently each time, no matter how minimal that difference may be. One of the reasons Derrida calls repetition 'prosthetic iterability' here is that it divides itself in order to add something new, the prosthesis, to itself. Frye illustrates his point by appealing to Kierkegaard's book Repetition to accentuate the forward-moving feature of repetition. This repetition is 'not the simple repeating of an experience, but the recreating of it which redeems or awakens it to life, the end of the process, he says, being the apocalyptic promise: "Behold, I make all things new"' (AC, 345). Making things new through repetition joins directly with the power of the redescription of reality in metaphorical fictions. For metaphor to remake reality and renew faith, something must come to an end so that it can repeat itself anew. Speaking of the symbolists like Mallarme in his essay on symbols, Frye details the paradoxical ontology of metaphor and how it remakes the world in defiance of reality to construct what Wallace Stevens calls the 'supreme fiction': The world of reality dies into nothing; the symbolic world is born from nothing, for a symbol to begin with is nothing apart from the context that forms around it and completes it' (MM, 39). The negativity of a world dying into nothing interrupts reality, but metaphor turns this nothingness into a resource that exceeds everything that exists and opens thought to the otherness of the unknown. Frye focuses on the symbol's paradoxical capacity to convey a mystery, a 'mystery [that] ... comes not from concealment but from revelation, not from something unknown or unknowable in the work, but from something unlimited in it' (AC, 88). As the passage from The Critical Path quoted earlier indicates, the unlimited dimension of mystery in Frye's writing involves not simply the unlimited possibilities which reveal that our world remains unfinished, but the impossible that opens the world to what is a completely different and unknown other. The mystery of the symbol fascinates Frye because it acts like a secret that announces itself in the present, but has not arrived yet and so is not present: 'in a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore by Silence and Speech acting together, comes a double significance' (MM, 31).19 The 'double significance' for Frye lies in the necessity of an other to complete the symbol, as in the example he uses of the railway checks that need to be validated (MM, 28). Frye wants the

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secret not to have this or that for its content, but rather to exhibit the structure of a secret, a relation to otherness that can never be known no matter how familiar. Frye's theory of the symbol illustrates what Derrida means by the secret. Indeed, literature is exemplary of the secret since poetic fiction 'detaches itself from its presumed source and thus remains locked away [au secret].'20 For Derrida, 'when it is the call [appel] of the secret... which points back to the other or to something else, when it is this itself that keeps our passion aroused, and holds us to the other, then the secret impassions us.'21 Derrida says that we can testify to the secret, but testimony never amounts to knowledge, which would constitute a means of trying to master and control the other. If one were to use a secret knowledge to control or manipulate others, one must divulge that there is a secret, one must testify to the secret. Even if there is no secret, or if the secret has no content - and Derrida does say the secret is that there is no secret - we always have a relation to an other that we cannot know, and the structure of the secret remains intact.22 Frye's symbol possesses the structure of the secret, for metaphorical language does not objectify the other, and the secret of a symbol without a determinate meaning is a secret without content. The last feature of Derrida's concept of testimony relevant to metaphorical fiction is Derrida's blunt assertion in Demeure that '[t]he miracle is the essential line of union between testimony and fiction.'23 The religious context of 'Faith and Knowledge,' however, develops this line in a way more immediately relevant to our analysis of Frye's theory of metaphor. Testimony or sworn faith, in Derrida's view, 'amounts to saying "Believe what I say as one believes in a miracle."'24 The miracle attracts Derrida as an explanation of testimony because it interrupts the normal course of events, exposing to otherness the sameness of our daily routines. In fact, interruption, especially in the form of doubt and 'disenchantment,' represents 'the very source of the religious.'25 Even in the most ordinary and the most normal event, testimony suspends the flowing current of events since it remains an extraordinary, unassimilated experience, beyond proof. Being beyond proof, testimony opens the space of faith: 'If belief is the ether of the address and relation to the utterly other, it is [to be found] in the experience of non-relationship or absolute interruption' (indices: 'Blanchot,' 'Levinas' ...).'26 The miracle, to borrow Derrida's phrase from another essay, 'interrupts the regime of the possible' with the impossible.27 Frye seldom uses the word 'miracle,' but he interprets Paul's definition of faith in Hebrews 11:1 using Tertullian's rule of faith, 'I believe because it is impossible' (WP,

Frye's Double Vision: Metaphor and the Two Sources of Religion 69Frye's Doubl

129). Frye demonstrates that there is a non-dogmatic, poetic interpretation of Tertullian's paradox as a means of resisting the 'reduction of the substance of belief to the credible' (WP, 129). For instance, Frye observes: 'Literature, with its sense of "anything is possible" and its convention of suspending disbelief even in the most fantastic assumptions, is a mode of language with a particular relation to hope' (WP, 130). Frye's concept of literature as a place where 'anything is possible,' includes the impossible, or the unbelievable as the word 'fantastic' suggests. Literature, then, has the essential, if paradoxical, function of going beyond the horizons of belief. In Frye's poetics of faith, literature interrupts faith, but in doing so renews faith by opening it to the coming of the other. Frye's Longinian Schema of the Holy The point of contact between Frye and Derrida on the matter of religious faith lies in the statement Frye makes about poets of the last century who 'do not necessarily believe this or that, but believe intransitively, preserving an openness of attitude which closes nothing off dogmatically, but is the opposite of gullibility, the readiness to believe anything transitively' (WP, 131). To 'believe intransitively' is to remain open to something we cannot know is coming, but only believe, something that comes 'like a thief in the night' (1 Thessalonians 5:2). Waiting for something to come as a complete surprise is a paradoxical position, yet Frye and Derrida realize the necessity of suffering through contradiction to give an account of religious experience, especially for an experience of holiness. If, as Kierkegaard tells us, 'paradox is the passion of thought,' then Frye counts on the paradox of metaphor that is and is not the thing it represents to provoke the passion to think the 'great mystery beyond.'28 Derrida captures the contrary movements of paradox in the word 'passion' itself, whose meaning ranges between suffering something passively and desiring something ardently.29 Of course, Derrida includes the Passion of Christ, which he notes is not unrelated to the testimony of martyrdom.30 But where metaphor 'in its radical form is a statement of identity' (AC, 123), where 'the passion for the impossible is a passion of faith,' metaphor must do violence to itself and admit difference so as not to do violence to the other.31 Frye rightly argues that the language specific to religion, kerygma, demands metaphor. Yet just at the point where the metaphor of identity offers to put us into relation to holiness, the

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question arises as to how metaphor testifies to the holy without objectifying it and thereby violating it. Since a person of faith possesses the desire for contact with the holy that must remain untouched, a relationship must be established that simultaneously preserves a respectful distance, an interruption. The very possibility of religion in Derrida's opinion is a movement of hesitation in order to open access to the holy: 'Scruple, hesitation, indecision, reticence (hence modesty [pudeur], respect, restraint before that which should remain sacred, holy or safe: unscathed, immune) - this too is what is meant by religio.'32 The two sources of religion converge here in the moment of hesitation because it is possible to maintain oneself in the presence of the holy only if 'faith or fidelity signifies here acquiescing to the testimony of the other - of the utterly other who is inaccessible in its absolute source. And there where every other is utterly other [ou tout autre est tout autre].'33 Derrida's idea of the holy agrees with Otto, who proposes that the contradictory feelings evoked by the sublime, feelings that he sums up in the phrases mysterium tremendum andfascinans, function as a schema for the holy.34 Frye, like Otto, schematizes the concept of the holy through the sublime because the things we categorize as holy cannot be known at all without the schema of the category of the holy. It is precisely this contradictory movement of attraction and repulsion in our feelings that characterizes the ecstatic response to kerygma and its sublime metaphors, Frye's anagogic metaphor or 'existential metaphor' (WP, 82). The contradictory movement of feeling evoked by sublime metaphor corresponds to the paradoxical ontology of metaphor. Frye's concept of metaphorical truth comes very close to Ricoeur's where we must, as I pointed out in my introduction, 'include the critical incision of the literal "is not" within the ontological vehemence of the metaphorical "is."'35 For Ricoeur, the critical incision between the literal 'is not' and the metaphorical 'is' raises the question of 'metaphor faith.'36 Ricoeur asks: 'Can one create metaphors without believing them and without believing that, in a certain way, "that is"? So it is the relationship itself, and not just its extremes, that is at issue/37 This question of metaphorical faith means avoiding the one extreme of 'ontological vehemence/ an extreme that persists for Frye in the language of religious faith. On the other hand, metaphorical truth does not mean giving in to the other extreme and dismissing the 'as if sceptically as an illusory utopianism. However, even when the metaphor reaches the anagogic phase, or perhaps especially here where metaphor makes statements of identity,

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Frye's notion of the intransitivity of belief now enhanced by literature ensures that what the metaphor refers to is not an object, which has disappeared with the literal, descriptive level, but the fictional appearance of those objects called to language in their disappearance. Thus, the symbol as monad can only convey its ghostly apocalyptic vision of last things if something has disappeared or come to an end. The anagogic symbol, then, is a sublime metaphor in which, to quote Michel Deguy, there is a 'relation between the sublime and the testamentary. Sublime words are words of the end.'38 The end comes in every metaphor since, as Ricoeur reminds us, every metaphor is built upon the 'ruins of the literal/39 One reason Deguy says 'sublime words are words of the end' is that Longinus's essay is replete with references to death. The poet/ Deguy states, 'is the witness who passes on the legacy of their [the dying ones'] final word/40 The reader, of course, is also a witness who 'takes up speech "on the lips of the dying," in order to promise to "realize" it/41 The sublime would be, for the one who receives the word, 'The elevated point... from which I get a glimpse of the land as promised land, in complete knowledge of the as if.'42 The vision is not a transcendental world because it is a promised land I do not enter. The sublimity of metaphor is quasi-transcendental, because it transports us beyond the actual to the possible. The experience of the sublime event is real, but the vision is not. The dying one 'experiences "in passing on" the revelation of a liberty that will not come to pass in the form of a possession but rather in the being-"liberated" into the possibility of relating to what there is as to a promised land/43 Deguy shares with Frye a view of metaphor as the testimony of a quasi-transcendental world that both is and is not. He writes: To go toward the other shore is to take the bridge and, so doing, to gain access to another world, whether it be religious belief in the 'next life' or poetic belief in the fiction (poiesis) of another world in this one: let us note that allegory here, that comparison with the bridge in poetry, presupposes the pontifical skill (techne) of a man, a 'craftsman' before he is a poet as Plato insisted - unless this habitation by which man constructs a world is thought of as in itself originally poetic (Vico).44

Here the bridge works as a metaphor for the sublime transports of metaphor. Whether that transport is the kerygmatic language of religion or the poetic fiction of 'another world in this one,' Deguy echoes

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the German Romantic poet Friedrich Holderlin, who deeply influences Heidegger in his turn from being to language: 'poetically man dwells on this earth.'45 To dwell poetically, or, as Frye puts it in The Double Vision, to have 'myths and metaphors that we can live by and in' (NFR, 180), is to exploit the performative power of poetry to create the state of affairs to which it refers. Like testimony, metaphor promises the truth, but there is no truth prior to it to represent. This 'testimonial performativity/ as Derrida refers to it, constitutes the social function of anagogic metaphor.46 If society has become sublime by becoming an object that cannot be represented, then the need for the sublimity of metaphor rises to greater urgency to represent the unrepresentable.47 Derrida has argued before that a totality only appears when it has been exceeded.48 Frye has anticipated this position in his exhortations about the social function of literature in the section on anagogic metaphor. Anagogic metaphor appears to lie on the threshold of literature and religion, for it has a cultural function that renders religion an 'essential service/ which is 'to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object' (AC, 127). If there is any sense of being 'elevated' in the anagogic, as its etymology implies (OED), Frye believes it refers to metaphors which show us that the actual is only part of the possible (WTC, 155). Even religion shares with ordinary life a primary concern for the existential, whereas culture, which depends upon the anagogic to attain a sublime view of a social totality, 'interposes, between the ordinary and the religious life, a total vision of possibilities, and insists on its totality' (AC, 127). The sublime resists 'presentism,' the central danger of what Frye calls 'ethical criticism/ In the spirit of insisting upon the 'total vision of possibilities' in his theory of metaphor, I now turn to some of the hitherto unseen possibilities in Frye's poetic of the sublime, in order to understand his synoptic view of literature and religion. We should not be surprised to find that Frye's anagogic metaphor in Patricia Parker's words, his 'copular metaphor' - must admit division even though it is a 'radical joining or copula, the "A equals not A" of metaphor which Frye insists is the basis of all poetry.'49 When he states the principle of identity that operates at the most radical level of metaphor, Frye, in the Anatomy, preserves difference: 'Identity is the opposite of similarity or likeness, and total identity is not uniformity, still less monotony, but a unity of various things' (AC, 125). Later in

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Words with Power, he becomes more explicit: 'Thus gods are ready-made metaphors [GC, 7], a metaphor being a statement of identity of the type "A is B," where personality and natural object are said to be the same thing, although they remain two different things' (WP, 71). Parker is right to say that metaphor is 'classically defined as a crossing of boundary lines/ but transgression affirms the limit even while it denies that limit.50 While metaphor, as its etymology in Greek reminds us, may transport a trait for us from one category to another, from the sensible to the intelligible, it may also offer an experience of the sublime and transport us. The question in both cases will have been a question of borders, since something will have been crossed. Frye conveys the capacity of anagogic metaphor to overflow boundaries when he says that the literary universe 'is a universe in which everything is potentially identical with everything else' (AC, 124). Yet Frye never goes much further than saying that the anagogic metaphor is a statement of identity that somehow does not suppress difference. Deguy offers the most detailed analysis of Longinian metaphor available, in his indispensable essay 'The Discourse of Exaltation (Megalopein): Contribution to a Rereading of Pseudo-Longinus.' He writes that the sublime has the character of the 'same transgressing difference,' especially the difference that 'divides saying from what it says.'51 Deguy has in mind Longinus's declaration that 'a figure is most excellent when the fact that it is a figure thoroughly escapes our notice.'52 The phrase at the end of the sentence attracts Deguy's attention, the Greek auxiliary verb lanthanesthai, referring to the fact that a sublime figure 'escapes our notice.' The phrase attracts Deguy's attention because it heightens the paradox of a sublime truth that elevates our awareness by making us 'overlook/ or lose our awareness of, the conditions that produced the truth. Since paradox is the passion of thought, the passion aroused by the great conceptions of the sublime must be a more exalted passion for paradox, a passion for the impossible. Longinus writes, 'If what is useful or even necessary to man is within his range, in turn the astonishing, for him, is always the paradox.'53 The paradox of sublime metaphor, then, must proceed in some way from the literal contradiction in metaphorical statements that preserves difference. In order that we do not forget the difference that sublime metaphor makes us forget, Deguy uses a punning neologism, lethal, to describe the contradictory structure of the sublime event.54 The sublime figure makes us forget the means by which we are transported to an exalted place, as though we

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had crossed the river of forgetfulness, Lethe. Nevertheless, the word lethal also reminds us of the difference crossed to get to the exalted place on the other side, by reminding us of the uncrossable difference of death. The 'ark crossing the flood' is the transport of metaphor.55 Deguy avers that, for Longinus, the synthesis of the whole in the sublime preserves the difference. Synthesis simplifies the differences as it unifies in the manner of a flood of light or water.56 Developing the watery image in the word lethal, Deguy compares the sublime metaphor to a flood or deluge which overwhelms the technical device of the figure that makes the sublime possible: The deluge, the sublime, simulates the origin in reproducing it and reproduces it in simulating the origin, the simplicity of the origin, dissimulating still, reserving the diversity of multiplicity, turning itself 'inside out' as it hides and 'makes one forget' the division one of whose names is the division between phusis and techne. The reascension to the postulated sameness can only be accomplished in the re (reproduction, repetition), in the knowledge of the difference and the awareness of the mechanisms (ruses, turns of phrase and pen: 'technique') for feigning forgetfulness of difference and its differentiations.57

Deguy emphasizes that the effect of the sublime metaphor is to make us forget the figurative, technical device that unnaturally transports us into the seemingly natural, ecstatic union with the object of the comparison. He is recalling the Heideggerian economy of truth expressed in the Greek word aletheia, meaning 'truth/ or (more literally) 'unforgetting/ Deguy suggests that our ascension to sublime truth is an unforgetting of nature as the origin. This ascension can only be accomplished by an artificial device that renders itself forgotten. In The Well-Tempered Critic (1963), Frye makes a similar remark concerning the ability of sublime metaphors to make us forget the technical devices of figuration: 'As early as Longinus we have the remark that it is the test of a good figure of speech when the fact that it is a figure goes unrecognized' (WTC, 120). The sameness between the objects of comparison that hides their differences is the very light (of truth) that the sublime figure manifests. Longinus compares the figurative device to a 'faint gleam' that is 'made to disappear when the sun radiates all around it/58 Although I cannot elaborate here, Deguy develops a kind of apocalyptic poetic concerning the question of technology in our culture, much as Heidegger does, based on the following remark by

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Longinus about the concealment of technique in the sublime: 'Now in speeches and writings, since emotion and sublimity lie nearer to our souls - because of a kind of natural kinship and because of their dazzling effect - over and over again they appear to us before the figures, and they cast technique into the shade and keep it hidden.'59 Paradoxically, art (techne) imitates nature since the technical figures of speech function like the sun - we see by its light, but cannot look directly at the source. Deguy also seems to be in agreement with Frye that the sublime is fundamental to metaphor when he says, 'Metaphor is what originally brings to visibility the figure of what is not visible.'60 Metaphor, like the sublime, presents the unpresentable. Anagogic metaphor, then, is not merely the transcendence of borders, which are easily hidden and forgotten. Without the borders the overflow of the sublime deluge cannot be measured, and the unpresentable would never be presented.61 Like Longinus in section 35 of his essay on the sublime, Frye characterizes human nature in terms of the sublime and explains why nature is not the container, but the thing contained. Poetry reflects this totalizing perspective because it goes beyond reality, and the only limit 'is the conceivable or imaginative limit of desire, which is infinite, eternal, and hence, apocalyptic' (AC, 119). The apocalyptic excess of the anagogic metaphor manifests itself when Frye resorts to sublime language to describe, as Deguy would put it, a 'perspective that is like the divine.'62 Frye states: Anagogically, then, poetry unites total ritual, or unlimited social action, with total dream, or unlimited individual thought. Its universe is infinite and boundless hypothesis: it cannot be contained within any actual civilization or set of moral values, for the same reason that no structure of imagery can be restricted to one allegorical interpretation. (AC, 120)

The aporia for Deguy of this elevated view of the mortal condition is in the metaphorical comparison, the word 'like' serving as the point from which one attains the hupsous, or the 'high/ usually translated as 'the sublime': From this light ledge, the height of the high, which is like a beyond, one can attain a totalizing and 'symbolic' view of the living-and-dying and find the equivalent of its enigma in a word, the word of the end, the word for us, the survivors of the arrival of death that neither hides itself nor

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The ledge - that is, the metaphorical comparison (which in this case is the comparison of comparison to a ledge) - suggests a material support upon which the mortal stands to go, paradoxically, beyond the mortal condition. The metaphorical ledge constitutes the frame or the threshold of the sublime, a threshold that joins and separates us, on the inside, to the apocalyptic vision of the outside. Having reached 'the word of the end/ we can go no further than to stand on the 'light ledge' of Frye's posthumous word in The Double Vision. One can certainly attain a 'totalizing and "symbolic" view' of the mortal condition in The Double Vision, but only because Frye transports us beyond that condition. For Frye, metaphor testifies to an otherness beyond the mortal condition, an attestation that unites the two sources of religion, the experience of faith and the experience of the holy. The testimony that metaphor gives of these two sources of religion is what I am calling the 'double vision.' Yet Frye is right to say that the language of religion is built upon the ruins of descriptive language, just as faith is always blind. Since possibility can be calculated in advance, the double vision always sees beyond mere possibility, to glimpse the impossible. As Frye reminds us, The language that lifts us clear of the merely plausible and the merely credible is the language of the spirit' (NFR, 182). What moves the spirit beyond the limit of the possible is the ark of metaphor, for only through its transports do we catch a glimpse of the promised land, the vision of another world in this one, a place in which the spirit can live and dwell poetically. NOTES 1 John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 87.1 am deeply indebted to Caputo's book for guiding me through Derrida's many writings on religion. 2 For what Caputo calls the 'strange syntax of the sans' (87) or 'without/ see Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, published together with Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 89-92. 3 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation

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4 5

6

7

8 9

10

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of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 255. For Ricoeur's writing on testimony and its relation to kerygma, see Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis S. Mudge (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980). Mudge in his introduction points out that, for Ricoeur, 'testimony is preserved in poesis' (27). Ricoeur's main concern, however, is to explain how testimony of the absolute is handed down through tradition. Although he mentions that the role of 'metaphorical reference' (101) is to help project the world of the text to the reader, Ricoeur does not focus, as I do, on how metaphor itself is testimonial. Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 255. Jacques Derrida, 'Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of "Religion" at the Limits of Reason Alone,' trans. Samuel Weber, in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds, Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1-78. Derrida, Circumfession: Fifty-nine Periods and Periphrases, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, in Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 47-8. Ricoeur, '"Anatomy of Criticism" or the Order of Paradigms,' trans. David Pellauer, in Eleanor Cook et al., eds, Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 8. Derrida, Demeure, 43. Michel Deguy, 'The Discourse of Exaltation (Megalopein): Contribution to a Reading of Pseudo-Longinus,' in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 9. The original passage can be found in Deguy, Gisants (n.p.: Editions Gallimards, 1985), 132, and reads as follows: La comparaison entretient 1'incomparable La distinction des choses entre elles Poesie interdit 1'identification Pour la douceur de comme rigoureuse.

I use the felicitous translation by Christopher Elson, professor of French at Dalhousie University, who introduced me to the poetry and person of Michel Deguy. I dedicate this paper to Professor Elson because he has forever changed the direction of Frye criticism for me. 11 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1950; first pub. 1923). 12 If I may borrow an example from Ricoeur's analysis of hyperbole, state-

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13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30

Garry Sherbert ments like the following challenge belief: 'Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.' See Ricoeur, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, ed. Charles E. Regan and David Stewart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 244. The passage from Browne is from Religio Medici, 18 (pt. 1, sec. 9), as Alvin A. Lee and Jean O'Grady point out (NFR, 400 n. 50). Derrida, Demeure, 41. Ibid. Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 61-2. Iterability also limits idealization because its structure contains within it the possibility of altering whatever repeats. Iterability is the capacity of any discourse to be repeated outside the circumstances of its origin, even in the absence or death of the sender (and receiver) of the discourse. The ability of discourse to function independently of its origin is the condition that makes ideality possible, yet limits it by opening up repetition to the possibility of change. Derrida, Demeure, 42. Here Frye is quoting Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, which raises the question of transcendentalism in the symbol. Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr, and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 29. Ibid., 29. Derrida, 'How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,' trans. Ken Frieden, in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 95. See also Caputo's excellent commentary on the secret in Derrida: The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, especially pages 33 and 107. Derrida, Demeure, 75. Derrida, 'Faith and Knowledge,' 63-4. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 64. Derrida, On the Name, 43. S0ren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard's Writings. Vol. VII, Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 37. For Kierkegaard's identification of the experience of faith with paradox, see p. 65. On Derrida's use of the word 'passion,' see 'Passions: "An Oblique Offering,"' trans. David Wood, in On the Name, 3-31; and Demeure, 26-9. Derrida, Demeure, 27.

Frye's Double Vision: Metaphor and the Two Sources of Religion 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53

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Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 63. Derrida, 'Faith and Knowledge/ 31. Ibid., 33. Otto translates this opposition in 'the mysterious': the tremendum refers to 'the daunting and repelling moment of the numinous/ whereas the fascinans refers to 'the attracting and alluring moment of the numinous.' See The Idea of the Holy, 140-1. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 255. Ibid., 254. Ibid. Deguy, The Discourse of Exaltation/ 10. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 221. Deguy, The Discourse of Exaltation/ 10. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 11. Ibid. Deguy, Topo-cultural/ trans. Christopher Elson (1992, unpublished paper), 15. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology/ in Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. and trans. David Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 340. Derrida, 'Faith and Knowledge/ 44. On society as an unrepresentable, or sublime object, see Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 151. Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 117. See Marian Hobson, Opening Lines (London: Routledge, 1998), 38, for the relationship between history and transcendentalism in Derrida. Her analysis has been useful to me for focusing on the transcendental dimension of the excess of possibility in Derrida's earlier writings. Patricia Parker,' Anagogic Metaphor: Breaking Down the Wall of Partition/ in Cook et al., Centre and Labyrinth, 39 (see n. 7). Ibid. Deguy, The Discourse of Exaltation/ 11. Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. James Arieti and John M. Crossett (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1985), 105. Quoted in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, 'Sublime Truth/ in Of the Sublime, trans, and ed. Librett, 106.1 have chosen Lacoue-Labarthe's translation over Arieti's because he preserves the word 'paradox/ Lacoue-Labarthe's essay is invaluable as a reading of the relationship between Heidegger and

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54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Garry Sherbert the sublime, of which he observes: '"sublime" is a word which does not belong to the Heideggerian lexicon, even if the concept - and the thing itself - are everywhere present (if only under the name of greatness)' (77). Lacoue-Labarthe also acknowledges that Deguy 'opened up the path' toward the paradoxical role of technique in the sublime (233 n. 35). Deguy, 'The Discourse of Exaltation/ 22. Ibid., 11. Ibid. Ibid. Longinus, On the Sublime, 105. Ibid., 105-6. Deguy, The Discourse of Exaltation/ 9. David Carroll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (New York: Methuen, 1987), 142. Deguy, The Discourse of Exaltation/ 9. Ibid.

The Reality of the Created: From Deconstruction to Recreation MICHAEL HAPPY

Looking back on the extraordinary development of literary criticism over the past century, we probably have good reason to regard Northrop Frye and Jacques Derrida as two leading, if very different, theorists who for a time dominated the practice of criticism. If this is the case, then Derrida's influence appears to be the one that most conspicuously continues to prevail. The rise of the criticism of culture, gender, class, and race, which seems to have reached its peak in the last decade or so, is hardly conceivable without the Derridian notions of absence, difference, marginality, privileging, and totalization. Meanwhile, the imaginative value of literature so essential to Frye's critical outlook is no longer a generally accepted proposition. The working assumption now is that any meaningful consideration of literature is to be found in the study of its ideological contexts. As Joseph Adamson observes, The ideological and political are assumed to have an absolute veto over all other concerns. Everything is ideology; all levels of culture are collapsed into the ideological level.'1 How did this happen? Why, almost fifty years after the publication of Anatomy of Criticism, do we find ourselves in the same situation Frye describes in the Polemical Introduction? We are still surrounded on all sides by what claims to be literary criticism, but which nevertheless regards literature as an allegorical expression of something else. Its uniquely literary qualities are either ignored or regarded as secondary to some overriding ideological interest. The situation is especially puzzling because we might have expected that Derrida's influence would only encourage the continued deconstruction of ideology. Instead, deconstruction and the post-

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structuralist movement as a whole have left us with a diminished sense of the autonomy of literature as literature, as well as with an ideological approach to it that is arguably more vigorous than it was before. The attitude of many current symptomatic readings is reminiscent of the Joe Orton character who, explaining why he regularly beats up his disapproving in-laws, declares, 'I can't stand intolerance.' The view of Frye and Derrida as antagonists might therefore appear to be a fair one and may only be encouraged by some of Frye's own comments in the recently published notebooks. His tone when dealing with Derrida and other prominent post-structuralists is often impatient and sometimes scornful. He at least once dismisses a Derridian proposition as 'complete bullshit/2 and elsewhere characterizes feminist literary criticism as 'mostly heifer-shit/3 Despite the odd scatological dismissal, however, it is also clear that Frye takes the development of post-structuralist criticism seriously, as his extensive exploration of it indicates. But no matter how closely and carefully he considers its implications, he keeps coming back to the same kinds of reservations represented by this notebook entry from the 1980s: The development of linguistics into semiotics, from Saussure to Derrida and others, is based on the concept of difference. A word is a signifier arbitrarily related to a signified; it has meaning because it is different from other words. Nobody can challenge such postulates; but I think metaphor provides an identity beyond difference, a construction beyond deconstruction. In metaphor the statement 'A is B/ being usually absurd on the face of it, carries with it the implication 'A is not B, and nobody but a fool would imagine that it was.' This latter implication is the basis of the present linguistic development. The assertion itself is made in order to open up a current of energy between subject and object: from the point of view of the denial, metaphor can never achieve anything except hypothesis. I got this far in the Anatomy, and am now trying to see how [much] further I can get with the Bible, which is metaphorical and yet is clearly concerned with something other than hypothesis. (LN, 512)

In this single excerpt we can see the outlines of the themes that appear throughout Frye's criticism: metaphor as a statement of identity-indifference, the unique verbal status of the biblical text, and the direct but still difficult relation between imaginative hypothesis and existential concern. While he appears to be sceptical about post-structuralism in the notebooks, Frye is more conciliatory in his published work and

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even suggests the possibility of consensus. In the introduction to Words with Power, for example, he observes that despite the wide variety of critical schools on the scene, there is nevertheless 'an underlying consensus of attitude' that could still 'progress toward some unified comprehension' of literature (xviii). What this underlying consensus of attitude might consist of is not always clear from anything Frye has to say about the matter, and it is of course easier to think of him and Derrida - who is obviously much on Frye's mind in Words with Power4 as irreconcilable. The critical vocabulary each uses only heightens the sense of opposition: Frye considers metaphor a statement of identity, Derrida a relation of differences; Frye emphasizes presence, Derrida absence; and where Frye sees language leading to kerygma, or 'proclamation,' Derrida sees aporia, or 'impassable path.' Frye and Derrida do, however, have at least a couple of very important things in common. Both place significant emphasis on the role of rhetoric in the generation of meaning, and both reveal the radically metaphorical condition of language. Frye consistently identifies metaphor and myth as two aspects of the same elementary verbal phenomenon, myth being metaphor as narrative (mythos) and metaphor being myth as a pattern of verbal elements (dianoia). In The Great Code he goes so far as to say that myth is 'implicit metaphor' because it is made up of the simple juxtaposition of metaphors (59). Derrida, for his part, in 'White Mythology' observes that the 'whole philosophical delimitation of metaphor is already constructed and worked upon by "metaphors" ... All the concepts which have played a part in the delimitation of metaphor always have an origin and a force which are themselves "metaphorical."'5 Why is it then that Derrida's readings move in the direction of aporia and Frye's in the direction of kerygma? The main reason seems to be that Derrida, as suggested by the above quotation, is a philosopher offering a critique on the 'metaphysics of presence' and the illusory assertions of truth that dominate the Western philosophical tradition. Frye, by contrast, is a literary scholar whose critical principles arise from the inductive survey of literature as an imaginative verbal structure existing for its own sake in a state of play. The issue for Frye is not so much an obscure metaphysics of presence as it is the conspicuous presence of metaphor. Hence, where Derrida sees language reaching for an illusory transcendental signified, Frye perceives it revealing the principle of immanent signification. This distinction between a philosophical and a literary conception of language is an important one and may provide a useful perspective on the turn literary criticism has

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taken since Derrida's appearance on the North American scene in the late 1960s. The practice of deconstructive criticism over the last thirty years or so appears to proceed on the following assumptions: the metaphysics of presence in any written text is sustained by privileging the authority of the living speaker over 'writing/ or ecriture, the system of differences. This authority is characterized as the logocentricism of the transcendental signified, the ultimate example of which is the God Nietzsche declared dead. Ecriture, however, is 'always already' a condition of speech, inasmuch as speech, like writing, is a system of differences. Hence, 'writing' in the Derridian sense is effectively prior to speech. The dominant metaphor of the speaking presence in the metaphysical tradition therefore embodies the rhetorical ruse by which written texts promote the fiction of the transcendental signified. The deconstruction of this rhetorical deception discloses the aporia of any text, the impassable path where the truth-affirming claims of logic break down. Because all language is metaphorical, its positive assertions can be endlessly deconstructed. The result is differance, Derrida's portmanteau term referring both to difference and to the deferral of meaning. The disclosure of differance in turn leads to 'the freeplay of meaning,' or the perpetual deconstruction of assertive value in any text. As Derrida says in his concluding remarks in 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences': Play is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Play is always play of absence and presence, but if it is to be thought radically, play must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence. Being must be conceived as presence or absence on the basis of the possibility of play and not the other way around.6

I think it is fair to suggest, however, that deconstruction as it has long been practised presupposes a primarily discursive intention in language. That is, deconstructive criticism presumes the assumption by the user of language of a transcendental signified, the fraudulent 'truth' transmitted in the written text by an illusory speaking presence. Yet it is clear that deconstruction is possible only because language's apparently assertive intention is undermined by its radically metaphorical condition. In other words, while Derrida appears to share with Frye the notion

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that the metaphorical provision of language is essentially literary (insofar as it is hypothetical play), the followers of Derrida, (mis)taking his cue, approach language philosophically as advancing a chiefly discursive aim. This aspect of the Derridian legacy may be why deconstruction and the criticism that developed in its wake have effectively discouraged the study of literature as literature. Subordinating the hypothetical condition of literary metaphor to its suasively rhetorical context only perpetuates the now virtually unquestioned assumption that meaning always already includes some degree of coercion, that to 'mean' is to assert an ideological compulsion of some sort. The effect of this assumption can be seen throughout the entire post-structuralist program, including the work of Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, and Michel Foucault, as well as Marxist, feminist, and New Historicist criticism. Frye himself sardonically alludes to this state of affairs in a late notebook entry: I know that when I suggested the possibility of a human primary concern that overrides all conceivable ideologies I'm flying in the face of Roland Barthes and the rest of the Holy Family. It's high time that sacred cow was turned out to pasture. By sacred cow I mean the omnipresence of ideology, & the impossibilty of ever getting past it. (LN, 49)

The trend has not abated. As Adamson suggests, 'From deconstruction, through New Historicism, to culture and race and gender studies, the last two decades have been dominated by a criticism that assumes an overtly interested use of language.'7 That said, it should be acknowledged that what deconstruction accomplishes certainly does seem valuable as a critique of philosophy and other discursive verbal structures. When applied to literature, however, it has the self-defeating effect of simultaneously revealing the innately literary condition of all language while also denying what Frye identifies as its disinterested hypothetical value. Deconstruction may be relevant to verbal structures claiming to have the authority of logic at their disposal, but as Frye points out in his own theory of rhetoric in Anatomy, There seems to be no evidence whatever that man learned to speak primarily because he wanted to speak logically' (331-2). Frye's theory of language includes what the post-structuralists' evidently does not: a conception of rhetoric in its distinctively tropological or ornamental aspect, what Frye calls its lexis or verbal texture, which has a signifying authority of its own. The rhetorically ornamental quality of

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literary language reveals its intrinsically disinterested and hypothetical character, which does not coerce but manifests its own imaginatively creative conditions. In Anatomy Frye observes that [rjhetoric has from the beginning meant two things: ornamental speech and persuasive speech. These two things seem psychologically opposed to each other, as the desire to ornament is essentially disinterested, and the desire to persuade essentially the reverse. In fact ornamental rhetoric is inseparable from literature itself, or what we have called the hypothetical verbal structure which exists for its own sake. Persuasive rhetoric is applied literature, or the use of literary art to reinforce the power of argument. Ornamental rhetoric acts on its hearers statically, leading them to admire its own beauty or wit; persuasive rhetoric tries to lead them kinetically toward a course of action. One articulates emotion; the other manipulates it. And whatever we decide about the ultimate literary status of oratory, there seems little doubt that ornamental rhetoric is the lexis or verbal texture of poetry. (AC, 245)

Thus, while persuasive rhetoric asserts what is supposed to be an objective (and readily deconstructible) truth, ornamental rhetoric gives expression to the hypothetical character of language particular in each instance to the distinctively lexical quality of its expression. How, then, does metaphor reveal kerygma, or proclamation, the positive value whose absence is the hallmark of post-structuralism? Frye only begins to use the term with the publication of The Great Code in 1982. But kerygma is not a last-minute addition to an already extensive body of work; it is a consistent articulation of principles everywhere inherent in it. One of these is the principle of polysemous meaning, which refers to the expanding contexts of verbal signification. Frye's conception of polysemy can be characterized as a literal-metaliteral dialectic, and I believe that any meaningful understanding of his critical theory requires an appreciation of what this dialectic entails. The 'literal' for Frye does not refer to the conventional definition of descriptive accuracy but relates to the gestalt apprehension of verbal communication as such.8 Frye never wavered in his view of the centripetal or inwardly directed nature of literal metaphor. In 'Levels of Meaning in Literature/ published in 1950, he observes that 'the verbal symbol does not represent anything except its own place in the verbal structure/ Accordingly, 'the total verbal structure itself does not "mean" anything except itself/ Hence, the gestalt apprehension of meaning at the literal level, although 'it takes precedence over all other meanings,

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lies outside the province of criticism. Understanding a verbal structure literally is the incommunicable act of total apprehension which precedes criticism.'9 Literal metaphor, then, is the simple meaninggenerating juxtaposition of verbal elements, whether written symbols or uttered sounds. It is, in fact, much like differance because it is ironicor and differential. Unlike differance, however, literal metaphor retains positive value because its initiative is inherently creative. That is, the mere ability to juxtapose verbal elements - undeniably shared by all human beings everywhere regardless of culture, gender, class, or race - is an act of creation in the most fundamental sense. Frye observes in one of the late notebooks that metaphors 'are verbal energy-currents carrying out the first act of consciousness, trying to overcome the gap between subject and object' (LN, 426). This in turn suggests that literal metaphor, while both ironic and differential, is also a concerned expression of identity. And the first consequence of this concerned expression of identity is the unbreachable relation of a creative human consciousness to the thing it creates, which is here the spoken or written signifier. Thus, all verbal structures (literary ones most obviously) are primarily centripetal or inwardly directed in reference, whatever external or metonymic authority their descriptive and conceptual applications are assumed to possess. Frye's literal basis of metaphor also seems to enhance Derrida's notion of ecriture because it includes a principle Frye adapted from Vico: verumfactum - we know only what we have made.10 Knowing only what we have made is for Frye the first postulate of an ongoing imaginative recreation of what we have already made that allows us to take all encounters with literature beyond the assertively ideological impetus of language assumed by so much contemporary criticism. The centripetally literal (and literary) nature of all verbal structures is perhaps one of the most elusive of Frye's concepts and it may be worthwhile to review it briefly here. In Anatomy Frye demonstrates the radically metaphorical character of non-literary verbal structures by drawing an analogy between literature and mathematics. Literature, like mathematics, 'proceeds by hypothetical possibilities.' While both can be referred to the 'common field of experience' we normally think of as an objective and external reality, pure literature, like pure mathematics, contains its own meaning: Both literature and mathematics proceed from postulates, not facts; both can be applied to external reality and yet exist also in a 'pure' or selfcontained form. Both, furthermore, drive a wedge between the antithesis

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In the same way, the literal condition of metaphor informs non-literary discursive verbal structures, which have two aspects, 'one descriptive, the other constructive, a content and a form': What is descriptive is sigmatic: that is, it establishes a verbal replica of external phenomena, and its verbal symbolism is to be understood as a set of representative signs. But whatever is constructive in any verbal structure seems to me to be invariably some kind of metaphor or hypothetical identification, whether it is established among different meanings of the same word or by the use of a diagram. The assumed metaphors in their turn become the units of the myth or constructive principle of the argument. While we read, we are aware of a sequence of metaphorical identifications; when we have finished, we are aware of an organizing structural pattern or conceptualized myth. (AC, 353)

The basic principle, then, is this: the inherently constructive condition of language that is fundamental to every human conscious effort radically informs its representational aspect, whatever the extent of its declared external or metonymic accuracy. A good analogy for this is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics, in which the object viewed is conditioned by the presence of a viewer in the act of viewing. Or, as William Blake expresses it, 'As the Eye, Such the Object.' This assumption in turn lies behind the revolutionary insight in Anatomy's Tentative Conclusion, that the 'literary universe' explored in the four preceding essays expands into a 'verbal universe/ all aspects of which manifest by way of metaphor - the humanly concerned recreation of the physical universe. As the hypothetical and concerned possibilities of identity proceed from metaphor's literal condition, meaning becomes increasingly

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centrifugal or outwardly directed. Here we begin to appreciate the metonymically descriptive, conceptual, and ideological uses of language: applied and practical metaphor, in other words. Yet because metaphor is innately hypothetical, language retains a disinterested quality even at this level of meaning, which perhaps helps to account for the easily observable fact that our conceptions of 'truth' are so readily subject to change according to the context in which they are asserted. The irreducibly hypothetical but still concerned nature of metaphor in its outwardly directed applications is represented in literature by such recognizable imaginative categories as comedy and tragedy, along with their complementary existential themes of fulfilment and anxiety. Metaphor in this context is clearly ethical because it expresses what Frye calls the participating aim of the concerned use of words in a social setting. The concerns conveyed in literature's imaginative context, however, do not, like ideology, necessarily prescribe any direct program of action. What they do provide is a polarizing vision of human life in terms of complete identity (archetypally, the paradisal) or of complete alienation (the demonic). What we generally call 'reality' lies in between and has affinities to both.11 It is for this reason that Sir Philip Sidney observed - in what may be the first great critical insight in the English tradition - that 'the poet never affirmeth,' but reveals what 'should' or 'should not' be.12 It is clear that Sidney's 'should' and 'should not' in their literary context do not refer to ideology and the compulsory programs of belief and action it invariably prescribes, but to the visionary possibilities of human existence, including the triumph of life over death, plenty over impoverishment, love over enmity, and so on. Ethical metaphor thus expresses concern in two distinct but related ways: the 'secondary' concerns of ideology with all its social necessities and compulsions, and the underlying 'primary' concerns proper to the individuals who collectively make up society. In Words with Power Frye defines primary concerns as 'food and drink, along with related bodily needs; sex; property (i.e. money, possessions, shelter, clothing, and everything that constitutes property in the sense of what is "proper" to one's life); liberty of movement' (42). Such concerns, once again, are true of all human beings, irrespective of their culture, gender, class, or race. Secondary concerns, by contrast, are the contingent ideological means by which we as social beings (typically defined according to exclusionary categories such as culture, gender, class, and race) attempt to fulfil individual primary ones. Because we never fully accomplish this task, one of the principal social uses of literature is to recreate the

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metaphorical expression of primary concerns in their specific historical and cultural setting. In this way literature confronts its audience with an imaginative vision of the primary concerns that have not yet been fulfiled, and - because the imaginative is also existentially concerned it always possesses the potential to recreate the social conditions that will foster such fulfilment. Frye notes that any work of literature 'will reflect the secondary and ideological concerns of its time, but it will relate those concerns to the primary ones of making a living, making love, and struggling to stay free and alive' (WP, 42). Again, the polarizing vision of literature is stereoscopic: desirous of fulfilment and anxious of denial. As such, it is always inherently critical of the existing social order, however it is made up. So far we have considered the literal and ethical conditions of metaphor and have yet to see how kerygma is dialectically related to both. Kerygma proceeds from what I am calling metaliteral meaning, which includes the practice of criticism itself. Criticism for Frye is metaliteral in the sense I use the term because it represents 'language that expresses awareness of language' (WP, 27). The metaliteral is the dialectical expansion of meaning that passes through metaphor's literal initiative and its ethical applications to express a more complete realization of verum factum, the principle that we know only what we have made. That is, insofar as we are capable of acknowledging the hypothetical but concerned initiative of literal metaphor in its ethical applications, we are more fully able to realize a creative potential liberated from any sense of necessity or external compulsion characteristically represented by ideological and conceptual verbal structures such as theology, history, philosophy, sociology, and so on. Literature - because it is imaginative in reference and metaphorically recreates primary concerns in the face of prevailing secondary ones - seems to allow the apprehension of this kerygmatic potential in language more readily. Primary concerns may themselves be necessary to the human condition, but the way in which we attempt to realize them by ideological means is a matter of contingency and choice, an immanently creative situation confronting each individual and of which the production and experience of literature are so superbly representative.13 Frye points out that what humanity has made it can remake, and this is as pertinent to language as it is to any other human artefact. Frye calls literary metaphor at this reach of signification 'anagogic/ a term originally applied to biblical exegesis. In Anatomy he effectively demonstrates that the anagogic is metaliteral because its meaning con-

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tains 'reality' metaphorically rather than simply seeming to make reference to it metonymically, as is the case in descriptive and conceptual verbal structures: When we pass into anagogy, nature becomes, not the container, but the thing contained, and the archetypal universal symbols, the city, the garden, the quest, the marriage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs inside nature, but are themselves the forms of nature. Nature is now inside the mind of an infinite man who builds his cities out of the Milky Way. This is not reality, but it is the conceivable or imaginative limit of desire, which is infinite, eternal, and hence apocalyptic. (AC, 119)

Here the initiative of concerned recreation is seen to be approaching its most expansive capacity, effectively revealing that every point of what Frye calls the verbal universe interpenetrates with every other, inasmuch as all verbal phenomena are now recognizable as expressions of the human concern that is the initiative of verbal expression itself. Such a condition cannot be demonstrated in the ordinary sense of the word because it is not an event occurring in time or space as we ordinarily perceive them, which is as a state of subject-object relations. Rather, literature's anagogic metaphor expresses the imaginative extent of human desire and the latent potential for the fulfilment of human need in the face of any 'reality' that denies either. Kerygma, on the other hand, is a further intensification of this perspective to suggest a wholly conscious awareness of our sustained participation in an ongoing act of recreation in which the infinite is always here and the eternal always now; in which the dead, the living, and the unborn are revealed to be members of one community of shared concern.14 Consequently, the metaliteral comprehension of kerygma is as particular to individual experience as it is universal in application, like the universally shared but individually apprehended gestalt of literal metaphor from which, as we have seen, the metaliteral arises. Kerygma seems to be most fully represented in religious texts where complex and typically paradoxical metaphors of divine and eternal presence are most likely to be concentrated. Frye, of course, is not interested in their asserted and eminently deconstructible metaphysical authority, but in the liberation of the recreative power they possess as metaphor. In Christian mythology, for example, kerygma is directly related to the Bible's unique typological structure in which God is identified with the man Jesus and both with the living Word.

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The metaphorical impetus of biblical typology culminates in apocalypse, the vision of a city-garden in whose construction humanity is able to participate because the human and the divine have been identified.15 Apocalypse in traditional Christian theology (distinguished from its underlying mythology) is usually thought of as an event that will occur sometime in the future. But, as Frye suggests, apocalypse relates to the perceiver, not to the perceived.16 The kerygmatic apprehension of apocalypse, in other words, is available to concerned individuals as a vision of fulfilled human potential we are continually recreating, whatever the social, cultural, or historical circumstances we happen to find ourselves in. Such a perspective is what Blake refers to as the human form divine, the point at which human consciousness comprehends that divinity proper is not some wrathful old man in the sky dispensing punishment to the reprobate, but the principle of creation as such in which humanity may freely participate. As Frye says in Fearful Symmetry, "The final revelation of Christianity is ... not that Jesus is God, but that "God is Jesus'" (53). And, as he says at the end of Words with Power in an obverse expression of the same principle, 'Hell is in front of us because we have put it there; paradise is missing because we have failed to put it there' (312). Kerygma therefore exceeds the hypothetical and concerned condition of literary metaphor because its authority derives from the recognition of the reality of what we, like the God who is no longer external to us, have created.17 Such an act of creation is also, in both the broadest and most particular sense of the word, an act of love, insofar as we identify love with our expectation to fulfil the primary concerns of all individuals all of the time. This is perhaps the most we can make of the theological axiom that is also pure metaphor: 'God is love.' Because kerygma arises from metaphor's essential condition as a statement of identity-in-difference, such a love manifests, in the words of Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle,' 'two distincts, division none.' The paradox of love, evident in the metaphorical articulation of it in all cultures, is that it elides the distinction between difference and identity. Yet to the extent that we must continue to make such a distinction, we might still appreciate that, as Frye says in Words with Power, 'identity is love and difference is beauty' (85), beauty being the apparently objective Other of our desire and love being our sense of union with it. This brings us around again to the notion of literal metaphor as a statement of identity-in-difference, but now raeta-literally realized as the beauty of

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the loving act of creation which, because it is perpetual, can now be appreciated as an infinite and eternal presence. We have seen that Frye's recreation and Derrida's deconstruction both reveal the principle of play, which is a manifestation of the freedom that arises from the practice of criticism. The freeplay of meaning in deconstruction, however, appears to lack any apparent conception of a concern that both precedes and exceeds all conceivable ideological articulations of it. This, it seems, is Frye's real complaint with poststructuralist criticism. His 1986 review of Paul de Man's posthumously published The Rhetoric of Romanticism includes this observation: [A]n ideology expresses secondary and derivative human concerns, and... what ideologies are derived from is mythology, which expresses the primary desires of existence, along with the anxieties attached to their frustration. The real object of deconstruction, then, is to reveal the mythological basis under the ideology [emphasis mine] ... I doubt that this is really so far from de Man's view, whatever his visceral reaction to the word myth would have been. I introduce the point because ideology is always nostalgic for the past or expectant of the future, or both, whereas mythology transposes everything into a present directly confronting the reader.18

For Frye, play is an individually realized creative potential in the context of a universally shared human concern that is continually reconstituted in the creative effort of any society. This, in fact, seems to be the work that play performs. From this perspective we can perhaps appreciate, first, that Derrida's freeplay of meaning as related to the philosophical concept of aporia, while it may not refer to, nevertheless does not seem to preclude kerygma's literal-metaliteral dialectic; and, second, that contemporary ideological criticism is in fact a further particularizing in a social context of individual concerns that have previously been neglected or excluded. Queer theory, for example, represents one of the latest ideological concerns introduced into the literary critical fold, but there can be no doubt that it will not be the last. Frye's conceptions of polysemous meaning, recreation, and kerygma do not deny any of these critical approaches but, as I hope is now clear, embrace them all. The inclusiveness of literary metaphor so apparent to Frye is, I believe, the basis of the underlying consensus of attitude in literary criticism that he alludes to in Words with Power. For Frye, again, criticism is itself a metaliteral

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extension of the possibilities of literary metaphor. It is true there may be much that appears paradoxical in Frye's critical outlook to those not familiar with it, but, as Oscar Wilde observed, paradox is the way of truth. Or, more prosaically, paradox is a verbal phenomenon that is arguably no less expressive than any other, and for which language itself seems to reserve a place. In fact, paradox may be to language what irrational numbers are to mathematics: an expansion of the actual into a realm of possibility that is 'real' if only because it may be expressed. And the fact of human expression is, in the language of deconstruction, always already a recreation of human concern.

NOTES 1 Joseph Adamson, 'The Treason of the Clerks: Frye, Ideology and the Authority of Imaginative Culture/ in David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky, eds, Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 80-1. 2 See LN, 647: 'Derrida on the book between two covers as a solid object enclosing an authority is, as Derrida must know, complete bullshit: nobody believes that a book is an object: it's a focus of verbal energy. What he should be attacking is the dogmatic formulation that eliminates its own opposite: that's the symbol or metaphor that can kill a man, and has killed thousands. It's always self-enclosed and opaque; no kerygma ever gets through it' (LN, 646). 3 See LN, 223: T can't say what I really think here: I'd kill the book [Words with Power] if I did. I think social feminism, genuine social & intellectual equality between men & women, a centrally important issue. Feminist literary criticism is mostly heifer-shit. Women frustrated by the lack of outlet for their abilities turn to pedantic nagging, and the nagging pedantry of most feminist writing is a reflection of frustration unaccompanied by any vision of transcending it. As Newman resignedly said of English literature, it will always have been Protestant. Perhaps female (not feminist) writing has a great future, but that doesn't make its effort to rewrite the past any less futile' (LN, 223). 4 A notable example of Frye's apparent concern to respond to Derrida's influence appears in chapter 5 of Words with Power, 114: 'In the Bible what we read is frequently presented to us as something that was originally spoken. This is especially true of the Gospels, centered as they are on a figure who spoke but did not write. The followers of Derrida who say that

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we have here another "logocentric" use of writing to denigrate writing have, I think, got this situation the wrong way round. The Gospels are written mythical narratives, and for casual readers they remain that. But if anything in them strikes a reader with full kerygmatic force, there is, using the word advisedly, a resurrection of the original speaking presence in the reader. The reader is the logocentric focus, and what he reads is emancipated both from writing and from speech. The duality of speaker and listener has vanished into a single area of verbal recognition.' Jacques Derrida, 'White Mythology,' New Literary History 6 (1974): 174. Derrida, 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,' in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 292. Rereading Frye, 73. Cf. AC, 77-82. Frye, 'Levels of Meaning in Literature,' Kenyan Review 12 (Spring 1950): 247-8. For Vico's influence on Frye, see Nella Cotrupi, Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). Cf. AC, 141-57. Sir Philip Sidney, 'A Defence of Poetry/ in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Hans Van Dorsten, eds, Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Oxford Clarendon, 1973), 102-3. Cf. WP, 116-17: Tn the first three modes we surveyed at the beginning [i.e., the descriptive, the conceptual, and the ideological], there is an emphasis on compulsion ... In the poetic mode there is no such compulsion: anything in the imaginative world can be assumed to be true for the duration of the individual work. So the imaginative and its freedom to create must be the basis of whatever goes beyond it. What does go beyond it is the "myth to live by," a myth which is also a model for continuous action, and which is the distinctively kerygmatic feature. 'The imagination itself cannot provide a "myth to live by," but its freedom is the essential basis of all models that retain any sense of tolerance, and any understanding that there could be different models for other people.' Cf. WP, 118: 'Such terms [as God, Word, Spirit, Father] are, at first, the objective counterparts of subjective psychic elements in the human complex, and as long as they are that they could be called pure projections. But as the subject-object cleavage becomes increasingly unsatisfactory, subject and object merge in an intermediate verbal world, where a Word not our

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Michael Happy own, though also our own, proclaims and a Spirit not our own, though also our own, responds. We capitalize these terms for the same reason that we capitalize other people's names.' See Frye's distinction between 'panoramic' and 'participating' apocalypse in GC, 136-7. Cf. FS, 195. Cf. WP, 135: 'We have invoked Vico's axiom verumfactum, that what is true is what we have made true, as an essential axiom of criticism. The structure of the Bible suggests that this axiom has two sides. The Bible begins by showing on its first page that the reality of God manifests itself in creation, and on its last page that the same reality is manifested in a new creation in which man is a participant. He becomes a participant by being redeemed, or separated from the predatory and destructive elements acquired from his origin in nature. In between these visions of creation comes the Incarnation, which presents God and man as indissoluably locked together in a common enterprise. This is Christian, but the answering and supporting "Thou" of Buber, which grows out of the Jewish tradition, is not imaginatively very different. Faith, then, is not developed by clogging the air with questions of the "Does a God really exist?" type and answering them with equal nonsense, but in working, in words and other media, toward a peace that passes understanding, not by contradicting understanding, but by disclosing, behind the human peace that is merely a temporary cessation of a war, the proclaimed or mythological model of a peace infinite in both its source and its goal.' Frye, 'In the Earth, or in the Air?' TLS, 17 January 1986: 52.

The Metaphysical Foundation of Frye's Monadology NICHOLAS HALMI

In the fourth chapter of The Great Code Frye distinguishes three kinds of metaphors: the first consisting in identification of one thing with another, as in the statement 'Joseph is a fruitful bough/ the second consisting in identification of one thing as another, as in the recognition of a brown and green object outside one's window as a tree. The third kind combines the first two into what Frye rightly describes as 'an extremely powerful and subtle form of metaphor/ in which identification of an individual object as a member of a class of objects is conflated with identification of the individual with that class (GC, 87). Frye himself calls this the royal metaphor, because one of its most important historical manifestations is in the function of a monarch as a representative of the unity of the society of which he or she is a member. But the more familiar name, the one in the rhetorical manuals, is synecdoche, a noun derived from the Greek verb synekdechomai, meaning 'take on oneself a share of or 'supply in thought a word or phrase in connexion with.'1 As usual, it was Quintilian who established the canonical definition of the rhetorical term: 'Synecdoche has the power to give variety to our language by making us realize many things from one, the whole from a part, the genus from a species, things which follow from things which have preceded; or, on the other hand, the whole procedure may be reversed.'2 It is a figure that Frye invokes frequently, from his discussion of the monadic symbol in the Anatomy to his last writings on religion, and it is clearly of central importance to his thought. Classical rhetorical theory distinguishes synecdoche, as a substitution based on lesser or greater extension, from metonymy, as a substi-

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tution based on contiguity. But Quintilian considered the two to be closely aligned, and some twentieth-century linguists and semioticians concur, either (like Roman Jakobson) designating synecdoche a subset of metonymy or (like Umberto Eco) dismissing the difference between them as merely contextual and perspectival. Tzvetan Todorov and the 'Groupe ^' (Jean Dubois et al.) at Liege go further, privileging synecdoche as the fundamental rhetorical figure, from which both metonymy and metaphor derive.3 What makes synecdoche so resistant to rhetorical or semiotic classification is also, however, what makes it distinctive: namely, an ontological connection, whether material or conceptual, between the figure and its referent. This fact escaped Frye's notice in his late essay 'The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange/ where he elides the synecdochic symbol with the ancient symbolon (MM, 28-43). Yet the ontological basis is important because it enables and indeed compels us to distinguish the synecdochic symbol, some manifestations of which in Frye's thought I shall discuss presently, from the one that would seem prima facie to be its closest and most respectable ancestor, the pseudo-Dionysian concept of the anomoion symbolon, the incongruous or dissimilar symbol, which reveals the divine in the form of the profane, the celestial in the form of the terrestrial: 'The divine and the celestial are revealed through incongruous symbols/ as Eriugena says in his translation of the pseudo-Dionysius.4 In this latter kind of religious symbol - as in its own pagan ancestor, the symbolon as a token of identity - the relation between the material signifier and its immaterial referent is arbitrary and conventional. It cannot be otherwise, for such a symbol has no ontological relation to what it represents (the creator being neither continuous with nor implicated in the creation) and is not divinely instituted (in contrast to, for example, the Eucharist). Thus, the dissimilar symbol is incompatible with the synecdochic symbol, as we see clearly in the attempt of Nicolaus Cusanus to assign the theological function of the symbolon, as a means of communication from the divine to the human, to the structure of synecdoche, in the form of the microcosm. In fact, Cusanus comprehended the microcosm from two perspectives, the conventional one of the relation between man and the world, and the more speculative one of the relation between man and God. For the moment I want to focus on the latter, which Cusanus explained as follows: although the universe represents and explicates (explicat) the absolutely infinite, it can itself be only privatively (privative) or contractedly infinite (contracte infinitus).5 The Cusan was evidently as attracted to microcosms as Sir

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Thomas Browne was to quincunxes - 'patterns which Browne sought in every corner of art and nature/ as Frye noted (AC, 145) - and for that reason did not fully appreciate the contradiction between the metaphysics of infinity and the metaphorics of synecdoche. Yet to the extent that Cusanus insisted on the necessity of the Incarnation, as he did in his Christmas sermon of 1440, it was to emphasize the incommensurability of the infinitas absoluta and infinitas contracta: 'God created everything for his own sake ... but it could not be united with him, since there is no proportion between the finite and the infinite. Thus everything has its end in God through Christ.'6 One might have thought that the authority for the Cusan's conception of the microcosm, or for that matter for Frye's anagogical symbol, was 1 Corinthians 15:28, where Paul says that God will be 'all in all/ which Frye paraphrases in Words with Power as 'a vision of plenitude in which each human being is a center and God a circumference' (186)7 But because Paul is referring here specifically to thearchic activity after the Last Judgment, I would suggest that the relevance of this passage to our present subject is superficial. Synecdoche could become uniquely useful in discourses we customarily consider rational (i.e., expressions of logos as opposed to mythos), first, because its signifying function was ontologically grounded (although that was obviously a prerequisite to the transformation of the trope into a concept), and second, because the pagan Neoplatonists conflated the logically distinct, indeed incompatible, relations of participation (part/whole) and identification (identity/difference). (As Plato explained in the Parmenides, a part can neither be the same as nor different from a whole, since it is in some sense both [146b-c, 147a-b].) Thus Proclus, in the Elements of Theology, distinguished a whole-before-parts, a whole-of-parts, and a whole-in-the-part (to holon en to merei).8 In the last of these, the original concept of the monad, as it were, the whole is implied in the part. I have not dwelt on the Cusan and the Neoplatonic tradition behind him because Frye took a particular interest in him - indeed, as far as I have been able to determine, the opposite was the case.9 His conception of the contracted infinite is instructive because it reveals, metonymically if not synecdocically what we shall also find in Frye's case: namely, an attraction to synecdoche, particularly in its microcosmic or monadic manifestation, and an application of it not merely to 'a relation between human consciousness and its natural environment' (WP, 71), that is, a relation of pure immanence, but also to a relation between the finite and the infinite.

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In his late notebooks, and more particularly in his sermon To Come to Light' (1986), Frye conceives the interchange between the undergraduate and the university in synecdochic terms: There are times when we feel that we are part of a larger body ... and that our individual selves are not lost but fulfilled in that body. Such feelings may be rare or brief, but they are not illusions, even though they may often be projected on things that turn out to be illusions... [W]e live in a whole-with-a-part life most of the time: in day to day experience we have to keep on being separate individuals. But for the best kind of life we need to carry something around within us that can turn us inside out at any moment. The university ... gives the clearest example of what I mean. Undergraduates are parts of which the university is the whole; after graduation they are individuals again, and their university experiences have become a part of them. (NFR, 362)

The relation of undergraduate and university is not unlike that of the sea snail that develops inside the mouth of the medusa jellyfish, devouring its host from within until the medusa, now dwarfed by its parasite, produces an offspring that will devour and nurture a snail of the same species as that which its parent supported.10 Yet there is this crucial difference from such a symbiotic relationship: synecdoche presupposes the identity of part and whole, so that one can substitute for the other. Just as each of Leibnitz's monads represents fully the entire universe of which it is a part, just as Boehme's microcosmic man contains all the properties of the larger world from which he comes, so each Victoria University alumnus preserves within himself the institution of which he was a member.11 Books too can be comprehended in this way, not least the Bible. As Frye explained in 'The Bible and English Literature,' an essay of 1986: The Bible is a narrative which starts where time starts and ends where time ends. It is long of reading, as you turn the pages from Genesis straight through to the end, but you notice that the last book of the Bible, a book which is explicitly called Revelation, is a book which presents you with the simultaneous understanding of the entire pattern of the Bible up to that point. (NFR, 147-8)

The reference to temporality here should not mislead us into assimilating typology, as a mode of establishing connections between distinct

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persons and events within the framework of a linear conception of human history, to monadology, even though Quintilian included temporal relations (praecendentia and sequentia) under the class of synecdoche. It is one thing to assert that the New Testament refers continually to the Old Testament, but another to assert that one book of the Bible contains all the books of the Bible in miniature. A crucial difference between these assertions consists in the kind of knowledge that assent to them requires. One can hardly determine if one character or event is the type of another (Moses of Christ, say) unless one is already familiar with both characters, for otherwise there would be nothing to prevent one from interpreting every character as the type of every other (Pharaoh of Christ, say). Typological interpretation presupposes a standpoint outside the temporal sequence to which it gives coherence. Yet one can easily affirm that a part of something stands for the whole without possessing a knowledge of the whole. Historically, the figure of the whole-tn-the-part has had both a metaphysical and an epistemological appeal, providing on the one hand a satisfying explanation of our relation to the world, and on the other hand a means of acquiring knowledge analogically. Thus Paracelsus, who was positively obsessed with the idea of the microcosm, maintained that understanding how the four elements operated in the world enables one to understand human physiology, for man is created out of the same elements, even if they take a different form: 'in man earth is flesh, water is blood, fire is warmth [Warme], and air is his breath [Balsam].'12 Treating the unknown afflictions of the body and restoring the harmony of the four elements within it is therefore a matter of applying to it a knowledge of the relations of the four elements outside it. To clarify the epistemological appeal of the microcosmic idea for the physician: if we contain within ourselves the structure of the world of which we are a part, then we can use our knowledge of the whole (in this case, the elements) to increase our knowledge of the part (disease), and conversely we can use our knowledge of the part to increase our knowledge of the whole (this was the fundamental premise of Paracelsian astronomy). What was previously inaccessible to understanding now becomes accessible, though only, I should stress, on the unprovable assumption of an ontological connection, a participatory relation, between the larger entity and the smaller. In this respect Paracelsus does not differ markedly from Frye, with whose discussion of the symbol in the Anatomy I shall close. The theory of symbolism which forms the second essay of that book proceeds from a definition of symbol that identifies the symbolic with the semiotic in

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general: 'Symbols ... may here be called signs, verbal units which, conventionally and arbitrarily, stand for and point to things outside the place where they occur' (AC, 73). But as Frye passes from the literal and descriptive phases to the fourth, or archetypal phase, he radically redefines the symbol, so that its relation to its referent is no longer one of identity and difference (that is, an identity established in the reader's mind between ontologically distinct entities), but one of participation, a relation that presupposes an inherent connection between the constituent elements. "The study of archetypes/ Frye explains, 'is the study of literary symbols as parts of a whole' (AC, 118), that whole being a vision of the goals of human work. In its fifth, or anagogical phase, the symbol becomes, according to Frye, identical with the larger structure of meaning in which it participates and to which it refers: In the anagogic aspect of meaning, the radical form of metaphor, 'A is B/ comes into its own. Here we are dealing with poetry in its totality, in which the formula 'A is B' may be hypothetically applied to anything, for there is no metaphor, not even 'black is white/ which a reader has any right to quarrel with in advance. The literary universe, therefore, is a universe in which everything is potentially identical with everything else. (AC, 124)

This equation of participation with identity serves an important methodological purpose in the Anatomy, grounding the study of archetypes and giving it a determinate scope. If the symbol, by virtue of participating in the total order of symbols, is also identical to that order, then we can comprehend in its individual representation that which we cannot, confined as we are by our mortality, comprehend in its totality. In other words, as Frye himself puts it, 'the symbol is a monad, all symbols being united in a single infinite and eternal verbal symbol' (AC, 121). Behind this desire to possess the universe in a grain of sand, to use Blake's particularly apposite expression, is precisely the fear of being engulfed in a universe of grains of sand, the sorting and classifying of which would be as impossible a task as that assigned to Psyche in Apuleius's fable. To express this in less autonomous terms, it is the fear of allowing significance to dissolve into an infinite and uncontrollable process of signification.13 'Unless there is ... a center/ Frye writes, 'there is nothing to prevent the analogies supplied by convention and genre from being an endless series of free associations, perhaps suggestive, perhaps even tantalizing, but never creating a real structure' (AC, 118).

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When the part represents the whole, each of us becomes the world in which we walk, and there we may find ourselves, if not more truly, then at least less strange. NOTES 1 H.G. Liddell, Robert Scott, and Sir Henry Stuart Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), s.v. 2 Quintilian, Institutio oratorio. 8.6.19, trans. H.E. Butler, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920). 3 For a summary of recent semiological explanations of synecdoche, see Wallace Martin, 'Synecdoche,' in Alex Preminger and T. V.F. Brogan, eds, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1261-2. Umberto Eco's discussion of the subject in Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (London: Macmillan, 1984), 114-17, is also recommended. See also Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, Dictionnaire encyclopedique des sciences du langage (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 355-6. 4 Dionysius Areopagita, De hierarchia coelestia 2, trans. Joannes Scotus Eriugena, in J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologia Latina (Paris, 1844-64), 122: 1039C: 'divina et caelestia per dissimilia symbola manifestantur.' For further discussion of the Dionysian concept of the symbol and its role in apophatic theology, see Jean Pepin, 'La Theorie du symbolisme dans la tradition dionysienne,' in La Tradition de I'allegorie de Philon d'Alexandrie a Dante (Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1987), 199-220. 5 Nicolaus Cusanus, De docta ignorantia 2.1 §97, 2.4 § 113, ed. Paul Wilpert and H.G. Senger, 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1977). 6 Cusanus, Sermones 22 §32, ed. Rudolf Haubst et al., in Opera omnia, vol. 16, fasc. 4 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1985), 351: 'Deus creavit omnia propter se ipsum ... sed nee ipsa ad ipsum nulla sit proportio, cum finiti ad infinitum nulla sit proportio. Sunt igitur omnia in fine, in Deo, per Christum.' 7 The verse from Corinthians reads in full, 'But when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject to him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.' Cf. Colossians 3:11: 'Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.' 8 Proclus, Elements of Theology, ed. E.R. Dodds, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), prop. 65. 9 Frye's library, now at the E.J. Pratt Library, Victoria University, includes an annotated copy of Cusanus's Vision of God, but he acquired this volume

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(a 1978 reprint of a translation published originally in 1960) relatively late in his career. 10 See Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (New York: Viking, 1979), 1-6. 11 Jakob Boehme, Theosophische Sendbriefe 22.7, ed. Gerhard Wehr, vol. 2 (Freiburg: Aurum, 1979): 'Denn der Mensch ist eine kleine Welt aus der grofien, und hat der ganzen grofien Welt Eigenschaft in sich.' 12 Paracelsus, Die Geheimnisse: Ein Lesebuch aus seinen Schriften, ed. Will-Erich Peukert (Munich: Knaur, 1990), 141. 131 use the term significance in Wilhelm Dilthey's sense of a quality that appears to 'reside in the essence of life itself and that enables us to comprehend the world in its coherence: see his Plan der Fortsetzung zum Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, in Gesammelte Werke (Leipzig: Teubner, 1921), 7: 232-41. For an interpretation of Frye's theory of the monadic symbol as a manifestation of 'the technological drive for absolute mastery of the other,' see Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 153-6.

Word, Flesh, Metaphor, and

'Something7 of a Mystery in Words with Power

LEAH KNIGHT

Why does the Word have to become flesh? Presumably so that mythically it can accomplish a quest, and metaphorically identify all the categories of being ... Surely I'm doing something more than just playing around here. (LN, 36)

The third chapter of Words with Power, "Identity and Metaphor/ mediates the apparently secular 'Concern and Myth' that precedes it and the apparently sacred 'Spirit and Symbol' that follows. It is thus the ideal place for Northrop Frye to reveal his view of the intermediary nature of metaphor as the meeting point between word and flesh. As he notes in his introduction, the chapter serves as a pivot between the explicitly literary and the explicitly biblical aspects of the book (WP, xi), a pivot that both allows a link between the Bible and Western literature and permits their distinction as Frye moves across the hypothetical, existential, and ecstatic versions of metaphor. In doing so he demonstrates the unity that he discerns in this variety as well as the mystery present in even the most mundane metaphor. Formally, what remains consistent among these manifestations is the logic-defying formula that something is both 'A and not-A.' In Frye's vision, metaphor defies logic not in order to deny the validity of logic within its own limits, but to point towards something hypothetically beyond them. While the content of that 'something' may be ineffable, Frye shows that its form, at least, can be expressed, and that this is best done by means of literary language, which permits the greatest expan-

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sion of metaphoric identification. Yet, as I will show, Frye's own critical prose partakes of and participates in such poetics and thereby provides a parable of the imaginative language it describes. Techniques of ironic indirection and metaphoric identification, for instance, are especially apparent in Frye's recurring reference, throughout his work, to a mysterious but mundane-sounding 'something.' As Frye uses 'something,' the word serves a dual, almost paradoxical, function: it is both a semantic gap and a syntactic place-holder. By deploying this unassuminglooking word and relying on the reader's tendency to assume a signified for it, Frye gracefully leaps any intermediate gap in his own logic and lands on the far side of the ordinary reach of literary criticism. As a result, 'something' assumes a substantial role as the third chapter of Words with Power builds to a climax (readers hope) of revelation. By examining the role of 'something' in this chapter, I would like to show how Frye plays on the immediate absence of its referent in order to entice readers towards its presumed presence at the end of the narrative, where answers to questions and solutions to riddles traditionally lie. 'Something' frustrates our understanding, therefore, only to lead us on in defiance of that frustration. It involves the reader as a protagonist in the mythic and metaphoric quest that Frye at once describes and embodies in the imaginative structure of his work. Finally, though, by encompassing the mythos of romance in the ironic mode, Frye identifies even his readers' frustration as integral to their satisfaction. Thus, the close of the chapter unexpectedly opens the imaginative potential of Frye's metaphors of metaphor, rather than confining them within a single signified. Part of this opening involves the realization that the reader's own reading is the most immediate example of a metaphor of metaphor, or of words made flesh. I will therefore reproduce key episodes from a reader's experience of the chapter in tandem with my analysis of the rhetorical strategies at work in Frye's account of 'something' as it culminates in the crucial metaphor of the Word. The role of 'something' as a merely metonymic pointer is illustrated in the first and second chapters of Words with Power by Frye's account of the descriptive mode of writing, which we read simply 'to get information about something in the world outside the book' (WP, 4), or put another way, about 'something outside the words that the words are pointing to' (WP, 34). Used in this way, 'something' is what we might call, echoing Frye in the opening of chapter 3, one of the 'ordinary boundary terms that we commonly use within verbal structures' (WP, 63). As an ordinary, even a shop-worn word, it is used every day to

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distinguish an item from its surroundings, thereby reinforcing bounds among subjects and objects. Frye opens his third chapter by hypothesizing that such terms, under scrutiny, 'begin to dissolve' (WP, 63), making it hard to separate one thing from the next, such as (he instantiates, not incidentally) literature from criticism. Yet as quickly as he raises their possible unity, Frye veers away from such a metaphorical merger by declaring his intention to accept, for heuristic purposes, the existence of something called literature based upon the ordinary 'common-sense practical distinction' (ibid.) made between it and other verbal forms. Later in the chapter, though, even such 'common sense' will fulfil Frye's initial hypothesis by dissolving under the pressure of his and his readers' scrutiny. Ironic indirection is therefore built into the very first rhetorical move of the chapter. For now, however, Frye continues to cater to the logic of common sense by appealing to the criterion of utility when he details how literary language makes a 'functional use' of verbal devices (WP, 64). Poetry uses 'ordinary' words, he says, but not in the ordinary way (WP, 64). We may not usually notice the arbitrariness of the relations between words and things, ingrained as they are by common sense. Sonic poetic effects, however, make the relation between words and things sound, not only not-arbitrary, but necessary. Frye locates the source of this imaginative convention in magic, where the word-thing identity is assumed to function mechanically; that is, words are supposed to make things happen. This causal connection 'between a word and a thing, a name and a spirit' (WP, 64-5) may remind a reader, as I think Frye's diction here is designed to do, of the central New Testament image of the Word made flesh. This is an image towards which the chapter proceeds and in which Frye's insistent identification of the metaphorical and the spiritual (WP, 45) finds substantiation. For now, though, the link he insinuates is simply between the magical and the spiritual, and the former can only render the latter suspect. Yet Frye may intend to exorcise our doubts by exercising and then exhausting them as they are revealed to be mere distractions from his real aim. Next he distinguishes between the metaphorical and the magical, since in a poetic invocation of a connection between words and things, the mechanical element is dropped. What is kept, he says, is 'the sense of a mystery in words' (WP, 65). Frye explains that this mystery is felt mainly in a couple of rather trivial-sounding effects of the literary way with words. The first effect, onomatopoeia, is not especially mysterious, so Frye self-consciously defends its significance: 'Perhaps there is

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always something of a trick about it, and yet it may be that a device found so constantly in Homer and Virgil is something very central to poetry' (ibid.). Here the second instance of 'something' is, characteristically of the idiom, figured as 'very central' and therefore invested with a great deal of interest for a reader. Despite being void of content, its presence acts as a focal point upon which a reader's interpretative activity can concentrate in an attempt to fill that void. The ordinariness of the word prevents it from appearing either like mere bluster, a word without a meaning, or like a threat, a presence too mysterious for the average reader to dare encounter. Such a fusion of the mysterious and the mundane is typical of Frye's presentation of his subject matter. For instance, he justifies as 'common enough' (WP, 65) the second source of the sense of mystery in words, which appears as 'a metaphorically "magical" line or passage that sticks in the memory, often coming loose from its original context' (ibid.). With its oxymoronic common magic, this effect will become significant to our understanding of metaphoric counter-logic later on. Out of this muddle of associations and distinctions among the metaphorical, the magical, and the spiritual, Frye invokes another assumption, that a poem is a unity (WP, 66). He then comments on the motive behind his heuristic method when he adds that this assumption is 'adopted for the sake of seeing what results' (ibid.). His self-conscious emphasis is on the creative capacity of mere assumptions and the visionary power of the hypothesis that can (unlike common sense, with its foregone conclusions) produce a new set of percepts. Briefly and unobtrusively, Frye's critical method has thus been linked to the imaginative mode of language. Yet the assumption that a poem is a unity may seem at odds with the mysterious effect of imaginative language noted above (the passages that somehow free themselves from the context of the work in which they are found). As if Frye realizes we might perceive a paradox between his assumption of poetic holism and peripatetic lyrics, he defies the contradiction by simply opposing the opposition we might imagine between its two elements. He does so by denying that the postulated poetic unity is violated when a passage 'seems to burst through that unity to suggest different orders of existence' (ibid.). We are bound to wonder what sort of orders he means. As if aware of his readers' pattern of questioning, Frye responds with an abundance of hypotheses: '[T]here may be something potentially unlimited or infinite in the response to poetry, something that turns on a light in the psyche, so that instead of the darkness of the unknown we see some-

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thing of the shadows of other kinds of emerging being' (WP, 66). Even after this incantatory invocation, Frye declines to attach any signifieds to his profusion of signifiers. If we accept that our response to poetry is as necessarily incomplete as he suggests in this passage, we can already imagine why such a refusal or at least a deferral is required by his rhetorical strategy. If making meaning is part of our response to poetry, and if that response contains the potential infinite, then Frye will need to wrestle with making reference to what is alternately a word without a thing and a thing without a word. As if to recover critical credibility by a renewed appeal to common sense, he hastens to a comparatively cramped viewpoint: 'We are concerned here only with the principle that a response to a specific passage in a poem may extend indefinitely beyond the poem' (ibid.). With this abrupt anticlimax he ends the paragraph. In elucidating the stages of such a response, Frye discusses the reader's second-stage vision of a total structure of imagery that is analogous to the poetic unity conjectured earlier. But he goes on to suggest that in the best literature, 'the seeing of the total structure is something that there could never be any question of completing' (WP, 70). For substantiation he turns to Henry James's What Maisie Knew, in which the 'what' of the title 'can only be conveyed by a simultaneous vision in the mind of the whole story, not by any discursive account of the "meaning" of her experiences' (WP, 71). Vision is similarly not something we think of as beginning and ending, in the way that an argument opens in one place and moves purposefully towards completion somewhere else. Frye's citation of James serves another purpose, however, in this context; it functions as an oblique parable of his own otherwise unexplained use of the word 'something,' a word that could arguably stand in for the 'what' in James's title. Later in Words with Power Frye notes that when talking about God, in the visionary tradition, 'all language about such a being dissolves in paradox or ambiguity,' which means that 'language in such areas has to carry with it the sense of its own descriptive inadequacy, and nothing but the mythical and metaphorical language that says both "is" and "is not" can do this' (109). 'Something' is one example of Frye's own language displaying its descriptive inadequacy in relation to its subject, although until now in chapter 3 it did not seem that he was talking about anything like God. By simply pointing to a word like 'something' and letting it point beyond itself, Frye expands the range of a reader's vision by the power of the word to evoke a way in which vision still might expand.

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Frye then shows this expanded sense of vision to have a peculiarly literary source when he elaborates on the way imagery works. Characters are, he says, the primary images because they, as the fleshiest words, most obviously 'mediate' author and audience (WP, 71). Moreover, the primary instance of the imaginative character is the god, since, in Frye's view, all imaginative characters descend from mythic deities designed to mediate human and non-human nature. This means, finally, that the primary instance of metaphor is a god. It is in the context of classical nature-gods that Frye posits his paradoxical definition of metaphor, since, in these gods, 'personality and natural object are said to be the same thing, although they remain two different things' (ibid.). Put another way, 'something related to human personality and something related to the natural environment tend to merge' in these divine metaphors (WP, 72). Such an apparent paradox, though - in the form of 'A is B/ when expanded into 'A is and is not A' - only presents a logical problem when expressed as a proposition that depends on an implication of bodily existence. Since no one is much concerned about whether these particular gods exist, the definition seems less irrational than it is, in the same way that metaphors seem to make sense enough when isolated in the imaginative domain. Still, Frye does not let the suspiciously paradoxical premises of the imagination subside into the shadows of his argument. Instead, he calls attention to them: '[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' (WP, 71). In this delightful and instructive instance of poetic wordplay, the phrase Frye uses to explain the function of metaphor ('passes beyond') is an informal translation of the roots of 'metaphor' (pherein, to ferry, carry, or pass + meta, above or beyond). This might reduce his definition of what literature does with its metaphors to tautology. Or it might rely on a spiralling, centripetal form of counter-logic that, like metaphor, builds up enough momentum to let a spark of understanding burst out of it, like the passages that deliver themselves from their poetic context without destroying its unity (WP, 65). Importantly, Frye does not appeal to common sense here, as he appeared to do before. Instead, he altogether uproots the authority of, in his own sceptical phrase, 'what is normally taken to be the common-sense (descriptive) use of language' (WP, 71). If metaphor works ironically by 'asserting and denying... at the same

Word, Flesh, Metaphor, and 'Something' of a Mystery in Words with Power III

time' (WP, 72), Frye's poet, unlike Sir Philip Sidney's (WP, 35), both affirms and denies. Since Frye has been so diligent up to now in appealing to common sense, we might feel that there is something irresponsible about a mode of language that points in two directions at once. Frye seems to share his readers' doubts: '[W]hat is the point of a figure of speech that at least includes the opposite of anything that a reader or listener would think of as the truth?' (WP, 72; my italics). His diction, as I have emphasized, anticipates a reader's next logical step, which is to learn to doubt his or her doubts by turning to doubt some supposed certainties instead. But if Frye has any more direct answer to our shared question, he will not let us in on it yet. As in any tale of mystery, suspense is essential to draw readers onward. Therefore, instead of answering the question, he changes the subject. He proposes that metaphor is 'least self-conscious in early societies, where the distinction of subject and object is not always clear' (WP, 72). Contemporary readers, products of the common sense that makes a split between subject and object their primary experience, turn gods into characters and statements about them to irony, no longer 'assertions about existence' (ibid.). In light of the cultural ascendancy of logic-bound forms of language, the function of poetry is, Frye says, 'to keep the metaphorical habit of thought alive' (WP, 73). My response is to wonder why one should bother to sustain a habit so primitive and irrational. As if on cue, so does Frye: 'But why should it be kept alive ...?' (ibid.). Once again, by asking this question he reveals an awareness of the typical path taken by a reader in response to the tale he tells. Yet once again, after raising such a question, and a reader's doubts, Frye offers no answers, which would only disrupt the pattern of ironic indirection and understated beguilement that has led the reader on so far. He moves along briskly to reveal the two-step reading model detailed in the chapter as a metaphor of all mental work accomplished in the advance from time-bound, particular, and wordless 'experience' towards what we call 'knowledge,' the present critical eye reflecting on the past (WP, 74). In the first stage of reading, 'we are inside the literary work, absorbed in it, as we sometimes say' (ibid.). With that last clause, Frye notes the metaphor that guides the reader's venture, a model in which pre-critical awareness could be said to be swallowed in a literary Leviathan. If we follow out the metaphor, only some active critical digestion that breaks down ordinary boundary terms will let us emerge transformed. As if in parabolic demonstration, Frye now begins to

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emerge from some of the monstrous structures he has set up so far, turning the chapter inside-out by undoing what he has done. For instance, 'while it may be theoretically useful to distinguish two stages [of reading], in practice they have to be assimilated' (WP, 74). Distinction turns to identity, as in metaphor, without obliterating difference. Instead, just as myth and metaphor are 'two aspects of one identity' (WP, 71), experience and knowledge 'become aspects of the same thing' (WP, 75). He suggests that an awareness of this same 'something' will alter the way we experience, or theorize, or, in Frye's metaphor, read. Its comprehensive perspective 'turns a wandering through a maze of words into a directed quest' (WP, 74-5), the romance of the reader. Putting the reader in this heroic position makes for self-referential critical work by overturning another common-sense distinction, that of reader and text. This is one example of what will be increasingly exemplified throughout the chapter, of metaphor as an interpretive process through which the relation of word and flesh becomes one of identity. The text is no longer 'something confronting us' (WP, 75), apart from us. Our response, having rendered us part of that same 'something,' becomes self-reflexive so that now we also have to read our own reading. At this point in the chapter, our vision has broadened sufficiently to create, at least, an expanded sense of self, the value of which we may already, however, see reason to doubt. Frye showed similar doubt earlier when he wrote ironically of the 'Herculean labours of misreading and deconstructing' that are so often considered part of the contemporary reader's role: T do not see how the reader can acquire so heroic a role unless something in literature gives it to him, even if this merely throws us back on the question of what gives this something to literature' (WP, xxi). Once again, Frye opens up the otherwise familiar bounds to the question at hand by referring to a term beyond those we already consciously control. His terms no longer permit a simple binary of reader and text, but a mysterious trinity of reader, text, and something else that seems more significant than the other two parts put together. Before readers start to take their heroism too much to heart, Frye notes two illusions that still threaten their vision: 'the illusion of detached objectivity' and the sense that 'all reading is narcissism' (WP, 75). Both illusions, Frye suggests, can be cut through by 'an extension of the use of metaphor that not merely identifies one thing with another in words, but something of ourselves with both: something of what we may tentatively call existential metaphor' (WP, 75-6). While once again

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verging on an explanation of the idea of a word made flesh, this particular identification of 'something' also raises the more mundane existential dilemma of metaphor; that is, the doubtful validity of a verbal formula that requires us to say things that break the law of non-contradiction, the most sacred commandment of ordinary logic and language. The term 'existential metaphor' may also bring to mind the existential orders that Frye earlier saw being suggested by passages that mysteriously free themselves from their respective poems (WP, 66). Now Frye finds a fairly mundane way of explaining the otherwise extraordinary existential aspect of metaphor by comparing an imaginative work to a pregnancy brought to term. This metaphor of metaphor mediates individual and shared existence to yield 'a personal but not subjective' identity (WP, 76). It implies that, far from a writer simply making things up at the moment of creation, it is as though 'something ... walked into the book by itself (WP, 76). The same image may remind us of the heroic readers' pilgrimmage from a pre-critical stage of reading, 'absorbed in' a work (WP, 74), through a liberating process of digestion or other physical labour that turns their perspective on the work insideout by delivering them from it. Both images point to the intermediary nature of metaphor as a meeting between word and flesh made by means of readers' responsive participation in a text with which, in some way, they identify. In Frye's account identity takes one of two possible forms, 'identity as' (placing an individual in a class) and 'identity with' (WP, 77). It is the second form that permits both metaphor and our personal identity with ourselves in time and space (ibid.). Since identity throughout a lifetime offers a rather ordinary kind of transcendence of these two otherwise binding dimensions, it seems plausible that metaphor, by using the same form of identification, should achieve a similar end. It also indicates that the meaning of metaphor may transcend the limits of literary considerations. In 'identity with/ Frye continues, identity 'means unity with variety' (WP, 78). This phrase resonates with his earlier definition of a reader's end-of-narrative vision as 'a unity of varied particulars' that resembles 'something of a mosaic' (WP, 74). The reason for such an echo becomes clear with his third example of 'identity with,' which is the sense that what we read becomes part of us, a phenomenon he dubs 'personally involving metaphor' (WP, 78), thereby rechristening what was previously introduced as existential metaphor (WP, 75-6), in which the self, words, and the things they describe are united like pieces of a mosaic.

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Frye proceeds to profile the persons (lunatic, lover, and poet) most involved in such metaphors. As the meeting point of difference that creates identity, the lover, through the biblical metaphor of one flesh, has long 'supplied the generative power' (WP, 79) of the poet, who repeatedly bears 'the child of the frustration of identity, a presence taking the place of or substituting for an enforced absence' (ibid.). This instance of the metaphor of sexual creation, while echoing Frye's metaphor of metaphor as a pregnancy brought to term, inverts our perspective on that same view by treating all creation as a metaphor 'taking the place of or substituting for' something else. This absent thing is somehow present, though, since it is experienced. Yet experience is speechless (WP, 74), so Frye, frustratingly, cannot be more explicit about it. Instead, he refers us to the indirect expressions of the imagination, of which the reader is simply supposed 'to share something of the experience' (WP, 79) and 'to feel that something more than a literary exercise is going on' (WP, 80). The absent-yet-present 'something' still frustrates our realization of the end of his argument. Perhaps, though, we can finally identify that thing, or its role in Frye's conception of the poetic universe, once and for all. If poetry is 'the result of imitating the model lovers' (WP, 79), whose union tends to be brief, if not altogether imaginary, then perhaps the desired imaginative effect of poetry is inherently incomplete as well. Perhaps, in metaphor, 'something' stands in to create an absence, a semantic gap, only to let us hope for its fulfilment. It may be that metaphor also always falls short of total identity, and this shortfall may be what drives further creation, since the average poet still valiantly 'employs the assumed or hypothetical identity of the metaphor, which asks us at least to consider the possibility that A and B are the same person even when we know, whatever knowing may mean in this connection, that they aren't' (WP, 80). Elsewhere Frye defines the conventional poet-hero's love for a disdaining mistress as 'a childlike and emotionally dependent relationship which, if it is not to end in frustration, must develop into something else' (SeS, 154). Yet readers remain trapped in a similarly frustrated relationship with Frye's diction, wondering still about the identity of that 'something else.' What is the ideal relation, hovering between identity and difference, which he envisions for everyone and everything from poets to lovers to language itself? Frye then puts the shared ecstatic impulse of lovers and poets in the religious context of the 'divine possession' of prophets, mystics, and

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their ilk (WP, 81), whose identification with gods matches other, apparently secular and much less mysterious kinds. What the visionary's ecstatic identification shares with secular enthusiasms is an ability to break out of an ordinary consciousness of subjective identity and surrounding objects. This links the mystic to the creator if we recall that in the previous chapter Frye claimed that, in the context of creation, 'something else supplements consciousness' (WP, 51). More than this he cannot say, except that the 'something' is 'more metaphorical than related to actual brain-structure' (ibid.). Though he remains dependent on the idiom of 'something/ Frye later adds detail to his sketch when he states that the poet's 'abilities are linked to something involuntary in the mind, and he can write in the hope that something less inhibited and with a greater penetrating power may emerge' (WP, 110). This returns us to the conventional notion referred to earlier in the chapter, that the poet does not speak his poem, but invokes a muse or a god to do so instead (WP, 67-8). Here Frye cites Blake, who renounced his identity as maker for that of a medium (WP, 81). But Blake is famed, however mistakenly, as a mystic, so Frye turns for substantiation to the more mundane, commonsensical Montaigne, who identified his book as 'consubstantial with its author' (ibid.). If this is so, then the words in a book not only stand in metonymically for the flesh and bones of the author. The words, metaphorically, are that flesh. As Frye puts it, the book is 'both himself and not himself (WP, 82), both A and not-A, which makes a dialectical third come into existence. In light of these new factors, Frye renames 'existential metaphor'; in his new trope, it is 'ecstatic' (WP, 84). The metaphor that was formerly 'personally involving' (WP, 78) now turns one inside-out, as if born from one's own body and into an existence in what Frye calls 'a different order of things' (WP, 82). This phrase echoes those 'different orders of existence' (WP, 66) that Frye suggested some poetic passages can open without destroying their place in an imaginative order. Likewise, ecstasy is identity with difference, and 'unity with variety' (WP, 78). Working in this way, imagination compacts the ecstatic and the erotic with itself, but not by closing them in; instead, 'all the doors of perception ... are thrown open' (WP, 82-3). This open-ended vision is supposed to make up in intensity what it lacks in stability, since it is, ordinarily, brief in time and fragmentary in space. As such it sounds oddly incomplete, though, since Frye earlier spoke of a total vision of imaginative structure, towards a view of which this chapter seemed to

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be building. This sense of incompleteness can only mean that we have not yet reached a point from which the view is clear enough for such a comprehensive vision. We have, however, reached the point when Frye defines the 'something' that we have so long pursued. Having said so much about the form of imaginative vision, he now seems prepared to reveal what it sees. He begins negatively, asserting that it is 'not necessarily something seen steadily and whole' (WP, 83). Instead, he adds, we usually get only a glimpse. We must wonder what this glimpse reveals, and Frye does too: 'Glimpse of what?' (ibid.). He parodies our frustrated thought process as if he once stood where we now do, in the midst of the same quest for the same answers. Finally, after building up so much suspense, he offers an oracular proclamation: To try to answer this question is to remove it to a different category of experience. If we knew what it was, it would be an object perceived in time and space. And it is not an object, but something uniting the objective with ourselves. (WP, 83)

Plain description, at least, will not take us where Frye aims. To answer a question is to detract from the power of the imaginative mode, whose value is that it 'takes us into a more open-ended world' (WP, 22) rather than shutting down inquiry. Now that our quest to identify the 'something' seen by imaginative vision has come crashing to a finish, it may feel as though we have reached the end of the story. Despite the anticipated comic revelation turning out bitterly ironic instead, Frye carries on undaunted, returning our attention to the familiar axes of time and space. They may seem immaterial to our recent disappointment, but it soon becomes clear that what he describes in their terms is a parable of our experience of reading this very chapter. He proposes that 'if narrative is metaphorically horizontal, irony is built into the very conception of narrative/ since the inevitability of an end to the story places 'the reader ... above and the action of the text below' to give the reader a 'vision that oversees what he sees' (WP, 83). If nothing else, this heightened critical awareness lets us venture on after the ironic end to our pursuit of 'something.' We can then relate this structure to the two-step model of experience and knowledge, since reading, as an inherently ironic activity, also splits the reader's mind: 'one consciousness ... subjects itself to the text

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and understands' in pre-critical, experiential reading while another 'overstands' a comprehensive vision (WP, 83). Yet the latter could still be nothing but the ego's knowing view, and a split mind seems far from the total imaginative identity that Frye proposed as the end of a vision of the literary universe (WP, 70-1). Irony cannot be the end of the story a story that, far from ending, seems to have turned itself inside-out and started over again. Yet if we have begun to feel that we are going in circles, Frye offers some hope of a way out when he closes the second section of the chapter by suggesting that even in cyclic imaginative models, 'the cycle symbolizes something that is more than a cycle' (WP,84). Frye opens the dialectical third section of chapter 3 with a straightforward declaration of the way metaphorical experience works: by alternating identity and difference. Similarly, an optical illusion skews the relation between parts and whole. As our focus oscillates, we perceive each part alternately as figure and ground. Ordinary physiological vision can make sense of each partial view, not of both at once. But metaphorical vision takes a step beyond the physiological when the two different views, A and B, resolve into one identity. Frye refers this process to Plato's ladder, a metaphor of an imaginative 'journey upward into a world where subject and object are one' (WP, 85), a unity achieved by an alternation in the climber's perception 'between a feeling that he is part of a larger design, and a feeling that a larger design is a part of him' (ibid.). Analogously, in literature, the unification of subject and object requires an alternation between 'illusion and reality' (ibid.) as perceived by a reader's vision. This happens when 'something created by human imagination ... becomes real' (ibid.) while reality is recognized as equally created and therefore equally illusory. With this it becomes apparent why no final identification of 'something' is forthcoming, and why comprehensive vision is always only provisional: because in the course of the stories we tell ourselves, time carries on, something else emerges from what has merged in metaphor, and any single realization of truth is bound to turn inside-out. Frye confirms here his reasons for expanding Vice's verumfactum to include a reader's reception of an imaginative work (WP, 82), since response to an experience of what others make is one way, perhaps the only way, of participating in creation. Instead of making a paradox of reality and fiction, instead of subordinating one to the other, Frye simply denies the opposition that yields paradox in the first place. With this in mind, we can better understand his distinction between

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two approaches to religion. One 'remainfs] within the ideological framework of its revelation, observing its laws and rituals' (WP, 86). The other strives to burst out of that unity without destroying it, like the magically liberated lyrics to which Frye has attributed the 'sense of a mystery in words' (WP, 65). The latter approach of breaking all bounds ends in identification, in existential, ecstatic metaphor or, in Frye's words, 'a sense of presence, a sense uniting ourselves with something else' (WP, 85). Yet a unity with that sense of 'something' present is hardly final: 'it soon turns into a sense of absence' (ibid.). While the former approach to religion may sound more peaceful, it leaves one separate and subordinate in the belly of the spatio-temporal beast. Frye refuses to rest there, since '[ajccepting the objective world simply as a given is a parodycreation' (WP, 87). Ironists accept as a given, instead, the objective world as a creation to be parodied. Irony may pretend to descriptive neutrality, like that of a critic's prose, for instance; but its parody lets the ironist see and set forth 'not another world but the same world with a new intensity,' a world 'transfigured by identification with the perceiver' (WP, 88). Frye defines the result with a familiar metaphor, which he cannot help commenting on: 'an object impregnated, so to speak, by a perceiver' (WP, 88). Irony, far from being barren in its self-reflexivity, seems the source of all creation - not the end of the story, but the very start. The perspective of irony also depends on an alternation; perhaps more than anything else, it is 'a presence created by an absence' (WP, 89), turning the 'hell world ... of power without words' (WP, 88) inside-out with words spoken from the paradisal perspective of imaginative power. Upon Plato's ladder, or Frye's axis mundi, paradise may be the perspective from which we see, but it is never directly the object of our vision. This shows that the quest in pursuit of 'something/ which we may have thought finished a few pages ago, continues still, always under different rhetorical, imaginative, and spiritual guises. The form is the same: a semantic gap and a syntactic place-holder that make way for an expanded field of vision. Yet such alternation, like all two-step procedures, is 'the result of living in time' (WP, 89), which splits things into the poles of subject and object that form the common sense of 'ordinary experience' (WP, 90) and descriptive language. Time makes us construct hypothetical, analogical structures of knowledge, like literary criticism and theology, whereas ideal experience would self-reflexively unite means (experience) and end (knowledge) to form what Frye calls

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'some kind of union between the imaginative and the actual that we have not yet identified' (ibid.). To identify it, Frye leaps to the particular metaphor of the journey or 'way.' He implies that this is simply one of many metaphors that could serve as 'a good example of the extent to which language is built up on a series of metaphorical analogies' (WP, 91). Yet it quickly becomes clear that 'the way' bears a significant relation to both myth and metaphor in general and to a particular myth and a metaphor central to the Bible in its relation to mythopoeic language. The narrative ofajournee, the cycle of a day, commonly acts 'as a symbol for the whole of life' (WP, 90). It is therefore an example of the kind of metaphor that finds a way to free itself from its original context, the kind with which Frye began this chapter (WP, 65) and which increasingly seems to be the way of all metaphor. Frye describes varieties of this unity (WP, 91-4) to show that all 'ways' are basically quests, and so basically cyclic: 'horizontal circle[s]' (WP, 93) bound in time. But we have already heard him allude to 'something' that breaks free of any cycle (WP, 84). Here, finally, Frye is more specific, pointing to a cycle's potential to 'spiral' up into a 'vertical dimension of a directed movement, an end-ofnarrative-vision' (WP, 93-4). By way of example, Frye raises 'the paralyzing paradox' of the phrase 'I am the way' (John 14:6) a phrase that ironically implodes 'the whole metaphor of journey, of the effort to go there in order to arrive here' (WP, 94). Through these words the romance quest, released from time's trap, 'modulates into the metaphor of an erect human body ... with which we identify ourselves' (ibid.). Frye thus links 'the way' of genuine society to 'identity with,' that is, to metaphor and to the potential it creates for a union of word and flesh. The way to achieve this, Frye seems to think, is clear: '[W]e form part of a body which is both ourselves and infinitely larger than ourselves' (WP, 95). This metaphorical presence is what John refers to as the Word made flesh (1:14), a presence in which, as Frye goes on to say in chapter 4, 'the distinction between the end and the means of communication has disappeared' (WP,110). As is easily imagined, a response to such a structure cannot be explicated discursively, nor can it be contained in a single chapter of a single book. Here, for instance, our response carries us into the more explicitly biblical material of the next chapter, 'Spirit and Symbol,' in which Frye promises we will find a further stage of response where 'something like a journeying movement is resumed' (WP, 96). This is

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the field of kerygma, the metaphor of metaphors, with its 'ability to make its way through all the barriers of language' (WP, 110) and so to collapse the bounds of reader and writer, text and person, body and spirit, and so on. Frye alludes to kerygma in the introduction of Words with Power, when he refers to the Bible as 'a work of literature plus' (xv) and declares the goal of his quest, in writing this book, as the identification of the nature of that 'plus' as syntactic place-holder and semantic gap, as 'something' worth pursuing. The absent content and present form of 'something' make it a crucial word in the third chapter of Words with Power. Through it and associated forms of ironic indirection and imaginative identification, Frye contributes to the reader's growing sense, consistent throughout Frye's works, of metaphor as the axle between materiality and imagination, flesh and word. Indefinite about the infinite and mundane about a mystery, the word may seem inadequate to the task at hand. With it, Frye defers a direct approach to an explanation of the value of imaginative language, of metaphor as its central meaningful form, and of their affiliation with sacred scripture. Yet by means of 'something' Frye moves ahead by moving laterally, and his oblique path around what we may think of as the point of the chapter allows him to make, instead, a parabolic demonstration of it. He is in this way able to bring down to earth even the most mysterious metaphor, 'an invisibility that enables another kind of reality to appear, a mystery turned into revelation' (WP, 127). Here he refers to the responsive Spirit, the ideal form of a reader's imaginative response, but such an invisibility is metaphorically identical to that of 'something.' Its referent may be imperceptible, even hypothetical, yet through that hypothesis, through the faith or at least the hope with which it is invested, and through the frustrations overcome in its name, a vision of Frye's words can expand into a vision of the Word.

MYTH AND TYPOLOGY

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The Flesh Made Word:

Body and Spirit in the New Archetypology of Northrop Frye GLEN ROBERT GILL

The Word clarifies, the Spirit unifies, and the two together create what is the only genuine form of human society. (Northrop Frye, Words with Power, 89)

The usual pattern of an intellectual life is one that sees the idealism and radicalism of youth gradually replaced by the pragmatism and conservatism of maturity, a process Northrop Frye in his studies of William Blake called the Ore cycle, in reference to the subservience of that poet's youthful character Ore to the aging Urizen. Having studied the dangers of this cycle, Frye ensured that his own career inverted this pattern. During the last ten years of his life, Frye wrote and spoke more radically about the nature and potential of myth and metaphor than at any point in his career, such that these fundaments of literature became for him the sine qua non of a genuine human life. This increasingly existential interest is evident in the descriptive subtitles of Frye's works after Anatomy of Criticism (1957): The Stubborn Structure (1970) is subtitled 'Essays on Criticism and Society'; The Critical Path (1971) is described as 'An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism'; and Spiritus Mundi (1976) is called a collection of 'Essays on Literature, Myth and Society.' In a late essay, Frye described the shift in focus as an inquiry into the cultural (as opposed to the specifically literary) function of metaphor: The hypothetical nature of literature, its ironic separation from all statements of assertion, was as far as I got in my Anatomy of Criticism ... I then

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became increasingly fascinated with the Bible, as a book dominated by metaphor throughout, and yet quite obviously not content with an ironic removal from experience or assertion. Clearly one had to look at other aspects of the question, and reconsider the cultural context of metaphor. (MM, 114) In his last major work, Words with Power (1990), Frye reached the limits of that cultural context, its lower limit at the boundary of nature and its upper limit at the boundary of the spiritual world. The result was his conclusion that human experience between these boundaries, and our only passage through them, relies upon our capacity to generate and fully experience metaphor and myth. His first principle, as he states it in the introduction to Words with Power, is that metaphorical and mythological thinking, despite all attempts to the contrary, 'cannot be superseded, because it forms the framework ... for all thinking' (WP, xvi). In the farreaching discussion that follows this statement, Frye's intention seems to be to chart this epistemological and ontological framework, as he had charted the framework of literature thirty years earlier, and to produce something for literary and cultural criticism broadly analogous to a unified field theory in physics. The reader of the Anatomy coming to Words with Power well versed in Fryean vocabulary encounters a set of new terms for the key components of this framework. Most significant among them are primary concern, ecstasis or ecstatic metaphor, and, particularly, kerygma. These concepts - the first two at least - are not overly difficult in themselves, and certainly not as obscure and difficult as some of the ideas that post-structuralism has produced (many of which, as we shall see, Frye's theories deftly invalidate). Yet as with most things in Frye's theoria, it is the more complex matter of the implications and interrelationships of these concepts that must be considered. A single essay cannot provide a complete survey of these implications and interrelationships, but two particular issues require elucidation: (1) The first two concepts (primary concern and ecstatic metaphor) are the preconditions and enabling components of the third (kerygma); (2) Together they hold the potential to 'turn out to pasture' what Frye once referred to as the 'sacred cow' of contemporary theory, the omnipresent continuum of ideology as the sole context of human experience, by demonstrating that mytho-metaphorical experience precedes that context, speaks through it, and recreates reality beyond it (LN, 49). The foundation of Frye's framework is the idea of primary concern, which underpins everything that follows. It is an idea Frye developed through the discursive inquiry of the Anatomy on the one hand and the

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existential focus of his later books on the other. In the Anatomy, Frye theorized the existence of universal symbols that underwrite the archetypes of myth. By 'universal/ he did not specifically mean universally innate in a psychological sense, but rather simply 'images of things common to all men and [which] therefore have a communicable power which is potentially unlimited' (AC, 118). 'The point about archetypes [in the Anatomy] is not that they're built into the human mind/ he wrote in one of his many private notebooks, 'but that they are communicable through recognition' (LN, 130). Such images include, for example, 'food and drink, ... the quest or journey, ... and sexual fulfillment, which would usually take the form of marriage' (AC, 118). Particular myths, such as that of Adonis or Oedipus, are obviously not universal, Frye concluded, but the archetypes of which they are composed, being based on these common images and experiences, are universally present (and therefore potentially recognizable) in the world's mythologies and literatures. When the existential project of Words with Power drove Frye to try to isolate the essential physical components of all human life, which he called 'primary concerns/ he made the not-unexpected discovery that they are in fact the same universal experiences upon which he had earlier shown the archetypes of myth to be based. Frye identified four such primary concerns: 'food and drink, along with related bodily needs; sex; property (i.e. money, possessions, shelter, clothing ...); liberty of movement' (WP, 42). These primary concerns are distinguishable from what Frye calls 'secondary concerns/ which 'arise from the social contract, and include patriotic and other attachments of loyalty, religious beliefs and class-conditioned attitudes and behavior' (ibid.). Secondary concerns are, in other words, those ideological components of our lives that too often override or otherwise take precedence over the primary concerns. Frye recognized that the provision for the primary concerns, as the absolute requirements of all human life, is in itself the closest we can come to an absolute good: The general object of primary concern is expressed in the Biblical phrase 'life more abundantly' ... The axioms of primary concern are the simplest and baldest platitudes it is possible to formulate: that life is better than death, happiness better than misery, health better than sickness, freedom better than bondage, for all people without significant exception, (ibid.)

The theory of primary concern maintains that what is speaking in myth, and what is spoken to, is not etiological or proto-scientific in nature, nor any type of obscured history or veiled ideology, but rather

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the universal experience of having had these four essential physical needs satisfied, and the anxiety of not having them satisfied (Frye even refers to the primary concerns in his notebooks as 'primary anxieties' [LN, 165]). When historian Morris Berman observes that '[hjistory gets written with the mind holding the pen; what would it look like, what would it read like, if it got written with the body holding the pen?'1 Frye's response would be that it would not be history at all, but myth. For example, in what is perhaps a staggeringly obvious but hitherto untheorized connection, Frye sees the concern for food and drink as generating archetypes like the sparagmos (dispersion or dismemberment) and the Eucharist symbolism of the New Testament (and its literary antecedents). 'This rooting of... myth in primary concern,' Frye writes, 'accounts for the fact that mythical themes, as distinct from individual myths or stories, are limited in number' (WP, 44-5). We shall return to the crucial question of how exactly the primary concerns motivate such archetypes, and what is accomplished in their production. The relevant point here is that by establishing a demonstrable connection between archetypes and the primary concerns, Frye is able to seize what has hitherto been the donkey's carrot of archetypal theory, if not of a good deal of philosophical inquiry at large: a conception of myth as a potentially universal discourse grounded in a set of ethical constants, and existing, therefore, prior to or beneath the vagaries of history and ideology. Frye's point is that, because myth originates in primary concern, the common denominators of human life, it speaks for everyone's essential interest, and hence for no one's particular interest. As a mythogenetic theory, this is more compelling and defensible than anything intimated by Freud or Jung, for example, who were themselves attempting to ground outdated, logocentric theories that attributed myth to a transcendent or divine source. Jung's claim that the archetypes of myth result from 'deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity'2 that have accumulated in the collective unconscious seems as though it might be moving in the direction of Frye's theory. Yet when he cites the observance of the movement of the sun or the trauma of being born as examples, he reveals his theory to be at least geographically or technologically variable, if not culturally contingent, which is of course the case with Freud's ideas of originary parricide and the primal horde.3 This is to say nothing of the fact that even to speak of accumulated deposits and things originary is to plant both feet of the archetype in time and history and require of it a specific evolution, disqualifying it as genuinely universal. But Frye's theory of pri-

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mary concern does make good upon a general claim put forth by that other influential mythologist, Joseph Campbell, who once stated that 'myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body ... This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of those organs/4 Lying beneath even the unconscious, collective or personal, is the body and the constancy and urgency of its needs, which are the generators of myth, and the guarantors, so to speak, of its identity and authority. The theory of primary concern does not belong to a wholly traditional context, however, or solely among the thought of the giants of mythography and psychoanalysis. Frye's theorizing of a connection between the body and metaphor is fully contemporary with the work of thinkers like Jacques Lacan and feminist theorists Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva, as well as the foremost theorists of so-called 'secondgeneration cognitive science' and 'cultural phenomenology/ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. All are involved in a recent theoretical trend aimed at correcting the failure of post-structuralism to configure a relationship between language and what has been called the 'actuality' of 'the embodied subject/5 What they share is a resistance to the residual Cartesianism in analytic philosophy and faculty psychology, which has propped up the assumption of post-structuralism that the mind, as the disembodied seat of consciousness, is free (or condemned, depending on one's perspective) to generate arbitrary systems of meaning in language. For these theorists, the body is not inconsequential to thought and signification, nor is the mind a mere tabula rasa upon which culture inscribes itself. Their common intention is, among other things, to demonstrate that the material conditions of the body, while existing prior to language, nevertheless structure 'discursive space' and influence the formation of 'the symbolic order/ Central to Lacan's thought, for example, is the theory of phallogocentricism, a complex metaphorization of the phallus that functions as the presumed locus of power or authority in writing.6 As a feminist alternative to this theory, Cixous offers the idea of ecriture feminine, which theorizes the influence of the female body on women's writing to the point where, in her essay The Laugh of the Medusa/ she finds it to be metaphorically informed by the production of mother's milk and menstrual blood.7 More directly congruent with Frye's thinking is Julia Kristeva's theory of 'the abject' as she applies it to the Oedipus plays of Sophocles, where she argues that the pharmakos or scapegoat archetype and the ritual of royal exile is motivated by the desire for bodily purification.8 Still more in

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line with, and illuminating of, Frye's theory is the work of Lakoff and Johnson. It is their position that all abstract and conceptual thought is metaphorically structured, and that the metaphors used to structure it are drawn from concrete bodily experience (thus throwing the entire idea of 'abstraction' itself into question). Although phrased in the language of cognitive linguistics rather than that of cultural or literary theory, their hypothesis that 'concepts are developed via metaphorical extensions of ... basic sensimotor structures'9 will, as we shall see, be of use in corroborating the theory at work at the higher levels of Frye's framework: the cultural and spiritual contexts of metaphor and myth. Clarifying Frye's thinking on myth and metaphor in these contexts requires that we return to the question raised earlier: by what process, and to what effect and end, do the primary concerns generate the archetypes of myth and literature? The primary concerns are physical needs, and a need consciously recognized and linguistically configured becomes what contemporary theory by way of psychoanalysis typically calls 'desire.' It is the progression from 'need' to 'demand' that one finds in the work of Lacan,10 or from 'animal desire' to 'anthropogenetic desire' in the writings of Kojeve.11 'Desire', it must be recalled, is also a term of great importance in the Anatomy, functioning as a motivating force analogous to 'primary concern' in Words with Power (AC, 104-28). Archetypes are metaphors collectively held and conventionally used in myth, originating in desire; only metaphorical language, the self-referential language of images and sensations, is natural to the expression of desire. As Mervyn Nicholson observes (in a series of very Frye-like aphorisms), 'Desire creates images and is guided by images; it thinks in images. Images are thus the natural idiom of desire ... The form of desire can not be anything other than an image.'12 The transformation of bodily need to desire in consciousness and language is inevitably accompanied by the image of the thing or experience required to satisfy that desire. Desire speaks primarily in a language, in other words, that envisions its own fulfilment. It conceives of images, not arguments. One reason for this must be that, despite what deconstructionists have said about the inherent instability and inefficacy of language, something of desire is genuinely satisfied in metaphor. Otherwise, among other problems, it becomes difficult to account for the virtual omnipresence of (and we might say the obsession with) myth, religion, and literature in human culture, all of which are discourses and activities reliant upon metaphorical language.

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A metaphor, as we well know, is a verbal equation or formula that identifies one thing with another thing. The deconstructive principle of non-coincidence, Frye concedes, theoretically adheres to non-metaphorical modes of language, which he variously calls 'descriptive/ 'metynomic,' or 'centrifugal' (GC, 7-8; WP, 3). The inability of these linguistic modes to represent the object of desire adequately means that when desire is expressed in these modes, it falls inevitably into Derrida's chain of diffemnce, an anti-epistemological system of perpetual difference and deferral, constantly relocating but never to be fulfilled, susceptible if not destined ultimately to be dragged about by some ideological concern that dangles the promise of fulfilment before it in order to control it. This process is neatly paralleled in the history of literary theory itself in the development from deconstruction to new historicism and cultural materialism, where the system of language advanced by the first theoretical movement led inevitably to the second. Such understandings of language, however, emerge theoretically and culturally only if we first permit the profoundly anti-humanist exile of the conscious human subject and, indeed, a world of signifieds itself, from our linguistic models and presumptions. This allows an incomplete and limited sense of language as simply a closed system of rebounding signifiers to inform our thought and action. As the theory of primary concern is intended to remind us, such a model of language has little fidelity to the actual conditions of human life. When we recall the centrality of the embodied human subject in language, other forces and other fields of reference must be considered, and we have to take into account the intense desire 'to unite human consciousness with its own perceptions/ which includes language itself and the metaphors born of desire (WP, 250). Such a consideration obviously goes beyond questions of the commonplace literary metaphor, the theory of metaphor as Aristotelian mimesis that influenced Anatomy of Criticism. 'We have to ... consider an extension of the use of metaphor/ Frye amends, 'that not merely identifies one thing with another in words, but something of ourselves with both' (WP, 75-6). The human subject at the centre of language brings with it not only the physical body whose needs and experiences provide the concrete metaphorical grammar of myth and literature, but also a consciousness that is indivisible but distinguishable from it. This constitutes another referential plane to that upon which that body exists (while interpenetrating with it). In the work of Lakoff and Johnson, the sensorimotor functions and experiences of the physical body (seeing, feeling, grasp-

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ing, pushing, [rejcollecting, penetrating, consuming, etc.) provide the metaphors with which consciousness possesses and organizes concepts, thoughts, and images. We speak of 'seeing the light/ 'grasping an idea,' 'food for thought/ or 'an intellectual movement/ not simply to provide these ideas with rhetorical or imagistic window dressing, but because it is only through the use of such physically derived metaphors that these ideas possess any reality or meaning and serve any function for us. The first principle of cognitive linguistics is that there is no conception without perception, and although Lakoff and Johnson are loath to state the case so emphatically, the implication is clearly that without such metaphors, there can be no consciousness (and hence no 'reality') whatsoever. Mark Johnson defines metaphor itself as 'a tool for conceptualizing one domain of experience in terms of another';13 he refers to the body and its sensorimotor functions as the 'source domain/ and consciousness, which engages metaphors of those functions in order to structure thought and reality, as the 'target domain/14 'One major consequence of this research/ Johnson observes, 'is that it provides a major critique of any view that treats meaning and conceptual structure as radically ungrounded and arbitrary/15 Furthermore, The mind is not merely embodied, but embodied in such a way that our conceptual systems draw largely upon the commonalities of our bodies ... The result is that much of a person's conceptual system is either universal or widespread across languages and cultures/16 Frye's framework turns upon a similar literal-metaphorical exchange between body and consciousness, although he finds the results of the exchange to have much greater potency than any that could be attributed to it through cognitive linguistics, owing to the greater powers that Frye attributes to consciousness itself. Frye associates the body and consciousness with what St Paul calls the soma psychikon ('mortal' or 'natural man') and the soma pneumatikon ('spiritual man'), respectively (WP, 124; citing 1 Corinthians 15:44); but he reminds us that the word 'spiritual' may be used to refer simply to 'the highest intensity of consciousness' (WP, 128). He acknowledges that there is no question of immediately uniting subject and object on the purely physical plane, a field of either/or distinctions where the tertium non datur principle and other physical laws apply. But consciousness is not subject to such principles and laws, because this is never a reality it can access and never a reality in which it dwells. PostEinsteinian physics, in fact, has repeatedly demonstrated the inaccessibility of an 'objective' reality to the point of being able to disprove its

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very existence in the Heisenberg Principle of quantum theory ('the observer determines the observed') and the work of Erwin Schrodinger and David Bohm. If the human sciences have consistently shown one thing, it is that the first order of business for human consciousness, individually and collectively, is to get clear of 'objective' reality and begin constructing something else, that which we call 'culture.' In other words, consciousness creates and perceives (which is the same thing, as Lakoff and Johnson demonstrate) its own reality, a reality that necessarily becomes the foundation of our life and society. This creation of a human reality by consciousness is its primary function, in fact, and its fundamental tool for doing so, as we have suggested, is metaphor. Thus, Frye aptly describes metaphors in a notebook entry as 'verbal energy-currents' that carry out 'the first act of consciousness,' the attempt 'to overcome the gap between subject and object' (LN, 426). In Words with Power, Frye calls metaphor engaged to this end with the full intensity of consciousness ecstatic metaphor, a term he adapts from Longinus and Heidegger that tends to be used more often in discussions of religious and mystical experience (WP, 82). For Frye the term retains all the connotations of its Greek original ekstasis: 'lifted out of one's place/ leaving the limitations of subjectivity behind. The 'central axiom [of ecstatic metaphor] is ... something like "One becomes what one beholds/" Frye writes, re-wording the Hindu Upanishadic principle Tat tvam asi (Sanskrit, Thou art that') into something that sounds as if it might (or should) be found in the Gospels. The point is that 'consistent and disciplined vision ends in ... identification/ which involves an upward journey of consciousness into a world where subject and object are at one (WP, 86). What takes place through ecstatic metaphor, Frye explains, is 'an interchange of illusion and reality. Illusion, something created by human imagination ... becomes real; reality, most of which in our experience is a fossilized former human creation from the past, becomes illusory' (WP, 85). As extraordinary as such forms of participation mystique17 might initially appear, however, Frye maintains that the idea of ecstatic identification should not be an unfamiliar concept: In the last dozen years or so, with all the emphasis on separate realities, altered states of consciousness, and the like, we should be able at least to conceive the possibility of thinking in such terms ... [T]his ecstatic power [is] not something separate from conscious intelligence ... simply an additional dimension of experience. (NFR, 20)

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As Michael Dolzani soberly reminds us, ecstatic identification is commonplace, and occurs in the mental activities of our daily lives: 'Not all forms of ecstatic experience are ... epiphanic: every time we identify ourselves with something else - a lover, a cause, a country, even our name - we bind together that which we know is also other than ourselves.'18 What is potentially epiphanic, however, as well as potentially circumventive of the ideological continuum, is the occasion when that which is ecstatically engaged is not such a transient condition of human life as cause, country, or name (which are secondary concerns), but a metaphor born of primary concern, an archetype of myth and literature. This is the occasion, in other words, when the essential, universal experience of the soma psychikon, Frye's equivalent of the 'source domain' of cognitive linguistics, structures and informs experienced reality for the soma pneumatikon, the 'target domain' of the spirit-consciousness. Passages in Frye's notebooks often describe the result of such an exchange more schematically and unabashedly than does Words with Power. In one entry, Frye posits that, in such an instance, what's below [ordinary] consciousness, traditionally called the body, may suddenly fuse with what's above consciousness, or spirit. These are the moments of inspiration, insight, intuition, enlightenment, whatever: no matter what they're called or what their context is, they invariably by-pass ordinary consciousness. (LN, 661)

In a later entry, he explains the dynamic more fully, leaving no doubt that he is theorizing nothing less than a full transformation of consciousness and reality: The 'body' is preoccupied with primary concerns on the physical level... It 'knows' nothing except that the soul or mind or consciousness that keeps bullying it is all wrong about everything. Above ... is the spirit, and when the 'body' makes contact with that, man possesses for an instant a spiritual body, in which he moves into a world of life and light and understanding that seemed miraculous to him before, as well as totally unreal. This world is usually called 'timeless/ which is a beggary of language: there ought to be some such word as 'timeful' to express a present moment that includes immense vistas of past and future. I myself have spent the greater part of seventy-eight years in writing out the implications of insights that occupied at most only a few seconds of all that time. (LN, 663)

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In the framework of Words with Power, Frye adopts the name kerygma (Greek, 'proclamation') for the apotheosis of language that enables such peak experience. Metaphor, engaged kerygmatically, becomes 'an instrument of spirituality' that sees 'the direct transmutation of desires and emotions into presences and powers that become "realities" in themselves' (WP, 128).19 Kerygmatic language 'extendfs] bodily experience into another dimension/ fulfilling the primary concerns of the spiritual body in the expanded forms that human consciousness requires. For the spirit, as its etymology suggests, not only has its primary concerns, but is itself one; '[t]he metaphorical kernel of spirit, in all languages/ Frye reminds us, 'is air or breath' and '[b]reathing is the most primary of all primary concerns' (WP, 126). The pattern of expansion and development from the primary concerns of the body to those of the consciousness/spirit is clearly comprehensible, as is the connection between the metaphorical image that desire generates to satisfy the spiritual dimension of primary concern and the 'literal' or 'actual' object or experience that satisfies the physical component of it. In kerygma, in fact, archetypes are to the satisfaction of the spiritual aspect of primary concern what such actual objects are to the satisfaction of its physical aspect. Hence, the archetypes motivated by the concern for freedom of movement, for example, fulfil consciousness in the form of experience in dance, music, and play, and especially freedom of religion and intellectual inquiry. They possess the form of familiar ascent images such as mountains, towers, ladders, staircases, upward spirals, and 'world trees' (WP, 144-87). The archetypes generated by the concern for sexual fulfilment satisfy the desire of consciousness for love in the form of the hierogamy or sacred marriage, including an ecologically minded identification with 'Mother Earth.' They possess the form of gardens and other sensual, earthly paradises, such as one finds in the metaphorical exchange of the eroticized body and the garden in the Song of Songs (WP, 188-228). The archetypes born of the concern for food and drink develop through the logic of communion into community; they take their images from the disappearance of vegetable life into the ground in winter and its return in spring, as well as the taking of water and fish from the sea, and appear, therefore, as caves, waters, and other descents into 'lower' kingdoms (WP, 229-71). The archetypes projected by the concern for property unfold into the collective cultural and intellectual possessions of technology, the arts, and education; they possess the form of furnaces, fires, and other forces of creation and creativity located below and within (WP, 271-313).

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As these archetypal images are ecstatically engaged, fulfilling the primary concerns of body and spirit, they cohere and appear to the kerygmatic consciousness as a cosmology consisting of four vertically arranged archetypal zones, broadly labelled by Frye Mountain, Garden, Cave, and Furnace, which as a whole he calls, in the tradition of shamanism, the axis mundi. The 'mystical itinerary' of this archetypal world, to borrow a phrase from Mircea Eliade,20 provides a breadth of experience that 'begins to look like the revelation of a paradisal state ... where all primary concerns are fulfilled' (WP, 88). Rising out of the collective, social production of archetypes and the individual ecstatic response to those archetypes, kerygma results in the creation of a reality and a society that shatters the binary categories of what we have previously known as reality and society. This includes, obviously, such binaries as the 'master-slave dialectic' that thinkers from Nietzsche to Foucault to Said have argued or assumed is our fundamental mode of thought. Other, even more basic binaries fall away with this dialectic in the verbal and perceptual apocalypse of kerygma: '[T]he principle that opens the way into the kerygmatic/ Frye explains, 'is the principle of the reality of what is created in the production and response to literature. Such a reality would neither be objective nor subjective, but essentially both at once, and would of course leave the old opposition of idealism and materialism a long way behind' (WP, 128). In what may be the climactic passage of Words with Power, in fact, we see Frye struggling to evade even the binaries of grammar itself as he characterizes kerygma: '[A]s 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' (WP, 118). Frye's frequent use of the subjunctive ('such a reality would') and his private labelling of himself 'an architect of the spiritual world' remind us that this reality and world is nothing pre-existent to kerygmatic consciousness (LN, 414). If it were pre-existent, Frye would use the indicative consistently and refer to himself as a cartographer or cosmologist. His focus is rather the world we are free to build and create in kerygma, a reality we may speak, write, construct, and inhabit through what Frye describes as a dialectic of word and spirit (WP, 89, 251). Protests that this and that part of his framework do not correspond to this and that aspect of literary or social experience are pointless in this regard, for Frye is not articulating something that exists in the (now problematic) 'objective' sense, but something that could and should be,

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and is within our power to manifest through the untapped resources of language and consciousness. As a phenomenal theory of myth and metaphor, what we may call the 'new archetypology/ Frye's framework represents our coming full circle, the full romantic inversion of the old archetypology of Neoplatonism (active down to Eliade), where the celestial image mysteriously descends to structure earthly forms. In its humanly concerned and invitational character, it bears the same relationship to older, numinal and authoritative, archetypal theories as the New Testament does to the Old. Through it we may revitalize and reintroduce the discredited term archetype (Greek, arch, 'first' + typos, 'form, type') to cultural theory, not in the sense debunked by Derrida's manifold critique of arch,21 the impossibility of recovering the originary, but in the other senses of 'first': the primary (concerns), the basic (act of consciousness), the fundamental (structures of literature and culture). In Words with Power, Northrop Frye begins with the principle that, as a famous aphorism of Merleau-Ponty has it, 'our body is the general medium for having a world'22 (especially a visionary one), and proceeds to demonstrate how we may project our genuinely human forms upon the stars. This is the act of creation Blake is speaking of when he proclaims that 'we may build Jerusalem' or describes how the mortal 'ruins of time build mansions in eternity.'23 For just as the biblical antitype of the Incarnation is the Resurrection and Ascension, so the human response to the sacred scripture is, as Frye's work reveals, the literary miracle of the Flesh made Word. NOTES 1 Morris Berman, Coming to Our Sense: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West (Toronto: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 110. 2 C.G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 69. 3 Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Religion: Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism, and other works, ed. Albert Dickson (Markham, ON: Penguin Books, 1985), 160-92. 4 Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 46. 5 Colin Falck, Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 12. 6 Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990), 104-48.

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7 Helene Cixous, 'The Laugh of the Medusa/ in Elizabeth Abel, ed., The Signs Reader: Women, Gender and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 312-15. 8 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 84-9. 9 Mark Johnson, 'Embodied Reason/ in Gail Wiess and Honi Fern Haber, eds, Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 85. 10 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (New York: Norton, 1977), 270. 11 Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 6. 12 Mervyn Nicholson, 'Cosmology and Imagination in Northrop Frye/ URAM: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Philosophy of Ultimate Truth and Meaning 15 (1999): 57. 13 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 46. 14 Johnson, 'Embodied Reason/ 97. 15 Ibid., 85. 16 Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 6. 17 Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality (London: Gresham, 1923), 17. 18 Michael Dolzani, 'Wrestling with Powers: The Social Thought of Frye/ in Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham, eds, The Legacy of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 100. 19 Frye here is quoting Paul Valery on Stephan Mallarme. See 'Mallarme' in The Collected Works of Paul Valery, ed. Jackson Mathews, vol. 8, tr. Malcolm Cowley and James R. Lawler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 294 ff. 20 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 265. 21 Jacques Derrida, The Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3-27. 22 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1962), 146. 23 William Blake, The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1970), 94-5,678.

Northrop Frye between Archetype and Typology ROBERT ALTER

The Great Code may well be the most deeply instructive of Northrop Frye's books, though the object of instruction is less the Bible itself than the nature and source of Frye's enterprise as a critic. His uncompromising conception of mythology as the very heart of literature is grounded here in an account of the Bible as the origin of what he repeatedly calls the 'mythological universe' of Western literature. It is myth, he argues, that marks the contours of a culture: 'A mythology rooted in a specific society transmits a heritage of shared allusion and verbal experience in time, and so mythology helps to create a cultural history' (GC, 34). It is, we should note, the internal coherence of culture through the complex reiterations of verbal experience that literature articulates, and not a response to the natural world or to history: [T]he real interest of myth is to draw a circumference around a human community and look inward toward that community, not to inquire into the operations of nature ... [M]ythology is not a direct response to the natural environment; it is part of the imaginative insulation that separates us from that environment. (GC, 37)

This conception of the insulating function of mythology is directly linked to Frye's polemic stress on the autotelic character of literature, a controlling idea in Anatomy of Criticism, Fables of Identity, and elsewhere in his writing. In The Great Code he offers what he calls a provisional definition of the literary as 'a verbal structure existing for its own sake' (57). He immediately goes on to propose that the Bible is just such a

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structure, and he cites the predominance of metaphor and other kinds of figuration in the Bible as evidence of its self-referential literary character. This assertion, which is central to The Great Code, is vulnerable from two directions - from the point of view of literary theory and in regard to the descriptive claim about the nature of the Bible. Let me comment briefly on the former consideration, and then I shall go on to discuss in detail the account Frye renders of the Bible, which strikes me as imaginatively conceived, often beguiling, and based on a series of more or less systematic misrepresentations of the biblical texts. Is it true that metaphoric language implies linguistic self-referentiality, directing us centripetally from world to text? Frye posits what he calls a 'descriptive phase of language' that 'invokes the criterion of verifiable truth,' in part by a renunciation of metaphor (GC, 58). It is not altogether clear how this process of verification is to be implemented, and the very assumption of verifiability - is that the only way we relate to reality? - seems oddly scientistic. A plausible case can be made, with the greatest variety of examples from both ancient and modern literature, that metaphor, far from being directed towards the system of language, is very often a more precise instrument of reference to the world of nature and experience than is ordinary, non-figurative language. When Job, in the great death-wish poem that precedes the cycle of debate with his three friends, says of the day on which he was born, 'Let it not see the eyelids of the dawn' (3:9), that striking metaphor, which will be invoked again antiphonally by the Voice from the Whirlwind, is something other than an act of verbal self-reference. The first thin crack of light at daybreak is associated analogically and also causally (because light rouses the sleeper) with the fluttering open of the eyelids to take in the world. There is a suggestive mirroring of the act of observation as the eyelids lift and the world's returning to visibility as the east begins to brighten. The metaphor thus realizes - a Russian Formalist would say, defamiliarizes - the visual aspect of dawn, an eternally repeated sight, and also endows it with a palpable emotional or even kinesthetic valence as a moment of discovery and renewal. It is all this that Job, longing for sightlessness and the enveloping womb/ tomb of oblivion, would like to blot out. Metaphor, in this biblical instance and in countless others all the way to Dickens and Wallace Stevens, is not a verbal structure existing for its own sake but a vehicle for giving precise and arresting form to a certain vision of the world, to the look and feel of the world as they impress the mind and, indeed, the body of the experiencer.

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In any case, is it true that metaphor and other kinds of figuration are predominant in the Bible? Metaphor is of course prominent in biblical poetry, but poetry is clearly a minority genre in the Hebrew Bible, limited to Psalms, 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 characters and so to make us ponder their moral, spiritual, psychological, historical, or political implications. Here, for example, is the report in Genesis 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.'1 Or again, here 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 Samuel 11:4). In this breathless progress of actions, not a moment is allowed for metaphoric elaboration. Our gaze is directed steadily at the events, and each one of them has moral or political or evidential weight in the complex articulation of the story. David sends messengers because this is the tale of a sedentary king ensconced in his palace operating through the compromising agency of intermediaries, through the emissaries of a new royal bureaucracy. Bathsheba's voiceless compliance and the motives behind it remain an enigma, though the role she plays much later in securing her son Solomon's succession to the throne may allow some retrospective inferences about what motivates her here. The participial phrase about Bathsheba's having cleansed herself from her impurity is a crucial indication that she has recently completed a menstrual cycle, so that when she conceives, neither she nor David can have any doubt that her absent husband is not the father. Her return to her house at the end of

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the verse sets up a thematic space of two houses (the palace also being referred to simply as the king's 'house/ bay it): Uriah, summoned from the front, will refuse to go down to his house, sleeping instead outside the king's house; and we are led to contemplate how David has violated the integrity of Uriah's house by having the royal messengers bring the good soldier's wife for an illicit dalliance in the king's house. There is not even a hint of adjectival or adverbial emphasis in all this, nothing to compromise the hard focus on a series of verbs - sent, fetched, came, lay, returned - and two thematically fraught nouns, messengers and house. This verse is, of course, a verbal artefact, which is part of the much larger verbal artefact that is the David story, but it presents itself not as a linguistic gesture ultimately pointing to itself, or to the system of language through which it is enacted, but as a factual report of historical events that is also a strong moral and political interpretation of them, which is to say, a kind of intervention in them. Frye's notion of literature, and of the literature of the Bible, as an autotelic activity thus runs directly against the grain of the whole literary enterprise of the Bible, which aspires to make a profound difference in history and in the realization of humanity's potential by offering a strong representation of their actual unfolding. For the Bible's commitment to the actual Frye consistently substitutes an adherence to the symbolic. Let me hasten to say that he effects this substitution with remarkable interpretive resourcefulness, a quality that is one of the chief sources of what I have called the beguiling character of The Great Code. Although his eye, as we shall see, is fixed on overarching schemata, his lively and athletic intelligence does enable him on occasion to produce evocative insights into particular biblical texts. He notes, for example, that Lot's wife is the sole instance in the Bible of a metamorphosis, triggered by her looking back into what he designates archetypically as 'a demonic world.' Then, more interestingly, he goes on to observe: The Bible ... thinks rather in terms of a future metamorphosis of nature in an upward direction, when it will gain the power of articulateness instead of losing it,' and Isaiah 55:12 is happily cited as proof-text, with its imagery of the hills bursting out in song and the trees of the field clapping their hands (GC, 97). There is a certain homiletic touch in such a 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 sug-

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gestive horizon of meaning beyond any that the anonymous poet of the Babylonian exile was likely to have had in sight. What is most original in The Great Code - and also, I would argue, what is ultimately most misleading - is the fecundity with which it proffers elegant schemata to explain the design and purpose of the Bible. The book abounds in tables of sequenced phases of language use, categories of imagery, graphic illustrations of a proposed U-shaped pattern of the biblical story as a whole and of its constituent parts, tabulated columns to correlate Old Testament topography with New Testament spiritual process and eschatology. The last of the schemata I have just mentioned is doubly symptomatic of Frye's whole project. It suggests the degree to which he embraces a rather traditional Christian typological reading of the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the New - a way of reading that leads him to many odd claims about what is really going on in the Hebrew texts. Typology also enables his understanding of the Bible as a predominantly metaphoric book. If the narrative prose does not offer much in the way of metaphor on the micro textual level, metaphor may be conjured up from the settings and the material circumstances of the stories: the Sinai wilderness in which the Hebrew refugees from Egypt wander for forty years is less a geographical space between Egypt and Canaan than the stage in a spiritual progress, and hence can be appropriately aligned with Dante's Purgatory; the Red Sea, associated by the Bible itself with birth imagery, as liana Pardes has recently shown, is read as a type of baptism.2 Sequence, as one might expect from a typological critic, is one of Frye's favourite terms. He sketches out a 'structure of imagery' in the Bible that moves from the first Garden through pastoral to agricultural to urban, 'all contained in and infused by the oasis imagery of trees and water that suggests a higher mode of life altogether' (GC, 139). Frye is one of the great architectonic critics of the twentieth century, repeatedly exhibiting a kind of imaginative exuberance in eliciting large patterns from a welter of literary data. It is precisely this gift and this conceptual orientation that enabled him to make important contributions to the theory of genre. In The Great Code one is often left wondering whether these lovely designs are intrinsic to the texts or rather artefacts of interpretation. The Bible, after all, is an anthology of disparate texts by very different writers spanning a millennium of literary activity, as Frye himself at one point concedes, and, whatever the compositional ingenuity of its Christian or Jewish editors, it seems doubtful that its variegated components really generate the sort of continuous symbolic plot

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that Frye proposes. Events are represented as taking place at oases, or in deserts, or in walled towns because these were the real available settings of the ancient Near Eastern world. And in the imagery of the biblical poems, rivers and seas, gardens and fields, flocks of sheep and cattle are repeatedly invoked, though by no means in a patterned sequence, because they were prominent elements of the realia familiar both to the poets and their audiences. Had the Hebrew poets inhabited a reality in which plumbing, bicycles, and e-mail were common, they would surely have used them in their metaphors. As it is, their figurative language is not in the least limited to what can easily be transposed into archetypes: Amos uses plumb-lines, Jeremiah baskets of summer fruit and boiling pots, and the endlessly fecund Job-poet draws on cheese-making, weaving, grinding, business contracts, and courtroom proceedings for his imagery. Frye repeatedly refers to the approach to the Bible he is proposing as a literary approach, but his very use of the term in connection with the Bible suggests the rather peculiar conception of literature that he fostered. At a few points Frye intimates that what he aspires to do is to read the Bible as poets through the ages have read it. This aspiration involves a fundamental confusion of purposes. It is the very nature of poetry to make the freest imaginative use of antecedent literature, and one more or less expects that the antecedent texts will often be drastically recontextualized, semantically flipped. The business of the poet, after all, is not necessarily to provide a persuasive or plausible reading of the earlier text, but to use it as an expressive resource for making new literature. We need have no qualms, then, about Dante's or Milton's typological use of the Hebrew scriptures. It is quite another matter when a critic purports to show us how the Bible works as literature, which is what Frye claims to do. The elision between the project of poetry and the project of criticism is facilitated for him because, as we have already noted, literature is conceived above all as a self-reflexive system encompassing a sequence of mythological patterns. What The Great Code makes clear is that the ultimate source of this comprehensive conception of literature is the Christian typological reading of the Bible, which it seeks to rehabilitate. (Frye's early training as a seminarian appears to have had a profound and enduring effect on his conception of both literature and the Bible. The traditional apparatus of Christian typology has in turn been reinforced and complicated by Blake's strong mythopoeic reading of Scripture.) Frye prominently uses both 'typology' and 'archetype' as terms of analysis, and in the course of The Great

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Code it becomes evident that the symbolic equivalence between Old Testament type and New Testament antitype offers him a model for the symbolic equivalence between different manifestations of the same archetype in all literature. One may infer why he objects to what he views as the peculiarity of Jung's use of the concept of archetype. For Frye, the archetype is not the product of a conjectured collective unconscious, but is rather a lexical item in the symbolic vocabulary of a literary corpus, as each articulated image, figure, or event in the Old Testament is seen to be reflected in the literary mirror of the New Testament. Beyond the Bible, Western literature is seen as a quasibiblical 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 that '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 of by Jesus'(GC, 171). It is worth noting how uncompromising Frye's typological language is. These different moments of the biblical corpus in his formulation 'are all identical/ 'interchangeable,' 'synonyms' of each other. I shall argue that just as languages have no true synonyms, there is no such thing as a truly synonymous narrative event or literary articulation. The essential weakness of Frye's critical system, which is particularly transparent in his treatment of the Bible, is that it is interested in the individual literary text chiefly as a confirmation of the general pattern, and hence it has no adequate instruments of attention for the compelling or surprising peculiarities of the individual text. This predilection for the pattern or archetype produces less distortion when the work under inspection - say, Shakespeare or Milton - is closer to us in time, because philological difficulties are relatively marginal and the sundry cultural contexts and references of the work are still relatively familiar. Applying this strategy of reading to a body of literature largely composed more than two and a half millennia ago in a Semitic language structurally and semantically unlike our own leads to some very odd claims about what the texts mean. It is also 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

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with the Incarnation (that is, the descent of the divine into the flesh), which is a rather traditional manoeuvre of typological interpretation. To this reading, however, of Joseph as Christian/fgwra 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' (GC, 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 colours seems altogether arbitrary. Is there really a documented correspondence between fertility gods and particoloured coats? In any case, the Hebrew term ketonet pasim, despite the King James version, probably does not refer to colour but to ornamental strips (pas means 'strip'), hence E.A. Speiser's rendering of the term in the Anchor Bible as 'ornamental tunic.' 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 pasim, 'for the virgin princesses did wear such robes' (2 Samuel 13:18). The ornamental tunic or coat of many colours is thus identified by the Bible itself not with pagan ritual but with social status. Frye characteristically looks past the sociology to mythology, for the social meaning of the garment would lead him away from archetype to the actual institutional arrangements of a particular culture at a particular moment in time - the narrator's need to gloss the sartorial practice in 2 Samuel 13 suggests that it may no longer have been familiar to his audience as a marker of royal status. This sort of transmogrification of the biblical text by promoting its images and narrative events to the lofty sphere of archetype is a repeated feature of The Great Code. There are, of course, actual archetypal images, usually drawn from ancient Near Eastern mythology, in the figurative language of biblical poetry. Perhaps the most prominent of these is the primordial sea beast, variously designated as Yamm, Rahab, and Leviathan, which in Canaanite cosmogonic myth is conquered by a land god so that the world can be securely established against the forces of formlessness or chaos figured by the sea. Poetry, we should recall, is extravagantly conservative in its habits of expression, as the frequent recourse of Christian poets to Greco-Roman pagan imagery, more than a millennium and a half after the passing of antiquity, vividly demonstrates. In the Bible, the beastly sea god Yamm is confined within the cage of imagery of Psalms, Isaiah, and Job, but, given the monotheistic scruples of the Hebrew writers, he is not allowed to become a part of

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the real plot of the biblical books. In Frye's reading, by contrast, anything that lives in the water can be an archetypal manifestation of the primordial sea monster. In this fashion, after confirming the traditional typological identification of Jonah's descent into the belly of the big fish with Jesus' descent into the world, Frye can confidently announce: 'We should have enough training in metaphorical thinking by now to realize that the sea, the sea monster, and the foreign island he lands on are all the same place and mean the same thing' (GC, 191). Frye's attachment to sameness or perfect equivalence among the disparate elements of a story has the effect of flattening the story and sometimes badly distorting its contours. Is there, to begin with, any 'sea monster,' archetypal or otherwise, in the Book of Jonah? The narrator refers to the creature, quite plainly, only as the 'big fish' (dag gadol), not as Leviathan or even whale, and no descriptive monstrous attributes are assigned to him, apart from the implied cavernous dimensions of his belly. The ancient editor of Jonah actually proposes a different archetypal identification for the big fish by inserting, after Jonah has been swallowed, a thanksgiving psalm in which the speaker praises God for having brought him back to life from the murk of the underworld. Even more problematic is the licence provided by training in 'metaphorical thinking' to equate Nineveh with the big fish. Frye calls it, quite carelessly, 'a foreign island' because he wants to retain metonymic contiguity with the sea, though a moment's reflection surely would have reminded him that Nineveh is located in the Mesopotamian Valley, a few hundred miles from the sea. (In the fabulous terms of the story, Jonah, once having been cast up on the shore, would presumably have had to walk several days in order to get to his prophetic destination.) The significance, not to speak of the plot function, of the big fish and of the pagan city are anything but identical. The fish represents a near-death experience from which God rescues Jonah in order to bring him to his senses about responding to the prophetic call. The pagan city, baking under a summer sun, is the theatre of Jonah's prophecy and, in the universalistic perspective of the book, a demonstration that a traditional pagan enemy of Israel can respond to God's call and be an object of His compassion. Where in all this is there any sea monster? Even when a biblical writer actually draws on mythological imagery extensively in the representation of a sea creature, Frye ends up construing that representation as the constituent of a mythic plot nowhere in evidence in the biblical text. The awesome invocation of the Levia-

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than, of which Melville would make so much, at the end of Job of course exploits the myth of the primordial sea beast, Lotan, familiar to the poet from Canaanite poetry, of which we have recovered some vestiges in the Ugaritic texts. Job's Leviathan, I would suggest, sits on the border between the mythological and the zoological. He is a brilliantly hyperbolic representation of the Egyptian crocodile, a strange ferocious creature that neither the Hebrew poet nor his audience would have actually seen but about which they might have heard some report through travellers' yarns. This Leviathan is in no way a force contending with God, and associated with an opposed realm, like his Canaanite antecedent Lotan, but, quite the contrary, is a manifestation of the fierce and unfathomable beauty of God's creation that the mere human Job cannot grasp. From Frye's archetypal perspective, however, Leviathan is identified with the 'realm of the demonic': 'Job lives in enemy territory, in the embrace of heathen and Satanic power which is symbolically the belly of the leviathan, the endless extent of time and space' (GC, 195). This sentence has a grand ring, but every significant term reflects a serious misperception, all of them dictated by the commitment to reading a mythological plot into the book. There are no heathens anywhere in Job, just glib monotheists (the three friends and Elihu) and one tormented, struggling monotheist. There is equally nothing 'Satanic' in the Book of Job. The satdn (always with the definite article in the Hebrew because it is a common noun) means simply The Adversary, as Frye recognizes at one point but then conveniently forgets, and that dramatic personage of a spirit of opposition remains at a considerable distance of literary evolution from the properly diabolic figure of Satan that later Jewish and Christian tradition would construct. The notion that the world of time and space is dominated by demonic powers is the exact antithesis of the vision of existence put forth by the Book of Job. The principal argument of the Voice from the Whirlwind is that the whole vast creation in all its impenetrable contradictions of violence and beauty is God's doing and under His providential care in ways that humankind cannot fathom. In this scheme of creation, there is no place for the demonic-mythological version of Leviathan Frye proposes, and the notion of the 'belly' of Leviathan is purely the product of the bad habit of metaphorical thinking - the Hebrew poet never so much as alludes to the belly of the beast, and Job himself, far from being trapped in that cavity, symbolically or otherwise, is invited by the Voice from the Whirlwind to visually contemplate Leviathan/crocodile from a distance as a magnificently powerful creature he cannot control or understand.

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The distorting effects of equating every figure or event in a literary text with an archetype is a good deal more transparent in Frye's treatment of the Bible than it is in his discussions of later works, because his grasp of the philological issues and of the concrete historical contexts of Scripture is a little shaky. He has done a certain amount of homework on the subject, though it is noteworthy that The Great Code makes virtually no reference to specific items of biblical scholarship. Yet if you are constantly looking for the link between Old Testament and New and between both and some general item in the lexicon of mythology, there is always a temptation to fudge the facts of philology and literary articulation in order to get the overarching pattern, even if careful attention to the text and to a dictionary or concordance might instruct you otherwise. In his initial chapter on language, for example, Frye tells us that the Hebrew Bible, like the languages into which it was translated (he is thinking first of all of the Vulgate), has two terms that distinguish between soul and spirit, nefesh and ruah (GC, 20). In point of fact, there is no word for soul in biblical Hebrew, and the body-soul distinction is alien to the biblical world view. Both nefesh and ruah mean 'life-breath/ though ruah can also mean 'wind.' Nefesh is connected with a verb of the same root that means something like to draw a long breath of relief after hard labour. By metonymy, nefesh also occasionally means 'throat/ the passageway for the breath. To sublimate this concrete term into anima is still another gesture of Christianizing Hebrew scripture. Elsewhere, as Frye is sketching one of his ingenious patterns, in this instance an interaction of air and light or fire as the process of creation (actually not in evidence in the Bible), he claims that Ecclesiastes' favourite word hevel ('vanity' in the King James Version) sometimes means 'dense fog' (GC, 124). But hevel means 'vapour,' never 'dense fog/ the very point of its metaphoric use by Ecclesiastes being its insubstantiality, its wispiness - the very opposite of density. Beyond such tweaking of terms, Frye's commitment to metaphorical thinking often makes his reading of biblical texts arbitrary. Sometimes it is merely fanciful and often it is downright misleading. One can see the fancifulness in his meditation on the first words of Genesis. '[W]e realize/ he claims, 'that the central metaphor underlying "beginning" is not really birth at all. It is rather the moment of waking from sleep, when one world disappears and another comes into being' (GC, 108). Having seized the metaphorical ball, Frye runs with it, contending that 'this metaphor of awakening may be the real reason for the emphasis on "days'" in the story of creation that ensues. All this reflects the response of a sensitive and thoughtful reader, and it has a certain

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charm, but it is hard to see where in the opening words of Genesis there is any hint of a theme or metaphor of awakening. The underlying problem is the assumption that this passage, and all others, must be controlled by a metaphor - if not birth, then awakening. The text itself presents the creation as a series of performative speech acts - hence the apt rabbinic epithet for God as 'He who spoke the world into being,' mi she'amar vehayah haolam. The only image that might minimally encourage a metaphorical reading is the report of the spirit/wind (ruah) of God hovering 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," 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' (GC, 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 biblical image of the 'devouring sword' could end up being read, because the Hebrew for 'sword,' herev, is feminine, as a figure of vagina edentata. The most crucial aspect of biblical literature that is skewed by archetypal 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, sometimes 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 Rebecca, 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

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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 triumphal 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 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 honourable and what is disgraceful. Oddly enough, Frye associates this scene with a purported 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' (GC, 90). This move of comparative anthropology enables Frye to associate the story in 2 Samuel 6 with the story of the humiliation of the King of Kings in the Gospels. The compelling interest of individual lives played out in the theatre of politics in the David story disappears 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 were told that she loved him, and she risks her neck to help him escape from her father's assassins. About David's early feelings towards 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 political 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

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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 frustration 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 predecessor on the throne?3 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 strength as a critic, enabling him to make lasting contributions to the understanding of genre and literary modes. But the real excitement of reading is in the endless discovery of compelling differences. In the nineteenth-century novel, a Young Man from the Provinces may be the protagonist of a whole series of books, but Rastignac is not Raskolnikov, nor is Flaubert's Frederic Moreau just a Gallic version of Dickens's Pip. The specificity of sensibility, psychology, social contexts, and moral predisposition of each is what engages us in the distinctively realized world of each of these novels, whatever the discernible common denominators. The Bible, as a set of foundational texts for Western literature, is an exemplary case for the fate of reading. Through centuries of Christian supersessionism, Hebrew scripture was systematically detached from the shifting complications of its densely particular realizations so that it could be seen as a flickering adumbration of the Gospels that were understood to fulfil it. This is hardly a reading practice we want to revive, either for the Bible or for secular literature. NOTES 1 All translations from the Bible are my own. 2 liana Pardes, The Biography of Ancient Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 16-39. 3 I owe the last of these three possibilities to Rabbi Israel C. Stein; written rnmmiiniratinn

Northrop Frye: Typology and Gnosticism LINDA MUNK

To C.T.R. Hay ward

In fact every interpretation of history presupposes a hermeneutic method. (Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology)}

During an interview conducted in 1985, Northrop Frye was asked: 'How did the Second World War affect the composition of Fearful Symmetry?' 'Well/ he answered, 'I think if you look carefully at the book, and even more at the footnotes, you'll see it's a very anxious, troubled book. It's written with the horror of Nazism just directly in front of it all the time.'2 One of the horrors of Nazism is neo-Gnosticism, as Frye knew. Outlining in The Great Code 'the typological structure and shape' of the two-part Christian Bible, he alludes to 'the Gnostic tendency to think of Christianity as totally discontinuous with Judaism, even to think of the Old Testament God as an evil being' (GC, 83-4). Once Christianity is thought to be 'totally discontinuous with Judaism/ the two-part figure of speech known as 'biblical typology' (type and antitype) or as 'figuralism' (figure and fulfilment) makes no rhetorical sense. Gnosticism denies the continuity of Christianity with Judaism; typology takes it for granted. Despite their differences, Gnostic sects of the second and third centuries had two things in common: the rejection of Jewish scripture as the law of another God; and Docetism - the belief that Christ's body was a semblance. Instead of looking at Gnosticism broadly, I want to focus on Marcion,

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the second-century Christian heretic, whose 'special and principal work/ according to Tertullian (c. 160-c. 225), was 'the separation of Law and Gospel.'3 'Certainly,' Tertullian writes in Adversus Marcionem, the whole of the work he has done ... he directs to the one purpose of setting up opposition between the Old Testament and the New, and thereby putting his Christ in separation from the Creator, as belonging to another god, and having no connection with the law and the prophets ... Marcion lays it down that there is one Christ who in the time of Tiberius was revealed by a god formerly unknown, for the salvation of all the nations; and another Christ who is destined by God the Creator to come at some time still future for the re-establishment of the Jewish kingdom. Between these he sets up a great and absolute opposition, such as that between justice and mercy, between law and gospel, between Judaism and Christianity.4

For Marcion, there were two gods: the harsh, malevolent CreatorDemiurge of Hebrew scripture (deus Justus or deus judex); and a remote, true, and 'good God' (deus bonus), who was first revealed by his envoy, Jesus Christ. Unannounced by the Hebrew prophets, Christ had come as an alien: a stranger in the guise of a thirty-year-old man, whose 'purpose was to undo the works of the Creator.'5 The 'works of the Creator' (or 'Demiurge') are the things of this world. Teeming with vermin and characterized by a disgusting system of procreation, the natural world was repulsive to Marcion: 'Come on then/ Tertullian addresses him, 'use all your eloquence against those sacred and reverend works of nature ... revile that in which both flesh and soul begin to be: characterize as a sewer the womb [doacam voca uterum].'6 Gnostic systems are radically anticosmic, the whole point being to escape from the created order. 'There is no sense/ Hans Jonas explicates Marcion, 'in which the Deity that saves the world has anything to do with the existence of the world ... Consequently no genealogy, or history of any kind, connects the demiurge with the Good God.'7 Denying the nativity (thus the Davidic genealogy) of Christ, and convinced that his body was a phantom or similitude (real bodies were 'packed with dung': stercoribus infersam), Marcion 'started from the axiom that Christianity had no forerunners.'8 Having jettisoned the Hebrew Bible along with the God of Israel, Marcion rejected three of the four Gospels. Only one Gospel was au-

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thentic: the Gospel of Luke, which he censored to remove its 'Judaizing interpolation/9 As reported by Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (c. 130-c. 200), Marcion 'mutilates the Gospel which is according to Luke, removing all that is written respecting the generation of the Lord, and setting aside a great deal of the teaching of the Lord, in which the Lord is recorded as most clearly confessing that the Maker of this universe is His Father.' Ten Pauline epistles were accepted by Marcion; but they were 'dismembered,' Irenaeus writes, when Marcion removed 'passages drawn from the prophetical writings which the apostle quotes, in order to teach us that they announced beforehand the coming of the Lord.'10 In the church of the second century, the Hebrew Bible (in the Greek Septuagint version) was the basic scripture to which the New Testament was the exegetical appendix. For Marcion, Jewish scripture was 'incompatible ... with the Christian revelation.'11 In the view of Hans Jonas, it is the antithesis of the harsh God of the Old Testament and the 'good' God of the New Testament that represents 'the most dangerous aspect of Marcion's dualism,' for it 'sunders and distributes to two mutually exclusive gods that polarity of justice and mercy whose very togetherness in one God motivates by its tension the whole dialectic of Pauline theology.' Pauline theology and dialectics aside, Marcion sundered the two-part Christian Bible, assigning to two mutually exclusive texts the polarity of justice and mercy: 'if "Holy Scripture" to this day means both Testaments,' Jonas writes, 'this is due to the fact that Marcionism did not have its own way.'12 (In the light of history, that statement should be qualified.) To acknowledge the continuity of Christianity with Judaism is to place the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth in historical or diachronic time, thus rescuing it from the circular time of eternal recurrence.13 As E.C. Blackman points out in his study of Marcion, biblical typology was (and remains) an invaluable trope for Christian apologists: Perhaps the deepest reason why the Church as against Marcion would not cast itself loose from the Old Testament is that by so doing it would have lost one of its strongest arguments for belief in Christ as the unique son of God. A divine incarnation was no new idea to the hellenized world ... And the average Greek or Syrian of the period was prepared to accept Christ as the son of a Jewish God, Jehovah, and thus to place him in the category of these divinely inspired and divinely protected beings. The task of Chris-

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tian preaching was to convince men that Jesus Christ was not in that category. One of its most effective methods was to claim that his appearance and work had been foretold hundreds of years before.14

Christianity, then, was not another mystery cult: an analogue of myths of dying and resurrected gods (Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Mithra, Tammuz). Foretold by the Hebrew prophets and recorded in Scripture, the earthly life of Jesus Christ was continuous with the venerable history of Judaism. Frye remarks: '[I]t is only within a historical context that personality can emerge ... Jesus is a person and Adonis is not' (GC, 83). Between the second and fourth centuries (to cite Jean Danielou), 'dissensions concerning the Old Testament... led the Fathers to develop typology, which brought out against the Gnostics the unity of the two Testaments/15 To counter Marcion, Tertullian, like Irenaeus and Justin Martyr, adopted a standard catena of proof texts demonstrating that the life and death of Jesus had been prefigured and prophesied in the Old Testament. (Prefiguration implies continuity, contextuality.) In short, for the Church Fathers, biblical typology was a means of defending Jewish scripture against those who, like Marcion, were determined to get rid of it. Typology 'was a means of turning the variety of biblical books into a single, unitary canon, one that embraced in particular the difference between the Old and the New Testaments': that is Hans W. Frei's point, and a crucial one.16 It is not a theologian but a literary critic, Erich Auerbach, who in 'Figura' (1938) and in Mimesis (1942-5) presents what has been called 'the most illuminating analyses available of the figural or typological procedure.'17 (Dismissed from Marburg in 1935, Auerbach was in Istanbul by 1936.) 'Figural interpretation/ Auerbach writes in 'Figura/ establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfills the first. The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but both, being real events or figures, are within time, within the stream of historical life.

For Auerbach, as for Frye, the types or figures of the Old Testament are not definitely fulfilled by their New Testament antitypes. The type always stands. Events and persons of both Old and New Testaments are incomplete and open to interpretation:

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Both [type and antitype] remain historical events; yet both ... have something provisional and incomplete about them; they point to one another and both point to something in the future, something still to come, which will be the actual, real, and definitive event.18

Frye addresses the same (eschatological) paradigm: Typology is a figure of speech that moves in time: the type exists in the past and the antitype in the present, or the type exists in the present and the antitype in the future. What typology really is as a mode of thought... is a theory of ... historical process: an assumption that there is some meaning and point to history, and that sooner or later some event or events will occur which will indicate what that meaning or point is. (GC, 80-1)

In the context of biblical typology, what I find remarkable about Auerbach and Frye is their introduction into literary studies of an outmoded, potentially explosive hermeneutic based on the historical continuity of Christianity with Judaism. Their revival of figuralism has prompted this remark from Harold Bloom, who, declaring himself 'an enemy of the New Testament/ writes: Well, we are all trapped in history, and the historical triumph of Christianity is a brute fact. But I am moved to reject the idealized modes of interpretation it has stimulated, from early typology on to the revival offigura by Erich Auerbach and the Blakean Great Code of Northrop Frye. No text, secular or religious, fulfills another text, and all who insist otherwise merely homogenize literature.

Earlier in the same essay, Bloom makes the 'modest observation' that several years spent in reading as widely as I can in Biblical scholarship have not left me with the impression that much authentic literary criticism of Biblical texts has been written. To make a clean sweep of it, little seems to me to have been added by recent overt intercession by literary critics, culminating in Northrop Frye's The Great Code, a work in which the triumph of the New Testament over the Hebrew Bible is quite flatly complete. Frye's code, like Erich Auerbach's/zgwra, which I have attacked elsewhere, is only a belated repetition of the Christian appropriation and usurpation of the Hebrew Bible.19

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When Bloom was reading 'Biblical scholarship/ had he also been paying attention to the writings of theologians under Hitler? For Frye and Auerbach, figuralism may have represented the critical stay against the horrors of neo-Gnosticism, which are still with us. In the short term, the revival of typology in the late 1930s and 1940s worked against New Criticism. But its true antagonist was Gnosticism: a mode of reading that assumes the unfulfilled, dehistoricized, status of texts. It cannot be insignificant that Marcion was formally revived in 1921 by the respected Church historian Adolph von Harnack, whose hagiographic study, Marcion: Das Evangelium von Fremden Gott, repeats Marcion's thesis: the Old Testament has no rightful place in Christianity and should be rejected by Protestants once and for all. Harnack's most notorious sentence, italicized in the German text, is this one: das AT im 2. Jahrhundert zu verwerfen, war ein Fehler, den die grosse Kirche mit Recht abgelehnt hat; es im 16. Jahrhundert beizubehalten, war ein Schicksal, dem sich die Reformation noch nicht zu entziehen vermochte; es aber seit dem 19. Jahrhundert als kanonische Urkunde im Protestantismus noch zu konservieren, ist die Folge einer religiosen und kirchlichen Lahmung.20 (the rejection of the Old Testament in the second century was a mistake the Great Church rightly refused to make; that it was retained in the sixteenth century was a fate which the Reformation was not able to escape; but to have preserved it in Protestantism as a canonical document since the nineteenth century is the result of a religious and ecclesiastical paralysis.) In Harnack's view, Marcion was Paul's successor and the founder of the Catholic church. Marcion had not mutilated the New Testament, as Tertullian had claimed; on the contrary, Marcion had restored to the Gospel of Luke and the Pauline letters their original purity and simplicity, which early on had been 'adulterated' with Judaic materials. With great foresight, he had understood that the Old Testament could have no canonical authority whatsoever in Christianity. Here, in distinctively bloated rhetoric, Harnack reconstructs a moment in the life of Marcion and of Christianity: The Old Testament is abandoned - at that moment, however, the new religion stood naked and bare, uprooted [entwurzelt] and defenseless. It

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must renounce all proofs from antiquity, indeed every historical and literary proof!... God cannot have any natural or historical connection [naturhaftgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang] with those to whom he shows mercy and whom he redeems; thus he cannot be the world-creator and lawgiver; thus neither the Old Testament nor any dreamed-up prehistory [ertraumte Vorgeschichte] has any claim to validity ... Thence it follows that the enemy from which one is redeemed through Christ can be nothing else but the world itself together with its Creator. Now since Marcion remained true to the Jewish-Christian tradition in identifying the Creator of the world with the God of the Jews ... for him the God of the Jews, together with his document, the Old Testament, had to become the actual enemy [so musste ihm der Judengott samt seiner Urkunde, dem AT, zum eigentlichen Feinde werden].221

According to Harnack, the Ausgangspunkt or starting point of Marcion's theology 'lay in the Pauline opposition of Law and Gospel on the one side malicious, narrow, and vindictive justice [ubelwollender, kleinlicher und grausamer Strafgerechtigkeit]; on the other, merciful love.' Marcion knew that 'religion itself is nothing else than the faith that abandons itself to this Redeemer God who transforms man, while the whole of previous world history is the evil and repulsive drama of a deity who possesses no higher value than the dull and nauseating world itself, of which he is the creator and governor' [dass das gesamte Weltgeschehen vorher das schlechte und widerliche Drama einer Gottheit ist, die keinen hoheren Wert besitzt als die stumpfe und ekelhafte Welt selbst].22 Marcion's (and Harnack's) demand that every 'historical and literary proof be renounced leads us to what Julius Schniewind terms the 'flight from history' associated with Rudolf Bultmann and existentialist theology. For Bultmann, history is 'something dead and done with, something which does not vitally affect us, something which ... is dependent on tradition and all its hazards, and which is ... essentially relative.'23 To dismiss as 'theologically irrelevant' the historical relation of Old and New Testaments, as Bultmann does, and then to declare one's freedom from the contextuality and burden of the past, is to pass on the legacy of Marcion tempered with Heidegger. Or tempered with 'one book by Heidegger' only, Sein und Zeit, which, according to Karl Jaspers, Bultmann 'misunderstands' (or did not misunderstand). From Jaspers's point of view, Bultmann's 'interest in the Bible is singularly restricted. He is almost indifferent to the Old Testament.'24

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With the word 'restricted/ Jaspers alludes not just to Bultmann's dismissal of the Old Testament, but to the fact that the Fourth Gospel and the Pauline Epistles held for him a 'higher meaning' than the Synoptic Gospels. As for Bultmann's 'indifference' to the Old Testament, it is his contention that the early Christians 'no longer identified the redemptive history with the empirical history of Israel... [T]he history of Israel is no longer their own history ... The original meanings and context of the Old Testament sayings are entirely irrelevant.'25 There are, as Marcion (and Bultmann) knew, several ways to go about proving the irrelevance of the Hebrew Bible to Christianity. And without exception, none of them can admit biblical typology as a hermeneutic method, for typology takes 'the unity of the Bible as a postulate' (GC, xvii). The 'Death of God' school, for example, is nothing more than a revision of Gnostic dualism with overtones of Marcion. So Thomas Altizer can argue that 'the radical Christian seeks a total union with Jesus or the Word and repudiates the God who is the sovereign Creator and the transcendent Lord' - the 'primordial' God of the Old Testament. Apparently 'Christian theology has been thwarted from reaching its goal by its bondage to a transcendent, a sovereign, and an impassive God.'26 Another, nuanced approach to severing the two-part Bible is to displace the historic background of Christianity from Judaism onto Hellenism in order to present Christianity as a version of Hellenistic theosophy. Consider too the 'crass Hellenization' of the Fourth Gospel by Fichte, who, as Alan Davies suggests, was 'probably the first modern European to echo the age-old suggestion of Marcion that Jesus was not a Jew.'27 Or consider the revered Simone Weil, whose teacher Alain 'instilled in her the sacred horror vis-a-vis the Bible that characterizes modern humanism and anti-humanism as well.'28 According to the late J.M. Cameron, Weil 'thought it a great pity that the Hebrew Scriptures, and not the works of Plato, were prolegomena to the New Testament, a book she found Greek, not Hebrew, in spirit.'29 Any of these methods of devaluing and/or decanonizing Hebrew scripture, thus of severing the Old Testament from the New (which alone would constitute the 'Bible'), are underwritten by Friedrich Schleiermacher, the most important of Harnack's precursors, who, in The Christian Faith (1821), argues in a sentence that dooms: 'Christianity does indeed stand in a special historical connection with Judaism; but as far as concerns its historical existence and its aim, its relation to Judaism and heathenism are the same.' To which he adds: 'Christianity

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cannot in any wise be regarded as a remodelling or a renewal and continuation of Judaism.'30 That is the line taken up by Harnack and also by Bultmann, whose wilful essay 'The Significance of the Old Testament for the Christian Faith/ written at Marburg in the inauspicious year 1933, 'largely escaped attention in the English-speaking world until it was translated in 1963.'31 For the sake of brevity, Bultmann's essay is excerpted in point form (italics are his): 1 Thus the New Testament presupposes the Old, the Gospel presupposes the Law. But this Law, which is embodied in the Old Testament, by no means needs to be the concrete Old Testament. The pre-understanding [Vorverstandnis] of the Gospel which emerges under the Old Testament can emerge just as well within other historical embodiments of the divine Law. 2 True, the Old Testament, in so far as it is Law, need not address us as direct word of God and as a matter of fact does not do it. It speaks to a particular people who stand in a particular ethnic history [Volksgeschichte] which is not ours. 3 In Israel God's gracious activity was continued in the individual leaders and prophets whom God raised up from time to time. This history has come to an end [Diese Geschichte hat aufgehb'rt]. The old has passed away; the new has come. But this also means: to the Christian faith the Old Testament is no longer revelation as it has been, and still is, for the Jews. For the person who stands within the Church the history of Israel is a closed chapter [Wer in der Kirche steht,fur den ist die Geschichte Israels vergangen und abgetan] ... Israel's history is not our history, and in so far as God has shown his grace in such history, such grace is not meant for us. 4 This means ... that to us the history of Israel is not the history of revelation. The events which meant something for Israel, which were God's Word, mean nothing more to us ... The exodus from Egypt, the giving of the Law at Sinai, the building of Solomon's Temple, the works of the prophets, all redound to our benefit in so far as these are historical episodes which form part of our occidental history. In the same sense, however, it can be said that the Spartans fell at Thermopylae for us and that Socrates drank the hemlock for us.32 If one proposes to sever the Old Testament from the New on the premise that for Christianity the 'original meaning and context' of

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Scripture is 'entirely irrelevant/ as Bultmann does; or, to recall Harnack's darkly prophetic words, on the premise that its inclusion in the Christian canon is due to a 'paralysis'; it may be only a further step to 'the horror of Nazism' - a theory of history that regards the people of the Old Testament as entirely irrelevant, their chapter as closed. NOTES

An earlier version of this essay was presented in 1992 at a conference held at the University of Toronto, 'The Legacy of Northrop Frye.' The (unpublished) conference paper, in turn, was an abridged version of an (unpublished) essay dedicated to and read by Northrop Frye in 1990. 1 Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology, The Gifford Lectures 1955 (Edinburgh: The University Press, 1957), 110. 2 Imre Salusinszky, Criticism in Society: Interviews with Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, Barbara Johnson, Frank Lentricchia, and J. Hillis Miller (New York, London: Methuen, 1987), 41. 3 Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, ed. and trans. Ernest Evans, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), I.I.19. 4 Ibid., II.IV.6. 5 B.C. Blackman, Marcion and His Influence (London: SPCK, 1948), 118: 'Marcion's theory [was that] Christ came as the inaugurator of an entirely new order, sweeping away the old and acknowledging no contact with or responsibility for it.' 6 Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem I.III.11. 7 Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 2nd rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 138. 8 Blackman, Marcion and His Influence, 118. The phrase 'packed with dung' can be found in Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, I.III.10. 9 The phrase 'Judaizing interpolation' is taken from the entry on Marcion by Adolph von Harnack in The Encyclopedia Britannica, 13th edition. 10 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, book 1, chapter XXVII, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, revised and chronologically arranged by C.A. Cleveland (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1885; repr. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1989), 352. 11 Blackman, Marcion and His Influence, 22-3. 12 Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 141,146.

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131 have avoided the term 'salvation history/ which carries far too much baggage for a short essay. 14 Blackman, Martian and His Influence, 120. 15 Jean Danielou, From Shadows to Reality: Studies in Biblical Typology of the Fathers (London: Burns & Gates, 1960), 1. 16 Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 2. 17 Ibid., 325 n. 1. 18 Erich Auerbach, 'Figura/ in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 53,58. Auerbach bibliographies I have seen get the date of 'Figura' wrong; it was first published in Italy in the journal Archivum Romanicum 22, no. 4 (October-December 1938): 436-89. 19 Harold Bloom, '"Before Moses Was, I Am": The Original and Belated New Testaments/ in John Hollander, ed., Poetics of Influence (New Haven: Henry R. Schwab, 1988), 402, 389-90. See also Bloom: The Hebrew Bible is cancelled, not fulfilled, in the Christian mythology of Blake and of Frye' (Ruin the Sacred Truths [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989], 123). And again: 'Criticism is in danger of being over-spiritualized by the heirs of Auerbach and of Northrop Frye ... Figural interpretation has a compensatory and self-serving element in its too certain assumption that later texts can "fulfill" earlier ones' (A Map of Misreading [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975], 79). And again: 'Poets no more fulfill one another than the New Testament fulfills the Old. It is this carry-over from the tradition of figural interpretation of Scripture to secular literature that has allowed a curious over-spiritualization of texts canonized by poetic tradition' (Poetry and Repression [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976], 95). The Old Testament is far too strong as poetry, to be fulfilled by its revisionary descendant, the self-proclaimed New Testament. "New" means "Early" here and "Old" means "Late" ... We may wonder whether the idea of figura was ever more than a pious self-deception' (ibid., 89). And again: 'In merest fact, and so in history, no text can fulfill another, except through some self-serving caricature of the earlier text by the later ... For us, now, the only text that can fulfill earlier texts, rather than correct or negate them, is what ought to be called the text of death' (Ruin the Sacred Truths, 433). 20 Adolph von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium von Fremden Gott, in Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Altchristlichen Literatur, vol. 45 (Leipzig, 1921), 248-9. In the second edition of Harnack's Marcion (Leipzig,

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1924), the passage appears on 217. Reprinted at least four times since 1924, most recently in 1985, the monograph, or part of it, has at last appeared in an English translation. The crucial 400 pages of Harnack's Beilagen, however, are not included. Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, trans. John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierma (Durham, NO Labyrinth Press, 1990). Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium von Fremden Gott: Eine Monographic Zur Geschichte Der Grundlegung Der Katholischen Kirche, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrich, 1924), 32-3.1 have consulted Wayne A. Meeks's translation of this passage in The Writings of St. Paul (New York: Norton, 1972), 190. In 1933, Harnack's Marcion was taken up by R.S.Wilson, whose study Marcion: The Study of a Second-Century Heretic is a precis and paraphrase of Harnack's bias: 'Luther reformed the Bible by taking the Apocrypha out of the canon of scripture. Some would have wished that he had similarly treated the Old Testament/ 95. Furthermore, 'Marcion saw the difficulty, and undoubtedly it is a difficulty, of reconciling the Old Testament with the New Testament. The Old Testament with all its bloody sacrifice, its slaughter and its warfare, its murders done in the name of Jehovah, and its breathing of vengeance - all this must somehow be related to the God of the Sermon on the Mount. Impossible. Marcion saw that it was impossible ...,' 91. Wilson then echoes and elaborates upon Harnack's notorious judgment: 'It would have been a mistake to reject the Old Testament in the second century; the church could not help keeping it in the sixteenth century; is the Old Testament rendering its best service in the twentieth century when it is bound within the same covers as the New Testament? There is a place for the Old Testament when correctly set alongside the New Testament, but before it can find its right place in the Christian church it must be deprived of canonical authority/ 179. Parodying George Herbert, Wilson imagines that when Marcion 'looked at the traditional religion which he loved, he found it spelled Judaism, and he declared that the two letters were enough IS=Jesus/ 184. Julius Schniewind, 'A Reply to Bultmann/ in Hans-Werner Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, vol. 1, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (London: SPCK, 1953), 80-1. See Oscar Cullmann's sustained reply to Bultmann in Salvation in History (London: SCM Press, 1967; a translation of Heil als Geschichte: Heilsgeschichtliche Existenz in Neuen Testament [Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1965]). Karl Jaspers, 'Myth and Religion/ in H.-W. Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, vol. 2, trans. R.H. Fuller (London: SPCK, 1962), 136, 140.

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25 Rudolf Bultmann, Primitive Christianity in Its Contemporary Setting, trans. R.H. Fuller (London, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1956), 187. Northrop Frye writes: 'to "demythologize" any part of the Bible would be the same as to obliterate it' (GC, 30). The allusion to Bultmann is unmistakable. 26 Thomas JJ. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (London: Collins, 1967), 25, 42. 27 Alan Davies, 'On Religious Myths and Their Secular Translation: Some Historical Reflections/ in Davies, ed., AntiSemitism and the Foundations of Christianity (New York, Toronto: Paulist Press, 1979), 196. Descended from a small and unpolluted group of Aryans living in isolation in the middle of first-century Galilee, Jesus Christ had not a drop of Jewish blood, according to Nazi propaganda. 28 Rene Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundations of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 245. 29 J.M. Cameron, 'From the Tissue of Intuitions,' a review of Peter Winch, Simone Weil: The Just Balance, TLS, 17 November 1989:1256. See a book published in 1934 by Alain (Emile-Auguste Chartier): The Gods (Les dieux), trans. Richard Pevear (London, New York: Quartet Encounters, 1973): 'We see what it means for people to have to drag the Bible behind them. And along with the Bible, such contempt for mankind and contempt for themselves, the pride of being nothing, and the essential irony of Job, who knows that he did not deserve punishment, but that his punishment is just,' 149-50. 30 Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, English trans, of 2nd German ed., ed. H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart (1928; repr. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1968), 60-1; emphasis added. 31 The phrase is Bernhard W. Anderson's, from his introduction to The Old Testament and Christian Faith: A Theological Discussion (London: SCM Press, 1964), 6. 32 Rudolf Bultmann, The Significance of the Old Testament for the Christian Faith/ in B.W. Anderson, ed., The Old Testament and Christian Faith, 17, 312. The German text can be found in a collection of essays Bultmann dedicated to Heidegger: Glauben und Verstehen, Gesammelte Aufsiitze, vol. 1 (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1954), 313-36 ('Martin Heidegger / bleibt diese Buch gewidmet in dankbaren Gedenken / an die gemeinsame Zeit in Marburg').

A Note on Frye and Philo: Philosophy and the Revealed Word JOHANNES VAN NIE

In his numerous notebooks, Northrop Frye refers to Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE-c. 40 CE) fifteen times, more than any Neoplatonist and more than Clement of Rome, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen combined. Philo even gets more attention than Pseudo-Dionysius, whose direct influence on Dante and whose visions of celestial hierarchies could have been grist for Frye's mill. The sheer number of references to Philo intimates that Frye may have seen in Philo a kindred spirit. As I hope to show, there are suggestive parallels between these two thinkers. What immediately comes to mind are similarities in their use of biblical revelation as a source of knowledge and in their employment of interpretative strategies to extract revelation from biblical literature. To place Philo in the context of the development of Western spirituality, we may turn to one of the major Philonic scholars of the last century, Harry Austryn Wolfson (1887-1974). The following passage from Wolfson is an epitome, inspired by the biblical historiographers, of the movement of religious thought from Plato to early modern times: Now these are the generations of Platonic ideas. And Plato lived forty years and begat ideas. And the ideas of Plato lived three hundred years and begat the Logos of Philo. And the Logos of Philo lived seventy years and begat the Logos of John. And the Logos of John lived six hundred years and begat the attributes of Islam.

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And the attributes of Islam lived five hundred and fifty years and begat the attributes of the Schoolmen. And the attributes of the Schoolmen lived four hundred years and begat the attributes of Descartes and Spinoza. And the attributes of Spinoza lived two hundred years and begat among their interpreters sons and daughters who knew not their father.1

According to this schema, the ideas of Plato receive their first major monotheistic expression in the work of Philo. In Wolfson's view, Philo introduced the use of 'revealed' truth as an indispensable source for philosophical thinking. Subsequently, medieval philosophy was based on the belief that there is a primary source of truth, namely revelation, which was seen to be embodied in biblical scripture. Medieval philosophy puts its energy into reflections on the relative merits of divine revelation and human reason, and the relationship between the two, generally upholding the primacy of revealed knowledge and its scriptural basis. Philo of Alexandria is the first thinker to exhibit this typical medieval interest in revealed knowledge. He was followed by the ancient church fathers and the medieval philosophers. Modern philosophy, by contrast, is characterized by an attempt to free itself from the influence of Scripture and the corresponding dependence on revealed truth. In this regard, Spinoza was the forerunner of modern philosophers, if one considers the assault on the usefulness of revelation for philosophy that can be found in Tractatus TheologicoPoliticus. Northrop Frye rejects the trend in modern philosophy to free itself from the influence of Scripture, which in fact plays a fundamental role in Frye's thinking. Scripture is a work of art that contains essentials of philosophy provided by revelation. Human reason itself cannot discern and articulate this essential knowledge. A deeper understanding arises from the divinely inspired imagination, expressed in biblical literature and reflected in other literature using biblical imagery. It is not my purpose in this essay to elaborate on Spinoza's views or to show how he undermines the role of revelation as a source of knowledge. I only acknowledge Wolfson's argument on the matter and place Northrop Frye with Philo of Alexandria in a position over against the philosophers of the modern period who have largely shared Spinoza's views with regard to the idea of revelation.

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Philo maintains that certain descriptions in biblical writings are 'intended symbolically rather than literally' and that such descriptions are 'modes of making ideas visible, bidding us resort to allegorical interpretation guided in our renderings by what lies beneath the surface/2 In reading biblical passages 'we must turn to allegory, the method dear to men with their eyes opened.'3 Philo maintains that Scripture itself calls for allegorical interpretation because it presents the reader with images that are inexplicable by ordinary interpretive means. He cites as an example the description of trees in the Garden of Eden: Indeed the sacred oracles most evidently afford us the clues for the use of this method. For they say that in the garden there are trees in no way resembling those with which we are familiar, but trees of Life, of Immortality, of Knowledge, of Apprehension, of Understanding, of the conception of good and evil. And these can be no growths of earthly soil, but must be those of the reasonable soul, namely its path according to virtue with life and immortality as its end, and its path according to evil ending in the shunning of these in death.4

In one of his treatises, Philo describes a community of philosophers that embraces a 'life of contemplation.' In this community, Scripture is interpreted allegorically: The exposition of the sacred scriptures treats the inner meaning conveyed in allegory. For to these people the whole law book seems to resemble a living creature with the literal ordinances for its body and for its soul the invisible mind laid up in its wording. It is in this mind especially that the rational soul begins to contemplate the things akin to itself and looking through the words as through a mirror beholds the marvellous beauties of the concepts, unfolds and removes the symbolic coverings and brings forth the thoughts and sets them bare to the light of day for those who need but a little reminding to enable them to discern the inward and hidden through the outward and visible.5

Within the mainstream of biblical exegesis, Philo is often dismissed as an allegorist who simply imposes his own philosophical and ideological perspectives and biases on the biblical texts in question. As a means of discovering revealed knowledge, such allegorical interpretation has been deemed naive. What we require still, however, is a deeper understanding of Philo's exegetical process and its affinities with Frye's own typological vision.

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Frye refers to Philo twice in his published writings. The Great Code contains an indexed reference to Philo where Frye notes that Philo treats the original Hebrew metaphorical concept expressed in the Greek term logos in the same metonymic sense as we find in the Gospel of John (GC, 18). In the reference itself, Frye asks the reader to take special note ('Note especially the remark ...') of the following passage from Philo: The world discerned only by the intellect is nothing else than the Word of God when He was already engaged in the act of creation/6 Philo seems to be anticipating, with Frye's consent, Frye's own understanding of the Word of God as a metaphor for a coming into consciousness and for creative power itself. There is another unindexed reference in Fearful Symmetry, where Frye mentions 'the old Philonic doctrine that Plato and Ovid got their creation myths from Moses' (FS, 110). Frye makes further reference here to Blake's understanding that there are 'older Scriptures still from which the Bible itself is derived' (FS, 110), and he quotes Blake as saying that a study of the neglect of such 'antiquities' would be 'an enquiry worthy both of the Antiquarian and the divine' (ibid.). Frye seems to be tipping his hat to Philo here as providing an interpretive model by which to understand Blake's own sense that all literature is derived from spiritual sources and can only be understood in how it is revealed in relation to those sources. In fifteen references in Frye's notebooks, Philo makes appearances in relation to various topics found in ancient thought. Often the references trace the development of ancient ideas, as for instance the idea of the logos and the development of law, with Philo representing a stage in that development. The following example from notebook 40 contains a typical reference to Philo: No code of law in Egypt, as in Mesopotamia, because the will of the divine Pharaoh was law. Will of God delayed science in Hebrew culture for the same reason. In Xy [Christianity] the arbitrariness of the will of God is qualified by the descent of the Logos. This of course was growing in Philo, & the Stoics later. (LN, 164)

What Frye recognizes in Philo is the seed of an interpretive methodology that he has effectively made his own. Here, the typological approach enables readers to recognize the logos (God as creator) in the Word made flesh. Philo himself connects God as creator to the world as created by perceiving the logos as an active agent, a streaming into the world without contamination.

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I turn to Frye's theory of allegory, which was Philo's key to discerning revelation. In Frye's schema, allegory, used by metonymic thinkers, 'smooths out the discrepancies in a metaphorical structure by making it conform to a conceptual standard' (GC, 10). Allegory is 'a special form of analogy, a technique of paralleling metaphorical with conceptual language in which the latter has the primary authority' (GC, 10). In order to investigate revelation, we must distinguish allegory from typology. Typology is not allegory: allegory is normally a story-myth that finds its "true" meaning in a conceptual or argumentative translation' (GC, 85). For Frye, such conceptual or argumentative translation does not discern revelation because that revelation would be dependent on the concepts and arguments constructed by the translator in keeping with the 'conceptual standard' to which the translator is making the story-myth conform. In Frye's schema, revelation arises from the typological rather than the allegorical reading of the Bible. More specifically, Frye sees revelation as a sequence of phases that is in itself an 'aspect of biblical typology, each phase being a type of the one following it and an anti-type of the one preceding it' (GC, 106). It is in the dialectical interplay among these types and antitypes that revelation occurs. Frye sees this interplay as 'dialectical progression' (GC 106). Although Frye uses the language of revelation and typology, his primary concern is with literary criticism. He does not explain precisely how revelation works, nor does he quite articulate a comprehensive theory of typology as a tool for discerning revelation. He does, however, give some indication of what is revealed through the dialectical progression of biblical typology. An important characteristic of biblical typology is its temporal fluidity. The typological structure and shape of the Bible 'make its mythology diachronic' (GC, 83). A particular type/ antitype can be from phase to phase, thereby revealing that most elusive form of knowledge, the meaning of history. Typology is a figure of speech that moves in time: the type exists in the past and the antitype in the present, or the type exists in the present and the antitype in the future. What typology really is as a mode of thought, what it both assumes and leads to, is a theory of history, or more accurately of historical process: an assumption that there is some meaning and point to history, and that sooner or later some event or events will occur which will indicate what that meaning or point is, and so become an antitype of what has happened previously. (GC, 80-1).

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The meaning of history, arising from the diachronic mythology of the Bible, is closely related to the revelation of divine personality: [I]t is only within a historical context that personality can emerge. Jesus and Adonis are both 'dying gods/ in the sense of being objects of cults with similar imagery and ritual attached to them; but Jesus is a person and Adonis is not, however many sacrificial victims may have represented him. Some of the stories about Hercules or Theseus or Perseus may have been originally attached to human figures, as were, much earlier, the stories about Gilgamesh. But they tend to lose the sense of historical personality when they become assimilated to a synchronic mythology. (GC, 83-4)

In his earlier writings, Frye described the person of Jesus as the primary archetype of biblical typology, the 'archetypal Word of God' (FS, 108ff.). By the time Frye was writing The Great Code, he was reluctant to keep using the language of archetypes, noting that he had used it 'in its traditional sense, not realizing how completely Jung's more idiosyncratic use of the same word had monopolized the field' (GC, 48). Frye's reference to the use of archetypes in its traditional sense takes us back to the writings of Philo, who uses the neo-Platonic language of types and archetypes to describe what the biblical record reveals about the person and the mind of God. According to Philo, the books of Moses (known to us as the Torah or Pentateuch) describe the sensible world as a world of types drawn from archetypes in the intelligible world that exist in the mind of God. Moreover, the expression of the intelligible world comes to us in the 'Word of God' (ho theou logos). To quote again the passage Frye cites in his note in The Great Code, Philo says in his treatise on the creation of the world: [T]he world discerned only by the intellect is nothing else than the Word of God when He was already engaged in the act of creation ... It is Moses who lays down this, not I. Witness his express acknowledgment... when setting on record the creation of man, that he was moulded after the image of God. Now if the part is an image of an image, it is manifest that the whole is so too, and of the whole creation, this entire world perceived by our senses ... is a copy of the Divine image, it is manifest that the archetypal seal also, which we aver to the world descried by the mind, would be the very Word of God.7

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Although Frye characterizes Philo's use of ho theou logos (the Word of God) as metonymic allegory, a reading of Philo's theory of the logos shows that it is built on an articulation of archetypology which is remarkably similar to Frye's treatment of the Logos in chapter 5 of Fearful Symmetry. Compare the following quotation from that chapter with the one quoted from Philo's treatise above: .

When we perceive, or rather reflect on, the general, we perceive as an ego: when we perceive as a mental form, or rather create, we perceive as part of a universal Creator or Perceiver, who is ultimately Jesus. Jesus is the Logos or Word of God, the totality of creative power, the universal visionary in whose mind we perceive the particular. But the phrase 'Word of God' is obviously appropriate also to all works of art which reveal the same perspective, these latter being recreations of the divine vision which is Jesus. The archetypal Word of God, so to speak, sees this world of time and space as a single creature in eternity and infinity, fallen and redeemed. This is the vision of God (subjective genitive: the vision which God in us has). In this world the Word of God is the aggregate of works of inspired art, the Scripture written by the Holy Spirit which spoke by the prophets. Properly interpreted, all works of art are phases of that archetypal vision. (FS, 108)

Notwithstanding Frye's identification of Jesus with the Logos, both Frye and Philo in one sense or another see creation in an archetypal relationship with the Logos. In Philo, the world we see is a copy of the archetypal Logos that exists in the human imagination ('the mind') as well as in the words of Scripture. Philo's allegorical method of interpreting Scripture then facilitates a view into the archetype itself by discerning the inward and hidden through the outward and visible. Similarly, Frye's 'archetypal Word of God' sees the world as a 'creature' and is reflected in Scripture and other works of art. Such works are 'phases' of the archetypal Word of God and these can be interpreted through a participation in the visioning that occurs in the interplay between the types and antitypes presented in the various phases. For Frye, the archetypal Word of God is thus the divine 'vision' in which the things of God can be revealed. A little further on in the chapter, Frye discusses the difference between vision and allegory, with vision being capable of revelation while allegory often serves to point away from the divine to the profane: 'Hence what is usually called allegory, that is, art the meaning of which

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points away from itself toward something else which is not art, is a profane abomination' (FS, 115-16). In fact, however, what Philo labelled as allegory is exactly analogous to Frye's description of vision and revelation. Philo's methodology makes a similar claim to see beyond what appears on the surface, pointing within (not away from itself) and allowing the revelation of the Word of God to connect with the interpreter's perception. Although Philo names his methodology allegory, it functions typologically well beyond metonymy as Frye describes it. That is, Philo's notion of allegory has less to do with metonymic substitution and more to do with the kind of metaphorical identification that Frye associates with typology. Finally, we should note that both Philo and Frye ultimately appeal to a mysterious connection between the human imagination and the mind of God in their discernment of revelation, whether it be by means of Philo's allegorical method or Frye's dialectical progression in biblical typology. Ultimately, Frye's dialectical progression on the typological journey leads to a revolutionary shift into another understanding: Typology points to future events that are often thought of as transcending time, so that they contain a vertical lift as well as a horizontal move forward. The metaphorical kernel of this is in the experience of waking up from a dream, as when Joyce's Stephen Dedalus speaks of history as a nightmare from which he is trying to awake. When we wake up from sleep, one world is simply abolished by another. This suggests a clue to the origin of typology: it is essentially a revolutionary form of thought and rhetoric. We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling 'life is a dream' becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it. (GC, 82-3)

Revelation, then, occurs not just in the discovery of meaning and divine personality through typological progression, but also, perhaps more essentially, in an accompanying awakening into a realm of events that are not limited to history. This realm is the world of human imagination that William Blake (followed by Frye) equates with God. The ascetics mentioned above in Philo's 'Contemplative Life' also experience a mystical awakening into the intelligible world, a world that Philo calls 'the mind of God/ where types (and antitypes) of the sensible world are illuminated and defined by original archetypes conceived in the image of God. From the perspective of the philosophy of religion, and particularly with reference to a philosophy of revelation, Frye walked in the foot-

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steps of Philo of Alexandria. After Philo, and until the time of the socalled modern period, scriptural revelation became a legitimate source of knowledge for philosophical reflection. It is as yet unclear whether or not Frye will have the same influence on the period we have now embarked upon (whatever it will eventually be labelled). If our 'new age' does in fact become characterized by a renewed focus on biblical (and other sacred) literature as a prime vessel of knowledge, then Frye will have captured its emerging character and set the stage for the next period of religious-philosophical thought. NOTES 1 Leo W. Schwarz, Wolfson of Harvard: Portrait of a Scholar (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1978), 206. 2 Philo, De Opificio Mundi, trans, by F.H. Colson and G.H. Whittaker, Loeb vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), 154. 3 Philo, De Plantatione, trans. F.H. Colson and G.H. Whittaker, Loeb vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1929), 36. 4 Ibid., 36. 5 Philo, De Vita Contemplativa, trans. F.H. Colson and G.H. Whittaker, Loeb vol. 9 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), 78. 6 Quotation from Philo taken from De Opificio Mundi (Loeb), vol. 1, 21. See also GC, 236-7. 7 Ibid., 154.

THE CHURCH

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Frye and the Church JEAN O'GRADY

The student of Frye's thought on the church is confronted with two contradictory sets of indicators. On the one hand is the fact that Frye remained throughout his life an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada. His duties were in practice restricted to marrying and burying his students and friends and officiating at college events. But when, late in his life, an official of the Toronto Presbytery suggested that he might wish to surrender his ordination in view of his lack of active parish work, he replied with a touch of asperity, 'I regard it as permanent and wish to retain it.'1 Evidently he believed that the church had a role to play in society, and that he himself should take a part in it. Ranged on this side of the equation is his frequent evocation of Paul's figure of Christians as members of one body (e.g., 1 Corinthians 12:27). The metaphor, one of the sources of the anagogic man or giant human figure that is central to Frye's thought, suggests that the Christian church provided him with a model of the community combining unity with diversity, the one and the many, that he sought on every level. On the other hand, however, is Frye the individualist, who began his career by explicating the antinomian and revolutionary ideas of William Blake. 'Religion has been called the opiate of the people; but religion in its conventionally accepted and socially established form is far more dangerous than any opiate/ he wrote in Fearful Symmetry (60), apparently paraphrasing Blake but not distancing himself from this view. This is the Frye whose religion, like Blake's, was based on an unmediated encounter with the Bible and with works of imagination and owed little to church formulations. In one of his late notebooks he described it as 'essentially my own creation' (LN, 467).

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Given the two impulses glanced at above, which might be generalized as the need to attain an individual imaginative vision and the need to be part of a community, how did Frye deal with them when he thought of the church and its role? Of particular interest, how did he approach the potential conflict between individual beliefs and the church's stated creed? The question has not received much attention, in part because Frye said little about it in his published works. The diaries and notebooks now becoming available are therefore extremely valuable, and I shall use them both initially, to suggest Frye's personal attitude, and in conclusion, to indicate some of his wide-ranging theoretical speculations on the church and the course of human history. If one searches the diaries and notebooks for evidence of Frye's attitude to his clerical role, one may well be startled by the prevailing negativity of his remarks. In his diaries of the 1940s and 1950s, for instance, he keeps up a constant sniping and grousing at the United Church, its narrow social views, its sometimes fatuous functionaries he calls the headquarters staff 'those boobs at 299 Queen' (D, 219) and its propensity to waste his time by calling on him to perform unnecessary, irksome, and tedious tasks. More startlingly, he also throws doubt on the usefulness of the church as such. One would not expect Frye to prize the church as a source of moral guidance, but one looks in vain in the diaries for an acknowledgment that the church has anything at all to teach. One would not expect him to see the need for the church as a vehicle for the forgiveness of sins, but one might well anticipate that he valued the ceremonies by which it sanctifies the major passages of life. On the contrary, he tried to avoid going to church, sympathizing with a fellow minister's remark that 'he didn't mind preaching sermons: it was the goddam prayers that got him down' (D, 286). Surprisingly for a student of myth and ritual, he was generally unmoved by the enactment of the Eucharist: 'As I don't believe in a substantial real presence, I don't believe anything happens at a church service. I don't understand the "this do in remembrance of me" aspect of Christianity: it seems silly, & I must think about it' (D, 223). In what must have been a moment of great bitterness, he wrote in one of his notebooks of the early 1970s 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' (TEN, 216). Even allowing for the tough-guy, 'I'm no nambypamby parson' stance that is often characteristic of the diary and notebook entries, such remarks suggest that inferences about Frye's

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attitudes based on the fact that he was a Christian minister should be made with extreme caution. It is generally recognized that Frye began to study for the ministry because he believed religion dealt with the central issues of life: the fact that religio means 'to bind together' was a favourite point of his.2 But it is not so clear why he persisted in being ordained after he had discovered that his vocation lay in teaching rather than in the ministry.3 His own explanation is more quoted than understood: In my last year at Emmanuel, after I had decided on university teaching as my life's work, I consulted an older classmate about whether I should accept ordination, quoting a remark of a teacher of mine that ordination might become an embarrassment in a secular career. He said: 'But isn't that your best reason?' (WE, 522)4

Does this indicate that Frye perversely elected to burden himself with a handicap? Was he deliberately allying himself with what was seen in some academic circles as a reactionary body, in anticipation of heroic martyrdom in the 1970s as the high priest of clerical obscurantism? It seems an odd basis, to say the least, for a life choice. And his supposed comment after the event - 'God damn it, I'm ordained!' - is, if authentic, delightfully equivocal. In his later life, it may well be that Frye was restrained from expressing some of his more radical religious views because of his clerical position.5 And though he testified that the United Church was one of the hybrid, uniquely Canadian institutions that kept him from being recruited to a prestigious American university, he seems to have valued it highly partly because, to paraphrase his words on the Bible (GC, 62), it was the least like a church that it could well be without actually ceasing to be a church. As he quipped in his diary, 'Personally, I rather like the United Church because it contains a sort of churchdestroying principle within itself, having already destroyed three' (D, 105). These biographical speculations are introduced as a background to Frye's theoretical situating of the church, in the belief that the latter was inevitably influenced by his own experience and the historical situation. Though the rest of this essay lies mostly in more abstract realms, it would be unrealistic to discuss Frye's view of the church without reference to what the Methodists had been and the United Church was. If my reading of Frye on the church is even partly correct, it will in turn help to explain why Frye gave his time, effort, and skills to the univer-

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sity rather than the church, a fact that is of profound significance both biographically and theoretically. Very early in his career, Frye established his own formulation of the Protestant doctrine of the separation of church and state. He addressed the question as a result of serving on the United Church's Commission on Culture, which met between 1947 and 1950 to study how the church could best relate to modern culture. This was Frye's most sustained work for the church, though accepted inwardly with poor grace. The diaries are full of such remarks as 'cut the goddam Commission on Culture, which is a hell of a waste of time' (D, 129) and 'diddled with the Culture Commission nonsense' (D, 363). Nevertheless his work did result in his writing two sections of the final report, as well as expanding one of them into the important essay Trends in Modern Culture' (1952). Two other essays of this period, 'The Church: Its Relation to Society' (1949) and The Analogy of Democracy' (1952), deal with the same themes; the former, Frye said, 'consolidated my thinking along lines that had preoccupied me for months' (D, 214). Together they constitute his only extended comments on the institutional church. In these essays, Frye employs the Spenglerian notion that history exhibits a cyclical pattern of growing and decaying cultures. For Christian theology, the Incarnation cut across this pattern, introducing the idea of eternity into time, or in St Augustine's terms placing an abiding City of God against the ephemeral earthly city. Yet this City of God, or the church as its representative, has only a spiritual authority. As a ruling earthly city, it would inevitably be caught in the dialectic of power and obedience. Christ would then become assimilated to Caesar or Antichrist, and another cycle would begin. This notion persisted in Frye's later distinction in The Great Code between Weltgeschichte, the rise and fall of secular kingdoms, and Heilsgeschichte, the spiritual history of Israel or God's people (47-50).6 Heilsgeschichte is symbolic history only: the Second Coming and the Apocalypse are not to be expected in actual time. In his early writings, Frye was evidently reacting against the Social Gospel still popular in his youth, in which the church was held to have a mission to further a Christian social order and to help build the kingdom of God on earth. Sending the Culture Commission a copy of his recently published article Toynbee and Spengler,' Frye pointed out that 'it follows that to mingle the church and the world into a hermaphroditic "Christian civilization" is to make one of the most enormous errors of judgment of which modern man is capable.'7

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Thus, the church should have no temporal ambitions or even cultural hegemony. Nevertheless, it does exist in human time and respond to historical forces. In Spenglerian fashion, Frye sees an analogy between Protestantism and the other typical cultural expressions of modernity: empiricism in science and liberalism, individualism, and democracy in politics. The Protestant's approach to Scripture might be called empirical: according to the view Frye learned partly from Milton's polemical prose, the Word must be interpreted primarily by the Holy Spirit within each individual. The Protestant church is therefore not, like the Catholic church, an authoritative source of doctrine and interpreter of Scripture; rather, it is the community of those who listen to the Word, 'the product of their dialogue with one another' (RE, 114). This church, whose 'members are made free and equal by their faith' (NFR, 262), offers the image of the community as a square or cube to set against the pyramidical or hierarchical organization still present in secular society (NFR, 256). Thus, in political terms, just as the Catholic church expressed itself in the Holy Roman Empire, so the Protestant church offers a pattern for democracy. Its function is to act as a leaven to draw society closer to the Gospel ideal of freedom and equality. Indeed, Frye goes further and suggests that the Christian notion of equality is the only sufficient basis for democracy, 'a secular belief in human freedom [being] a contradiction in terms' (NFR, 265). Democracy is based on a vision that might be expressed as 'Let's see what happens when we start organizing society on the assumption that we are all members of one body' (NFR, 274). The church is not so much that body itself as the source of belief in the metaphor. The Christian 'lives in society as though the real social body were the real presence of an incarnate God' (NFR, 255). Finally, the liberalism or individualism that Frye admires in both church and state (NFR, 263-7; NFMC, 257-8) means for him not anarchism but a community of seekers with tolerance for each other's perspectives, the 'open' or pluralistic society celebrated later in such works as The Critical Path. As a young man Frye hoped that the United Church would be this kind of liberal church. In an essay written for Ada Victoriana in his fourth year as an undergraduate, he commented that 'the old Methodist tradition of the bespectacled theological student of immense energy and occasional stodginess is giving way to a new conception of the United Church scholar, of keen, penetrating intellect, wide outlook, and occasionally mistiness of thinking/ and remarked that this church 'will inevitably be the cradle of all future Canadian philosophy and culture'

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(WE, 15).8 Presumably it would also shed the husk of antiquated theology regarding sin and damnation that Frye himself had so spontaneously shrugged off as an adolescent.9 All too often, however, the new United Church scholar proved to be but the old Methodist writ large, fixated on the 'shoddy fetishism' of crusades against drinking or the desecration of the Sabbath that Frye deplored in editorials in the Canadian Forum (NFR, 246-7,268-9). 'I don't want a Church of any kind/ he wrote in his diary, 'but if, say, a student of mine were quavering over conversion to Catholicism, I'd like to be able to point to something better than a committee of temperance cranks, which is about all the United Church is now' (D, 59-60). We might pause here to speculate on the practical bearings of Frye's stance. If temperance is ruled out, what kind of social action, if any, is open to the church? It is impossible to be precise, but it would appear that, while he advocated the proclamation of freedom and equality as an abstract ideal, Frye drew back in horror from the spectacle of the faithful advancing in a phalanx on behalf of any specific social or political cause. Such actions appeared to him to be counterproductive and coercive. He himself was a supporter of the CCF, and later of the NDP, parties both of which owed much to former Methodist ministers. In a Canadian Forum editorial urging the churches to address the roots of social evil rather than their symptoms, he did remark that 'socialists ask for the support of the Christian churches on the ground that the present system of monopoly capitalism is immoral as well as inefficient' (NFR, 247). Nevertheless he drew back from advocating that the churches become formal pillars of the socialist party as the unions were. His position was presumably that individual Christians, but not the church as a whole, should work towards social change, though the line between advocating a principle and committing an institution and its members to particular actions is, of course, notoriously difficult to draw. As far as I know, Frye himself kept aloof from any of the United Church's social activities, concentrating instead on what he thought was the central concern of a Protestant church, fostering the understanding of the Word among individuals. Such scepticism about the efficacy of group political action points to an iota of truth in the complaint of Marxist critics that Frye does not engage sufficiently with the political world. Fredric Jameson, for instance, maintains that on the anagogic level 'political and collective imagery is transformed into a mere relay in some ultimately privatizing celebration of the category of individual experience.'10 Though it would

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be absurd to think of the anagogic man as merely an image of the individual, nevertheless it is a central fact that Frye was far more at home in the university, where ideas are discussed in an abstract way, than he was in the committed and collective realm of the church, where constant dangers lurk. In Trends in Modern Culture' he had declared that 'freedom is exclusively a matter of setting up the university and the church in the center of society' (NFMC, 259), university and church being roughly the foci of what he later called the myth of freedom and the myth of concern. Not only did he talk and publish more about the university - understandably, given his focus on literature - but increasingly he privileged the university intellectually. Ostensibly, Frye was clear that university and church had different functions, one operating in the realm of speculation and the other in the realm of commitment. He scorned Matthew Arnold's hope that culture could replace religion, and thought T.S. Eliot very astute in pointing out that nothing could substitute for something else in this way (NFMC, 67). When the student radicals of the 1960s demanded existential experiences and social action from the university, Frye attributed their protests to frustrated religious impulses; in effect they were asking the university to become a 'bastard church' (DG, 165). In Frye's view, we can infer, such a state of affairs had come about partly because the churches themselves were not fulfilling their role, being mired in dismal literalism and intellectual humbug. In some ways, however, Frye himself blurs the line between church and university. Just as, for him, the secular scripture completes or perhaps supersedes the sacred, so on the institutional level the roles of church and university overlap and even compete. Difficult as it is to see how anyone could be convinced of the truth of Christianity by reading a poem, or by reflecting on any number of poems and constructing an imaginative universe, Frye seems to suggest that the university does offer, hypothetically, the vision one needs in order to choose faith. In the second part of Words with Power, he discusses the way in which works of literature complete the revelation begun by the Bible, and the church has little role to play. In spite of his lifelong battle with the ghost of Matthew Arnold, Frye said on one occasion that in modern society the university should be seen as 'what the church formerly was: the institution most centrally concerned with spiritual authority' (WE, 309). In his diary he wrote, '[O]ne of my favorite ideas is that the real form of society is not the Church but the university' (D, 86). The Protestant church, for Frye, is most itself as it approaches the

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condition of a university, like Pater's art fulfilling itself by aspiring towards the condition of music.11 There are two main ways in which the church, for him, falls short of the university. The first is that churches inscribe their faith in creeds or statements of belief. Such creeds, by translating the fluid images of revelation into fixed conceptual terms, pretend to knowledge of what cannot be known. In his late notebooks Frye calls this 'simulated knowledge' that 'limits [hope] because it tries to define' (LN, 368). The university, of course, asks for no such artificial certainty. The second is that traditional churches define themselves dialectically - that is, against some other position that they reject thus giving rise to a sectarian mentality that contrasts with the disinterested stance of the university and the ideal Protestant church (D, 1967). Dogma, Frye says, is 'the logos that's opaque, intolerant, and malignant' (LN, 614). In his diary Frye refers to the essay The Church: Its Relation to Society' as his 'Idea of a Protestant University' (D, 197). The published essay says only that the university as well as the church has a role in spiritual life: 'as long as the church listens to a Word of God distinct from itself, culture will always have a potentially prophetic office, and the Word may emerge from a destructive critic of the church as easily as from Balaam's ass' (NFR, 260). Yet the whole thrust of the essay is to turn the Protestant church itself into a 'bastard university,' a glorified discussion group with no creed that cannot be challenged and altered. Frye's preference was for keeping all the balls up in the air, all conclusions possible, a condition that can only really be met in the realm of the myth of freedom. Even such a university-like Protestant church might be destined, like the Marxist state, to wither away. Frye was much attracted to the speculations of the medieval mystic Joachim of Fiore, who predicted that there would be three stages in the spiritual history of mankind: an Age of the Father, associated with the Old Testament; an Age of the Son, or of the New Testament; and a coming Age of the Spirit, which would be an age of pure spirituality or of the Everlasting Gospel, for which no church is necessary. During the 1960s Frye developed a similar threefold historical scheme of his own, involving a First Awareness that was Catholic and worked by inclusion and reconciliation, a Second Awareness that was Protestant and worked by opposition and dialectic, and a Third Awareness that was mythical and imaginative (TEN, 305). For him, all denominations operate on the level of secondary faith, or ideology, what we say we believe. Primary faith, what we show by our

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actions that we believe, is charity, and comes from identifying ourselves with a myth, 'creating an existential reality out of what is accepted as a fiction' (LN, 432). A religion centred in the language of myth transcends the divisive formulations of the different creeds and opens up the possibility of interfaith dialogue based on primary needs. As the third stage of awareness comes to prevail, the difference between sacred and secular disappears, all cultural artefacts testify to the same spiritual longing, and confessional churches are no longer mutually exclusive fortresses. Frye recognized, however, that groups will always to some extent be necessary: 'mankind' is too large a unit to provide a spiritual home. 'In a more sensible Christian world,' he wrote in one of his late notebooks (perhaps describing a transitional phase), 'people would move in and out of Catholic and Protestant lifestyles, instead of all this ideological crap about once-for-all baptism or conversion, always having to be either in or out of the church' (LN, 143). The ultimate community of the Gospel offers belonging without coercion. Frye calls it 'a spiritual community, where the individual once again is a unit of a larger body, but has a full and not an embryonic individuality' (534). It is not clear whether Frye envisaged this development occurring in historical time. His three ages may be conceptual rather than chronological categories. Given his opposition to the doctrine of progress, it is not surprising that in The Church: Its Relation to Society' he hedges a remark on the idea that the Reformation introduced a paradigm shift in understanding with the disclaimer that the principle 'is essentially distinct from its historical projection as a movement from the old to the new, and has nothing to do with a temporal progress of revelation' (NFR, 261). Yet at other times he appears to believe that the Reformation did represent an advance in religious thought, as he had done in a cautious way in the student essay 'Gains and Losses of the Reformation' (SE, esp. 270), and by implication seems to see some hope of further progress in mankind's spiritual history. In Words with Power he speaks of sensing a great desire in contemporary society for a religion that will supersede the competing doctrines of the different churches (98), a desire for what he calls in his notebooks 'religion without Christianity' or Bonhoeffer's 'Christianity without religion' (432). The possibility of such a development reconciled Frye to the flawed reality of his own church, whose role he likened in his late notebooks to that of an embryo that gives birth to true religion. He added: 'I question whether it would be possible to have the mature religion without a

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primitive embryo still present in society' (IN, 630). For him, society is always prior to the individual and individuality grows out of social roots; as he frequently stated, 'we all belong to something before we are anything' (NFR, 172). In his notebooks, looking back on his previous belief that many of the church rituals and sacraments represented 'corruption,' Frye recorded his present realization that 'there can't be a mature society of the Word unless there's first a primitive society for it to grow out of (LN, 629). Glimpsing the coming of a purely spiritual Christianity, at least as an ideal, he declared, 'I should quite cheerfully write off Protestantism as a transitional phase to it' (202). The Christian church could, he conceded, be 'useful to have around as long as it doesn't make absurd and blasphemous pretensions,' as long as it realizes it is 'only one of the many ways in which the Holy Spirit operates' (630). In these notebooks he is outspoken about the dangers of a church that does not embrace pluralism: The individual grows out of the community: an infallible communion, whether Christian or Moslem or the Holy Communist Church of China, keeps human beings in an embryonic state. The metaphors of flock and sheepfold are very dangerous. What is the continuous function of the church? What chance has one to develop an individual religious consciousness if the communal body isn't there? (697)

In The Double Vision Frye is more positive about the role of the church as an institution in upholding continuity for those who are not ready to live in the bracing air of pure freedom: 'besides, we are not alone: we live not only in God's world but in a community with a tradition behind it. Preserving the inner vitality of that community and that tradition is what the churches are for' (NFR, 181). The United Church, so often criticized for its laxness and fuzziness of belief, becomes in this context an open church whose refusal to pretend to know what cannot be known is an openness to the language of love (NFR, 182). In the final analysis, then, Frye did prize aspects of the Methodist and United Church tradition. His writings on the Bible and religion may be seen as an attempt to emancipate that tradition by moving its understanding from the literal and conceptual to the imaginative and metaphorical level. In his notebooks of the late 1960s he pictures himself as a sort of John the Baptist proclaiming this new understanding: 'The third awareness of the third phase is Frye, of course, but I'll have to locate it in the mythopoeic poets from Blake on' (TEN, 315).12 He

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ventures to predict that the book on these themes that he periodically longed to write (but never actually did) 'may even become prophetic, a sacred book like the ones it studies' (TEN, 270). Lest such a claim should sound grandiose, he goes on to say that he is only a medium of revelation. 'All revelations have the problem of the stupid medium: my ob is to try to be as transparent as possible while it struggles past me' [ibid.). Frye saw himself as a minister of the Everlasting Gospel, and without overtly causing scandal to the church in which he had been Drdained, he hoped to help it towards a fulfilment that was, paradoxi:ally, that of ceasing to exist. NOTES 1 Frye, Letter to Robert K. Leland, 30 October 1984, photocopy in possession of Robert D. Denham. My thanks to him for this reference. 2 One of his earliest essays, 'The Freshman and His Religion' (1933), makes this point: 'Religion representing the principle of coordination in the world, a more purely religious activity than college life would be hard to find' (NFR, 240). 3 Frye had realized during his experience as a student minister in Saskatchewan that the ministry was not for him: see letters of Frye to Helen Kemp, 6 lune 1934 (NFHK, 274) and 19 June 1934 (NFHK, 280-1). His ordination occurred on 14 June 1936. 4 When he told the same anecdote to David Cayley, Cayley said that he did not understand, and Frye said that it was a matter of being a witness - a suggestive, partial reply. The older student was Harold Vaughan (NFC, 66). 5 There are many possible reasons, including pedagogical ones, for his reticence, so this must remain a speculation. But see the diary entry in which he remarked that 'somebody asked me about the Virgin Birth on Tuesday & I was afraid to say I thought it was nonsense, not because of the repercussions, but because of the nature of my influence' (D, 155). The Double Vision surprised some people in its revelation of Frye's spiritual world: it was as if he were burning his bridges at the end of his life, revealing (though still obliquely) what he had kept hidden. 6 The idea of a contrast between world history and 'salvation' history goes back to the church fathers, but Frye probably encountered the terms in Karl Lowith's Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), preface and 225 n. 1. Frye reviewed this book for the Canadian Forum in 1949.

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7 Frye, undated letter to Culture Commission, NFF, 1991, box 58, file 8. Frye's debt to, and divergence from, St Augustine are made clear in this submission. The one-volume abridgment of Toynbee's A Study of History, ed. D.C. Somervell (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), was in Frye's library, now in NFF. 8 In 'The Question of Maturity/ a month later, Frye contrasted an issue of Acta written by Methodist students in 1892 with the present one, noting that the present is 'true Protestantism, the liberal thinking of the United Church, the other is Catholicized and congealed Protestantism' (WE, 28). 9 John Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography (Toronto: Random House, 1989), 44. 10 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 74. 11 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1925), 140. 12 Each awareness has phases or sub-awarenesses, which themselves are arranged in the threefold pattern of inclusive (or conceptual), dialectical, and imaginative. The first two awarenesses have only two phases, but the third has three phases recapitulating (in spiral fashion) the whole progression, so that the third phase of the third awareness represents its full flowering and culmination.

Northrop Frye and Catholicism J. RUSSELL P E R K I N

The centrality of Northrop Frye's radical religious vision to his criticism did not really become apparent until the publication of The Great Code and Words with Power, followed by their coda, The Double Vision, although Louis Dudek argued in 1963 that 'mythopoeic criticism pointed to "a veiled Christianity/"1 Frye's reserve about his religious views has been attributed to his 'insistence on the importance of teaching under the rubrics of academic freedom and professional ethics and his extreme reticence in the face of any direct discussion of his personal beliefs.'2 Since Frye's death, access to his unpublished works has permitted a more thorough investigation into the nature of those beliefs. My aim in this essay is to discuss Frye's relationship with Catholicism, which was often adversarial, in the hope of contributing to a fuller picture of his overall theological position, and of locating him more precisely in the religious and intellectual context from which his works emerged. By the terms 'Catholicism' and 'Catholic Christianity' I mean both Anglo-Catholicism, which was at the peak of its influence in the Church of England during the time that Frye resided in Merton College, Oxford, and Roman Catholicism, which provided the intellectual framework for Frye's rivals at St Michael's College in the University of Toronto, Marshall McLuhan, Etienne Gilson, and Jacques Maritain. 3 The religious dimension of Frye's writing is sometimes seen merely as the most egregious of the logocentrisms that make him irrelevant in the postmodern critical scene. There is also a tendency among commentators who are sympathetic to Frye's position to assume that his

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extremely humanistic Christianity, a radical development of the dissenting Protestant tradition, is as a matter of course to be preferred to a more dogmatic and Catholic form of Christianity. I admire Frye profoundly as a literary critic, but as a Catholic Christian I have serious reservations about his religious thought, and my reading of his work is thus characterized by both respect and critical difference. I will begin with some striking parallels between the careers of two twentieth-century men of letters who might not be expected to have much in common. Northrop Frye was born in 1912, and Thomas Merton in 1915. Their childhoods were both overshadowed by the First World War, and they came to maturity in the period of political turmoil and extremism that led up to the Second World War. Both were brilliant students of literature who had a crucial early encounter with the poetry of William Blake, and who worked on graduate theses on that poet, and both aspired to become great novelists. Each of them produced a vast array of published work and private writing; each had a strong reaction to the revival of Thomist theology, one negative, the other positive; each was ordained as a Christian clergyman, one Protestant and one Catholic. Northrop Frye did not finish his thesis on Blake until it finally appeared in print as Fearful Symmetry in 1947, after which he was widely recognized as an important literary critic. Thomas Merton abandoned his teaching job at a Catholic college to become a Trappist monk, and published The Seven Storey Mountain in 1948, after which he was widely recognized as an important spiritual teacher. The different trajectories of the careers of the two men can be explained in many ways, but what interests me most is the way that for Frye literature was primary, even though almost everything he wrote can be seen within a religious context; while for Merton religion came first, even though he spent his whole life as a monk struggling with his other vocation as a writer. What I think this brief comparison suggests is that among the crucial choices Frye made in his life was the decision to accept, and then to reinterpret, the religious tradition into which he was born. The example of Merton shows how by making different choices, by choosing preceptors from the Latin and Catholic tradition, someone with similar interests to Frye could follow a very different road. William Blake was crucially important to Merton, as Michael Higgins has recently argued in his book Heretic Blood: The Spiritual Geography of Thomas Merton, but Merton ended up with a very different religious affiliation from Frye.4 For Frye, Blake is the ultimate dissenter, and the most prophetic reader of the Christian Bible. Merton was more inter-

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ested in Blake's reported comment to his friend Samuel Palmer that 'the Catholic Church was the only one that taught the love of God.'5 Incidental comments on Catholicism are scattered throughout Frye's published and unpublished works. His attitude towards T.S. Eliot is a good place to begin, for it typifies his ambivalent response to the Catholic tradition as a whole. In an astute and helpful discussion of the relationship between Frye and Eliot, Imre Salusinszky notes that Frye's relationship to Eliot was antagonistic. He suggests that 'religious differences - that is, conflicting versions of Christianity, one radically Protestant and the other conservatively Anglo-Catholic - ' are at the root of the antagonism.6 However, in a manner that I would emphasize more than Salusinszky does, Frye also regularly uses Eliot as a crucial example of certain poetic images, especially of the anagogic phase, and Eliot was the only modern author to whom he devoted an entire book.7 Similarly, Frye uses the interpretive method of Dante and the medieval church as the basis for his theory of literary symbolism, and in a number of places he acknowledges the religious significance of the Catholic mass. Frye's early religious upbringing was in the linguistically and religiously divided city of Moncton, and he has described the cultural division that prevailed there as an 'amiable apartheid': 'some people spoke English and went to Protestant schools, and other people spoke French and went to Catholic schools' (WGS, 326). Frye has also memorably described his emancipation from Protestant fundamentalism.8 Since he identified with the ascendant Protestant liberalism while a divinity student, he was unlikely to have found reason to become more sympathetic to Catholic Christianity. Later in his life, he told an interviewer that he had been concerned that a former student, the poet Margaret Avison, had once been in danger of converting to Catholicism.9 Frye's student essays are an invaluable source of information about his reading and his thought during the crucial period of his intellectual formation. It is remarkable how many of the insights of his later books are already present, at least implicitly, in these essays. An essay entitled 'Gains and Losses of the Reformation' weighs the claims of Catholicism and Protestantism.10 From Frye's point of view, not surprisingly, access to the Bible was one of the great gains of the Reformation: 'The shift in authority from Church to Scripture may not have been a gain in consistency, necessarily, but it did bring the Bible, which remains the quintessence of the written word, into the vulgar tongues and into the possession

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of the commoners' (SE, 266). Frye frequently expresses the view that the nineteenth-century Catholic revival was an unfortunate step backwards. Late in his life, he wrote that '[t]he nineteenth-century obsession with conversion, mainly from Protestant to Catholic positions, was a desperate effort to keep history continuous: I think it no longer works, if it ever did' (LN, 467). Frye underestimates the importance of the Catholic revival for English literature. In a student essay entitled 'A Study of the Impact of Cultural Movements upon the Church in England during the Nineteenth Century,' Frye wrote, The Oxford Movement, no matter what importance we may ascribe to it in the history of the period, is logically outside our subject; as it was a movement within the Church itself, and had no very definite cultural connotations' (SE, 296). In the same essay, Frye sees Christina Rossetti as simply exemplifying 'the routine practice of Victorian religion' (SE, 300). In 'Religion and Modern Poetry' (1959), he neglects the achievements of the Victorian poets, from the minor poets of the Oxford Movement to Rossetti, in his praise of Eliot's originality in revivifying Christian symbolism for poetry (RW, 238). Frye's omission is likely the result of his preference for the radical Romantic tradition rather than the conservative one: Blake and Shelley were much more important to him than was Wordsworth. Another student essay, entitled The Importance of Calvin for Philosophy,' shows that the view of history underlying Frye's understanding of the Catholic revival was formed early on; it would remain constant throughout his life: A good deal of Catholic thought today is greatly weakened by the fact that it feels itself bound in consistency to regard the Renaissance and Reformation as essentially a mistake, the development of individuality since that time having been on the wrong track, and to propose that we return to the ideals of the Middle Ages in politics, philosophy, and art. Surely such a reaction to history is hopelessly quixotic. We move very quickly in a linear progression; we are dragged backward into the future, and are not free to stop and start again. (SE, 410)

Frye was acutely sensitive to the metaphors that provided the basis for theories of history. While he opposed what he called 'butterslide' theories of decline, he also criticized facile optimism. In writing about the Catholic revival, he sometimes uses a typological figure, suggesting that Catholic converts were like children of Israel 'who turn back from the wilderness to Egyptian civilized life,' and as a result 'will never see

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the Promised Land' (LN, 202). It is worth noting that Anglo-Catholic preachers preferred different biblical types; the priest and translator John Mason Neale, for example, liked to see himself as a modern Nehemiah, working to rebuild the English church.11 Frye's correspondence with Helen Kemp is another valuable source of information about his formative years. Considering that Frye was a candidate for ministry at the time, spiritual and theological matters play a surprisingly small role in this correspondence, though passing references to the Orangemen's Parade (NFHK, 35) and the Holy Name Society Parade (NFHK, 467) indicate that religious conflict was part of the background public discourse at the time the letters were written. At one point Frye comments that 'there is nothing more sacred in existence than the Catholic High Mass' (NFHK, 209). Similarly, in a talk entitled T.S. Eliot and Other Observations,' which he gave to a student society in Oxford in 1937, Frye describes Dante and the Catholic mass as 'the two most vital sources of Christian imagery' (SE, 425).12 An Emmanuel College essay suggests in ecumenical mode that 'it is hardly possible for Christianity to preserve much longer the antithesis of Catholic and Protestant' (SE, 411). In spite of this claim, which is made in the context of a Hegelian discussion of the consequences of the Reformation for theology, Frye tends to write as though everyone will eventually become a liberal Protestant. In various of his letters, he is sardonic about the Anglican church (NFHK, 64, 714) and at Oxford he relishes the thought of 'setting some of these Anglo-Catholics by the ears' (NFHK, 637). This ambivalence remains throughout Frye's life. His own view of religion, as expressed in the letters to Helen Kemp, is, like that expressed in the later works, profoundly humanist: I propose spending the rest of my life, apart from living with you, on various problems connected with religion and art. Now religion and art are the two most important phenomena in the world; or rather the most important phenomenon, for they are basically the same thing ... Read Blake or go to hell: that's my message to the modern world. (425-6)

Another useful source of documentation for Frye's attitudes towards Catholicism is the marginal comments he wrote in a number of the books that he owned. These can now be examined in the Northrop Frye Fonds.13 Frye here is far less inhibited than in published works, and one can get a sense of exactly what kinds of things irritated him or aroused his displeasure. Any comment in a book implying that the historic

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churches are to be identified with the Church, or implying that unity of belief is desirable in the Church, tends to elicit a sardonic 'yuh' or 'uh huh.' Some of Frye's most impatient comments occur in an edition of the Apostolic Fathers. When Ignatius discusses the need to live together in truth, without heresy, Frye exclaims 'God, what an obsession/ while the editor of the edition is an 'addled old bugger.'14 At the end of the First Epistle of Clement, Frye writes, 'the processing machine of the godly factory is starting to roll/15 When Matthew Arnold in Literature and Dogma contrasts 'the historic churches in their beauty and the dissenting sects in their unloveliness/ Frye's response is 'this bullshit.'16 A laboured effort by Arnold at biblical criticism elicits the observation 'I'm so glad I'm unsound.'17 Frye cannot resist noting ironically that E.B. Pusey, following what in fact is a common practice among Anglo-Catholics, dates his preface to St Augustine's Confessions on a saint's day.18 Commenting on a passage from the early diaries of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Frye notes that the Counter-Reformation 'took them [the faithful] away from the Almighty & back to the Church.'19 Not surprisingly, John Henry Newman, whom Frye saw as a profoundly timid thinker,20 comes in for a lot of abuse. A passage in Discourse I of On the Scope & Nature of University Education elicits a more lengthy comment than usual (Frye's marginalia tend to be words or phrases): 'Personally, I get a bit fed up with being told about the wonderful synthesis they had in the Middle Ages, And I dislike Catholic & Communist butterslides. God meant us to think in perilous equipoise.'21 Frye recognizes the Romantic, subjective dimension of Newman when he comments that 'Newman was certainly a contemporary of Schleiermacher.'22 Newman at one point in Discourse VIII describes the intellectual habits of the 'civilized heathens': 'they made their own minds their sanctuary, their own ideas their oracle, and conscience in morals was but parallel to genius in art, and wisdom in philosophy';23 Frye clearly finds this an appealing description, and he notes in the margin, 'so I think it is/ A couple of pages later, in the context of a discussion of Julian the Apostate and Gibbon's treatment of him, Frye writes, 'I think that all that was wrong with Julian was his swagger/24 No doubt recalling his own experiences at Merton College, and remembering that he had been less than impressed both with Oxford intellectual life and with Oxford plumbing, Frye's comments in both On University Education and in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua take exception to what he terms 'disgusting Oxford nostalgia'25 or 'Oxonitis/26 The Tractarian

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Hurrell Froude is described as 'the T. E. Hulme of that period/27 which is certainly no compliment coming from Frye, who two pages earlier in the Apologia has jotted an ironic credo: 'I believe in the religion of Philistinism, in a reverent flippancy.'28 One of the funniest moments comes when Newman declares perhaps a trifle disingenuously, 'I loved to act in the sight of my bishop' and Frye asks 'gaiters and all?'29 I was surprised as well as disappointed to find that Frye left unmarked a passage in Evelyn UnderhiU's Mysticism where she says that '[a]lmost alone amongst English Protestant mystics, he [William Blake] has also received and assimilated the Catholic tradition of the personal and inward communion of love.'30 The prominent Anglican clergyman Dean William Ralph Inge's book on Christian Mysticism was particularly effective in arousing Frye's ire. After a passage that discusses the relationship between Christianity and pantheism, he wrote, 'if only he wasn't such a fucking priest: there are no dangerous thoughts or doctrines: that's God-ass-licking'; a later passage extolling the conventional forms and observances of the church is summed up as 'horseshit.'31 Some of Frye's most interesting annotations come in E.R. Curtius's European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages. A number of them are closely related to the concerns of the Anatomy of Criticism. He grudgingly acknowledges that Curtius's erudition is equal to his own: 'heck, he gets everything'; 'Hell, he's even got that.'32 Frye sums up his reaction at one point: 'more damn fascinating information in this book than in any other I've read, in a long time anyway.'33 On the other hand, 'Curtius shouldn't try to think.'34 Frye is unsympathetic to the subject of the book, as one might expect given his deprecation of the Latin influence on English literature and his emphasis on the Protestant biblical tradition. This is partly the result of the particular authors whom Frye chooses to emphasize, especially his Protestant canon of Milton, Blake, Shelley, and Yeats, but as George Woodcock has pointed out, even given this fact Frye overemphasizes the role of the Bible: The centrality of the Bible to western culture is not so much stated as taken for granted in The Great Code, and the typically Protestant failure to recognize sufficiently the other elements of western civilization gives the book from the beginning a somewhat lopsided appearance as a thesis in cultural history.'35 When Curtius writes that 'England is a Latin country/ Frye's response is 'God, how caught he was.'36 Later he comments that St Thomas Aquinas's distrust of poetry has been 'explained away by Maritain & Co.'37 At another point Frye refers to 'the obscurantist move towards Catholicism now.'38

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One reason why Catholicism probably remained a significant target for Frye was his relationship with Marshall McLuhan, and his general disapproval of the intellectual world of St Michael's College, just across the road from Victoria College.39 McLuhan was Frye's chief rival for academic celebrity in Canada, while Etienne Gilson, when he taught at St Michael's, equalled or exceeded Frye in terms of his ability to attract an audience for his lectures.40 In his conversations with David Cayley, Frye acknowledges that along with Freudian and Marxist criticism, Thomism was the other target of his attack on deterministic criticism in Anatomy of Criticism: CAYLEY: What was criticism subservient to at the time you wrote? That is, what were the forces outside it that dominated it, to which it attached itself? FRYE: The things I was attacking were the reductive or deterministic criticisms, such as the Marxist, the Freudian, and, at that time, the Thomist type. CAYLEY: The Thomists were notably at the University of Toronto, I think. FRYE: Yes. CAYLEY: You never mentioned any names. But that was at the time of Gilson's great influence. FRYE: Oh, yes.41 Frye was alert to the political conservatism that often accompanied Catholic thought. In a notebook comment he writes: I suppose what my bourgeois liberalism really amounts to is the sense of the ultimately demonic nature of all ideological constructs. In the 30s & 40s the Thomist one had Gilson & Maritain in the front line: they were gentlemen, of course, but a mean-minded fascism lurked in the background. I knew that the Thomist setup was an illusion, and that Marxism (which didn't have any gentlemen) would eventually be exposed as another illusion. (LN, 244)42

Although Anatomy of Criticism was written against neo-Thomism, Frye's second essay ('Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols') owes a great deal to medieval Catholic hermeneutics as well as to later developments in the same tradition. The idea that 'a work of literary art contains a variety or sequence of meanings' is described by Dante's term 'polysemous' (AC, 72), and Frye's task in the essay is to take over

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the medieval scheme of meaning set out by Dante, but deriving from St Thomas Aquinas, St Augustine, and others, and to adapt it to his own Blakean view of literature. Frye's system is 'parallel to' the medieval one (AC, 115), but he redefines the literal level in order to sever it from history, with reference to an external world being relocated to the second phase. Frye's version of the anagogic phase is illustrated by reference to numerous writers from the Catholic tradition. One of the prominent examples of it is the climax to Dante's Purgatorio, while the phase is defined in language that echoes the Four Quartets ('the feeling that we have moved into the still center of the order of words' [AC, 117]). It is significant too that when Frye seeks to define the symbol as monad, the first two examples that come to his mind are from sacramental poetics: Joyce's epiphany and Hopkins's inscape (AC, 121). Frye revisited typology at length in The Great Code, though as Charles Wheeler's perceptive review points out, his use of the concept is idiosyncratic and extremely loose.43 It is not really surprising that there were so many negative reviews of The Great Code** for the book is not the comprehensive overview of the Bible and literature that its subtitle might appear to promise.45 The Great Code is really an account of the relationship between Blake's reading of the Bible and Frye's understanding of literature, as was suggested by Joseph Gold.46 It is best read as the deeply personal statement that Frye acknowledged it to be in his introduction, a book that gives us insights into Frye's visionary mode of reading both the Bible and literature and into his rather gnostic version of dissenting Protestant Christianity.47 In his view of the Bible as 'a double mirror', a self-contained and selfreflexive literary artefact in which each testament reflects the other 'but neither the world outside' (GC, 78), Frye removes the connection to history that is the bedrock of orthodox accounts of biblical typology and indeed of orthodox Christianity.48 By eliminating the descriptive dimension of biblical language, he in effect reads the Bible as a kind of giant New Critical poem. Yet he does not want to reduce it to literature altogether. A revealing passage in The Great Code shows Frye approaching a purely literary reading of the Bible, only to assert its impossibility, on grounds that are not really specified: [T]rying to reduce the Bible entirely to the hypothetical basis of poetry clearly will not do. There is no difficulty with Homer or the Gilgamesh epic, because they are poetic throughout, but large areas of the Bible are clearly not poetic. To put it another way, the Bible taken as a poem is so

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spectacularly bad a poem that to accept it all as poetry would raise more questions than it solves. Besides, we should have no criteria for distinguishing, say, Jesus from the prodigal son of his own parable, both being equally characters in fictions, and nobody would take such an approach to the Bible very seriously, whatever his degree of commitment to it. (47)

One could argue that such an approach to the Bible is exactly what would be entailed by a secular literary critical approach to that text. This is in fact the approach taken by Frank Kermode,49 who describes himself as writing from a self-consciously 'secular' position. He notes that 'inquiries of this kind do of course have implications for Christian belief, but such implications have no relevance to the present inquiry.'50 Like Frye, he seeks to treat the Bible as a text that does not refer to 'what is outside or beyond it/ but for Kermode this method requires that the interpreter relinquish the belief that the text provides 'access to a single truth at the heart of the thing.'51 While Frye wishes the Bible to be unique, he is not willing to assert that it is unique because it is the inspired word of God; nevertheless, as Wheeler notes, 'he wants to achieve the effect of the orthodox commitment of faith.'52 A different solution is provided by the Catholic tradition, where the Bible is seen as being contained by, and indeed as the creation of the continuing tradition of the Church, so that reading the Bible is, for Catholic Christians, conditioned by the history of biblical interpretation and commentary in the Church as well as by the tradition of Catholic spiritual writing. It is curious that in his literary theory Frye stresses the importance of tradition and convention, opposing the unconscious and naive romanticism of his students with the view that literature comes out of other literature, while in religion he generally regards tradition and structure as repressive, infantile, or neurotic, and often seems laboriously to reinvent the resources of the great spiritual teachers of the Western church, that is, the resources of the tradition from which he is all too proud to dissent. Frye rejects the conservative Christian's insistence on the historical or descriptive truth of at least some of the biblical narrative; on the other hand, he also seems uninterested in the Modernist Christian's belief in the affective or spiritual truth of the same scripture, because for Frye the Bible is primary and refers only to itself. In the absolute primacy he gives to the sacred text, Frye remains, as he readily acknowledged, close to the religious tradition in which he was reared.53 Many of the literary works that Frye most valued as examples of the

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most revelatory moment of the reading experience come from the Catholic tradition, and this I think is no accident, given the sacramental poetics that nurtured those works. Yet Frye could not submit in any way to the authority of Catholicism, for his version of Christianity was one in which such an attitude of humility was regarded with profound suspicion, as the marginal comments I quoted from earlier testify. It seems to me that Frye's concern with the authority of the Bible is ultimately secondary to his primary concern, which is with the spiritual significance of literature, and for that reason Frye for me is far more important as a literary humanist than as a religious thinker. In his religious thought, he is caught within the aporia of liberal Protestantism, which is faced with the logical necessity of extinguishing itself within the secular culture from whose values it ultimately derives its coherence.54 I would suggest that Thomas Merton's unorthodox orthodoxy, or perhaps radical orthodoxy,55 might be a more fruitful way of making a connection between literature and religion. Merton regards religious truth as primary, but literature, as well as Scripture and the Church, is for him a potential source of spiritual insight. For Merton, as for many in the Catholic tradition, the Church is something poetic as well as being an institution and a doctrine. Thus, as I have already suggested above, religious tradition has the same kind of ongoing vitality that literary tradition does. Frye sometimes recognizes this, as in his comments about Dante and the Catholic mass. At other times, his preoccupation with the individual's response to Scripture makes him impatient with and dismissive of Catholicism. His highly personal and at times idiosyncratic reading of the Bible is the cause of at least some of the hostile or bewildered responses to The Great Code. His marginalia and notebooks will certainly not help to endear him to Catholic Christians. Having said all of this, however, I come back to the fact that Frye is such a capacious thinker that one hesitates to come to a categorical conclusion about any aspect of his thought. During the late stages of revising this essay I was struck by a passage in The Double Vision that I had not previously noticed: 'Many of the greatest spirits of Luther's time, such as Erasmus, looked for a movement toward a far greater spiritual maturity than either Reformation or Counter-Reformation achieved, and tried to hold to the standards of a liberalism that would transcend both the Roman Catholic status quo and its Lutheran and Calvinist antitheses' (NFR, 174). Imagining a meeting of the humane (and satirical) spirits of Erasmus and Frye might be a way to imagine the transcending of the opposition of Catholic and Protestant.

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1 Louis Dudek, The Bible as Fugue: Theme and Variations/ in W.J. Keith, ed., 'Northrop Frye and the Bible: A Review Symposium/ University of Toronto Quarterly 52 (1982-3): 128. 2 Margaret Burgess, The Resistance to Religion: Anxieties Surrounding the Spiritual Dimensions of Frye's Thought; OR, Investigations into the Fear of Enlightenment/ in Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham, eds, The Legacy of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 60. 3 Frye does not have much to say about the Eastern Orthodox tradition, as Emero Stiegman points out in 'Discovering the Bible/ in Keith, ed., 'Northrop Frye and the Bible/ 146. 4 Michael W. Higgins, Heretic Blood: The Spiritual Geography of Thomas Merton (Toronto: Stoddart, 1998). 5 Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948), 87. Merton seems to be misremembering a statement that he had quoted from Mona Wilson's Life of William Blake in his Columbia masters thesis (1939); it comes from a letter by Samuel Palmer to Anne Gilchrist (24 July 1862): 'He quite held forth one day to me on the Roman Catholic Church being the only one which taught the forgiveness of sins; and he repeatedly expressed the belief that there was more civil liberty under the Papal government than any other sovereignty.' 'Nature and Art in William Blake: An Essay in Interpretation/ in Brother Patrick Hart, ed., The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1981), 404 n. 47. Merton's quotation contains some slight inaccuracies: see Mona Wilson, The Life of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 346, and G.E. Bentley, Jr, Blake Records (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 321. 6 Imre Salusinszky, 'Frye and Eliot/ Christianity and Literature (Special issue on Northrop Frye) 41 (1992): 299. 7 Northrop Frye, T.S. Eliot (London: Chatto and Windus, 1963). A.C. Hamilton writes that Four Quartets is 'the inevitable example of anagogic criticism.' 'Northrop Frye on the Bible and Literature/ Christianity and Literature, 259. 8 Frye describes 'walking along St. George St. to high school and just suddenly that whole shitty and smelly garment (of fundamentalist teaching I had all my life) just dropped off into the sewers and stayed there. It was like the Bunyan feeling, about the burden of sin falling off his back only with me it was a burden of anxiety.' Quoted in John Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography (Toronto: Random House, 1989), 44.

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9 David Kent shared this information from an unpublished interview with Frye (8 April 1988). 10 'Loss and Gain' was a favourite nineteenth-century phrase, and gained currency with reference to religion after it was used by John Henry Newman as the title of his 1848 novel about conversion to the Roman Catholic Church. 11 Stephen Reynolds, comp., For All the Saints: Prayers and Readings for Saints Days According to the Calendar of the Book of Alternative Services of the Anglican Church of Canada (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1994), 612. See Neale's sermon preached to the Society of St Margaret, a community of Anglican nuns he founded in 1855, in Reynolds, For All the Saints, 613-15. For a discussion of Neale see Michael Chandler, The Life and Work of John Mason Neale 1818-1866 (Leominster: Gracewing, 1995). It is interesting to see that Thomas Cranmer used a similar reference to the exodus when describing conservative resistance to the Reformation in England. He describes conservative laypeople listening to priests and monks, 'rather turning their minds back to the fleshpots of the Egyptians, and out of dislike for the Word of God, rather reaching out to acorns and swinish food, to which they were once accustomed, than to the purest wheat.' Quoted in Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1996), 178. 12 In a note justifying his refusal to adopt inclusive language in The Double Vision, Frye comments that 'we no longer think of ... "Christmas" as a mass' (NFR, 398 n.17), which might be true for the general population, but not necessarily for Catholic Christians. 131 am very grateful to the E.J. Pratt Library of Victoria University for providing access to Frye's books. I will provide bibliographical information for each book from which I quote marginal comments, and I will give the number from the catalogue of 'Works with Annotations by Northrop Frye in His Collection/ http://vicu.utoronto.ca/library/fryebib/index.htm, followed by the page reference. 14 The Apostolic Fathers, trans. Kirsopp Lake, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1912-13), annotated no. 567,1:181, 2:165. 15 Ibid., 1:121. 16 Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible (New York: Macmillan, 1877), annotated no. 334, 250. 17 Ibid., xxiv. 18 Saint Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. E.B. Pusey (London: Dent, 1907), annotated no. 908, xxxi. 19 Gerard Manley Hopkins, A Hopkins Reader: Selections from the Writings of

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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39

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Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. John Pick (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), annotated no. 28, 246. In his copy of the Apologia, Frye noted: 'like so many timid thinkers, Newman finally decided that the devil must be God.' John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (London: Dent, 1912), annotated no. 335,131. John Henry Newman, On the Scope & Nature of University Education (London: Dent, c!915), annotated no. 336,20. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 190. Ibid., 150. Newman, Apologia, 36. Ibid., 70. See Frye's comments on Hulme in the essay 'Religion and Modern Poetry' (RW, 236). Newman, Apologia, 68. Ibid., 68. Evelyn Underbill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness, 12th ed. (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), annotated no. 1555,473. Presumably Frye read this passage, since he had made an annotation only three pages earlier. William Ralph Inge, Christian Mysticism (New York: Meridian, 1956), annotated no. 809,122, 259; emphasis Frye's. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), annotated no. 819,140 and 141. Ibid., 261 n. 38. Ibid., 47; emphasis Frye's. George Woodcock, 'Frye's Bible,' in Keith, ed., 'Northrop Frye and the Bible,' 150. Curtius, European Literature, 35. Ibid., 224 n. 20a. Ibid., 235. Phyllis Grosskurth comments that McLuhan and Frye 'loathed each other.' Elusive Subject: A Biographer's Life (Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1999), 97. In a personal interview (26 July 1999) Professor Frederick Flahiff kindly shared with me some memories of the University of Toronto English department in the 1950s, and particularly McLuhan's negative reaction to Anatomy of Criticism. Flahiff sees theological issues as being at the root of the differences between the two men, but does not see those differences in such strongly personal terms as Grosskurth does.

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40 Flahiff interview. 41 David Cayley, Northrop Frye in Conversation (Toronto: Anansi, 1992), 72-3. 42 As I have already suggested, Frye was similarly unenthusiastic about the literary criticism inspired by Anglo-Catholicism. In an interview with Imre Salusinszky, he noted that Harold Bloom was uncomfortable with the New Criticism he found at Yale. 'But that, of course, was in a line of Christianity that I don't have a great deal of interest in myself.' 'Northrop Frye,' in Criticism in Society (New York, London: Methuen, 1987), 33. 43 Charles Wheeler, 'Professor Frye and the Bible,' South Atlantic Quarterly 82 (1983): 157. Frye's reworking of typology is viewed more sympathetically in two articles by Alvin Lee: 'Old English Poetry, Mediaeval Exegesis and Modern Criticism,' Studies in the Literary Imagination 8 (1975): 47-73, and Towards a Language of Love and Freedom: Frye Deciphers the Great Code,' English Studies in Canada 12 (1986): 124-37. 44 See the reviews by Dudek, The Bible as Fugue'; Joseph Gold, 'Biblical Symmetry: The Gospel According to Frye,' in Gold, ed., 'A Little Symposium on The Great Code,' Dalhousie Review 63 (1983): 408-11; George Grant, Globe and Mail, 27 February 1982: E17, repr. in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 357-61; Peter Richardson, 'Cracking the Great Code, or History Is Bunk/ in Gold, ed., 'A Little Symposium,' 400-7; Francis Sparshott, Philosophy and Literature 6 (1982): 180-9; Wheeler, 'Professor Frye'; and Woodcock, 'Frye's Bible.' 45 Readers who are interested in this topic would be better advised to begin by browsing in David Lyle Jeffrey's remarkable Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992). 46 Gold, 'Biblical Symmetry,' 408. 47 The present work is not a work of Biblical scholarship, much less of theology: it expresses only my own personal encounter with the Bible, and at no point does it speak with the authority of a scholarly consensus' (GC, xi). 48 In his introduction to NFR, Alvin Lee suggests that Frye's religious writings contain an implied critique of the theological movement known as neo-orthodoxy, of which Karl Barth was the most influential theologian (xxv). 49 Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). See especially chapter V, 'What Precisely Are the Facts?' (100-23). 50 Ibid., 101. 51 Ibid., 122-3.

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52 Wheeler, 'Professor Frye/ 160. 53 See Cayley, Frye in Conversation, 39^40. 54 Frye, of course, would have paid little attention to this logic. While he did not have much patience for the United Church of Canada as an institution, Frye never renounced his allegiance to it, no doubt because it was the closest institution in existence to his idea of the Church, in spite of still falling far short of that idea. In an early essay, The Church: Its Relation to Society' (1949), he provides an eloquent defence of the spiritual authority of the church in the modern world. The Church, according to Frye, must insist that 'there is no liberty except Christian liberty, and that a secular belief in human freedom is a contradiction in terms' (NFR, 265). 55 For an introduction to the movement in contemporary theology known as 'radical orthodoxy,' see John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, eds, Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).

APPLICATIONS

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Crazy Love: Frye, Breton, and the Erotic Imagination JOSEPH ADAMSON

One of the principal claims that Northrop Frye makes in Words with Power is that the imaginative structures and narrative shapes of the Western literary tradition derive their mythological unity from the Bible, this being the case even when the writers in question are indifferent or even hostile to Christianity as an organized religion. I would like to offer a demonstration of this claim by way of an exercise in practical criticism. The imaginative framework I shall be exploring is the second of Frye's symbolic variations in Words with Power, which focuses on the second creation story in Genesis and the primary concern of sexual love. The myth is occupied with the sexuality of human beings, who like other creatures are part of natura naturans - nature as a generative process - and it tells the story of their loss of sexual innocence and consequent expulsion from the paradise of love and nature. The main text I have in mind for the exercise is L'Amourfou (1937), Andre Breton's deeply romantic prose hymn to the power of sexual love. I am probably safe in saying that Breton, the great French poet and 'pope of surrealism/ is a writer no one would readily associate with either Frye or the Bible. Indeed, one of the advantages of such a test case is that Breton's overt antagonism to Christianity as an ideological system of belief can be shown to contrast with his imaginative use of an erotic mythology that is, in large part, biblical in provenance. The paradox gives support to the main thesis of Words with Power, that the mythos of the Bible, its imaginative vision of human reality, flourishes in the literary and religious tradition at a mythological and kerygmatic level distinct from its ideological or doctrinal adaptations.

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The metaphoric identification organizing the concern and imagery of sexual love, as Frye outlines it, is the union, in the poet's imagination, between the woman he loves and the renewed world of nature. The basis for the imagery of Eros in Scripture is actually quite restricted. In the second creation myth in Genesis, Adam's first mate, as it were, is a 'female' Nature in the form of a garden, and is superseded with the creation of Eve, who is thus identified with the world of nature and sexuality. This imagery recurs in the Song of Songs, where sexual love between a man and a woman is associated with images of the fertility of the earth in springtime. Human sexuality, as something affirmed and valued, is perhaps the least adequately represented of the human concerns in the Bible, but it is there, and its importance for the 'secular scripture' of literature is undeniable. Breton's 'L'Union libre' (1931), a poem written three years before the events described in L''Amour fou, offers an extraordinary illustration of this metaphoric structure of imagery. The poem is loosely based on the Renaissance blazon, in which an amorous poet praises and catalogues the beauty of his mistress's body. The breathtaking sequence of striking and bewildering images, many of which can be read as direct parodies of the Song of Songs, is highly erotic while evoking at the same time a union of the bride ('ma femme,' my wife or woman) with a world of the most diverse particulars. The epithetic structure of each image allows for a catachrestic or violent yoking of remotely related but startlingly fitting realities. Here is a sampling from the opening lines. My wife of the brushfire hair Of the thoughts of heat lightning Of the hourglass waist My wife of the waist of an otter between the tiger's teeth My wife of the mouth of cockade and a bouquet of stars of the first magnitude My wife of the tracks of white mice on the white earth Of the tongue of amber and rubbed glass1

The images in lines five and six might be understood as hyperbolic, if somewhat grotesque, ways of describing very red lips and very white

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teeth, suggesting, indeed, an outlandish parody of the already farfetched similes in the Song of Songs: 'Your lips are like a thread of scarlet, and your mouth is lovely' (4:3), 'your teeth are like a herd of sheep that have come up from washing; each one has twins, none of them is barren' (4:2). These examples are from the blazon in chapter 4 that includes the most influential verse of all: 'A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed' (4:12). Traditionally, the enclosed garden and the sealed spring or fountain are symbols of the inviolate body of the Virgin Mary. In a more secular and unsublimated context, it is the body of one's mistress that is associated with the garden and with images of nature and the earth coming alive in springtime. One of the poems of L'Air de I'eau (written during the same period as L'Amour fou) offers a particularly interesting condensation of this imagery of the 'bride-garden' metaphor. Breton plays on the alchemical correlation of copper (cuprum) with the goddess Venus (the Cyprian, as she is traditionally known) and with the planet of the same name,2 while exploiting at the same time the metaphoric linking of sexual emotion with the awakening of nature in springtime: When you walk the copper of Venus Enervates the slippery leaf without borders [Quand tu marches le cuivre de Venus Innerve la feuille glissante et sans bords] ('Us vont tes membres ...,' OC, 2: 404)

We find the same type of imagery if we disentangle the nickname of Breton's daughter, Aube, who, in the poet's letter to her at the end of L'Amour fou, is linked with her mother as the latest embodiment of the Ewig-Weibliche (eternal feminine). Her pet-name, 'Ecusette de Noireuil,' is a playful transposition of the phrase 'ecureuil de noisette.' When Breton first meets Jacqueline on the legendary Night of the Sunflower, her smile leaves him with the memory of 'un ecureuil tenant une noisette verte' (OC, 2:715) - 'a squirrel holding a green hazelnut' (ML, 43). In the same breath, there is the image of her 'hair in a bright downpour upon the flowering chestnut trees' (43) and, two pages before, of 'the extraordinary pale sun of her hair like a bouquet of honeysuckle' (41). In 'L'Union libre,' this association of woman and a vitalized nature is quite explicitly eroticized:

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Joseph Adamson My wife of the buttocks of sandstone and asbestos My wife of the buttocks of a swan's back My wife of the buttocks of springtime Of the sex of a gladiolus Of the sex of a gold mine and ornithorhynchus Of the sex of seaweed and antique candies Of the sex of a mirror (OC, 2:87)

The encyclopaedic specificity of the images and vocabulary that make up the poem convey the impression of a union of the bride with the earth and the world in all its exhilarating diversity, a 'garden' of earthly delights, as it were. Elemental images of water, fire, air, and earth, and various forms of natural and animal life, are of particular importance. Such an association of sexual love with the love of nature is far from being an objectification of woman, or of nature. As Frye puts it in one of the late notebooks: "The basis of the female-garden identity is that the alienated subject, the Moi, can only confront an alienated object. In proportion as the ego-feeling switches over to the spiritual body, the object becomes an emanation' (LN, 332). Frye refers here to the 'moi' of Lacan's stade de miroir, the alienated state of objective self-awareness in which one's sense of self is caught up in a destructive struggle with the other for recognition and power, as in Hegel's dialectic of master and slave. The ultimate significance of the erotic symbolism of the garden is, then, the separation of the personality from this ego-self and the reuniting of human consciousness with the natural environment, a union that 'is not simple sublimation but an expansion of sexual emotions' (WP, 200). It is a meeting or, to use Frye's term, interpenetration of subjective and objective worlds, an imaginative identification and metaphorically expansive union with the other in one's consciousness. Breton's poem is a most illustrative instance of the tendency of the 'feminine principle' to expand, as Frye puts it, into 'the totality of what is loved' (WP, 199). The title, 'free union,' refers to (1) sexual union, (2) union, in an intensified or expanded state of consciousness, with the environment (both human and natural), and (3) the verbal union of images made possible by poetic metaphor. In an essay entitled 'Expanding the Limits of Metaphor,' Frye explains the association of sexual love and poetry as 'a throwback to ecstatic metaphor' (113):

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Eros is the presiding genius of the awakening of the imagination, and poetry is written as what biologists now call a displaced activity, the baffling of love by a lady's cruelty. But Eros is still the driving force of the poetry, and Eros does not care how casual or inappropriate any given metaphor may be: he only wants to get as many images copulating as possible. (MM, 114)

Interestingly, Breton uses precisely the same image of copulating images or words at the end of the essay 'Les mots sans rides' ('words without wrinkles'), through wordplay on the idea of wordplay, foreplay, and love-making: I would beg the reader to be satisfied for the moment with these initial signs of an activity one had no inkling of before. There are several of us who consider them extremely important. And one should understand clearly that when we say 'word play' [jeux de mots], it is our most certain raison d'etre that is at stake [or in play: en jeu]. Besides, the words have finished playing. The words are making love.3

In 'L'Union libre/ through the copulae of metaphor - the wedding of 'ma femme' to (a) a conglomeration of the most diverse particulars - the incantatory praise of a female body perceived as beautiful becomes a hallucinatory vision of a recreated nature or world, 'a universe/ as Frye describes anagogic metaphor in Anatomy of Criticism, 'in which everything is potentially identical with everything else' (AC, 124), the poem itself 'proceed[ing] as though all poetic images were contained within a single universal body/ At this level of metaphor, 'total identity is not uniformity, still less monotony, but a unity of various things' (125).4 The Night of the Sunflower The central subject of L'Amour fou, a book comprising a series of essays that Breton wrote in the mid-thirties, is the poet's momentous meeting with the artist Jacqueline Lamba, who shortly afterwards became the poet's wife (his second of three, the knowledgeable cynic might pointedly remind us). In the first three chapters of the book, actually written before the meeting with Jacqueline, Breton explores some of the unconscious conflicts operating in his life at the time due to his despondency

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over the 'loss of a beloved being/ his former partner Suzanne Musard (ML, 38). Evoking Freud's credo from The Ego and the Id - 'Of Eros and the struggle against Eros' - he speaks at the same time of the providential action of an ascendent countervailing influence, which he describes as a manifestation of 'the desire to love and to be loved in search of its real human object' (ML, 26). The theme of this part of the book is Breton's personal transformation through the power of Eros, a metamorphosis foreshadowed by Breton's acquisition of the Cinderella ash-tray ('le cendrier Cendrillon') - a spoon in the shape of an elongated slipper with a heel in the form of a tiny shoe - discovered on a foray to the marche aux puces in the company of the sculptor Alberto Giacometti. The Cinderella theme evokes the yearning for sexual union and for the victory of erotic wish-fulfilment over death, while 'potential in the modest spoon' is 'the marvellous slipper,' and thus a transformation coinciding with 'the pumpkin-carriage of the tale' (ML, 34). The negative images dominating him at the time - those 'previous reductive representations which threatened me just now' - suggest what Jung would diagnose as the influence of the hindering aspect of the anima as well as the shadow side of his personality, both of which are especially active when the self is in the process of a psychic transformation. Released from these 'paralyzing affective scruples' in his initial passionate encounter with Jacqueline, he is freed at last from everything that could persuade me that it is impossible to distinguish my affective self from yesterday's character. Let this curtain of shadows be lifted and let me be led fearlessly toward the light! Turn, oh sun, and you, oh great night, banish from my heart everything that is not faith in my new star! (ML, 48-9)

The symbolism here is based on the image of the sunflower, an image that provides an intricate network of metaphoric associations running through this part of the book. Tournesol' is the title of a poem Breton had written over a decade before, and that he claims had foretold of his mysterious meeting with his future wife. In recounting his walk with Jacqueline through Paris in the early morning, Breton cites another poem he had written a few years before, 'Vigilance/ the opening lines of which describe the Tours Saint-Jacques in Paris as swaying or tottering like a sunflower. It is this image that comes to him as they pass, on their first night together, the ancient landmark, its construction inexplicably left incomplete and still mysteriously veiled by scaffolding. The

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tower-sunflower metaphor involves a number of complex links that imaginatively unite Breton, the plant, the building, and his new lover. The flower is associated with the ancient tower, first of all, by their common 'somber magnificence' (ML, 47) and the fact that they both rise in inhospitable corners of the earth; the construction of the tower was plagued by troubles, while the sunflower is known for its ability to grow in the most barren and unaccommodating soil. The two are also linked by their association with alchemy and 'the age-old dream of the transmutation of metals' (ML, 47), a subject with which Breton had a long-standing fascination. The Saint-Jacques tower was a location famous for alchemical experiments centuries before, and the sunflower or 'tournesol' is also called in French 'le grand soleil' or great sun. The word also means 'litmus' in French, 'the reactive agent used in chemistry, usually as a blue litmus paper reddening at the contact of an acid' (ML, 47). All these meanings and associations evoke the ancient dream of the alchemists: the transmutation of the basest metal into gold, of primary, unconscious matter into a state of spiritual transcendence; the progress and conversion from earth to heaven, night to enlightenment, of chaos into new creation. A modulation, in fact, of the world-tree or axis mundi, a symbolism awakened by Breton's linking the sunflower with the Saint-Jacques tower, the sunflower itself, or sun-tree, is an alchemical image.5 The legendary rubric - 'la Nuit du Tournesol' ('the Night of the Sunflower') is itself penetrated with the magic of alchemical imagery, evoking as it does the night of the nigredo and the sol of the alchemist's dream, the sun-king who, in the coniunctio, is united with his queen luna. This type of symbolism suggests a recreation or re-enactment of an original creation myth: the dissolution of the world into the primeval darkness before light entered the world, and the creation of a new world out of chaos and nothingness, a process often symbolized by a hierogamy or sacred marriage, the union of the male and female principles, represented by images of the sun and moon, a red king and white queen.6 The word 'tournesol' in French derives from the way that particular flower turns towards the sun, but it also calls forth the image of the earth revolving on its axis: tourne-sol, turn-earth. Thus, the pun in Breton's apostrophe: Turn, oh sun [tourne, sol], and you, great night, banish from my heart everything that is not faith in my new star!' (ML, 49) The 'great night' turning into day evokes the new life emerging from the stage of darkness and confusion as well as a growing enlightenment: 'Let this curtain of shadows be lifted, and let me be led fear-

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lessly towards the light' (ibid.). This expansion of consciousness brings to mind the ultimate goal of the opus alchemicum: the tourne or turning of spiritual transformation. As night turns into day with the turning of the earth, the curtains of darkness are lifted at last in Breton's troubled emotional life. Converging, then, in the sunflower metaphor is the central idea of a profound personal recreation, a spiritual revolution or metanoia, a dramatic transformation or conversion through the power of Eros. Despair is turned into new faith, night into a new day, an obsession with death and mourning into sexual awakening and a new erotic identity. Paradise Regained At the end of their breathless march through Paris in the early morning hours, Breton and his new bride-to-be arrive at Les Halles, the great farmer's market in the middle of the city. The increasing noise of traffic, Breton writes, 'mounts like the sea towards the immense appetite of the next day,' as men unload from the trucks the fresh produce transported from the market gardens. It is this arresting sight that Breton connects, in his explication of the poem Tournesol,' with the image of a farm 'prospering in the middle of Paris.' The 'brisk wind' carrying them along is 'perfumed, as if tiers of gardens were to be raised above us' (ML, 49), and suddenly they come upon the Quai aux Fleurs. Enraptured, they stand in the semi-darkness of first light and watch as 'the mass of rose-colored earthenware pots arrive, on whose base all tomorrow's active seduction is predicated and concentrated/ There is emotion and magic emanating from the 'spectacle' of flowers in this corner of the city, as, only just transported from the countryside and 'still numb from the night,' the plants suddenly find themselves 'in contact with the city pavement.' Motionless upon the earth before me, they fall asleep once more, huddled against each other in pairs as far as the eye can see. Soon it will be June, and the heliotrope will be bending its thousands of crests over to look in the round black mirrors of the wet earth. Elsewhere, the begonias recompose in patience their great rose window with its dominant solar red, causing even the window of Notre Dame over there to go pale. All the flowers, even the least exuberant in this climate, delight in mingling their strength as if to restore to me the youth of feeling. A clear fountain where my desire to take a new being along with me is reflected and comes to

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slake its thirst, the desire for that which has not yet been possible - to go together down the path lost with the loss of childhood, winding along, perfuming the woman still unmet, the woman to come amid the prairies. Are you, at last, this woman? is it only today you were to come? While, as if in dream, with still other flowerbeds before us, you lean long over these flowers enveloped in shadows as if less to breathe in their perfume than to snatch their secret from them, and such a gesture, by itself alone, is the most moving response you could make to this question which I am not asking you. This profusion of wealth at our feet can only be interpreted as a luxurious advance made by life toward me, and more obviously still, through you. And moreover, you are so blond, so attractive in the morning dawn, that it understates the case to say that you cannot be separated from this radiant expansion. (ML, 50-1)

Two illustrations go with this passage: a photograph by Man Ray of a great sunflower and a photograph of the flowers of the Quai aux Fleurs, 'still numb from the night.' The association of heightened sexual passion with a vision of renewed nature in springtime is made explicit in this profusion of still-dormant flowers, at the end of May, as they are just beginning to stir and to open their petals to the dawn. The incongruity of their massive presence in the middle of Paris makes their appearance all the more arresting and charged with emotion. The Edenic imagery of a garden fountain and a living well of water (Song of Songs 4:15) is recreated in this image of a clear flowing spring where the poet's desire is reflected and drinks. A restored 'jeunesse de la sensation' ('the youth of feeling'), the evocation of lost childhood innocence ('the path that was lost on leaving childhood'), the nostalgia for an idyllic natural setting ('the path that ... slipped away among the prairies') are all linked poetically to a dream of fulfilled sexual love and to a unique woman saturated with the perfumes of the meadow flowers. The aromatic detail is typical of depictions of the earthly paradise, while the bride-garden metaphor is explicit in the sight of Jacqueline, as she bends long and absorbedly over the flowers, 'enveloped in shadows as if less to breathe in their perfume than to snatch their secret from them,' appearing so beautiful in the first light of dawn that she cannot be separated in his mind from this 'radiant expansion' of natural life.7 After the narration of the Night of the Sunflower the scene abruptly shifts, a year later, to the Canary Islands, where the couple attends a conference on surrealism on the island of Tenerife. Like all good conference-goers, they seize the opportunity to do some sightseeing and take

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an elevator to the peak of the Teide mountain, admiring, at each stage of their climb, the fantastic terrain and exotic plant life. The opening description sets the intense erotic tone at the same time as highlighting the vertiginous verticality of the setting, beginning with the opening conceit: the peak of the mountain glinting in the sun is composed of 'sparks glancing off the little play dagger that the pretty Toledan ladies keep day and night against their breasts' (ML, 67). The arid landscape 'at this depth' is described as being formed of the 'incandescent stone of the sexual unconscious, as unparticularized as possible, apart from any idea of immediate possession' (67-9). In the town of Santa Cruz below, the 'fiancees' are 'shining in the windows' and the voices of the women and of the young men, 'ardent for them/ are 'mingled with the perfumes unloosed in the May night in a restless murmur' (69). The shifting terrain of these 'ultrasensitive parts of the earth/ the simultaneity or coexistence of aridity and profusion, gives the 'illusion of recreating the world at once' (ML, 73). The highlight of the climb is the Orotava valley, which reflects in a pearl sky 'all the wealth of vegetal life, otherwise dispersed between different countries.' A 'jardin climatologique' - a garden of the four seasons, in Caws's translation - it is presented as both a prehistoric and a prelapsarian state of nature. On the threshold of the valley stands an immense dragon-tree - 'the greatest dracaena in the world' - which plunges 'its roots in prehistory' and hurls into the day as yet unsoiled by the apparition of man its irreproachable mast, which suddenly bursts apart in oblique masts, radiating out in a completely regular rhythm. It shoulders with all its strength intact these still living shadows among us which are those of the kings of the Jurassic fauna whose traces you find once more as soon as you scrutinize the human libido. I like its being the dracaena, in its perfect immobility, the dracaena plant only apparently asleep, standing on the threshold of the palace of foliage of the garden of four seasons of the Orotava ready to defend the eternal reality of all these stories, this princess lavish with palms. She is gliding, or then it is you gliding near me along the paths of nightlight. Scarcely have we entered than all the little geniuses of childhood throw themselves around our neck. (ML, 73)

Shouldering the living shadows of 'Jurassic fauna/ the dracaena is a menacing hydra or serpent guarding a part of the earth identified, in the poet's imagination, with a period before human history and the sexual fall of humanity. In Fearful Symmetry, Frye speaks of Blake's identification of the serpent and the Covering Cherub of Ezekiel 28:11-

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16 with the Greek 'myth of the Hesperides, the Paradisal islands of the west under the domain of Atlas, where a mysterious tree with golden fruit is guarded by a dragon' (FS, 138). The same association is at work here. Like the mysterious tree of the Hesperides, Breton's dragon-tree is also an image of the axis mundi or world-tree: the Orotava valley is a paradisal state of nature to which the couple has been magically transported as if to 'the very heart of the world.' As such, it is also the place of the sexual unconscious, and its 'savage intimacy/ as Jean-Luc Steinmetz describes it - the volcanic stone, the maternal stalks, the forests and bush, 'the multiple presence of multi-coloured orchids (the word means "testicles" in Greek)' - suggests a 'regained union' with Nature.8 This is a vision of nature as natura naturans, 'the nature of vitality and growth' (Frye, WP, 190), as Frye puts it, and thus very much in the mode of Graves's white goddess: Nature as 'woman, nourishing Cybele, Diane of the Ephesians brewing in herself lives and deaths.'9 The 'garden' of the Orotava, as described in the same passage, is also a 'dream country' harbouring 'the eternal reality of all these stories,' myths, or fairy tales, like that of Perrault's Cinderella evoked in the first part of the book by the slipper-spoon that Breton discovers at the fleamarket - a trouvaille precipitated, as he explains it, by his unconscious struggle to overcome the emotional obstacles to the advent of new love. Thus, in apposition to the phrase 'eternal reality of all these stories' is a catachrestic or far-fetched metaphor for the valley itself: the 'princess lavish with palms/ housed in her 'palace of foliage.' This sleeping beauty or fairy-tale princess is explicitly identified with Breton's newfound love, Jacqueline, the unique woman, and thus the indecision or 'confusion grammaticale/ as Steinmetz puts it in his explication of this same passage, in the next sentence: 'she [the princess: metaphoric figure of the Orotava protected by the dragon-tree] is gliding, or it is you [Jacqueline] who are gliding near me.'10 This passage recalls the earlier one just examined in which the poet evokes the unique woman lost among the prairies, a figure linked with a world of youth and innocence, 'the pathway lost on leaving childhood and which slipped away among the prairies.' The same word - glisser - is used in both passages,11 and evokes in both cases the elusiveness of the paradise that is lost; she is gliding ('Elle glisse, ou bien c'est toi qui glisses'), the pathway glides or slips away ('le chemin ... qui glissait'). The word also appears, significantly, in contiguity with the 'copper of Venus' earlier quoted from L'Air de I'eau: 'la feuille glissante et sans bords/ which also metaphorically identifies Jacqueline with an awakened and vitalized nature. Glisser - 'to slip' - has an even more suggestive link with the

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idea of a lapsus, a chute or fall from erotic paradise and exile into a world ruled by the polarities of moral knowledge. Evoking his despondency and wavering faith in the possibilities of sexual love -just pages before describing the vision of Jacqueline bending over the flowers of the Quai aux Fleurs - Breton depicts his sorry state of mind: it is only in fairy tales, he thinks, that the insinuations of doubt are absent, 'that it is never a question of slipping [glisser] on some fruit peeling. I see bad and good in all their native state, the bad winning out with all the ease of suffering: the idea that it is perhaps the only way, in the long run, to create the good perhaps no longer even grazes my mind. Life is slow and man scarcely knows how to play it' (ML, 45). In his own vision of paradise regained Breton thus recreates, with the aid of classical myth, the biblical myth of the sexual fall: the great dragon-tree is both a world-tree and a hydra set to guard; the valley of the Orotava is both a natural paradise and the body of his bride. The point, of course, is that in recreating the myth, Breton reverses the movement of the fall, as sexual fulfilment and love bring with them an expansion of consciousness that transcends shame and guilt and reintegrates human beings with nature. In one of the poems of L'Air de I'eau, Breton evokes the same visit to the Canary Islands. Opening with the image of the black laval sands of the beaches unfolding beneath 'an immense peak fuming with snow' and 'a second sun of wild canaries/ the poem develops the same erotic metaphor: What far away country is this then That seems to draw all its light from your life It trembles with such reality at the tips of your lashes Gentle to the tints of your flesh like ethereal linen Freshly unpacked from the half-opened trunk of the ages Behind you Throwing its last dark fires between your legs The ground of the lost paradise Looking-glass of shadows mirror of love And lower down towards your arms which are opening to the proof by springtime AFTER Of the nonexistence of evil The whole flowering apple-tree of the sea (OC, 2:407)

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Identified with Jacqueline are images of reawakened nature and paradise regained. The 'soil of the lost paradise' lies just behind her, while the 'whole flowering apple-tree of the sea' below - the forbidden tree and its bleak wilderness of moral knowledge now transformed into a tree and garden of renewed life - stretches out towards her arms which are opening to the 'proof by springtime/ the proof, indeed, of the 'nonexistence of evil.' A related image occurs in another poem of L'Air de Veau. In 'Je reve je te vois superpose indefiniment a toi-meme/ the superimposed images of Jacqueline generate the figure of an innocent child-woman skipping rope. Frye evokes an identical image in the Late Notebooks - 'The end of wisdom, the child with the skipping rope, is spontaneity or unconscious knowledge' (LN, 129) - in relation to the image of wisdom as 'ludens in orbe terrarum' ('playing over all the earth') in Proverbs 8:31 (GC, 125). This personfication of creative wisdom is traditionally associated with the divine Sophia, and expresses, according to Frye, the 'exuberance of creation, the spilling over of life and energy in nature that so deeply impresses the prophets and poets of the Bible' (125). In Breton's poem, the apex of the turning rope is the top of an 'invisible staircase' and a 'single green butterfly' haunting 'the Asian summits,' while the woman's moving or 'countless arms' suggest all the melded images of what she is, was, and is to be: I listen to your countless arms Melodiously hiss Unique serpent in all the trees Your arms at whose centre turns the crystal of the compass My living fountain of Shiva (OC, 2:397)

The whistling sound of the rope is conceived of as a hissing, while Jacqueline's 'countless arms' are identified with a 'unique serpent in all the trees.' The Edenic or paradisal garden imagery, identified with the bride's body, is explicit: the serpent, the trees, and the final image of her as a 'living fountain' resembling the four-armed Shiva, 'the Tantric symbol of Shiva bindu/ as described by Jung, 'the creative, latent god without extension in space who, in the form of a point or lingam, is encircled three and a half times by the Kundalini serpent.'12 The mandala symbolism, traditionally associated with paradise and its four rivers flowing to the four corners of the known world, is also

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worth noting: the wheel-like skipping rope, the world-tree (axis mundi) image of the 'crystal' or 'rose' of the four points of the compass at the 'centre' of Jacqueline's arms, along with the centre and circle imagery of the living fountain and the four-armed Shiva. This image of the serpent-woman calls forth the myth or legends of Lilith and Lamia, but is clearly not recognizable as the demonic creature of Christian myth. In a reversal of the use of the imagery in Genesis, Breton's serpent-woman is a titanic figure radiating sexual energy and bringing about, not a descent in consciousness, but a heightening of mental energy through a spiritual renewal and a transcendence of the moral polarity of good and evil. The Cloven Fiction At this point in L'Amour fou, with the return to paradise emerges the theme of a restoration of moral innocence - thus the childhood theme ('all the little geniuses of childhood [throw] themselves around our neck') - and of a sexual union no longer haunted by shame and guilt. If read imaginatively, the significance of the biblical myth of the fall in Genesis is not that there is something sinful about human sexuality, but that the first consequence of eating of the 'wrong' tree, as Frye calls it, was 'a repressive morality founded on a sexual neurosis.' The moral knowledge was 'disastrous when attached to a sense of shame and concealment about sex, and was forbidden because in that situation it ceases to be genuine knowledge of anything, even of good and evil' (WP, 194). In metaphorical terms, the forbidden tree is 'the demonic parody of the tree of life, and in the J account the tree of life looks as though it were the chief axis mundi image of the close connection with the world of the gods before the Fall' (ibid.). The knowledge of good and evil that Adam and Eve gain in eating the fruit is what Blake called a cloven fiction, the false polarity of good and evil, in this case a polarity based primarily on sexual repression. The significance of this originary fall into moral polarity is that it is the beginning, in biblical narrative, of a splitting into further hierarchical oppositions that take equally oppressive forms. In one of his late notebooks Frye speculates that '[a]ll false or ethnocentric polarities,' for example, 'are founded on [the] good-and-evil one of Genesis, which in turn is founded on shame, or erotic repression/ and that to move from these to 'the genuine polarities of primary concern' is the central quest of the Bible (LN, 33). By 'genuine polarities' Frye means the difference

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between life and death as it applies to basic human needs and capacities: food, sex, freedom, and property. The singularity of these areas is that they are indispensable to the flourishing of human life, and thus they are the invariable subject matter of the mythological and literary imagination.13 As Frye emphasizes in his discussion of romance in Anatomy of Criticism and The Secular Scripture, the basic structuring principle of mythos or story, the polarization and separation of divine and demonic worlds, is ultimately resolved in the separation of worlds of life and death. The latter is the genuine form of a splitting and polarization that throughout human history has been perverted into the ideological forms of social and political domination with specific reference to the social anxiety surrounding sexual love. The most crucial polarity in the erotic vision is the one that rationalizes the domination of women by men, the false polarity of a patriarchal order with its demonic accusing superego, in which man projects his own anxieties and repressed sexual emotions onto woman. As Frye points out in another entry in the late notebooks: 'What has to be destroyed in the Promethean vision is exploitation and alienation; in the Eros vision it's patriarchy & male supremacy. That's where Freud conspicuously fails as an Eros prophet' (LN, 133). To what extent Breton and the surrealists succeed where Freud failed is uncertain. Sade, for example, the eponymous hero of what Frye calls, in another notebook entry, 'the sado-sexual set-up' (LN, 94), was an important surrealist icon, and an author Breton was reading with great interest around the time of writing L'Amour fou. In what way can the fascination with a figure epitomizing 'the anxiety of male domination' (ibid.) be reconciled with an affirmation of the revolutionary power of Eros? Without meaning to trivialize legitimate concerns about the glorification of a writer such as Sade, one can conclude that the most significant thing about him for Breton and the surrealists is his role as the great sexual outlaw flouting and defying the obsession of the moralist who sets out 'to create as many categories of crime as he can, and reduce sin to crime wherever possible' (LN, 94). The surrealists' hostility to morality, like Blake's, stems from the recognition, as Frye puts it, that 'one lives a good life in a bad world by using the minimum of imagination' (FS, 135-6). The context for this insight is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where Satan is 'the active springing from energy/ while conventional morality and the mystery of tyranny represents 'the passive that obeys reason.' Thus, Breton portrays Sade, in one of the poems of L'Air de I'eau, as a Promethean rebel re-entering an erupting

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volcano. He is an incarnation of the stolen fire, a titanic prophet defiantly hurling 'mysterious commands' and opening 'a breach in the moral night.' It is by this breach that I can see The great creaking shadows the old eroded crust Dissolve So as to permit me to love you As the first man loved the first woman In complete freedom This freedom For which fire became a man For which the marquis de Sade defied the centuries with his great abstract trees Of tragic acrobats Clinging to the gossamer thread of desire (OC, 2:399)14 The 'grands ombres craquants' ('great creaking shadows') and 'vielle ecorce mine' ('old eroded crust'), in the geological metaphor organizing the poem, are allusions to that darkening of consciousness that Blake identifies with the opaque shell of Selfhood, for centuries imposed and maintained by a now-decrepit system of morality, that 'moral night' pierced only by the Promethean light of the poetic imagination. It is precisely the entire framework of false polarities stemming from the moral one of good and evil that is the chief target of Breton's polemic in this section of L'Amour fou, and it is at this point that the Cinderella archetype of the first part of the book reveals its genuine core, dramatizing, as Frye formulates the significance of this type of story in the late notebooks, 'the victory of a sexual concern over a social establishment that has every appearance of being able to suppress it' (LN, 142). Passionate sexual love, Breton proclaims, is 'the bearer of the greatest hopes that have been translated into art for centuries' (ML, 92), hopes that have been dashed again and again by society's moral opposition to the realization of the 'amorous potential between two beings' (90-1). Nothing, he declares, is 'more capable of representing the present world as a great misery' than the belief that 'Juliet, continuing to live, would no longer be always more Juliet for Romeo' (92). In the current social order, 'the initial choice in love is not really allowed' (92). Unable to free themselves from 'the infamous Christian idea of sin' (93) and the consequent 'moral error' of fear and doubt, men and women are barred from

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'exposing themselves without defense to the overwhelming gaze of the god' (93), to the unresisted divinity of sexual love. This image of being visually exposed and defenceless gains significance if we recognize it as a reversal of the shame and concealment imagery of the biblical fall, in which Adam and Eve, after eating of the fruit, are covered with mortification and self-consciousness and try to hide their nakedness from God's angry gaze. If moral knowledge brings about a 'fall/ it is because the shame associated with sexuality represents a dramatic descent or narrowing of consciousness, a fatal diminishment of imaginative and creative power. In The Return of Eden, Frye identifies Satan's rebellion against God in Paradise Lost as a refusal to recognize his 'own creative principle/ This, he concludes, is the basis of the feeling which later appears in humanity as what Milton calls shame. Shame to Milton is something deeper and more sinister in human emotion than simply the instinctive desire to cover the genital organs. It is rather a state of mind which is the state of the fall itself: it might be described as the emotional response to the state of pride. (RE, 37)15

The state of pride or what Blake calls Selfhood - the 'desire to assert rather than create, that stands between man and Paradise' (FS, 137) corresponds to the psychoanalytic concept of a narcissistic overvaluation or overestimation of the self, what Jung calls 'inflation/ a state of the personality that is easily recognizable as a compensatory defence against shame. Accordingly, the transcendence of shame and guilt through Eros or the 'higher ladder of love/ as Frye calls it, involves a reversal of the constricted consciousness of the ego that Blake identifies with the Covering Cherub or the principle of Selfhood. To regain the state of innocence would be to transcend, with the feelings of shame and guilt, both the compulsions of subjective assertion and the paralysing anxieties of objective self-awareness. It is from this transcendent perspective, beyond the ego-bound consciousness and the false polarity of good and evil, that Breton can insist: There has never been any forbidden fruit. Only temptation is divine.' He proclaims, indeed, in his antithetical way, that even the need 'to vary the object of this temptation, to replace it by others ... bears witness that ... one has already doubtless proved unworthy of innocence. Of innocence in the sense of absolute nonguilt' (ML, 93).16 The abatement of sexual passion and the need for variety constitute, in other words, not a moral failure, but a regressive psychological metamorphosis, a

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lowering of consciousness. Human beings hobble themselves and their own creative energies with fallacious memories of some 'immemorial fall' (ML, 64), as Breton puts it in an earlier passage, the moral lie of their conscience that allows them to consent in bad faith to their own disempowerment. Raised above that accusing voice is the image of Eros, with 'its procession of clarities, its gaze composed of all the eyes of diviners focused on the world' (64), a beacon of visionary consciousness that reconnects us with our own alienated powers. The Return of the Golden Age Thus, Breton's championing of sexual exclusivity, too easily dismissed as a bourgeois and reactionary gesture, is really a way of affirming the role of the erotic imagination in human society and culture. Earlier he quotes Engels, who writes of looking forward to the social revolution when, for the first time, monogamy, 'far from disappearing ... will be realized for the first time' (ML, 77). Citing Freud to the same effect, Breton then concludes that these two 'testimonies' to 'love as a fundamental principle for moral as well as cultural progress ... give poetic activity a major role as a tried and tested means to fix the sensitive and moving world on a single being as well as a permanent force of anticipation' (77). Breton's phrasing here - 'to fix the sensitive and moving world on a single being' - identifies poetic activity explicitly with the power of metaphoric identification in which a channel of emotion is opened up between the poet's consciousness, 'la femme unique,' and the natural world in all its diversity and particularity. Breton's conception of the poetic imagination, primarily inspired by Eros, accords with Frye's view that the role of poetry and literature is to recreate myth and to keep the mythological and metaphoric habit of thinking alive. It keeps the imagination, more precisely here the erotic imagination, educated, maintaining it as 'a permanent force of anticipation/ keeping it alive as a cultural force and a visionary means of social transformation. For the paradise of love, as Breton presents it in this part of the book, is above all a social vision, the gateway to abundant life on every level, to a restored Golden Age of material and spiritual fulfilment: 'we will never again be done/ Breton announces, 'with this foliage of the Golden Age/ where 'electively united' are ... all the conditions of free extension and mutual tolerance that permit the harmonious gathering of individuals of a whole kingdom ... Orpheus has

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passed this way, pulling after him the tiger and the gazelle side by side. The heavy snakes uncoil and drop around the circular bench on which we sat to enjoy the deep dusk which finds the way to share the garden, at noon, with the broad daylight. (ML, 75)

Such a vision of regenerated nature, as Frye says of the upper world of the Garden of Eden in the pre-Romantic cosmology, is of 'a life in which nature itself has become home, its animals and plants a rejoined part of our society' (SS, 154). In evoking such a world, Breton summons, in one way or another, all the images of paradise most common in the Western tradition: the locus amoenus or 'pleasant place' of classical literature, the Golden Age, the Garden of Eden or earthly paradise, and perhaps most particularly the Peaceable Kingdom of Isaiah in the Bible (as Breton's phrasing 'harmonious gathering of individuals of a whole kingdom' suggests). These are, indeed, all images - as the deconstructionists would accusingly insist - of presence, and this is exactly the word Breton uses for this scene of sexual union and reconciliation with nature: 'Delirium of absolute presence,' he calls it, and asks, 'How could one not find oneself wishing to love like this, in the bosom of reconciled nature?' (ML, 76). A few pages later he turns to Bunuel's film L'Age d'Or (which was screened at the surrealist meeting in Tenerife), celebrating it as remaining 'to this day, the only enterprise of exaltation of total love such as I envisage it' (ML, 78). That total love here takes the form of an exclusive and isolated erotic couple, like Adam and Eve, is an indication that the biblical paradise of sexual love is very much in Breton's mind: Love, in everything it can contain for two beings, which is absolutely limited to them, isolated from the rest of the world, has never shown itself so freely, with so much tranquil audacity. The stupidity, the hypocrisy, the routine, can never keep such a work from having been born, or keep a man and a woman, on the screen, from inflicting on the entire world as it rises against them the spectacle of an exemplary love. In such a love there exists potentially a veritable golden age in complete rupture with the age of mud Europe is going through and of a richness inexhaustible with future possibilities. (ML, 78)

It is characteristic of Breton that he resists the common view of Bunuel's film as a work of mordant irony and satire. In a poem inspired by the same events as those recounted in L'Amour fou, he speaks of being

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reproached by a friend, 'non sans raison/ for his lack of mistrust with regard to the 'false and tyrannical intuition' of his 'nostalgia' for a Golden Age. This 'poetic obsession' is inseparable from his deep faith in an 'original and final meaning' hidden in 'modern events/ and in the elective meeting as it really can be Of man and woman You whom I discover and who always remain for me to be discovered (OC, 2:405) In a remarkable little essay, The Imaginative and the Imaginary/ originally published in 1962 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Frye observes that the only thing that 'sense' or reason can make of 'the visions of the artist, the lover, and the saint/ which it can only regard as untrue or unreal, is 'that certain significant types of activity seem to be guided by illusion' (FJ, 152). Later in the same essay he evokes the example of Don Quixote's obsessed and diseased imagination, the great model of all 'false and tyrannical intuitions/ which Breton's quixotism clearly brings to mind. Frye concludes that, however senseless, the mad knight's 'wistful sense of a golden age, lost but still possible, the child's vision which the Gospel tells us is so dangerous to lose, is something that makes Quixotes of us all, and gives our minds, too, whatever dignity they may possess' (165). Here we touch on the function of all great poetic obsessions as an indispensable part of literature and art: to inflict on the world the childlike vision of how the world should look, of how things should be, a vision that, although it may not correspond to our rational sense of things, is in fact the only thing that makes human sense.17 This vision of a sensible world, as a child might see it, is exactly what follows. As in the dazzling catalogue of female beauty of 'L'Union libre/ the metaphorical magic of this passage is facilitated by the remarkable copular power of the French preposition 'a/ which Breton highlights by citing Raymond Roussel, the writer famous for having turned the device into an entire poetic technique. By such deceptively simple means, we are provided with an enchanting childlike vision of a world that, like the biblical paradise as originally designed for its human occupants, is tailored to the fulfilment of all our basic material needs. In this playful sequence of associations, it is the primary concern of 'food' that stands in for all the rest, as indeed it might in a child's

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drawing. There is a sense of innocent exuberance in this passage. Steinmetz points out that the writing here 'does not have enough grammatical, semantic, analogical resources' to express the world it is describing: 'Overtaxed and in a state of excess, it overflows in symbolism, it humanizes [humanise (hominise)] everything in its passage'; an 'oversignification' dominates rather than a describable reality of things.18 This sequence in particular, like the imagery of TUnion Libre,' is reminiscent, in the grotesquery of its invention, of Rabelais's golden-age vision of the Pays de Cocaigne, or the Big Rock Candy Mountain theme of American folklore and frontier humour. We find ourselves surrounded by a fantastic paradise of trees, a world of nature that arbitrarily reverses the values of the bourgeois and industrial world of work into a playful space where time is wasted or 'perdu' only when one is not playing or making love: 'how to resist the charm of a garden like this one, where all the trees of a providential type have gathered? ... Livelihood we call "earned" returns to the aspect it had for us in childhood: it takes on once more the character of a life wasted. Wasted for games, wasted for love' (ML, 80). In the dream world of the Orotava, the 'great dream trees' pass before him: The bread tree, the butter tree, have called to them the salt tree, the pepper tree: a whole frugal lunch is being improvised. How hungry we are! The traveller tree and the soap tree are going to let us present ourselves at the table with clean hands ... From immensely high beams the long smoked fruits of the prodigious sausage tree are hanging. (ML, 81)

This then brings us to the imperial fig tree and the great sequence of the magical meadow and the Mimosa pudica - Ta sensitive/ the legendary herb of Shelley's poem, famous for its susceptibility to the touch. The erotic implications of the plant are obvious. Composed of 'a thousand invisible, unbreakable links, which happen to chain your nervous system with mine in the deepest night of knowledge' (82), this 'endless sea' (82) of 'lacy' grass, 'this foliage of the mimosa of your eyes' (83), is metaphorically identified with the swelling tide of passion as the lovers gaze in each other's eyes and offer this 'absolute gift of one being to another, which can exist only in reciprocity' (83). In the Face of Bluebeard's Beard As we can see, the variety of subtropical plant life that the lovers encounter on their tour of the paradise of the Orotava becomes the

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basis for vertiginous lyrical flights that are often of an intensely polemical nature.19 This extraordinary explosion of metaphor is itself an enactment of the intensification and expansion of consciousness that Frye associates with Eros as a humanizing force. However, not all the images associated with the couple's visit to Tenerife are of the paradisal kind. Earlier in his account, Breton mentions the cacti that are idly stoned by the impoverished children of the island. A poignant image of the hostile reaction that, as Breton observes, is one of the most common indications of the 'presence of the beautiful' (ML, 41), the wounded plants bleed a milk-like substance. The image of mother's milk appears again in the last section of the book. In his letter to his daughter, Breton associates the word 'forever/ 'as in the oaths that girls insist on hearing,' with the image of 'white sand of time' flowing through an hourglass and 'reduced to a stream of milk endlessly pouring from a glass breast' (114). This maternal imagery is consistent with the theme of erotic ascent fully developed in section 5. In the context of human misery and want, the enduring desert plants are poignant symbols of the violent exploitation and martyrdom of both woman and nature: 'Nothing keeps the thought of misery more alive than these plants exposed as they are to all the affronts and disposing of such an amazing power to scar over' (ML, 70). The source of the hostility in this case is the social injustice and consequent suffering and resentment that make of most human societies states of seemingly unrelievable misery. The 'martyred blooms of the cacti/ the 'secretions' from the wounds of these 'superb milk hydras' - a Medusan image that can be linked to the chthonic, life-supporting power of the 'female' earth - are portrayed as 'the most disturbing thing imaginable. Impossible not to associate with it the idea of mother's milk and also that of ejaculation ... Guilty feelings cannot be far off.' Being '[i]nvulnerable in its essence/ 'the attacked spine clump' is 'not the one who has most suffered from the staining' (70). In his discussion of the Book of Ruth, Frye speaks of the overall 'position of women in Biblical history' as one that 'expands into a kind of proletariat, enduring, continuous, exploited humanity, awaiting emancipation in a hostile world: in short, an Israel eventually to be delivered from Egypt' (WP, 215). Implied, then, in the garden-body metaphor is the recognition that, like woman, 'nature is also exploited, fruitful and patient' (216). The word 'misere/ with the particular resonance it has in French, haunts L'Amour fou like a conscience, and the linking of human misery to moral repression and interdicts against sexual passion runs

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throughout Breton's book, and points to the profound connection of the fear of nature and of human sexuality to the general state of social oppression. The same theme appears in the closing lines of 'L'Union libre': My wife of the eyes of savannah My wife of the eyes of water for drinking in prison My wife of the eyes of wood always under the axe Of the water level eyes of the level of air, earth, and fire (OC, 2:87)

The lines recall the four natural elements that make up two of the titles of Breton's books of poetry, Clair de terre (1923) and L'Air de I'eau (1934). The images of healing water offered to the prisoner and of innocent wood under the axe identify the beauty of the beloved with the lifegiving natural environment. Eros and Nature are thus united as enduring sources of hope for a recreated world, and therefore as forces inevitably threatened by a fearful and hostile social order. The appearance of the datura, a poisonous plant belonging to the nightshade family, is the pretext for a particularly powerful poetic meditation. The 'snowy bells' of the flower are converted, in the poet's imagination, into moral 'alarm bells/ the interdictions of anxiety and repression that poison all sexual union with shame and guilt. In response, Breton declares in the most explicit terms his frank allegiance to the vulgar as opposed to the heavenly Eros: 'Love, only love that you are, carnal love, I adore, I have never ceased to adore your lethal shadow, your mortal shadow. A day will come where man will be able to recognize you for his only master, honoring you even in the mysterious perversions you surround him with' (ML, 76). Looking ahead to that day, he describes himself as still a 'child' in terms of unlearning the 'dualism of good and evil': 'These roots half in the air, half under the ground, these vines, these indiscernible snakes, this mixture of seduction and fear, he could not swear it didn't resemble for him Bluebeard's beard' (76). The Cinderella fairy tale of the first part of the book is thus countered by the story of Bluebeard: the tale of marriage with a sexual monster who exercises his domination by killing and dismembering his wives. The Bluebeard motif anticipates the penultimate section of the book, when the newly married couple visit Breton's parents in his native region of Brittany, and are driven apart for the first time in a bitter quarrel. Breton explains the fight as a result of the sinister psychic

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influence emanating from a nearby villa, the scene of a violent murder 'the Loch affair/ in which a man shot his wife with his hunting rifle. The man in question, Michel Henriot, was a prominent member of the local haute bourgeoisie, 'the son of the attorney general of Lorient' (107), and thus imaginatively interconnected are a patriarchal social order, the violence done to women, and the fears and anxieties associated with human sexuality. If Cinderella is the erotic wish-fulfilment dream, Bluebeard is the erotic nightmare that lies behind the facade of bourgeois morality: the shadow of mutilation and death cast over human sexual relations, a nightmarish fear fuelled by the shame and guilt associated with the forbidden tree of knowledge. The dracaena tree, under which the couple rests for a moment, evokes, of course, the same forbidden tree of Genesis. But now it is transformed into the tree of life, as the threat evaporates in the face of Breton's provocative championing of carnal love. 'I love you/ he declares, 'in spite of Bluebeard's beard and by the diamond of the Canary Island air ... as it forms a single bouquet of everything which grows jealously alone here and there over the earth's surface' (ML, 76). In a condensed version of the bride-garden metaphor, Breton now fantasizes that a tiny window opens in the 'fascinating and fatal flower' (76) and that he will join his wife there in a state of complete union, isolation, and sufficiency from the rest of the world. This image of erotic identity, of the couple hidden in the poisonous flower of love (76), a displaced version of Adam and Eve in the garden, is a powerful poetic expression of defiance directed at the taboos of a sexually anxious society, a society that has tainted Eros with shame, guilt, sin, and death. Concluding Remarks Nothing in Anglo-American modernism can compare with the allencompassing role played by Eros in the poetry and art of the French surrealists, where passionate sexual love is the primary force behind what Frye calls the 'imaginative identities of metaphor' (WP, 80). Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon in particular shared with Breton an intense interest in, to borrow the title of Mary Ann Caws's study of surrealism, a poetics of erotic encounter.20 Since the seventies, however, the surrealists' focus on sexuality has fallen under the scrutiny of a predictable ideological critique. Seen as revolutionary in the twenties and thirties, their erotic preoccupations have now become notorious for the often glaring 'heterosexist' and misogynistic content of their themes and

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imagery. The most comprehensive study in this regard is perhaps Xaviere Gauthier's Surrealisme et sexualite (first published in 1971), which offers a detailed analysis of the role of sexuality in surrealist art and writing from a highly polemical Marxist and feminist perspective.21 Besides offering a critique of the androcentric bias of the surrealist conception of Eros, she concludes that the erotic vision affirmed by Breton and others is 'fundamentally asocial/ ultimately an image of the 'couple without society.'22 The image she has in mind is precisely the one just cited above - that of the original man and woman in the unspoiled sexual paradise before the fall. As we have seen, such an image is indeed an essential part of Breton's work. Yet to see it primarily as that as a poetic image, and not a programmatic statement - is a better starting-point for understanding its significance than a set of ideological presuppositions that remove it immediately from its metaphorical context and avoid any exploration of its imaginative possibilities. Sexual union or, as Gauthier puts it, the 'couple without society/ is in fact, as Frye points out, 'the seed, so to speak, of the human community, and so interposes the community between the individual consciousness and its environment' (WP, 191). In a related passage from The Secular Scripture, Frye observes that '[t]he closer romance comes to a world of original identity, the more clearly something of the symbolism of the garden of Eden reappears, with the social setting reduced to the love of individual men and women within an order of nature which has been reconciled to humanity' (SS, 149). From the point of view of a realist aesthetic, which is really a form of ideological allegory, such a reduced image necessarily comes across as a distortion of social reality, precisely because it is a vision of something that doesn't exist but is only imagined: a fulfilled social ideal, an image of society in which the stress is on the individual, not the group, and on the extent to which the community's goal is the flourishing of a 'genuine individuality' (8) in every one of its members, as Frye puts in The Double Vision. We are, of course, far from such a world, and it is fair to say that the exalting of 'mad love' is not enough when social oppression and 'patriarchal ascendency' are still long from being reversed into 'a society where love makes everyone equal' (WP, 216). Breton's exhilarating testament to erotic faith may indeed be guilty of not spending more time addressing the concrete nature of the social and political conflicts that continue to plague human sexual relations. Feminists, in particular, have good reason to address these aspects of his work, and that of the surrealists in general, inasmuch as they offer a markedly masculine

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and often patriarchal vision of Eros. Still, the imaginative core of Breton's writings eludes these criticisms, and it does so precisely because it is rooted not just in his own personal and ideological anxieties and conflicts, but in an expansive mythological framework of communication that ultimately transcends them. That framework is deeply indebted to biblical narrative and imagery, whatever Breton's own view of Christianity or of the Bible might have been. Frye tells us that the function of literature is to keep alive the mythological habit of mind, and that literature has the authority it does precisely because it provides us with imaginative models of human life based on human desires: images of the worlds we want and the worlds we reject. It is with reference to such models or norms that people are able to measure the grotesqueness of the world around them, and to find the creative energy and inspiration for social transformation. Indeed, it is the high visionary hopes that Breton entertains for Eros that lie behind the Utopian impulse expressed in L''Amour fou, and for that matter his entire body of work. If we are attuned to the disparity between how life is and the way it should be, it is only because we already hold in our minds, as a legacy of our imaginative culture, a deeply rooted conception of abundant life - in this case, of what a flourishing sexual life in its most expansive dimensions might be. It is this erotic myth, with all that it owes to the biblical tradition and the shaping imaginative framework of Genesis and the Song of Songs, that a writer like Breton keeps alive for us - while at the same time deepening and reshaping, deconstructing and recreating its concerned vision of human life. NOTES 1 In translating Breton's poetry I have consulted Poems of Andre Breton, A Bilingual Anthology, trans, and ed. Jean-Pierre Cauvin and Mary Ann Caws (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), and Earthlight, trans. Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1993). With the exception of Mary Ann Caws's translation of L'Amour fou (Mad Love, abbreviated here as ML), parenthetical references to Breton's work will be to the Pleiade library edition of the Oeuvres Completes, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1988-99), abbreviated here as OC. 2 See C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies, trans. R.F.C. Hull, vol. 13 of The Col-

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lected Works of C.G. Jung (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 183. 'Je prie le lecteur de s'en tenir provisoirement a ces premiers temoignages d'une activite qu'on ne soupgonnait pas encore. Nous sommes plusieurs a y attacher une importance extreme. Et qu'on comprenne bien que nous disons: jeux de mots, quand ce sont nos plus sures raison d'etre qui sont en jeu. Les mots du reste ont fini de jouer. / Les mots font 1'amour' ('Les mots sans rides/ Les Pas Perdus, OC, 1: 286). Cf. the following passage from Georges Bataille's 'Solar Anus/ in Allan Stoekl, ed., Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939 (University of Minnesota Press, 1985): 'Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne's thread leading thought into its own labyrinth. / But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream I AM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy' (5). Such a 'free union' of images should be considered in light of Bakhtin's observations about the use of the blason in Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 425-30. In the book on Rabelais and in the section on 'The Rabelaisian Chronotope' in the essay 'Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel' (in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981], 167-206), Bakhtin analyses the ways in which a grotesque fusion of images decreates and recreates the verbally organized conception of the world. Bakhtin's understanding of poetic and literary imagery, particularly in its relation to the matrix of objects and phenomena (food, drink, copulation, birth and death) is, in fact, very close to Frye's, where such images are an outgrowth of the primary concerns of food, sex, freedom, and property. In Psychology and Alchemy, for example, Jung includes an illustration depicting the '"green lion" devouring the sun' (which appears as a rather dismayed sunflower), while another illustration portrays the 'crowned hermaphrodite representing the union of king and queen, between the sun and moon trees.' C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy vol. 12 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 332, 231. See WP, 208, 292,296. See also Mircea Eliade, Forgerons et Alchimistes (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), 137. The card symbolism that Breton evokes is

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also part of this symbolic network. He describes how, during this emotional crisis, he would consult his fortune by cards, placing them in a cross with one or the other of his 'spell-casting' objects or homunculi at the centre (the spatial pattern formed by the cards being a perfect example of Jung's mandala, that is, an image of the non-ego centre of the personality) and using a deck in which, he observes, 'the queen of spades is more beautiful than the queen of hearts' (ML, 23). A photograph on the adjacent page shows a woman's black-gloved hand holding a queen of hearts over the talismanic statuette in rubber, to the right of which a King of hearts is turned up. 7 Compare the poem in L'Air de I'eau that begins 'Zinnia-red eyes ...': When the hand of Jacqueline X Opens like a casement window on a nocturnal garden How pernicious you are in the hollow of that hand Eyes from beyond time forever moist Flower that could be called The Prophet's Reticence We are done with the present the past the future I sing the one light of coincidence (OC, 402) 8 Jean-Luc Steinmetz, Andre Breton et Les Surprises de I'amour (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 63. Steinmetz's close reading of LAmour fou is a particularly rewarding exegesis of the poem. Quotations will be in English translation. 9 Ibid., 63. 10 Ibid., 60. 11 See Steinmetz's commentary (59-62) on the use of this particular word in L'Amourfou. 12 Psychology and Alchemy, 180. 13 Frye's view of myth as a form of human communication that transcends ideology and that expresses primary human concerns is worth comparing with some of the ideas of Martha Nussbaum, the liberal political philosopher. In an essay entitled 'Women and Cultural Universals' [in Sex and Social Justice (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], 29-54), Nussbaum proposes the idea of 'central human functional capabilities/ a rather awkward term, but one that designates something very close to what Frye means by primary concerns. Nussbaum's aim is to 'put forward something that people from many different traditions, with many different fuller conceptions of the good, can agree on, as the necessary basis for pursuing their good life,' which is 'why the list is deliberately rather

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general' (40). In the same way, Frye's primary concerns are initially based on the biological needs and capacities human beings share with animals, which, even in their most highly individualized form, can be formulated only in 'the simplest and baldest platitudes' (WP, 42), such as the desire for 'freedom, health, equality, happiness, love' (310). Frye has in mind a standard not of minimal but of 'abundant life/ while Nussbaum speaks of a norm that goes well beyond any standard of 'mere humanness,' but specifies 'a life in which fully human functioning, or a kind of basic human flourishing, will be available' (40). 14 In French, the line 'Cramponnes au fil de la Vierge du desir' has additional erotic associations, thanks to the French word for gossamer: 'fil de la Vierge.' 15 My thanks to Michael Happy for drawing my attention to this particular passage in Frye. 161 have altered Caws's translation very slightly. She translates, incorrectly I believe, 'De 1'innocence au sens de non-culpabilite absolue' as 'From innocence in the sense of absolute non-guilt.' 17 The relationship of illusion and reality to imaginative art and literature is addressed in Words with Power. Frye speaks of Miranda's reaction in The Tempest to her first encounter with human society. Prospero tells her that 'this brave new world' is just another illusion, a result of her innocence. However, Frye concludes, 'for an instant there has been an epiphany, when how things should be has apppeared in the middle of how things are' (86). The fresh or innocent vision is often associated with children Miranda is still a child in experience, if not in age - and has traditionally been associated in Christianity with the alleged nearness of children to the garden of Eden, the age of innocence before the fall' (86). Later, Frye addresses Blake's 'categories of innocence and experience,' observing that Blake associates innocence 'with children, not because of any moral superiority in the child, but because the child assumes a world that makes human sense, and was in fact probably created for his benefit' (244). In Frye's scheme, this 'childhood vision/ which, as the child grows up into the world of 'reality/ 'is driven underground into what we now call the unconscious or subconscious' (244), forms the basis of human imaginative vision and creative energy. 18 Steinmetz, Andre Breton, 63-4. 19 For example, the sempervivium, famous for its durability, comes to symbolize the revolutionary power of the human imagination energized by Eros and defiantly surviving all the efforts of the social establishment to prevent it from spreading over the earth: 'It is lovely and confusing like human subjectivity, so that it comes forth more or less haggard from

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egalitarian revolutions.' (74). The sempervivium is a kind of leek, and thus the pun at the end of this passage that men so far have found nothing better to do with it than to boil it. 20 Mary Ann Caws, The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 21 Xaviere Gauthier, Surrealisme et sexualite (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). When quoting this book, I have translated into English. Caws's study, cited in the previous note, which focuses on Andre Breton and three visual artists (Man Ray, Salvador Dali, and Rene Magritte), also explores from a feminist position the male gaze of the surrealists and its misogynistic implications. 22 Ibid., 197.

Toni Morrison:

Re-Visionary Words with Power JEAN WILSON

The impetus for this paper comes from Frye's remarks, in letters to Helen Kemp, about religion and his own vocation. Feeling at one point in his life called to the ministry rather than to the professoriate (NFHK, 52-3), he affirms Christian doctrine as revolutionary and urges that religion not be considered 'a specialized department of life': 'as soon as you start to worry about your soul, you're getting away from religion, and as soon as you get to work, you're being religious' (NFHK, 279, 479-80). His vocational deliberations I find of great personal relevance, coming as I do from a family replete with ordained ministers,1 as Frye himself became, in the United Church of Canada. This background, moreover, has led to my impatience with certain critics, described by Johan L. Aitken in her introduction to The Double Vision (xiii-iv), who attempt to dismiss Frye's literary theories simply by pointing to his status as a clergyman; the logic of this is difficult to grasp. Equally bewildering, however, are those sympathetic to Frye who nonetheless feel vaguely embarrassed about his clerical status and therefore bracket it as a quaint, but irrelevant biographical feature. From this perspective, it would seem that Frye the ordained minister is hardly more noteworthy than Frye the business college graduate and accomplished typist.2 The bracketing of a writer's religious commitments - and a selective focus on the biographical - also occurs in critical approaches to Toni Morrison's work. Even as a Nobel laureate, Morrison says, most of the questions posed to her after readings or talks 'are anthropological or sociological or political. They are not about literary concerns.'3 Nor, clearly, are they about religious concerns, a conspicuous omission espe-

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cially in the midst of a plethora of 'non-literary' critical approaches to Morrison, associated, in Frye's terms, with urgent ideological interests (WP, xvii, 27). This lack of attention to religious elements in Morrison's writing is indeed remarkable. The novels Beloved (1987) and Paradise (1997), for example, not only are filled with biblical imagery, but also feature strong, prophetic4 preachers and their congregations: Baby Suggs calling her people in the Clearing,5 Richard Misner seizing and holding forth the cross in a wordless contesting of a fellow minister's 'poison[ous]' sermon on love.6 In conversation, Morrison unsettles assumptions that would narrow the range of interpretation of her work. Asked about her childhood, for example, she talks not about race - 'the least reliable information you can have about someone' - but about birth order, thus subtly challenging the expectations of an interview presumably designed to elicit rather different biographical details from 'the author who almost single-handedly gave African-American women their rightful place in American literature/7 Morrison and Frye are rarely mentioned in the same critical breath. This has, of course, not a little to do with identity politics, the celebrated African-American woman writer inconceivably on the same page as the iiber-WASP literary theorist. Yet many of their concerns are remarkably similar. I use this term advisedly, in view of Frye's preoccupation with the need to reverse the historical privileging of secondary, ideological concerns and refocus, as Morrison's fiction so explicitly, so strikingly, does, on the primary concerns of food, sex, property, and freedom of movement (WP, 42-3, 307-10; DV, 6-7). In Beloved, for example, all four of these concerns are reflected in two horrific illustrations of the demonic economy of slavery, with its forced giving and taking: the slave-owner's nephews' violation of Sethe by holding her down and sucking the breast milk meant to feed her child (16), and Paul D's being compelled, as part of the chain gang, to take the guard's semen as his 'breakfast' (107). I will return to these passages in what follows, my focus on Morrison's Beloved being designed to suggest how Frye's writings on religion and on the human work of recreation can open up in productive ways an understanding of works of contemporary fiction, whose related concerns have been largely unexamined in current criticism.8 In his essay The Meaning of Recreation,' Frye identifies as the central issue of humanism 'the issue of language and the way that society uses language' (NFR, 34). He also speaks in that essay (and in Creation and Recreation, NFR, 77) of the remarkably concrete vocabulary of Homer:

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'Words like "life" and "mind" and "soul" and "thought" and "passion" ... have no genuine abstract reference at all. They are all concrete conceptions related to the action of the heart and the lungs and the brain' (NFR, 25). In her 'recreating of language/ as Frye would put it (NFR, 79), Morrison also uses an astonishingly concrete vocabulary; she revives 'that original, metaphorical sense of immediacy'9 (NFR, 30) that Frye associates with the first phase of language. We might characterize our contemporary culture as an 'oblivious' one, reminiscent (to digress for a moment) of the Macondo that Gabriel Garcia Marquez depicts in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). The insomnia plague described in that novel leads to a loss of memory, and we read how an afflicted individual forgot 'the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of his own being, until he sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past.'10 'Living in a reality that was slipping away/ the inhabitants of Macondo at first try to put up signs to mark the names and provide descriptions of the use and value of things, but 'the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality,... which was less practical for them but more comforting' (49). This becomes the reality of the dominant culture, whose official history subsequently denies the massacre of more than 3000 workers, and isolates the sole survivor's testimony of the traumatic event as a hallucination (355). Lacking any basis for truth - and for accountability - such a culture cannot resist the drift into meaninglessness, and becomes utterly vulnerable to decay and ruin. Reliant on euphemism (216), scandalized when things are called by their names (353^4), the people become unattached, disengaged. They lose their bearings; they lose touch with each other and indeed with life itself, succumbing one by one to the force of oblivion. The book ends with a description of the complete invasion of enormous red ants, which, having undermined the foundations of the house during the second great period of forgetting, the deluge (340), now devastate the garden (410). In such an evasive culture, whose motto might be the currently popular response 'Whatever/ language is used thoughtlessly, carelessly, meaninglessly; one's sense of the literal, that word beset with illogicalities, according to Frye (WP, 5), becomes false and confused. As if to establish a hold on a reality felt to be slipping away, to stand their ground, as it were, people commonly say things such as 'I literally died of embarrassment' or 'I literally fell apart/ when they of course did nothing of the kind. Even in print, examples abound: a magazine article

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concerning investment banking in Moscow reports that 'all financial transactions, all business plans are literally on ice'; a newspaper columnist interviews a woman said 'literally' to be breaking her back as she gathers rocks to reinforce the riverbank at the edge of her property.11 Against the trend towards a 'false/ even 'demonic literalism' (DV, 15, 18), Morrison's truthful fiction exemplifies what Frye, referring to the Bible's language of myth and metaphor, the language of literature, terms 'imaginative,' 'metaphorical/ or 'literary literalism': 'the real literal meaning is an imaginative and poetic one/ 'the true literal sense ... is metaphorical' (WP, xiv-xv; DV, 16-17, 69). In many respects, Beloved constitutes a history book: 'Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War/ this is, the back cover tells us, 'a profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath.' Morrison, however, offers what Frye would describe as 'a vision of reality that is something other than history or logic'; hers is an imaginative vision whose transformative power begins 'to remake the world' (DV, 19). The context for Beloved is a culture that has become oblivious to the reality of the 'Sixty Million and more' to whom the book is dedicated, the people who died as a result of two hundred years of slavery, beginning with those who died either as captives in Africa or on the Middle Passage.12 In such a context, where words such as 'slavery/ 'freedom/ and 'love' have lost their meaning, where one encounters daily what Frye, quoting Wallace Stevens, refers to as 'the metaphor that murders metaphor' (WP, xxiii), Morrison's work performs that 'fundamental function of literature/ which is to revive 'the metaphorical habit of mind' (NFR, 30, 78). What unites Frye, in his theoretical writings, and Morrison, in her fiction, is above all their extraordinary emphasis on human recreation (NFR, 30, 48, 66-70). Morrison's imaginative vision, which, in Frye's terminology, enlarges our sense 'of the real dimensions of our own experience' (NFR, 42), presents itself clearly as a 're-vision';13 it is a 'recreating of language' (NFR, 79), a life-giving act of reattachment and reclamation, powerfully reflected on a thematic level within the novel itself. Literature has always taken upon itself the telling of difficult stories, and from its beginnings it self-consciously draws attention to this task. In the Western tradition, for instance, when the hero of Homer's Odyssey is asked about his sufferings, he ponders how to relate his traumatic experience, aware that a recounting of his trials will cause him to 'mourn and grieve even more': 'What then / shall I recite to you first of all, what leave till later? / Many are the sorrows the gods of the sky have given me.'14 As it turns out, Odysseus tells his story with remark-

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able ease, which is really not so surprising, given that his is a success story, a tale of mastery, indeed, a largely uncontested master narrative. The contrast between acceptance of this sole survivor's testimony within the Odyssey and rejection of Jose Arcadio Segundo's account of the massacre within One Hundred Years of Solitude illuminates the Odyssean hero's cultural dominance. He tells his story; it is believed, and it is passed on. Significantly, in book 11, when Odysseus reports his encounter with various inhabitants of the underworld, he lets the great heroes speak directly of their trials, but presents the women's stories - stories often involving the trauma of abduction and rape - through the filter of his own narrative voice. Today's literature, in contrast to this, offers numerous examples of women themselves telling of things not easily told. Often, as in Beloved, these are stories of widespread historical oppression, which encompass the tales of a great many individuals; there is no single story, no sole survivor's testimony. A crucial focus on specific, even gender-specific experience, however, is partly what allows these stories to be heard, even in an oblivious culture lulled by the comforts of its evasive dominant narratives. The problem of how to speak of the unspeakable belongs, of course, to both men and women in Beloved: there are things neither Sethe nor Paul D 'ha[s] word-shapes for' (99). Moreover, although there are things 'neither kn[ows] about the other' (99), there is an acknowledgment of their common experience under slavery - 'Her story was bearable because it was his as well' (99) - or at least of commensurability: 'He wants to put his story next to hers' (273). Nevertheless, Morrison's novel expresses the importance of positionality, both in traumatic experience and in the subsequent processing of such experience. This focus on what has been identified as a feminist concern15 ultimately enables readers to make connections, to put the various stories within the narrative - stories of women and of men - next to one another, the reader working with the text, as the character Beloved does with Denver, when the latter tells of her own birth, the two doing their best 'to create what really happened, how it really was, something only Sethe knew' (78). This amazing passage, which describes Denver's monologue becoming a duet, illustrates the process of reading that Frye posits as integral to recreation: readers themselves assume 'a heroic role' (NFR, 75; cf. SeS, 186 and WP, 128). This is not to say that Beloved pretends to offer some unmediated access to the conditions of slavery. Despite reviews that would suggest both a successfully conveyed and a homogeneous reality - 'a milestone

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in the chronicling of the black experience in America'16 - Morrison's narrative refuses such illusions, offering a powerful sense of shared, but not undifferentiated experience, and underlining the impossibility of recreating 'how it really was.' According to Ella, for example, who was confined in a room by a father and his son for more than a year, 'You couldn't think up ... what them two done to me' (119). Thus, the past here - the historical experience of oppression - is presented as both unspeakable and unimaginable, beyond our knowing, and yet what else does this imaginative work of fiction claim to do but tell, but speak of that past? This not altogether rhetorical question is worth pursuing, not least because of the insistent focus on the very issue of 'claiming' in Beloved. The novel's epigraph comes from the Bible, and speaks of an act of renaming, recalling, reclaiming: 'I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.'17 These words from the book of Romans themselves recall God's promise of reclamation as described in Hosea 2:23, a vision of future relationships, harmonious and faithful, that actually encompasses the past. God's people, figured as the reclaimed beloved, will in this future of justice and mercy sing 'as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt' (Hosea 2:15), where she had been enslaved. Reclamation is similarly linked with liberation in Beloved, as over and against the claims of the slave-owners,18 who exhibit an insatiable appetite and greed, the characters who have escaped to what the novel terms 'unslaved life' begin, 'bit by bit,' to claim themselves: Treeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another' (95). This emphasis on the necessity of proceeding bit by bit relates to what Frye notes about the 'predatory,' but potentially recreative activity of reading: 'the personal appropriation of what one reads' can only succeed if one takes this food for the imagination 'discontinuously, in bites' (WP, 113). Sethe, however, after only twenty-eight days of unslaved life, is in no position to hold back when schoolteacher comes to claim his property: Sethe and her offspring. She herself makes 'outrageous claims' (171) on the lives of her children,19 going so far as to kill her daughter in order to save the child from slavery. She thus calls upon herself widespread condemnation, most devastatingly articulated in Paul D's reaction to 'what she claimed': 'You got two feet, Sethe, not four' (164-5). Such a binaristic formulation, neatly separating the human and the animal, is part of the discourse of slavery; it issues from the mouth of school-

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teacher, who instructs his pupils to record Sethe's 'human characteristics on the left [side of the page]; her animal ones on the right' (193). While Baby Suggs goes to her grave unable to approve or condemn 'Sethe's rough choice' (she is 'beaten up by the claims of both' [180]), Paul D ultimately emerges from what Frye would term 'an embryonic state/ into new life as the reborn individual, the resurrected spiritual body, finally able to 'distinguish what he believes from what he believes he believes' (DV, 13-14). There is, as Frye maintains, 'nothing ghostly' about the resurrected spiritual body, no 'antagonism' between body and soul (DV, 73). Indeed, by the end of the narrative, having seen himself, as it were, in Sethe's position,20 Paul D moves from judging Sethe to caring for her, from counting her feet to massaging them (272), from ventriloquizing schoolteacher to announcing his own claim, 'I'm a take care of you, you hear?' (272). These words form part of a new discourse that miraculously 'open[s] [the] mind/ as Sethe's daughter discovers when she hears a neighbour say to her, Take care of yourself, Denver/ and she hears it 'as though it were what language was made for' (252). The last time Nelson Lord spoke to her, eighteen years previously, when he raised the isolated and isolating question of what Sethe had done (102), 'his words blocked up her ears. Now they opened her mind' (252). Language, such truly careful language, is what Morrison claims - or reclaims - in Beloved, offering her readers a prophetic orientation that resists the effects of oppressive discourses. The latter - most notably associated with schoolteacher - are represented in the novel as leaving Sethe 'walk[ing] backward/ without even looking behind her 'to find out where [she is] headed' (193). But when Denver, in the context of community, begins to confront and participate in defining the past rather than be simplistically defined by it, she, like Paul D, experiences a second birth,21 which, like the first one, is clearly associated with liberation: 'It was a new thought, having a self to look out for and preserve' (252). This recalls Baby Suggs's experience of discovering her own hands, her own heartbeat, when she first 'step[s] foot on free ground' (141), her discovery of the self marked by her self-baptism as 'Baby' (142). Mrs Jones's recognition of Denver when the latter leaves the confines of 124 and calls on the community for help - 'Oh, baby/ she says, 'softly and with such kindness' - 'inaugurate[s] [Denver's] life in the world as a woman' (248). It also signals the typological connection between Baby Suggs, 'the unchurched preacher' (87), who extends a powerful call to the community to experience the redemptive power of recreation, and her granddaugh-

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ter Denver, another newly born woman,22 whose 'unmistakable love call' (247) revives, reconnects, and recommits the congregation to the ongoing work of reclamation. Beloved has been regarded as 'a love story/ 'a story about the selfsacrifice of motherhood.'23 While we might easily dismiss the first cliched claim along with the second, I would suggest that what Morrison provides is precisely a story of love, the language she claims being in part the language of such love. The narrative's work of reclaiming 'what language was made for' involves a re-imagining and reconfiguring of conventional relationships and conceptions of love. Halle, for instance, is said to be 'more like a brother than a husband. His care suggested a family relationship rather than a man's laying claim' (25, emphasis added). This anticipates the position into which Paul D moves at the end of the novel, with his declaration of care. Immediately following Paul D's announcement, Sethe wonders if he will bathe '[fjirst her face, then her hands, her thighs, her feet, her back? Ending with her exhausted breasts? And if he bathes her in sections, will the parts hold?' (272). This explicitly recalls Baby Suggs's loving attention to her daughter-in-law's body on the day Sethe crossed the river: Baby Suggs 'bathed her in sections,' starting with her face, and then moving to her hands and arms, her legs, her stomach and vagina, and finally to her feet (93). Such echoing of the description of the care extended to Sethe by her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, marks Sethe and Paul D's love affair as indeed a kind of 'family relationship.' It is predicated, to be sure, on a man's laying claim, but he claims something for both Sethe and himself, something both the man and the woman, under slavery, have been denied. The relationships depicted in these scenes of care are both intimate and familial. Like the comparable accounts of bathing in a related work, Joy Kogawa's Obasan (49, 78,165), such passages constitute a reclamation of the blason, that traditional mode of describing the beloved, here rid of its idealizing, objectifying effects, conveying instead something of what it might mean, as Baby Suggs puts it, to love flesh, to touch '[fjlesh that needs to be loved' (88). Sethe is thus touched by Amy, the unlikely midwife, whose care delivers both mother and child in more ways than one; after Sethe and Amy 'push' and 'pull' together (84), Denver is born, and then she and Sethe find deliverance as they cross the river into potential freedom. Sethe also experiences Baby Suggs's touch, and finally Paul D's,24 becoming indeed, I'd suggest, the beloved, moving into a position similar to that of the reclaimed woman in Hosea, mercifully delivered 'as in the day when she came up

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out of the land of Egypt.' The process of liberation - of reclamation proceeds gradually, 'bit by bit' (95), and finds expression in these imaginatively literal accounts of careful, physical touching. The morning after she is delivered by the touch of Amy and of Baby Suggs, Sethe, the beloved, lovingly reclaims her children, entering into a new relationship with them now that they have escaped to the promising side of the river. 'Sethe lay in bed under, around, over, among but especially with them all' (93). No longer 'need[ing] permission for desire' (162), Sethe and her children25 explore different possible physical positions - under, around, over, among, with - that reflect different possible configurations of pleasurable, 'harmonious' relationships (99), such as we see modelled, for example, in the passage already cited, in which Denver tells Beloved the story of her own birth: "The monologue became, in fact, a duet as they lay down together, Denver nursing Beloved's interest like a lover whose pleasure was to overfeed the loved' (78). The image of nursing is used here to suggest a reciprocal relationship, both mother and child ideally being in a position actively to nurse. The picture of the two women - sisters and more26 than sisters - as lovers, nursing, suggests the kinds of relationships that in the next chapter we see as perhaps possible in the community Baby Suggs, Ella, Stamp Paid, and others have come to know. In such a community, being called to claim ownership of the self, one is freed 'along with the others' (95) to reject the perverse economy of slavery and invent ways 'to love and be loved/ 'feed and be fed' (177). While the image of nursing is used to express possibilities for free and loving relationships, it also serves to convey something of the horror of slavery, most notably in the scene in which schoolteacher's boys violate Sethe by holding her down and sucking her breast milk. Critics have shown how Morrison focuses 'on the primacy of sexual assault over other experiences of brutality/27 rape being suffered by both men and women in the novel. The particular violations Sethe and Paul D experience are 'characterized by sucking/ the 'eating imagery associated with Sethe's rape reappear [ing]' (Barnett, 422) in the account of Paul D's being forced to fellate prison guards who announce this as 'breakfast' (107). In thus speaking of both of these unspeakable violations, in connecting or relating Paul D's 'unrelatable' experience (Barnett, 424) to that of Sethe, the novel succeeds in putting the man's story next to the woman's. Rape comes to be associated with race as well as with gender, as Morrison, through an initial focus on women's experience - in particular, the taking of Sethe's milk (17) - carefully28

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enables readers to understand something of Paul D's position as well as of Sethe's. The novel's sustained attention to positionality reveals the extent to which relationships have been damaged under slavery. The notoriety of Sethe's killing of her child, together with the spiteful ghost and the appearance of Beloved, initially suggests uniqueness, the unforgettability of the incident in the woodshed at least temporarily obscuring so many other severed relationships, such as those between Baby Suggs and her offspring, who are taken from her, claimed by people who didn't stop 'playing checkers just because the pieces included her children' (23). Her fourth child 'she could not love and the rest she would not' (23), it being dangerous, as Ella also recognizes, to love anything at all (92). Sethe, the only child her mother named and did not throw away, was separated from that mother after only two or three weeks of nursing (60-2,201), while Ella, forced to deliver 'a hairy white thing,' product of the aforementioned year in captivity, would not nurse it (258). Once again, the focus on women's experience under slavery - in this case, on the prevention of mother-child love and the horrifically abusive disruption of maternal claims - ultimately helps to tell Paul D's story as well. Like the enslaved mothers, he knows the dangers of loving more than 'just a little bit' (45), and so makes himself not love what is 'not his' (268), including even the beauty of earth and sky. Denied human sexual contact, he loves 'small and in secret' (221,162), and unable to remember either his father or his mother (219), he resigns himself to a life all but devoid of relations, 'aunts, cousins, children' (221). At first glance, Beloved resembles a conventional love story in its narrative of Paul D and Sethe's attempts to establish a life of relations after all: 'When I got here,' Paul D tells Sethe, 'and sat out there on the porch, waiting for you, well, I knew it wasn't the place I was heading toward; it was you. We can make a life, girl. A life' (46). What emerges, however, is a parodic manipulation of traditional literary forms, as Denver's resistance to her mother's forming a twosome with Paul D (13) creates a love triangle (Denver, Sethe, Paul D), which eventually gives way to the deadly conflicts of the more complicated triangle consisting of Denver, Beloved, and Sethe. Its intense claims - 'You are mine / You are mine / You are mine' (217) - betray a 'breakneck possessiveness' (54), an infernal togetherness,29 doomed to mere repetition or a compulsive 'binding,' in Frye's terms, when he contrasts 'mechanical memory that broods on an unalterable past' with creative repetition, which leads to an 'enlargement of freedom' by 'build[ing] a

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present out of the past' (DV, 52; WP, 304-5; cf. SeS, 175-9). Before Beloved comes and he just has the ghost to chase away, Paul D does the much-needed work of repositioning at 124, 'making space' for himself 'along with' Denver and Sethe (45). Beloved soon appears, however, with more powerful claims, which crowd the house again and move both Paul D and Sethe around like 'rag doll[s]' (126,243). This time, the repositioning is women's work, accomplished not by the 'bash[ing]' of tables and the 'wrecking' of everything (18), as in a man's laying claim Paul D's belligerent 'screaming back at the screaming [haunted] house' (18) - but by Denver's response to her grandmother's call to 'go on out the yard' (244) and into the community. Having rallied from the defeat reflected in her last words while alive (89, 104), Baby Suggs speaks to Denver from the other side, from beyond the grave, identifying knowledge of the traumatic past as the key to moving towards a new position, here literalized30 as the ability to 'walk down the steps' (244). Throughout the novel, crowded spaces evoke not only the historical conditions of slavery, but also the subsequent inability to free oneself from slavery's monstrous claims: Sethe, for instance, stands daily at her job 'in a space no wider than a bench is long,' to do the 'serious work of beating back the past' (73). Conversely, open spaces such as the Clearing are associated with freedom, with 'room to imagine' and to be 'interested in the future' (70). It is in the Clearing that Baby Suggs calls upon her people ('O my people' [88]), the people she has claimed as her own, lovingly to re-imagine and reclaim themselves, this open territory, therefore, being neither an empty nor a private place, but one filled with the communal expression of desire. Of course even this special meeting place, like the church with which it is associated (87) and to which Paul D at one point retreats (218), becomes deserted, abandoned by the congregation, as does 124 Bluestone Road, which for a long time functioned as a kind of Clearing (86-7, 95). For a long time Baby Suggs lived in the house that nominally belonged to the Bodwins, but was actually possessed by no one, claimed by the community as its own. Significantly, it is in this communal space that even the unspeakable, unimaginable past becomes something other: '124 was a way station where messages came and then their senders. Where bits of news soaked like dried beans in spring water - until they were soft enough to digest' (65). At a crucial point, however, this open space of 124 almost imperceptibly develops into private property, Baby Suggs's 'yard' (179), the arrival of her more immediate family (Sethe and her children) some-

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how confused with the staking of an exclusive and 'arrogant claim' (249) of love, ownership, and protection. The feast that marks this turning point is miraculous - a kind of loaves and fishes experience (137; cf. Matt. 14:16-21) - excessive, something the community cannot claim as its own. As Frye points out, citing Vico: '[W]e understand nothing except what we have made' (DV, 25). Baby Suggs had earlier told her people that 'the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it' (88). Even though they are present at this miraculous celebration, it remains something they cannot see. The liberating claims of and within the community are thus set against Sethe's apparently 'outrageous claims, her self-sufficiency' (171). Only when Denver reclaims connections to the community is this dichotomy overcome, as her story enables others finally to see themselves in Sethe's position, Ella, for instance, thinking of the dead child she refused to nurse 'coming back to whip her' (259). The women in the community respond to Denver's 'love call' (247) by concocting the second wondrous feast described in the novel, this time, however, it being one truly of their own making, the gifts of food literally named as their own on the slips of paper that accompany each offering (249). This carefully prepared feast appears not all at once, but rather bit by bit over days and weeks - another metaphorically literal rendering of the liberating process of reclamation. The second feast constitutes a sustained expression of the women's 'care' (250) and a communal celebration of the grace they together can imagine, can see, and therefore can have. 'For Sethe, it was as though the Clearing had come to her' (261). Morrison's Beloved finds ways to speak of the unspeakable and tell of things too horrific to be told. Paul D's answer, for instance, to Sethe's 'careful' question as to why at a crucial point he remained silent - T had a bit in my mouth' (69) - relates without embellishment the unrelatable fact of the matter. Yet this is not, as the last page of the novel indicates, a story simply to be told, believed, and passed on: 'This is not a story to pass on' (275). Indeed, this is a story imaginatively to work on and to work with, as readers engage in building what Frye calls 'a human environment' (DV, 27-8, 32), ultimately that 'earthly paradise' where primary concerns are fulfilled in the living of 'more abundant life' (WP, 42-3, 310). Like many of the biblical passages it cites, Morrison's narrative takes as its focus the imagining not of an unimaginable past, but of a future that must be seen - figured - in order to be claimed. As it relates stories of various women and men to one another and thereby to

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the reader, Morrison's novel defamiliarizes 'slavery/ 'freedom/ and love/ conveying a powerful sense not only of what these terms might have meant, but also of what they might yet mean. And in its vision of possibilities for reconfigured relationships and communities, Beloved, a Dock, I suggest, with the poetic power to 'revolutionize our consciousness' (WP, 116), to 're-create the mind' (DV, 83), begins to make us hear 'what language was made for.'

NOTES 1 This includes my father and my mother, Lois M. Wilson, who provides the following endorsement of Frye's Double Vision on the back cover of the 1991 edition: 'Dr. Frye's treatment of the Bible as metaphor and myth frees the imagination and expands one's vision of what an intentional committed life can be. What a lively and persuasive contribution to those who are struggling for spiritual maturity in the contemporary world!' 2 Frye's training at Success Business College and his prowess as a typist are documented in John Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography (Toronto: Random House, 1989), 50-3, and Joseph Adamson, Northrop Frye: A Visionary Life (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993), 21. 3 Qtd. in Paul Gray, 'Paradise Found,' Time, 19 January 1998 (Cdn ed.): 56. 4 Compare Frye's understanding of the prophetic, which links secular and sacred literature; the ability to see a conditional future stems from uncommon 'insight into social phenomena,' 'an intense vision of the present' (WP, 53). For Morrison's view on the role of art in the visionary process, see Danille Taylor-Guthrie, ed., Conversations with Toni Morrison (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 273. 5 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1988), 87-9. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 6 Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York: Knopf, 1998), 145. 7 Gray, 'Paradise Found,' 59-60. 8 If space permitted, I would discuss Christa Wolf's Cassandra (1983), with its focus on the prophetic act of re-vision, and Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981), replete with biblical imagery and attentive to the role of congregations and communities in the fulfilling of primary concerns. Both works seek a language of transformative power, referred to explicitly as the 'living word': Joy Kogawa, Obasan (Toronto: Penguin, 1983), i; Christa Wolf, Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays, trans. Jan van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984), 270.

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9 Again, Frye's perspective on the language of Homer is illuminating: 'It has been said that there are no metaphors in Homer, but in another sense Homer is all metaphor: what goes on inside the human heart, such as thymos, are events of the same entity as storms and the like in nature' (NFR, 118). 10 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 45. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 11 'U of T Engineer Builds a Business in Moscow/ Borderlines 1.2 (1999): 2; 'We're Talking Boulders,' Globe and Mail, 19 May 2001: L3. 12 Those 60 million are people who didn't make it from there to here and through': Morrison, quoted by Kastor in Barbara H. Solomon, ed., Collected Essays on Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' (New York: G.K. Hall, 1998), 58. See also Morrison, quoted by Angelo in Taylor-Guthrie, Conversations, 257; see Clemons, Finney, and Atkinson in Solomon, ed., 46,112, 248, 253-4; see Philip Page, Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison's Novels (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 158. 13 Adrienne Rich, 'When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,' in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), 35. 14 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 9.13-15. 15 Linda Alcoff, 'Cultural Feminism versus Poststructuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13 (1988): 428-36. 16 Emphasis added. Excerpts from this review in Publishers Weekly and from other reviews serve as endorsements included on the first few pages of the edition cited. 17 Romans 9:25 (King James Version). 18 Baby Suggs describes how, following Sethe's killing of her child, schoolteacher left town, '[f]iled a claim and rode on off (183). This is after the destruction made it clear to him 'that there was nothing [in the yard left] to claim' (149). Sethe recalls the appetite of the white boy with 'mossy teeth' who claimed her milk (31) and the related claim of 'the little whitebabies' to Nan's milk when Sethe herself was an infant; neither as a mother nor as a child does Sethe have 'nursing milk to call [her] own' (200). 19 As Morrison points out, under the circumstances of slavery, even the claim to be the mother of these children is 'unheard-of,' 'an outrageous claim for a slave woman' (quoted by Darling in Taylor-Guthrie, Conversations, 252). Margaret Garner, the historical figure on whom Sethe is based, was tried

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not for murder, as the abolitionists had hoped, but for running away and for theft; her children were 'stolen property' (quoted by Darling and by Moyers, ibid., 251, 272). See also Brooks J. Bouson, Quiet as It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 131-62. Reintegration and renewal take place here in what Frye refers to as 'an expanded present where ... the past and the future are gathered.' This present is 'a transfiguration into a world we keep making' (NFR, 50-1). Cf. Frye's view that 'those who refuse to confront their own real past, in whatever form, are condemning themselves to die without having been born' (NFR, 43). Frye and Morrison come together in their understanding of community as involving what Frye, citing Burke, refers to as 'the continuum of the dead, the living, and the unborn' (DV, 46). Baby Suggs, for instance, even after she has died, explicitly supports Denver by urging her out of the yard and into new life (244). My phrase 'newly born woman,' which echoes the English title of Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement's La jeune nee (1975), suggests something of the extensive imagery of rebirth in Beloved. As critics have noted (see, e.g., Page, Dangerous Freedom, 144-7), this theme is particularly significant in the context of an African-American narrative tradition that 'pictures the Middle Passage as a journey toward a horrific rebirth' (Jean Wyatt, 'Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison's Beloved,' PMLA 108 [1993]: 480), from 'death below decks ... into a new life of slavery' (Page, Dangerous Freedom, 158). The description of Denver leaving the yard in terms of her stepping 'off the edge of the world [to] die' (239), only to re-emerge, newly born, contributes to the novel's project of reclamation. From a review in the Orlando Sentinel, an excerpt included as an endorsement on the third of the opening pages of the edition cited. See also Carl Malmgren, quoted by Otten in Solomon, Collected Essays, 287. Amy massages Sethe's feet (82); Baby Suggs similarly 'attack[s] the unrecognizable feet' (93); Paul D asks if he may heat up some water in order to bathe and rub Sethe's feet (272). Like Sethe in her own deliverance as the beloved, the reclaimed children are active participants in the process, here exercising the freedom to say 'enough' (93). Cf. Baby Suggs's comment on white people not knowing 'when to stop' (104). Denver acknowledges Beloved as her sister and as 'more' (266), which is consistent with the common interpretation of this figure as not only the baby whom Sethe killed returned to her, but also the embodiment of a collective, traumatic past. See Wyatt, 'Giving Body to the Word,' 479-80;

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Furman and Otten in Solomon, Collected Essays, 270, 294; Bouson, Quiet as It's Kept, 161-2. Cf. Morrison, quoted by Darling in Taylor-Guthrie, Conversations, 247. Pamela E. Barnett, 'Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved,' PMLA 112 (1997): 420. Hereafter cited parenthetically. I use this word advisedly, noting the way it reflects Sethe's own approach to Paul D: 'carefully, carefully she had left the bed' (38); 'carefully, carefully, she passed on to a reasonable question' (69). Note the apparently casual mention of the devil (182), as well as the explicit reference to the 'doomsday truce designed by the devil' (250). Infernal togetherness is modelled on an early literary example of what Paul D calls 'devil's confusion/ which is something bad looking good (97, 271): Dante's depiction of the good-looking couple Francesca and Paulo in book 5 of the Inferno. See Wyatt's illuminating discussion of Morrison's strategy of literalization. Whereas Wyatt regards this process as antimetaphorical, I argue that, on the contrary, it revives what Frye, cited above, refers to as an 'original, metaphorical sense of immediacy'; Morrison's language exemplifies imaginative or metaphorical literalism.

Northrop Frye and the Poetry in Biblical Hermeneutics JAMES M. KEE

From the time that Northrop Frye published his first book, Fearful Symmetry, 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 published 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 relationships 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 hermeneutics 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, 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

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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.1 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 on 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 unified narrative having a beginning, a middle, and an end - whatever the results of the modern critical-historical study of it (GC, 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 (GC, 24). While this is not the place to take up the numerous problems associated with the Bible's historicity, 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, non-poetic criteria of truthfulness. For Frye metaphorical discourse is marked by an elemen-

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tal disclosing power that, initially at least, harbours an intuitively selfconfirming quality within it. Frye's third claim is that, while the biblical narrative itself may be primarily metaphorical, the Bible has been read and interpreted within a Western tradition that has not always privileged metaphorical discourse as the most authoritatively truthful (GC, 5-17). Following a suggestive schema found in Vico's New Science,2 he divides the history of Western langage into three phases: a first, in which metaphorical discourse is the most authoritative; a second, dating from the time of Plato, in which metaphorical discourse is subject to the truth of what Frye calls metonymic or conceptual discourse; and a third, dating from the beginnings of modernity in the sixteenth century, in which both metaphorical and metonymic discourses are subject to the standards of descriptive discourse. To understand the Bible today we must, among many other things, attend to how it has been interpreted in the past. In particular, we must take note of the forms of discourse in which it has been interpreted and the criteria of truth that operate within those discourses. Frye's fourth claim casts light upon why he spent so much of his energy linking the Bible to literature and literature to the Bible. In the second and third phases of the history of Western langage, the Bible's radically metaphorical language was reinterpreted and, at times, criticized according to standards derived from metonymic and descriptive languages respectively. The first operation produced, for example, the doctrinal languages of speculative theology; the second, in the extreme, led to a point at which the biblical God became, in Frye's phrase, 'entombed in a dead language' (GC, 18) and was thus experienced as dead. Reading the history of the Bible's language and its interpretation in this way, Frye is led to postulate that it is the primary function of literature, more particularly of poetry, to keep re-creating the first or metaphorical phase of language during the domination of the later phases, to keep presenting it to us as a mode of language that we must never be allowed to underestimate, much less lose sight of. (GC, 23)

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

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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 imaginations 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 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 biblical 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 conviction 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 metaphorical 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/4 He writes a poem characteristic 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 parallel with a conceptual one but defers to it' (GC, 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 disclosing 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.5 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

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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. St Lucia, part of the chain of figures 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 towards 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 journey. The metaphorical narrative, however, dramatizes the pathos experienced when the frail, mortal humanity of Dante is literally seized by grace without being able to recognize it. Told by Virgil what the true nature of the experience was, the pilgrim confidently moves on. Without such repeated anchoring in concrete experience, Frye suggests, the abstractions of conceptual language take on 'a strong smell of intellectual mortality' (GC, 55). To understand why the conceptual pole of his poem is nevertheless so important to Dante, we must reflect upon the nature of the intellectual experience that the poem unfolds. Frye calls the dominant discourse of the second phase 'metonymic' because in this discourse words are 'put for' thoughts. The order of thinking thereby expressed, however, is an index of a transcendent order of being in which thinking participates. The ideal unity among being, thought, and language suggested by this complex has its roots in an attempt to explicate sheer wonder at the experiences of being and intelligibility as such - that the world is, that its structure should become luminous, that human being could be the site in which this happens, that language can articulate the world's intelligible structure. Dante's understanding of this experiential complex seems decisively to have been affected by the prologue to the Gospel of John. In the Beginning was the divine Logos; through this Logos the world was created; this same Logos became flesh and constituted the logos of history. The orders of the cosmos and its history are thus expressions of the divine substance. As a creature endowed with an intellect that can understand because it participates in the divine intellect, Dante finds his way out of the dark wood by learning to read the ultimate order of the cosmos and its history as these are revealed in the Creation and the Incarnation. The journey repeatedly moves beyond Dante's symbolizations of this order until it climaxes in Dante's

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direct, unmediated vision of the divine itself, a moment that Dante can only attempt to represent while also indicating its radically unrepresentable character. The force with which Dante experienced the divine Logos is evident in the elaborate conceptual differentiations that structure his hell, purgatory, and paradise. Nevertheless, for all the luminosity in Dante's intellectual journey towards the vision of God, he was not finally a philosopher but a man of biblical faith. The singularity of Christ's birth, death, and resurrection makes the Bible's narrative a historical account for Dante, one in which he has a personal role to play. The letter of his poem, therefore, presents not an instance of an eternal archetype but a radically metaphorical disclosure of how Dante came to participate in the Christ event. He was lost in a dark wood. Through the mediation of Virgil, Beatrice, Lucia, Mary, and a host of others, divine love graciously intervened in his life. He writes a poem in the present about the responsive journey that he took in the past for the sake of his future salvation and that of his readers. Writing the poem repeats the journey. And because the poem is figuratively a repetition of the biblical narrative, it carries on the work of revelation in the present. Only through the repetition of such narrative time, one might say, is time past, present, and future redeemed.6 Langland's Piers Plowman and Milton's Paradise Lost are similarly shaped by the need of the poet to find a way to refigure the biblical narrative for his time. These poems differ significantly from each other, however, and from Dante's poem for reasons that Frye's account of the different phases of language can cast light upon. Allow me briefly to refer to each poem in order to indicate the suggestiveness of Frye's schema. Langland, like Dante, writes an allegory in which metaphorical and conceptual narrative poles can be discerned. In Piers Plowman, however, the metaphorical narrative decisively fails to defer to the conceptual one at crucial moments, and the progress the poem makes depends upon the transformations that the metaphorical process thereby brings about. More than most poets who preceded him (and many who followed him), Langland is engaged with the personal, social, and historical disorders of his day in intensely concrete ways. (Is he, perhaps, being responsive to newly emergent demands for 'descriptive' truth?) Unlike Dante, whose vision included a political theory according to which both Pope and Emperor are assigned divinely ordained roles, Langland's

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engagement is not clearly guided by theoretical concepts grounded in a vision of the logos of history. He does, however, rely upon the overall shape of the biblical narrative to provide him with heuristic schemas. From the time in Passus I that the Dreamer turns to Holy Church and asks her to explain the meaning of what he has seen on the field full of folk,7 Piers Plowman is concerned with making sense of the order of history in terms of the biblical narrative: Holy Church's response includes a summary retelling of its major events. While this retelling is not deficient in any doctrinal way, it is highly compact and often riddling, and in such a form it does not seem to cast sufficient light upon the source of the concrete evils - both personal and social - with which Langland is preoccupied. What follows, therefore, is a poem that proceeds to generate a series of metaphorical networks - each derived in some manner from the biblical narrative, each responding to blind spots in the previous network, and each seeking better to illuminate the causes of disorder and the way to reform. The metaphoricity of the process is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the poem's second vision, in Passus V-VII, which comes to a climax in the famous Pardon scene. The first vision, which surveyed the immense variety of sinful practices that were causes of injustice, had ended on a hopeful note: the King had agreed to rule guided by Reason and Conscience. The poetic task going forward concerns how to bring about concrete reform within the field full of folk who represent contemporary fourteenth-century society. The second vision responds to this imperative by imagining that the sacramental processes associated with penance can be applied to society at large. Reason preaches a sermon calling for repentance. The members of society are personified as the Seven Deadly Sins, and these come forth to confess and repent. The complex tasks of living responsibly in the world after confession and repentance are then explored in terms of a metaphorical narrative that focuses, first, upon making a pilgrimage to St Truth, and then upon helping Piers Plowman plow a half-acre plot. There turn out to be tensions, however, between the responsibilities disclosed by the metaphor of pilgrimage and those disclosed by the metaphor of plowing, and these threaten to derail the poem's quest for a just social order. When Truth hears tell of these problems, he graciously intervenes, sending Piers a pardon. In narrative context, the symbol 'pardon' names both a church institution (i.e., an indulgence) and the manner, as revealed in the Incarnation, in which God acts in history. As interpreted by the authorities in the poem, however, the pardon proves to be no

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pardon at all, and the poem's quest for a just social order collapses, sending the Dreamer off, for a time, on a very different kind of journey. The action of Passus V-VII is immensely complex and calls for multilayered commentary of a kind that cannot be provided here. My hope, however, is that I have evoked a sense of how this poem seeks to respond ever more adequately to the concrete disorders of its day by engaging in serious play with metaphors. At critical turning points in its second vision the breakthroughs in understanding that take place literally depend upon the alliterative play that is possible among its guiding metaphors: pilgrimage, plowing, and pardon. Langland's metaphors do not defer to a conceptual order, it seems, because Langland does not experience the ideal unity among being, thought, and language that informed Dante's poem. It is as if his God were closer to that of William of Ockham than to Dante's: a God thought more in terms of his will than his intellect, one whose creation, therefore, is more an expression of one divine choice among an infinite number of possible choices than the expression of the divine substance. Langland does find a way to refigure the logos of history in the poem's final sections, but that he does so is due more to his genius for serious play with metaphors than to the conceptual dimensions of his allegory. Milton's Paradise Lost has allegorical passages, to be sure, but unlike Dante's Commedia or Langland's Piers Plowman, the poem as a whole is not properly described as an allegory. Milton's heroic attempt 'to justify the ways of God to men'8 by exploring why it is that human beings repeatedly choose to be slaves rather than accept God's offer of freedom must, like the poems of Dante and Langland before it, find a way to refigure the biblical narrative in the present. Paradise Lost, however, is characterized by many features indicating that the effort has required Milton to be responsive 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. (GC, 13)

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Within such a network of relations, language is thus 'primarily descriptive of an objective natural order. The ideal to be achieved by words is framed on the model of truth by correspondence' (GC, 13). According to Heidegger, the driving force behind the emergence of this new relationship among human beings, the world, and language is a desire to represent reality with certainty. Descartes's famous search for that which cannot be doubted stands as the event that discloses what is most significant in this process of transformation. Descartes's desire for certainty required him to seek a foundation 'which no longer depends upon a relationship to something else, but ... rests within itself.' The only being that can provide such a foundation is one that 'already lies present' in all representing: 'the representer itself (ego cogitans).'9 Hence the emergence of the kind of human being who, in its self-consciousness, can function as a subject of knowledge - a subject who constitutes the world as an object in order that it might be methodically observed and known. Language becomes this subject's primary instrument for representing the observed world truthfully.10 Several of the narrative and representational strategies that Milton adopts in Paradise Lost suggest that the poet, in retelling the biblical story, had to respond to the exigencies of this emerging modern epoch. Although a thorough analysis of these strategies lies beyond the scope of this essay, allow me briefly to indicate some of the topics that would be taken up in such an analysis.11 First, at numerous places in the poem an epistemology based upon observation is assumed. For example, the poem includes no fewer than thirteen references to 'prospect' views. These invariably occur at places where someone - whether divine, human, or demonic - comes to know something important by taking a look at it.12 There is, as well, the remarkable manner in which the truth of Adam's two dreams is established. When Adam wakes he finds '[b]efore [his] eyes all real, as the dream / Had lively shadowed.'13 In contrast, the truth of a dream that occurs within a medieval poem is typically established by an authoritative interpreter (recall the dream from Purgatorio discussed above). When an epistemology based upon observation holds, linguistic signs function as instruments that correctly describe a world of objects to observing subjects. Second, the world in Paradise Lost shows clear signs of becoming a collection of objects. Dante's cosmos is, first and foremost, a comprehensive unity, an embracing Whole in which human beings participate. In Milton's poem, however, the wholeness of the cosmos is largely concealed. What has emerged instead are individual realms in their

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separateness from one another. The Ptolemaic spheres now stand discretely apart, suspended by a golden chain from the floor of Heaven. Heaven no longer embraces all space and time but is a discrete place to be represented. Hell lies not at the centre of the created world but is another discrete realm separated from the created world by vast Chaos. Finally, the self-consciousness that grounds the modern subject of knowledge is evident in one of the poem's most pervasive representational strategies. In his quest to justify the ways of God to men, Milton repeatedly represents the subjective points of view of his characters. The consciousnesses of Adam, Eve, Satan, God the Father, and the Son are all explored in depth in the course of their dialogues, speeches, and soliloquies. Many readers, of course, have been scandalized by Milton's decision explicitly to represent God the Father expressing his point of view on the poem's subject matter. But Milton likely had to do so if he were to make God the Father integrally present in the poem. The necessities with which Milton struggled at the beginning of the modern epoch are some of the same ones that will eventually 'entomb' the traditional God in a dead language. A biblical hermeneutics concerned with the role that Northrop Frye's work might play within it, then, would include more than what today is usually thought to belong to biblical hermeneutics. By way of conclusion I would like to make more explicit some of the guiding insights and concerns of such a hermeneutic and summarize more generally how Frye's work might contribute to it. First, such a hermeneutic would acknowledge the irreducibly social character of the search for understanding. Gerald Bruns, expanding upon Gadamer's work, characterizes hermeneutical consciousness as a dialogical space filled with different voices - in Bakhtin's phrase, a 'dialogized heteroglossia.'14 Second, the dialogical search for understanding is concerned, not primarily with an author's intentions or with an original audience's understanding (although these are both important concerns), but with the subject matter of the text. If Frye's work on the Bible and literature is of interest to us, it is because we share a concern for the same subject matter that engages his thought. So do many others, we wager: Dante, Langland, Milton, others who value Frye's work, even those - perhaps especially those - who are most critical of it.15 Hermeneutics is concerned with listening to and participating in a conversation about this subject matter. Bruns characterizes the conversational space in which the search for

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understanding takes place as an in-between region.16 The thinking that unfolds within it moves between poles of disclosure and concealment, insight and blindness, knowledge and ignorance. Most significantly, perhaps, such thinking moves between what Plato called the One and the indeterminate Two. In relating to the subject matter that concerns it, thinking must avoid making One too quickly or Many too quickly. It must remain concerned with both the Oneness and the indeterminate Two-ness of its subject. Frye's thinking is especially productive of understanding because his particular voice is in quest of Oneness, of comprehending unity, in a historical context where the character of the Oneness that operates in much thinking is often suspect or concealed.17 For him visionary poetry involves nothing less than our attempt to participate responsively - one might even say responsibly - in the comprehending cosmic process within which we find ourselves. Frye's thinking may tend to move too quickly to the pole of Oneness, but in the heteroglossia that is the hermeneutical quest for understanding, his excesses are balanced by those of others, and our shared concern with the subject matter can be well served by listening to him. If Frye's thinking is animated by his search for a unity in poetic vision, it nevertheless does not unfold without a pole of indeterminate Two-ness. I find such a pole in his emphasis upon the radically metaphorical character of poetic discourse - the way in which metaphor serves for him as a synecdoche for the poetic as such. Metaphor constitutes a pole of indeterminate two-ness because it involves an irreducible play of difference (an irreducibly 'double vision'?) that resists thinking's attempts to sublate it. When Frye argues that the letter of the biblical text is radically metaphorical, then, he is not primarily pointing to individual metaphors within the text but characterizing its mode of symbolization, the manner in which it articulates the reality with which it is concerned. The metaphorical 'is' explicitly asserts an identification but implicitly acknowledges a difference, an 'is not.'18 For Frye, the discourses that interpret the dimensions of ultimate mystery in our living and dying are radically metaphorical. If the traditions that they constitute lose touch with these metaphorical roots, the discourses will wither and die. Hence the essential role of poets and poetic spirits - like Frye himself who have sought to recreate or preserve the meaning and significance of biblical mythoi for their age. As a final way of characterizing what Northrop Frye's work might

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contribute to biblical hermeneutics, let me draw upon some insights of Heidegger. In The Origin of the Work of Art/ Heidegger argues that the work of art is one of the few essential ways in which truth happens, and that the noun 'work' must not be heard as naming a thing, especially an objectified thing.19 Instead, we must hear the activity called for by the word 'work' and take up the task of carrying out the work of art. Intriguingly, Heidegger describes the tasks of creating a work of art and interpreting it in almost identical language. To create, he claims, is 'to [let something emerge] as a thing that has been brought forth'; to interpret the work - which he here calls preserving it - is to '[let] the work be a work,' to submit to a displacement that allows us 'to stay within the truth that is happening in the work.'20 A work of art, Heidegger adds, cannot come into being without those who preserve it. (The German verb translated as 'preserve' is bewahren, which is etymologically related to Wahrheit, German for 'truth.')21 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 narrative by recreating 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. NOTES 1 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). 2 For the passage in Vico that forms the basis of Frye's account, see The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), par. 401-6. 3 Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 3. 4 The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1982), 1,1-2. 5 Ibid., Purgatorio (1984), IX, 13-69. 6 Cf. T.S. Eliot, 'Burnt Norton/ in Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1943; repr. 1971), lines 85-9. 7 William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, 2nd ed., ed. A.V.C. Schmidt (London: J.M. Dent, 1995), 1,11.

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8 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: The Odyssey Press, 1962; repr. 1981), I, 26. 9 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 in Martin Heidegger, 'Metaphysics as History of Being/ in The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 19-32. Heidegger 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 26-8. The passages cited in the text are found on 26 and 29. 10 Frye's claim that descriptive language is culturally ascendant in the modern epoch also receives support from Timothy Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). See in particular Reiss's description of what he calls 'analytico-referential discourse/ 31-54. 11 I have developed the argument more fully in James M. Kee, Typology and Tradition: Refiguring the Bible in Milton's Paradise Lost,' Semeia 51 (1990): 155-75. See especially 156-64. 12 See, for example, Paradise Lost, III, 77; IV, 144 and 200; and V, 88. 13 Ibid., VIII, 310-11. 14 Gerald R. Bruns, 'Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Hermeneutics/ Diacritics 14.1 (Spring 1984): 15. For Bakhtin's original use of the phrase, see 'Discourse in the Novel/ in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 273. 15 In discussing what Frye's work might contribute to biblical hermeneutics, I in no sense intend to suggest that the results of critical-historical scholarship or other critical approaches to biblical texts are invalid or irrelevant. Such practices continue to play an essential role in the hermeneutical conversation. 16 Bruns, 'Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Hermeneutics/ 20-3. Bruns bases his argument upon Gadamer's discussions of Plato in 'Plato's Unwritten Dialectic' and 'Dialectic and Sophism in Plato's Seventh Letter/ in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 93-123 and 124-55. 17 Of course much critical effort in recent years has been devoted to unmasking the differences that are suppressed when thinking moves too quickly towards forms of oneness. If Plato is correct, however, thinking is always structured by a pole of oneness. The principle of unity that operates in

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many forms of critique is that of critical consciousness itself. For discussions of these issues, see Paul Ricoeur's, 'Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology' and 'Science and Ideology/ in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 63-100 and 222-46. Frye's conception of the metaphorical can be better understood when his works are read together with Paul Ricoeur's The Rule of Metaphor: MultiDisciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). Similarly, his conception of typology is illuminated by A.C. Charity's, Events and Their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art,' in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 55, 69. Ibid., 60 and 66. In the first passage quoted, I have followed the lead of David Farrell Krell and modified Hofstadter'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 modification, see Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art,' in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 180. Given Heidegger's critique of the metaphysics of causality (see, e.g., Heidegger, 'Metaphysics as History of Being,' 10-20), the connotations associated with 'cause' are misleading for translating an activity that Heidegger is repeatedly describing in terms of the verb lassen (to let, to allow) and its related forms. The original reads, 'kb'nnen wir das Schaffen als das Hervorgehenlassen in ein Hervorgebrachtes kennzeichnen.' See Heidegger, 'Der Ursprung des Kunst-werkes/ Holzwege, 4th ed. (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1963), 49. Heidegger, 'Der Ursprung des Kunst werkes,' 54.

Oscar Wilde's De Profundis:

Prison Letter as Myth PETER G. CHRISTENSEN

In the second essay of Creation and Recreation, Northrop Frye defines myths as 'culturally early narratives, which come from a time when concepts and arguments and abstractions had not yet appeared in language' (NFR, 51). Although there is nothing surprising in this definition, Frye goes on to provide a more provocative correlative. He says that 'the "real meaning" of a myth emerges slowly from a prolonged literary life, and then its meaning includes everything it has effectively been made to mean during that life' (NFR, 51). By this definition, it is not missing the mark to say that in the prison letter, De Profundis, Oscar Wilde uses the myth of Christ and the myth of the tragic hero to recreate himself as a figure of mythic proportions, the enunciator of the gospel of Christ the Divine Artist. Wilde has suffered tragically at the hands of society through the hamartia of vanity and weak will and allowed himself to be deflected from his mission by Bosie, the profligate and untutored hearer of the new message. Critics have often been puzzled as to what to make of this letter. On the level of factual event, is it true or a fabrication of partial truths expressing Wilde's anger at Bosie? Second, is it a self-critique or a defiant self-justification of Wilde's own life? When we read Frye, we realize that these two questions are not the key ones to ask. We come to realize that Wilde is not interested in telling the literal truth. Instead, he turns his life into a myth in which the referent Oscar Wilde has been shifted so that the real person who wrote plays, stood in the docks, and was placed in Reading Gaol disappears behind the persona constructed by the letter itself.

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Frye in the four books on religion from the last decade of his life never mentions Wilde's last great work, the letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis, published in part in 1905, almost in full in 1949 from a copy of the original, and in full in 1966 from the original manuscript. (In 1900 Robert Ross had succeeded in getting the manuscript sealed in the British Museum - away from the public for sixty years.)1 On at least two occasions Frye thinks of Wilde as a mythmaker. In Words with Power, he mentions Wilde's Salome as a femme fatale (WP, 219) and Dorian Gray as a type of the double (267). Behind these categories we can see Frye's concern with the Fall. As he notes in The Mythical Approach to Creation' (1985), in Genesis 'humanity falls as woman' (NFR, 122). In The Bible and English Literature' (1986), he notes that in English literature from Romanticism onward a 'demonic fall of the rebel angels begins to become annexed to the human order' as a means of filling out the creation story (NFR, 152). Frye also converts the mythic figures into Greek equivalents. Thus in Wilde's work, one can say that Salome takes part in what Frye calls the 'creation and fall of Eros' and that Dorian Gray participates in the 'creation and fall of Prometheus' (ibid.). De Profundis can bframed on the model of truth by correspondence' (GC, 13).e used to illustrate other connections with Wilde's thought that Frye touches upon but does not fully develop, since it has a mythic dimension just as developed but perhaps more concealed than these two other works have. In order to understand De Profundis in terms of Frye's thought in The Great Code, we need first to see Frye's affinities with Wilde in both Creation and Recreation and The Double Vision. In the first of the three essays in Creation and Recreation, Frye praises Wilde's The Decay of Lying' because he is drawn to Wilde's 'conception of the creative arts as essentially forms of "lying," or turning away from the external world' (NFR, 39). Frye believes that when in this essay Wilde is defending the 'romantic against the realistic,' he is only using the 'terms of the age.' Frye claims, '[T]he positive thing he is defending is not the romantic but the unmediated' (NFR, 40). For Wilde, we can never see things directly. They all require some type of emendation. Sometimes, the binoculars we wear give us only a 'prism of conventionalized commonplaces, outworn formulas within the art itself, the fossilized forms of earlier attempts to escape from nature and reality' (NFR, 40). Frye writes, 'Only a distorted imagination that breaks away from all [the commonplace] and sees reality as a strange, wonderful, terrible, fantastic world is creative in the human sense of the term' (NFR, 40-1). Frye wants to rescue Wilde from the accusation of being an aesthete,

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an accusation that Wilde himself also confronted in De Profundis, in which he shows perhaps more provocatively than in any of his other works the transformative power of the artist, the person who has, as Philip Sidney says in his Defence of Poesie, not only the gnosis but the praxis.2 For Frye, what humankind wants is meaningful work that reveals the deepest of our capacities. In addition to the creation of the universe, Frye states that 'there is another creation which involves human effort, and the idealized forms of this creation are again projected on the future' (NFR, 48). This counter-movement of 'recreation' is characterized by the redemption of the world of formerly exploited nature, 'the reintegrating of the past through art and the renewal of the future through the energy of youth and nature' (NFR, 50). Frye locates in Wilde's thought a version of Ernst Bloch's Utopian projection, reminding us of the seriousness of Wilde's statement in The Soul of Man under Socialism' that 'a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.' Commenting on Wilde's opposition to censorship and his hope of a more equitable distribution of wealth, Frye again sides with Wilde in 'The Soul of Man under Socialism' for saying that 'the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.'3 Wilde reprises his phrase 'the soul of man' in De Profundis when he talks of the self-realization that is part of the redemption of one's own past and the creation of one's future. He tells Bosie that there is a limitation to the words of the Greek oracle when it commands us to 'know thyself.' In fact, 'people whose desire is solely for self-realization never know where they are going. They can't know.' Wilde tells us that 'to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of Wisdom' (DP, 934). Wilde in his letter is trying to get Bosie to experience emotions that he has never had; these emotions are ultimately not connected to the truth value of Wilde's accusations against him. It no longer matters by the end of the letter if Bosie sent all the insulting letters, went out on the town when Wilde was ill, hid from his mother's warnings, and squandered all of Wilde's money. What is important, and what Wilde never says directly to Bosie, is that by the end of the letter, on an imaginative level, Bosie as reader should see himself as the person who has indeed committed all these sins. Through the very consideration of such monstrous crimes, Bosie will be affected for the better by art. He will have the chance to become a good person. Hurling recriminations and counter-

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recriminations will never allow Wilde and Bosie to advance. Bosie must silently consent to Wilde's tragic reading of their relationship, the only thing that can turn Wilde's disaster into a future on which they can both build. Thus the great egotism, if not self-righteousness, or even blindness, that some have found in Wilde's tone is an irrelevancy to his project, an attempt to enlarge two souls that have shrivelled. Frye's writings show a continuous interest in Wilde's essay The Decay of Lying.' In The Rhythms of Time' (1974), he calls that essay 'a manifesto of romantic and mythical writing as opposed to realism' (MM, 167). Frye himself feels that 'Romanticism deals with the recurring constants of myth and romance' (ibid.). In 'Shakespeare's The Tempest/ Frye mentions Wilde's essay approvingly and remarks that it may be 'the function of all art to "create a past" in this sense of revealing to us the range of experience that our timid senses and reasonings largely screen out' (EAC, 91). In 'The Double Mirror' (1981), Frye not only mentions The Decay of Lying' but The Critic as Artist' as 'two almost unreasonably brilliant essays' (NFR, 87). In 'On Teaching Literature,' Frye elaborates on Wilde's idea that life imitates literature with a discussion of masks and the claim that 'there is never anything under a persona except another persona' (W£, 457-8). In Creation and Recreation Frye quotes part of Gilbert's third major speech from The Critic as Artist.' This passage explains Wilde's strategy in De Profundis: After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.4 Although Frye in the last two essays of Creation and Recreation does not return to a discussion of Wilde, his analysis of self-transcendence is once again relevant to Wilde's setting himself up as the preacher of a new gospel in which Christ is the Supreme Artist and Oscar is his prophet. Frye writes that although 'Word' and 'Spirit' can be 'understood in their traditional context as divine persons able and willing to

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redeem mankind/ we can also think of them as 'qualities of self-transcendence ... capable of pulling [us] out of ... psychosis' (NFR, 80). Wilde makes it clear that living for others' was not the central doctrine of Christ's creed. Instead this idea is subsumed under self-perfection. We can tell from Frye's Student Essays (1932-8) that he was influenced by Wilde's views on Christianity at least as far back as 1936, when he wrote 'A Study of the Impact of Cultural Movements upon the Church during the Nineteenth Century.' Here he quotes from De Profundis: I see a far more intimate and immediate connection between the true life of Christ and the true life of the artist... Christ was not merely the supreme Individualist, but he was the first individualist in history ... To live for others as a definite self-conscious aim was not his creed ... But while Christ did not say to men, 'Live for others/ he pointed out that there was no difference at all between the lives of others and one's own life. By this means he gave to man an extended, a Titan personality ... Wherever there is a romantic movement in Art there somehow, and under some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ. (DP, 922,926 [3], 928; quoted in Frye SE, 285, slightly emended by me to follow punctuation of 1966 ed. of DP)

Frye makes the point that from 'subjective idealism, which the individualism of the age necessitated, comes this microcosmic soul which, by absorbing the universe within itself, does indeed become a "Titan personality"' (SE, 285). The worldwide community of action and charity for which Frye yearns in the last paragraph of Creation and Recreation is one that Wilde might have acknowledged. In De Profundis Wilde writes, 'Every single human being should be the fulfillment of a prophecy. For every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man' (DP, 928). Frye maintained that the 'germ of truth in this identification of religion and art had been provided by Blake, or would have been provided by him if anyone had listened to him' (SE, 285). In Frye's last book on religion, The Double Vision, the four topics under discussion - language, nature, time, and God - are all ones that relate to Wilde's vision of himself in De Profundis. Let us first look at the category of language. In 'The Double Vision of Language/ Frye laments the bizarre and self-defeating overemphasis given to the 'descriptive

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accuracy of the historical events recorded in the New Testament' as a basis for faith (NFR, 177). This stress on literalness led to the prosecution of heretics. Frye wants us to understand Christ as a counterhistorical entity. The Gospel writers do not present Him as a historical figure, but rather as one 'who drops into history from another dimension of reality, and thereby shows what the limitations of the historical perspective are' (NFR, 178). Wilde senses this counter-historical dimension of Christ when he writes in De Profundis that Christ was both fulfilment and rejection of the prophetic tradition: And it is the imaginative quality of Christ's own nature that makes him this palpitating centre of romance. The strange figures of poetic drama and ballad are made by the imagination of others, but out of his own imagination entirely did Jesus of Nazareth create himself. The cry of Isaiah had really no more to do with his coming than the song of the nightingale has to do with the rising of the moon - no more, though perhaps no less. He was the denial as well as the affirmation of prophecy. For every expectation that he fulfilled, there was another that he destroyed. (DP, 929)

Wilde does make some concessions to the depiction of the everyday world into which Christ was born, such as his discussion of the proliferation of Greek in the communities of Galilee, a condition that may have allowed us to read Christ's real words rather than translations of his words from the Aramaic. However, for the most part his search for Christ does not put him on the route of the historical Jesus. Instead, he talks of Christ as 'the precursor of the romantic movement in life' (DP, 931). As Guy Willoughby puts it, Wilde's Christ is in effect a 'reconciler of Hellenism and Hebraism.'5 When Frye speaks of nature as something that should be cherished and fostered, he writes that 'God did not make a humanly useful world; his creation relates to a world, or rather to a condition of being, that exists for its own sake, and for his' (NFR, 197). Although Wilde is not concerned with conservation and the reversal of destruction to the planet, he does write that in our utilitarian age, we 'have forgotten that Water can cleanse, and Fire purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all' (DP, 954). He confides to Bosie that he feels 'sure that in elemental forms there is purification' and he wants to return to them and live in their presence. For Wilde, 'we all look at Nature too much, and live

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with her too little' (ibid.). Although his own vision of nature is one that is anthropocentric, he tries to invoke a Greek ideal that takes away some of the egotism from this world view: They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon' (ibid.). Certainly Wilde would not want these forests to be lost. Nor does he want the ivy of the vineyard to go to waste. It should be used for the garlands created for athletes and artists. Wilde is not creating a romantic Arcadia, but trying to find a modus vivendi with nature. In the chapter on time in The Double Vision, Frye discusses its tragic aspects that stem from the irreversible progress towards death. He finds a cure in the 'directed and progressive attack on time that underlies all genuine achievement in everything that matters' (NFR, 209). For him, the 'building up of habit through incessant practice creates a new vertical dimension in experience' (NFR, 209). Wilde is also determined to thwart the flow of time and thus to make it redeemable. He does so by being frozen in a type of time at Reading Gaol that takes him away from the pressure of modern life. The suffering moment engulfs him, but this eternal moment is what leads to his personal redemption. He "writes that suffering is one 'long moment' that does not progress and which we cannot divide into seasons (DP, 904). For Wilde, 'with us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain' (ibid.). In this almost unbearable state Wilde is opened up to true charity. As he goes about his circular rounds, he is told by one of the fellow inmates that it must be harder for a person of his fame and background to endure what they are all going through together. The reality of this world in which time has stopped for him while Bosie goes on with his fluttering bohemian life is the world that has taught him one of his major mistakes: '1 treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction' (DP, 912). Finally, in the fourth category in The Double Vision, God, Frye states that Christ as depicted by the Gospel writers is someone who 'remains aloof from decision and action, apart from those decisions that affect his own life, but is totally concerned with the world, even though he has a high regard for privacy' (NFR, 225). Wilde also stresses the sense of detachment that surrounds Christ. In St John's gospel in particular, Wilde writes, T see this continual assertion of the imagination as the

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basis of all spiritual and material life' (DP, 930). He claims that for Christ 'imagination was simply a form of Love' (ibid.). Christ is the first person to tell people that they should live 'flower-like' lives (DP, 931). In an oblique way, Wilde consolidates his view of a Christ who is aloof from action yet still concerned with the world. He states: [Christ's] justice is all poetical justice, exactly what justice should be. The beggar goes to heaven because he had been unhappy. I can't conceive a better reason for his being sent there. The people who work for an hour in the vineyard in the cool of the evening receive just as much reward as those who had toiled there all day long in the hot sun. Why shouldn't they? Probably no one deserved anything. (DP, 931)

Christ was not interested in dealing out the law, says Wilde. To him, everyone was an exception to the law, and thus deserved to be treated as an individual (ibid.). Wilde's letter can also be seen in terms of the discussion in chapter 5 of the Great Code, Typology II: Phases of Revelation/ where Frye points out the steps marking Creation, Revolution, Law, Wisdom, Prophecy, Gospel, and Apocalypse. Wilde has his particular 'take' on all of these stages on life's way. In Wilde's myth, virtue destroys and goodness kills, just as much as virtue preserves or goodness saves. Christ offers salvation through creativity because it is the manifestation of pure interiority. In the letter's opening section, Wilde gives a history of his disastrous relationship with Bosie. In the second section he moves into a discussion of his own private feelings. From there, he jumps into a treatment of the Christian religion. Finally, he comes back to his own personal life and then to Bosie's destructive part in it. His revised Christian message is the central point. Wilde writes, 'Christ's place indeed is with the poets. His whole conception of Humanity sprang right out of the imagination and can only be realized by it' (DP, 923). Wilde sees himself as having the powers of the imagination that both connect him to other people and serve as the wellspring of his art. In draining Wilde of his capacity to work, Bosie has ironically brought to Wilde the sorrows that will now deepen his imaginative responses. De Profundis begins and ends with the spotlight on what Bosie has done and what he may now do. The letter closes: 'You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow and its beauty' (DP, 957). The suffering Wilde can now clarify the message of Christ. He

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claims, The absolute purity of the protagonist [Christ] raises the entire scheme to a height of romantic art from which the sufferings of "Thebes and Pelops' line" are by their very horror excluded' (DP, 924). Wilde, however, does not follow the predictable path of turning himself into the crucified Christ, suffering at the hands of unjust society. Instead, he incorporates his understanding of the kerygma of the four gospels in order to present himself as a sinner who is the evangelist of the new gospel of Christ, the greatest romantic artist of all time. Wilde presents himself as a John the Baptist of the new version of Christianity-Romanticism, a position that returns him to his roots in Salome, whose translation Bosie initially bungled so badly, as the prison letter says. We can now elaborate on the seven phases in Typology II: Phases of Revelation' as applied to De Profundis. Here is a brief review of the phases. Creation is not really birth at all, but rather 'waking from sleep, when one world disappears and another comes into being' (GC, 108). Revolution is an emancipating experience in which 'the word listened to and acted upon is the starting point of a course of action' (GC, 117). Law refers to a separation, a shared crisis for a community in which a people realizes that it is set apart (GC, 118). Wisdom stands for the 'individualizing of law' (GC, 121), followed by prophecy, the 'individualizing of the revolutionary impulse' (GC, 125). Gospel, an intensification of prophecy, is predicated on metanoia, or 'turning around/ which leads to the knowledge that sin is not 'illegal or antisocial behavior' but rather the attempt to 'block the activity of God' (GC, 130). Apocalypse, finally, is the Vision that passes through the legalized vision of ordeals and trials and judgments and comes out into a second life' (GC, 137) or 'the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared' (GC, 138). Frye's phases are particularly useful in thinking of De Profundis because Wilde is describing how he had to separate himself from the terrorism of the legalistic code of English society around him in order to accept the true spirit of life. It is not just the moving story of Wilde's trials, literal and symbolic, faced and overcome, but also the triumphant achievement of the fullness of the imaginative life, which he extends to Bosie, who is still unable to realize his full personality. De Profundis corresponds with this typology of phases, as Wilde begins the fifth stage (after presenting himself as an artist in the first four), by discussing the reinterpreted message of Christianity. His vision broadens as he re-evaluates his experiences. Frye begins his discussion of the Creation phase by noting the rela-

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tionship between God as Creator and poet as 'maker.' For Frye, creation is connected to the metaphor of integration (GC, 112), the craftsman's care to create a designed unity, and so he argues that 'the conception of God as Creator is a projection from the fact that man makes things.' As for human creativity itself, 'we see that there is a quality in it better called re-creation, a transforming of the chaos within our ordinary experience of nature' (ibid.). The original creation, then, serves as a type to the antitype of Revelation's recreated new heaven and new earth. 'Creation' characterizes Wilde's awakening to life in the making of beautiful works of art. He was in this phase before he met Bosie. He claims, 'Drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched, I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty' (DP, 912). At this time he 'awoke the imagination of [his] century so that it created myth and legend' around him (DP, 912-13). Just as God the Creator may be seen as a projection of the poet maker, Wilde's awakening imagination is projected onto society at large. With respect to Revolution, Frye warns us against looking at this phase in terms of the literal kind of iconoclasm that has sometimes characterized Christianity. Instead, we should delve deeper and see that the root of revolutionary iconoclasm is the 'impatience with a passive attitude toward nature and the gods assumed to be dominating it' (GC, 118). Revolution guards us against the temptation to give in to fate or accept passively the cycles of nature. 'Revolution/ or Exodus, occurs when Wilde, exasperated by Bosie, nevertheless forgives him his petulance and goes to Paris to meet him. They thus flee temporarily their enemy, Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensbury (DP, 884). They set themselves up as social outlaws. Their emancipatory flight represents for Wilde the 'intensification of personality' that each artist requires. Law, the third phase, provides insurance against the dangers inherent in the smug sense of purity that can corrupt a group of people united by traditions, when they decide to purge the social order to keep their purity. Frye's use of Taw' is not to be confused with the 'repeating processes in nature/ about which he is not concerned here (GC, 118-19). Coming after awakening and emancipation, Taw' represents the stage in which social and individual standards are assimilated, and the community affirms its apartness from the rest of the world. Here Wilde and Bosie, as artists, are supposed to live under an injunction: thou shalt remove from life all that does not promote art (DP, 876). Yet Bosie does not have the power to live by this commandment, and he begins to

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bring Wilde down with him. Bosie's evil ways and squandering of his talents bring about the artist's fall. Wilde can only write when Bosie is away. Ironically, as their relationship progresses, Bosie himself becomes the force that does not promote art. Wilde bewails that the entire day after 11:30 a.m. is wasted with a series of luncheons, teas, dinners, and after-dinner chitchat. Wilde says, 'At the great moment my will power completely failed me' (DP, 879). He tells Bosie, 'I should have shaken you out of my life as a man shakes from his raiment a thing that has stung him' (ibid.). He goes on to compare Bosie to the lion cub that seems sweet when it is young but which grows up to be ferocious and deadly (ibid.). The fourth phase, Wisdom, is predicated on law, and since through wisdom a person interprets an individual law and applies it to a concrete situation. 'Wisdom/ then, is the individualizing of the law, follows upon the creation of the special community. Wisdom is Janus-faced. On the one hand it is rooted in understanding the past that produces viable laws, and on the other hand it is a grounding for the prudence that allows us to get from day to day on a stable moral course. With wisdom we escape from parroting a handful of precepts and release the energy to live adaptive moral lives (GC, 124-5). Wilde resists the moral that he has suffered for his sins. Instead, he insists that he has suffered for his good points. He has resisted again and again being overcome by hatred. This insight is the beginning of his wisdom, but he must now try to apply the law of the artist's calling to his own situation: he must get rid of Bosie for both their sakes. Wilde learns that one cannot sacrifice oneself to save someone who is morally suicidal. He says, The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving' (DP, 889). Unlike Bosie, Wilde refuses to hate. He exclaims: 'Hate blinds people. You were not aware of that. Love can read the writing on the remotest star; but Hate so blinded you that you could see no further than the narrow, walled-in, and already lustwithered garden of your common desires' (DP, 884). Prophecy, phase five, marks for Frye 'the extent of what in other contexts we could call the creative imagination' (GC, 128). The present moment for the prophet is a state of alienation from a state of 'relative happiness' (ibid.), and he looks forward to a return to happiness in the future. Prophecy has created much anxiety in the past because of the competing claims of priests and prophets and the conflicting voices of accredited prophets and ecstatics. With 'Prophecy' - the individualiz-

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ing of the revolutionary impulse - Wilde mixes art and religion. He declares that the externals of life now no longer matter to him, and he will show that Christ's life is the 'most wonderful of poems' (DP, 924). Wilde says that if he ever writes again, one of his works will be on 'Christ as the precursor of the Romantic movement in life' (DP, 931). He sees in Christ 'not merely the essentials of the supreme romantic type, but all the accidents, the wilfulness even, of the romantic temperament also' (ibid.). Wilde claims, 'Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy. For every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image' (DP, 928). Wilde does not present himself as John the Baptist to the new vision of Christ. He does, however, refer to the song of the prophet Isaiah: 'He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him' (ibid.). The metanoia of the Gospel phase, according to Frye, is a kind of 'spiritual metamorphosis' that keeps the individual from becoming stuck in the limiting view of the traditional community. Respect for others, delight in sharing, and enthusiasm for existence itself, all of which we see in the Sermon on the Mount, set one free of the 'latent terrorism in the rule of law' (GC, 131). For Frye, these characteristics of Jesus' sermon show us that the overcoming of evil in the world is not just the replacement of ignorance with enlightenment. In the metanoia that comes with 'Gospel,' Wilde's avoidance of mentioning his illegal and antisocial behaviour is not only an example of self-censorship, although it is partially that, but also an indication that what he really sees as his sin is not the violation of society's strictures, but his blocking of the activity of God within him in his failure to reassert his artistic potential after his disastrous relationship with Bosie. As part of this antinomian gospel, Wilde states: 'Christ's primary desire was not to reform people, any more than his primary desire was to relieve suffering' (DP, 933). Christ was not interested in turning a robber into a model of bourgeois propriety. Instead, 'in a manner not yet understood of the world he regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes of perfection' (ibid.). Wilde is not presenting himself as a Christ figure here. Instead he is the prophet as tragic hero, a person whose ability to be tragic has partially been removed from him. I remember that I used to say that I thought I could bear a real tragedy if it came to me with purple pall and a mask of noble sorrow, but that the dreadful thing about modernity was that it put Tragedy into the raiment

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of Comedy, so that the great realities seemed commonplace or grotesque or lacking in style. (DP, 936)

Wilde laments that everything in 'my tragedy' has been 'hideous, mean, repellent' (DP, 936), and he later states that one should not assume that those who are the 'causes or occasions of great tragedies share in the feelings suitable to the tragic mood' (DP, 949). Finally, Frye divides the seventh and last phase, Apocalypse, into two varieties: panoramic and participating (GC, 135-7). He is less concerned with the first, which includes the marvels of the Last Judgment opening up into the categories of Heaven and Hell, and other end-ofthe-world scenarios, and more interested in the second, in which God is seen as the Alpha and Omega who makes all things new. In the participatory apocalypse the division between the divine and human is finally abolished, the subject and object tension is dissolved, and 'the law loses its last hold on us' (GC, 137). In Wilde's 'Apocalypse' the panoramic view of terrible last things opens up on the age of modern life itself. We are now living in an age of sentimentality. Since 'the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart' (DP, 946), the opposite ends of thought have met. On the more personal level, the apocalypse is what Bosie will have to face in terms of his own conscience. Bosie must overcome the 'mean, starved, unimaginative life' (DP, 953) he has led in order to find salvation. He must realize himself (ibid.), just as Christ points to self-realization. Bosie must not be afraid of the past if he is to do so. Here we have the 'abolition of time' theme that is part of the vision of participatory apocalypse, following upon the panoramic apocalypse. Wilde says, '[T]he past, the present and the future are but one moment in the sight of God, in whose sight we should try to live. Time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of Thought' (DP, 956). In The Double Vision, Frye writes, The metaphors of creation and apocalypse, at the beginning and end of the Bible, mean that in the presence of God the past is still here and the future already here' (NFR, 205). Frye coins the word 'timeful,' the better to indicate the 'eternal presence of God as timeless' (ibid.). Frye always warned against a literal reading of the Bible. Various critics have warned us of a literal reading of Wilde's prison letter that would obscure its mythic dimension. Examining De Profundis through Frye's categories enables us to agree with M.C. Andersen, who feels that despite the invective and transference of blame in the letter, it is not

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really appropriate to charge Wilde with a 'lack of integrity for voicing these thoughts/ since 'the aesthete in him finds pleasure in the picture of a lie - his lie - beautifully transformed.'6 Furthermore, as William E. Buckler states, if 'one takes the relentless case against Douglas to be the author's primary motive, then De Profundis becomes a sort of pitiless diatribe in which the charges are all out of proportion to any constructive purpose they might be said to serve.' Buckler would prefer to see it as a 'celebration of the protagonist's spiritual salvation/7 Such readings, I feel, are preferable to one such as Leszek Drong's which, rather biographically in its view of Wilde and Bosie, sees the letter as an indication of the 'excessive nature of their relationship/8 Frye wrote that there is nothing behind the mask, so to look beneath the mask of the persona of the letter is to no avail. Wilde's final plea is one that may still seem egocentric to some. He appears to offer knowledge. However, I would say that he offers us a path to follow, not a self to emulate. When Frye speaks in Creation and Recreation of the coral insect that may suddenly be endowed with enough consciousness and vision to be able to see the island it has been helping to create (NFR, 51), we have the sense of what Wilde has awakened to see in prison. NOTES

1 All further references to Oscar Wilde's De Profundis will come from the The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, intro. Vyvian Holland (London: Collins, 1966; repr. New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 873-957. All subsequent references in this essay are to this edition and are marked DP, followed by the page number. (For the earlier editions, see also De Profundis, ed. Robert Ross [London: Methuen, 1905], and De Profundis, ed. Vyvyan Holland [New York: Philosophical Library, 1950].) 2 Sir Philip Sidney, Selected Writings, ed. Richard Dutton (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1987), 119. 3 Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism,' in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Collins, 1966), 1089,1100. 4 Oscar Wilde. The Critic as Artist/ in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 1011. See NFR, 41. 5 Guy Willoughby, Art and Christhood: The Aesthetics of Oscar Wilde (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), 108.

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6 M.C. Andersen, 'Document of Division: Oscar Wilde's De Profundis,' Unisa English Studies 17.2 (September 1979): 9. 7 William E. Buckler, 'Oscar Wilde's Aesthetic of the Self: Art as Imaginative Self-Realization in De Profundis,' Biography 12.2 (Spring 1989): 112. 8 Leszek Drong, 'Of Wild(e)ness and Carceral Subjectivity,' in Wojciech Kalaga and Tadeusz Rachwal, eds, The Wild and the Tame: Essays in Cultural Practice (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Slaskiego, 1997), 84.

The Seduction of Figaro: Gender and

the Archetype of the Tricky Servant' GRAHAM N. FORST

I

When Figaro makes his second entrance in Act One of Rossini's // Barbiere di Siviglia (just after Rosina's famous aria Una voce pocofa) he begins to chide her for her apparent acquiescence in her marriage to her guardian, the obsessively jealous Dr Bartolo. Looking at Rosina, Figaro compliments her (indirectly) on her capello nero, her guancia porporina, and her occhio die parla, and so forth... but there's not a hint of anything romantic occurring between them. And quite frankly, it never really occurs to anyone, although it's a logical enough question: why exactly does the insanely jealous Bartolo let Figaro into Rosina's presence at all? Our casual acceptance of this anomaly shows how conditioned we are to narrative archetypes: Figaro is after all the 'tricky servant' - the dolosus servus - and as such, his gender (in what Northrop Frye called 'the holiday or Sabbath world' of art [CP, 169]) is quite irrelevant. Therefore, the following piece of dialogue between Figaro and Rosina (dropped from the opera libretto) in Rossini's source, de Beaumarchais's Le Barbier de Seville is all the more remarkable: BARTHOLO: ... Has that barber been around here? ROSINE: Don't tell me he worries you too! BARTHOLO: He's no different from the rest. ROSINE: You can't be serious! BARTHOLO: Ha! Once you let your defences down everyone will end up deceiving you - women, your best friends - even your most trusted servants!

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ROSINE: Good God. Surely you give me enough credit to be able to resist Figaro! BARTHOLO: I don't trust any woman, and I certainly don't trust their principles!1

What is surprising here is the idea, or accusation, that an inamorata could be even accused of being sexually interested in the dolosus servus. Of course, Figaro is a 'stronger' character than the archetypal dolosus servus: his opening monologue (gloriously rendered by Rossini through the aria Largo al factotum della citta - 'Make way for the factotum of the town') makes it very clear that he is 'on the way up'; that he won't let his status as a servant impair his social aspirations (a fact that led Napoleon to refer to Le Barbier as 'the revolution in action').2 Yet for all his bluster, Figaro remains, archetypally at least, the purest embodiment of such tricky servants as Puck or Ariel or Mozart's Leporello or Despina; or Dorine in Moliere's Tartuffe, or Jeeves, or Mary Poppins - and who would ever accuse any of these characters of arousing sexual interest in the men and women they serve? And probably, the fact that de Beaumarchais felt he had to provide dialogue rationalizing Figaro's isolation with Rosine simply reflects a sign of the upward mobility of the servant class at the end of the eighteenth century.3 Northrop Frye, of course, had a great deal to say about such archetypes, very little of which has been directed towards the subject of the depiction of gender as such in narrative. But an examination of the relationship between Figaro and Rosina raises the possibility of just such a fruitful discourse between archetypal and gender criticism, in a way that could divert gender criticism from ideology towards revealing how specific types of gender depiction feed into or emerge from certain types of narrative strategies, and even ontologies in general: in Frye's case, Romanticism itself. II

When we consider why the archetypal 'tricky servants' have always been 'safe' with their masters, we realize that it is not just because they were servants (God knows there has always been sufficient sexual interest between the master and servant class throughout history and literature - take Rochester and Jane Eyre, for example), but because they were not in any material way represented as gender-specific. Maybe, like Peter Pan and other fairies and sprites they are pre-sexual, or perhaps they transcend sexuality, like the 'facilitators' of myth and ritual - the

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Tricksters' of North American aboriginal myth4 or the various priests, oracles, shamans, psychoanalysts (i.e., in Eliot's The Cocktail Party), medicine men, fairy godmothers, angels, clowns, pudgy little boys with dainty wings, helpful ghosts, or grateful animals so ubiquitous in world mythology. One only need think of how 'butch' the traditional 'female' servants are in Moliere's comedies or are television's Hazel, Alice in The Brady Bunch, or Florence in The Jeffersons; and how 'feminine' are the male servants in Western comedy from Terence and Shakespeare to Le Cage aux folles to countless other indulgent and compliant butlers, chauffeurs, cooks, stewards, and valets in 'classical' and pop comedy forms. So the question must be asked: why is depiction of the dolosus servus as androgynous, or sexually shifty, so universal in comic narrative? And surely the answer is, precisely because it is the comic responsibility of the dolosus servus to act as a 'neutral' catalyst in a chemical reaction or a 'touchstone' in alchemy; and the dolosus servus can only facilitate the union of the subversive lovers if he or she has no specific 'interest' (sexual, ideological, economic - it doesn't matter) in either partner of the immanent union. This fact becomes especially clear when we turn to the genre of Romance, where the comic archetype of the dolosus servus has its corollary, as Frye points out (AC, 197), in the sexually neutral or ambiguous prophetic sibyl or Jung's 'old wise person' (guru, counsellor, guide), who is called upon to mediate between the quester (seen as natural) and his or her spiritual goal (seen as supernatural). Among such, we can count such 'sexless' characters as Teiresias (Eliot's 'Old man with wrinkled female breasts') or Merlin or Falstaff or Prospero or Wordsworth's Leech Gatherer or Tolkein's Gandalf; Melville's Queequeg; the slave Jim in Huckleberry Finn; the ghosts in Dickens's A Christmas Carol; the teetotal, 'something not human' Hickey among the drunks at Harry Hope's bar in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh; and the transsexual Hermine who guides Harry Haller sexlessly through the Magic Theatre in Hesse's Steppenwolf (a favourite novel of Frye's). Or, in recent pop culture, we think of Yoda in Star Wars, or the robot Data in Star Trek; the chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy or Mr Miagi in the Karate Kid series of 1980s cinema; the dwarfish medium Tangera in the Poltergeist movies; the cryptic Wilson in TV's Home Entertainment; and the various judges and juries in courtroom dramas and doctors in hospital dramas - all of whom are depended on or sought out for guidance when the hero's quest is at its nadir. Why? Because, as 'sexually disinterested/ they can

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objectively facilitate the search of the quester for occult or arcane knowledge, justice, equity, freedom, health, initiation, spiritual fulfilment, and so forth. This need for 'catalytic' or neutral facilitation of the quest accounts for Dante's provision in his Commedia of a male and a female facilitator (Virgil and Beatrice) - which permits the transcendence of gender stereotypes and conventions as the poet seeks his rebirth, exactly as in Wordsworth's Prelude, where the poet's passage is enabled on the one hand by his 'bodiless and sexless' sister, Dorothy, and on the other by his friend Coleridge.5 The case is similar in many English Romantic lyrics, where we find that the growth of the spiritually questing narrators is facilitated by persons, creatures, or entities that are socially proscribed by taboos against homosexuality and pederasty, incest, fetishism, and bestiality, as in so many myths and fairy tales (e.g., 'Eros and Psyche/ 'Snow White,' 'Jack and the Beanstalk') and in much pop culture (Lassie, Flipper, Mr Ed, Charlotte the spider, Pinocchio's Jiminy Cricket, etc.). Thus, the speaker's 'passage' in Coleridge's This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison' is realized through the vicarious agency of his (conveniently) absent male friends Lamb and Wordsworth; and the 'passage' of the narrator of Wordsworth's 'Lines' (Tintern Abbey') is affected platonically by his sister; while the spirit of the narrator of Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is 'released' through the agency of a totemic objet d'art, as is Shelley by a skylark and the west wind. And the list goes on, through wind harps, daffodils, babies and children (vide Wordsworth's 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality/ 'We Are Seven'); nightingales, the Waldvogel in Wagner's Siegfried; the Ancient Mariner's water snakes - and, of course, there's Coleridge's Christabel, whose 'initiation' is achieved through the sublimated enticements of the lesbian lover Geraldine. Strikingly, although Frye never makes this connection, the androgynous (or at least non-gender-specific) facilitating character appears in a failed capacity in the tragedy-irony cycles as an ironic or impotent fool (King Lear, Hamlet [Yorick], the Porter in Macbeth, Wagner in Goethe's Faust); a fantasy child (Waiting for Godot, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf); an ineffective spirit (the powerless Ariel in Pope's The Rape of the Lock, or the goddess Dullness in The Dunciad) or tormenting demon (like Melville's Bartleby, the Valet in Sartre's No Exit, Orwell's Big Brother, Carol, the vexatious 'student' in David Mamet's Oleanna, or Dostoevsky's Underground Man's torturer, Apollon); a lunatic (Aeschylus' Cassandra, Conrad's Mr Kurtz, the Orator in lonesco's The Chairs, O'Brien in

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Orwell's 2984); a foolish old man (Felonious, Pander, Pangloss, or Dr Rank in Ibsen's A Doll's House); a crooked or feckless ecclesiast (Friar Laurence, Tartuffe, Dostoevsky's Father Zossima, Flaubert's Fere Bournisien, Pastor Manders in Ibsen's Ghosts, Hawthorne's Arthur Dimmesdale); a quack, impotent doctor (Charles Bovary, the protagonist's husband in Charlotte Oilman's grim The Yellow Wallpaper,' or the inept Dr Mandelet in Kate Chopin's The Awakening); a fake or incompetent clairvoyant (Eliot's medium 'with a bad cold,' Madame Sosostris; Madame Flora in Menotti's opera The Medium; or Madame Arcati in Coward's Blithe Spirit); a robot or machine (as in Kapek's R.U.R., Pinter's The Dumb Waiter, or the hideous torture mechanism in Kafka's 'In the Penal Colony'); or, as in Tintern Abbey' (but with an ironic difference), as a sibling protected by the incest taboo, exactly as is Gregor Samsa, in Kafka's Metamorphosis, by his sister, Greta, whose music is said to 'open before [Gregor] the unknown nourishment he craved'; which does not, however, true to the ironic mode, prevent him from being swept out with the trash.6

Ill Northrop Frye's insistence in Words With Power that our response to the Bible should be 'literary' (xv) allows us to explore the neutrality of the facilitating archetype in a scriptural context by showing how those biblical characters most associated with the 'linking' of man to God, such as the various O.T. angels and prophets (Gabriel, Raphael, Elijah, Jeremiah, etc.) are inevitably represented as non-sexual (and in this respect anyway, the Buddha is certainly correlative, as are Prometheus and Hermes); as opposed to the very gender-specific 'earthly' biblical protagonists such as Adam, David, and Solomon (compare, in this respect, the two Marys in Jesus' life). Indeed, when Christian themes are displaced into literary narrative, this 'story of a virgin son of a virgin mother ... dominated by images of sublimation' (202) presents Jesus himself as precisely such a sexually neutral or, as in modern Catholic mysticism, 'androgynous' facilitator - the catalyst through whom mankind is redeemed in the eyes of God - and all Christians or ex-Christians remember that their prayers end with 'We ask this in Jesus' name.'7 In short, Jesus must be presented as 'free' from sexual orientation or impulse (pace Lawrence [The Man Who Died] and Kazantzakis [The Last Temptation of Christ]) precisely so that he may facilitate: in Paul's words, 'In Christ, there is neither male nor female' (Galatians 3:28).

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Frye strongly alludes to this sublimated dimension of Christian mythology in Words with Power in an important reference to a passage in Revelation (14:4) that he sees as containing 'suggestions that the emancipation of the spirit restores an original androgynous form of humanity'; and in this context, he also quotes 1 John 3:9: 'Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him' (127). Later in Words with Power, Frye refers to some gnostic traditions identified with Christ that 'seem to suggest that his spiritual kingdom returns to the total fusion of male and female': Jesus said to them, 'When you make the two one and make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside and the above like the below, and that you might make the male and the female be one and the same, so that the male might not be male nor the female be female ... then you will enter' [i.e. the spiritual kingdom (Frye's emendation)], (quoted on 204)

As Frye suggests many times, the need to facilitate this male+female 'spiritual kingdom' is the reason why 'the gospel Jesus is presented as a homosexual (actually androgynous)' (LN, 277: Denham's LN index has many similar references under 'Jesus: as homosexual').

IV As I have said, the androgyny of the tricky servant, or of the MerlinTeiresias figure, or of saviour figures in narrative generally is requisite if (s)he is to 'mediate' the social or metaphysical needs of their protagonists 'disinterestedly' - with a foot in both worlds, as it were. But Northrop Frye's profound unfolding in Words with Power of the aesthetic concepts (derived from Kant) of 'disinterestedness' and 'purposiveness without purpose'8 drives this notion of the androgynous facilitator beyond mere gender abstractions, to reveal on a higher level how powerfully and energetically Frye's literary theories can nourish our understanding of the role of gender depiction in literary studies, driving gender studies towards 'primary' rather than 'secondary' concerns. The true 'power' of words is most fully proclaimed, says Frye, when words are 'intensified' in myth and metaphor, those 'primitive formjs] of awareness' which take us 'to a more open-ended world' and show us 'the reality of non-human personality' (VVP, xxiii, 22,23). Language thus intensified becomes 'not only the obvious but the inescapable guide to

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higher journeys of consciousness' (28). This capacity of the poetic to 'mediate' between 'nature' and 'grace/ between 'the undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature' (RE, 97; AC, 203), suggests a role for art that exemplifies what Frye has called 'The Romantic Myth.' For corresponding to Kant's demonstration in his critical philosophy of the estrangement of man and nature is, in Frye as in Romantic theory generally, a vision of man as 'fallen/ not into sin, but into 'self-consciousness': into 'his present subject-object relation to nature, where, because his consciousness is what separates him from nature, the primary conscious feeling is one of separation' (SR, 17-18). And the function of art in this context is, as Frye said often, no less than the 'recovery of Paradise' or 'the reforging [of] the broken links between creation and knowledge, art and science, myth and concept' (AC, 354). Similarly in Words with Power, where this art-as-reconciler theme is very strong, it is through the 'poetic imagination' that we learn that 'the ultimate sources of hampered movement/ that is, time and space, 'disappear' in the domain of 'play' discovered by the arts (185). Thus, just as the sexually undressed facilitating character in a dramatic narrative seeks to conjoin his or her protagonist to a narratively defined social or metaphysical ambition, so does art, undressed of ideological allegiance (and only when it is so), accomplish the reconciliation of man to his spiritual essence.

V The tradition of German Idealism, which Frank Lentricchia correctly (and disdainfully) traces from Frye back to Kant and Schiller, places at the centre of consciousness a 'free' faculty.9 In Kant, it is the aesthetic Urteilskraft ('judgment') that, because it is 'disinterested/ 'mediates [freely] between' the understanding and the reason, between nature and freedom.10 As Herbert Marcuse put it, in a passage heavily underscored in Frye's personal copy of Eros and Civilization: Tn the Critique of Judgement, the aesthetic dimension and the corresponding feeling of pleasure emerge not merely as a third dimension and faculty of the mind, but as its centre, the medium through which nature becomes susceptible to freedom, necessity to autonomy.'11 As is well known, the Romantics, like Schopenhauer after them, seeking to stipulate a more powerful faculty than judgment (one that would actually enter and proclaim the noumenal), sprang their concep-

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tion of the 'Imagination' from Kant's more restricted Urteilskraft. This essentially Romantic notion of the imagination as capable of mediating between freedom and necessity appears all through Frye's oeuvre, but with increasing frequency in his latter books. Thus, in Anatomy of Criticism, Frye defines 'the world of imagination' as one that 'rises free' from the 'compulsions' of morality and 'truth' (93). In The Educated Imagination, the imagination is similarly defined as 'the constructive power of the mind set free to work on pure construction, construction for its own sake' (50); and later, in Myth and Metaphor Frye refers to imaginative constructs as 'form[s] of play' because they are 'detached from the kind of commitment that we call "belief" (112). It is in Words with Power, however, that Frye is clearest and most insistent on this point: here, 'non-rational psychic activities' are said to give the poet a '"let's pretend" playground that need not be taken seriously unless he re-enters an ideological mode and devotes himself to expounding it in his own language' (24). For the poetic is 'playful, and therefore should be taken in a different spirit from discursive verbal structures' (36). Finally, Frye insists that there is 'something of Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game about the arts' (41); for 'however ironic or anxiety-ridden the fiction may be, the positive impulse behind it, the impulse to express a concern for more abundant life, is still a gay a scienza, a form of play or self-contained energy' (43). This is what Frye means when he says that 'in the poetic mode there is no compulsion: anything in the imaginative world can be assumed to be true for the duration of the individual work.' As a result, 'the imaginative and its freedom to create must be the basis of whatever goes beyond it' (117; my emphasis). And it is precisely this Vision of man as homo ludens/ participating in the 'dance of liberated movement' (176, 187) that is both the cause and consequence of the free imagination. Thus, we have in Frye a three-level correlation: as on the aesthetic level is the 'facilitator' of dramatic narrative to a literary protagonist, so on the psychological level is the free Imagination to the spiritually attended mind, and so on the cosmological level is art to humanity in general, as Blake and Shelley always maintained. Yet as Frye insisted over and over, there is also a fourth level - that of the teacher, constantly 'abolishing himself,' or 'turning ... himself into a transparent medium for his subject, so that the authority of his subject may be supreme over both teacher and students' (WE, 550). And the suns of this four-starred galaxy are the symbols of freedom

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itself: first, Figaro, the unaffiliated valet nonpareil; second, art, which joins poetry and music as 'the three Powers in Man of conversing with Paradise, which the flood did not Sweep away/ as Blake said;12 third, the human imagination; and fourth, the critic, or the educator detache, exemplified by the 'invisible' Northrop Frye himself, for whom, like Figaro, room must be made: Largo factotum dell' universitd, largo.

NOTES 1 Le Barbier de Seville (Paris: Petites Classiques Bordas, 1970). My trans. 2 John Wood, in the introduction to his trans, of de Beaumarchais's The Barber of Seville and the Marriage of Figaro (Harmonds worth: Penguin, 1964), 30. 3 Indeed, when Figaro and his fellow-servant Suzanne become the protagonists of the second of de Beaumarchais's trilogy, Le Manage de Figaro, they quite successfully get up the nose of the senex iratus of their play - Count Almaviva himself - by foiling his plans to execute the droit du seigneur with his wilful maidservant. 4 In the introductory note to his play Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, playwright Tomson Highway describes the native Trickster' god as 'as pivotal and important a figure in our world as Christ is in the realm of Christian mythology ... [H]e straddles the consciousness of man and that of God, the Great Spirit... By [our] system of thought [Nanabush]... is theoretically neither exclusively male nor exclusively female, or is both simultaneously.' In Modern Canadian Plays, ed. Jerry Wasserman, 3rd ed., vol. II (Vancouver: Talon, 1994), 322. 5 Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (London: Yale University Press, 1990), 307. Paglia sees Dorothy as William's 'Jungian anima' who 'hovers at Wordsworth's side like a tutelary spirit' (308). 6 In The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1971), 171. 7 See Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Bollingen series XX, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 174. 8 These Kantian formulae recur often in Frye, who was very familiar with Kant's Critique of Judgement. His copy in the E.J. Pratt library of the University of Toronto is lightly annotated. 9 After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 20-1.

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10 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans., with intro., J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1961), 15. 11 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York: Random, 1962), 159. Frye's copy is item #1059 in the EJ. Pratt Library, University of Toronto. 12 William Blake, Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Nonesuch, 1927), 609.

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SPIRAL CURRICULA

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Frye's Fourth: The Substance of Things Hoped For, The Evidence of Things Not Seen' IAN SINGER

Solo quest'iride posso lasciarti a testimonianza d'una fede che fu combattuta, d'una speranza che brucio piu lenta di un duro ceppo nel focolare. Conservane la cipria nello specchietto quando spenta ogni lampada ... Montale, 'Piccolo testamento'1

Frye organized all his thinking, reading, and writing, much as poets do, according to schemes. Anatomy of Criticism is organized according to four-part schemes: there are four essays, four fictional modes, four phases of literary meaning, four major mythoi or story patterns, and so on.2 In the introduction to the Anatomy's Fourth Essay, Frye finally makes explicit the master-scheme or 'diagrammatic framework' (AC, 243) underlying all the other schemes employed in the book. It is a traditional scheme for poetics in which Plato's idea of 'the good' is divided 'into three main areas' (ibid.). The world of beauty and art occupies the central area, flanked on either side by two others: 'One is the world of social action and events, the other the world of individual thought and ideas' (ibid.). The literary critic's proper concern is, presumably, with the central area of beauty and art. 'Criticism ... is to art what history is to action and philosophy to wisdom' (AC, 12). But history and philosophy regularly encroach upon the critic's territory,

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relating works of art to the extraneous standards of action or ideas, morality or truth. A defence of the autonomy of the discipline of literary criticism therefore entails 'defending the autonomy of the aesthetic.'3 It seems odd, however, that all the Anatomy's four-part schemes should be organized on a three-part plan. Frye immediately reminds us, however, that earlier in the book he has dropped the hint that there may be another way of looking at the tripartite diagram 'in which the middle world is not simply one of the three [goods] but a trinity containing them all' (AC, 243). Since this trinity is arrived at through the middle world it is not simply a reversion to the transcendent good; and yet the suggestion seems to be that, as it is not one of the three goods per se, it constitutes some sort of a fourth. Designating this fourth good a 'trinity/ Frye drops another hint. The buried allusion is to a doctrinal interpolation in the First Letter of John: 'For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one' (5:7). This 'one/ Frye seems to be saying, is a fourth; but we gain access to it through the middle term, 'the Word.' In Frye's view, whatever social authority literary criticism legitimately possesses derives from the cultural authority of the creative arts. We should not be surprised, therefore, to find that Frye's master-scheme for the Anatomy is ultimately derived not from abstract aesthetics, nor from doctrinal theology, but rather from a story. King Nebuchadnezzar was a great lover of the arts. He assembled a magnificent Babylonian big band, and commanded that all his subjects must report to the temple to worship a beautiful golden image that he had specially commissioned whenever they hear the band playing (Daniel 3). There were three Jews of good faith who refused to hearken to the music or to worship the image. This disobedience inflamed the king's temper; he promptly ordered that the three Jews be thrown into a flaming furnace and that the temperature in the furnace be raised. When Nebuchadnezzar went to check the oven, he 'was astonished ... and said unto his counsellors, Did not we cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? ... Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God' (Daniel 3:24-5; emphasis added). Shemaryahu Talmon has remarked on the fact that 'Daniel shares with other biblical writings a predilection for the ascending numerical pattern 3 + 1 ... Whatever the roots of this pattern, it signifies a basic "complete" unit of three, topped by a fourth of special standing and importance.'4 In the Apocryphal 'Song of the Three Young Men' that immediately precedes Daniel 3:24, the fourth figure who has

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a form like the Son of God is designated 'the angel of the Lord.'5 'And the angel of the Lord came down into the oven ... and smote the flame of the fire out of the oven ... so that the fire touched them not at all, neither hurt nor troubled them. Then the three, as out of one mouth, praised, glorified, and blessed God in the furnace' (1:26-8). William Blake, in an account of his painting of 'Three Ancient Britons overthrowing the Army of armed Romans/ alludes to the story in Daniel of the four Jews in Nebuchadnezzar's furnace. Blake explains that the three Ancient Britons were 'originally one man, who was fourfold; he was self-divided, and his real humanity slain on the stems of generation, and the form of the fourth was like the Son of God.'6 In Fearful Symmetry, Frye notes Blake's allusion to Daniel and goes on to identify the original fourfold man mentioned there with the visionary Four Zoas of Blake's prophetic books (272)7 The Four Zoas are the four powers of humanity that, when fully integrated, bring humanity into identity with God. According to Frye, the missing Zoa in Blake's painting of the 'Ancient Britons' is Los, the power of the creative imagination in time whom Blake identifies with Jesus, the God-Man.8 In Blake's myth, reality subsists in this identity of God and humanity. The archetypal Fall, an event continually repeated throughout time, is humanity's fall from identity with God, a rending of the fabric of reality that results in what Blake calls a 'cloven fiction.'9 It begins with the fall of the Zoa called Tharmas, who represents the virtue of hope as well as God's 'power to bring what he creates into complete existence, the first privilege lost to man at the Fall' (FS, 274).10 In his fallen state, Tharmas becomes A threefold region, a false brain: a false heart: And false bowels: altogether composing the False Tongue, Beneath Beulah: as a wat'ry flame revolving every way ...11

The 'False Tongue' is obviously a lie, and as 'a wat'ry flame revolving every way' it is identified with the cherubim who block the way back into Paradise (Genesis 3:24). The threefold region of fallen Tharmas made up of bowels, heart, and brain - corresponds to the tripartite scheme of the good, which 'divides human faculties into will, feeling, and reason' (AC, 243). It should be noticed that Tharmas's heart, corresponding to the province of the beautiful, comes in for no special treatment vis-a-vis Tharmas's other two fallen regions.12 It is, or has become, equally 'false/

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In Fearful Symmetry Frye discusses what Blake means by false or fallen beauty with reference to the Platonic tripartite scheme. 'Beauty/ Frye writes, is not a third form of the good, but good itself, the union in which the reality of the other two consists; it is pursued not by feeling or emotion or any part of the personality, but by the imagination which [Blake calls] 'the Real Man' ... Thus Blake's identification of religion with art is utterly different from the Romantic identification of the religious and aesthetic experiences. (FS, 51)

Frye returns to this point in The Double Vision: With words like 'beauty' we begin to get some glimpse of Blake's 'threefold [vision] in soft Beulah's night'... Beulah in Blake is much the same as the holiday world of the imagination that I identified... with literature and the other arts, where there is entertainment without argument... What he meant by a fourfold vision is beyond our present scope. (NFR, 193)

In a notebook kept during the composition of The Double Vision Frye reconsidered the withdrawal implicit in the final sentence of this passage. 'I have to strike out the passage about the fourfold vision being beyond my scope' (LN, 253). Frye did not strike out the sentence; he did, however, 'after considerable hesitation' ('Preface/ DV, in NFR, 167), add a fourth chapter for publication to the three originally delivered as lectures at the University of Toronto's Emmanuel College. The title of this fourth chapter is The Double Vision of God.' Frye's ultimate concern as a critic is not with a defence of aesthetic good, if by 'aesthetic' we mean one good among three rather than 'the union in which the reality of the other two [goods] consists' (FS, 51).13 In the Anatomy Frye explicitly rejects morality, beauty, and truth as all equally constituting external goals in the valuation of literature. The fact that they are external/ he argues, in rather unexpected terms, 'makes them ultimately idolatrous, and so demonic' (AC, 115; cf. CP, 168-9). Here "The Song of the Three Young Men' may be recalled. Joined by a fourth in the furnace, the three Jews who had refused to hearken to the King's music made music of their own, singing songs to the King of Kings. Following a song of repentance they sang 'a paean of praise to God for his creation, as seen from the perspective of a wholly

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awakened mind' (GC, 193). The 'form' of the fourth who joined them, we may assume, was substantially different from the 'image of gold' (Daniel 3:1-3, 17-18) the three Jews had refused to worship. In a new preface to his classic study of Paradise Lost, Stanley Fish observes that Mammon is faulted not for admiring Heaven's riches but for admiring them in and of themselves and not as signs of the power ('divine or holy else') that made them ... When Milton allows Mammon ... to undercut himself, it is not to make an ascetic point. He is rejecting not gems and gold but the impoverished vision which, in a kind of negative transubstantiation, impoverishes them. Seen (and given life) by another vision, gems and gold would not be mere show and surface glitter; rather they would 'show' something in the sense of pointing to it, emblematizing it, embodying it; and the something they would thus show would bathe them in its glory. This is the vision that is oriented from the beginning toward the origin of value and sees everything in its light.14

The potential of a work of art to be received as the sign of a power 'divine or holy else' does not depend on the artist's religious convictions or the religious content of the work. It is rather a function of art's revelatory power, and therefore of the reader's capacity to discover what is being revealed.15 Frye writes in a late notebook, 'Literature is seed; criticism is the kerygma [i.e., the divine proclamation] of what's in literature' (LN, 334).16 This critical principle or precept, derived from his study of Blake, is the 'suffiction' or 'hypopoiesis' that underlies Frye's entire theoretical project.17 In Blake's poetics, 'the Word of God is the aggregate of works of inspired art, the Scripture written by the Holy Spirit which spoke by the prophets. Properly interpreted, all works of art are phases of that archetypal vision' (FS, 108; cf. FS, 45). Wishing to import Blake's vision of art (and, implicitly, of criticism) into Words with Power, Frye recognized that 'Blake's statements are too extreme for those who dor't know him to understand what he's saying: but perhaps I can say that every work of art is a possible medium for kerygma' (LN, 643).18 At the point in the Anatomy where morality, beauty, and truth are all rejected as incapable standards for the valuation of literature Frye moves to the anagogic phase of his theory. The fourth good appears in this phase as a 'fable of identity'- the only fiction capable of casting out the 'cloven fiction.' Frye's description of the anagogic phase of meaning is

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informed by a vision of a fourth good reached through the Word and encompassing the trinity of justice, beauty, and truth:19 The study of literature takes us toward seeing poetry as the imitation of infinite social action and infinite human thought, the mind of a man who is all men, the universal creative word which is all words. About this man and word we can, speaking as critics, say only one thing ontologically: we have no reason to suppose either that they exist or that they do not exist. We can call them divine if by divine we mean the unlimited or projected human. (AC, 125; emphasis added)

In his elocution of this fiction Frye is very close to Wallace Stevens, who writes in his essay 'Imagination as Value': 'If the imagination is the faculty by which we import the unreal into what is real, its value is the value of the way of thinking by which we project the idea of God into the idea of man/20 Stevens's formulation of the value of human imagination as a conscious introjection of divine mind, Romantic in origin, is not without biblical antecedents. In Paul's letter to the Philippians the apostle exhorts his audience: 'Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men' (RSV, 2:5-7).21 The word 'form' is important here: it is a translation of the Greek en morphe, meaning 'the form by which a person or thing strikes the vision, the external appearance' (cf. Mark 16:12).22 As 'form,' Jesus is a phenomenon; he is the evidence (etymologically, 'what is seen') of the invisible God. On the basis of the word 'form' this passage from Philippians is identified typologically by Christians with the passage already quoted from Daniel, 'Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.' Within the Hebrew Bible itself there is a typological relation between the fourfold Jews who walked in the midst of the fire without being hurt and the bush through which God appeared to Moses on Mount Horeb, that burned without being consumed by the flames (Exodus 3:2; see CR, in NFR, 70-1). Frye's discussions of faith always begin or end as a midrash on Hebrews 11:1: 'Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Yet his entire dialectic of faith, what he calls

The Substance of Things Hoped For, The Evidence of Things Not Seen' 299 the 'dialectic of belief and vision' (NFR, 344-59), turns upon possible translations of the Hebrew words that God uses to identify himself out of the burning bush, ehyeh asher ehyeh (Exodus 3:14). That of the Authorized Version, for one, reads, 'I AM THAT I AM/ To Frye this translation always had the ring of an ontological assertion, reifying the presence of God. But we recall Frye's attitude in the Anatomy to the 'infinite man' and 'infinite word' of the anagogic phase of meaning: 'About this man and word we can, speaking as critics, say only one thing ontologically: we have no reason to suppose either that they exist or that they do not exist.' Angus Fletcher is no doubt correct when he observes that, [a]s Christian thinker, Frye would emphasize the possibility of a Blakean incarnation of the infinite human being divinized through vision. As mere critic, however, as raw theorist, he found in the notion of the final book ['the anagogic ... Book'] a model for the sort of totality he believed the critic should seek to elucidate.23 Yet this speaks to Frye's sense of discretion, not to separate aspects of his identity. Frye's approach to religion and his approach to literature are, in key ways, virtually indistinguishable.24 In the first chapter of The Great Code Frye observes that the translation of ehyeh asher ehyeh into an ontological assertion leads to the conception of God as a noun, an object to whom we relate as subjects (17). The word 'subject' carries a twofold meaning here, with both meanings related to the 'cloven fiction' Blake attacked and lamented. In Frye's understanding of it, belief, as opposed to faith, is a relation predicated upon the separation (spatial or temporal) of subject and object. As subjects relating to an object, that is, to the Being of God, we have already projected God outside of ourselves, reversing the action of the imagination which, as Stevens says, is 'the way of thinking by which we project the idea of God into the idea of man.' Severed from humanity, God the Father becomes 'Nobodaddy/ the 'Ghost of Priest & King.' To believe in such an 'Allegoric Godship' is to subject oneself to a rationalized and coersive authority.25 For a Christian to say that he believes in Jesus does not take him any farther; it merely shifts the object of belief from one person of the Trinity to another. As Immanuel Kant remarks in The Conflict of the Faculties, [I]f we think of this God-man ... as the Divinity 'dwelling incarnate' in a real man and working as a second nature in him [exclusively], then we can draw nothing practical from this mystery: since we cannot require our-

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selves to rival a God, we cannot take him as an example. And I shall not insist on the further difficulty - why, if such a union is possible in one case, God has not let all men participate in it, so that everyone would necessarily be pleasing to Him.26

Of course, this is just the difficulty Blake and Frye do insist on. Frye's depiction in the Anatomy of the literary critic who repeatedly finds himself carried away in a sort of undertow from literature proper towards either history or philosophy (AC, 12) is a schematic displacement of Blake's depiction of what happens to the Jesus who is conceived of as singularly and exclusively partaking of divinity. This Jesus will be carried away in an undertow from the Word. Either he will be accommodated to the Father, understood in this context as the transcendent Ghost of Priest and King, or else he will be accommodated to the immanent, indwelling Holy Spirit. In the latter case this Jesus becomes a historical scapegoat onto whom humanity projects its own indwelling divinity. This is to say, humanity externalizes its own imaginative freedom, along with the responsibility such freedom entails, in order to kill it. The Modern Church Crucifies Christ with the Head Downwards,' Blake writes in his Notebook.27 Geoffrey Hill, 'the most Blakean of modern poets/ provides us with a variation on this scapegoat image in his recent The Triumph of Love.28 From the Book of Daniel, am I correct? Quite correct, sir. Permit me: refocus that Jew - yes there, that one. You see him burning, dropping feet first, in a composed manner, still in suspension, from the housetop.29

This image of a Jew falling in flames from a housetop is documentary; it comes from actual film footage shot by the German perpetrators of genocide.30 It thus constitutes evidence. But this section of Hill's poem concludes with a different species of evidence, the biblical 'evidence of things not seen.' We might call it the evidence of the fourth Jew, the Jew Nebuchadnezzar was astonished to see walking in the midst of the fire: Run it [the scene / the victim] through again and for ever he stretches his wings of flame upon instruction.

The Substance of Things Hoped For, The Evidence of Things Not Seen' 301 'Instruction' is the word English translators of Martin Buber have used to render Weisung, Buber's own preferred translation of the Hebrew word Torah. (Buber entitled his translation of the Pentateuch Die Ftinf Bucher der Weisung [The Five Books of Instruction].) Stretching his wings upon instruction, upon Torah, the falling Jew is capable of reversing the natural direction of his fall.31 Martin Buber concludes his afterword to I and Thou with the following admonition: God's address to man penetrates the events in all our lives and all the events in the world around us, everything biographical and everything historical, and turns it into instruction, into demands for you and me. Event upon event, situation upon situation is enabled and empowered by this personal language to call upon the human person to endure and decide. Often we think that there is nothing to be heard, as if we had not long ago plugged wax into our own ears. The existence of mutuality between God and man cannot be proved any more than the existence of God. Anyone who dares nevertheless to speak of it bears witness and invokes the witness of those whom he addresses - present or future witness.32 Hill's evidence of the thing that went unseen by the SS chroniclers and by their camera, that is, of the image of the ascending Jew stretching his angelic wings of flame upon Torah, is reminiscent of Blake's biblically inflected description of the rising sun: What it will be Questiond 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 [Isa. 6:3; Rev. 4:8] I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it.33 Frye comments on this 'description without place': It is no use saying to Blake that the company of angels he sees surrounding the sun are not 'there'... To prove that he sees them Blake will not point to the sky but to, say, the fourteenth plate of the Job series illustrating the text: 'When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy' [Job 38:7]. That is where the angels appear, in a world formed and created by Blake's imagination and entered into by everyone who looks at the picture. (FS, 26)

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It is at the point where vision becomes doubled, where the Jew falling in flames becomes a Jew rising on wings of fire, where the furnace of Mammon's 'guinea' sun becomes the heavenly sun of a Hallelujah chorus, that Frye's own reformulation of Hebrews 11:1, in The Double Vision, takes effect: [F]aith is the reality of hope and of illusion. In this sense faith starts with a vision of reality that is something other than history or logic, which accepts the world as it is, and on the basis of that vision it can begin to remake the world ... There is no certainty in faith to begin with: we are free to deny the reality of the spiritual challenge of the New Testament, and if we accept it we accept it tentatively, taking a risk. The certainty comes later, and very gradually, with the growing sense in our own experience that the vision really does have the power that it claims to have. (NFR, 181)

Frye's faith, as 'the reality of hope and of illusion,' gradually dissolves the condition in the conditional clause in Stevens's formulation of imaginative value: 'If the imagination is the faculty by which we import the unreal into what is real, its value is the value of the way of thinking by which we project the idea of God into the idea of man.'34 It is no use saying to Frye that the divine fourth of his anagogic fable of identity is not 'there.' Frye does not present us with an esoteric Urmythos of a God-Man and ask us to believe it exists ontologically. The infinite imagination is not something we can objectively see. Rather, it is a power we struggle to see by: it is our own imagination raised to its greatest potential power.35 We remember that before Paul calls the attention of the Philippians to the 'form' God took in Jesus, he exhorts them, as a sort of precondition for witnessing this form: 'Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus' (RSV, 2:5).36 The Hallelujah-Chorus perception of the sun makes it a far more real sun than the guinea-sun, because more imagination has gone into perceiving it ... If there is a reality beyond our perception we must increase the power and coherence of our perception, for we shall never reach reality in any other way. If the reality turns out to be infinite, perception must be infinite too. To visualize, therefore, is to realize. The artist is par excellence the man who struggles to develop his perception into creation, his sight into vision. (FS, 21, 25-6)

The Substance of Things Hoped For, The Evidence of Things Not Seen' 303 The infinite imagination is not an object of study, but a theory, which for Frye always takes its now obsolete sense of 'a sight.'37 In 1971 a young man wrote to Frye from the Department of English at Wilkes College, Pennsylvania: 'Blake & a few others ... know something that the rest of us don't know ... You know about it... What they know & you know about is apocalyptic ... My request is: could you let me know if you guys are onto something that I could get onto & how.'38 Frye responded to the letter, writing that what he learned from Blake is that every consistent and continuous creative life, whether it is creating in the arts or simply in ordinary social relations, has for its assumption, whether the person realizes it or not, the principle that a creative life in time is helping to build up something which is above time and does not go away. But for the most part it is not a matter of knowing what other people don't know. It is rather a matter of being able and willing to do things that most people are not able or willing to do, or don't see the importance of doing.39 If we follow the young man's suggestion and look to the apocalyptic climax of Blake's epic Jerusalem we see: The Four Living Creatures Chariots of Humanity Divine Incomprehensible In beautiful Paradises expand ... And they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which bright Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in Visions In new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect.40 The evidence that the author of Hebrews provides to document his formulation of faith as 'the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen' is evidence of such 'exemplars of Memory and of Intellect/ John H. Augustine entitles his essay of introduction to a commentary of 1609 on Hebrews 11 '"Notable Precedents": The Vocational Rhetoric of Exemplary Figures/41 Hebrews 11 is a catalogue of exemplary figures like Noah and Abraham who, as Frye wrote in his

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letter, 'were able and willing to do things that most people are not able or willing to do, or don't see the importance of doing/ It was "by faith/ says the author of Hebrews, that 'Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went' (11:8). And so the author of Hebrews goes on, telling how everything the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs took upon themselves to achieve was undertaken through a vision of what they were supposed to do, and with a faith that God was with them in doing it, and with a hope that it might be accomplished. This brings us to the second translation of ehyeh asher ehyeh upon which Frye's dialectic of belief and vision hinges. Frye puts the ontological assertion of being suggested by the translation of the Authorized Version aside and follows Martin Buber in his understanding of God's words from the burning bush. One of the most seminal books I have read is Buber's I and Thou. Buber says we are all born into a world of 'its/ and if we meet other human beings we turn them into 'its/ In this view, everything is a solid block, a thing. Consequently, when we think of God, we think of a grammatical noun. But you have to get used to the notion that there is no such thing as God, because God is not a thing. He is a process fulfilling itself. That's how he defines himself: 'I will be what I will be.'42

As Frye observes, Buber's way of translating God's words allows God to articulate himself as a verb, a power of divine activity. In Frye's own reformulation of this second reading of ehyeh asher ehyeh, God is 'a process accomplishing itself (GC, 17). How we ought to act, how we ought to know, how we ought to feel: these give us the Platonic triad, the good, the true, the beautiful. These form Kant's three critiques. Over the three is the form of the fourth: how we ought to make: man's role as creator. Faith is not assent to the probably untrue: it's man making himself in the image of God. (LN, 413)43

The form of the fourth enters Frye's critical cosmos at its theoretical and practical limits, bringing vision and action into dynamic identity. Here also it is fitting to recall Blake's Zoa Tharmas: in his fallen form a 'threefold region' corresponding to the Platonic triad; but, in the restored company of Blake's fourth, Los (the creative imagination working in time), Tharmas performs his proper role as both the power of

The Substance of Things Hoped For, The Evidence of Things Not Seen' 305 hope and the power of God to bring what he creates into a complete existence. This second reading of ehyeh asher ehyeh cannot be firmly established, but Everett Fox observes in his recent translation of the Torah into English (in which he follows the tack of Buber's German translation) that 'the several times Moshe tries to wriggle out of his mission, God answers him all but once with the same verb, in the same meaning: "I will be-there with you.'"441 conclude with one last passage from Geoffrey Hill's The Triumph of Love, a passage composed very much in 'the vocational rhetoric of exemplary figures': What remains? You may well ask. Construction or deconstruction? There is some poor mimicry of choice, whether you build or destroy. But the Psalms - they remain; and certain exultant canzoni of repentance, secular oppugnancy ... And if not wisdom, then something that approaches it nearly. And if not faith, then something through which it is made possible to give credence - if only to Isaiah's prophetically suffering servant; if only by evidence of the faithful women, Ruth and Naomi, as they were, and as Rembrandt sees them, the widowed generations, the irrevocable covenant with Abraham which you scarcely recall.45

NOTES

1

All I can leave you is this rainbow in evidence of a faith that was contested, a hope that burned more slowly than hardwood on the hearth. Keep its powder in your compact till every light goes out... Eugenic Montale, 'Little Testament' (Collected Poems, 1920-1954, trans. Jonathan Galassi [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998], 406-7).

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2 Four Essays is the subtitle of Anatomy of Criticism, but see Eleanor Cook's 'Anatomies and Confessions: Northrop Frye and Contemporary Theory' (Recherche semiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry 13 [1993]: 13-14) as well as her earlier 'Against Monism: The Canadian Anatomy of Northrop Frye' (in Agostino Lombardo, ed., Ritratto di Northrop Frye [Rome: Bulzoni, 1989]), in which she describes the 'mathematical formula' organizing Frye's work as '4 plus 1' (284). It may be noted that 'myth/ the first of the five fictional modes in the Anatomy, is 'as a rule found outside the normal literary categories' (AC, 33), so that only four fictional literary modes are operative in Frye's scheme. Likewise, the first of the five phases of meaning in the Anatomy, the 'descriptive/ is not a literary phase proper, except insofar as it exists as a tendency within the 'literal' phase of meaning (AC, 73-4). Where Frye does seem to begin with a pattern of five, therefore, the 'mathematical formula' he uses might best be described as '5 minus 1.' 3 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994), 10. 4 'Daniel/ in Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, eds, The Literary Guide to the Bible (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 347. 5 'The angel of the Lord seems to have been understood as distinct from other angels and, in the earlier Old Testament literature, appears to be almost another designation for God' (HarperCollins Bible Dictionary, ed. Paul J. Achtemeier [New York: HarperCollins, 1996], 34). 6 A Descriptive Catalogue, in David V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 542. 7 Frye returned to this complex of imagery in his final essay on Blake. 'Blake was one of a minority of visionaries in the West to think in fours and eights rather than the traditional constructs derived from the Trinity. His chief biblical sources here are the four rivers of Eden, the fourth figure who appears along with the three in Nebuchadnezzar's furnace, and the "fourfold Gospel," which is connected with his four "Zoas"' ('Blake's Bible/ MM, 271). To redescribe what Cook has identified as the '4 plus 1' schematic formula in Frye as a formula of '5 minus 1' is not merely to quibble. The significant number is '4.' (Frye would think of it as an image rather than as a numeral.) '5 minus 1' and '3 plus 1' both come out to '4.' For the significance of '8' in Frye's work, and its relation to Blake's symbolism, see Michael Dolzani's 'The Book of the Dead: A Skeleton Key to Northrop Frye's Notebooks/ in David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky, eds, Rereading Frye, The Published and Unpublished Works (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 20-2.

The Substance of Things Hoped For, The Evidence of Things Not Seen' 307 8

Four Mighty Ones are in every Man: a Perfect Unity John XVII c. 21 & 22 & 23 v Cannot Exist, but from the Universal Brotherhood of Eden, John I c. 14 v The Universal Man. to Whom be Glory Evermore Amen. Los was the fourth immortal starry one ... (The Four Zoas, 1:3-10; Erdman, ed., Descriptive Catalogue, 300-1)

9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16

Blake's first marginal reference to John in the above passage juxtaposes the 'Perfect Unity' of the Four Zoas with Jesus' prayer for the interpenetration - through his own person - of God and humanity ('I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one' [John 17:23]). The second marginal reference to John juxtaposes 'the Universal Brotherhood of Eden' with the form of 'the Word ... made flesh' (1:14). Blake's Four Zoas are adapted from the 'four living creatures' surrounding the 'throne' or 'chariot' (Heb. merkavah) of God seen by Ezekiel in the first vision of his Babylonian exile (Ezekiel 1:5-28; the image is renewed in Revelation 4:69). Daniel also saw a vision of the merkavah of the 'Ancient of days' in Babylon (Daniel 7:9-11). 'For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise,' in Erdman, 268. The Four Zoas, 4.7; Erdman, 301. See FS, 277-9. Jerusalem, 14:5-7; Erdman, 158. The False Tongue's heart may be identified with '[t]he Beautiful Man, [who] represents the human pathetic' in Blake's account of the 'Ancient Britons' (Erdman, 543). In his review of Fearful Symmetry Henry Wasser commends Frye for finally resolving the problem of how to come to terms with the aesthetic quality of Blake's poetry: 'The individual quality of Blake's poetry cannot come clear unless the visionary intent is comprehended ... [Blake cannot] be evaluated except in relation to the dynamics and goal of his vision ... Professor Frye has realized this fully. For him the "politics of vision" have given way to the ends and qualities of vision, and a basic standard of aesthetic judgment has been reaffirmed' (Modern Language Quarterly 9 [1948]: 249). Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), xv-xvi. Cf. CP, 125; FS, 159; AC, 348-9. For 'kerygma' see GC, 29-30 and WP, 116-19.

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17 Coleridge coined these words to signify 'something made up underlying something else, as distinguished from "hypothesis" and "supposition," words that signify something (already existing) put under something else' (H.J. Jackson, ed., Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A Critical Edition of the Major Works [New York: Oxford University Press, 1985], 705 n. 211). ('We have invoked Vico's axiom verumfactum, that what is true is what we have made true, as an essential axiom of criticism' [ WP, 135; cf. WP, 82].) 18 Cf.LN,341. 19 'The three persons of the Trinity are to be connected by ors rather than ands, and the real God is fourfold, power, love and wisdom contained within the unity of civilized human imagination ... The final revelation of Christianity is, therefore, not that Jesus is God, but that "God is Jesus'" (FS, 52-3). (Frye quotes an aphorism from Blake's Laocobn design.) 20 Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 735-6. 21 The Revised Standard Version (Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger, eds [New York: Oxford University Press, 1952]) is quoted in this instance because, as Frye remarks, 'the AV's rendering [of Philippians 2:6-7] is not a translation but an inept gloss' (GC, 129). The AV's gloss is a carry-over from William Tyndale's translation (The New Testament. Translated by William Tyndale. 1526, ed. W.R. Cooper [London: The British Library, 2000]): 'he made hymsilfe of no reputacion, and toke on hym the shape of a servaunte.' Tyndale misses Paul's notion of kenosis - 'that Christ "emptied himself" of the divine nature at his incarnation, or at least of a divine nature separate from the human one. This appears to mean that what is really dead is [not God but rather] the antithesis between a human subject and a divine object' (WP, 133). 22 The Scofield Reference Bible, ed. C.I. Scofield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), 1258 n.l. 23 Angus Fletcher, 'Frye and the Forms of Literary Theory,' in Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham, eds, The Legacy of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 284. 24 This is clear practically from the start: 'Protestantism contains, at its finest, the refusal of a fine mind to be bullied by inferior interpreters of tradition' ('Gains and Losses of the Reformation/ in SE, 266). 'Vision is the end of religion, and the destruction of the physical universe is the clearing of our own eyesight. Art, because it affords a systematic training in this kind of vision, is the medium through which religion is revealed' (FS, 45). The priority of myth to fact is religious as well as literary; in both contexts the significance of the flood story is in its imaginative status as an archetype, a status which no layer of mud on top of Sumeria will ever account for' (AC, 325).

The Substance of Things Hoped For, The Evidence of Things Not Seen' 309 25 Blake, To Nobodaddy/ in Erdman, 471; 'Annotations to Thornton/ in Erdman, 669. See Blake's famous vignette on plate 11 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 26 Trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Abaris Books, 1979), 67. 27 A Vision of the Last Judgment; Erdman, 564. See FS, 83-4. 28 See Harold Bloom, 'Introduction/ in Bloom, ed., Geoffrey Hill: Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 1. Bloom reaffirms his sense of Hill's poetic lineage in a blurb written for the dust jacket of The Triumph of Love (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998): 'Hill, always the heir of William Blake ...' 29 Section XX. 30 'Not infrequently, the Jews stayed in the burning buildings [of the Warsaw Ghetto during its final evacuation] until, due to the heat and the fear of being burned alive, they preferred to jump down from the upper storeys' ('Report of SS-Brigadefuehrer und General-leutnant der Polizei Juergen Stroop, to the Hoehere SS- und Polizeifuehrer Ost, Crackow/ in Es gibt keinen juedischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr [There is no longer a Jewish ghetto in Warsaw], quoted by Gerhard Schoenberner in The Holocaust: The Nazi Destruction of Europe's Jews [Edmonton: Hurtig, 1985], 177 [trans. Susan Sweet]). 31 Walter Kaufmann notes that 'Weisung could also be rendered as "direction"' (Martin Buber, / and Thou, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970], 182n.). 32 / and Thou, 182. 33 A Vision of the Last Judgment; Erdman, 565-6. 34 Collected Poetry and Prose, 735-6.

35 According to a midrash on Ezekiel's vision of the chariot of God, composed by Jewish mystics of the fourth or fifth century C.E., 'It is impossible to say that the Holy One, blessed be He, declared to Ezekiel: I show you My merkavah on condition that you explain it to Israel... But it was in order to expound to man the extent to which the eye can see and the ear hear' (Schocken Book of Jewish Mystical Testimonies, ed. Louis Jacobs [New York: Schocken Books, 1996], 39). 36 When Kant complains that we as mere human beings 'cannot require ourselves to rival a God/ and that therefore Jesus cannot stand as a practical example for humanity, he would seem (at least in Blake's reading of Philippians) to be missing the significance of this exhortation and of the characterization, directly following, of the divinity of Jesus, 'who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped' (RSV, 2:6). The communication of divinity to humanity does not end with the kenosis of Christ's incarnation: 'the apocalypse begins with

310

37

38 39

40 41

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the release of the Word from incarnation' (LN22; emphasis added). 'The kerygma is - and I use the term advisedly - the resurrection of the living speaker from the written myth. Or rather, the living word ... Kerygma is the completion of the personal possession of the written word' (LN, 306; cf. LN, 16 [para. 85]). For the motto of his poem Milton Blake quotes from Moses' reply to the messenger who informed on Eldad and Medad - two men not of the seventy authorized to prophesy at Mount Sinai but upon whom the 'spirit rested' nonetheless: 'would God that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them' (Numbers 11:26-9; cf. Erdman, 96). If we look in the Oxford English Dictionary for this sense of 'theory,' we find the following example from a sermon of Bishop Andrewes (1605): 'St. Luke ... calleth the Passion a Theory or Sight [23:48]... Of our blessed Saviour's whole life or death, there is no part but is a Theory of it selfe, well worthie our looking on.' Robert J. Heaman to Frye, 3 October 1971, NFF, 88/39/9. 13 October 1971, NFF, 88/39/9. Heaman had asked Frye about a passage in 'The Keys to the Gates' in which Frye discusses the function of Los, whom we recall is the missing Zoa in Blake's painting of the 'Ancient Britons': 'Los is not simply creative power, but... the power that constructs in time the palace of art (Golgonooza), which is timeless. As Blake says in a grammatically violent aphorism, the ruins of time build mansions in eternity. The products of self-sacrifice and martyrdom and endurance of injustice still exist, in an invisible but permanent world created out of time by the imagination. This world is the genuine Atlantis or Eden that we actually live in. As soon as we realize that we do live in it, we enter into what Blake means by the Last Judgment. Most people do not make this act of realization, and those who do make it have the responsibility of being evangelists for it' (StS, 198). 98.24-30; Erdman, 257-8. A Commentary on Hebrews 11 (1609 Edition), by William Perkins, ed. John H. Augustine (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1991). In Blake's view the whole of the Bible is written in the 'Rhetoric of Exemplary Figures': T cannot conceive the Divinity of the Bible to consist either in who they were written by Or at what time ... but in the Sentiments & Examples which whether true or Parabolic are Equally useful as Examples' ('Annotations to Watson'; Erdman, 618). Northrop Frye in Conversation, ed. David Cayley (Concord, ON: Anansi, 1992), 183-4. Frye seems to be recalling the following passages from I and Thou: 'I do not believe in God's naming himself or in God's defining him-

The Substance of Things Hoped For, The Evidence of Things Not Seen' 311 self before man. The word of revelation is: I am there as whoever I am there [Ich bin da als der ich da bin]'; 'We cannot go to others with what we have received, saying: This is what needs to be known, this is what needs to be done. We can only go and put [the revelation] to the proof in action' (160). 43 Frye's notebook entry reiterates an earlier passage in the Anatomy: 'We live in a world of threefold external compulsion: of compulsion on action, or law; of compulsion on thinking, or fact; of compulsion on feeling, which is the characteristic of all pleasure whether it is produced by the Paradiso or by an ice cream soda. But in the world of imagination a fourth power, which contains morality, beauty, and truth but is never subordinated to them, rises free of all their compulsions. The work of imagination presents us with a vision, not of the personal greatness of the poet, but of something impersonal and far greater: the vision of a decisive act of spiritual freedom, the vision of the recreation of man' (94). 44 The Five Books of Moses (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 270. 'God said to Moshe: EHYEH ASHER EHYEH / I will be-there howsoever I will be-there. And he said: Thus shall you say to the Children of Israel: EHYEH / I-WiLLBE-THERE sends me to you' (Exodus 3:14). 45 Section XXIII.

The Ashes of Stars:

Northrop Frye and the Trickster God MICHAEL DOLZANI

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. (Mallarme, Igitur, trans. Mary Ann Caws)

A few days before his death, 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.'1 Edward Edinger, who reports Jung's response in Ego & Archetype, comments that 'Jung is calling God what most people call chance or accident. He experiences apparently arbitrary happenings as meaningful rather than meaningless.'2 According to this way of thinking, 'all the vicissitudes of the outer and inner life have a meaning and are expressions of transpersonal patterns and powers.'3 Elsewhere, Jung had a name for this theory of meaningful pattern as an epiphany out of chance or chaos: synchronicity. Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow, a book that Northrop Frye admired a great deal, had another name for it: paranoia. In another work that Frye admired, Mallarme's Igitur, the title character throws dice in a tomb, then lies down and dies upon the ashes of

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his ancestors, which may or may not be the ashes of stars upon which his family buries him. Whatever number he got was meaningless, because random: it could have been anything. It could also, however, be seen as infinitely meaningful: why that particular number in the final gamble of one's life? These are the two levels of experience, natural and spiritual, that Frye speaks of in his last book, The Double Vision, and the latter is an epiphany out of the former, a light manifesting itself in darkness. Several years before his death, Northrop Frye speculated upon what he called 'the concealed extra number' (LN, 456). Twelve, for example, harbours an extra thirteenth that is the essence of the twelve. Another form of concealed extra number is the sum of all the numbers in a particular sequence. A later paragraph in the same set of typed notes observes the fondness of Rabelais - whom Frye has just got done calling 'probably the writer who most clearly grasped all the dimensions of language and verbal communication' - for the number seventy-eight, 'particularly in the final descent' (LN, 458). Seventyeight is the sum of the numbers up through twelve. Three paragraphs further on, Frye adds that seventy-eight is 'the number of cards in the Tarot pack if we count the Fool one instead of zero' (LN, 459). Frye died a few years later, at the age - by chance? - of seventy-eight. A throw of the dice does not abolish chance, but at the same time that it exemplifies what Pynchon called entropy, signifying nothing, it also suggests a mysterious and meaningful pattern. In this way, everyone's life, and death, is a throw of the dice in which the stakes are literally all or nothing. The fact that Edinger's quotation from Jung appears at the end of a discussion of Blake's interpretation of the Book of Job takes the argument a step further. In evolutionary biology, neo-Darwinism says that even the most elegant and complex examples of design in the natural world have been generated by sheer blind accident, the chance mutation of a particular chromosome. Yet if that accidental universe, while remaining accidental on the natural level, becomes the vehicle for the revelation of an inward order of oracular meaningfulness, we infer 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?'4

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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, especially 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 Christian 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 leaders 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. 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, as Job himself found out, he is a home wrecker. Frye says in a notebook entry: '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 our front parlors' (LN, 668-9). He is even destructive of the grammar 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:

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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 (Genesis 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 (Genesis 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 committed an unforgivable sin (I Samuel 15); a God who observes children mocking the prophet Elisha and sends bears out to eat up the children (2 Kings 2:23), and so on? All mythologies have a trickster God, and Jehovah's treatment 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.5 (NFR, 226-7; DV, 74-5) If you have such a God on your hands, you are going to have to struggle. In Frye's later work, this struggle is what he means by the purgatorial; its telos is recreation, one of the keys to his thought. Frye's Bible books struggle with the Word in an attempt to recreate both its aspects: as text and as vision of God. The following notebook entry 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 organizing image of Words with Power: Powerful pull toward the primitive submission to doctrine: I've always been attracted by those who took religion 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 ... (LN, 632)

Far from being the struggle of Frye alone, however, recreation 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' (LN, 678). This is Heilsgeschichte, the shape of sacred history: Turgatorio in history is the wrestling of Jacob

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or Israel with the angel or God. The swallowing of the sky-bugger' (LN, 666). Thus, in the exercise of our imagination or recreative powers, we become what Nikos Kazantzakis referrred to as the saviours of God.6 But Jacob's agon is also the model for all reading, which is recreative: All reading begins in the revolt against narcissism: when a book stops reflecting your own prejudices, whether for or against what you think you 'see in it' - & begins to say something closer to what it does say, the core of the reality in the 'objective' aspect of it takes shape & you start wrestling with an angel. (LN, 184)

Even more explicitly: 'A central symbol of criticism for me is Jacob wrestling with the angel, but I don't want this to be the frame-up that many modern wrestling matches are' (LN, 390). Recreation turns the perspective of the Book of Job inside out: it is no longer Job who is on trial but God himself. In such vortical reversals, recreation is to some extent like deconstruction: it does not wilfully and irresponsibly twist the text into any shape it wants, but liberates an aspect that was latent but suppressed by its selectivity. For all Job's final yes-master grovelling in the dust, the book as a whole can hardly be said to justify the ways of God to man; it seems to say something closer to, 'Yep, that's God all right.' As a whole history of commentary proves by trying desperately to avoid saying it, the suggestion is that there is a very dark side to the divine nature, projected as Satan and the dragon Leviathan. If we have a Jungian shadow, perhaps it is because we are made in the image of God. Jung's own Answer to Job makes clear what we might infer from the history of commentary: that the only interesting responses to the darkness of God are going to be those that do not nervously try to absolve the trickster God by allegory or any other mode of rationalization, but which do not merely reject him either, like the Gnostics and Marcionites who wanted to expurgate him out of the Bible. Rather, they will be those who descend into that shadow to find out what is inside it. This is not a fanciful image; in fact, it is more or less Frye's own figure in Words with Power: the katabasis or descent-quest into the 'nothing' out of which vision must come (WP, 288-92). Robert Denham has explained how the vision of what Frye calls interpenetration is his Paradiso, both the centre and the circumference of his religious thought, his vision of plenitude.7 What I am going to go on to describe briefly is the purgatorial way of vacancy that is the journey towards interpenetration and therefore the

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shadow side of interpenetration itself, a way that is an exodos or departing from the way. In individual experience, the descent into nothing is the descent into loss, for loss and absence are the typical manifestations of God's power in this world, as if God had an impulse to undo his own creation. He takes away paradise from Adam and Eve; everything from Job; himself from Jesus ('My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'); Beatrice from Dante; Regina Olsen from Kierkegaard; the entire past from Marcel in Proust; Helen Frye from her husband. Life is transience, and poststructuralism tells us that all our illusions of presence are a desperate defence against the reality of loss in its various forms of difference in space and deferral in time, the ultimate denial being, as Ernest Becker said, the denial of death.8 We are such stuff as dreams are made on, says Prospero in The Tempest, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. Milton's Paradise Regained is explicitly modelled on the Book of Job, but Christ's rejection of Satan's temptations in it also has overtones of the Preacher's 'Vanity of vanities' in Ecclesiastes. Again and again in Frye's 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.9 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 endorses the endless miseries of human history is only a projection 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 which 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.

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A consequence of this reversal is the transfer of the trickster persona: the real trickster now is creative man, Prometheus, Blake's rebel-hero Ore. All the imagery of the trickster shaman is transferred over to a figure of uprising revolutionary energy, whose ideological implications are expounded politically 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; and artistically by poete maudit figures whose manic-depressive responses range from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell to line 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 conventions 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' (LN, 657). 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 consciousness, an everlasting nay that begins in the Bible's own revolutionary basis. In some of the unpublished notebooks, he calls this the second awareness, locked in a cyclical historical conflict with a conservative and authoritarian first awareness. Usually these just go around in a circle resembling Blake's Ore 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 befriend man. There is also a generic parallel: in 'Romance as Masque,' Frye traces the affinities of the idealizing forms of naive romance and classical New Comedy with the Christian commedia, 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 (SM, 148-78). 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 narrative Old Comedy, labyrinth followed by dialectic emergence of identity of Odysseus at Ithaca' (TEN, 165). 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.

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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' (NFC, 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 '[t]he 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' (TEN, 216). Elsewhere, he says that 'there's a special viciousness in religion that's found nowhere else' (LN, 661). Therefore it seems 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 co-eternal with his divinity. This doctrine is not strictly a heresy, in the sense of being a doctrine inconsistent with the Christian tradition (in 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.10

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 creative imagination, might seem not just unusual but unorthodox. 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.'11 The standard 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 division. For Romanticism is a tragically failed project, and it is because it failed that we have lived the two centuries of alienation, irony, and

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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 perception 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 egocentre of consciousness to a maximal level of apocalyptic vision. The younger Frye had little use for the alternative strain of hidden-reality Romanticism whose line runs from Jakob Boehme and the occult tradition by way of Kant's noumenal reality to Heidegger and Jung. His antipathy derives in part from Blake's criticism of Boehme, but also from his own youthful prejudice against German culture, acquired during the Nazi era and later outgrown. He expresses his impatience in his article of 1947, 'Yeats and the Language of Symbolism,' significantly, one of the few pieces of writing whose formulations he suggested might be revisable (FZ, 218-37).12 Some of Frye's later religious formulations remain close to the Blakean mode of expression, for instance his oft-repeated recreation 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 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-fulfilment. 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 that if God wanted human beings to fly he would have given them wings, is not so stock as it seems. There are

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eloquent passages in Mircea Eliade about flight as one of the oldest and most powerful symbols of human transcendence, the trickster shaman's 'flight of the wild gander.'13 Forty years later, engineers swore that it was aerodynamically impossible to break the sound barrier. Since this essay is involved with hermetic number-symbolism, it should be pointed out that Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, mostly by ignoring the doubters, in 1947, the year Fearful Symmetry was published. Frye says to David Cayley that '[t]he 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' (NFC, 190-1). 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.14 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.'15 Yet the problem with recreation through an expansion of the limits of the phenomenal 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 Wallace Stevens's title, 'A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts.'16 The only thing that can follow, in a manic-depressive cycle, is deflation. In the Cayley interviews Frye says, 'Human nature is corrupt at the source, because it has 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 in Job: what is there in life for him unless he has a vision of something else?' (NFC, 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.

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Hence Frye begins to be interested in a line of thinking he was ambivalent 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 towards 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 decreated. Recreation 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 Mallarme. 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 provides 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 transfigured, as Jung says the trickster spirit Mercurius is transfigured in alchemy from the spirit of chaos into the lapis itself. Out of absurdity, he is the wonderful counter-absurdity 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 descending 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, 'a spiritual reality, an otherness of a creative power not ourselves.' The context here is important, as he draws this out of Stevens, whom he calls 'a useful counterweight to the sometimes exclusive radicalism of the tradition that is embryonic in Milton, fully developed in Blake, and, perhaps, already decadent in Yeats' (SM, xii-xiii). On the other hand, the Spirit is not just human natural energy, Freud's libido, Blake's Ore, but is rather

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the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, our deepest identity that is nevertheless also our identity with the divine. Of course, not even Frye can transcend the conflict of opposites. In a late notebook, he writes, The metaphorical structure of Acts 2 says that the Holy Spirit came down from outside into the apostles, creating the metaphor of the Holy Spirit being within man as an ultimately external power, salvation thus being a drama among the persons of the Trinity in which man is hardly included at all. This seems to me to ignore Paul's conception of man as himself being a spiritual body, so that the Holy Spirit and the spirit of man unite and the soul dissolves with the body. It's a question of metaphors, of course, and either-or situations are always deadlocked. (LN, 643)

But uniting the Holy Spirit and the spirit of man also seems to dissolve the human into the divine, so that we are still caught up in a drama within the Trinity, and the paradoxes of theodicy remain what they always were. Any discursive argument can be deconstructed, even those in which the rhetorical trickster's sleight of hand moves quicker than the eye. At any rate, this is why Frye sounds sometimes religiously orthodox and at other times religiously radical. I do not think he would be ruffled by this. No one has ever constructed an argument without two sides to it; a one-sided argument is only a euphemism for stupidity. It stands to reason that what Milton called 'this great argument' would require the greatest possible tension between the bow and the lyre. Yet wisdom does not turn itself into an unhappy consciousness making itself ill with irresolvable contradictions; its attitude is a gaya scienza that has learned to breathe in the upper air of paradox. It is indeed a question of metaphors, and a great visionary is God's fool or juggler judged according to how many metaphors he can keep in the air at the same time, each of them a supplement and counterbalance to the others. Odysseus is a wonderful model for such a trickster. In the first line of the Odyssey he is identified as the polytropos, the 'man of many turnings/ the original man for all seasons, meeting each occasion with the response that suits it. In verbal terms, this means a gift and a zest for lying that would have won the admiration of Oscar Wilde. Lying in this context means finding, not the definitive metaphor, but the right metaphor for the occasion, the one that 'works' in the pragmatic sense. (Frye

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once said of himself, 'I'm one of Jung's feeling types, a senser of occasions' [LN, 247]). Odysseus creates, sometimes with make-up but for the most part verbally, not one identity but 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 Proteus. He knows he is in for a Job-like ordeal, but he cries out on Calypso's island, 'Let the trial come.'17 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 everything, like Job - and he does so, even down to his identity, becoming 'Nobody.' 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.'18 And it is Athena's help that enables him to pull off his ruse, 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 oneself. 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 blaming 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. 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 by way of the analogy with human love. The centre of 'orthodox' or relatively conservative 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 apocalypse. 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

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or immortality, conversion means more than becoming a believer or joining a church. It means metamorphosis, recreation, transfiguration, 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, sometimes linked by Frye with the Odyssey because of the shared pattern of a disguised ruler reclaiming his rightful kingdom, Angelo's deepest desire is to torment and rape a woman whose deepest desire is to become a nun. His desires are fortunately thwarted by that trickster figure the Duke, who seems to have learned most of his tricks from the God of Job. Like him, he abdicates, leaving in charge a sinister figure who puts the imperfect but sympathetic hero Claudio through a terrible ordeal. When the Duke finally puts things right, he marries Angelo to the long-suffering Mariana, thereby earning Measure for Measure its reputation as a 'problem play' and perpetuating Shakespeare's habit of marrying an unsympathetic male figure to a woman who has redeemed him but whom he does not deserve - Claudio to Hero in Much Ado about Nothing, Bertram to Helena in All's Well That Ends Well. In order to see Angelo's marriage as a happy ending, we have to assume a change in him far more radical than the deepest change in attitude; we have to assume a total metamorphosis into a different person, a new identity. The Accuser in us demands measure for measure, and refuses in the name of realism to recognize the possibility for such a break with everything that Angelo has been. Modern cultural studies tell us relentlessly that we are merely the product of everything we have been, of the shaping forces of nature and environment that have constructed an identity for us that we can only exemplify but whose horizon we can never transcend. Nothing transcends genetics, or the Family Romance, or ideology, or the metaphysics of presence, or original sin: the name of what Blake called the Limit of Contraction is legion. Yet it is a tomb out of which we must be resurrected. There was a man called Saul who became another man called Paul, a persecutor of Christians who became a Christian saint, and some people are as suspicious of him as they are of Angelo; but he was not merely a fictional character in a play. He represents the hope in all of us that we are more than what the sceptical, despairing Mephistopheles in us tells us we are. Thus, the hope for miraculous self-transformation is the opposite of egocentrism. It is in fact the necessary prelude to a greater hope, the

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hope of transcending the imprisoning bounds of ego-identity that limit human love. When Frye is on the verge of remarrying in old age, he recounts a story that was told to him of a married couple of Polish Jews who were separated by the Nazis, the man sent to Dachau and the woman to Auschwitz. Both miraculously survived, remarried, each thinking the other one dead, and had children. Then the woman discovered the existence of her first husband, and consulted a rabbi to resolve what we might call the Enoch Arden dilemma. The rabbi's response provides yet another portrait of God as a trickster of the negative sort: He said there must be no direct connection of any kind with him, otherwise she'd be adulterous & her second-marriage children bastards. Nothing to me what Jews do or think: I simply note how frenziedly anxious humans are to catch themselves in rat-traps, and how eagerly they interpret the will of a God who could only be a shit and a stinker. (LN, 203) But eight entries later comes Frye's announcement that he has married Elizabeth Eedy: 'Well, I've entered the Elizabethan age' (LN, 204), and we realize that there is a much profounder reason why he has bothered to record the story. He goes on to explain: 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 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. (Ibid.) The second sentence echoes the problem of the woman with seven husbands in the Gospel of Luke.19 The final sentence refers to a passage in Donne's Devotions that Frye has in fact transcribed just previously: 'All mankind is of one author, & is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is ... translated into a better language ... God's 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' (LN, 203; Frye's italics). Donne's metaphor is a remarkable 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. Yet Frye's immediate reason for quoting it originates in his love for two different women.

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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 (LN, 176). To adapt a sentence from Words with Power, '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' (WP, 141). 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 wilful path violently and recklessly, upset our plans and intentions, and change the course of our lives for better or worse.

NOTES 1 Edward F. Edinger, Ego & Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche (Boston & London: Shambala, 1972), 101. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, newly rev. ed., ed. David Erdman (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 35. 5 An almost verbatim passage in Words with Power adds the 'long bargaining scene with Abraham about the number of righteous men needed to save Sodom' (WP, 106). 6 The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises, trans. Kimon Friar (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960). 7 Robert D. Denham, 'Interpenetration as a Key Concept in Frye's Critical Vision/ in David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky, eds, Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 140-63. 8 Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973). 9 William Blake, Milton, plate 19. 10 'William Blake/ in Carolyn W. Houtchens and Lawrence H. Houtchens, eds, The English Romantic Poets and Essayists: A Review of Research and Criticism (New York: Modern Language Association, 1957); rev. and updated by Martin K. Nurmi in new ed. (New York: New York University Press, for the ML A; London: London University Press, 1966), 13. 11 Ibid., 19. 12 In the introduction to Fables of Identity, he says that 'though I repudiate nothing in it, I should write it very differently now' (FI, 2).

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13 See, for example, The Magic Flight' in part V of Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities, trans. Philip Mairet (New York, Evanston: Harper Torchbooks, 1967), 99-110; also 'Brancusi and Mythology/ in Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, ed., Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1986), 93-101, 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 forgotten bliss of an existence freed from any and every system of conditionings' (100). 14 William James, 'The Will to Believe,' in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover, 1956), 29; repr. of 1st ed. as originally pub. by Longmans, Green & Co., 1897. 15 'Is Life Worth Living?' in The Will to Believe, 61. 16 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1954), 209. 17 Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 5.233. 18 Ibid., 13.379-80. 19 The Sadducees, who denied the resurrection, tried to embarrass Jesus by asking him about a hypothetical case in which a woman successively married seven brothers. Whose wife would she be in the resurrection? Jesus replied: 'But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage' (Luke 20:35).

Northrop Frye's 'Kook Books' and the Esoteric Tradition ROBERT D. DENHAM

Northrop Frye's notebooks, which run to well over a million words, provide a record of his critical and imaginative life that in many respects is quite different from what we find in his published work, and one of the areas of this difference is, I believe, worth opening up for investigation. Frye's notebooks were the workshop from which he fashioned his books and essays. If we consider the notebooks he wrote, say, during the last six or seven years of his life, it is possible to trace the connections between the material they contain and the form this material eventually took in Words with Power. The published form often represents a distillation into a paragraph or so of what Frye laboured over, page after handwritten page, in his notebooks. As one might expect, the late notebooks provide a fairly full account of what Frye was reading during the last years of his life. One of the interesting features of Frye's reading during these years is the attention he devotes to a number of writers who get left behind in Words with Power. The significance, for example, that the French symbolists had for Frye - Rimbaud, Laforgue, Nerval, and especially Mallarme - is not really apparent in his published work. Mallarme makes six cameo appearances in Words with Power, but in the notebooks he appears in ninety-six entries, mostly in the late notebooks and mostly in connection with Frye's fascination with Mallarme as a religious visionary.1 One wonders why the fruits of Frye's interest in Mallarme - as well as in Nerval and Laforgue2 - never made their way into his books or essays. Other topics that Frye planned to write about but never did in any extended way include Schelling's philosophy of mythology and revela-

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tion; the network image in De Quincey, Ben Jonson, and others; 'fairies and elementals'; the American Romantics; the Vedic myth of Hiranyagarbha (especially the seed of fire in the midst of the waters); and Poe, whom Frye calls 'the greatest literary genius this side of Blake' (LN, 165). What I want briefly to canvass is another body of notebook material that I have combined under the umbrella phrase 'esoteric spirituality.' How to understand this material in the development of Frye's thinking is something of a challenge, and I propose here only to outline the broad contours of Frye's reading in this area and to glance at several examples. My intuition is that because the esoteric tradition comes up so repeatedly in Frye's notebooks, it is important to try to understand his interest in it. The appendix to this paper contains an outline of the esoteric tradition as it appears in Frye's notebooks, and the ways Frye draws on this tradition is what warrants study. My use of the word 'esoteric' generally follows the broad definition given it by Wouter J. Hanegraaff, that very diligent Dutchman who has become one of the leading students of the field. Hanegraaff, drawing in part on the work of Antoine Faivre, says we should distinguish five different meanings of the word:3 1 'Esoteric' as a synonym for the occult: here we would have a wide variety of writings on the paranormal, exotic Wisdom traditions, New Age spiritualities, and the like. Frye is clearly interested in the esoteric in this sense. 2 'Esoteric' as secret teachings; the discipline of the arcane with its distinction between initiates and non-initiates. Frye occasionally speaks of secret books and traditions.4 3 The philosophia perennis in religious studies: here 'esoteric' is a metaphysical concept referring to the 'transcendent unity' of exoteric religions. In Notebook 44 Frye writes that 'the progress from "literal" to spiritual meaning ... is ... often identified with an exoteric-esoteric movement' (LN, 131). 4 'Esoteric' as gnosis, in the sense of various religious phenomena that emphasize experiential rather than rational and dogmatic modes of knowing, and which favour mythical or symbolic over discursive discourse. Such esoteric modes of knowing are again clearly central to Frye's grand critical project. 5 'Esoteric' as a complex of interrelated traditions that arise from Renaissance 'hermeticism': alchemy, Paracelsianism and Rosicrucianism; Christian and post-Christian Kabbalah; theosophical and

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Illuminist currents; and various occultist and related developments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Frye's understanding of esoteric in this sense derives chiefly from Frances Yates's Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Antoine Faivre, another widely published authority on the esoteric tradition, argues that we can distinguish Western esoteric thought by four 'intrinsic characteristics/ and these too provide a context for understanding Frye's thinking:5 1 The belief that there are correspondences between all aspects of the visible and invisible worlds that are meant to be decoded. Correspondences can be (a) within nature itself (e.g., the seven metals and seven planets of astrology), or (b) between nature, history, and sacred texts (e.g., Jewish and Christian Kabbalah). This notion of correspondences is everywhere in Frye, though he usually uses the word 'analogy' to refer to it. 2 Nature is felt to be essentially alive in the cosmos (e.g., Paracelsianism, Naturphilosophie). This is less important in Frye, who believed with Blake that there is no natural religion, though we see him drawing back somewhat from the Blakean view in Words with Power. 3 The imagination is the faculty for revelation and mediation. This is, of course, absolutely central in Frye: imagination is all. 4 The experience of transmutation, metamorphosis, or 'second birth.' Such experience is also fundamental in Frye's thought, though the language he uses to refer to it (e.g., resurrection, apocalypse, interpenetration) is different. As the appendix suggests, Frye's reading in the esoteric tradition was wide. How deep it was I think we do not yet know,6 but we get a number of hints from the notebooks. Frye was no stranger to the offbeat. In a set of notes written sometime after 1985 he says, 'I had a strong impulse the other day to write an article called "Fairies and Elementals." It branches out in so many directions that it becomes bewildering, and worse, it takes me back to the days when I wanted to read every kooky book in the world as a background for Blake' (NFF, 1991-28-3b.l). He is referring to Swedenborg, Blavatsky, and Boehme, among others. Frye's interest in elemental spirits (spirits neither angelic nor demonic, or, as he says in Notebook 3, 'non-human forms of more

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or less conscious existence')7 appears to have been motivated by what he found in the early Milton, especially Comus, where the elementals are the Attendant Spirit, Sabrina, and Comus himself. It is an interest that can be traced back to his study of eighteenth-century primitivism as well.8 But Frye's remark about wanting to write on 'fairies and elementals/ a remark that gets repeated throughout his notebooks,9 was triggered on this occasion by his having read Maureen Duffy's The Erotic World of the Faerie (LN, 190), which is pretty close to a kooky book. And Frye's mind began to branch in every direction indeed: backward to Shakespeare's Puck and Ariel and further back to Lyly's Endymion and Peele's Old Wives' Tale; forward to Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno and George Macdonald and Tolkien's essay on fairy stories; then to John Crowley's Little, Big, and from there to Giordano Bruno, science fiction, Celtic mythology, James's occult fiction, and finally to the theosophists (LN, 190). To move from Shakespeare to Madame Blavatsky is to move from the centre to the circumference. Frye had read Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine for Fearful Symmetry and had turned to her again when he was trying to crack the code of Yeats's A Vision - in the first major paper he wrote after Fearful Symmetry.10 Why the attraction to such a discredited (though fairly influential) figure as Madame Blavatsky?11 'Whenever I read Blavatsky and other deifiers of the void,' Frye writes, 'I realize that Xy [Christianity] & the other great religions are, so to speak, phenomenological: they deal with the infinite only in terms of what the infinite has revealed' (RT, 207). Blavatsky's theosophy was, for Frye, 'the connecting link between myth and science,' a kind of thinking that was not quite poetic and certainly not rational, but, as Frye says 'a synthetic and mythical reasoning known as occultism' (NFF, 31.5). 'I don't want to dismiss the "mezzanine" world of Yeats and Blavatsky as purely unreal: some such theory as Bardo might make sense of it, as I've always thought' (NFF, 37.11).12 What Frye is referring to is Blavatsky's view of the cosmos, which he finds linked somehow to William Morris's revolutionary romances. He describes this as Blavatsky's 'dumb-bell shaped cosmos, before birth and after death meeting somewhere around the universe, east of the sun and west of the moon, where the archetypes of the psyche fight their Valhallas, and where the revolutionary drive in all romance isn't perverted or kidnapped by some social institution' (NFF, 1991-28-4bb.24). Frye worries a good deal about such social institutions, including the social institution of second-phase rational thought. If literature can be a critique of pure reason, so can the occult. In his 1947 essay on Yeats,

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Frye says of Madame Blavatsky, 'The Secret Doctrine, whatever else it is, is a very remarkable essay on the morphology of symbols, and the charlatanism of its author is less a reflection on her than on the age that compelled her to express herself in such devious ways' (F7, 221). In other words, if we shift our perspectives, Blavatsky is not a quack after all. Frye was always engaged in trying to get us to shift our perspectives. Here is the way he puts it in a relatively early notebook: Now let's go back to the occult threshold ... Mysticism can come to terms with the dogmatic systems: the soul accepts what the mind hands it just as the mind accepts sense data from the body ... All mental systems are symbolic forms, & are held in suspension by the spirit with a detachment beyond all skepticism. The mystic is thus naturally attracted by a 'why not?' sense of the relativity of reality, & likes to return to the free speculation of the primitive, who thinks a dream is experienced by his soul when leaving the body. Sophisticated reasoning conventionalizes & orders reality, & uses the word 'coincidence' to dismiss any form of unusable design. So he wonders what would happen if he shifted the perspective;... occultism has a continuously satanic role to play, as Blavatsky shows. (NFF, 32.66) Satanic role, I think Frye means, because of the deviousness with which theosophy forces a shift in perspective away from the conventions of Cartesian thinking. We turn now to several of the categories in the appendix, beginning with what Frye called his 'kook books' and then moving to the world of physics - to David Bohm and the ideas of the implicate order and the holographic paradigm. The kook books themselves include a group of highly speculative, somewhat zany, and often amusingly eccentric books that Frye was attracted to. They range from the completely bizarre at one extreme, like Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati, to what we can call New Age religion. They include also perhaps the channelling phenomena, as in Bishop Pike's The Other Side and Jane Roberts's various Seth books, as well as transpersonal or fourth-force psychology. Frye uses the phrase 'kook book' four times in his notebooks. The first is at the beginning of Notebook 23, written during the early 1980s, where he announces that he has become interested lately in two literary genres, science fiction, which he read fairly widely in, and the 'kook book.' Of the latter category he lists three: Wilson's Cosmic Trigger,

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already mentioned, Adam Smith's Powers of Mind, and Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier's The Morning of the Magicians (RT, 366). Smith is a journalist, and Powers of Mind is a far-ranging compendium of all sorts of consciousness expanding: EST (Erhard Seminar Training), Zen, Easlen, biofeedback, transcendental meditation, yoga, the / Ching, and other such inner-space movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The Morning of the Magicians is a book about 'ultra-consciousness/ another encyclopedic account of the anomalies of Charles Fort, vanished civilizations, conspiracies, cryptology, Nazism and the Golden Dawn, and tantalizing enigmas of all sorts. Then in Notebook llh, written in the mid-1980s, Frye lists five books, saying in the entry that follows, Tor years I have been collecting and reading pop-science & semi-occult books ... Some are very serious books I haven't the mathematics (or the science) to follow: some are kook-books with hair-raising insights or suggestions' (LN, 713). The five books are Wilson's Cosmic Trigger again, Itzhak Bentov's Stalking the Wild Pendulum, Rudy Rucker's Infinity and the Mind, Ken Wilber's The Holographic Paradigm, and Stanislav Grof's Realms of the Human Unconscious (LN, 712). Of these, the only two real 'nut books/ as Frye calls them later (LN, 713), are Wilson's and Bentov's. Rucker is a mainstream mathematician; Wilber a biochemist, who has done much to popularize New Age physics, especially the speculations of David Bohm, Fritjof Capra, and Karl Pribram, whom Frye refers to as 'the Tao of physics people' (LN, 106); and Grof, an LSD researcher also connected with the Easlen Institute. Exactly what Frye thought of Grof's work is uncertain, as he does not mention him elsewhere in the notebooks. The other two times Frye uses the 'kook book' epithet is in connection with Merezhkovsky's Atlantis/Europe, and in both cases, while he recognizes that Merezhkovsky comes close to the fictions of Eric von Daniken, he sees the Atlantis book nevertheless as 'an example of how yesterday's kook book becomes tomorrow's standard text' (LN, 17,495). To this list of Frye's 'kook books' we would have to add Michael Baigent's Holy Blood and Holy Grail, perhaps A.E. Waite's book on the Tarot, and Marilyn Ferguson's The Aquarian Conspiracy (which Frye calls a 'goo-goo book' [LN, 713]; it is a kind of Bible of New Age and expanded-consciousness movements in the 1980s, an American version of Pauwels's The Morning of the Magicians, which appeared in France in 1960). We would also have to add Gurdjieff and his pupil Ouspensky, both of whom Frye read. Pauwels had been a member of Gurdjieff's

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circle. But how wide should we cast the 'kook book' net? As Frye recognizes, there is a large gap between the serious work of a respected physicist like David Bohm and the zany speculations of Robert Anton Wilson. The 'kook book' begins to shade off into other areas. The Tao of physics people' (Wilber, Capra) are interested in Eastern mysticism, and so it is not a very large step to Frye's reading of Patanjali's Yoga Sutra and Gopi Krishna's Kundalini, or to the hermeticism and theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and G.R.S. Mead's Thrice Greatest Hermes (a book Frye seems to have admired). It is only another small step to Marie-Louise von Franz's book on alchemy, which would take us towards Jung and Eliade. Yoga and Ouspensky and even A.E. Waite lead us into mysticism, and this opens up another whole area of Frye's reading. 'I have very few religious books,' he writes, '& those I have stress the mystics' (LN, 35). He is speaking not simply of his fondness for Eckhart and Boehme, of William Law and Joachim of Floris, and of scores of others anthologized in Huxley's Perennial Philosophy, a book to which Frye often recurred; he is speaking as well of the writers about mysticism: Silberer, Underbill, Otto, Inge, Fremantle, and Zaehner, among many others. Then there is the 7 Ching, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the latter of which was the source of his lifelong fascination with the bardo state - as well as the bardo novel that he kept wanting to write for most of his adult life. I find no evidence that Frye knew the work of Karl Pribram directly (he appears to have read about Pribram's neurological research in Wilber's The Holographic Paradigm), but he did read at least parts of the other books I have mentioned, many of them during the last six or seven years of his life. His annotated copies of these books are in the Frye Library at Victoria University. We would not be surprised to encounter writers such as Jung and Eliade and the German mystics in Words with Power, where they do in fact appear. None of the other writers I have mentioned, however, appears in that book, though David Bohm's notion of the implicate order does get mentioned in the closing pages of The Double Vision. The scope of Frye's references to the esoteric tradition can be seen in the appendix. Philo of Alexandria, who is mentioned once in passing in The Great Code, appears in fifteen entries of eleven different notebooks. Similarly, one would hardly infer from Frye's published work that he had much interest in Jakob Boehme: he gets mentioned twice in Words with Power. Yet in the notebooks there are fifty-five references. Frye calls himself an 'architect of the spiritual world' (LN, 414), yet much of the

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architecture in the notebooks disappears altogether when the builder gets to work on The Great Code, Words with Power, and The Double Vision. And we find hardly a syllable about the various esoteric traditions in Alvin Lee and Jean O'Grady's edition, Northrop Frye on Religion. The kook book genre is actually rather small, containing a half-dozen or so titles, but the genre does begin to shade off into the categories listed in the appendix, and I think it would be possible to organize all these books on a continuum, like Frye's organization in Anatomy of Criticism of the kinds of allegory. There his principle is the degree of explicitness of the allegory. Here the principle would be, or at least could be, the degree of acceptance or standing such works would have in an academic community. To speak of Itzhak Bentov and Robert Anton Wilson in the same breath as Karl Pribram and David Bohm may seem curious, but there is a connection, and I am not alone in seeing the connection. Practically all of the names I have mentioned so far find their way into two of the most comprehensive studies we have of Western esotericism, Wouter Hanegraaff's New Age Religion and Western Culture and Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman's Modern Esoteric Spirituality. The image we have of Frye is of a brilliant and original thinker creative, schematic, powerfully synthetic - working away for sixty years on the great tradition. Not all readers of the Anatomy were overly familiar with the eccentric fictions of Thomas Amory or the curious treatises of Urquhart of Cromarty. Still, such writers were the exception rather than the rule, and most of what Frye wrote about was on the syllabus, was in fact on his own syllabi: Blake, the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, the Victorian prose writers, the Romantic poets, the modernists from Yeats and Eliot and Joyce to Wallace Stevens. There is, however, another image of Frye that has begun to emerge from the notebooks - a Frye with one of his two annotated editions of the / Ching at his side, using toothpicks instead of yarrow stalks, in order to receive, as he says, 'general advice about what to do and be' (LN, 4); a Frye who is practising the various breathing exercises of Patanjali's Yoga-Sutra;13 a Frye who is trying to discover the meaning of interpenetration in the Mahayana sutras;14 and a Frye whose reading of these kook books is moving out from the centre to the circumference. From another perspective we might say that almost all of the books listed in the appendix are part of the philosophia perennis. The phrase was coined by Leibnitz, but it was of course made popular by Huxley's Perennial Philosophy, a book that Frye says in one of his notebooks he

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'must keep in touch with' (RT, 360). The philosophia perennis is the philosophical version of what Frye calls, following Blake, the Everlasting Gospel. In that sense, the appendix includes texts that belong to the esoteric, visionary, and mystical traditions. According to Huxley, the perennial philosophy embraces a metaphysics, a psychology, and an ethics. It is a metaphysic, he says, 'that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; a psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being - the thing immemorial and universal.' That is not Frye's language, but it would not take much to translate it into third-phase language,15 and Frye does talk about his own version of the perennial philosophy (TEN, 241). Are the kook books a part of the philosophia perennisl In Notebook llh Frye writes, 'At present only the real nut books, Wilson's & Bentov's, are interesting to me' (LN, 713) The reference is to two books already mentioned, Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger and Itzhak Bentov's Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness. What does Frye mean by 'real nut books,' and why would he be interested in them? Cosmic Trigger, published in 1977, is the most popular of more than two dozen of Wilson's books: it has been reprinted at least eleven times. Wilson, a New Age guru and former editor at Playboy, descends from Timothy Leary and Aleister Crowley. He writes on tantric sex, synchronicities, secret societies, goddess mythology, black magic, and a host of other esoteric topics. The Cosmic Trigger is a shapeless book that was itself triggered by Wilson's interest in the Bavarian Illuminati, the alleged conspiracies of which are more mysterious than a Borgesian plot. The Illuminati lead Wilson on a discontinuous romp through all forms of esoterica: triple agents, UFOs, presidential assassination plots, the eye of the U.S. dollar bill, messages from Sirius, Aleister Crowley's shenanigans, quantum mechanics, and deliberately induced brain changes. Cosmic trigger indeed! Wilson proclaims himself the ultimate sceptic, yet it is clear that he has come to take all this very seriously. Frye is obviously right in calling it a real nut book, but why would he be attracted to this kind of thing? In one of his notebooks, Frye quotes, without comment, the epigraph to Cosmic Trigger: 'It's an ill wind that blows nobody's mind' (LN, 713). The source of this twist on Pistol's remark in Henry IV, Part 2 (5.4.90) is identified by Wilson as Principia Discordia by Malaclypse the Younger. Malaclypse the Younger turns out to be a man named Greg Hill, a

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California libertarian from the 1960s and one of the founders of a wacky 'religion' called Discordianism, based on the worship of Eris, the goddess of chaos. Frye says that the kook books are often a frequent source of adagia (RT, 367). Does he mean that 'it's an ill wind that blows nobody's mind' is one such proverb? Frye doubtless rather liked the notion of mind-blowing, which in the late notebooks is at the centre of his mission, though he does not use such breezy slang to describe it. In fact, Frye devotes entry after notebook entry (there are hundreds of them) to exploring ordinary consciousness and ways to get beyond it. For him, to have your mind blown is to revolutionize consciousness. He has a number of different phrases for it: the intensifying, the exalting, the transcending, the transfiguring of consciousness. The 'kerygmatic breakthrough,' he says in a notebook entry from 1988 or 1989, 'always contains some sense of "time has stopped." The sequential movement has become a focus, or fireplace. In intensified consciousness the minute particular shines by its own light (or burns in its own life-fire)' (LN, 290). Or again, from a 1985 notebook: 'expanded consciousness is not religion, of course, but it may be the precondition for any ecumenical or everlasting-gospel religion' (LN, 17). Or still again, from another notebook of about the same time: 'Apocalypse is the hidden flame lit up, first setting the world on fire, then shining in its own light of awakened consciousness (omnia sunt lumina)' (LN, 515). These are Frye's own adagia, but surely he would not have to turn to one of the founders of a parody religion - Discordianism, which Wilson calls a 'guerilla ontology'16 - as a source of adagia. No one but the lunatic fringe would take any of this 1960s brand of neo-paganism seriously. Perhaps a more likely source of Frye's interest is numerology. Here is what Frye writes in Notebook llh: He makes a lot of 23: [The reference is to Wilson's speculations about the mystical significance of the number 23.] 24 & 33 are closed cycles, because you say twelve o'clock or north time. 23 and 32 have the open spark gap I mentioned in FS.17 Maybe this is the 7-8 relation too. And my 15 (16) And the climacteric 63 (641 Ching, chess, etc.). Blake-Jung's 3 & 4. (No: 7 > 8 won't work: it would have to be 8-9 diagrammatically, although 7 > 8 has a lot of tradition going for it. As I've known since Blake, 7 is an event number in time, which includes space by turning 8.) Note the close paranoia links [in Wilson]: if you get fixated on 23, you develop a 'that's for me' feeling about every 23 you see. He'd be nowhere without Jung's 'synchronicity.' (LN, 713)

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Frye had a penchant for such number schemes. Except for his elaborate playing with sixes in the Third Essay of the Anatomy, he was able to keep a tight rein on anything approaching numerology, the belief that numbers reflect properties of our minds or reveal features of the cosmos, and especially that certain numbers have an occult or mystical significance. But the notebooks are filled with number schemes of all kinds. Consider these passages: 100 sections [for the book Frye planned to write following Anatomy of Criticism] with an occult meaning for every damn one; patterns of repetition connecting them; climactic sequences 27-33, 60-6, 90-9; prime numbers after 50 perhaps philosophical. Odd numbers cyclical, especially 7, 11, 13 & 17; even numbers dialectic, especially 8 & 16; five & decimals mixed, that sort of thing. It isn't just childish, either: Dante & Joyce do it. (RT,207) I'm back to my alphabet of forms. A fourfold ogdoad would be the full compass of 32 ... I have a circular vision of 8, a square Eros-Adonis one of 12, a triangular katabasis-escape one of 10 (4-3-2-1) and a Thanatos cloven fiction of 2. Incidentally, if the 7's & 12's of Revelation are essentially astrological, then they include the natural religion basis of Blake's Europe, & the woman crowned with stars is Enitharmon. (TEN, 183) Seven is the number of sequence (stations of the cross), the drama of fall & redemption in history. Eight is the number of thematic stasis ... Most mandalas & contemplative icons involve an even-number principle of symmetry. But if 8 is the thematic stasis of 7,13 is the thematic stasis of 12, hence Yeats' 13th cone. Well, anyway: the normal plot sequence is a parabola in seven stages, (ibid.) Jung talks about embracing the demonic principle or shadow. In my scheme, to embrace the demonic is to embrace (incorporate or include) the cycle. That's why all the 'square' (cubic) numbers have to turn into rolling ones (7, 11, 13, 17). At the last supper there is the normal establishment number of twelve: thirteen includes the demonic figure, and eleven is the centrifugal movement of gospel into world. In FT [The Phoenix and the Turtle] & its parliament of fowls there are seven birds, one banished. (By the end of the poem there are 5). (TEN, 244) I still should do some thinking about the I Ching: 64 is the number of squares in chess, 32 of pieces. The hexagrams would have to be in se-

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quence, & no doubt I should study the sequence. Of course they have a primary connexion with divination, oracle, knowledge of the future, & hence Thanatos. But my six phases, each three overlapping with another three, indicate some connexion in my own mind. (TBN, 261)

There are scores of such passages in the notebooks. How seriously did Frye take all this? He says at one point, 'Recurrent numbers, seven & twelve & the like, are elements of design only: they represent no hidden mystery or numinousness in things. Not even the trinitarian three or the Jungian four. There are twelve signs in the zodiac, but it would be equally easy to see nine or eleven or fourteen and a half. Only fractions seem so vulgar' (LN, 157-8). Yet at other places Frye certainly seems to think that numbers do contain some hidden mystery. He even has an entry on gemetria, the kabbalistic practice of interpreting the Bible by counting the numerical value of the letters of each word and using the result to derive the meaning of a passage; in gemetria, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet had a traditional numerical value assigned to it. Frye writes that 'the numerical value of the Tetragrammaton (or four-letter word) is 26, so that a Trinity would be 78. The word for salt also has that number. Don't know what Rabelais knew or cared about this: I should look at Revelation' (TBN, 304). In another notebook he writes, Re. numbers: one gets 28 either by adding 24 & 4 or by multiplying 4 & 7. For Blake it's important that 24 & 28 make 52. For Chaucer it may be important that 4 humors & 7 planets make 28 temperamental types, along with a 29th narrator who is, so to speak, interlunar. I must track down the moon-on-England reference in Dryden's AA [Absalom and Achitophel] & keep in mind Malory's association of 28 & the Round Table. As I've said, there are seven supports or pillars of wisdom, 7 branches of the tree of life, & 7 hills of the unfallen city (2 Esdras) as well as a sevenfold analogy. (NFF, 7.34)

As I say, there is a great deal of this kind of speculation going on in the notebooks, and if we put such passages beside the zaniness of Robert Anton Wilson, we do not notice much of a difference. Does Frye's interest relate to synchronicity, the idea that forms the backbone of Wilson's Cosmic Trigger? Frye had read Jung on synchronicity, and he remarks in one notebook that that idea 'makes a powerful appeal' (RT, 205). In another notebook he writes, '[T]he possibility remains that as long as [synchronicity is] acausal, in the same way that putting a thermometer outside the window doesn't cause but only records a

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change in temperature, not only astrology but any number of "mancies" or forms of divination might be alternative ways of recording the phenomena of human (or any other) life' (RT, 326). Frye calls such recording a 'silent ecriture' (ibid.). Synchronicity for him is somewhat broader than Jung's definition of 'meaningful coincidence/18 For Frye it means that 'every object is an event & every event a signature of a total entity' (RT, 205). Now this sounds quite similar to some of the ideas of one of Frye's favourite mystics, Jakob Boehme. In The Signature of All Things, a book from his middle period, Boehme maintained that within and behind things in the external world there was an internal spiritual form that incised its signature in various shapes and forms - in the stars, the elements, living creatures, trees, and herbs. Now it is a long way from Boehme to Robert Anton Wilson, but the idea of the signature of all things is what connects them and helps to explain Frye's interest in Wilson, for the signature of all things is like a cosmic trigger. Frye writes in Notebook 27, following the passage about the religious books he owns stressing the mystics: I have great difficulty, nonetheless, in reading, say, Boehme, because mystics (less true of Boehme than of others) seem so masochistic: isn't this stuff just wonderful that we have to say we believe anyway? But now Boehme is making more sense as I move closer to light and signature symbolism. Once more, it's not that I 'believe' him but that this is the kind of link between the Bible and the creative imagination that I'm looking for. (LN, 35)

My thesis about these kook books - at least a preliminary one - is that Frye was drawn to them for the same reason that he was drawn to everything else in the verbal universe: the imaginative use he could make of it. He says as much in the several places that he refers to Bentov's Stalking the Wild Pendulum, which he calls a 'very good' book (LN, 357). Bentov, who was killed in a plane crash in 1979, was an inventor who tinkered in his basement laboratory and who learned a great deal about contemporary physics on his own (he had little formal education). He began to practise meditation in the 1960s and became especially interested in what in yoga is called 'the awakening of KundalimY Bentov believed that all matter is consciousness and that our bodies mirror the vibrating universe, so that we are in constant motion between the finite and the infinite. Frye will have nothing to do with Bentov's views on reincarnation,

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which Bentov comes at by way of Carlos Castenada and the Seth books of Jane Roberts, both of whom Frye read. He will have nothing to do as well with Bentov's view of 'the pyramid-hierarchy of aristocratic levels leading to God the monarch' (LN, 357). At least, as we know from Words with Power, the mountain-ladder archetype tells but half the story. In other words, Bentov has no conception of the world below, the cave in Words with Power, and no conception of what Frye calls the culbute, the revolutionary somersault of which the poets are always aware. Yet he is attracted to Bentov for the same reason that he turned to some of the New Age scientists - the Tao of physics and the holographic paradigm writers. This is the way he puts it in Notebook 50: 'The second essay [of The Double Vision] is the reason why this series may come to nothing before my death. It uses books on pop-science about the bootstrap theory, the implicate order, the hologram metaphor, the wild pendulum, & the like, to show how the inner dynamic of science increasingly drives it to describe the physical world as an analogy of the spiritual one' (LN, 416). Frye does not actually use these notions anywhere in The Double Vision, though he does, as already indicated, make a passing reference to David Bohm's 'implicate order' in the closing pages of the book (84). But consider this passage: The physical body is an instrument that allows us to interact best with our physical environment. This body is interpenetrated [there's that Frye word] by 'bodies' or 'fields' [that] extend beyond the limits of the physical body ... The psyche serves as a bridge between the physical level and our real selves - spiritual beings ... It's unfortunate that the word 'spirit' or 'spirits' in the English language is so versatile ... We shall use the word 'spirit' or 'spiritual' to describe the highest level of human evolution, which borders on the absolute. It is very difficult to draw any sharp demarcation lines because the very highest spiritual merges with the absolute, which is the level of the Creators.

Now compare that with this passage: Our physical bodies are a part of a world usually described as material, but if matter is simply energy cooled down to the point at which our physical bodies can live with it, perhaps spirit can enter a world of higher energies where the separate things spread around objective heres and theres are no longer things to keep bumping into. In such a spiritual

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nature, a nature of 'implicate order/ as it has been called, or interpenetrating energies, and no longer the nature of congealed objects, we should be gods or numinous presences ourselves.

These passages are obviously quite similar: both seek to relate the material body to the world of spirit; both speak about the higher world of spirit; both call on the idea of interpenetration. The first, perhaps, sounds a bit more like Frye because of its attention to the multiple meanings of the word 'spirit' and because it leads up to the idea of creation. But the second passage is Frye's: it is from the last page of The Double Vision (NFR, 234-5). The first is from Bentov's Stalking the Wild Pendulum.19 This helps us to see, I think, what Frye means when he says that a book like Bentov's shows us how 'the inner dynamic of science increasingly drives it to describe the physical world as an analogy of the spiritual one.' Similarly with David Bohm and the Tao of physics people.' Frye read and annotated Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order, but that is a highly technical book for the most part, and my guess is that Frye picked up most of what he knew about Bohm from Ken Wilber's The Holographic Paradigm, from which he quotes in Notebook llh. The notebooks have a half-dozen or so entries in which Frye mentions Bohm. In Notebook 27 Frye says, regarding the conclusion of Words with Power, The apocalyptic finale will have to take in the total-consciousness speculations of Schrodinger and (now) David Bohm' (LN, 26). There is no evidence from either his notebooks or his library that Frye knew Schrodinger except through secondary sources, but he did look into what he calls Bohm's 'total-consciousness speculations.' These are speculations about the implicate and explicate order. Bohm called the world we think we live in the 'explicate order.' That is the objective world out there, or at least what we take to be the objective world - the world of Newtonian physics. This however, is only our perception of order. Beneath it is what he called the 'implicate order/ an order where things are folded together and deeply connected. The explicate order unfolds from the implicate order, and the explicate order is only the bare surface of reality. The implicate order includes both matter and consciousness. Frye's phrase for it, describing the last of his three stages of religion [body, mind, and soul] is 'the ultimate achievement of the "spiritual body"' (RT, 101). One can understand why Frye would be greatly attracted to this vision of reality, as it does away with the subject-object separation. If

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Bohm had been around when Frye was writing The Case against Locke' in Fearful Symmetry, Frye could have enlisted him on Blake's behalf. Bohm was a very eminent quantum physicist, and he spent the last years of his life trying to find a mathematical expression for his views. He was also influenced by his close contacts with Einstein and Krishnamurti. I do not pretend to understand any of the physics, but I think I understand why Frye would refer to Bohm on practically the last page he ever wrote. For Bohm, a brilliant theoretical physicist, was, like Frye, on a lifelong spiritual quest. That is what the implicate order, with its vision of wholeness and totality, is all about. Consider another brief passage. '[We] are often led to speak of the totality, of a wholeness which is both immanent and transcendent, and which, in a religious context, is often given the name of God. The immanence means that the totality of what is, is immanent in matter; the transcendence means that this wholeness is also beyond matter.' These are the words of David Bohm,20 but they could have been written by Frye. In Notebook 50, Frye clearly has Bohm in mind when he writes, 'Explicitly, the part is "in" the whole; implicitly, the whole is "in" the part. But the way that the chicken is in the egg is different: a world of interlocked energies. I suppose this is what the hologramparadigm people are getting at' (LN, 324). Three hundred and fifty entries later in the same notebook Frye writes, 'The end of the journey is interpenetration, or perhaps the hologram model. It's the recognition scene of proclaiming word & responding spirit' (LN, 395). Bohm uses the hologram to illustrate what he means by undivided wholeness, and 'hologram model' here is a reference as well to the work of Karl Pribram, Ken Wilber, and others, who postulate that both the brain and the universe function like the unity-in-diversity experience that has been recorded by many of the world's mystics. Frye's relationship to mysticism is still an unexplored topic, and the notebooks provide a number of passages that will help to discover it. Similarly for his relationship to the Renaissance hermetic tradition, to alchemy, to various forms of the occult, to Eastern thought. What are we to make of Frye's interest in all those texts listed in the appendix? It would be difficult to imagine Frye citing many of these works in Words with Power, but he does justify his interest in such writers as A.E.Waite, who is only 'superficially off-putting': I've been reading Loomis and A.E. Waite on the Grail. Loomis often seems to me an erudite ass: he keeps applying standards of coherence and

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consistency to twelfth-century poets that might apply to Anthony Trollope. Waite seems equally erudite and not an ass. But I imagine Grail scholars would find Loomis useful and Waite expendable, because Waite isn't looking for anything that would interest them. It's quite possible that what Waite is looking for particularly doesn't exist - secret traditions, words of power, an esoteric authority higher than that of the Catholic Church - and yet the kind of thing he's looking for is so infinitely more important than Loomis' trivial games of descent from Irish sources where things get buggered up because the poets couldn't distinguish cors meaning body from cors meaning horn. Things like this show me that I have a real function as a critic, pointing out that what Loomis does has been done and is dead, whereas what Waite does, even when mistaken, has hardly begun and is very much alive. (LN, 460)

I have only scratched the surface of Frye and esoteric spirituality, and I am in no position to provide any kind of definitive answer to the question, Why does Frye think that what Waite and the others I have mentioned have done is very much alive? Still, I believe it has to do with Frye's attraction to schematic thinking; with the esoteric tradition coming to us largely in third-phase language; with Frye's conception of analogies of revelation; with his view of the unity of body and spirit or matter and consciousness; with his understanding of a psychic world as existing between Beulah, the world of imagination, and Generation, the physical world; with his understanding of the way genres change over time (Frazer and Jung may have little standing in anthropology or psychology, but they provide us grammars of the imagination; or, as Frye says, to reverse the observation, yesterday's kook book becomes tomorrow's standard text [LN, 17]); and with his belief in the imagination's providing a critique of pure reason. The religious contexts of Frye's thought are, I believe, becoming clearer and clearer, and while Frye's views on religion remain firmly rooted in the radical Protestant tradition, his interest in esoteric spirituality is another context worth further investigation if we are fully to understand the Fryean encyclopedic vision. I conclude with the one reference in Frye's notebooks to Jane Roberts's Seth books. In the early 1970s, almost twenty years before Shirley MacLaine popularized channelling, Jane Roberts, with the assistance of her husband, began writing what became a series of trance-dictated books, the real author said to have been a discarnate entity (she called Seth an 'energy essence personality'). A substantial literature has grown

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up around Roberts's Seth. Apparently, the only Seth book Frye read was the two-volume The 'Unknown' Reality: A Seth Book. In Notebook 50 he writes, 'I have to alter the self-delusion bit: what I say is true enough, but I shouldn't suggest junking it all. I may yet find myself stealing from the Seth books, and of course there's James Merrill, who extracted an epic from a ouija board' (LN, 283). Frye appears to be talking about something he has written for a draft of Words with Power, saying here that he should not junk all of what he has said about deluding ourselves with certain paranormal phenomena. Maybe it is not self-delusion after all to consider Seth to be the author of a kook book, and maybe Merrill really did derive his epic poem from the ouija board. I will leave Frye's cryptic remark hanging in the air, adding only that perhaps in some of these strange books that Frye was reading we do get 'the incarnation and withdrawal of a god.' As for synchronicities, that is a phrase that James Merrill quotes and attributes to Frye on the first page of his epic ouija-board poem, The Changing Light at Sandover. NOTES 1 At one point Frye refers to 'the pan-literary universe which only three people understand: Blake, Mallarme, and myself (LN, 247). Mallarme is a poet, writes Frye, 'who will take me through the third great crisis of the birth of the spirit out of the depth of fallen spirits,' who sometimes talks 'as though he thought literature was a "substitute" for religion,' who sees the pure poem as a symbol of 'something transcendent/ who 'tries to sink himself in myth & metaphor so completely that the kerygmatic will speak through/ and who believes '[t]here really is some kind of resurrection by faith in myth' (LN, 1:41,182,202, 303,43). One might also note the connection between Frye's unsuccessful effort to write the one great book, which he struggled mightily to formulate for a twenty-five-year period after Anatomy of Criticism, and Mallarme's equally unsuccessful effort to write the one 'Great Book.' 2 'I don't know why/ Frye writes at one point, 'I've spent so much time on Rimbaud and Mallarme when it's so clearly Laforgue who has all the answers' (LN, 142). 3 Wouter J. Hanegraaff, 'Some Remarks on the Study of Western Esotericism/ Theosophical History 7 (Spring 1999): 223^. 4 In one of his notebooks, Frye writes, This lower world, the world of signs, of secrecy, & of oracles, is also the world of writing - proclaimers have to

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5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14

15 16 17

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depend on a writing secretary or keeper of the secrets. Xy [Christianity], Islam, & probably Judaism, have the conception of the secret books of life in which some angel writes down our largely forgotten acts, & confronts us with them at the Last Judgement. The dark world is the world of signs, of which the archetype is the sign of Jonah, the prophet who descended to that world. It stretches from the paleolithic cave of magic animal pictures to the descent to the cipher or oracle which we have in Arthur Gordon Pym, in Endymion, in Rabelais' bottle oracle. This all contrasts with the claim of Jesus & Mohammed to have said nothing in secret - secret traditions always have a gnostic, sufi, mahayana sense of heresy about them: the exoteric tradition is what is primary & holds society together: the gospel, not the mystery cult' (RT, 86). Antoine Faivre, 'Introduction I/ in Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman, eds, Modern Esoteric Spirituality (New York: Crossroad, 1992), xvi-xix. We can say more about the depth of Frye's reading after the annotations he made in books in his own library have been examined. Frye's library is now housed in the Victoria University Library at the University of Toronto. 'Northrop Frye's Notebook 3,' Northrop Frye Newsletter 8, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 30. See FS, 170-1. See, e.g., IN, 189-90; RT, 54-6; NFF, 32.51, 53; NFF, 7.97. 'Yeats and the Language of Symbolism,' F/, 218-37. On Blavatsky and other late-nineteenth-century occult systems, see pp. 220-1. By 'discredited,' I mean only that Blavatsky's claims of psychic powers did not stand up under investigation by the Society for Psychical Research. Frye uses 'mezzanine' to refer to various occult and imaginative conceptions that exist halfway between the physical and spiritual levels of reality; see FS, 152. 'Bardo' refers to the 'in-between' state in Tibetan Buddhism that connects the death of individuals with the rebirth that follows. Frye's most extensive reflections on Patanjali's Yoga-Sutra are in Notebook 3, published in the Northrop Frye Newsletter 8 (Fall 2000): 1-44. See my Tnterpenetration as a Key Concept in Frye's Critical Vision,' in David V. Boyd and Imre Salusinszky, eds, Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 140-63. For Frye's comment on Huxley's 'Thou art That' collection of second-stage mystical texts, see RT, 100. Cosmic Trigger, 59. 'The final comprehension of the Bible's meaning is in the spark of illumination between its closing anode and its opening cathode, and if that gap

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were not there the Bible would not stimulate the imagination to the effort of comprehension which recreates instead of passively following the outline of a vision' (FS, 386). 18 C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 104. 19 (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1988), 11-12,121-2. 20 David Bohm, 'The Physicist and the Mystic - Is Dialogue between Them Possible?' interview with Renee Weber in Ken Wilber, ed., The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes: Exploring the Leading Edge of Science (Boston: Shambhala, 1985), 187-8. Appendix: The Sources of Frye's Reading in Esoteric Spirituality The breadth of Frye's reading in esoteric spirituality is represented by the following list. A very small percentage of these writers and texts will be found in Frye's published works, but taken together they appear hundreds and hundreds of times in the notebooks. The categories in section 1 derive largely from Antoine Faivre, 'Ancient and Medieval Sources of Modern Esoteric Movements,' in A. Faivre and J. Needleman, eds, Modern Esoteric Spirituality (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 1-70. The other ten categories, some broadly inclusive and others quite specific, catalogue what we know of Frye's sources, based on the annotated books in his library and his notebooks. Sections 2-11 are arranged alphabetically. It goes without saying that other ways of categorizing Frye's reading are possible. An asterisk indicates that the copy of the book in Frye's library has marginal markings or comments or both. These are sometimes extensive, sometimes minimal. A double asterisk means that the book or author is not in Frye's library but that there is evidence from the notebooks that he read the book or read about it in some related secondary source. A triple asterisk means that Frye owned the book but did not annotate it. The list excludes studies of comparative mythology and books on ancient myth, folklore, and ritual - works that often treat such topics as magic, mystery cults, and other esoteric subjects. It does include a few works of fiction (e.g., novels based on the Tarot by Anthony Piers and Italo Calvino and the novels of Carlos Castaneda).

Northrop Frye's 'Kook Books' and the Esoteric Tradition 1. Esoteric Traditions

Frye's Sources

Hellenistic Judaism Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 BCE-ca. 50 CE)

*Works

Alexandrian Hermeticism Hermes Trismegisthus

Corpus Hermeticum

Neoplatonism Philostratus (ca. 170-ca. 247) Porphyry (232-ca. 305) lamblichus (ca. 250-ca. 330) Macrobius (fl. ca. 430)

Christian Esotericism Clement of Rome (fl. ca. 96) Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-ca. 211)

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G.R.S. Mead, *Thrice-Greatest Hermes: Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis Frances Yates, *Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition

*Life ofApollonius

ofTyana

*On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians *Commentary on the Dream of Scipio; *The Saturnalia

***The Exhortation to the Greeks; The Rich Man's Salvation; The Fragment of an Address Entitled 'To the Newly Baptized' Frances Yates, *Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition

Pseudo-Dionysius (1st cent. CE)

*The Divine Names; *The Mystical Theology Frances Yates, *Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition

Boethius (ca. 480-ca. 525)

*The Consolation of Philosophy

Martianus Capella (fl. 5th cent.)

**The Marriage of Philology and Mercury; *Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts

John Scotus Eriugena (ca. 810-ca. 880)

**On the Division of Nature

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Joachim of Floris (ca. 1145-1202) Ramon Lull (ca. 1232-1316)

*Blanquerna. See also Frye's paper on Lull inSE.

Meister Eckhart (1260-1328)

*Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation; *Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense

Jan van Ruysbroek (1293-1381)

*Spiritual Espousals

Julian of Norwich (ca. 1341-ca. 1413)

*Revelations of Divine Love

Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64)

*The Vision of God

Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493-1541)

*The Prophecies of Paracelsus: Occult Symbols, and Magic Figures with Esoteric Explanations

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)

*The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast Dorothy Singer, *Giordano Bruno Frances Yates, *Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition

Jakob Boehme (1575-1624)

*The Signature of All Things; *The Aurora, *Six Theosophic Points; *The Three Principles of the Divine Essence

William Law (1686-1761)

*Characters and Characteristics of William Law; * Selected Mystical Writings of William Law Aldous Huxley, *The Perennial Philosophy

H.P. Blavatsky (1831-1891)

*The Secret Doctrine; *An Abridgement of The Secret Doctrine

Alchemy

C.G. Jung, *Psychology and Alchemy; *Mysterium Coniunctionis

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Mircea Eliade, *The Forge and the Crucible Artur Rimbaud, *Poems Stephane Mallarme, *Poems and Letters Marie-Louise von Franz, *Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology Herbert Silberer, *Problems of Mysticism and its Symbolism Titus Burckhardt, *Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul Chao Pi Ch'en, *Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality Astrology

Franz Cumont, *Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans Warren Kenton, *Astrology: The Celestial Mirror

Rosicrucianism

Frances Yates, *The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Israel Regardie, *The Golden Dawn Edward Bulwer Lytton, *Zanoni: A Rosicrucian Tale

Tarot

Piers Anthony, *Faith of Tarot: Book III of the Tarot Sequence; *God of Tarot: Book I of the Tarot Sequence; *Vision of Tarot Papus (Gerard Encausse), *The Tarot of the Bohemians Italo Calvino, *The Castle of Crossed Destinies A.E. Waite, *A Pictorial Key to the Tarot Charles Williams, *The Greater Trumps

2. Channelling Edgar Cayce James A. Pike Jane Roberts

Jess Stearn, *Edgar Cayce - The Sleeping Prophet **The Other Side *The 'Unknown Reality: A Seth Book

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3. Eastern Traditions Walt Anderson John Blofeld Chang Chung-yuan, ed. Chao Pi Ch'en Chuang-tzu Thomas Cleary, trans. Confucius Kazi Dawa-Samdup, trans. Mircea Eliade W.Y. Evans-Wentz, ed. W.Y. Evans-Wentz, ed. Yu-lan Fung Eugen Herrigel Gopi Krishna Lao-tsu James Legge, trans. R.A. Nicholson, ed. Patanjali James N. Powell Peter Rawson P. Rawson, L. Legeza Paul Reps, comp. Sankaracara D.T. Suzuki D.T. Suzuki, trans. D.T. Suzuki D.T. Suzuki Shunryu Suzuki Holmes Welch R. Wilhelm and C.F. Baynes, trans.

Ernest Wood

*Open Secrets: A Western Guide to Tibetan Buddhism *The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet *Tao: A New Way of Thinking *Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality *Chuang-tzu: Genius of the Absurd *The Avatamsaka Sutra *The Analects *The Tibetan Book of the Dead *Yoga: Immortality and Freedom *The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation *Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, or, Seven Books of Wisdom of the Great Path *The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy *Zen in the Art of Archery *Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man *Tao Te Ching; *The Wisdom ofLaotse *l Ching *Rumi: Poet and Mystic *The Yoga-Sutra *The Tao Symbols *Tantra: The Indian Cult of Ecstasy *Tao, the Chinese Philosophy of Time and Change *Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings *Shankara's Crest-Jewel of Discrimination *Essays in Zen Buddhism (3rd series) *The Lankavatara Sutra *Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings *Zen and Japanese Culture *Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind *Taoism: The Parting of the Way *I Ching *Yoga

4. Fairies and Elementals John Crowley

*Little, Big

Northrop Frye's 'Kook Books' and the Esoteric Tradition Maureen Duffy Jacob Grimm George MacDonald Milton Shakespeare Edmund Spenser W.B. Yeats

353

*The Erotic World of Faery *The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales *Fantastes *Comus *A Midsummer Night's Dream; *The Tempest *The Faerie Queene *Irish Folk Stories and Fairy Tales

5. Gnosticism Hans Jonas Bentley Lay ton, ed. G.R.S. Mead G.R.S. Mead, ed. Jacob Needleman Pheme Perkins James M. Robinson, ed.

*The Gnostic Religion *The Gnostic Scriptures *Thrice-Greatest Hermes: Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis *Pistis Sophia: A Gnostic Miscellany *The Sword of Gnosis: Metaphysics, Cosmology, Tradition, Symbolism *The Gnostic Dialogue *The Nag Hammadi Library

6. Kabbalah Migene Gonzalez-Wippler Z'ev Ben Shimon Halevi S.L. MacGregor Mathers, trans. Charles Ponce Leo Schaya Gershom Scholem Gershom Scholem, ed. Carlo Suares

*A Kabbalah for the Modern World: How God Created the Universe *Kabbalah: Tradition of Hidden Knowledge *The Kabbalah Unveiled *Kabbalah: An Introduction and Illumination for the World Today *The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah *Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism; *On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism *Zohar: The Book of Splendor *The Cipher of Genesis: The Original Code of the Qabala as Applied to the Scriptures; *The Qabala Trilogy: The Cipher of Genesis, The Song of Songs, The Sepher Yetsira; *The Sepher Yetsira, Including the Original Astrology according to the Qabala and Its Zodiac

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Robert D. Denham

7. Kook Books Michael Baigent et al. Itzhak Bentov Dmitry Merezhkovsky Adam Smith Robert Anton Wilson

**Holy Blood and Holy Grail *Stalking the Wild Pendulum * Atlantis/Europe *Powers of Mind *Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati

8. Magic and Shamanism E.M. Butler Alphonse Louis Constant Mircea Eliade Joseph Ennemoser Francis Hitching Francis King Stephen Larsen I.M. Lewis John Matthews Louis Pauwels, J. Bergier John Baptista Porta Kurt Seligmann John Wilcock

*Ritual Magic *The History of Magic *Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy *The History of Magic *Earth Magic *Magic: The Western Tradition *The Shaman's Doorway *Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism *At the Table of the Grail: Magic & the Use of the Imagination *The Morning of the Magicians *Natural Magick *Magic, Supernaturalism and Religion *A Guide to Occult Britain: The Quest for Magic in Pagan Britain

9. Mysticism, Mystery, and the Occult Hubert Aquin A.J. Arberry Franz Cumont Charles Fort Anne Fremantle, ed. Leo Frobenius Phyllis Hodgson, ed. William R. Inge

*Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam *Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam *The Mysteries ofMithra *The Books of Charles Fort *The Protestant Mystics *The Childhood of Man *The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counselling *Christian Mysticism

Northrop Frye's 'Kook Books' and the Esoteric Tradition Justin McCann, ed. Gustav Meyrink Raymond Moody Marcia Moore Margaret Alice Murray Agrippa von Nettesheim Joachim Neugroschel, ed. Rudolf Otto Anthony Piers Jill Puree Maulana Jalal al-Din Rumi Herbert Silberer Sidney Spencer August Strindberg Emanuel Swedenborg Thomas Taylor Evelyn Underbill Alan Upward Valmiki Immanuel Velikovsky Arthur Versluis A.E. Waite

Paul Waldo-Schwartz Lyall Watson John Wilcock Edgar Wind Frances Yates R.C. Zaehner

355

*The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Treatises *The Golem *Life after Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon - Survival of Bodily Death *Hypersentience: Exploring Your Past Lifetimes as a Guide to Your Character ... *The God of the Witches *Three Books of Occult Philosophy or Magic *Yenne Veil: The Great Works of Jewish Fantasy and Occult *Mysticism East and West *Macroscope *The Mystic Spiral: Journey of the Soul *Rumi: Poet and Mystic *Problems of Mysticism and its Symbolism *Mysticism in World Religion *From an Occult Diary *The Divine Love and Wisdom; *Heaven and Hell; *The True Christian Religion *The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries *Mysticism; *The Golden Sequence *The Divine Mystery *The Ramayana of Valmiki *Worlds in Collision *The Egyptian Mysteries *The Holy Grail; *The Quest of the Golden Stairs; *The Unknown Philosopher: The Life of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin and the Substance of His Transcendental Doctrine ***Art and the Occult *Supernature: A Natural History of the Supernatural *A Guide to Occult Britain: The Quest for Magic in Pagan Britain *Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance *The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age; *The Art of Memory *Mysticism: Sacred and Profane

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Robert D. Denham

10. New-Age Science and Religion Fritjof Capra Carlos Castaneda

Geoffrey Chew Marilyn Ferguson Stanislav Grof Stanislav and Christina Grof G.I. Gurdjieff Aldous Huxley Abraham H. Maslow P.D. Ouspensky

Rudy Rucker Ken Wilber, ed. Colin Wilson W.B. Yeats

*The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture; The Tao of Physics *The Fire from Within; *Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan; *The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge; *A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan; *Tales of Power ***Lectures on Modelling the Bootstrap *The Aquarian Conspiracy *Realms of the Human Unconscious *Beyond Death: The Gates of Consciousness *All and Everything *Doors of Perception *Toward a Psychology of Being *In Search of the Miraculous; *A New Model of the Universe; *The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution * Infinity and the Mind *The Holographic Paradigm; *The Spectrum of Consciousness *The Philosopher's Stone *A Vision

11. Synchronicity C.G. Jung Lyall Watson Robert Anton Wilson

**Synchronicity *Lifetide *Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati

Index of Works by Northrop Frye

Note: The Abbreviations section (pp. xiii-xv) provides full bibliographical information on Frye's works listed here. AC (Anatomy of Criticism), 3, 23, 24, 25, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55, 59, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 69, 72, 73, 81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88,90, 91, 95nn8, 11, 97, 99, 101,102,123,124, 125,128,129,137,193,194,195, 200n39, 209, 219, 282, 286, 287, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 300, 306n2, 307nl5, 308n24, 311n43, 336, 339, 346nl CP (The Critical Path), 47, 49,55, 64, 65, 67,123,179, 280, 296, 307nl5 CR (Creation and Recreation), 24, 35, 37, 41n7, 44, 236, 265, 266, 268, 269, 278, 298 D (Diaries, 1942-1955), 176,177,178, 180,181,182,185 DG (Divisions on a Ground), 181 DV (The Double Vision), 4, 5, 6,8, 9, 10, 23, 24, 25, 26, 36, 37,41nn2, 7, 45, 51, 52, 54, 59, 61, 72, 76,184, 187,197, 229, 235, 236, 238, 241,

245, 246, 247, 247nl, 249n21, 251, 266, 269, 271, 277, 296, 302, 313, 314, 315, 335, 336, 342, 343 EAC (The Eternal Act of Creation), 268 El (The Educated Imagination), 45, 51, 52, 287 FI (Fables of Identity), 137, 224, 320, 327nl2, 333, 347nlO FS (Fearful Symmetry), 8,10,13, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 45, 47, 49, 50, 51, 53, 92, 95nl6,151,167, 169,170,171,175,188, 214, 215, 219, 221, 251, 295, 296, 297, 301, 302, 307nnl3,15, 308n24, 319, 320, 321, 332, 344, 347n8, 348nl7 GC (The Great Code), 6, 8,11,16,19, 20n5, 23, 24, 31, 36, 37, 41n7, 45, 47, 49, 50, 53, 63, 65, 73, 83, 86, 95nl5, 97,129,137,138,140,141, 142-3,144,145,146,147,148,149, 151,155,158,167,168,169,171, 177,178,187,193,195,196,197,

358

Northrop Frye

201, 217, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 258,259, 262, 266, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276,277, 297,299, 304, 307nl6, 308n21, 335, 336 LN (Late Notebooks), 10,18, 41n8, 42nlO, 44,52, 54, 85, 87, 94nn2, 3, 105,124,126,131,132,134,167, 175,182,183,184,190,191,208, 217, 218, 219, 285,296, 297, 310n36, 313, 314, 315, 316, 318, 319, 323, 326, 327, 332, 334, 335, 336, 338, 340, 341, 342, 343,344, 345, 346, 346nl, 347n9 MC (Modern Century), 181 MM (Myth and Metaphor), 64, 67, 124, 209,268, 287, 306n7 NFC (Northrop Frye in Conversation), 319, 321 NFCL (Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature), 55 NFF (Northrop Frye Fonds), 310n39, 331, 333 NFHK (Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp), 191,235 NFMC (Northrop Frye on Modern Culture), 179,181 NFR (Northrop Frye on Religion), 34, 35,41n8,44,48,52,54, 64, 72, 76, 100,131,179,180,182,183,184, 197,202n54, 236, 237,238, 239, 248n9, 249nn20,21, 265, 266, 267, 268,269, 270, 271,277, 278, 296, 298, 302, 336 NP (A Natural Perspective), 46 RE (The Return of Eden), 179, 221, 286 RT (Northrop Frye's Notebooks and Lectures on ... Religious Texts), 332, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 343, 347nn4, 9,15 RW (Reading the World), 190

SE (Northrop Frye's Student Essays), 183,190,191,269, 308n24 SeS (The Secular Scripture), 33, 34, 114,219, 239, 245 SM (Spiritus Mundi), 49, 51,123, 318, 322 SR (Study of English Romanticism), 286 SS (The Stubborn Structure), 53,123, 229, 310n39 TEN ('Third Book' Notebooks), 55,176, 182,184,185,319,337,339,340 T.S. Eliot, 198 WE (Writings on Education), 177,179, 181, 287 WGS (The World in a Grain of Sand), 189 WP (Words with Power), 4, 6,8,9,10, 12,18,24, 26,36, 37,38,40,41, 41nn3,4, 6, 7,43,44,45,47,49,50, 51,53, 54, 60, 63, 68, 69, 70, 73,83, 89, 90, 92, 93,94nn3,4,95nnl3,14, 96nl7, 99,105,106,107,108,109, 110, 111, 112,113,114,115,116, 117,118,119,120,123,124,125, 126,128,129,130,131,132,133, 134,135,181,183,187, 205, 208, 218, 226, 229, 233nl5, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 245, 246, 247, 251, 266, 284,285,286, 287,297, 307nl6, 315, 316, 317, 322, 327, 329,335, 336,342, 343,344,346 WTC (The Well-Tempered Critic), 63, 72,74 Essays 'The Analogy of Democracy,' 178 'The Bible and English Literature,' 100, 266

Index of Works The Church: Its Relation to Society/ 178,182,183 'Criticism, Visible and Invisible,' 52-3 The Double Mirror,' 268 The Double Vision of Language,' 269 'Expanding Eyes,' 51 'Expanding the Limits of Metaphor/ 208 'Gains and Losses of the Reformation/ 189 'Idea of a Protestant University/ 182 The Imaginative and the Imaginary/ 224 'The Importance of Calvin for Philosophy/ 190 'In the Earth, or in the Air?' 96nl8 'Levels of Meaning in Literature/ 86, 95n9

359

The Meaning of Recreation/ 236 The Mythical Approach to Creation/ 266 'On Teaching Literature/ 268 'Religion and Modern Poetry/ 190 'The Rhythms of Time/ 268 'Romance as Masque/ 318 'A Study of the Impact of Cultural Movements upon the Church during the Nineteenth Century/ 269 The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange/ 98,103n4 To Come to Light/ 100 Toynbee and Spengler/ 178 Trends in Modern Culture/ 178,181 T.S. Eliot and Other Observations/ 191

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Index of Biblical Passages

Note: Citations in bold refer to chapter or chapter and verse in the Bible. The remaining citations refer to pages in this volume. Genesis, 100,144,147,148, 205, 206, 218, 230, 266; 3:24, 295; 8:21, 315; 9:11, 315; 25:34,139 Exodus: 3:2, 298; 3:14, 299 Numbers: 11:26-9, 310n36 Ruth, 226 1 Samuel: 15, 315 2 Samuel: 6, 149; 11:4,139; 13:18,144 2 Kings: 2:23, 315 Job, 139,144,146, 313, 314, 316, 321; 3:9,138; 38:7, 301 Psalms, 139,144 Proverbs, 139; 8:31, 217 Ecclesiastes, 147, 317 Song of Solomon (Song of Songs), 133,139, 206, 207, 213, 230; 4:2, 207; 4:3, 207; 4:12, 207; 4:15, 213 Isaiah, 140,144, 223, 270, 276, 305; 6:3, 301; 55:12, 140 Ezekiel: 1:5-28, 307n8; 27, 214 Daniel, 294, 295, 298; 3, 294; 3:1-3, 17-18, 297; 3:24, 294; 3:24-5, 294; 7:9-11, 307n8

Hosea: 2:15, 240 Jonah, 145, 347n4 Matthew: 14:16-21, 246 Mark: 16:12, 298 Luke, 139,156, 326; 20:35, 328nl9; 23:48, 310n37 John, 255, 271, 307n8; 1:14,119, 307n8; 14:6, 119; 17:21-3, 307n8 Romans, 240; 9:25, 248nl7 1 Corinthians, 103n7; 12:27,175; 15:28, 99, 103n7; 15:44, 130; 15:52, 5 2 Corinthians: 12, 36 Galatians: 3:28, 284 Philippians: 2:5, 302; 2:5-7, 298; 2:6, 309n36; 2:6-7, 308n21 Colossians: 3:11,103n7 1 Thessalonians: 5:2, 69 Hebrews: 11, 303; 11:1, 61, 68,298, 302; 11:8, 304 1 John, 294; 3:9, 285 Revelation, 100, 340; 4:8, 301; 4:6-9, 307n8; 14:4, 285

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Index of Names and Subjects

Abel, Elizabeth, 136n7 Abigail, 149 Abishai, 149 Abraham, 303, 305, 315 Achtemeier, Paul}., 306n5 Ada Victoriana, 179,186n8 Adagia, 338 Adam, 148, 206, 218, 221, 223, 228, 259, 260, 284, 314, 315, 317 Adams, Hazard, 56n8 Adamson, Joe, 14, 81, 85, 94nl, 247n2 Adonis, 125,154,169, 339 Aeschylus, 283 Agag, 315 Agape, 324 Aitken, Johan Lyall, 235 Alain, 158,163n29 Albee, Edward: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woo//, 283 Alchemy, 54-6, 207,211, 322,330, 344 Alcoff, Linda, 248nl5 Alienation, 208, 219, 275, 317, 319 Allegory, 55, 71, 81,166,168,170, 171, 254, 256, 258, 316, 336;

'Allegoric Godship/ 299; metonymic, 170; typology and, 168; vision and, 170 Alter, Robert, 6,12-13,14, 306n4 Altizer, Thomas J.J., 158,163n26 Amnon, 144 Amory, Thomas, 336 Amos, 142 Anagogy, 23-4, 30,102,189, 195, 297, 299. See also Language Anderson, Bernhard W., 163nn31, 32 Anderson, M.C., 277, 279n6 Anderson, Walt, 352 Andrewes, Lancelot, Bishop, 310n37 Anglican Church. See Church, Anglican Anthony, Piers, 351 Anthropology, 235, 345; comparative, 143,149 Antichrist, 178 Anxiety, 34, 37, 89, 93,126, 219,227, 275, 287 Apocalypse, 92,178,272, 273, 277, 309n36, 324, 331, 338, 343; apocalyptic, 63, 75, 286, 303; apocalyptic

364

Index of Names and Subjects

poetic, 72; 'panoramic' vs. 'participating/ 95nl5, 277; vision of the, 71, 76, 320 Apocrypha, 162n22 Aporia, 83, 93 Apostolos-Cappadona, Diane, 328nl3 Apuleius, 102 Aquin, Hubert, 355 Aquinas, Thomas, Saint, 193,195 Aragon, Louis, 228 Arberry, A.J., 355 Archetype, 12, 48,102,124,125-8, 132,133-5,142-9,169,170, 256, 281; archetypal meaning, 53; archetypal vision, 170; archetypology, 170; of literature, 128,132; of myth, 125,128,132; mythic, 143, 144; narrative, 280; primary concerns and, 126 Aristotle, 62, 65 Ark of the Covenant, 149 Arnold, Matthew, 44,181,192, 199nl6,199nl7; Literature and Dogma, 192 Art, 15, 32, 62, 65, 99,190,191,192, 224, 228, 229, 233nl7, 262, 267, 271, 272, 276, 286, 288, 293, 294, 297,308n24, 320; religion and, 269, 276, 296, 302 Ascension, 135 Astrology, 351 Atlantis, 310, 334 Atonement, 314 Attis, 154 Atwood, Margaret, 19n4 Auden, W.H. (Wystan Hugh), 41 Auerbach, Erich, 154-6,161nl8; 'Figura,' 154,155; Mimesis, 154 Augustine, John H., 303,310n41

Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo, 61,178,186n7,192,195,199nl8; Confessions, 61,192 Avatamsaka Sutra, 352 Avison, Margaret, 189 Axis mundi, 5,118,134,211,215, 218, 328nl3 Ayre, John, 19n3, 20n5,186n9,198n8, 247n2 Babylonia, 149,294, 307n8 Baigent, Michael, 334, 354; Holy Blood and Holy Grail, 334 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 231n4, 260 Barnett, Pamela E., 250n27 Barth, Karl, 201n48 Barthes, Roland, 17,85 Bartsch, Hans Werner, 42n9, 162nn23, 24 Bathsheba, 139 Baudelaire, Charles, 315 Baynes, C.R, 352 Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de, 280-1,288nn2,3 Beauty, 92,293, 296-8, 304,322; false, or fallen, 296 Becker, Ernest, 317,327n8 Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot, 283 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 322; A Study of English Romanticism, 322 Belief, 47, 71, 89,125,182,192, 287, 298, 299,304,325; Christian, 196; intransitivity of, 71; literature and, 64, 69, 71. See a/so Faith Bentley, G.E. (Gerald Eades), 198n5 Bentov, Itzhak, 334, 336, 337, 341-3, 354; Stalking the Wild Pendulum, 334, 337, 341

Index of Names and Subjects Bergier, Jacques, 334,351; The Morning of the Magicians, 334 Berkeley, George, 320 Berman, Morris, 126,135nl Beulah, 296, 345 Bhagavadgita, 31 Bible, 3, 4, 6,10,18, 23-6, 29,31,33, 34, 35, 36,40, 41,47,48-9, 52, 55, 82, 91, 94n4, 96nl7,100,101,105, 119,120,124,125,137-50,150nl, 151-8,162n22,163n29,166,167, 168,169,175,177,184,189,193, 195-7, 205, 206, 217, 218, 223, 230, 238, 240, 251-6, 259, 266, 277, 284, 310n41, 315, 316, 318, 319, 321, 336, 340, 341, 347nl7; Anchor Bible, 144; Authorized version, 299, 304, 308n21; biblical exegesis, 166; biblical hermeneutics, 251; Christian, 151,153,188, 252; as 'double mirror,' 195; Hebrew Bible, 31,139,147,152,153,155, 158, 298; of hell, 318; historicity of, 252; King James version, 144,147; literal meaning as metaphoric, 52; literature and, 3, 45, 53,100,140, 142,181,195, 251-2, 260, 266; metamorphosis in, 140; as metaphor, 247nl; mythos of, 205; New Testament, 11,13, 31,101,107,126, 135,139,141,143,147,152-9, 161nl9,162n22,182, 270, 302; Old Testament, 13, 31,101,135,141, 143,147,151-9,160,161nl9, 162n22,182, 284, 314; Pauline Epistles, 158; Pentateuch, 169, 301; poetic understanding of, 252; politics in, 149; the Prophets 139; self-referential literary character of, 138; Synoptic Gospels, 158;

365

Torah, 169, 301,305; as work of literature, 120. See also individual books of the Bible Biology, 148; evolutionary, 313 Blackman, E.G. (Edwin Cyril), 160nn5, 8,11,161nl4 Blake, William, 8,10, 23, 26-32, 33, 34-5, 38,40,47,48, 50, 65, 88,92, 102,115,123,135,136n23,142, 161nl9,167,171,175,184,188-9, 190,193,195,198n5, 214, 218-21, 233nl7, 251, 269, 287, 288, 289nl2, 295-7, 299-301, 303, 304, 306nn6, 7,8,12,13, 308nl9, 309nn25, 28, 36, 310nn36, 39,41, 313-14, 315, 317, 318, 319-20, 322, 327nn4, 9, 10, 330, 331, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 346nl; cloven fiction, 218, 295, 299, 320; works: Jerusalem, 303; Milton, 48, 317; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 219, 318 Blanchot, Maurice, 68, 76n2 Blavatsky, H.P. (Helena Petrovna), 331, 332, 333, 335, 347nnlO, 11, 350; The Secret Doctrine, 332, 333 Blofeld, John, 352 Bloom, Allan, 136nll Bloom, Harold, 6,48, 56n7,155, 161nl9, 201n42, 306n3, 309n28 Body, the, 127-30,132-5,166, 226, 323, 333, 342, 343, 345; consciousness and, 130; female, 209; spiritual, 343 Boehme, Jakob, 6, 35,100,104nll, 320, 322, 331, 335, 341, 350; The Signature of All Things, 341 Boethius, 349 Bohm, David, 131, 333, 334, 335, 336, 342, 343^, 348n20; Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 343

366

Index of Names and Subjects

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 183 Bouson, Brooks }., 249nl9,250n26 Boyd, David V., 6,19n2,42nlO, 56nnl, 2,5,9,10,14, 94nl, 306n7, 327n7, 347nl4 Brancusi, Constantin, 328nl3 Breton, Andre, 14, 205-30,230nnl, 2, 231nn3, 6,234n21; works: Clair de terre, 227; L'Air de I'eau, 207, 215, 216, 217, 219, 227; L''Amour fou, 205, 206, 209, 218,220, 223, 226, 230; 'L'Union libre/ 206,207, 209, 224, 225, 227; Tournesol/ 210, 212; 'Vigilance,' 210 Brogan, Terry V.F., 103n3 Browne, Thomas, 64, 78nl3; Religio Medici, 64 Bruno, Giordano, 332, 350 Bruns, Gerald, 252, 260,263nl4, 263nl6 Buber, Martin, 41, 96nl7,301, 304, 305, 309n31; / and Thou, 301 Buckler, William Earl, 278,279n7 Buddha, 284 Buddhism, Tibetan, 347nl2 Bultmann, Rudolf, 13,36,42n9,15760,160nl, 162n23,163nn25,32; works: History and Eschatology, 151; 'The Significance of the Old Testament for the Christian Faith,' 159 Bunuel, Luis, 223; L'Age d'Or, 223 Bunyan, John, 198n8 Burckhardt, Titus, 351 Burgess, Margaret, 198n2 Burke, Edmund, 249n21 Butler, E.M., 354 Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 32 Caesar, 178 Calvin, John, 190

Calvino, Italo, 351 Cameron, J.M. (James Munro), 158, 163n29 Campbell, Joseph, 6,127,135n4 Capek, Karel, 284; R.U.R., 284 Capra, Fritjof, 334, 335,356 Caputo, John, 76nnl, 2, 78n22, 79n31 Carlyle, Thomas, 78nl9,319 Carroll, Lewis, 332; Sylvie and Bruno, 332 Castaneda, Carlos, 342,356 Catholicism, 14, 28,180,188-91,194, 345; Catholic mass, 189,191,197; Catholic mysticism, 284; Catholic revival, 190; Church of England and, 187; English, 187,189,191, 192; neo-Thomism, 194; Roman, 187; Thomism, 194. See also Church, Catholic Cauvin, Jean-Pierre, 230nl Caws, Mary Anne, 214, 228, 230nl, 233nl6, 234n20, 312 Cayce, Edgar, 351 Cayley, David, 194, 201n41,202n53, 310n42, 319, 321 Chain of being, 30 Chandler, Michael, 199nll Chang, Chung-yuan, 352 Channelling, 351 Chao Pi Ch'en, 351,352 Chapman, George, 27 Charity, A.C. (Alan Clifford), 264nl8 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 33,34 Chew, Geoffrey, 356 Chopin, Frederic, 268 Chopin, Kate, 284; The Awakening, 284 Christ. See Jesus Christensen, Peter, 15 Christian, William, 201n44

Index of Names and Subjects Christian church, 175,184 Christian doctrine, 235 Christian Esotericism, 349 Christianity, 6,13, 28, 29, 31, 34, 37, 53, 92, 96nl7,141,142,146,150-9, 167,175-84,187-91, 205, 220, 230, 233, 235, 254, 269, 272-4, 284, 298, 308nl9, 314, 318, 319,320, 324, 325, 332, 347n4; Blake and, 29-30; Christian myth, 218; Christology, 30; as ideological system of belief, 205; orthodox, 195,324; revolutionary, 324; supersessionism in, 150; typological reading of the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the New, 141,147; without religion (Bonhoeffer), 183 Chuang-tzu, 352 Church, 14,153,156,159,162n22, 175-84,189,192,196, 257; Anglican, 191; Catholic, 28,179,182, 183, 186n8,187-97; Christian, 175, 184; Church Fathers, 34,154,165; cultural hegemony and, 179; English, 191; history and, 178,179; Medieval, 189; Methodist, 177, 179,180,184,186n8; Protestant, 27, 28, 94n3,156,178-84,186n8, 188,189, 319; scripture and, 189; society and, 175; state and, 178, 179; United Church, 6,14,175, 176-80,184,186n8, 235, 319; United Church of Canada, 7,175, 176-9,235; the university and, 7-8,181,182 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 49 Cinderella archetype, 220 Cixous, Helene, 127,136n7, 249n22; ecriture feminine, 127; "The Laugh of the Medusa/ 127

367

Class, 81,87, 89 Cleary, Thomas, 352 Clement, of Alexandria, Saint, 164, 349 Clement, Bishop of Rome, 164,192, 349 Clement, Catharine, 249n22 Cleveland, C.A., 160nlO Cloud of Unknowing, The, 354 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 32,46,49, 283, 308nl7, 319; works: 'Kubla Kahn,' 49; This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison/ 283 Colossians, Epistle to the, 103n7 Comedy, 3,46, 89, 277, 318 Concern, 54,105,181, 206; primary, 6,15, 33,46, 47, 54, 89-90, 92, 93, 124-9,132-5, 218, 224, 231n4, 236, 246; secondary, 15, 46, 47, 54, 89-90, 93,125, 236 Confucius, 352 Conrad, Joseph, 283 Consciousness, 8,128-35,167, 208, 212, 216, 218, 221, 222, 226, 278, 286, 338, 341, 343, 345; body and, 130; collective unconscious, 126, 143; critical-historical, 254; expanded, 10,16,18, 212, 334; religious, 318 Constant, Alphonse Louis, 354 Cook, Eleanor, 306nn2, 7 Cooper, W.R., 308n21 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 34 Corinthians: First, 5,103n7,130,175; Second, 36 Coward, Harold, 78n22 Coward, Noel, 284; Blithe Spirit, 284 Cranmer, Thomas, 199nll Creation, 93, 96nl7,115,117,118, 133,147,167,169,170, 217, 255,

368

Index of Names and Subjects

258, 260, 266, 267, 270, 272^, 277, 296, 302, 317, 319, 343 Criticism. See Theory and criticism Crowley, Aleister, 337 Crowley, John, 332, 353; Little, Big, 332 Cullmann, Oscar, 162n23 Culture, 24,26-8, 32, 34,35, 72, 74, 81, 85, 87,89, 92,126-8,130-3, 135,137,143,182,222, 237,238, 239, 265,269, 294; Hebrew, 167; history and, 34; and imagination, 37; modern, 178; religion and, 72, 181; United Church Commission on Culture, 178; Western, 193. See also Theory and criticism Cumont, Franz, 351,355 Curtius, E.R. (Ernst Robert), 193, 200nn32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38; European Literature in the Later Middle Ages, 193 Cusanus, Nicolaus, Cardinal, 98-9, 103nn5, 6, 350 Dali, Salvador, 234n21 Daniel, Book of, 294,295, 297, 298, 307n8 Danielou, Jean, 154,161nl5 Daniken, Eric von, 334 Dante Alighieri, 15, 34,141,142, 164,189,191,194,195,197, 251, 252, 254-6, 258, 260, 262, 262nn4, 5,283, 317,326, 339; works: Cornmedia, 251, 254, 258, 283; Divine Comedy, 46,195,254,259,326 Darling, Marsha Jean, 249nl9 Darwin, Charles, 34 Darwinism, 313 David, King, 139,140,144,148,149, 150, 284

Davies, Alan, 158,163n27 Dawa-Samdup, Kazi, 352 Death, 62, 71, 89,166, 218, 219, 228, 271, 317 Deguy, Michel, 11, 61, 62, 63, 71-2, 73-5, 77nn9,10, 79nn40,41,42,43, 44, 51,80nn53, 54,55,56,57, 60, 62, 63; works: 'Aide Memoire/ 63; The Discourse of Exaltation (Megalopein): Contribution to a Rereading of Psuedo-Longinus,' 73 Deluge myth, 35,44, 237,308n24, 315; the sublime as, 74. See also Flood De Man, Paul, 85,93, 252,262nl; The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 93 Democracy, 178,179 Denham, Robert D., 16,39,41n8,43, 45, 56nnl, 2, 3,136nl8,164,198n2, 285, 308n23, 316, 327n7 De Quincey, Thomas, 330 Derrida, Jacques, 11,17, 47, 50, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64-70, 72, 76nnl, 2, 77nn5,6, 8, 78nnl4,15,16,18,20, 21, 22, 23, 24,25, 26,27,29, 30,32, 33,46,48, 81-5, 87, 93,94nn2,4, 95nn5, 95n6,129,135,136n21; differance, 47, 84, 87,129; ecriture, 84, 87; transcendental signified, 83,84; works: Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, 66,68; 'Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of "Religion" at the Limits of Reason Alone/ 61; 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences/ 84 Descartes, Rene, 165, 259 Desire, 128,129, 220 Dianoia, 44,45, 52, 53, 83

Index of Names and Subjects Dickens, Charles, 32,138,150, 282; A Christmas Carol, 282 Dickinson, Emily, 32, 41, 288n5, 315 Dickson, Albert, 135 Differance, 47, 84, 87,129 Difference, 82, 84,112; differance and, 84; identity and, 72-3, 92,102,114, 115,117; sameness and, 74 Dilthey, William, 104nl3 Dionysius Areopagita, Pseudo-, 98, 103n4,164, 349; anomoion symbolon, 98 Docetism, 151 Dodds, E.R. (Eric Robertson), 104n9 Dolzani, Michael, 16, 39, 40, 42nlO, 44,46,48, 51, 54,132,136nl8, 306n7 Donaldson, James, 160nlO Donne, John, 326; Devotions, 326 Dostoevsky, KM. (Fyodor Mikhailovich), 283, 284 Douglas, Alfred, Lord, 266 Drong, Leszek, 278, 279n8 Dryden, John, 340 Dubois, Jean, 98 Ducrot, Oswald, 103n3 Dudek, Louis, 187,198nl, 201n44 Duffy, Maureen, 332, 352; The Erotic World of the Faerie, 332 Dutoit, Thomas, 78n20 Dutton, Richard, 278n2 Eady, Elizabeth, 326 Eagleton, Terry, 79n47 Ecclesiastes, Book of, 147, 317 Eckhart, Meister, 335, 350 Eco, Umberto, 98,103n3 Eden, Garden of, 166, 223, 229, 233nl7, 306n7, 307n8, 310n39. See also Garden

369

Edinger, F. Edward, 312,313,327nnl, 2, 3; Ego and Archetype, 312 Einstein, Albert, 344 Eiron figure, 3 Elements, the four, 208; air, 208; earth, 206,207, 208, 270; fire, 208, 270; water, 208, 213, 270. See also Nature Eliade, Mircea, 6,134,135,136n20, 231n6, 321, 335, 351, 352, 354 Elihu, 146 Elijah, 284 Eliot, T.S. (Thomas Stearns), 24, 32, 44,181,189,190,191,198nn6, 198n7, 262n6, 282, 284, 336; works: The Cocktail Party, 282; Four Quartets, 195 Elisha, 315 Elson, Christopher, 77nlO Eluard, Paul, 228 Engels, Friedrich, 222 Ennemoser, Joseph, 354 Epistemology, 101,124, 259 Erasmus, Desiderius, 197 Erdman, David V., 136nn22, 23, 306n6, 307nn8, 9,10,11,12, 309nn25, 27, 310nn36, 40, 41, 327n4 Eriugena, Joannes Scotus, 98, 349 Eros, 40, 206, 209,210, 219, 221, 222, 226-30, 266, 283, 286, 339; in scripture, 206 Esau, 139 Eschatology, 141 Esoteric, 330,331; exoteric tradition, 347n4; spirituality, 345, 345; tradition, 330, 331, 335, 336, 337, 345; Western esotericism, 331, 336 Eucharist, 98,126,176 Evans, Ernest, 160nn3, 4

370

Index of Names and Subjects

Evans-Wentz, W.Y., 352 Eve, 28, 206, 218, 221, 223,228, 260, 314, 317 Evil, 166, 218, 220, 227, 276, 319; nonexistence of, 216-17 Exodus, Book of, 18,298,299,315 Experience, 112,114,116,117,118, 124-6,129-34,138, 313,317; aesthetic, 296; ecstatic, 132; mystical, 131; religious, 48,131, 296,313; universal, 125,126 Ezekiel, 307n8, 309n35 Ezekiel, Book of, 214,307n8 Faith, 11,15, 69, 70, 76, 96nl7,157, 179,181,182,270,293, 298, 299, 302, 304,305, 315,320, 321, 327; biblical, 256; literary vision and, 63^4; literature and, 69; metaphor and, 63-4, 67, 76; primary, 182-3; secondary, 182. See also Belief Faivre, Antoine, 330, 331,336,347n5, 351 Falck, Colin, 135n5 Fall of man, 35, 40,170, 214, 216, 218, 221, 222, 229, 266, 286, 295, 315, 319; redemption and, 170; sexual, 214, 216 Ferguson, Marilyn, 334,356; The Aquarian Conspiracy, 334 Fichte, lohann Gottlieb, 158 Tiguralism/ 151,154,155,156, 161nl9; figuration, 74,154 Finite, 98; infinite and, 12,99 Fish, Stanley, 297, 307nl4 Flahiff, Frederick, 200n39, 201n40 Flaubert, Gustave, 150, 284 Flesh, 144,152,255; word and, 10, 12,105,107,112,113,115,119,120, 135

Fletcher, Angus, 299,308n23 Flood (deluge), the, 35,44,237, 308n24,315; the sublime as, 74 Forst, Graham, 15 Fort, Charles, 355 Foshay, Toby, 78n22 Foucault, Michel, 41, 85,134 Fox, Everett, 305 Franz, Marie-Louise von, 335,351 Frazer, James George, Sir, 345 Freedom, 37,93,220,238, 245, 247, 258, 286, 328nl3; equality and, 179,180; of movement, 54; myth of, 181; necessity and, 287; play and, 93; of speech, 53; of thought, 53 Frei, Hans W., 154,161nnl6,17, 254, 262n3; The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 254 Fremantle, Anne Jackson, 335, 354 Freud, Sigmund, 40,41,44,126, 135n3, 210,219,222, 318,322; The Ego and The Id, 210 Frobenius, Leo, 355 Froude, Hurrell, 193 Frye, Helen (Kemp), 191,235, 317, 326 Fung, Yu-lan, 352 Furman, Jan, 250n26 Gabriel, 284 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 252,260, 263nl6 Galatians, Epistle to the, 284 Galilei, Galileo, 34 Garden, 206-8, 213, 214, 215, 217, 225,226,228, 237. See also Eden and Nature Gauthier, Xaviere, 229, 234n21; Surrealisme et le sexualite, 229

Index of Names and Subjects Gender, 81, 85, 87, 89 Genesis, Book of, 100,139,144,147, 148, 205, 206, 218, 230, 266, 295, 315 Giacometti, Alberto, 210 Gibbon, Edward, 192 Gilchrist, Anne, 198n5 Gilgamesh, Epic of, 169,195 Gill, Glen, 12 Gilman, Charlotte, 284 Gilson, Etienne, 187,194 Girard, Rene, 163n28 Gnostic, 35,151,152,154,158,195, 285, 316, 347n4; Gnosticism, 13, 151,156, 353 God, 16, 23, 24, 29-31, 38, 39-40, 91, 92, 95nl4, 96nl7, 98, 99,109,145, 146,148,149,151,153,157-9, 162n22, 167,169-71,176, 178,179, 184,193, 221, 240, 253, 255-8, 260, 269, 270, 273, 274, 276, 277, 284, 285, 295, 296, 298-302, 304, 305, 308nnl9, 21, 309n36, 310n42, 312-23, 326, 342, 344; 'Allegoric Godship/ 299; Being of, 299; as creator, 30, 167; Creator-Demiurge, 152; form of, 298, 302; 'Ghost of Priest & King/ 299, 300; GodMan, 295, 299, 302; 'good God' (deus bonus), 152, 153; humanity and, 295, 307n8; of Israel, 152; Jehovah, 153; of Job, 325; man and (metaphor of), 29-32,40; mind of, 167,171; 'Nobodaddy/ 30, 299; Old Testament, 151,153; Son of, 294, 295, 298; trickster, 16, 314, 317, 322, 326, 327; Urizen 317; vision of, 170, 314, 315; will of, 167; Word of, 27, 30,167,169,170, 171, 182, 196, 297

371

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 283, 322; Faust, 283, 322 Gold, Joseph, 195,201nn44,46 Gonzalez-Wippler, Migene, 353 Good, 166, 218, 220, 227, 294-6, 304, 322; aesthetic, 296; and evil, 166, 218, 220, 221, 227 Gospel, the, 64, 94n4-95n4,131,149, 150,152,153,159,179,182,183, 224, 265, 268, 270-3, 276, 285, 306n7, 319, 347n4; Everlasting Gospel, 337,338; law and, 152, 157,159. See also individual Gospels Grant, George, 201n44 Grant, Sheila, 201n44 Grey, Paul, 247nn3, 7 Grimm, Jacob, 353 Grof, Christina, 356 Grof, Stanislav, 334, 356; Realms of the Human Unconscious, 334 Grosskurth, Phyllis, 200n39 Grosz, Elizabeth, 135n6 Guilt, 218, 226, 227, 228, 228 Gurdjieff, Georges Ivanovitch, 334, 335, 356 Haber, Honi Fern, 136n9 Halevi, Z'ev Ben Shimon, 353 Halmi, Nicholas, 12 Hamilton, A.C. (Albert Charles), 23, 41nl, 198n7 Hanegraaff, Wouter J., 330, 336, 346n3; New Age Religion and Western Culture, 336 Happy, Michael, 11, 233nl5 Harnack, Adolph von, 13,156-60, 160n9,161n20,162nn20, 21, 22; Marcion: Das Evangelium von Fremden Gott, 156 Hart, Patrick, 198n5

372

Index of Names and Subjects

Haubst, Rudolf, 103n7 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 284 Heaman, Robert J., 310nn38,39 Heaven, 260, 277, 294, 297, 318 Hebrew Bible. See Bible Hebrews, Epistle to the, 61, 68,298, 302, 303, 304 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 208, 322 Heidegger, Martin, 60, 74, 79n45, 80n53,131,157,163n32, 252, 259, 262, 263n9, 264nnl9, 20, 21, 320, 322; Sein und Zeit, 157 Heisenberg, Werner, 88,131 Hell, 31, 92, 260, 277,318 Herbert, George, 162n22 Hercules, 169 Hermeneutics, 252; biblical, 15, 251, 253, 260, 262, 263nl5 Hermes, 284 Hermes, Trismegisthus, 349. See also Mead, G.R.S. Hermeticism, Alexandrian, 349 Herrigel, Eugen, 352 Hesse, Hermann, 282, 287; works: Glass Bead Game, 287; Steppenwolf, 282 Higgins, Michael, 188,198n4; Heretic Blood: The Spiritual Geography of Thomas Merton, 188 Highway, Tomson, 288n4 Hill, Geoffrey, 300,305,309n28; The Triumph of Love, 300, 305 History, 33, 37,52, 61, 90,92,101, 125,126,137,140,155,157-60, 168,169,176,178,179,183,190, 214, 253, 255, 257,270, 293, 300, 302, 320, 331; biblical, 226; biblical historiography, 164; cultural, 137, 193; culture and, 34; fall and

redemption in, 339; Heilsgeschichte, 12,178; historicity, 39,49; literature and, 65; logos of, 255,257, 258; mimetic theory of literature and, 65; philosophy and, 293; poetry and, 62; sacred, 315; salvation, 161nl3; spiritual, 178,182; Spenglerian notion of, 178,190, 192; Weltgeschichte, 12,178 Hitching, Francis, 351 Hitler, Adolf, 156 Hobson, Marian, 79n48 Hodgson, Phyllis, 354 Hofstadter, Albert, 264n20 Holderlin, Friedrich, 72 Holland, Vyvian, 278nl Hollander, John, 161nl9 Holquist, Michael, 231n4 Holy, the, 11, 63, 70, 76 Holy Roman Empire, 179 Holy Spirit, 170,179,184, 294, 297, 300, 323 Homer, 27,108,195, 236, 238, 248nn9,14; works: Iliad, 46; Odyssey, 46,238,318,323,325 Hope, 34, 69,182, 293, 295, 305, 320, 321 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 192,195, 199nll Hosea, Book of, 240 Houtchens, Carolyn W., 327nnlO, 11 Houtchens, Lawrence H., 327nnlO, 11 Hughes, Merritt Yerkes, 263n8 Hulme, T.E. (Thomas Ernest), 193, 200n27 Huxley, Aldous, 335, 337, 347nl5, 350, 356; Perennial Philosophy, 335, 336 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 44

Index of Names and Subjects lamblichus, 349 Ibsen, Henrik, 284; works: A Doll House, 284; Ghosts, 284 Identity, 87,102,105,112,113,119; anagogic fable of, 302; difference and, 72-3, 92,102,112,114,115, 117; Identity-in-difference, 82, 92 Ideology, 6, 8, 39,46, 47,54,81,85, 89, 90,93,118,124,125,126,129, 132,182,183, 205, 219, 228,281, 286, 317, 318, 325; conservativism, 194; imaginative vision and, 47; liberalism, 194. See also Theory and criticism Idolatry, 54, 72 Illuminism, 331 Illusion, 40,131, 233nl7,320,321 Imagery, 128,225, 231n4; apocalyptic, 53; biblical, 165, 230,236,247n8; Christian, 191; demonic, 53; metaphor and, 206; mythological, 145 Imagination, 8,15, 26-7, 29, 95nl3, 114,118,120,165, 209, 219, 246, 252, 271-2, 274, 287, 288, 296, 298, 302, 303, 308nl9, 311n43, 322, 331, 345; creative, 275, 295, 319, 341; educated, 30, 222; erotic, 222; literary, 150, 219; mythical, 219; poetic, 220, 222, 286 Immortality, 166, 325 Incarnation, 99,135,144,153,178, 255, 308n21, 309n36, 310n36, 324 Infinite, 98,109,120, 332; and finite, 12,99, 341 Inge, William Ralph, 193, 200n31, 335, 354; Christian Mysticism, 193 Interpenetration, 52, 331, 343; as metaphor, 43-4 lonesco, Eugene, 283; The Chairs, 283 Irenaeus, of Lyons, 153,154,160nlO

373

Irony, 39,46, 87,106,107,110, 111, 116-20, 223,283, 287, 319; Eiron figure, 3; ironic separation, 123^4; Isaac, 315 Isaiah, Book of, 140,144,223, 270, 276, 301, 305 Islam, 165, 347n4 Israel, People of, 145,149,152,158, 159,178,190, 226, 311n44 Iterability, 66, 78nl7 Jackson, H.J., 308nl7 Jacob (Israel), 139,148, 314,315,316 Jacobs, Louis, 309n35 Jakobson, Roman, 98 James, Henry, 109, 332; What Maisie Knew, 109 James, William, 321,328nl4 Jameson, Fredric, 180,186nlO Jaspers, Karl, 157-8,162n24 Jeffrey, David Lyle, 201n45 Jeremiah, 142, 284 Jerusalem, 135,149 Jesus, 4,13, 29, 30-1,41, 64,91,92, 99,101,103n8,139,145,151,152, 153,154,157,158,169,170,178, 196, 252, 256, 265, 270, 271, 272, 273, 276, 277, 284, 285, 295, 298, 299, 300, 302, 307n8, 308nl9, 309n36, 317, 319, 328nl9, 347n4; as androgynous, 285; Divine Artist, 265; as 'form/ 298,302; God-man, 92,295, 299, 302; historical, 270; as homosexual, 285; Passion of, 69; Supreme Artist, 268 Joachim, of Floris, 182, 318,335, 350 Job, 138,142,146,163n29, 313, 314, 315, 317, 322, 324 Job, Book of, 138,139,144,146, 301, 313, 314, 316, 321

374

Index of Names and Subjects

Johnson, Mark, 127,128,129,130, 131,136nn9,13,14,15,16 John, First Epistle of, 285,294 John, Gospel of, 119, 255, 271, 307n8 John the Baptist, 184, 273, 276 Jonah, Book of, 145,347n4 Jonas, Hans, 152,153,160nn7,12,353 Jonson, Ben, 330 Joseph, 143; as Christian figura, 144 Joyce, James, 24, 32,171,195,314, 336, 339 Judah, 148 Judaism, 6,13, 37,96nl7,141,146, 151,152,153,154,155,158,159, 347n4; Hellenistic, 349 Julian, the Apostate, 192 Julian, of Norwich, 350 Jung, C.G. (Carl Gustav), 55,56nn8, 15,126,135n2,143,169,210, 221, 230n2, 231n5, 232nn6,10, 282, 288n7, 312, 320, 321, 324,335, 338, 339, 340-1, 345, 348nl8, 350, 356; works: Answer to Job, 316; Psychology and Alchemy, 55 Justice, 298; mercy and, 153 Kabbalah, 340, 353; Christian, 330, 331; Jewish, 331; Kabbalah Unveiled, 353; post-Christian, 330 Kafka, Franz, 284; works: 'In the Penal Colony,' 284; Metamorphosis, 284 Kalaga, Wojciech, 279n8 Kant, Immanuel, 285, 286-7, 288n8, 289nlO, 299, 304, 309n36; The Conflict of the Faculties, 299 Katabasis, 44, 316, 339 Kaufmann, Walter, 309n31 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 284, 316; The Last Temptation of Christ, 284

Keats John, 283; 'Ode on a Grecian Urn/ 283 Kee, James, 15,19nl, 20n7, 263nll Keith, W.J. (William John), 198nl, 198n3, 200n35 Kenner, Hugh, 17 Kenosis, 308n21, 309n36 Kent, David, 199n9 Kenton, Warren, 351 Kermode, Frank, 196,201nn49, 50, 51, 306n4 Kerygma, 3, 6,11,12,30,36,48, 60, 70,83, 86,90,91,92,93, 94n2, 95nn4,13,120,124,133,134, 205, 273,297,310n36, 338, 346nl; as language specific to religion, 63, 69, 71; metaphor and, 86,120; sacred, or holiness and, 63. See also Language Keynes, Geoffrey, 198, 289nl2 Kierkegaard, Soren, 67, 69, 78n28; Repetition, 67 King, Francis, 354 Kings, Second Book of, 315 Knight, Leah, 9,12 Knowledge, 112,118,164,165,166, 168,172,182, 263n9, 315; experience and, 116,118; moral, 218, 221; revealed, 165; 'simulated,' 182; unconscious, 217 Kogawa, Joy, 242,247n8; Obasan, 242 Kojeve, Alexander, 128,136nll 'Kook books,' 16, 333, 334, 335, 336, 345, 346, 354, 348-55 Krell, David Ferrell, 79n45, 264n20 Krishna, Gopi, 335,352; Kundalini, 335 Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju, 344 Kristeva, Julia, 127,136n8

Index of Names and Subjects Laban, 148 Lacan, Jacques, 4, 41,127,128, 136nlO, 208; stade de miroir, 208 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 79n53 Laforgue, Jules, 329, 346n2 Lakoff, George, 127,128,129,130, 131,136nnl3,16 Lamba, Jacqueline, 209 Lamia, 218 Langland, William, 15,251, 252, 256-8, 260, 262n7; Piers Plowman, 251, 254, 256, 257, 258 Language, 4,11, 32,48, 83-9,90, 94, 97, 109,113,114,120,127-30,132, 133,135,138,140,147, 236, 237, 242, 252, 253, 254, 256, 258, 259, 269, 285, 313, 345; allegory, 28, 71; biblical, 195, 238, 252, 253; centrifugal, 129; descriptive, 48, 95nl3,106,118,129,138, 253, 258, 345; doctrinal, 253; ideological, 38-9, 89, 95nl3; imaginative, 10, 28, 37, 38^0,108,116,120, 238; kerygma and, 63, 69, 71,120,133; langage, 253, 254; literary, 105, 107; of love, 184; metaphoric, 48,128, 138,168, 238, 253, 254; metonymic, or conceptual, 48, 89, 95nl3,129, 168, 253-5; modes of, 28, 38, 4950, 95nl3, 111, 293; of myth, 183, 238; poetic, 95nl3; professional vs. public discourse, 49; rhetorical, 28, 36, 38, 39, 83, 84, 85, 97-8; theoria of, 25, 26. See also Theory and Criticism Lankavatara Sutra, 352 Lao-tsu, 352 Larson, Stephen, 354 Last Judgment, 99, 277, 310n39, 347n4

375

Law, 166,167,272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277; Gospel and, 157,159 Law, William, 335,350 Lawrence, D.H. (David Herbert), 284; The Man Who Died, 284 Layton, Bentley, 353 Leary, Timothy, 337 Lee, Alvin A., xii, 7, 8,10,11,16,19, 78nl3,136nl8,198n2, 201nn43, 48, 308n23, 336 Legeza, L., 352 Legge, James, 352 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 100, 336 Leith, James A., 103n4 Leviathan, 144,145,146, 314, 316 Levinas, Emmanuel, 68 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 136nl7 Lewis, I.M., 354 Librett, Jeffrey, 79n38, 80n53 Lilith, 218 Literary criticism. See Theory and criticism Locke, John, 344 Logic 39,113, 302; metaphor and, 105 Logos, 30, 99,167,170,182, 255,256, 322; of history, 255, 257, 258; of John, 164; of Philo, 164 Lombardo, Agostino, 306n2 Longinus, 11, 62, 71, 73-5, 79n52, 80nn58, 59,131; 'On the Sublime/ 62 Loomis, Roger Sherman, 344-5 Los, 304, 310n39 Lot, 140 Lotan, 146 Love, 14, 89, 90,92-3,114,133,149, 184,193, 208-10, 215, 216, 220-3, 225, 229, 236, 238, 242, 243, 244,

376

Index of Names and Subjects

246, 247, 272, 275, 308nl7, 320, 324, 326; divine, 324; of God, 189; human, 324; nature and, 205; sexual, 32,205,206,207, 216,219, 220, 223, 228 Luke, Gospel of, 139,156, 310n37, 326, 328nl9 Lull, Ramon, 350 Luther, Martin, 162n22,197 Lyly, John, 332; Endymion, 332 Lytton, Edward Bulwer, 351 MacColloch, Diarmaid, 199nll MacDonald, George, 332, 353 Mackintosh, H.R. (Hugh Ross), 163n30 Macrobius, 349 Magic, 107; metaphor and, 108; shamanism and, 354; the spiritual and, 107 Magritte, Rene, 234n21 Malaclypse the Younger (Greg Hill), 337; Principia Discordia, 337 Mallarme, Stephane, 4,41, 67, 136nl9, 312, 322, 329, 346nnl, 351; Igitur, 312 Malmgren, Carl, 249n23 Malory, Thomas, 340 Mamet, David, 283; Oleanna, 283 Mammon, 297,302 Marcion, of Sinope, 13,151-4,156-8, 160nn5,9,161n20,162nn20, 21,22 Marcionites, 316 Marcuse, Herbert, 286, 289nll; Eros and Civilization, 286 Maritain, Jacques, 187,193 Mark, Gospel of, 298 Marques, Gabriel Garcia, 237, 248nlO; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 237, 239

Martianus Capella, 349 Martin, Wallace, 103n3 Martyr, Justinus, Saint, 154 Marx, Karl, 44,318 Marxism, 180,182,194 Mary, Virgin, 207, 284 Mary Magdalene, 284 Maslow, Abraham H., 356 Mathematics, 334,344; literature and, 87,94 Mathers, S.L. MacGregor, 353 Matthew, Gospel of, 246 Matthews, John, 354 May, Herbert G., 308n21 McCann, Justin, 354 McLuhan, Marshall, 187,194, 200n39 Mead, G.R.S., 335,349,353; Thrice Greatest Hermes, 335 Meaning, 90,109,127,141; centrifugal, 10,89; centripetal, 10; levels of, 293, 306n2; polysemus, 93 Melville, Herman, 146, 282, 283 Menotti, Gian Carlo, 284; The Medium, 284 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry Sergeyevich, 334, 354; Atlantis/Europe, 334 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 135, 136n22 Merrill, James, 346; The Changing Light at Sandover, 346 Merton, Thomas, 6,14,188-9,197, 198nn4, 5; The Seven Story Mountain, 188 Metamorphosis, 331 Metanoia, 212, 273, 276 Metaphor, 6,11,12,17, 26,36,38-40, 43^, 48, 59-76, 82-94, 94n2, 97, 98,102,105-20,123,124,127-33, 138,139,141,147,148, 206,209,

Index of Names and Subjects 238, 253, 256, 261, 285, 323, 346nl; anagogic, 63, 70, 71-3, 75, 90, 91, 209 - see also Anagogy; applied and practical, 89; Christology as, 30; circumambulatio, 54-6; cultural context of, 124; cultural function of, 123^; ecstatic, 63,105,115, 118,124,131; ethical, 89-90; existential, 63, 70,105,112-13,115, 118; faith and, 63-4, 67; God and man, 29-32,40; the gods as, 73; imaginative identities of, 228; and kerygma, 86,120; logic and, 105; magic and, 107,108; myth and, 83, 106,119,123,124,128, 346nl; one flesh (biblical), 114; religious writing and, 64-5; royal, 97; speaking presence, the, 84; the spiritual and, 11,107; the sublime (Deguy), 62-3, 70, 71, 72-6; testimony and, 71-2, 76; 'way' (or journey), 119; Word of God as, 167 Metaphysics, 97,101, 330, 337; of infinity, 99; of presence, 83, 84 Methodist Church. See Church, Methodist Metonymny, 17, 31, 48, 87, 88, 91, 97-9,106,115,147,167,168,171. See also Metaphor Metzger, Bruce M., 308n21 Meyrink, Gustav, 355 Michal, 149,150 Midrash, 298, 309n35 Migne, J.-P. (Jacques-Paul), 103n5 Milbank, John, 202n55 Milton, John, 7,15, 32, 33, 34,48, 142,143,179,193, 221, 251, 252, 256, 258, 259-60, 262, 263nn8,11, 297, 317, 323, 332, 336, 353; works: Paradise Lost, 221, 251, 254, 256,

377

258, 259, 297; Paradise Regained, 317 Mimesis, 6,39, 62,129; history and, 65; philosophy and, 65 Mind, 127,130,132,133,166, 237, 333, 343; of God, 169,171 Mithra, 154 Mohammed, 347n4 Moliere, 281, 282; Tartuffe, 281 Monad, 12,99,100,102,195; monadic symbol, 97; monadology, 97, 101 Montaigne, Michel de, 115 Montale, Eugenio, 293,305nl; 'Piccolo testamento/ 293 Moody, Raymond, 355 Moore, Marcia, 355 Morality, 218, 219, 287,294, 296, 297 Morris, William, 33, 332 Morrison, Toni, 15, 235-47,247nn4, 5, 6, 248nnl2,19, 249nn21, 22, 250nn26, 30; works: Beloved, 236, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 244, 246, 247; Paradise, 236 Moses (Moshe), 13,18, 35,101,167, 169, 298, 305, 311n44 Moyers, Bill, 249nl9 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 281 Munk, Linda, 13,14 Murnane, Gerald, 45, 56n4 Murray, Margaret Alice, 355 Music, 133,182, 268, 288, 294 Mysticism, 333, 335, 341, 344; Eastern, 335; German, 335; mystical tradition, 337; the occult and, 354 Mythology 6,11,12, 26, 33-6, 39,47, 49, 93, 95nl3, 96nl7,105,109,112, 123,124,125,126,128,129,132, 137,140,142,144,145,146-7,150, 176,183, 230, 265, 268, 282, 285,

378

Index of Names and Subjects

306n2, 329, 346nl; Canaanite cosmogonic, 144; Celtic, 31; Christian, 91-2,161nl9, 285; diachronic, 168,169; divine creation myth, 24, 35; late classical, 26; metaphor and, 83,106,119,123,124,128, 346nl; mythical narrative, 95n4; 'the mythical' vs. 'the fabulous,' 33-4; mythological universe, 137; mythos, mythoi, 44,45,46,48, 83, 99,106, 205,219, 261, 293; Near Eastern, 144; Norse, 26,31; North American aboriginal, 282; philosophy of, 329; Romantic, 286; science and, 332; synchronic, 169; Vedic, 330 Naomi, 305 Napoleon, 281 Narrative: biblical, 252,254, 256, 257, 262; metaphorical, 255, 256, 257 Nature, 99,110,137,138,205-8, 215-17, 223, 225-7, 229, 248n9, 258, 259, 267, 269, 270, 271, 274, 286, 286, 331; anthropocentric vision of, 271; classical naturegods, 110; cyclical world of, 286; fear of, 227; human, 110, 321; natura naturans, 205, 215; sexuality and, 206 Nazism, 13,151,160, 300-1, 309n30, 320,326, 334; Neo-Gnosticism and, 151,156 Neal, John Mason, 191,199nll Near Eastern mythology, 144 Nebuchadnezzar, 294, 300 Needleman, Jacob: Modern Esoteric Spirituality, 336,347n5,353 Neoplatonism, 99,135,164, 349 Nerval, Gerard de, 329

Nettesheim, Agrippa von, 355 Neugroschel, Joachim, 355 Newman, John Henry, Cardinal, 94n3,192,193,199nlO, 200nn20-9; works: Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 192; On the Scope & Nature of University Education, 192 New Testament. See Bible Nicholson, Mervyn, 128,136nl2 Nicholson, R.A., 352 Nie, Johannes van, 13,14 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 41,44, 84,134 Ninevah, 145 Noah, 303, 315 Numbers, Book of, 310n36 Numerology, 338-340 Nussbaum, Martha, 232nl3 Occult, 330, 332,333, 344; occultism, 332 Odysseus, 238-9; as trickster, 323-4 Oedipus, 125 Ogdoad scheme, 48, 51,339 O'Grady, Jean, 14, 78nl3, 336 Old Testament. See Bible O'Neill, Eugene, 282; The Iceman Cometh, 282 Onomatopoeia, 107-8 Ontology, 124, 299, 302; guerilla, 338 Ore, 318,322; Ore cycle, 123, 318 Origen, 164 Orotava, the, 214-16, 225 Orpheus, 222 Orwell, George, 283, 284; Nineteen Eighty-Four, 284 Osiris, 154 Otten, Terry, 249n23, 250n26 Otto, Rudolf, 63, 70, 77nll, 79n34, 335,355; The Idea of the Holy, 63

Index of Names and Subjects Ouspensky, P.D., 334, 335, 356 Outram, Richard, v Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 23, 26, 27, 31-2, 38,40, 41,41n5,167; works: Fasti, 23; Metamorphoses, 26 Oxford, 191,192; Merton College, 187,192 Oxford Movement, the, 190 Pagan, 98,145; Greco-Roman, 144; neo-paganism, 338; ritual, 144 Page, Philip, 249n22 Paglia, Camille, 288n5 Palmer, Samuel, 189,198n5 Paltiel, 149 Pantheism, 193 Papus (Gerard Encausse), 351 Paracelsianism, 330-1 Paracelsus, Theophrastus, 101, 104nl2, 350 Pardes, liana, 141,150n2 Parker, Patricia, 72-3, 79nn49, 50 Patanjali, 335, 347nl3, 352; Yoga Sutra, 335, 336 Pater, Walter, 182,186nll Paul, Saint, 36-7, 41, 42n9, 68, 99, 130,156,175, 284, 298, 302, 308n21, 325; soma psychikon, 130, 132 Pauwels, Louis, 334, 354 Peele, George, 332; Old Wives' Tale, 332 Pepin, Jean, 103n4 Perkin, Russell, 14 Perkins, Pheme, 353 Perkins, William, 310n41 Perrault, Charles, 215 Perseus, 169 Peukert, Will-Erich, 104nl3 Pharmakos, 127

379

Philippians, Epistle to the, 298,302, 308n21, 309n36 Philo, of Alexandria, 13,164-72, 172nn2-7, 335, 349 Philosophy, 61, 65, 85, 90,127,165, 179,190,192, 293, 300; Calvin and, 190; as discursive verbal structure, 85; history and, 293; as ideological and conceptual verbal structure, 90; mimetic theory of literature and, 65; modern, 165; perennial philosophy, 337; philosopher's stone, 56; philosophia perennis, 330, 336, 337; of religion, 171; revelation and, 165,171 Philostratus, 349 Physics, 124,130, 333, 335, 344; explicate order, 343; Heisenberg principle, 131; holographic paradigm, 333, 342; implicate order (Bohm), 333, 335, 342, 343; Newtonian, 343; Tao of, 334, 342, 343 Pick, John, 200nl9 Pickstock, Catherine, 202n55 Piers, Anthony, 355 Pike, James A., 351; The Other Side, 333 Pinter, Harold, 284; The Dumb Waiter, 284 Plato, 99,117,118,158,164,165,167, 253, 261, 263nnl6,17, 293; idea of 'the good,' 293; Parmenides, 99; Platonic idea, 164,165 Play, 84, 93,133, 286, 287; presence and, 84 Plutarch, 27 Poe, Edgar Allan, 330 Poetry, 27, 62, 63, 71, 72, 75, 86,102, 107-11,113-15,139,140,142,

380

Index of Names and Subjects

144,161nl9,188,193, 208, 209, 222, 228, 251,252,261, 287, 288, 298, 307nl3; biblical, 139,144; Canaanite, 146; Hebrew, 146; poetics, 293; visionary, 261. See also Metaphor Politics, 27,179,180,190,194, 235; communism, 192; Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), 180; identity, 236; New Democratic Party (NDP), 180; socialism, 267 Ponce, Charles, 353 Pope, Alexander: The Dunciad, 283; The Rape of the Lock, 283 Porphyry, 349 Porta, John Baptista, 354 Powell, James N., 352 Pratt, E.J. (Edwin John), 32 Preminger, Alex, 103n3 Pribram, Karl, 334,335,336 Primary concern. See Concern, primary Proclus, Arabus, 99,104n8; Elements of Theology, 99 Prometheus, 219, 220, 284,318 Promised Land, the, 191 Prophecy, 272-6 Prophets, Hebrew, 154 Prose Edda, 26 Protestantism, 14,27,28, 94n3,156, 178-84,186n8,188,189,190,193, 195,197, 308n24, 315, 319, 324, 345; biblical tradition, 193; English, 193; fundamentalism, 189; Protestant liberalism, 189,191. See also Church, Protestant Proust, Marcel, 317 Proverbs, Book of, 139, 217 Psalms, Book of, 139,144

Psychology, 55,127, 337, 345 Puree, Jill, 355 Pusey, E.B. (Edward Bouverie), 192 Puttenham, George, 31 Pynchon, Thomas, 312, 313; Gravity's Rainbow, 312 Quai aux Fleurs, 212, 213,216 Quintilian, 97-8,101,103n2 Rabelais, Francois, 225,231n4, 313, 347n4 Race, 81,85,87, 89 Rachwal, Tadeusz, 279n8 Rahab, 144 Raphael, 284 Rawson, Peter, 352 Ray, Man, 234n21 Rebecca, 148 Recreation, 93, 94,211, 212, 214, 236, 238, 239, 240, 241, 262, 267, 274, 311n43, 315, 316, 321,322, 325 Redemption, 267, 268, 269; the fall and, 170 Reformation, 156,183,189,190,191, 197, 308n24; Counter-Reformation, 192,197 Regan, Charles E., 78nl2 Regardie, Israel, 351 Reiss, Timothy, 263nlO Religion, 6,24, 27,29,33,37-8,47, 54, 59, 60,63, 68, 70, 72, 76,97,118, 128,133,156,157,162n22,171, 175,177,183,188,197, 235,252, 266, 269, 297, 299, 308n24, 315, 319, 320, 323, 332, 338, 343, 345, 346nl; art and, 269, 276,296; Blake and, 29-30; culture and, 26-9, 72, 181; Discordianism, 338; exoteric, 330; as ideology, 39-40; as illusion,

Index of Names and Subjects 40-1; literature and, 59, 63, 72,188, 299; natural, 331, 339; New Age, 333, 334, 342; of Philistinism, 193; religious experience, 48,131; religious texts 91,155; religious thought, 164; testimony and, 61; without Christianity, 183 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 305 Renaissance, 28, 31, 49,190, 206; English, 27; hermeticism, 330 Repetition, 66-7; as 'prosthetic iterability,' 67 Reps, Paul, 352 Resurrection, 5,135, 310n36, 324, 328nl9, 331 Revelation, 23, 33, 38, 40,48, 52, 63, 92,106,159,164,165,168,169, 170,171,172,182, 273, 274, 297, 308n24, 311n42, 313, 329, 331, 339, 345; Christian, 153, 308nl9 Revelation, Book of, 100,285, 301, 307n8, 340 Revolution, 272, 273, 274, 318, 322; cultural, 28 Reynolds, Stephen 199nll Rhetoric, 17-18, 49, 83, 84, 85, 86, 97-8,106, 107,108,118,171 Rich, Adrienne, 248nl3 Richardson, Peter, 201n44 Ricoeur, Paul, 11, 60, 62, 70-1, 76n3, 77nn4, 7,12, 79nn35-7, 39, 252, 263nl7, 264nl8; The Rule of Metaphor, 60 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 24, 41 Rimbaud, Arthur, 315, 329, 346n2, 351; line Saison en enfer, 318 Rituals, 47,176; pagan, 144 Roberts, Alexander, 160nlO Roberts, Jane, 333, 342, 345-6, 351;

381

The 'Unknown' Reality: A Seth Book, 346 Robinson, James M., 353 Romans, Epistle to the, 240,248nl7 Romanticism, 190,268,273, 276, 281, 287, 296,298, 317, 318, 319,320; English, 32; of Newman, 192 Romantic quest, 9,12 Rosicrucianism, 351 Ross, Robert, 266, 278nl Rossetti, Christina, 190 Rossini, Gioacchino, 280-1; // Barbiere di Siviglia, 280 Roussel, Raymond, 224 Rucker, Rudy, 334, 356; Infinity and the Mind, 334 Ruth, 305; Book of, 226 Ruysbroek, Jan van, 350 Sacred, 10,24,183; history, 315; literature, 23,150; texts, 25, 331 Sade, Marquis de, 219 Said, Edward, 134 Salusinszky, Imre, 6,10,11,19n2, 42nlO, 56nnl, 2,56nn5, 6,9,10,14, 94nl, 160n2, 198n6, 201n42, 306n7, 327n7, 347nl4 Samson, 47 Samuel, 315 Samuel (Book of): First, 315; Second, 139,144,149 Sankaracara, 352 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 283,322; No Exit, 283 Satan, 146, 219, 260, 314, 316, 317 Saul, 149, 315, 325 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 82 Schaya, Leo, 353 Schelling, F.W.J. (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph) von, 322, 329

382

Index of Names and Subjects

Schiller, Friedrich, 286 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 158, 163n30,192; The Christian Faith, 158 Schmidt, A.V.C. (Aubrey Vincent Carlyle), 262n7 Schniewind, Julius, 157,162n23 Schoenberner, Gerhard, 309n30 Scholem, Gershom, 353 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 44,286 Schrodinger, Erwin 131, 343 Schwarz, Leo W. (Leo Walder), 172nl Science, 343; myth and, 332; popular, 334, 342 Science fiction, 333 Scofield, C.I. (Cyrus Ingerson), 308n22 Scott, Walter, Sir, 33 Scripture, 23, 24,142,147,153,160, 161nl9,162n22,165,166,167,170, 179,189,297; Eros in, 206; Hebrew, 150,152,158; Jewish, 151, 153,154; philosophy and, 165; sacred, 34-6,120,135,166,181; 'sacred' and 'secular,' 4, 24-5,29, 30, 33-5, 37-8,40-1; secular, 181, 206 Secondary concern. See Concern, secondary Secular, 10,24, 25, 38,183,196; literature, 23,161nl9 Seligmann, Kurt, 354 Senger, H.G. (Hans Gerhard), 103n6 Sermon on the Mount, 162n22,276 Sexuality, 14, 32, 205, 206, 207, 210, 213, 214, 216, 218-22, 227, 228, 229,230,283; sexual union, 208, 210, 223, 227 Shakespeare, William, 3,32,33, 34, 41, 92,143, 268,282, 314, 325,332,

336,353; works: All's Well That Ends Well, 325; Hamlet, 283; Henry IV, Part 2,337; King Lear, 283; Macbeth, 283; Measure for Measure, 325; The Merchant of Venice, 314; Much Ado About Nothing, 325; The Tempest, 233nl5, 268, 317 Shame, 218,221, 227, 228; concealment of, 221 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 190,193, 225, 283, 287 Sherbert, Garry, 11 Shimei, 149 Shiva, 217, 218 Sidney, Philip, Sir, 56, 89, 95nl2, 111, 267,278n2; The Defence ofPoesie, 267 Silberer, Herbert, 335,351,355 Simile, 139 Sin, 180, 218, 219,220,228, 273, 286; original, 37, 317 Singer, Dorothy, 350 Singer, Ian, 15 Slavery, 236, 238, 239, 240, 243-5, 247 Smith, Adam (G.J.W. Goodman), 334,354; Powers of Mind, 334 Social action, 180,181, 293 Social contract, 125 Society, 32,33, 92,123,131,134,175, 181,184,229, 257, 265,274,318, 319; English, 273; religion and, 176; secular, 179 Sociology, 90,144,235; as ideological and conceptual verbal structure, 90 Socrates, 159 Solomon, Barbara H., 248nl2, 249n23, 250n26 Solomon, King, 139,159,284 Soma psychikon (mortal body), 130, 132

Index of Names and Subjects Somervell, D.C. (David Churchill), 186 'Something/ 12,106,108,109, 112-18,120 Song of Solomon (Song of Songs), 133,139, 206, 207, 213, 230 Sophocles, 127 Soul, 147,152,166, 323, 333, 343; rational, 166 Space, 11, 277, 286 Sparagmos, 126 Sparshott, Francis, 201n44 Speech: ornamental and persuasive, 86; verbal artefact, 140; writing and, 84, 87, 95n4 Speiser, E. A. (Ephraim Avigdor), 144 Spencer, Sidney, 355 Spengler, Oswald, 52,178 Spenser, Edmund, 32, 33, 50, 336, 353 Spinoza, Baruch, 165; Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 165 Spiral, The, 51,108,119; interpenetrating version of (two spinning gyres), 51; Jung and, 55; spiral curriculum, 10,15, 51, 54 Spirit, 6,11,15, 95nl4,105,119,120, 123,132,133,134,147, 268, 322, 333, 342, 343, 345; the Word and, 123,134. See also Holy Spirit and Spirituality Spirits, 342, 346nl; fairies and elementals, 330, 331, 332, 353 Spirituality, 3,4,10,11,16,19, 23, 107,118,130,133,139,182,191, 313, 342; esoteric spirituality, 330; magic and, 107; spiritual body, 133; spiritual community, 183; spiritual progress, 140,141;

383

spiritual world, the 124; Western spirituality, 164 Stearn, Jess, 351 Stein, Israel C, Rabbi, 150n3 Steinmetz, Jean-Luc, 215, 225, 232nn8,11, 233nl8; Andre Breton, 215 Stevens, Holly, 56nll Stevens, Wallace, 32, 51, 56nll, 67, 138, 238, 298, 299, 302, 321, 322, 328nl6, 336; works: 'Imagination as Value/ 298; The Sail of Ulysses/ 51-2 Stewart, David, 78nl2 Stewart, J.S., 163n30 Stiegman, Emero, 198n3 Stoekl, Allan, 231n3 Strindberg, August, 355 Suares, Carlo, 353 Sublime, the, 11, 71-6 Surrealism, 205, 219, 228, 229 Suzuki, D.T., 352 Suzuki, Shunryu, 352 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 331,354 Symbol, symbolism, 98,101-2, 103n5,105,119, 127,140, 225, 261; Blake's symbolism, 27; Christian symbolism, 190; erotic symbolism, 208; French symbolists, 329; literary symbolism, 189; mandala symbolism, 217; monadic, 104nl4; morphology of, 333; religious, 98; symbolic equivalence, 143; theory of symbolism, 102,194; universal, 125. See also Language, Metaphor, Metonomy, and Synecdoche Synecdoche, 12, 97-101; anomoion symbolon (pseudo-Dionysius), 98; microcosmic, or monadic manifestation of, 99; symbolon and, 98

384

Index of Names and Subjects

Talmon, Shemaryahu, 294 Tamar, 144,148 Tammuz, 154 Tarot, 351 Taylor, Thomas 354 Taylor-Guthrie, Danille Kathleen, 247n4, 248nl9 Teaching. See University Technology, 74 Terence, 282 Tertullian, 68-9,152,154,156, 160nn3,4, 6, 8 Teskey, Gordon, 104nl3 Testimony, 11, 64, 66,68, 70; fiction and, 61, 62, 65, 68; metaphor and, 71-2, 76; miracle and, 68; performative character of, 61; as poetic act, 65; the secret and, 68; the sublime and, 71 Thanatos, 339, 340 Tharmas, 295, 304 Theology, 30,90, 92,118,180,191; apophatic, 103n5; Christian, 53, 92,158,178; Christology, 30; doctrinal, 294; existentialist, 157; as ideological verbal structure, 90; Marcion's, 157; Pauline, 153; speculative, 253; Theodicy, 324; Thomist, 188 Theory and criticism, 4,6,15,17, 24, 25,29, 32,43,47,48, 52-6, 59, 81, 82, 83, 85,87,90,96nl7,106,107, 118,123,124,155,161nl9,168, 196,236,293, 294,297; 'abject,' the (Kristeva), 127; archetypal, 281; biblical, 192; class, 81, 87; contemporary, 124; cultural, 18, 81,85,87, 124,128,135; cultural materialism, 129; cultural phenomenology, 127; of decline ('butterslide'), 190,192;

deconstruction, 11,47, 59, 81,82, 84, 85,93,94,128,129,223; ecriture feminine (Cixous), 127; 'ethical,' 72, 194; feminism, 82, 85,94n3,127, 229,239; Freudian, 194; gender, 81,85, 87, 281; ideological, 49,93; literary, 17-18,124,128,129,138, 155, 285, 294; Logocentrism, 187; Marxism, 180,182,194; as metaliteral, 90,91,93; mythopoeic, 187; New Criticism, 44,156; New Historicism, 85,129; phallogocentricism (Lacan), 127; political, 256; post-structuralism, 25, 81-2, 85, 86,93,124,127; project of, 142; Queer theory, 93; race, 81,85, 87; Romantic, 286; second generation cognitive science, 127; as sight, 303 Theseus, 169 Thessalonians, First, Epistle to the, 69 Thomas, Dylan, 24 Thomas, Lewis, 104nlO Thompson, John B., 264nl7 Tibetan Book of the Dead, 335,352 Time, 11, 269,277,286; 'timeful,' 277 Todorov, Tzvetan, 98,103n3 Tolkein, J.R.R. (John Ronald Reuel), 282, 332 Torah, 169,301,305 Toynbee, Arnold, 178,186n7 Tragedy, 46, 89,276,277, 283 Trees, 225; axis mundi, or world-tree, 118,134,211, 215, 216,218; dragon tree (Breton), 214-16; forbidden, 217; of knowledge, 228; of life, 218; 'wrong' tree, the, 218 Tricky servant' (dolosus servus), 3,

Index of Names and Subjects 15, 280, 281, 282; as facilitator, 283-5; gender of, 280-6 Trinity, the, 299, 306n7, 308nl9, 323 Trollope, Anthony, 345 Truth, 294, 296, 297, 298, 304, 322; Aletheia, 74; 'revealed,' 165 Tyndale, William, 308n21 Typology, 6,11,12-13, 51, 61,100-1, 141-5,151,154,155,156,167,168, 171,190,195, 241, 273, 298; allegory and, 168; biblical, 13, 55, 91-2,151,153,154,155,158,168, 169,171,195; Christian, 142,143; typological vision, 166 Underbill, Evelyn, 193, 200n30, 335, 354; Mysticism, 193 United Church. See Church, United University, the, 32,100,177,178,181, 182; the church and, 181,182; teaching and, 7-8,177; the undergraduate and, 100 University of Toronto, 187,194; Emmanuel College, 45,177,191, 296; St Michael's College, 187,194; Victoria College, 100,194, 335, 347n6 Upward, Alan, 355 Uriah, 140 Urquhart of Cromarty, 336 Valery, Paul, 24,136nl9 Valmiki, 354 Vattimo, Gianni, 77n5 Velikovsky, Immanuel, 355 Venus, 207 Verbal structures, 87, 88,90, 91 Versluis, Arthur, 355 Vico, Giambattista, 6, 41, 52, 60, 71, 87, 95nlO, 96nl7,117, 246, 253,

385

262n2, 308nl7; New Science, 253; verumfactum, 60, 62, 87, 90,117 Virgil, 27,41,108, 255,256 Vision, 109,110,117,138,181,224, 278, 298, 304, 308n24, 321; allegory and, 170; apocalyptic, 71, 76, 320; archetypal, 170, 297; of art, 297; double, 8, 302; of God, 170,256, 314, 315; imaginative, 46,47,116, 238; of plenitude, 316; revelation and, 171; spiritual, 4, 6,11; visionary tradition, 337 Wagner, Richard, 283; Siegfried, 283 Waite, Arthur Edward, 334,335, 344-5, 351, 355 Waldo-Schwartz, Paul, 355 Ward, Graham, 202n55 Wasser, Henry, 307nl3 Wasserman, Jerry, 288n4 Watson, Lyall, 355-6 Weber, Renee, 348n20 Wehr, Gerhard, 104nl2 Weil, Simone, 158,163n29 Welch, Holmes, 352 Wheeler, Charles, 201nn43, 44, 202n52 Whitehead, Alfred North, 6 Wiess, Gail, 136n9 Wilber, Ken, 334, 335, 343,344, 348n20, 356; The Holographic Paradigm, 334, 335, 343 Wilcock, John, 354,355 Wilde, Oscar, 94, 265-78, 278nnl, 3-8, 323; works: 'The Decay of Lying,' 266; De Profundis, 265, 267, 268, 269, 270, 272, 273, 277, 278; Salome, 273 Wilhelm, Richard, 352 Wilpert, Paul, 103n6

386

Index of Names and Subjects

Willard, Thomas, 56n3 William, of Ockham, 258 Williams, Charles, 351 Willoughby, Guy, 270, 278n5 Wilson, Colin, 356 Wilson, Jean, 15 Wilson, Lois M., 247nl Wilson, Mona, 198n5 Wilson, Robert Anton, 333,334, 335, 336, 337-8, 340, 341, 354, 356; The Cosmic Trigger, 333,334,337,340 Wilson, R.S. (Robert Smith), 162n22 Winch, Peter, 163n29 Wind, Edgar, 355 Wisdom, 272,273, 275, 293,308nl9; traditions, 330 Wolf, Christa, 247n8 Wolfson, Harry Austryn, 164,165, 172nl Women, 226,228, 243; femalegarden identity, 208; motherhood, 242; nursing, 243; violence against, 243 Wood, Ernest, 352 Wood, John, 288n2 Woodcock, George, 193, 200n35 Word, the, 4,18,25, 37,41,47, 91, 95nl4,105,106,123,134,158,179,

182,184, 247n8,268, 294,298, 299, 300, 310n36,315, 322; flesh and, 10,105,107,112,113,115,119,120, 135; of God, 27,30,167,169,170, 171,182,196,297; Spirit and, 123, 134 Wordsworth, William, 190,282,283, 288n5; works: 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality,' 283; Prelude, 283; Tintern Abbey/ 283,284; 'We Are Seven,' 283 Writing, 127; ecriture, 84,87; logocentric, 94n4,126; and speech, 84, 87 Wyatt, Jean, 249nn22, 26, 250n30 Yamm, 144 Yates, Frances, 331, 350-1; Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 331 Yeats, W.B. (William Butler), 24,32, 41,193, 315, 322, 332, 336, 339, 347nlO, 349, 350, 355,353, 356; A Vision, 332 Zaehner, R.C. (Robert Charles), 335, 355 Zion, 140