Semeia 89: Northrop Frye and the Afterlife of the Word

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emeia is an experimental journal devoted to the exploration of new and emergent areas and methods of biblical criticism. Proposals for volumes employing the methods, models, and findings of linguistics, folklore studies, contemporary literary criticism, structuralism, social anthropology, and other such disciplines and approaches are invited. Although experimental in both form and content, Semeia proposes to publish work that reflects a well-defined methodology that is appropriate to the material being interpreted. Semeia is complemented by Semeia Studies, also published by the Society of Biblical Literature. As a monograph series, Semeia Studies encourages publication of more elaborate explorations of new and emergent approaches to the study of the Bible. founding editor (1974–1980): general editor: editor for Semeia Studies:

Robert W. Funk David Jobling, St. Andrew’s College, Saskatoon Danna Nolan Fewell, Theological School, Drew University

associate editors: Sheila Briggs, University of Southern California; Musa Dube, University of Botswana; Danna Nolan Fewell (Semeia Studies Editor), Theological School, Drew University; David M. Gunn, Texas Christian University; Richard A. Horsley, University of Massachusetts; Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, Graduate Theological Union; Stephen D. Moore, Theological School, Drew University; Tina Pippin, Agnes Scott College; Fernando Segovia, Vanderbilt University; Yvonne M. Sherwood, Glasgow University; Abraham Smith, Andover Newton Theological School; R. S. Sugirtharajah, University of Birmingham, UK; Gerald O. West, University of Natal; Gale A. Yee, Episcopal Divinity School. assistant to the general editor: Audrey Swan, University of Saskatchewan Issues of Semeia are unified around a central theme and edited by members of the editorial board or guest editors. Future themes and editors are given at the back of each issue of Semeia. Inquiries or volume proposals should be sent to the General Editor: David Jobling, St. Andrew’s College, Saskatoon, SK S7N OW3, Canada. Inquiries or manuscripts for Semeia Studies should be sent to the series editor: Danna Nolan Fewell, Theological School, Drew University, Madison, NJ 07940. Semeia and Semeia Studies are published by the Society of Biblical Literature as part of its research and publications program. A subscription unit to Semeia consists of four consecutive issues, and costs $25 for SBL members; $50 for non-members. Members and subscribers outside the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are requested to pay a postal surcharge. All payments should be in U.S. currency or its equivalency. Single issues are $19.95. Institutional subscription inquiries, subscription orders and orders for single issues (including multiple copy orders) should be sent to the Society of Biblical Literature, P.O. Box 2243, Williston, VT 05495-2243. Phone: (877) 725-3334 (toll free); Fax: (802) 864-7626.

SEMEIA 89

NORTHROP FRYE AND THE AFTERLIFE OF THE WORD

Guest Editor: James M. Kee Board Editor: Adele Reinhartz

© 2002 by the Society of Biblical Literature

Published Quarterly by THE SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE 825 Houston Mill Road Atlanta, GA 30329

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

NORTHROP FRYE AND THE AFTERLIFE OF THE WORD

semeia 89

CONTENTS Contributors to This Issue ....................................................................................v Introduction James M. Kee ..........................................................................................1 ESSAYS 1.

Northrop Frye between Archetype and Typology Robert Alter ............................................................................................9

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Towards Reconciling the Solitudes Joe Velaidum ........................................................................................23

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“The Humanized God”: Biblical Paradigms of Recognition in Frye's Final Three Books David Gay ............................................................................................39

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The Ashes of the Stars: Northrop Frye and the Trickster-God Michael Dolzani ..................................................................................59

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Northrop Frye and the Poetry in Biblical Hermeneutics James M. Kee ........................................................................................75

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Early Modern Women’s Words with Power: Absence and Presence Patricia Demers....................................................................................89

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From Archetype to Antitype: A Look at Frygian Archetypology Margaret Burgess ..............................................................................103

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Modeling Biblical Narrative: Frye and D. H. Lawrence William Robins ..................................................................................125 RESPONSES

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Biblical Studies on a More Capacious Canvas: A Response to Joe Velaidum and James M. Kee David Jobling ....................................................................................139

10. Reconfiguring the Liberal Imagination: A Response to Margaret Burgess, Patricia Demers, and William Robins J. Russell Perkin ................................................................................147 11. The “Something More” in the Bible: A Response to Robert Alter, David Gay, and Michael Dolzani Robert Cording ..................................................................................155

CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE

Robert Alter Department of Comparative Literature University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 [email protected]

David Jobling St. Andrew’s College Saskatoon, SK S7N 0W3 CANADA [email protected]

Margaret Burgess Northrop Frye Centre Victoria College 73 Queen’s Park Crescent Toronto, ON M5S 1K7 CANADA [email protected]

James M. Kee Department of English College of the Holy Cross Worcester, MA 01610 [email protected]

Robert Cording Department of English College of the Holy Cross Worcester, MA 01610 [email protected]

J. Russell Perkin Department of English Saint Mary’s University Halifax, NS B3H 3C3 CANADA [email protected]

Patricia Demers Department of English University of Alberta Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5 CANADA [email protected]

William Robins Victoria College University of Toronto 73 Queen’s Park Crescent Toronto, ON M5S 1K7 CANADA [email protected]

Michael Dolzani Department of English Baldwin-Wallace College 275 Eastland Road Berea, Ohio 44130 [email protected]

Joe Velaidum Department of Religious Studies McMaster University Hamilton, ON L8S 4K1 CANADA [email protected]

David Gay Department of English University of Alberta Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5 CANADA [email protected]

INTRODUCTION James M. Kee College of the Holy Cross

Northrop Frye was without question one of the most important literary scholars and critics of the twentieth century. The range of authors and periods on which he wrote is extraordinary. The boldness and scope of his contributions to literary theory may be unmatched among his contemporaries. Not without reason is his Anatomy of Criticism one of the few literary-critical books that has been mentioned in the company of Aristotle’s Poetics. Its influence has often extended beyond the boundaries of literary criticism per se to historiography and other disciplines on occasions when their practitioners have reflected critically upon the structures of their discourse. During the last decade of his life, Frye published three books that dealt explicitly with the Bible and its relationship to literature: The Great Code (1982), Words with Power (1990), and The Double Vision (1991). These works enable scholars to address, to a degree never before possible, the “religious context” of Frye’s entire corpus. In order to take advantage of this opportunity, members of the Departments of English and Religious Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, organized an international conference on “Frye and the Word,” which was held at McMaster in May, 2000. Participants focused upon the following questions: (1) what is the legacy of Frye’s work for literary and religious studies? and (2) what work might scholars now take up in light of that legacy? As Joe Velaidum notes, however, in the essay he has contributed to this volume (Velaidum was one of the organizers of the conference), genuine dialogue on these questions was often difficult to achieve. From the standpoint of many in religious studies, Frye’s insistence upon the fundamentally mythical and metaphorical character of the Bible—explicitly described by him as “counter-historical” (1991:17)—was unintelligible given the selfunderstanding of biblical traditions and the achievements of modern critical-historical methods. Those more persuaded by Frye’s work felt, in contrast, that his critics failed adequately to take note of the “limitations” that Frye rightly found in their “historical perspective” (1991:16), limitations that, in part, motivated his emphasis on myth and metaphor. This volume of essays, all initially presented at the conference on “Frye and the Word,” is offered in the hope that fruitful conversation, in Gadamer’s sense (367–69, 383–89), on these and related matters is not only possible but called for, despite the gulfs that such a conversation must somehow bridge.

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For the difficulties faced by the participants in the conference are not new. They are at least as old as the “aporias,” as Paul Ricoeur calls them, that have plagued modern hermeneutics since its beginnings: tensions between romantic and critical imperatives with which Schleiermacher and Dilthey wrestled are still felt in the contrast between truth and method that Gadamer addresses (Ricoeur: 43–62). Both of these imperatives arise from a common experience: processes of historical change have left us feeling distanced, if not outright alienated, from traditionally important texts. And both call upon us to overcome, in some sense, this distance. The “romantic” imperative does so by calling for an imaginative, intuitive act of understanding that would restore fullness of life to the dead words of tradition. Those who would respond to this imperative fear that forms of critique, left to themselves, will ultimately “murder to dissect” (Wordsworth: 107, line 28). Those who would respond to the “critical” imperative, however, see little hope for overcoming historical distance in ways that are at best unsystematic and at worst hopelessly subjective. They would overcome such distance by critically reconstructing texts as historical objects. They see the need, furthermore, to guard vigilantly against the blind spots in tradition. Ricoeur, in his own work, has sought to find ways beyond such aporias by establishing a dialogue, if not a dialectic, between these romantic and critical imperatives. There can be no question, ultimately, of responding to one by excluding the other. Indeed, “distanciation,” according to Ricoeur, can provide conditions for the critical development of sympathetic understanding (131–44). The back-and-forth movement of thought that characterizes such development has suggested the order in which the essays in this volume are presented. The first essay is written by Robert Alter, one of the few literary scholars who might be said to rank with Frye as a student of the Bible and literature. Alter offers the most far-reaching critique of Frye’s work contained in the volume, one that argues, finally, on both literarycritical and historical-critical grounds, that Frye’s work ought not to provide occasion for reviving an inherently “typological” style of reading the Bible. Alter’s essay is followed by four essays that seek sympathetically to explicate or develop Frye’s insights. The first three of these deal with Frye’s relationship to the Romantic revolution and especially to Blake. Joe Velaidum seeks to bridge the gulf between Frye and historicalcritical scholars by demonstrating how Frye’s readings of the Bible are informed by a Blakean epistemology. David Gay focuses similarly on the presence of Blake in Frye’s work, demonstrating affinities between paradigmatic moments of recognition in both Frye’s and Blake’s readings of biblical books such as Job. Michael Dolzani argues that while the early Northrop Frye may essentially have been a Blakean revolutionary, the late Frye differentiates himself from the dilemmas of such a romanticism by focusing upon the trickster-God found in stories such as Jacob’s and Job’s.

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This trickster-God is a positive symbol for the mysterious divine Other. Finally, my essay seeks to clarify just what Frye means when he argues that the letter of the biblical text is radically metaphorical and to argue that Frye envisions a biblical hermeneutic in which poetic traditions must be seen as playing a constitutive role. The next three essays in the volume return the conversation to its critical imperatives. Patricia Demers focuses upon Frye’s lament for the absence of a critical language that deals adequately with the traditionally female symbols of the Bible. She finds this lament ironic in that Frye ignores a notable number of early modern female writers who interpreted their experiences in light of biblical paradigms and in doing so developed a rich symbology that illuminated their status as women within their communities. Margaret Burgess also criticizes Frye’s inadequate attention to female mythical symbols. She turns Frye’s play with the figurations of typology against him, arguing that the type-antitype relationship must be allowed to extend beyond both the beginning and the end of the Bible. By recollecting forms of the divine feminine that belonged to prebiblical myths, she anticipates speculatively the reemergence of the “Goddess-Woman” as a supplement to biblical figurations of the divine. William Robins offers a critique of Frye’s approach to understanding the relationship between the Bible and literature that draws inspiration from, among other sources, the work of Robert Alter. Robins focuses upon the novel Aaron’s Rod by D. H. Lawrence in order to argue that Frye’s interpretive paradigms are biased toward a visionary poetics and not well suited to interpreting the biblical resources important to novelists. The responses to these essays keep the back-and-forth movement of the dialogue going. David Jobling addresses two of the essays that offer sympathetic explications of Frye’s project, Joe Velaidum’s and my own. General Editor of Semeia and a long-time practitioner of experimental forms of biblical scholarship, Jobling makes use of the occasion to think through his own ambivalent relationship to Frye’s work. He finds within these two essays resources for appropriating Frye’s socially engaged, imaginatively expansive approach to the Bible while still being critical of Frye’s desire for a “transcendental perspective” that ultimately subordinates the “Old Testament” to the “New.” With Velaidum and me, Jobling calls for “a biblical studies with a Frygian vision rather than a Frygian biblical studies.” J. Russell Perkin considers collectively the critiques of Frye offered by Demers, Burgess, and Robins. Each of them, he argues, diagnoses a similar defect in Frye’s approach, one rooted in Frye’s understanding of the liberal imagination. Perkin argues that for Frye’s own project to be pursued successfully, it does indeed need to incorporate modes of critique such as those brought to bear on it by Demers, Burgess, and Robins. Finally, Robert Cording considers together the critique of Frye offered by Alter and the sympathetic

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expositions found in the essays by Gay and Dolzani. Based upon his own close reading of Frye’s last three books, Cording defends Frye against Alter’s charges, claiming that they are based upon unsympathetic misreadings of Frye’s texts and intentions. Cording argues that Frye’s intentions are, in fact, often deeply consonant with Alter’s own as these are presented in Alter’s books on the Bible. He then analyzes Gay’s and Dolzani’s essays in order to evoke the distinctly spiritual dimensions in Frye’s relationship to the Bible—dimensions, he argues, that Alter misses. Since the final page of this volume is not intended to mark the close of the dialogue, I would like to raise some questions that might suggest ways to continue the conversational inquiry. First, need the opposition between myth and history be as sharply drawn as it often seems to be by both Frye and his critics, or are there ways in which the opposition can be mediated? While Frye counts himself among those who have come to think that “mythological thinking cannot be superseded, because it forms the framework and context for all thinking” (1990:xvi), it would be profoundly incorrect to say that his work is not informed by critical-historical awareness. The meanings of “myth” and “history” and their relationship to one another need to be explored more critically. Secondly, just what is the identity of the Bible? Is it the historically reconstructed collection of books that, as we now know, were written over a period of more than a millennium under a variety of vastly different circumstances? Or is its identity in some sense a function of the ways in which these books have been shaped into canons and read within a variety of traditions? How are these different identities that the Bible unquestionably has today to be related to one another? Finally, does the meaning of “typology”—a figure central to Frye’s understanding of the Bible as well as to the way in which his Christian tradition read the Bible for 1800 years— necessarily imply a supersessionist understanding of the relationship between the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible? Or does “typology,” freed from the narrow confines of a certain type of exegetical practice and understood as a poetic figure, harbor dialectical possibilities that might transcend the supersessionism of Christian exegetical practice? Such dialectical possibilities, I would argue, are implied by A. C. Charity’s analysis of “the dialectic of Christian typology” in Events and Their Afterlife. I have entitled this volume “Northrop Frye and the Afterlife of the Word” in the hope that Frye’s understanding of typology need not necessitate supersessionism. Northrop Frye never tried to hide the place from which his writings on the Bible and literature emerged. He was not writing “a work of Biblical scholarship” but “express[ing] only [his] own personal encounter with the Bible” (1982:xi). At no point does he seek to speak “with the authority of a scholarly consensus.” He also insisted, however, that any understanding of the Bible would involve such a concerned personal dimension. The Bible, finally, is about mysteries “that can never be objectified” (1990:312). We

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must engage it as “participants” if we hope to understand; we cannot, ultimately, be mere “observers” (1990:75). Frye devoted considerable imaginative and intellectual energies to the study of the Bible in the hope that the kerygmatic character of its rhetoric might again be experienced, that the Bible’s words might once more be heard as “words with power,” the power to evoke our response. While Frye’s engagements with the Bible cannot be understood without acknowledging this personal dimension, it would be shortsighted to interpret “personal” here to mean “individualistically subjective.” Northrop Frye was one of the most capacious, imaginative, and learned readers of the twentieth century. Each of his many works shows him deeply, passionately, engaged with pressing intellectual, cultural, and social issues of his era. He pursued these engagements, moreover, within a remarkably expansive historical horizon. As Frye noted in one of his last published utterances, the opinions he presents in his final books “should not be read as proceeding from a judgment seat of final conviction, but from a rest stop on a pilgrimage, however near the pilgrimage may now be to its close” (1991:xvii–xviii). I would suggest that we do well to respond to Frye’s works on the Bible in the spirit in which they were presented. They call for neither idolatrous worship of Frye nor casual dismissal of him, but for the kind of personal engagement with their subject matter that genuine conversation requires of us.

WORKS CONSULTED Charity, A. C. 1966 Events and Their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frye, Northrop 1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1982

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

1990

Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

1991

The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 1989 Truth and Method. 2d ed. Trans. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad.

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Ricoeur, Paul 1981 Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wordsworth, William 1965 Selected Poems and Prefaces. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

ESSAYS

NORTHROP FRYE BETWEEN ARCHETYPE AND TYPOLOGY Robert Alter University of California, Berkeley

abstract Northrop Frye’s first book on the Bible and literature, The Great Code, discloses more about the nature of Frye’s literary criticism than it does about the Bible itself. According to Frye, a literary work is “a verbal structure existing for its own sake.” It has a self-referential character. The Bible, as a text in which metaphor and other kinds of figuration predominate, is just such a structure and, as such, has served as the origin of Western literature’s “mythological universe.” Arguing from this far-reaching claim, Frye offers a series of schemata that seek to explain the design and purpose of the Bible. His claims are questionable from the point of view of both literary theory and biblical scholarship, and they lead him systematically to misrepresent biblical texts. In particular, his readings revive a form of Christian supersessionism that detaches the Hebrew Scriptures from the shifting complications of their densely particular realizations.

The Great Code may well be the most deeply instructive of Northrop Frye’s books, though the object of instruction is less the Bible itself than the nature and source of Frye’s enterprise as a critic. His uncompromising conception of mythology as the very heart of literature is grounded here in an account of the Bible as the origin of what he repeatedly calls the “mythological universe” of Western literature. It is myth, he argues, that marks the contours of a culture: “A mythology rooted in a specific society transmits a heritage of shared allusion and verbal experience in time, and so mythology helps to create cultural history” (34). It is, we should note, the internal coherence of culture through the complex reiterations of verbal experience that literature articulates, and not a response to the natural world or to history: “[T]he real interest of myth is to draw a circumference around a human community and look inward toward that community, not to inquire into the operations of nature. . . . [M]ythology is not a direct response to the natural environment; it is part of the imaginative insulation that separates us from that environment” (37). This conception of the insulating function of mythology is directly linked to Frye’s polemic stress on the autotelic character of literature, a controlling idea in Anatomy of Criticism, Fables of Identity, and elsewhere in his writing. In The Great Code, he offers what he calls a provisional definition of the literary as “a verbal structure existing for its own

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sake” (57). He immediately goes on to propose that the Bible is just such a structure, and he cites the predominance of metaphor and other kinds of figuration in the Bible as evidence of its self-referential literary character. This assertion, which is central to The Great Code, is vulnerable from two directions—from the point of view of literary theory and in regard to the descriptive claim about the nature of the Bible. Let me comment briefly on the former consideration, and then I shall go on to discuss in detail the account Frye renders of the Bible, which strikes me as imaginatively conceived, often beguiling, and based on a series of more or less systematic misrepresentations of the biblical texts. Is it true that metaphoric language implies linguistic self-referentiality, directing us centripetally from world to text? Frye posits what he calls a “descriptive phase of language” that “invokes the criterion of verifiable truth,” in part by a renunciation of metaphor (58). It is not altogether clear how this process of verification is to be implemented, and the very assumption of verifiability—is that the only way we relate to reality?—seems oddly scientistic. A plausible case can be made, with the greatest variety of examples from both ancient and modern literature, that metaphor, far from being directed toward the system of language, is very often a more precise instrument of reference to the world of nature and experience than ordinary, nonfigurative language. When Job, in the great death-wish poem that precedes the cycle of debate with his three friends, says of the day on which he was born, “let it not see the eyelids of the dawn” (3:9; this and all subsequent translations from the Bible are my own), that striking metaphor, which will be invoked again antiphonally by the Voice from the Whirlwind, is something other than an act of verbal self-reference. The first thin crack of light at daybreak is associated analogically and also causally (because light rouses the sleeper) with the fluttering open of the eyelids to take in the world. There is a suggestive mirroring of the act of observation as the eyelids lift and the world’s returning to visibility as the east begins to brighten. The metaphor thus realizes—a Russian Formalist would say, defamiliarizes— the visual aspect of dawn, an eternally repeated sight, and also endows it with a palpable emotional or even kinesthetic valence as a moment of discovery and renewal. It is all this that Job, longing for sightlessness and the enveloping womb/tomb of oblivion, would like to blot out. Metaphor, in this biblical instance and in countless others all the way to Dickens and Wallace Stevens, is not a verbal structure existing for its own sake but a vehicle for giving precise and arresting form to a certain vision of the world, to the look and feel of the world as they impress the mind and, indeed, the body of the experiencer. In any case, is it true that metaphor and other kinds of figuration are predominant in the Bible? Metaphor is of course prominent in biblical poetry, but poetry is clearly a minority genre in the Hebrew Bible, limited to Psalms,

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Job, Proverbs, the Song of Songs, parts of the Prophets, and relatively brief poetic insets in the narrative books. The adoption of prose as the principal medium for narration is in fact one of the most innovative steps taken by the biblical writers, entailing profound consequences that Frye nowhere addresses. In the New Testament, moreover, the only formal poem is the Magnificat in Luke, to which one should probably add the exalted prosepoetry of the book of Revelation and the crucial emphasis on figurative language in Jesus’ parables. In the predominant prose narratives of the Hebrew Bible, only the most sparing use is made of either metaphor or simile. The very point of the narrating language often seems to be to focus our attention, without rhetorical embellishment, on the actions of the characters and so to make us ponder their moral, spiritual, psychological, historical, or political implications. Here, for example, is the report in Gen 25:34 of the consummation of Esau’s selling of his birthright to his brother Jacob: “Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and he drank and he rose and he went off, and Esau spurned the birthright.” Or again, this is a biblical writer’s notion of how to convey to his audience the sequence of events of what will prove to be a fatally adulterous liaison, after David has seen Bathsheba bathing naked on her roof: “And David sent messengers and fetched her, and she came to him and he lay with her, she having cleansed herself of her impurity, and she returned to her house” (2 Sam 11:4). In this breathless progress of actions, not a moment is allowed for metaphoric elaboration. Our gaze is directed steadily at the events, and each one of them has moral or political or evidential weight in the complex articulation of the story. David sends messengers because this is the tale of a sedentary king ensconced in his palace operating through the compromising agency of intermediaries, through the emissaries of a new royal bureaucracy. Bathsheba’s voiceless compliance and the motives behind it remain an enigma, though the role she plays much later in securing her son Solomon’s succession to the throne may allow some retrospective inferences about what actuates her here. The participial phrase about Bathsheba’s having cleansed herself from her impurity is a crucial indication that she has recently completed a menstrual cycle, so that when she conceives, neither she nor David can have any doubt that her absent husband is not the father. Her return to her house at the end of the verse sets up a thematic space of two houses (the palace also being referred to simply as the king’s “house,” bayit): Uriah, summoned from the front, will refuse to go down to his house, sleeping instead outside the king’s house, and we are led to contemplate how David has violated the integrity of Uriah’s house by having the royal messengers bring the good soldier’s wife for an illicit dalliance in the king’s house. There is not even a hint of adjectival or adverbial emphasis in all this, nothing to compromise the hard focus on a series of verbs—sent, fetched, came, lay, returned—and two thematically fraught nouns, messengers and house. This verse is, of course, a

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verbal artifact, which is part of the much larger verbal artifact that is the David story, but it presents itself not as a linguistic gesture ultimately pointing to itself, or to the system of language through which it is enacted, but as a factual report of historical events that is also a strong moral and political interpretation of them, which is to say, a kind of intervention in them. Frye’s notion of literature, and of the literature of the Bible, as an autotelic activity thus runs directly against the grain of the whole literary enterprise of the Bible, which aspires to make a profound difference in history and in the realization of humanity’s potential by offering a strong representation of their actual unfolding. For the Bible’s commitment to the actual, Frye consistently substitutes an adherence to the symbolic. Let me hasten to say that he effects this substitution with remarkable interpretive resourcefulness, a quality that is one of the chief sources of what I have called the beguiling character of The Great Code. Although his eye, as we shall see, is fixed on overarching schemata, his lively and athletic intelligence does enable him on occasion to produce evocative insights into particular biblical texts. He notes, for example, that Lot’s wife is the sole instance in the Bible of a metamorphosis, triggered by her looking back into what he designates archetypically as “a demonic world.” Then, more interestingly, he goes on to observe: “The Bible . . . thinks rather in terms of a future metamorphosis of nature in an upward direction, when it will gain the power of articulateness instead of losing it,” and Isa 55:12 is happily cited as prooftext, with its imagery of the hills bursting out in song and the trees of the field clapping their hands (97). There is a certain homiletic touch in such reading because a poetic hyperbole used by Deutero-Isaiah to express a grand vision of exultation in the return to Zion is translated into a programmatic scheme of spiritual progress, part of a large mythological plot informing the whole biblical corpus. The homily, in any case, is an attractive one, proposing a suggestive horizon of meaning beyond any that the anonymous poet of the Babylonian exile was likely to have had in sight. What is most original in The Great Code—and also, I would argue, what is ultimately most misleading—is the fecundity with which it proffers elegant schemata to explain the design and purpose of the Bible. The book abounds in tables of sequenced phases of language-use, categories of imagery, graphic illustrations of a proposed U-shaped pattern of the biblical story as a whole and of its constituent parts, tabulated columns to correlate Old Testament topography with New Testament spiritual process and eschatology. The last of the schemata I have just mentioned is doubly symptomatic of Frye’s whole project. It suggests the degree to which he embraces a rather traditional Christian typological reading of the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the New—a way of reading that leads him to many odd claims about what is really going on in the Hebrew texts. Typology also

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enables his understanding of the Bible as a predominantly metaphoric book. If the narrative prose does not offer much in the way of metaphor on the microtextual level, metaphor may be conjured up from the settings and the material circumstances of the stories: the Sinai wilderness in which the Hebrew refugees from Egypt wander for forty years is less a geographical space between Egypt and Canaan than the stage in a spiritual progress, and hence can be appropriately aligned with Dante’s Purgatory; the Red Sea, associated by the Bible itself with birth-imagery, as Ilana Pardes has recently shown (16–39), is read as a type of baptism. Sequence, as one might expect from a typological critic, is one of Frye’s favorite terms. He sketches out a “structure of imagery” in the Bible that moves from the first garden through pastoral to agricultural to urban, “all contained in and infused by the oasis imagery of trees and water that suggests a higher mode of life altogether” (139). Frye is one of the great architectonic critics of the twentieth century, repeatedly exhibiting a kind of imaginative exuberance in eliciting large patterns from a welter of literary data. It is precisely this gift and this conceptual orientation that enabled him to make important contributions to the theory of genre. In The Great Code, one is often left wondering whether these lovely designs are intrinsic to the texts or rather artifacts of interpretation. The Bible, after all, is an anthology of disparate texts by very different writers spanning a millennium of literary activity, as Frye himself at one point concedes, and, whatever the compositional ingenuity of its Christian or Jewish editors, it seems doubtful that its variegated components really generate the sort of continuous symbolic plot that Frye proposes. Events are represented as taking place at oases or in deserts or in walled towns because these were the real available settings of the ancient Near Eastern world. And in the imagery of the biblical poems, rivers and seas, gardens and fields, flocks of sheep and cattle are repeatedly invoked, though by no means in a patterned sequence, because they were prominent elements of the realia familiar both to the poets and their audiences. Had the Hebrew poets inhabited a reality in which plumbing, bicycles, and e-mail were common, they would surely have used them in their metaphors. As it is, their figurative language is not in the least limited to what can be easily transposed into archetypes: Amos uses plumb lines, Jeremiah baskets of summer fruit and boiling pots, and the endlessly fecund Job-poet draws on cheese-making, weaving, grinding, business contracts, and courtroom proceedings for his imagery. Frye repeatedly refers to the approach to the Bible he is proposing as a literary approach, but his very use of the term in connection with the Bible suggests the rather peculiar conception of literature that he fostered. At a few points, Frye intimates that what he aspires to do is to read the Bible as poets through the ages have read it. This aspiration involves a fundamental confusion of purposes. It is the very nature of poetry to make the freest

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imaginative use of antecedent literature, and one more or less expects that the antecedent texts will often be drastically recontextualized, semantically flipped. The business of the poet, after all, is not necessarily to provide a persuasive or plausible reading of the earlier text but to use it as an expressive resource for making new literature. We need have no qualms, then, about Dante’s or Milton’s typological use of Hebrew Scriptures. It is quite another matter when a critic purports to show us how the Bible works as literature, which is what Frye claims to do. The elision between the project of poetry and the project of criticism is facilitated for him because, as we have already noted, literature is conceived above all as a self-reflexive system encompassing a sequence of mythological patterns. What The Great Code makes clear is that the ultimate source of this comprehensive conception of literature is the Christian typological reading of the Bible, which it seeks to rehabilitate. (Frye’s early training as a seminarian appears to have had a profound and enduring effect on his conception of both literature and the Bible. The traditional apparatus of Christian typology has in turn been reinforced and complicated by Blake’s strong mythopoeic reading of Scripture.) Frye prominently uses both “typology” and “archetype” as terms of analysis, and in the course of The Great Code it becomes evident that the symbolic equivalence between Old Testament type and New Testament antitype offers him a model for the symbolic equivalence between different manifestations of the same archetype in all literature. One may infer why he objects to what he views as the peculiarity of Jung’s use of the concept of archetype. For Frye, the archetype is not the product of a conjectured collective unconscious but is rather a lexical item in the symbolic vocabulary of a literary corpus, as each articulated image, figure, or event in the Old Testament is seen to be reflected in the literary mirror of the New Testament. Beyond the Bible, Western literature is seen as a quasi-biblical arrangement of mirroring structures that exhibit elaborate symbolic equivalencies analogous to those identified in Frye’s typological account of the Bible, as when he observes, “the garden of Eden, the Promised Land, Jerusalem, and Mount Zion are interchangeable synonyms for the home of the soul, and in Christian imagery they are all identical in their ‘spiritual’ form . . . with the kingdom of God spoken by Jesus” (171). It is worth noting how uncompromising Frye’s typological language is. These different moments of the biblical corpus in his formulation “are all identical,” “interchangeable,” “synonyms” of each other. I shall argue that just as languages have no true synonyms, there is no such thing as a truly synonymous narrative event or literary articulation. The essential weakness of Frye’s critical system, which is particularly transparent in his treatment of the Bible, is that it is interested in the individual literary text chiefly as a confirmation of the general pattern, and hence it has no adequate instruments of attention for the compelling or surprising peculiarities of the individual

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text. This predilection for the pattern or archetype produces less distortion when the work under inspection—say, Shakespeare or Milton—is closer to us in time because philological difficulties are relatively marginal and the sundry cultural contexts and references of the work are still relatively familiar. Applying this strategy of reading to a body of literature largely composed more than two and a half millennia ago in a Semitic language structurally and semantically unlike our own leads to some very odd claims about what the texts mean. It is worth noting that as Frye constantly negotiates between Christian typology and mythic archetype, he enriches typology with patterns drawn from comparative anthropology and by that very act magnifies the parallax in the view of the biblical text that he proposes. Thus, he associates Joseph’s being flung into the pit by his brothers with the incarnation (that is, the descent of the divine into the flesh), which is a rather traditional maneuver of typological interpretation. To this reading, however, of Joseph as Christian figura he adds a mythic archetype: “There is in Genesis a type of such a descent [i.e., as in the incarnation], not wholly voluntary, in the story of Joseph, whose ‘coat of many colors’ suggests fertility-god imagery” (176). The identification of Joseph’s temporary imprisonment in the pit with the incarnation strikes me as a bit of a stretch, but the assignment of fertility-god imagery to the coat of many colors seems altogether arbitrary. Is there really a documented correspondence between fertility gods and particolored coats? In any case, the Hebrew term ketonet passim, despite the King James version, probably does not refer to color but to ornamental strips (pas means “strip”), hence E. A. Speiser’s rendering of the term in the Anchor Bible as “ornamented tunic” (287–90). This particular sartorial item is referred to one other time in the biblical corpus: after David’s daughter Tamar is raped by her half-brother Amnon, we are told that she was wearing a ketonet passim, “for the virgin princesses did wear such robes” (2 Sam 13:18). The ornamented tunic or coat of many colors is thus identified by the Bible itself not with pagan ritual but with social status. Frye characteristically looks past the sociology to mythology, for the social meaning of the garment would lead him away from archetype to the actual institutional arrangements of a particular culture at a particular moment in time—the narrator’s need to gloss the sartorial practice in 2 Samuel 13 suggests that it may no longer have been familiar to his audience as a marker of royal status. This sort of transmogrification of the biblical text by promoting its images and narrative events to the lofty sphere of archetype is a repeated feature of The Great Code. There are, of course, actual archetypal images, usually drawn from ancient Near Eastern mythology, in the figurative language of biblical poetry. Perhaps the most prominent of these is the primordial sea beast, variously designated as Yamm, Rahab, and Leviathan, which in Canaanite cosmogonic myth is conquered by a land god so that the

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world can be securely established against the forces of formlessness or chaos figured by the sea. Poetry, we should recall, is extravagantly conservative in its habits of expression, as the frequent recourse of Christian poets to Greco-Roman pagan imagery, more than a millennium and a half after the passing of antiquity, vividly demonstrates. In the Bible, the beastly sea god Yamm is confined within the cage of imagery of Psalms, Isaiah, and Job, but, given the monotheistic scruples of the Hebrew writers, he is not allowed to become a part of the real plot of the biblical books. In Frye’s reading, on the other hand, anything that lives in the water can be an archetypal manifestation of the primordial sea monster. In this fashion, after confirming the traditional typological identification of Jonah’s descent into the belly of the big fish with Jesus’ descent into the world, Frye can confidently announce, “We should have enough training in metaphorical thinking by now to realize that the sea, the sea monster, and the foreign island on which he lands are all the same place and mean the same thing” (191). Frye’s attachment to sameness or perfect equivalence among the disparate elements of a story has the effect of flattening the story and sometimes badly distorting its contours. Is there, to begin with, any “sea monster,” archetypal or otherwise, in the book of Jonah? The narrator refers to the creature, quite plainly, only as the “big fish” (dag gadol), not as Leviathan or even whale, and no descriptive monstrous attributes are assigned to him, apart from the implied cavernous dimensions of his belly. The ancient editor of Jonah actually proposes a different archetypal identification for the big fish by inserting, after Jonah has been swallowed, a thanksgiving psalm in which the speaker praises God for having brought him back to life from the murk of the underworld. Even more problematic is the license provided by training in “metaphorical thinking” to equate Nineveh with the big fish. Frye calls it, quite carelessly, “a foreign island” because he wants to retain metonymic contiguity with the sea, though a moment’s reflection surely would have reminded him that Nineveh is located in the Mesopotamian Valley, a few hundred miles from the sea. (In the fabulous terms of the story, Jonah, once having been cast up on the shore, would presumably have had to walk several days in order to get to his prophetic destination.) The significance, not to speak of the plot function, of the big fish and of the pagan city are anything but identical. The fish represents a near-death experience from which God rescues Jonah in order to bring him to his senses about responding to the prophetic call. The pagan city, baking under a summer sun, is the theater of Jonah’s prophecy and, in the universalistic perspective of the book, a demonstration that a traditional pagan enemy of Israel can respond to God’s call and be an object of his compassion. Where in all this is there any sea monster? Even when a biblical writer actually draws on mythological imagery extensively in the representation of a sea creature, Frye ends up construing

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

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philological issues and of the concrete historical contexts of Scripture is a little shaky. He has done a certain amount of homework on the subject, though it is noteworthy that The Great Code makes virtually no reference to specific items of biblical scholarship. But if one is constantly looking for the link between Old Testament and New and between both and some general item in the lexicon of mythology, there is always a temptation to fudge the facts of philology and literary articulation in order to get the overarching pattern, even if careful attention to the text and to a dictionary or concordance might instruct one otherwise. In his initial chapter on language, for example, Frye tells us that the Hebrew Bible, like the languages into which it was translated (he is thinking first of all of the Vulgate), has two terms that distinguish between soul and spirit, nefesh and rua˙ (20). In point of fact, there is no word for soul in biblical Hebrew, and the body-soul distinction is alien to the biblical worldview. Both nefesh and rua˙ mean “life-breath,” though rua˙ can also mean “wind.” Nefesh is connected with a verb of the same root that means something like to draw a long breath of relief after hard labor. By metonymy, nefesh also occasionally means “throat,” the passageway for the breath. To sublimate this concrete term into anima is still another gesture of Christianizing Hebrew Scripture. Elsewhere, as Frye is sketching one of his ingenious patterns, in this instance an interaction of air and light or fire as the process of creation (actually not in evidence in the Bible), he claims that Ecclesiastes’ favorite word hevel (“vanity” in the King James Version) sometimes means “dense fog” (124). But hevel means “vapor,” never “dense fog,” the very point of its metaphoric use by Ecclesiastes being its insubstantiality, its wispiness—the very opposite of density. Beyond such tweaking of terms, Frye’s commitment to metaphorical thinking often makes his reading of biblical texts arbitrary. Sometimes it is merely fanciful and often it is downright misleading. One can see the fancifulness in his meditation on the first words of Genesis. “We realize,” he claims, “that the central metaphor underlying ‘beginning’ is not really birth at all. It is rather the moment of waking from sleep, when one world disappears and another comes into being” (108). Having seized the metaphorical ball, Frye runs with it, contending that “this metaphor of awakening may be the real reason for the emphasis on ‘days’ ” in the story of creation that ensues. All this reflects the response of a sensitive and thoughtful reader, and it has a certain charm, but it is hard to see where in the opening words of Genesis there is any hint of a theme or metaphor of awakening. The underlying problem is the assumption that this passage, and all others, must be controlled by a metaphor—if not birth, then awakening. The text itself presents the creation as a series of performative speech acts—hence the apt rabbinic epithet for God as “He who spoke the world into being,” mi she,amar vehayah ha
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over the face of the deep, but even that seems intended as a setting of the actual physical scene of the primordial realm just before God begins to speak the world into being. Interpretive matters are made considerably worse by the insistence on archetypes. Thus, we are invited to contemplate the “traces” of an Oedipal plot “in the story of Adam, whose ‘mother,’ in so far as he had one, was the feminine adamah or dust of the ground, to whose body he returned after breaking the link with his father” (156). The ingenuity of the reading must be conceded, but it is extremely far-fetched. There is nothing in the story that would allow one to imagine Adam aspiring to kill or displace God, who in any case is not figured in it as a father. Moreover, the adamah out of which Adam is fashioned is clearly represented by the writer not as a mother but as the raw material from which God shapes him: the verb used for the making of the first man is the one usually attached to the activity of the potter, and if there is any metaphor in this second version of the creation of humankind, it is drawn from manufacture, not biology. The fact that adamah is a feminine noun is scarcely evidence for discovering a mother figure in this primordial soil. All Hebrew nouns are either masculine or feminine, and by this line of grammatico-psychoanalytic reasoning, the recurrent biblical image of the “devouring sword” could end up being read, because the Hebrew for “sword,” ˙erev, is feminine, as a figure of vagina edentata. The most crucial aspect of biblical literature that is skewed by 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 Rebekah, Jacob, Joseph, Judah, Tamar, even a scoundrel like Laban, are splendidly, stubbornly, their own peculiar selves. The story of David offers us the greatest representation of an individual life evolving through time in all of ancient literature, and even its incidental characters—the shrewd and resourceful Abigail, the impetuous Abishai, the pathetically devoted Paltiel, the two-faced Shimei—are memorably etched individuals. But individuality of character and the specificity of relationships between individuals evaporate when every personage is assimilated to an archetype. Let me offer a final example from The Great Code that is especially symptomatic of its interpretive bias. David, we recall, after conquering Jerusalem from the Jebusites, brings up the ark of the covenant to his new capital, dancing and gyrating in the 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

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for exposing himself to the slave-girls, and he responds that he, after all, is God’s chosen ruler and he is the one who will decide what is honorable and what is disgraceful. Oddly enough, Frye associates this scene with a 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” (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 theater 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 are told that she loves him, and she risks her neck to help him escape from her father’s assassins. About David’s early feelings toward Michal we are told nothing, though we can infer that the marriage is politically useful to him. He surely has political utility in mind when he makes it a condition of the peace treaty with the Saulide forces that Michal be returned to him, though by this point he has collected other wives. At the moment of her return, we are also made aware of the love her second husband, Paltiel, feels for her. When the great explosion of Michal’s feelings takes place after David’s dancing before the ark, there is both an edge of sexual jealousy in her words—her anger over his exposing himself to the slave-girls—and a 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 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?1 All such fascinating psychological and political complexities of this remarkable story vanish when the confrontation between husband and wife is explained as a type of the humiliated king. There is, I think, a lesson to be learned here about literary interpretation that goes beyond considerations of reading the Bible. The revelatory power of the literary imagination manifests itself in the intricate weave of details of each individual text. On occasion it can be quite useful to see the larger frameworks of convention, genre, mythology, and recurring plot shared by different texts. The identification of overarching patterns was Frye’s great

1

I owe the last of these three possibilities to Rabbi Israel C. Stein, written communication.

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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 Frédéric 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 fulfill it. This is hardly a reading practice we want to revive, either for the Bible or for secular literature.

WORKS CONSULTED Frye, Northrop 1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1963

Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

1982

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Pardes, Ilana 2000 The Biography of Ancient Israel. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Speiser, E. A. 1964 Genesis. AB 1. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

TOWARDS RECONCILING THE SOLITUDES Joe Velaidum McMaster University

abstract Frye’s writings on the Bible and religion have not had the influence in religious studies that his writings on literary criticism have had in literary theory. In fact, scholars of religion and those in literary criticism generally do not engage each other concerning Frye’s studies of the Bible. Biblical scholars often categorize Frye’s method as lacking a basis in biblical history and as being full of unstated theological assumptions. They fail to understand that Frye’s method of interpreting the Bible grows out of his larger theoretical principles for literary criticism. Conversely, those from literary studies who know Frye’s work categorize the criticisms levied against him by biblical scholars as foreign to Frye’s purposes and therefore irrelevant. They fail to appreciate, however, that these criticisms in turn reflect principles for reading the Bible that have long been dominant in the field of biblical studies—and that have proven fruitful. In order to foster a true dialogue between these two disciplines, this essay explicates the epistemology that underlies Frye’s critical thought and how it shapes his understanding of God and the Bible. Once we understand the overall meaning of Frye’s criticism, we can better situate his principles for interpreting the Bible and begin to evaluate their worth in the academic study of the Bible.

The majority of the papers in this volume were first presented at a conference at McMaster University whose intended purpose was to explore the religious dimensions of Northrop Frye’s criticism. The representatives from the departments co-hosting the conference (Religious Studies and English Literature) realized that, while Frye ranks among the most important literary critics of the twentieth century, his writings on the Bible and religion are not widely studied in religious studies, and they remain the most neglected topic in the secondary literature devoted to Frye’s writings. The considerable excitement generated by the topic, the quality of papers analyzing various aspects of Frye’s understanding of religion, and the lively and congenial dialogues they engendered made for a truly successful conference. All of this, however, obfuscates a problem that emerged at many points during the conference but was never fully articulated or directly addressed. Many religious-studies scholars in attendance were quite impressed by the papers that offered critiques of Frye’s use of the Bible and were perplexed with the rebuttals from those who were more sympathetic to Frye’s work.

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From the point of view of religious studies, these rebuttals did not account for what they saw as the obvious methodological problems inherent in Frye’s interpretation of the Bible. Conversely, those who attempted to explicate Frye’s understanding of religion within the context of his literary-critical principles defended Frye against what they saw as an incorrect evaluation of Frye’s reading of the Bible in terms of a methodology not applicable to his aims. The result was a respectful silence between these two academic fields. The silence was unsettling, given the mandate for the conference and the fact that Frye, as the most important modern literary critic interested in the Bible, offers a place where true interdisciplinary dialogue might occur. The underlying problem results not from the shortcomings of one group or the other but from a lack of understanding on both sides. It is true that Frye scholars for the most part do not understand that Frye’s methodology runs contrary to many of the larger theoretical principles of biblical studies. It is also true that many biblical scholars who have read only The Great Code and Words with Power do not understand that Frye’s approach to the Bible is informed by his own larger theoretical principles. In order to find a place where genuine dialogue between religiousstudies scholars and literary critics on the topic of Frye’s understanding of religion might be possible, the oeuvre of Frye’s criticism must be considered. Once we understand how Frye envisions reality and the place of religion within that context, we can begin to comprehend more fully Frye’s method in studying the Bible. Frye’s larger theoretical principles hinge on the most common spatial metaphor in his writings: ascent and descent. In one of his notebooks he writes that he is fixated on “meander-and-descent patterns” and that much of what interests him in literature is “katabasis” (1964:356). Throughout his published writings, Frye constantly alludes to a world above the regular world we inhabit now. It is not a separate world but rather a perspective on this world where boundless imaginative energy creates infinite possibilities for humanity. He also describes a world below the one we inhabit now. This too is not a separate world but rather a perception of this world as a subhuman world of nature, which for Frye means a world of cruelty and tyranny. This metaphorical elevator, up to a world above and down to a world below, is found with many variations in Frye’s works. It appears in his discussion of the development of society in The Educated Imagination, where civilization develops from a primitive identification with the brutalities of nature to a utopian vision where the imagination is left free to contemplate the best form of human society. In the second half of Words with Power, the main focus is the movement of consciousness upwards and downwards. In his discussion of his theological beliefs in The Double Vision, he continually looks down to a single vision of nature, space, time, and God, and up to the double vision of these things. In his first book, Fearful Symmetry, his masterful

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study of William Blake, Frye outlines Blake’s vision of hell (Ulro), nature (Generation), Paradise (Beulah), and finally Eden as a movement from memory or abstraction, to sensation, and, at last, to vision. While this vertical image is present in Frye’s earliest writings, he identifies its place in the history of ideas only late in his career when he writes that “the journey of consciousness to higher and lower worlds” is a “vertical image of the axis mundi” (1990b:95). The axis mundi is the traditional name given to the various symbols that unite “heaven,” “earth,” and “hell.” According to Mircea Eliade, the most widespread of these symbols are the cosmic mountain, which usually symbolizes the origin of creation and therefore the center of the world; the cosmic pillar, which is the center post of a cultic house and connects heaven to earth; and the cosmic tree, whose roots extend to the underworld, whose branches represent the planes of earthly existence, and whose uppermost region represents the Divine (1954:12–16; 1961:50; Sullivan: 20). According to Frye, his axis should be thought of as a world-tree, as he tells us in Words with Power: the trunk extending from the surface of the earth into the sky is nourished by roots below, and the intensifying of consciousness represented by images of ascent is unintelligible without its dark and invisible counterpart. (232)

For Frye, the axis is a metaphor that encapsulates how consciousness can either receive reality passively or create reality actively. Frye’s specific understanding of these alternatives comes from his exploration of William Blake. Blake is not simply a poet for Frye but is rather an intellectual and spiritual guide for Frye’s critical interests. Frye himself stated that he “learned everything [he] knew from Blake” (1986:32). This is most apparent when reading Frye’s first book alongside his last one. Published in 1947, Fearful Symmetry is a study of the thought and poetry of William Blake, and The Double Vision, published posthumously in 1991, aims to give a clear understanding of Frye’s view of the religious nature of reality. What we find in The Double Vision, however, is a retelling of Fearful Symmetry, with the noted difference that Fearful Symmetry explicates Blake’s artistic vision while The Double Vision articulates Frye’s own personal religious views. Indeed, Frye confesses to unconsciously modeling his personal life after Blake’s, who removed all elements of incident in his life in order to remain focused on the “germination” of his thought. He recommends that such a mimesis should inform all literary scholarship: I think it advisable for every critic proposing to devote his life to literary scholarship to pick a major writer of literature as a kind of spiritual preceptor for himself, whatever the subject of his thesis. . . . [G]rowing up inside a mind so large that one has no sense of claustrophobia within it is an irreplaceable experience in humane studies. . . . I notice that at the age of sixty, I have unconsciously arranged my life so that nothing has ever happened to

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It is thus impossible to separate the significant aspects of what Frye believes is true about Blake from what he believes himself. Given the importance of Blake in Frye’s thought, it is essential that we begin our study of the underlying basis of Frye’s criticism with an exploration of Blake’s thought as envisioned by Frye in Fearful Symmetry. Blake’s Epistemology: A Reaction against Locke Frye believes that the most instructive way to understand the foundation for Blake’s thought is in terms of his rejection of the philosophical systems that had gained widespread influence in his day. In the eighteenth century, Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding was the most significant epistemological treatise, so it is not surprising that we find that Blake mounts his attack against it.1 Locke’s argument for the mind as a blank slate (tabula rasa) upon which experience is imprinted is a refutation of Descartes’s assertion that some clear and distinct perceptions can be discerned through rational thought (i.e., require no sense experience) and are implanted in us by God. For Descartes, these ideas are known a priori; that is, they are innate. Locke attempts to show that all understanding is only possible by virtue of its connection to sensory experience, and therefore there is no a priori knowledge (104–18). Locke’s rejection of innate ideas, it is well known, was widely viewed as an attack on God and on the divinely sanctioned social structure. While Locke himself did not intend his philosophy to be an attack on the idea of God (see on this Marshall; Wolterstorff ), his rejection of God as innate or a priori led to the questioning of the philosophical underpinning for belief in God.2 For this reason, many saw in Locke’s ideas an attack on the religiously established social order (Yolton: 1–25). Blake’s acceptance of innate ideas is not, however, an endorsement of the then-current underlying presumptions of a society based on the hierarchical

1 Presumably, this is what Frye is alluding to when he writes: “That an eighteenth century English poet should be interested in contemporary theories of knowledge is hardly surprising” (1947:14). 2 Locke, however, does give a cosmological argument for the existence of God in his philosophy. He argues that since the existence of a human perceiver is beyond doubt, and since something cannot come from nothing, there must be a God who is eternal (619–30).

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concept of God. As noted by Michael Ferber, Blake had much in common with the Dissenters of his day, who also rebelled against traditional authorities.3 Blake accepts innate ideas but at the same time rejects the hierarchical concept of society from which it is derived. Blake’s problem with Locke’s empiricism is found in Blake’s rejection of objective knowledge. Empiricism is based on the fundamental separation between subject and object. Locke reflects this separation through his differentiation between sensation and reflection. Sensations are those ideas that come to us through our five senses, while reflection is the mind’s categorization of these ideas. Locke writes: First, our senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways wherein those objects do affect them. . . . This great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses, and derived by them to the understanding, I call sensation. . . . Secondly, the other fountain, from which experience furnisheth the understanding with ideas, is the perception of the operations of our own mind within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got. . . . I call this reflection, the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself. (105)

Thus, ideas are produced by the qualities found in objects. The crucial issue for the differentiation between subject and object here is found in Locke’s next differentiation between two types of qualities. Those qualities found in objects that cannot be separated from their objects Locke calls “primary,” and they give rise to ideas (215). Primary qualities of objects are quantifiable and are therefore the only true domain of scientific analysis. Secondary qualities are those characteristics in objects that produce sensations, and since they can be separated from the objects they reside in they are not essential to the object and are not conducive to true science. These secondary qualities, furthermore, require the perceiver in order to be realized, while primary qualities inhere in things, independent of the perceiver. Therefore, for Locke, true knowledge comes from the primary qualities of objects and therefore comes only from what can be objectified.4 Blake, however, accepts innate ideas: “Innate Ideas are in Every Man, Born with him, they are truly Himself” (648). As Frye notes, Blake is here following George Berkeley’s critique of Locke’s empiricism:

3 Michael Ferber thus concludes: “So many Blakean positions nonetheless bear a family resemblance to those taken by the Dissenting interest—the critique of clericalism and mystery, the liberty of conscience, praise of ‘industry,’ abhorrence of war” (25). 4 Locke goes as far as to claim that secondary qualities of bodies would disappear if we could discover the primary ones of their minute parts (301).

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semeia The chief attack on Locke in the eighteenth century came from the idealist Berkeley, and as idealism is a doctrine congenial to poets, we should expect Blake’s attitude to have some points in common with Berkeley’s, particularly on the subject of the mental nature of reality, expressed by Berkeley in the phrase esse est percipi: “to be is to be perceived.” (1947:14)

According to Berkeley, nothing can exist that is not perceived. Blake finds this idea congenial because he believes that Locke’s epistemology breeds a passive objectivity. According to Blake, knowledge is always dependent on the perceiver: “Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought? Where is it but in the Mind of a Fool?” (565). Knowledge for Blake and his predecessor Berkeley, unlike Locke, is knowledge of experience in perceived forms; there are no primary qualities. However, the perception of an object is not only known through the organ that perceives it, but also the existence of the object depends on the ability of the perceiver’s organ of perception: “Every Eye sees differently. As the Eye, Such the Object” (645). For Blake, the human perceiver is therefore not the passive recipient of qualities in objects that produce ideas in us, but is rather actively engaged in creating objects. If all knowledge is dependent on the perceiver, the perceiver possesses the innate ability to perceive and create reality. Frye goes further, attempting to show the reasonableness of Blake’s position against Locke: Reflection on sensation is concerned only with the mere memory of the sensation, and Blake always refers to Locke’s reflection as “memory.” Memory of an image must always be less than the perception of the image. . . . Sensation is always in the plural: when we see a tree we see a multitude of particular facts about the tree, and the more intently we look the more there are to see. . . . The first point in Blake to get clear, then, is the infinite superiority of the distinct perception of things to the attempt of the memory to classify them into general principles. (1947:15–16)

Blake and Locke agree that knowledge can emerge only from experience. For Blake this experience originates in the perceiver who actively creates the experience and therefore actively creates reality, while Locke emphasizes the way in which reality offers experience to the human perceiver. Despite their epistemological differences, both Locke and Blake must account for how we can obtain an idea of categories of things if all knowledge is specific. Since it is true that “Every Eye sees differently,” and if reality is known by experience, in either case, how can we go from knowing a “man” to knowing “Mankind,” for example? Locke accounts for our ability to form generalized concepts as either bringing separate ideas together into a relational whole or as the act of

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abstraction, where separate ideas are analyzed to find their commonality.5 Characteristics that are common to all humankind, to use our example above, cancel out all the individual variations, and thus only in considering their commonality are we able to acquire a generalized idea of humanity. Indeed, it is this ability that makes scientific knowledge possible: the ability to abstract, find relationships, reduce things to their constituent parts and then compare, are all hallmarks of scientific inquiry. For Blake such scientific “reason” is synonymous with “ratio,” and it is a lesser activity of the human mind: “Man by his reasoning power can only compare & judge of what he has already perceiv’d” so that “The desires & perceptions of man untaught by any thing but organs of sense, must be limited to objects of sense” (2). When the mind attempts to reason, for Blake, it is passively bound by what the sensations offer; hence there is no possibility of creating a better world through active human perception. Therefore, the philosophical and scientific theories of ratio are, in terms of their ability to create, impotent and simply “repeat the same dull round” over again (2). Frye, again, gives an example to help illustrate Blake’s position: a farmer and a painter, looking at the same landscape, will undoubtedly see the same landscape. . . ; but the reality of the landscape even so consists in its relation to the imaginative pattern of the farmer’s mind, or of the painter’s mind. To get at an “inherent” reality in the landscape by isolating the common factors, that is, by eliminating the agricultural qualities from the farmer’s perception and the artistic ones from the painter’s, is not possible, and would not be worth doing if it were. (1947:20)

Perception for Blake is not passively received and then generalized to form concepts but is rather the active creation of reality by the human perceiver. Specifically, it is the imagination that guides perception in its creation of reality. Therefore, it is not reason itself that is inadequate, but rather reason that is not guided by the imagination that leads to creative impotence: The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man, & when separated From the imagination and closing itself as in steel, in a Ratio Of the Things of Memory, It thence frames Laws & moralities To destroy Imagination, the Divine Body, by Martyrdoms & Wars. (229)

5 He writes: “The acts of the mind wherein it exerts its power over its simple ideas are chiefly these three: (1) Combining several simple ideas into one compound one; and thus all compound ideas are made. (2) The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex together, and setting them by one another, so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one; by which way it gets all its ideas of relations. (3) The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence; this is called abstraction” (163).

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Frye explains Blake’s point: since sense experience is chaotic, it “must be employed either actively by the imagination or passively by the memory” (1947:24). The type of world that is created thus depends on how experience is ordered: the world of vision, the world of sight and the world of memory: the world we create, the world we live in and the world we run away to. The world of memory is an unreal world of reflection and abstract ideas; the world of sight is a potentially real world of subject and objects; the world of vision is a world of creators and creatures. In the world of memory we see nothing; in the world of sight we see what we have to see; in the world of vision we see what we want to see. . . . [The] imagination creates reality, and as desire is part of imagination, the world we desire is more real than the world we passively accept. (1947:26–27)

The imagination, therefore, operates quite differently from abstraction in that it tries to unify experience into a perfect form. As Blake puts it: “All Forms are Perfect in the Poets Mind, but these are not Abstracted nor Compounded from Nature but are from Imagination” (648). For Blake the imagination is the coordinating element of all the senses, so much so that it is actually the imagination that perceives through senses. The more one is able to put into his or her imagination, the more the senses are able to perceive. Thus: When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea? O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty. I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight, I look thro it & not with it. (566)

Blake’s “corporeal” eye is the organ of sensory perception. Without the imagination, as we have seen, only the ratio can be ascertained. The imagination, for Blake, looks through these sensory organs and is able to create a more real world than the one that is simply accepted by the corporeal eye.

Frye’s Blakean Epistemology Frye’s own epistemology merges with and expands on Blake’s conclusion that reality is created by the imagination. For Frye, perception has the possibility of creating three types of reality: a reality based on the passive perception of objects, which Frye equates with nature; a reality based on the active perception of nature as material shaped into human form, which is equated with civilization; and finally, a reality based on the imaginative perception of unity, which aligns with the greatest visionaries and is ultimately the perception of God.

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Frye constantly reminds us that we do not live nakedly in nature in the way animals do (1991:24–25). By human standards the natural world is unbearably cruel and does not contain any discernible morality or ethics; instinct reigns supreme. If perception creates reality (the Blakean principle we established earlier), a human perceiving in this manner would create an existence akin to social Darwinism. But the crucial philosophical issue for Frye here is that there is a clear separation of subject from object at this level. Here is a cold, objective world. Reality is here seen as a conglomeration of external forces and desires and instincts acting on a helpless passive perceiver. Animals have no choice than to act on these forces, but once humanity succumbs to them, a human hell emerges. The second type of perception emerges with the realization that the world we want is not the world we see around us in nature, but the world we build out of what we see in nature (1963:6). Nature offers the necessary raw materials needed to overcome the bare necessities of existence to which animals are a slave: we use the land to create gardens and farms; we use water and sun to create electricity; we are not content with mere sustenance, but want cuisine; we are not content with shelter, but want a home; we are not content with sex, but want love. These are specifically human creations, and they are so imbedded in us that we usually forget that they are creations, created out of our imagination. The “real world” is a world created by humans. Again, if perception is reality, reality on this level is the perception of “a human world and separating it from the rest of the world” (1963:4). Subject and object here, however, are still differentiated to some degree. We are utilizing nature as material, and therefore to some degree we still stand external to it. Furthermore, the level of civilization is really not much better than the animal world since animals too shape the natural world. Creating an “ant colony” or a “beehive” is in some ways akin to creating “human civilization.” The third level goes beyond the shaping of material into form and into the realm of pure imaginative thought. As soon as we “want” something at the second level, we need to excavate the depths of the imagination to find the best possible models. Here the imagination is not bound by what is possible or probable and can be left to roam in the fields of infinity. The human imagination is now containing the forms of civilization, and while the expression of this realization does not exist except in the greatest minds (Utopia, you will remember, means nowhere), it is nonetheless more real than the world we passively accept. It is more real because more of the imagination is put into its perception, and perception is reality. The goal of all this knowledge, says Frye (following Hegel), is to bridge the gap between the separated subject and the separated object. In Hegel, this movement is the movement toward Spirit (Geist). This movement also

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illuminates the essential role God plays in Frye’s system. For Frye, as for Blake, perception at its highest level is intimately connected to God, and thus religion plays a crucial role in their constructions of reality. If existence is perception, the higher humanity perceives, the higher the level of existence. There is no existence higher than that of God. By implication, therefore, the highest level of perception is also the perception of God. According to Blake, Frye tells us: “Man in his creative acts and perceptions is God, and God is Man. God is the eternal Self, and the worship of God is self-development” (1947:30). We misunderstand, however, if we think that God is understood merely through perception. Rather, God is the act of unified perception. If humanity creates existence through perception, then humanity itself must also gain its existence from perception. Interpreting Blake, Frye writes: Just as the perceived object derives its reality from being not only perceived but related to the unified imagination, so the perceiver must derive his reality from being related to the universal perception of God. If God is the only Creator, he is the only Perceiver as well. In every act of perception, then, the act of perception is universal and the perceived object particular. (1947:31)

Thus we are confronted with two forces: a human world that gives existence to objective reality, and a God who gives existence to us. God is universal perception; in every act of universal perception we perceive as God perceives. When the imagination is at the peak of its power as a unifying instrument, there comes a point, for Frye, where one realizes that there is not only a human agent at work in the journey of consciousness but also “an infinitely active personality that both enters us and eludes us,” illuminating the “mysterium tremendum, the mystery that is really a revelation” (1990a:107). For Frye, God in some sense remains distant from humanity since he gives us our existence. But since God is the universal act of unified perception, we can access God only through our own acts of unified perception. We must, then, at the level of the imagination be willing to view God as both “a being surrounded by experience as it descends from creation to the final identity of incarnation” and as an aspect of “human consciousness surrounding experience, as it ascends from its ‘fallen’ state towards what it was designed to be” (1980:47). If we do not view God in a manner that recognizes both an external and internal reality, united as it is in the imagination, we end up like Narcissus, staring back at our own reflection (1976a:61). So when Frye claims that God is a “spiritual Other” we must understand that this does not simply mean that God is an external reality (1991:20). We must connect this to the type of experience that is engendered at each level of the axis. If God, as a spiritual Other, is understood at the level of nature, then we have idolatry. The Other at this level is nature, “red in tooth and claw,” and therefore there is nothing to admire, nothing

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worth aspiring toward. It is for this reason that Frye finds little redeeming value in Natural Theology, with the possible exception of Teilhard de Chardin (1980:15–16). If God as Other is understood at the level of human civilization and work, then self-idolatry ensues—the worshiping of human accomplishments and structures, including the idolatry of art and any other human creation, even the Bible (1991:39). It is only when the Otherness of God is equated with the human imagination that, in Frye’s words, the “otherness of the spirit . . . may become ourselves” (1976b:96), and that “one strives with God only by striving with or through oneself to obtain a spiritual vision of God” (1991:79). Only in this act of imaginative perception is humanity able to break free from the single vision that chains us to what both nature and civilization offer: in the unified perception of the greatest art, Guernica, or Finnegan’s Wake; in the unified perception of great science such as Einstein’s insights into space and time in his general and special theories of relativity, or the elegance of Newtonian mechanics; in the unified theories of literature and art of Aristotle, and, some would say, the theories of Frye himself, humans are able to imaginatively re-create the world, overcome the subject/object bifurcation that pervades the level of civilization or the level of nature, and mimic the unified perception of God. Frye’s Epistemology As Applied to His Biblical Interpretation The principle underlying Frye’s criticism, then, is that the imagination creates reality through overcoming the separation of subject from object. Frye is therefore not an objective scholar attempting to interpret the Bible as it was in antiquity with as little personal involvement as possible, but rather he re-creates the Bible to show its unified structure. Similar to Blake and many other English Romantics, the imagination is the conduit through which this bifurcation between subject and object, initiated by the Enlightenment, could be overcome. Frye’s method in interpreting the Bible clearly shows the Romantic ideal of bridging the separated subject and object. In The Great Code, Frye attempts to establish the Bible as a unified text that can most profitably be understood as a timeless and inexhaustible fount of human spiritual concern, regardless of its original historical context. Biblical scholars interested in the Bible’s historicity, according to Frye, will not get very far: [Biblical critics] are well aware that the Bible will only confuse and exasperate a historian who tries to treat it as history. One wonders why in that case their obsession with the Bible’s historicity does not relax, so that other and more promising hypotheses could be examined. Trying to extract a credible historical residue from a mass of “mythical accretions” is a futile procedure, if the end in view is biblical criticism rather than history. (1982:42)

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Instead, Frye treats the Bible typologically, stating that the Bible’s meaning must be found in its final unified symbolism: This typological way of reading the Bible is indicated too often and explicitly in the New Testament itself for us to be in any doubt that this is the “right” way of reading it—”right” in the only sense that criticism can recognize, as the way that conforms to the intentionality of the book itself and to the conventions it assumes and requires. (1982:79–80)

Here we can plainly see how Blake’s epistemology plays into Frye’s biblical interpretation. If Blake’s epistemology lies at the root of Frye’s criticism, which I firmly believe it does, then Frye’s attempt to unify the Bible through understanding its typological shape is more readily contextualized. To understand the Bible as a historical artifact, as many modern biblical scholars do, is to reflect, in Blake’s words, on the “ratio.” Frye’s epistemology as it is related to the Bible is concerned with the active unification of the various texts into imaginative unity, not with a reflection or description of its original contexts and meanings. The source of many criticisms against Frye’s interpretation of the Bible rests precisely in his lack of attention to the Bible’s historical elements. Here I will cite examples from three highly influential authors interested in various aspects of the Bible. Robert Alter finds that Frye’s treatment of the Bible as a single unit ignores the particularities of biblical texts: Individual literary texts, of course, cannot be read in isolation. Literature is certainly a cumulative tradition and, as Frye has so often argued, an endlessly cross-referential system. But by fixing above all on the system, we may forget to look for what the individual text gives us that is fresh, surprising, subtly innovative, and that, alas, is the fault illustrated page after page in The Great Code. (22)

Peter Richardson maintains that Frye’s work on the Bible is of limited value to the experienced reader of biblical texts: Northrop Frye provides an entrée into what he considers the main structures of the biblical narrative. Those with a good knowledge of the Bible, who value its understanding of history, and who are aware of the need to approach it critically may well be distressed by The Great Code. (400)

For Richardson, The Great Code is actually a modern apologetic in the sense that it seeks to authenticate the validity of Christian scripture. However, Richardson also believes that this apologetic motive is not intended by Frye and that his goal was to show the main structure of the Bible itself. Richardson then concludes: The book itself sounds as if Frye believes he has actually grasped the essential character of the bible, not as if he is trying to make it appealing to

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outsiders [the apologetic motive]. In the end, the intention of the author is important. This makes reading of the volume a sad experience for I suspect that Frye achieved something he did not set out to achieve, and that he failed to achieve what he thought he had. (407)

David Jeffery writes that the subtitle of The Great Code, “The Bible and Literature,” belies the content of the book and that it is more akin to the hermeneutical theology of Hegel, Derrida, and Kenneth Burke than it is to the study of the Bible and literature. As such, the book is a useful addition to understanding Frye’s own thought because it elucidates more fully various aspects of his delineations of metaphor and rhetoric. As an “authoritative pronouncement” on the study of the Bible and literature, however, Jeffery claims that The Great Code fails because Frye too often ignores, misrepresents, or seemingly unknowingly contradicts what is generally known and accepted about the original intentions of biblical authors (135–41). We can now better understand why Frye’s readings of the Bible have been rejected by many modern biblical scholars. While Frye’s interpretation is in the lineage of Romanticism in his search for unity and wholeness, modern biblical scholarship is a product of the Enlightenment (Lockean) principles of breaking things into their constituent parts because biblical texts are understood as objective historical artifacts to be dissected in order to find their most original form and meaning. So it is true that Frye’s typological structure elevates typology at the expense of history, the unity of the Bible as a whole at the expense of the great diversity of specific texts, and faith in the unified potential of the Bible at the expense of faith based in actual historical events. These criticisms, however, important as they may be for the academic study of the Bible generally, only demonstrate that Frye’s use of biblical material is sometimes suspect. They do not show that his overall perspective on the Bible is without merit. Frye scholars must also realize that these criticisms from biblical scholars are not simply driven by different personal beliefs about the Bible but by a long history of biblical exegesis. However little knowledge some biblical scholars might have of the underlying structure of Frye’s epistemology, they do know the degree to which Frye’s interpretation of specific elements of the Bible is flawed. While these criticisms attempt to show the inadequacies of Frye’s work as biblical scholarship, they must also be accompanied by a critique of Frye’s overall epistemology in order to be complete. This type of scholarship would acknowledge that while Frye’s interpretive stance is foreign to most biblical scholars, the only way to evaluate his position, or anyone else’s, is, as Daniel Patte has argued, to make explicit the reasons for the “analytical,” “hermeneutical,” and “contextual” categories of his interpretative practice (12–18). Such studies would identify and discuss how and why Frye chooses his critical categories for the study of the

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Bible (analytical); how and why Frye actually interprets biblical texts (hermeneutical); and whether or not Frye ultimately does provide meaningful interpretations of the text (contextual). This article takes some early steps within such an endeavor. It has laid bare the epistemology that underlies Frye’s thought and his understanding of the Bible and religion, and it thereby gives biblical scholars the necessary tools to answer the “why” questions above. Further studies by biblical scholars are now needed to show “how” Frye’s epistemology is connected to his understanding of the Bible and the degree to which this further helps or hinders reading biblical texts. In this way, Frye’s contributions to biblical studies can be ascertained either positively or negatively, and his efforts may be given their rightful place within biblical studies.

WORKS CONSULTED Alter, Robert 1983 Review of Frye, 1982. Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 17:20–22. Blake, William 1965 The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman. New York: Doubleday. Eliade, Mircea 1954 The Myth of the Eternal Return. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Pantheon. 1961

Images and Symbols. Trans. Phillip Mairet. London: Harvill.

Ferber, Michael 1985 The Social Vision of William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Frye, Northrop 1947 Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1957

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

1963

The Educated Imagination. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

1964

Notebook 19. To be published as part of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye by the University of Toronto Press.

1976a

The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

1976b

Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

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1980

Creation and Recreation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

1982

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

1986

“The Survival of Eros in Poetry.” Pp. 15–45 in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

1990a

“The Dialectic of Belief and Vision.” Pp. 93–107 in Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974–1988. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

1990b

Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” Toronto: Penguin.

1991

The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Jeffery, David L. 1982–1983 “Encoding and the Reader’s Text.” University of Toronto Quarterly 52:135–41. Locke, John 1975 An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marshall, John 1994 John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patte, Daniel 2000 “Critical Biblical Studies from a Semiotics Perspective.” Semeia 81:3–23. Richardson, Peter 1983 “Cracking the Great Code, or History Is Bunk.” Dalhousie Review 63:400–407. Sullivan, Lawrence E. 1987 “Axis Mundi.” ER 2:20–21. Wolterstorff, Nicholas 1996 John Locke and the Ethics of Belief. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yolton, John W. 1956 John Locke and the Way of Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

“THE HUMANIZED GOD”: BIBLICAL PARADIGMS OF RECOGNITION IN FRYE’S FINAL THREE BOOKS David Gay University of Alberta

abstract Recognition is a recurring critical and theoretical premise throughout Frye’s work. The culminating focus of recognition in Frye’s final three books is the humanized God. By equating the humanized God with a release of human imaginative power, Frye identifies criticism with the work of transforming and renovating society. Three biblical narratives are paradigms for the recognition of the humanized God: Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac; Genesis 32, Jacob’s struggle with the angel; and the book of Job. Of these three, the book of Job functions as a microcosm of the entire Bible in Frye’s final three books. Frye assimilates William Blake’s interpretation of the book of Job to the structure and purpose of his final books in order to demonstrate for his readers the release of imaginative power needed to undertake creative and restorative work in the spheres of culture, education, and religion.

In the preface to Words with Power, Frye remarks that much of his “critical thinking has turned on the double meaning of Aristotle’s term anagnorisis, which can mean ‘discovery’ or ‘recognition,’ depending on whether the emphasis falls on the newness of the appearance or on its reappearance. Of course every true discovery must in some sense relate to what has always been true, and so all genuine knowledge includes recognition, however interpreted” (1990b:xxiii). This statement illustrates many of the intellectual habits and commitments that shape Frye’s criticism. It constructs, for example, a relationship between Frye and an influential predecessor by re-creating and expanding upon Aristotle’s definition in a contemporary context; it also defines knowledge in terms of relationships that link the past and the present within an ongoing, dynamic body of criticism; it is ultimately conscious of the value of teaching by suggesting the function of criticism in education, or the pursuit of “genuine knowledge.” As it occurs in the second of Frye’s final three books, Frye’s reflection on the centrality of recognition in his thinking alerts us to its specific place in the critical relationship that is the subject of his final statements: the relationship between the Bible and literature. This specific context would, of course, be unknown to Aristotle, for whom the concept of anagnorisis is a defining event in a tragic mythos that is in turn extrinsic to, and problematic for, the study of

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the Bible. My purpose is to show how Frye establishes a uniquely biblical paradigm of recognition in the domain of biblical narrative and to consider how that paradigm functions in the argument of his last three books. The first two narratives I will discuss are Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac, and Genesis 32, Jacob’s struggle with the angel, which appear in chapter 4 of The Double Vision. I will then consider the book of Job, which appears in chapter 3 of The Double Vision and which Frye discusses at greater length in both The Great Code and Words with Power. The final focus of recognition in these three books, and most emphatically in the final section of The Double Vision, is what Frye calls the “humanized God.” The humanized God is identical with the release of human, creative power Frye discovers in these paradigmatic biblical narratives and associates with the humanizing, social goals of criticism. As such, the humanized God is not an object of sense perception but the perceptual power of the creative imagination itself, a condition that Frye and Blake equate with the term “vision.” As a radical shift from perception to vision, Frye’s paradigm of biblical recognition both describes and potentially effects a shift in the cognitive disposition of the reader from passive receptor to active participant in the Bible’s vision of a “humanized God.” “The Humanized God” is the title of the final section of chapter 4 of The Double Vision. The title indicates the identification of the divine and the human as the final effect of recognition in Frye’s thought. It also explicitly signals that, while Frye may subsume and revalue Aristotle’s classical concept of recognition in a biblical context, he is also re-creating the form of recognition developed by William Blake, the subject of Frye’s first major critical work and the formative preceptor in Frye’s articulation of the relationship between the Bible and literature. Blake repeats his precepts concerning the humanized God in a number of texts at various stages of his career. The mode of Blake’s precepts is, however, consistently participatory as Blake exhorts his reader to actualize his or her own divine humanity: God appears & God is Light To those poor Souls who dwell in Night But does a Human Form Display To those who Dwell in Realms of day. (496) Thou art a Man God is no more Thy own humanity learn to adore. (520) All must love the human form, In heathen, turk or jew. Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell There God is dwelling too. (13)

The conclusions to Blake’s three epics—The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem—seek to recognize the humanized God in an event that succeeds

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the crisis and climax of each poem. Thus, in the closing movement of book 4 of Jerusalem, the awakening Albion, who represents Britain, sees Jesus as the Good Shepherd: Then Jesus appeared standing by Albion as the Good Shepherd By the lost Sheep that he hath found & Albion knew that it Was the Lord the Universal Humanity, & Albion saw his Form A Man. & they conversed as Man with Man, in Ages of Eternity And the Divine Appearance was the likeness & similitude of Los. (253)

This is the event of anagnorisis in Blake’s final epic. While it emphasizes God in the human form of the incarnate Christ, it supersedes recognition as the perception of an objective reality by identifying both Albion and Jesus with a third figure, Los, the hero of the poem who is both prophet and artist and who represents creative imagination as the mechanism of spiritual perception in Blake’s system. Recognition for Albion is thus the subjectivity of vision in and through the actualization of his imagination, which is the faculty of divine similitude and likeness that is effaced and endangered by the dehumanizing modes of moralistic and militaristic perception that Albion confuses with true religion in the continuum of fallen history. Albion’s recognition of Jesus is the culmination of a sequence of seven “eyes” of God. Each eye is a metaphor for the image of God in human consciousness—God, that is, as people perceive God, not as God perceives us—in a given phase of history: The seven attempts made by God to awaken Albion divide history into seven great periods, each with a dominating religion. These Blake identifies with the “Seven Eyes of God” mentioned in Zechariah, and he gives these “eyes” the names of Lucifer, Moloch, the Elohim, Shaddai, Pachad, Jehovah and Jesus. The “eighth eye” he occasionally speaks of as the apocalypse or awakening of Albion himself. (Frye, 1947:128)1

This sequence of seven “eyes” anticipates Frye’s use of seven phases of revelation in his theory of typology in The Great Code. These seven phases are creation, revolution, law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse. The phases are not progressive in the sense of improving upon each preceding phase; rather, each successive phase creates a wider and clearer perspective on its predecessor. Thus the final, apocalyptic phase produces a vision of the meaning of scripture through a “progression of antitypes” (1982:135). The apocalypse is, like Blake’s treatment of the

1 Frye notes Zech 3:9 as a source for the seven eyes: “For behold the stone that I have laid before Joshua; upon one stone shall be seven eyes: behold, I will engrave the graving thereof, saith the Lord of hosts, and I will remove the iniquity of that land in one day.”

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eighth eye, subdivided into two distinct forms of apocalypse that comprise the seventh and eighth phases. The seventh consists of a “panoramic” apocalypse, or the idea of apocalypse as an objective, perceivable spectacle; the eighth becomes the “participatory” visionary apocalypse that signals the awakening of the reader in Albion’s place. Thus “the reader completes the visionary operation of the Bible by throwing out the subjective fallacy along with the objective one. The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared” (1982:138). Although Frye suggests that no improvement takes place through the seven phases of revelation, an increasing comprehension of the power of the humanized God does emerge through a process of dialectical tension. Emergence is perhaps an operative term in Frye’s clarification of the humanized God. In the second, participatory apocalypse “the creator-creature, divinehuman antithetical tension has ceased to exist, and the sense of the transcendent person and the split of subject and object no longer limit our vision. After the ‘Last Judgment,’ the Law loses its last hold on us, which is the hold of the legal vision that ends there” (1982:137). Like Blake’s Albion, the reader emerges from the restricted view of legality as a mechanism of condemnation (a view too often superficially equated with Old Testament “law” in some Christian writings) and gains, from the typological perspective of the apocalypse, a wider view of Torah as a vehicle of community. Frye is therefore linking the phases of gospel and apocalypse in the same way that Blake links Jesus and Albion: the first is the historical incarnation of god-as-man; the second is the potential manifestation of the humanized God in the present. All seven phases, like the significance of sevens in Zechariah and Revelation, make the processes of recreation and restoration in the course of time the antitypes of the seven days of creation in Genesis. As I will later demonstrate, the typology of creation and re-creation is central to Frye’s reading of Job. The disavowal of progress as improvement in the sequence of the biblical canon also declines any sense of the absolute superiority of one phase of revelation over another; instead, the seven phases gain their significance in the context of their various relationships. This context is analogous to the intertextual, signifying relationships that elevate biblical myth and metaphor to the level of kerygma, the rhetoric of proclamation that has as its ultimate message the identity of the divine and the human. The disavowal of a naïve form of progress leads Frye to repudiate terms such as optimism or pessimism as descriptions of his own religious thinking. His final book, The Double Vision, does, however, anticipate a better future. He speaks, for example, of gaining a “growing insight into our own conditioned limits,” a phrase that connects Frye to the purposes of much contemporary critical theory. And he imagines a Christianity no longer burdened by the demonic aspects of its past: “I think immense changes could be brought about by a

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Christianity that was no longer a ghost with the chains of a foul historical record of cruelty clanking behind it, that was no longer crippled by notions of heresy, infallibility, or exclusiveness of a kind that should be totally renounced and not rationalized to the slightest degree” (1991:58). This vision of organized Christianity functioning freely enough to reciprocate its own emancipation with the emancipation of others is not a vision of naïve optimism but of a more solid hope, a word that echoes throughout The Double Vision as an evocation of Heb 11:1: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” As I will argue, this social vision of emancipation is grounded in Frye’s hope for, and reading of, an emancipated scripture. The emancipation of scripture he argues for is clarified in the biblical paradigm of recognition he develops. In “The Humanized God,” which comprises the final section of The Double Vision, Frye surveys a sequence of anthropomorphic conceptions and images of God in their biblical-canonical sequence. The sequence comprises a flexible amalgam of the seven phases of revelation explored in The Great Code and the seven eyes of God outlined in Fearful Symmetry. Frye notes that nowhere “does the Bible seem to be afraid of the word anthropomorphic” (1991:76). Anthropomorphism, which characterizes much of the imagery of the Bible in its depiction of God, is distinct from the complete humanization Frye works toward in the conclusion to this book. An anthropomorphic deity can serve as a projection of human cruelty and unpredictability. Thus the Jehovah of the Old Testament is an “intensely humanized figure, as violent and unpredictable as King Lear” (1991:74). An anthropomorphic god can, on the surface, appear erratic and inconstant: “What, for example, are we to do with a God who drowns the world in a fit of anger and repeoples it in a fit of remorse, promising never to do it again (Gen 9:11); a God who curses the ground Adam is forced to cultivate after his fall, but removes the curse after Noah makes a tremendous holocaust of animals, the smell of their burning flesh being grateful to his nose (Gen 8:21)” (1991:74). The anthropomorphic god also shows what Frye calls strong “trickster affinities” in his command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and in his exposure of Job to an arbitrary testing. The sequence, as it proceeds through the prophets to the parables of the New Testament, is figured as a “purgatorial journey” that leads from natural to spiritual perception dichotomized in 1 Cor 2:14, the biblical locus of double vision. As a template of reading, the process becomes a metaphorical “journey of understanding” that develops the dialectic of natural and spiritual perception by distinguishing hell as an intensification of human evil from heaven as the divine image purified of the reflection of human evil. The site of the confusion of heaven and hell is, of course, our world. Hence, “Human life appears to be a mingling of two ultimate realities, which we call heaven and hell. Hell is the world created by man, and heaven, or at

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least the way to it, is the world created through man by God” (1991:79). The “mingling” Frye speaks of is a confusion of divine and demonic characteristics in the human perception of God. For Frye, social and literary criticism, in addition to literature, can be a part of the creative effort to distinguish divine and demonic characteristics, and thus “clean up the human image of God” (1991:xv). The process of purifying the divine image consists of three stages: demonic parody, redemptive power, and apocalyptic vision (1991:79–80). On the binding of Isaac, Frye observes that the story has a demonic basis: the sacrifice of human children that was practiced around Israel but forbidden to the Israelites themselves. This story also sets up a demonic situation and then moves in a redemptive direction, where Abraham becomes aware of the uncompromising priority of God’s right to human devotion against the closest of earthly ties. We may compare Jesus’ remark in the Gospels that he had come to bring not peace but a sword, and cause division even among families. (80)

Even in this compressed reading of the story, Frye articulates the redemptive as a countervailing movement that divides and distinguishes the divine from the demonic in human consciousness. His reading of Genesis 32, Jacob’s struggle with the angel, illustrates the same patterns. The demonic basis of the story consists in its initial association of the angel with local demons or night creatures. The struggle then initiates a redemptive countermovement as Jacob demands a blessing from the angel. Finally, by verse 30, we have a very strong hint that in some way and some sense Jacob has been striving with God himself, though surely one can strive with God only by striving with or through oneself to obtain a spiritual vision of God. So we have, first, a demon of darkness who attacks or mutilates those who encounter him, then a redemptive context in which Jacob demands a blessing from an angel, and a final outcome in which Jacob is transformed by divine power into Israel, the individual centre and starting point of God’s people. (ibid.)

As in his reading of the binding of Isaac, Frye suggests that the reciprocal recognition of God and Jacob follows a redemptive separation of divine and demonic elements in Jacob’s understanding of God. The book of Genesis, from which these paradigmatic stories are taken, can rightly be called a book of recognitions: the biblical anagnorisis begins ironically with the opening of Adam and Eve’s eyes after they taste the forbidden fruit and culminates in Joseph’s revelation of himself to his brothers in Egypt (Gen 45:4–9). The binding of Isaac is particularly dense with references to sight and seeing leading to recognition. At the tense moment when Isaac tells Abraham that they have no sheep for the sacrifice, Abraham

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remarks: “God will see to the sheep for the offering, my son.” In his recent translation of Genesis, Robert Alter comments that the idiomatic force of seeing is “providing,” but “God’s seeing lines up with Abraham’s seeing the place from afar, his seeing the ram, and the seeing on the Mount of the Lord. Beyond the tunnel vision of a trajectory toward child slaughter is a promise of true vision” (1996:105n8). Alter’s distinction between “tunnel vision” and “true vision” invites comparison to Frye’s distinction between demonic and divine premises in biblical narrative. The demonic stage is a threshold in a process that leads toward the recognition of the humanized God. Abraham’s resolution holds within it the subordination of paternal devotion to a divine command that is demonic in its apparent negation of God’s promise to Abraham: “I will establish my covenant between me and thee in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee and to thy seed after thee” (Gen 17:7). The power of the story consists primarily in the terror of subordinated devotion; the harsh facts of Abraham’s preparation, registered in the splitting of the wood and the saddling of the ass, intensify this terror without raising expectations of a reversed outcome. The middle stage of the process, which Frye calls the redemptive stage, consists of the three-day journey to the mountain. It marks the difference between unreflective religious fanaticism, which acts without distinguishing the command and the result, and deliberate, spiritual reflection, which seeks a broader perspective in the dimension of time. The journey is thus the embodiment of time in biblical narrative. Alter’s idea of narrative “trajectory” invites comparison to Frye’s view of narrative as a “journey of understanding” (1991:80). Trajectory and journey in turn constitute the temporality of biblical narrative. As Alter observes, biblical narrative “embodies the basic perception that man must live before God, in the transforming medium of time, incessantly and perplexingly in relation with others” (1981:22). The dynamic of transformation in the medium of time is impelled, Alter argues, by a dialectical tension between providence and human freedom: “the depth with which human nature is imagined in the Bible is a function of its being conceived as caught in the powerful interplay of this double dialectic between design and disorder, providence and freedom” (33). This dialectical tension explains the preoccupation of biblical narrative with the course of providential history: “The God of Israel, as has been observed, is above all the God of history: the working out of His purposes in history is a process that compels the attention of the Hebrew imagination, which is thus led to the most vital interest in the concrete and differential character of historical events” (32). For Alter, working with the primary data of biblical narrative, the “concrete and differential character of historical events,” or the intense and realistic specificity that registers the historicity of events, is a hallmark of the art of biblical narrative.

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Frye appears to some readers to submerge the concrete details of biblical narrative in larger archetypal categories of myth and metaphor that may contain any number and variety of narratives. For Frye, however, there is no denial of the specific stylistic and linguistic nuances from which narrative derives much of its power and significance; rather, Frye asks how later writers function within biblical categories. What, he asks, “in the Bible particularly attracts poets and other creative artists of the Western world?” (1982:106). In establishing the range of relationships between the Bible and literature, Frye identifies the literary forces that conduct human consciousness through the transforming medium of time. For Alter, these forces inhere in a dialectic of human nature and divine guidance as these are conceived by the biblical writers; for Frye, they inhere in a dialectic of opposed comic and tragic patterns that connect the Bible to Western literature. From both perspectives, notwithstanding a radical difference in priorities, the relation between temporality and transformation is maintained. Frye articulates the generic and temporal dialectic of recognition in the third chapter of The Double Vision: “The Double Vision of Time.” He introduces the concept of recognition found in Greek tragedy through the example of Oedipus Rex. Here he locates recognition as a moment near the end of “a story that begins, rises, turns, moves downwards, and ends in catastrophe” (1991:44). In the Poetics, Aristotle defines recognition as “a change from ignorance to knowledge—resulting in love or hate—by those marked out for good fortune or bad fortune” (84). Plot or mythos is the highest principle in Aristotle’s estimation of tragedy. Recognition is therefore a defining moment in the overall structure or emplotment of a tragic narrative in the form of drama or action. At its best, it coincides with reversal, or a change in fortune for the tragic hero who, like Oedipus, gains insight into the destructive forces in his own character that collide with the force of divine justice. Oedipus’s destruction of his own eyes shows the magnitude of the recognition he receives. In tragedy, recognition as knowledge or discovery is focused on memory and the past. The temporality of tragedy treats time as irreversibly linear or one-directional, a point emphasized in Fools of Time, Frye’s study of Shakespearean tragedy: “The basis of the tragic vision is being in time, the sense of the one-directional quality of life, where everything happens once and for all . . . and where all experience vanishes, not simply into the past, but into nothingness, annihilation” (3). In The Double Vision, Frye observes that the “passing of experience into knowledge is closely related to the tragic vision of life. It is part of a reality in which at every instant the still possible turns into the fixed and unalterable past” (53). The consumption of linear time into a “fixed and unalterable past” is only one side of the dialectic of time that Frye constructs in his view of the Bible. Movements toward

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social renewal and restoration effect the countervailing movement that opposes the isolating tragic momentum of time. Among the seven phases of revelation Frye identifies in the biblical canon, wisdom is a central illustration of this countervailing movement. Wisdom opposes the tragic momentum of linear time in part because it is a mode of education that consolidates relationships and forms communities. This mode of teaching may simply transmit the lessons of experience from one generation to the next. As Frye has suggested, wisdom typically “goes with the authority of seniors, whose longer experience in the tried and tested modes of action makes them wiser than the young” (1982:121). As a form of what Frye calls “concern,” wisdom can connect the individual to a larger society. Hence the biblical term torah or “essential instruction.” As myth, concern is both literary and ideological, playing, as Frye argues, a “leading role in defining a society, in giving it a shared possession of knowledge, or what is assumed to be knowledge, peculiar to it” (1990b:31). Frye’s concept of wisdom moves beyond the straightforward transmission of experience between generations in order to identify criticism with creative work in the renewal of society. In biblical wisdom, creative work is expressed in the book of Proverbs, where “Wisdom is personified as an attribute of God from the time of creation, expressing in particular the exuberance of creation, the spilling over of life and energy in nature that so deeply impresses the prophets and poets of the Bible. . . . Here we finally see the real form of wisdom in human life as the philosophia or love of wisdom that is creative and not simply erudite” (1982:125). As criticism, wisdom not only opposes the linear, tragic direction of time, but even sustains a “progressive attack on time that underlies all genuine achievement in everything that matters, in religion, in education, in culture most obviously” (1991:53). This observation forms part of Frye’s rejection of the familiar reading of Ecclesiastes as a work of “pessimistic melancholy”; instead, Frye considers Ecclesiastes as an emancipation of critical energy that opposes the tragic direction of time. The Preacher is the exemplary critic in the Bible: “He is ‘disillusioned’ only in the sense that he has realized that an illusion is a self-constructed prison. He is not a weary pessimist tired of life: he is a vigorous realist determined to smash his way through every locked door of repression in his mind” (1982:123). By expressing this critical and creative energy in the areas of education, religion, and culture, Frye implies that comedy, with its movement toward social renewal and restoration, is the mythos that opposes and subsumes the tragic impulses of biblical narrative. As Frye remarks in Anatomy of Criticism, the “appearance of a new society” marks the moment of anagnorisis in the comic mythos (1957:163). The redemptive and apocalyptic stages leading to recognition in biblical narrative subsume any tragic movements into a renewed society. Christ’s crucifixion is followed by his reunion with the

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disciples after the resurrection; the apocalypse concludes with the marriage supper of the Lamb and the return of the tree of life. As James Whedbee argues in The Bible and the Comic Vision, the movement from tragedy to comedy in the Hebrew Bible is “not simply sequential but includes a dialectic interplay between tragedy and comedy with comedy typically having the last word” (285). Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are non-narrative poetic texts and do not fully illustrate the dialectical relationship between comedy and tragedy in biblical narrative. The biblical narrative that best illustrates this dialectical opposition in Frye’s thinking is the book of Job. In The Great Code, Frye calls Job the epitome of biblical narrative. While Job is normally classified as a poetic wisdom text with Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, Frye treats it as biblical narrative because the linear direction of time emphasized in wisdom literature is amalgamated with the prophetic perspective of loss, deliverance, and restoration that Frye approximates as a “U-shaped story” (1982:193). In The Great Code, Frye considers Job a comedy through its final emphasis on the restoration of the human community (198). In Words with Power Frye concludes by exploring the reverse transformation of Job from tragedy into comedy through Job’s participation in God’s speech at the close of the poem. The Double Vision reiterates these readings in a compressed manner by emphasizing the broadest alignment of the biblical vision with comedy in the temporal movement from creation to apocalypse. Like Job, the binding of Isaac and Jacob’s struggle with the angel emulate this pattern within more confined narrative units. In fact, Frye concludes his discussion of Job in The Great Code by comparing Jacob’s struggle to the double movement of time: “The inference for the reader seems to be that the angel of time that man clings to until daybreak (Gen 32:36) is both an enemy and an ally, a power that both enlightens and cripples, and disappears only when all that can be experienced has been experienced” (1982:198). Frye notes that the book of Job is “usually classified among the tragedies,” but he rarely elaborates in detail on the critical history of a biblical text (1982:196). James Whedbee considers the treatment of Job as tragedy, which includes arguments for its dependence on Greek tragedy, and includes, for example, Terrien’s view of Job as a unique “festal tragedy” that presents the “theme of royal expiation that centers in the vicarious suffering of the king” (222–23). Whedbee argues that comedy explains the overarching structure of Job, yet he asks, “How can a book so filled with agony and despair, so dominated with the images of suffering and death, be considered a comedy?” (224). Here we need to consider that Frye’s approach to Job as a comedy of restoration depends heavily on William Blake’s interpretation of Job in his illustrations to the book. In his study of Blake’s illustrations, Frye observes that Job is “technically comedy by virtue of Job’s restoration in the last few verses, but the comic conclusion seems so wrenched and arbitrary that it is

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hard to think of it as anything but a wantonly spoiled tragedy” (1976:230). Frye also remarks that Job’s restoration, if read superficially, is unsatisfying. Job may originate in a folktale, and “in such a folk tale Job’s restoration as an individual can be accepted without question”: But for the book we have, restoration for an individual alone could only be an arbitrary act of a deity separate from Job, and a somewhat vulgar act at that, because of its elimination of love. Even in a society as patriarchal as Job’s, three new daughters would hardly make up for the loss of the previous daughters. (241)

In spite of these and other disconcerting issues that perplex readers of the book of Job, Blake found in this narrative a “microcosm of the entire biblical story” (234) and a comic conclusion that is inevitable rather than arbitrary (230–31). Frye’s assumption of Blake’s interpretation of Job is so complete that Job becomes a microcosm of the Bible in Frye’s final three books and a paradigm for the specifically comic form of recognition he explores in the conclusion of The Double Vision. Frye takes at least three premises from Blake’s reading of Job. The first is the premise that the Bible progresses towards a recognition of the “humanized” God. In “Blake’s Bible,” Frye argues that Blake “never believed, strictly speaking, either in God or in man; the beginning and end of all his work was what he calls the ‘Divine Humanity.’ He accepted the Christian position because Christianity holds to the union of divine and human in the figure of Christ, and, in its conception of resurrection, to the infinite selfsurpassing of human limitations” (1990a:270). Christ is thus the human outcome of a progressive revelation realized in Job’s consciousness when “God as a projected old man in the sky turns into Christ, God as Man, God as the essence of Job himself” (1976:236). In the conclusion to The Double Vision, Frye subsumes Blake’s sequential perception of the humanized God into a summary of anthropomorphic conceptions of the deity; he then associates his concept of resurrection, not with the objective image of a risen Christ, but with a “growing insight into our own conditioned limits” that is pursued by the critical imagination and that is identical with the release of creative and imaginative power within the individual, which is “the essence of Job himself.” Thus, in a passage that anticipates Frye’s reading of Genesis 32, Frye states that Blake’s Bible tells us “not that man fell into chaos, but that he can climb out of it if he uses all his creative capacities to do so. This means using everything he has that is imaginative, and the imagination, Blake says, is the human existence itself” (1990a:285). A second premise Frye takes from Blake is that Job is a second book of Genesis. Frye states that the books from Genesis to Esther “are concerned with history, law, and ritual; those from Job to Malachi with poetry, prophecy, and wisdom. In this sequence, Job occupies the place of a poetic

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and prophetic Genesis” (1982:193; cf. 1976:237). Job is therefore a type of Adam who “falls into a world of suffering and exile” and is eventually restored, though “Job’s ordeal is not punishment but a testing” (1982:193). The significance of Job’s relation to Genesis has to do less with typology than with the recognition of the humanized God. God’s speech from the whirlwind at the close of the poem places Job in what Frye calls a “polarized cosmos,” its two poles being the past creation event recounted in Genesis and the present representation of the creation event to Job in language (1990b:311). As Frye further observes in The Double Vision, God describes “to Job the past creation that Job never saw. But, once brought into Job’s present experience, it becomes a new creation in which Job is no longer a mere spectator but a participant” (1991:49). The result is again the release of creative power that Frye associates with the recognition of the humanized God: as Job “becomes more creative himself,” his “deeper apprehension is not simply more wisdom, but an access of power” (1990b:312). Two plates from Blake’s illustrations to Job demonstrate the shift that Frye describes. Plate 11 is a demonic image. Job lies prostrate before a God who terrifies him in the night. The potential comparison with the demonic stage of Jacob’s struggle with the angel exists, but Job is more passive than Jacob in this phase of his ordeal. The body of God presents the head of an old man, which Blake associates with the remote sky god Urizen; the foot of God is a cloven hoof, denoting not only Satan but also a confusion of God and Satan in Job’s perception of God. God’s hand points to a stony tablet, symbolizing Job’s subjection to the letter rather than the spirit of scripture. The figures suffering in chains in a lake of fire around Job’s bed signify that intermingling of heaven and hell in human consciousness that Frye explores in the final phase of The Double Vision. The demonic image belongs to a tragic paradigm, as the reader-viewer relates to Job as an individual isolated in his own ordeal and distanced in his suffering. In his commentary on Blake’s illustrations to Job, Foster Damon maps Blake’s seven eyes of God on to the sequence of twenty-one engravings that re-create Job’s narrative. The eye of God is, however, the eye with which Job sees God. As Damon remarks, “Job sees for the first time the cloven hoof of this God’s left foot; for the God of Justice is only Satan, masquerading as an angel of light” (32). Frye is equally concerned with the confusion of God and Satan in human consciousness. He therefore calls attention to 2 Thessalonians 2, which is the biblical text at the bottom of plate 11. In its entirety the passage reads: Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. (2 Thess 2:3–4)

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Figure 1. Plate 11 from William Blake, Illustrations from the Book of Job (London, 1825). Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, The Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.

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As Frye notes, this is Paul’s description of Antichrist, who is “notable for his superficial resemblance to Christ, and similarly, all gods portrayed as old men in the sky are variants of the Satan whom Paul, again, calls the prince of the power of the air” (1976:232). The inscription above the illustration further denotes the confusion of God and Satan through the motif Frye identifies as the Malak Yahweh, or angel of the Lord: “Satan has transformed himself into an Angel of Light.” The confusion of God and Satan is, as Damon suggests, “the nadir of Job’s life and the turning point” (32). Plate 20 is an apocalyptic image. The penultimate image in the series, it is the culmination of the redemptive movement that follows the demonic nadir of plate 11.2 Job’s daughters are restored to him, but for Frye this signifies the comic paradigm of a restored society rather than a single individual returned to prosperity. The Bible is now completely internalized by Job, who re-creates it by narrating past events to his daughters. Job thus becomes a poet and educator performing social and political work through the emancipation of his creative power. Just as his teaching emulates God’s representation of the past in the present, so do his outstretched arms emulate the dynamic of creation in both Genesis and Job: God’s division of light and darkness, sea and land, sun and moon occurs through the Hebrew verb bdl, meaning “to divide or separate.” For Blake, therefore, the actualization of the humanized God within Job is concomitant with the separation of divine and demonic elements in Job’s perception of God. The pattern of creation as division is in turn identical with the apocalypse in Blake’s thought; as he says in his Vision of the Last Judgement, “whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon the individual” (551). This separation of truth and error is an integral part of what Frye calls “cleaning up the human image of God.” In his commentary on plate 20, Frye confirms his association of Job with the mythos and anagnorisis of comedy. Job’s experience is a journey from the tranquil passivity Blake calls Beulah down through the states of Generation and Ulro, which mark stages of partial and total alienation, followed by an ascending emergence to the highest state of emancipated imaginative power that Blake calls Eden. In constructing the tragic and comic countermovements within this structure, Frye remarks that “only the individual descends; only the community returns” (1976:242). Recognition is identical with the purpose of redemption: “only a recreated society, like the one that crystallizes in the final scene of a comedy around a hero’s marriage, can

2 In Fearful Symmetry, Frye selected plate 20 to represent the sixth crisis in Blake’s cyclic myth, the “recovery of the unfallen state” (1947:434). As in Damon’s commentary (50), Frye sees Job as “raised to the unfallen world” and united with the “creative Word of God” (1947:434).

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Figure 2. Plate 20 from William Blake, Illustrations from the Book of Job (London, 1825). Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, The Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.

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fully experience the sense of redemption.” Hence, in plate 20, “Job’s arms, outspread over his daughters, show that he with his daughters forms part of a larger human body” (1976:242). The larger human body is a metaphor for the redeemed community. In developing this metaphor in The Great Code, Frye selects the name of one of Job’s daughters to further identify redemption and recognition: “One of Job’s beautiful new daughters has a name meaning a box of eye shadow. Perhaps if we were to see Job in his restored state, we should see, not beautiful daughters or sixteen thousand sheep, but only a man who has seen something we have not seen, and knows something that we do not know” (1982:197). The polarization of the cosmos that organizes Frye’s reading of Job occurs in both time and space. Polarization in time occurs in the distinction between the first and second creation as it is represented to Job in language. This polarization locates Job in the continuum of fallen time but affirms his role as an active participant in the re-creative and redemptive movement of providence within that continuum. The temporal movement is the emphasis of Frye’s reading of Job in The Great Code. Frye emphasizes the polarization of space in Words with Power. Here, Job “has reached the end of his narrative in his present situation, and must now look up and down. What he sees is the good creation in its original, unspoiled form: at one pole there is the intelligible harmony when the morning stars sang together; at the other is the leviathan who is king over all the children of pride (41:34). After this vision of a polarized cosmos Job can be restored to his original state because God has restored himself, so to speak, to his original state” (1990b:311). The polarization of time and space in their full extension demonstrates both how the book of Job functions as a microcosm of the entire Bible for both Blake and Frye and how Frye assimilates Blake’s biblical poetics to the structure of his biblical criticism. For Blake, recognition is triggered by a crisis of vision that succeeds the comprehensive, epic exploration of time and space by the poetic imagination. In Blake’s Milton, Los, who represents time as the “Spirit of Prophecy” (120), calls for the apocalypse when this process of exploration is complete: Fellow Labourers! The Great Vintage & Harvest is now upon Earth The whole extent of the Globe is explored: Every scatterd Atom Of Human Intellect now is flocking to the sound of the Trumpet. (120)

In the same manner, God’s speech from the whirlwind completes Job’s exploration of the fallen world in both space and time. The Great Code and Words with Power are similarly works of extension. The Great Code extends the Bible in time through a horizontal typological sequence from creation to apocalypse; Words with Power extends the Bible in space through a vertical survey of imagery from the furnace to the mountain. In Frye’s assimilation of Blake’s poetics, The Great Code and Words with Power are to The Double

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Vision as extension is to crisis: both terms combine to create the conditions of recognition. In Blake’s Jerusalem, Los exclaims that the apparent triumph of those who “Deny a Conscience in Man & the Communion of Saints & Angels/Contemning the Divine Vision” and worshiping “The God of This World” is, in fact, a “Signal of the morning which was told us in the beginning” (251). In the same way, The Double Vision identifies the crisis that triggers recognition. Frye’s final articulation of crises in language, nature, time, and ultimately in the human perception of God are both assertions about the state of the contemporary world and moments in a critical-poetic structure that re-creates the crisis poetics of William Blake in a fourfold contemporary context. In seeking to effect recognition in his readers, Frye envisions a restored society that is transformed in a resurrection that is “already here, waiting to be recognized” (1991:85). A final premise Frye takes from Blake’s Job is that the relationship between perception and interpretation is a central theme in the text. In this respect, Blake follows in a line of major interpretations of Job. In her study of the interpretations of Job from Gregory to Calvin, Susan Schreiner observes that these “commentators explain the various degrees of perception or understanding in terms of their presuppositions about suffering, providence, spiritual growth, and the nature of God” (20). While commentators throughout time share a common concern with these themes, their understanding of perception and interpretation is to some extent a function of the time in which they write. For both Blake and Frye, this common concern includes the awareness that they are working against the unique confusion of the divine and the demonic that is endemic to their respective eras. Had Blake written a commentary on Job instead of producing interpretive illustrations, his commentary would have reflected his conflict with natural religion or deism; it would also elaborate his conception of the “double vision” in terms of his conflict with deism and other forms of mental error as they are manifest in the social stagnation of war and injustice. Frye’s use of Job as a microcosm of the Bible, like his use of Genesis 22 and 32 as models of the progress from demonic parody to apocalyptic power in the human perception of God, reflects his concern for the social function of criticism at the close of the twentieth century; following Blake’s example, he articulates this concern in opposition to the conflicts and conditions that deny or suppress the primacy of primary human concerns. In his studies of the Bible, Frye’s concern for the social function of criticism is both a theoretical position and a form of recognition. In his view of the comic paradigm as countering the tragic paradigm of human isolation through its emphasis on collective critical work in the spheres of religion, education, and culture, and in his vision of the release of imaginative energy that shifts the subject from spectator to participant within this critical initiative, Frye again identifies the humanized God with his vision of a restored society. Frye suggests in several places that this form of

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recognition is located at points where “creation and criticism have become the same thing” (1976:244). The identity of creation and criticism is a basic premise, and ultimate goal, of Frye’s final three books. While the book of Job is its greatest illustration, a final example from Alter’s translation of Genesis 22 may help us to grasp this premise. In verse 14, Abraham renames the mountain where Isaac was bound “Jehovah-Jireh,” translated as “On the mount of the Lord there is sight.” Alter notes that the phrase “means literally either ‘he sees’ or ‘he will be seen’. . . . It is also not clear whether it is God or the person who comes to the Mount who sees/is seen” (1996:106). In Frye’s biblical paradigm of recognition, it is ultimately both.

WORKS CONSULTED Alter, Robert 1981 The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books. 1996 Aristotle 1984

Genesis: Translation and Commentary. New York: Norton. Poetics. Pp. 63–124 in Literary Criticism from Plato to Dryden. Ed. Allan H. Gilbert. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Blake, William 1988 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman. New York: Doubleday. Damon, S. Foster 1966 Blake’s Job: William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job. Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press. Frye, Northrop 1947 Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1957

The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

1967

Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

1976

“Blake’s Reading of the Book of Job.” Pp. 228–44 in Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth and Society. Richmond Hill: Fitzhenry & Whiteside.

1982

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic Press.

1990a

“Blake’s Bible.” Pp. 270–88 in Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays. Ed. Robert Denham. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

1990b

Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” Toronto: Penguin.

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The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Schreiner, Susan 1994 Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Calvin’s Exegesis of Job from Medieval and Modern Perspectives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whedbee, James 1998 The Bible and the Comic Vision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

THE ASHES OF THE STARS: NORTHROP FRYE AND THE TRICKSTER-GOD Michael Dolzani Baldwin-Wallace College

abstract In both his final books on the Bible and religion, Northrop Frye was haunted by the image of a trickster-God, an ambiguous figure like the God of the book of Job, with whom he felt it was his duty to struggle like Jacob with the angel. He began his career identifying with the Romantic revolutionary solution of Blake, who rejected the negative trickster-God as a symbol of false authority and found the true trickster deity in the creative spirit of humanity. But in his late works, Frye supplements such a solution with the vision of a positive trickster-God as a mysterious Other who may liberate us by breaking through the egocentric limitations of our own ambitions and desires. Ultimately, these alternative visions become imaginative contraries in a process he calls the dialectic of Word and Spirit.

Upon the ashes of stars, the undivided ones of the family, lay the poor character, after having drunk the drop of nothingness lacking to the sea. . . . Nothingness having departed, there remains the castle of purity. Mallarmé, Igitur (trans. Mary Ann Caws) Nora: Is this true? Nick: I don’t know. Nora: Well, then, why are you saying it? Nick: It’s the only way it makes sense. Dick Powell and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man

It was within days of his death that Carl Jung gave the following answer to an interviewer who asked him for his definition of God: “To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse” (Edinger: 101). Edward Edinger, who reports Jung’s response in Ego and Archetype, comments that “Jung is calling God what most people call chance or accident. He experiences apparently arbitrary happenings as meaningful rather than meaningless.”According to this way of thinking, “all the vicissitudes of the outer and inner life have a meaning and

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are expressions of transpersonal patterns and powers.” Elsewhere, Jung had a name for this theory of meaningful pattern as an epiphany out of chance or chaos: he called it synchronicity. Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow, a book that Northrop Frye admired a great deal, had another name for it: paranoia. In a second work that Frye admired, Mallarmé’s Igitur, the title character throws dice in a tomb, then lies down and dies upon the ashes of 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. It was within several years of his death that Northrop Frye speculated upon what he called “the concealed extra number” (Notes 52, par. 170).1 Twelve, for example, harbors an extra thirteenth who 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” (Notes 52, par. 176), for the number seventy-eight, “particularly in the final descent” (par. 177). Seventy-eight 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” (par. 180). By chance, Frye died a few years later at the age 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. Science 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

1 Throughout this essay “Notes” refers to a set of Frye’s typed notes and “NB” to one of his unpublished notebooks. Both are currently being edited for publication as part of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye.

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a God, some numinous presence, as the source of that secret order. But what a God! Edinger is right to associate him with the God of Job. Throughout his trials, Job keeps challenging God to step out from behind the curtains and answer him. Perhaps he was thinking of something like Blake’s “How do you know but that ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,/Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” (35, plate 5). But Blake’s aphorism is what he would have called an augury of innocence, and Job is not in the land of innocence. Be careful what you wish for, 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 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. His God is the God of Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts, who will throw a child suddenly in front of Lily Tomlin’s car on her way home from work; who will rock Los Angeles, city of angels, with an earthquake, apparently for no greater reason than that it is Los Angeles, thereby distracting its occupants momentarily from their preoccupation with their own neuroses. I find myself wondering what the readers of Good Housekeeping Magazine, where the interview with Jung was published, made of his comment, for his is definitely not a God of good housekeeping. In fact, he’s a homewrecker, as Job himself found out and as Frye says in an unpublished note: “Jehovah is not a theologian’s God; he’s an intensely humanized figure as violent and unpredictable as King Lear. He does silly and vicious things; as a human being we wouldn’t let him into

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our front parlors” (Notes 54.1, par. 22). (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 (74–75): What, for example, are we to do with a God who drowns the world in a fit of anger and repeoples it in a fit of remorse, promising never to do it again (Gen 9:11); a God who curses the ground Adam is forced to cultivate after his fall, but removes the curse after Noah makes a tremendous holocaust of animals, the smell of their burning flesh being grateful to his nose (Gen 8:21); a God who rejects Saul as king after he spares his enemy Agag out of human decency (because he should have been offered to God as a sacrifice) and inspires Samuel to hew Agag in pieces and tell Saul that he has committed an unforgivable sin (1 Sam 15); a God who observes children mocking the prophet Elisha and sends bears to eat up the children (2 Kgs 2:23), and so on? All mythologies have a trickster God, and Jehovah’s 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.

An almost verbatim passage in Words with Power adds (106–7) the “long bargaining scene with Abraham about the number of righteous men needed to save Sodom.” If you have such a God on your hands, you are going to have to struggle. In Frye’s later work, this struggle is what he means by the purgatorial; its telos is re-creation, one of the keys to his thought. Frye’s Bible books struggle with the Word in an attempt to re-create both its aspects: as text and as vision of God. The following unpublished note indicates how his role model was the figure who was lamed in a wrestling match with God, but was compensated by a visionary dream of the axis mundi that is the organizing image of Words with Power: “Powerful pull toward the primitive submission to doctrine: I’ve always been attracted to 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” (Notes 53, par. 103). 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” (Notes 54.1, par. 66). This is Heilsgeschichte, the shape of sacred history: “Purgatorio in history is the wrestling of Jacob or Israel with the angel or God. The swallowing of the sky-bugger” (Notes 54.1, par. 3). Thus in the exercise of our imagination or re-creative

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powers, we become what Nikos Kazantzakis referred to as the saviors of God. But Jacob’s agon is also the model for all reading, which is re-creative: “All reading begins in the revolt against narcissism: when a book stops reflecting your own prejudices, whether for or against what 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” (NB 44, par. 379). And 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” (NB 50, par. 659). Re-creation 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, re-creation is to some extent like deconstruction: it does not willfully 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 groveling 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. Draw your own conclusions.” 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, the greatest natural-born killer in history. 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 tricksterGod by allegory or any other mode of rationalization, but that 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 merely a fanciful expression: it is more or less Frye’s own image in chapter 8 of Words with Power: the katabasis or descent-quest into the “nothing” out of which vision must come. Robert Denham has explained how the vision of what Frye calls interpenetration is his Paradiso, both the center and the circumference of his religious thought, his vision of plenitude. What I am going to go on to describe briefly is the purgatorial way of vacancy that is the journey toward interpenetration and therefore the shadow-side of interpenetration itself, a way that is an exhodos 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

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us that all our illusions of presence are a desperate defense against the reality of loss in its various forms of difference in space and deferring in time, the ultimate denial being, as Ernest Becker said, the denial of death. We are such things as dreams are made on, says Prospero in The Tempest. Milton’s Paradise Regained is explicitly modeled on the book of Job, but Christ’s rejection of Satan’s temptations in it also has overtones of the Preacher’s “Vanity of vanities” in Ecclesiastes. Again and again in the notebooks these two works are grouped with a third, Blake’s Milton, as a kind of purgatorial triad; in the latter poem, Milton descends from eternity to clarify his own vision, and this involves both standing in his own shadow and wrestling with Urizen, the sky-bugger version of God, on the banks of the Jordan, thus recapitulating the wrestling of Jacob with the angel on the banks of the Jabbok, a tributary of the Jordan (112, plate 19). Frye of course learned his Jacobean wrestling-moves from Blake, who, like the rest of the Romantic revolution, saw that a perfectly good God who nevertheless signs off on all the miseries of human history is only a 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 that has brought everything into being, including God himself, who is only a projection of human creative power into the sky. Chapter 7 of Words with Power recapitulates what Frye has explained often before, how, beginning with the Romantics, the imaginative cosmos or symbolic universe has been inverted so that the quest for a divine vision is now downward and inward; the top of the ladder is now merely the vision of alienation. A consequence of this reversal is the transfer of the trickster persona: the real trickster now is creative man, Prometheus, Blake’s rebel-hero Orc. All the imagery of the trickster-shaman is transferred over to a figure of uprising revolutionary energy, whose ideological implications are expounded 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; artistically by poète maudit figures whose manicdepressive responses range from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell to Un Saison en Enfer. This is the trickster-God’s first rehabilitation, as he turns from alien other into a mask of Promethean humanity in its revolt against social 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” (Notes 53, par. 232).

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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 shadowside 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 Orc cycle, but there is always the possibility of a resolving third awareness, whose advent would usher in Joachim of Floris’s third Age of the Spirit. As for Classical parallels, there is of course Prometheus, the titan who defies the gods to be friend to man. There is also a generic parallel: in “Romance As Masque” (1976b) Frye traces the affinities of the idealizing forms of naïve romance and Classical New Comedy with the Christian 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. 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” (NB 12, par. 143). If the daylight side of the Odyssey is New Comedy and romance, its underside is Old Comedy, and its hero is one of the great trickster-figures in all literature. Romanticism, or at least its more Blakean forms, emerged out of the farleft inner-light wing of the great second-awareness upheaval known as Protestantism. Those of us who came to Frye before his three Bible books were written knew his religious views primarily through Fearful Symmetry, and perhaps some of us tended to assume that Frye was of the devil’s party and knew it. A deep identification with Blake is certainly there, early and late; when asked in an interview by David Cayley, “You’re with Blake?” Frye immediately responds, “Oh, yes” (1992:100). And in the privacy of the notebooks he is capable of sounding every bit as antinomian as his mentor: in Notebook 12, the ordained United Church minister says that “The effect of organized and institutional religion on society, for the most part, is evil. It isn’t just reactionary or superstitious; it is evil, and stinks in the nose of God” (par. 347). Elsewhere, he says that “there’s a special viciousness in religion that’s found nowhere else” (Notes 53, par. 25). Therefore it seemed mildly astounding to hear Frye say, in a review of Blake studies in 1957, “The student interested in Blake’s religious views should first get what few contemporary critics have, a coherent idea of Protestantism, and then investigate the doctrine technically known as preexistence: the doctrine that Christ’s humanity is coeternal with his divinity.

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This doctrine is not strictly a heresy, in the sense of being a doctrine inconsistent with Christian tradition (a little before Blake’s day it was held by Isaac Watts), but it is the only unusual feature of Blake’s religious beliefs granted his Protestant premises” (1966:19). To most Christians, Blake’s view that the creation and the fall were the same event, in which part of God fell along with man, and in which redemptive power is identified with the creative imagination, might seem just a wee bit unusual. But we get a more coherent view of Frye’s Protestantism when, in the same review article, he criticizes one Blake scholar for having “a somewhat pedestrian concept of orthodoxy which leaves little room for paradox in statement” (19). The 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 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 ego-center of consciousness to a maximal level of apocalyptic vision. Following Blake, the younger Frye had little use for the alternative strain of hidden-reality Romanticism, mainly (yuck) German, whose line runs from Jakob Boehme and the occult tradition via Kant’s noumenal reality to Heidegger and Jung. He expresses his impatience in his 1947 article “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism” (Frye, 1963)—significantly, one of the few pieces of writing whose formulations he later regretted and expressed the wish to revise. Some of Frye’s later religious formulations remain close to the Blakean mode of expression, for instance his oft-repeated re-creation of the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love. He begins with hope, which he defines as having a particular relation to the arts, providing as they potentially do the models of a world of gratified desire (and of its anxious opposites) from

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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 wishfulfillment. But faith, when it takes over from hope, is not the belief in what you know ain’t so but is rather the creative process itself, committing itself to a fictional and illusory model as a myth to live by and going on to realize it in experience. Frye’s example of the Wright brothers getting a plane off the ground when everybody knows, or else should know, that if God wanted human beings to fly he’d have given them wings, is not so stock as it seems: there are eloquent passages in Mircea Eliade about flight as one of the oldest and most powerful symbols of human transcendence, the trickster-shaman’s “flight of the wild gander.”2 Forty years later, engineers swore that it was aerodynamically impossible to break the sound barrier, and less scientific types, according to the film The Right Stuff, spoke of demons that would tear your plane apart as you approached Mach 1. Since this essay is into hermetic number-symbolism, it should be pointed out that Chuck Yaeger broke the sound barrier, mostly by ignoring the doubters, in 1947, the year Fearful Symmetry was published. When Frye says to David Cayley that “The criterion for faith to me is a pragmatic rather than a dogmatic one. Faith is something that works. . . . It’s a process of turning into reality what has been either a matter of hope or a matter of illusion” (1992:190–91), he is being even more accurate than he may seem. His frequent reference to “the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, ‘Faith is when you believe something that you know ain’t true’” comes from William James’s famous essay “The Will to Believe”—the wording I have just quoted is in fact James’s (1956b:29). In his follow-up essay, “Is Life Worth Living?” James is very much in the Romantic trickster tradition when he says that it feels “as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is adapted” (1956a:61). But the problem with the phenomenological-expansion version of recreation 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 phrase, “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” (209). The only thing that can follow, in a manic-depressive cycle, is deflation. In the Cayley interviews, Frye says, “Human nature is corrupt at the source, because it has

2 See, for example, Eliade, 1967; also his “Brancusi and Mythology,” which speaks of how, in Brancusi’s sculpture, the image of a bird in flight merges with that of the axis mundi, both symbolizing “the ecstatic experience of absolute freedom” and the desire “to recover the forgotten bliss of an existence freed from any and every system of conditionings” (1986:100).

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grown out of physical nature. It has various ideals and hopes and wishes and concerns, but its attempts to realize these things are often abominable, cruel, and psychotic. I feel there must be something that transcends all this, or else.” Cayley asks, “Or else what?” Frye responds: “Or else despair. . . . I think if I didn’t read the Bible and were confronted with all these dire prophecies about the possibility of the human race disappearing from the planet, I would be inclined to say, ‘The sooner the better.’ It’s like in the question asked Job: what is there in life for him unless he has a vision of something else?” (1992:189–90). This sounds much more orthodox and less Promethean, because it implies that the project of making ourselves into God by building monuments of unaging intellect is only another version of the tower of Babel and is due for a collapse. Hence Frye begins to be interested in a line of thinking he was 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 toward the vision of the Absolute Spirit in plenitude, of God as “all in all,” goes through the valley of negation. Subject and object, along with all the subsidiary cloven fictions that ramify from their division, have to be negated or decreated; re-creation can then be only the negation of a negation, a concept in Hegel that Frye believes was influenced by Boehme. The German tradition was supplemented by French symbolisme and above all by Mallarmé. The end result of Frye’s attempt to turn the mythologies of authority and revolution into a Yeatsian double gyre is the dialectic of Word and Spirit that is the heart of Words with Power. Here, the transforming human creative power we have been speaking of is revealed as the Spirit, the inner light or divine spark of creativity in the darkness of our corruption. But that is not the whole story, for the Spirit cries out like Job for an answering response and, like Job, receives one as the Word descends in a vision of order, pattern, and meaning that in-forms the human imagination and 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 to the lapis itself. Out of absurdity, he is the wonderful counterabsurdity of order and pattern that is all we know of the true, the beautiful, and the good, and all we need to know. The Word descends and becomes the substance of things hoped for. If there is such a thing as a paradoxical orthodoxy, Frye is shooting for it here. The 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,

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“a spiritual reality, an otherness of a creative power not ourselves.” The context here is important, as he draw 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” (1976a:xii–xiii). Contrariwise, the Spirit is not just human natural energy, Freud’s libido, Blake’s Orc, but is rather the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, our deepest identity that is nevertheless also our identity with the divine. But of course not even Frye can transcend the conflict of opposites. In an unpublished note, 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 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” (Notes 53, par. 157). But if the spirit of man is really the Holy Spirit, then 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, that is why Frye sounds religiously orthodox sometimes and religiously radical at others. I do not think he would be ruffled by this. No one has ever constructed an argument without two sides to it; a onesided 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. But wisdom does not turn itself into an unhappy consciousness making itself ill with unresolvable 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 once said of himself, “I’m one of Jung’s feeling types, a senser of occasions,” NB 44, par. 718.) Odysseus creates, sometimes with makeup but for the most part verbally, not one identity but

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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” (5.233). And sure enough, he has to go by the way of vacancy—it is the provision of the Cyclops’s curse that he shall lose everything, like Job—and he does so, even down to his identity, becoming “Noman.” But by doing so he earns the response of two trickster deities, Hermes and Athena; from the latter he gets the unparalleled comment, “Two of a kind, we are,/contrivers, both” (13.379–380). And it is Athena’s help that enables him to pull off his miracle, turning a beat-up beggar into the longlost 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. Buber’s I and Thou was one of the works that Frye regarded as truly kerygmatic, and our loving response to the trickster deity may be, in the end if not in the beginning, “No cause, no cause.” This does not so much solve the problem of theodicy as leap over it like the bull-leapers in Minoan frescoes. Contraries are the unfolded form of the final, enfolded form Frye calls interpenetration. Again the best way to approach the unapproachable is via the analogy with human love. The center of “orthodox” or relatively 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 or immortality, conversion means more than becoming a believer or joining a church. It means metamorphosis, re-creation, 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, often linked by Frye with the Odyssey because of the shared pattern of the disguised ruler reclaiming his

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rightful kingdom, Angelo’s deepest desire is to torment and rape a woman whose deepest desire is to become a nun. Their 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 become 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 the skeptical, despairing Mephistopheles in us tells us we are. Thus the hope of miraculous self-transformation is prerequisite to the hope for the even greater miracle of transcending the limitations of union in love. In Notebook 44 (par. 460), when Frye is on the verge of remarrying in his late 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, which itself echoes the problem of the woman with seven husbands in the Gospels. Eight entries later comes Frye’s announcement that he’s married Elizabeth Eedy: “Well, I’ve entered the Elizabethan age” (par. 468), and we realize why he has bothered to record the story. But in between Frye transcribes another passage, this time from Donne’s Devotions: “All mankind is of one author, & is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is . . . translated into a better language. . . . God’s

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hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another” (par. 464). Donne’s metaphor is a superb translation of Frye’s own vision of an order of words. At the same time, it is a vision of community, like Dante’s in the Paradiso, of a kind not possible except to the love that believeth all things, hopeth all things. But Frye’s immediate reason for quoting it is personal; the “Elizabethan” passage continues: “Not one atom of my feeling for Helen has changed: neither is my feeling that we’re linked somehow in the spiritual world. But my notions of spiritual union may have been clarified: there is no spiritual marriage because marriage has to be ego-centered and a mutual possession. In that world all books lie open to one another.” That union which is beyond all the divorces and translations of this world is not between egos: “Two egos identifying would be like two billiard balls copulating,” he says dryly (par. 428). To adapt a sentence from Words with Power (141), “So far as we can see, a complete redemption of this kind is entirely impossible, and is therefore one of the proper studies of faith.” Thus, the moral of this story seems to be that it may be useful to have a trickster-God to get us out of the impasses of our own contradictory and impossible desires, for often they are the very thing from which we need to be redeemed. Even if, as Jung said, he has to cross our willful path violently and recklessly, upset our plans and intentions, and change the course of our lives for better or worse. Is this true? I don’t know. Well, then, why am I saying it? It’s the only way it makes sense.

WORKS CONSULTED Blake, William 1982 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. Rev. ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Denham, Robert D. 1999 “Interpenetration As a Key Concept in Frye’s Critical Vision.” Pp. 140– 63 in Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works. Ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Edinger, Edward F. 1972 Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche. Boston and London: Shambala. Eliade, Mircea 1967 “The Magic Flight.” Pp. 99–110 in Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities. Trans. Philip Mairet. New York and Evanston: Harper Torchbooks. 1986

“Brancusi and Mythology.” Pp. 93–101 in Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts. Ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona. New York: Crossroads.

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Fitzgerald, Robert, trans. 1998 Odyssey. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. [Orig. 1961] Frye, Northrop —— Notebooks and Notes (in this essay, NB and Notes, respectively). Northrop Frye Fonds, E. J. Pratt Library, Victoria University at the University of Toronto. Currently being edited for publication by Robert D. Denham and Michael Dolzani as part of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Gen. ed. Alvin Lee. University of Toronto Press. 1963

“Yeats and the Language of Symbolism.” Pp. 218–37 in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt Brace.

1966

“William Blake.” Rev. by Martin K. Nurmi. Pp. 1–35 in The English Romantic Poets and Essayists: A Review of Research and Criticism. Ed. Carolyn Washburn Houtchens and Lawrence Huston Houtchens. New York: New York University Press for the Modern Language Association of America.

1976a

“Preface.” Pp. vii–xiii in Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press.

1976b

“Romance As Masque.” Pp. 148–78 in Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Bloomington amd London: Indiana University Press.

1982

A Study of English Romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Orig. 1968]

1990

Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

1991

The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

1992

Northrop Frye in Conversation. Ed. David Cayley. Concord, Ont.: Anansi.

James, William 1956a “Is Life Worth Living?” Pp. 32–62 in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Dover. [Orig. 1897] 1956b

“The Will to Believe.” Pp. 1–31 in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Dover. [Orig. 1897]

Stevens, Wallace 1954 Collected Poems. New York: Knopf.

NORTHROP FRYE AND THE POETRY IN BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS James M. Kee College of the Holy Cross

abstract Northrop Frye’s three last books, all of which deal explicitly with the Bible and its relationship to literature, argue for a conception of biblical hermeneutics more capacious than the historical-critical one that has shaped interpretation of the Bible for the last two centuries. Frye envisions a hermeneutic in which poetry plays an essential role. Three assertions lie at the heart of Frye’s argument. First, Frye claims that the letter of the biblical text is radically metaphorical in its mode of symbolization. Secondly, he argues that, for the course of much of its history, biblical language has been subjected to “metonymic” and “descriptive” criteria of truth that do not pay adequate attention to the Bible’s metaphorical mode. Thirdly, he asserts that it is thus the primary function of literature, and especially poetry, to re-create the metaphorical vitality of the Bible’s language in epochs when metonymic and descriptive norms are culturally dominant. The essay seeks to evoke the significance of this argument by attending to the varied ways in which poems by Dante, Langland, and Milton interpret the Bible.

From the time that Northrop Frye published his first book, Fearful 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 historicalcritical 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,

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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. Twentiethcentury thinkers belonging to this tradition include Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and, more recently, Gerald Bruns. From this hermeneutical tradition we have learned that understanding does indeed involve more than reconstructing an author’s ideas or arriving at a grasp of formal unities. It means experiencing a happening of truth, taking part in a historical event that will inevitably involve both disclosures and concealments—both insights and blind spots, as De Man might say. To be sure, the search for understanding requires us to attend to the contexts in which a work was written, but it also calls upon us to attend to the contexts in which we encounter the work today as well as the variety of ways in which it has been transmitted and received. Although Northrop Frye is not conventionally associated with this tradition, his work on the Bible and literature offers hermeneutical resources for understanding poems such as those mentioned above. In his literarycritical efforts Frye had always sought to defend the imaginative, the poetic, the literary against efforts to construe them in terms of something else, including religion. In The Great Code, however, he began to confront explicitly the relationship between his insights into the poetic and his understanding of the Bible. He sought to identify an irreducibly poetic element in the Bible’s language. He thereby opened up possibilities for understanding the Bible in ways mediated by the poetic traditions that derive from it. Several features of Frye’s argument in The Great Code can instruct us how better to read poets such as Dante, Langland, and Milton in relation to each other and to the Bible. The first is Frye’s claim that, in the literary traditions associated with the Christian Bible, the Bible was traditionally read as a unified narrative having a beginning, a middle, and an end—whatever the results of the modern critical-historical study of it (1982:xiii). One can hardly overestimate how intensely poets have sought to understand the Bible’s vision of the Whole in its unity. Second is Frye’s assertion that the literal level of the biblical narrative is radically metaphorical (1982:24). While this is not the place to take up the numerous problems associated with the Bible’s 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, nonpoetic criteria of truthfulness. For

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Frye, metaphorical discourse is marked by an elemental disclosive power that, initially at least, harbors an intuitively self-confirming 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 (1982:5–17). Following a suggestive schema found in Vico’s New Science (Bergin and Fisch: 127–50), 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” (1982:18) 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. (1982:23)

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 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

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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” (1982:1.1–2). 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” (1982:24). Although conceptual language is, finally, authoritative for Dante in a way that his poem does acknowledge, the poem’s metaphorical narrative does not merely “dress up” the conceptual, so to speak. It generates a disclosive power that is absolutely essential to the poem’s conceptual luminosity and vitality. Dante’s first dream in Canto IX of the Purgatorio may serve initially to illustrate the way in which the conceptual and metaphorical poles of the allegory interact in the poem as a whole (1984:9.13–69). Dante is still just outside Purgatory proper, unable to continue his journey up the mountain because night has fallen. He sleeps, and at an hour close to dawn, when “our intellect’s envisionings become almost divine,” he dreams that an eagle, “terrible as lightning,” swoops down and snatches him, carrying him in a terrifying flight up to the sphere of fire, just below the moon. The “imagined conflagration scorched [him] so” that he was awakened. When he awakens, utterly disoriented and still terrified, his experience is redescribed to him by Virgil, his guide. Saint Lucia, part of the chain of 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 toward the freedom that will make him capable of seeing God requires the assistance of divine grace—especially when he arrives at certain thresholds on the

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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” (1982:55). 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 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 toward 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

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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 (cf. Eliot: lines 85–89). 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 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 (1.11), 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

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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 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” (1.26) 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

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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. (1982:13)

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” (1982:13). 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)” (1973:26, 29).1 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.2 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.3

1 See Heidegger’s analysis of the modern epoch in terms of the “transformation of truth to certainty” and the emergence of human being as the subject of knowledge (1973:19–32). 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 pp. 26–28. 2 Frye’s claim that descriptive language is culturally ascendant in the modern epoch also receives support from Timothy Reiss’s analysis of the “discourse of modernism.” See in particular Reiss’s description of what he calls “analytico-referential discourse” (31–54). 3 For a fuller development of the argument, see Kee: 156–64.

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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 (see, e.g., 3.77, 4.144, 4.200, and 5.88). There is, as well, the remarkable manner in which the truth of Adam’s two dreams is established. When Adam wakes he finds “Before [his] eyes all real, as the dream / Had lively shadowed” (8.310–311). 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. Secondly, 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 have emerged instead are individual realms in their 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 center 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

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space filled with different voices—in Bakhtin’s phrase, a “dialogized heteroglossia” (Bruns, 1984:15). Secondly, 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.4 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 understanding takes place as an in-between region (1984:20–23).5 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.6 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.

4 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. 5 Bruns bases his argument upon Gadamer’s discussions of “Plato’s unwritten dialectic” and “dialectic and sophism” in Plato’s Seventh Letter. See Gadamer, 1980:93–123, 124–55. 6 Of course much critical effort in recent years has been devoted to unmasking the differences that are suppressed when thinking moves too quickly toward forms of oneness. If Plato is correct, however, thinking is always structured by a pole of oneness. The principle of unity that operates in many forms of critique is that of critical consciousness itself. See Paul Ricoeur’s studies of the relationships between “hermeneutics and the critique of ideology” and “science and ideology” (1981:63–100, 222–46).

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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.”7 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 re-create or preserve the meaning and significance of biblical mythoi for their age. As a final way of characterizing what Northrop Frye’s work might 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 (1971:55, 69). 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” (1971:60);8 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” (1971:66). A work of art, Heidegger adds, cannot come into

7 Frye’s conception of the metaphorical can be better understood when his works are read together with Paul Ricoeur’s studies of “the rule of metaphor” (1977). Similarly, his conception of typology is illuminated by A. C. Charity’s analysis of “the dialectics of Christian typology.” 8 In the passage quoted, I have followed the lead of David Farrell Krell and modified 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, 1977:180. Given Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of causality (see, e.g., Heidegger, 1973:10–20), the connotations associated with “cause” are misleading for 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, “können wir das Schaffen als das Hervorgehenlassen in ein Hervorgebrachtes kennzeichnen” (1963:49).

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being without those who preserve it. (The German verb translated as “preserve” is bewahren [1963:54], which is etymologically related to Wahrheit, German for “truth.”) Interpreted hermeneutically, we might say that Frye’s The Great Code understands poets such as Dante, Langland, and Milton as interpreters who seek to preserve the truth of the biblical narrative by re-creating its metaphorical power within the different discursive conditions of their epochs. By providing us with a speculative schema within which to read these poems, Frye helps us today to engage in the same work of preservation.

WORKS CONSULTED Alighieri, Dante 1982 The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. Toronto: Bantam. 1984

The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Purgatorio. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. Toronto: Bantam.

Bergin, Thomas Goddard, and Max Harold Fisch, trans. 1968 The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Bruns, Gerald R. 1984 “Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Hermeneutics.” Diacritics 14:12–23. 1992

Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Charity, A. C. 1966 Events and Their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Man, Paul 1971 Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Eliot, T. S. 1971

“Burnt Norton.” Pp. 13–20 in Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. [Orig. 1943]

Frei, Hans W. 1974 The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Frye, Northrop 1970 Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. [Orig. 1947] 1982

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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1990

Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

1991

The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 1980 Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato. Trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 1989

Truth and Method. 2d ed. Trans. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad.

Heidegger, Martin 1963 “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.” Pp. 7–68 in Holzwege. 4th ed. Frankfurt: Klostermann. 1971

“The Origin of the Work of Art.” Pp. 15–87 in Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row.

1973

“Metaphysics As History of Being.” Pp. 1–54 in The End of Philosophy. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row.

1977

Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row.

Kee, James M. 1990 “Typology and Tradition: Refiguring the Bible in Milton’s Paradise Lost.” Semeia 51:155–75. Langland, William 1995 The Vision of Piers Plowman. Ed. A. V. C. Schmidt. 2d ed. London: J. M. Dent. Milton, John 1981 Paradise Lost. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis: The Odyssey Press. [Orig. 1962] Reiss, Timothy 1982 The Discourse of Modernism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Ricoeur, Paul 1977 The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language. Trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1981

Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S WORDS WITH POWER: ABSENCE AND PRESENCE Patricia Demers University of Alberta

abstract By opening up Frye’s ironic lament for the absence of a “critical language” for the “mythical and metaphorical relations of the traditionally female symbols of the Bible,” this essay explores a representative sampling of the interpretative work of early modern women writers whom Frye ignores. Their complex symbology extends an understanding of selfhood from femaleness to androgyny, sisterly collaborations to bold declarations. Their membership in a human community addresses shifting and fraught religio-political dynamics. Their symbolic link to nature and redemption also recognizes the sacralization of the immediate political moment, in the work of the female spirit in the world. The psalmic paraphrases of Lady Mary Sidney Herbert, biblical marginalia of Royalist Elizabeth Warren, prophetic political commentary of Fifth Monarchists Anna Trapnel and Mary Cary, visions of the Quaker autobiographer Mary Penington, and rhapsodic chronicles of the Behmenist Jane Lead expand the Frygian survey field. A re-vision of his literary biblical analysis to include early modern women enlarges our grasp of the diversity of subjects in the early modern community.

[F]or euery one of us that be scollers to this lesson, is a minister aboute some one certin worke of the things apointed to us in the gospell. for in this chirche which is as a large house be not onely vessels of all sortes, as of goold, siluer, wood & earthe, but also, all maner of craftes. for this house of god which is the chirche of the liuing god hath hunters, wayfaring men, masters of workes, bylders, husbandmen, sheppards, wraslers, souldiers, even to all thus dothe this shorte saying agree: ingendring in everi one bothe an ernestnes to worke & a study to performe there purpose. —Mildred Cecil, Lady Burghley, translator It is the testament and last will which he bequeathed unto us wretches, and wretched sinners, which shall lead you to the path of eternal joy: and if you with a good mind read it, and with an earnest desire follow it, no doubt it shall bring you to an immortal and everlasting life. It will teach you to live and learn you to die. —Lady Jane Grey Dudley (a letter to her sister, inscribed in Greek on the blank leaf of her Greek Testament the day before her execution, 1554)

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Within the encyclopedic vastness of Northrop Frye’s literary analysis of the Bible, how can we explain the absence of reference to the immense riches of early modern women’s interpretative work? Is theirs an implied presence in the context of male collaborators, correspondents, and relatives? Whether a deliberate or inadvertent absence, this scanting of women’s exegeses may point to the undeveloped state of what Frye himself called the “feminist enzyme” (1990:284). Aware of the danger of speculating about intentions and of contributing to merely “vulgar feminist . . . topiary criticism, . . . clipping literature in order to distort it into a different shape” (1990:60), I propose to use Frye’s own terms to investigate early modern women’s simultaneous absence from his criticism and emphatic presence in the cultures of their canonized and commented-on contemporaries. Accordingly, this essay explores the turns of double meanings so productive for Frye’s critical thinking. The two terms he highlights at the outset of Words with Power, Aristotelian anagnorisis in the sense of “recognition” and “reappearance” and aletheia or “truth” in the sense of “unforgetting” or “trying to remove the impediments to seeing what is there already” (xxiii–xxiv), also delineate some contours of the discursive territory of early modern women’s writing. Steeped in the Bible, these resourceful, self-aware hermeneuts made their knowledge of the kerygma passports to social agency. Yet they are invisible, visions fugitives at best, in Frye’s criticism. What are the consequences of his ironic lament for the absence of a “critical language” for the “mythical and metaphorical relations of the traditionally female symbols of the Bible” (1990:203)? His preliminary schema identifies these symbols acknowledging womankind as a separate sex, as “the representative of human community” and as the connection between redemption and nature (1990:204). While this grid has the appeal of a deceptively simple “linguistic monad” (1982:209), it also cries out for testing, adjustment, and expansion in view of the actual, not infrequently resistant, practice of women as interpreters of such symbology. Moreover, Frye’s own treatment of the instrumentalist concept of words “as servomechanisms of reality, thought, activity and existence” and of the inseparability of “a transformation of consciousness and a transformation of language” (1982:224, 226) affords helpful cues for sketching the diversity of this practice. In an age when religion was the primary language of analysis, the Bible served as “a huge bran-tub from which anything might be drawn” (Hill: 5) and “the cultural matrix for explorations of virtually every topic: kingship, selfhood, rationality, language, marriage, ethics” (Shuger: 6). Despite the act of Parliament in 1543 forbidding anyone below the rank of a gentlewoman to read or discuss the Bible, women writers appropriated biblical language and modalities for an astonishing array of expressive purposes. The “command of both the Bible and colloquial English” propelled their attempts to articulate an idiosyncratic vision or “a re-vision of received tradition” (Ezell:

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151). Princess Elizabeth knew the Bible and the swirling currents of theological controversy as thoroughly as her multilingual reading of classical literature. The biblical citations glossing the margins of the New Year’s gift the eleven-year-old Elizabeth presented in 1545 in a hand-embroidered cover to her stepmother, Kateryn Parr, a translation of Marguerite de Navarre’s Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse as The Glass of the Sinful Soul, testify to her mature appreciation of Scripture’s usefulness to intimate the complexities of lineage. Similarly her translation of Psalm 13 and her kissing and pressing of the Bible in English, a gift of the Lord Mayor of London, to her breast during her procession through the city in 1558 on the day before her coronation, “promis[ing] the reading thereof most diligently” (Arber: 249), show her awareness of the private and public resonances of the sacred text. Dowager Queen Kateryn Parr’s The Lamentacion of a Synner (1547) threads a strategic path among approved and proscribed translations and commentaries, synthesizing her reading of Erasmus, Coverdale, Latimer, and Tyndale. Anne Wheathill’s forty-nine prayers, A handfull of holesome (though homelie) hearbs (1584), illustrates the capacity of her biblical gleanings to provide food, medicine, scent, and flavour. Anne Dowriche folds biblical allusion and invocation, along with anti-Papist animus, into her three versified discourses of Huguenot struggle, The French Historie (1589). Elizabeth Melvill, Lady Culros, relies on biblical language of despair and triumphalism to convey the depression and exuberance of her dream journey in the sixty stanzas of Ane Godlie Dreame (1603). Throughout her prolific (more than sixty) and syntactically eccentric tracts and in spite of repeated imprisonment and confinement in Bedlam and the burning of her work, Lady Eleanor Davies appropriates the model of biblical prophets to forewarn Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Civil wars, tortures, and belittlement do not dampen the biblical fervour of radical women. In her broadsides directed at Oxford, Cambridge, and London, Quaker convert Hester Biddle minces no words in transposing Old Testament cadences and trenchant excoriations to condemn clerical neglect, profligacy, and arrogance. This brief sampling, merely hinting at the range of early modern women’s words with power, offers some sense of their forms and registers of voice. It might also indicate the need to revise Frye’s schema to include the textual traces and discontinuities of women’s actual struggles for meaning. In verse and prose and a variety of genres—from metrical paraphrase to learned essay, scathing diatribe, and dream narrative—these translators, polemicists, prophets, and autobiographers used biblical language and vision to move, awaken, alert, exhort, or galvanize their readers. Each author exemplifies Frye’s claim about the conscious subject’s “not really perceiving until it recognizes itself as part of what it perceives” (1991:23). Though acknowledging Frye’s organizing patterns of the cyclical and the dialectic, a symbology revised to include women’s writing would

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extend each of his provisional “female symbols.” The exploration of a separate sex would include an understanding of selfhood encompassing a range of possibilities, from self-conscious femaleness to androgyny, from sisterly collaborations to boldly single-minded declarations. Membership in a human community would have to address the shifting and fraught religio-political dynamics of church affiliation and the definition of church itself. While the foregoing concept would involve the politicization of the sacred, women’s symbolic link to nature and redemption would have to recognize the sacralization of their immediate political moment, in the work of the female spirit or anima in the world. Like Frye’s own counterpointed categories, these concepts are not discrete entities; they overlap and interpenetrate. Early modern women’s “servomechanisms of reality, thought, activity and existence” fastened on the Bible as the text for creative commentary and paraphrase, as a political gloss, and as an integral component of visionary expression. Now to illustrate these extensions with more developed examples. Lady Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke’s presentation copy of the metrical psalmic paraphrase to Queen Elizabeth in 1599 consisted of Lady Mary’s revisions to Sir Philip Sidney’s translations of Psalms 1–43 and her own translations of Psalms 44–150, including “164 distinct stanzaic patterns, with only one repeated” (Waller: 190). She offered this beautiful manuscript to Elizabeth in the names of both translators since, as Lady Mary knowingly observed, “A King should onely to a Queene bee sent” (Herbert: 1:103).1 Some students of Sidney have viewed his sister as “an inveterate tinkerer” (Ringler: 502) whose “unavoidable makeshift” contrasts with Sidney’s “precise architectonic skill” (Lanham: 183). As a devotional poet she has been found “uneven,” failing “to measure up to the level of the second- or third-rate poems written in the Nineties” (Freer: 38), and overornamented, thereby losing “control of the larger imaginative infrastructure of her own psalm imitations” (Zim: 195). My reading, by contrast, focuses on her daring creativity and the baroque exuberance of her paraphrase in contrast to the sonnet sequence of another female contemporary, Anne Lock. Pembroke’s version of the fourth penitential psalm, Psalm 51, “Miserere Mei, Deus” (Herbert: 2:49–51), is independent and vigorous, characterized by adroit repetitions, proleptic extensions of biblical metaphors, and simultaneous breathlessness and assurance. Though aligning herself with Huguenot devotional stances, she retains a uniqueness of expression and form. Théodore Bèze’s Argument to Psalm 51 posits that the penitence here

1 Pembroke was a collaborator aware of her own artistic worth. The best known portrait, completed by Simon van de Passe in 1618, showcases her role as a translator holding the open book of the Psalms of David.

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demonstrates “how great weaknesse there is euen in the best and most excellent men” (Gilby: 126). The rhetorically ornamented force of Pembroke’s opening stanza, O Lord, whose grace no limitts comprehend; sweet lord, whose mercies stand from measure free; to mee that grace, to mee that mercie send, and wipe o Lord, my sinnes from sinfull mee O clense, o wash, my fowle iniquitie: clense still my spotts, still wash awaie my staynings, till staines and spotts in me leave no remaynings, (lines 1–7)

extends the deliberateness of Bèze’s plea: “wash me therfore O my God againe and againe and often times, whiles the filth of so great wickednesse be vtterly washed away” (Gilby: 126). Pembroke’s rhyme royal supplies a veritable catalogue of rhetorical devices: antimetavole or the counterchange (lines 1–3, 6–7); antistrophe or the “counter-turne,” turning counter “in the middest of euery meetre” (Puttenham: 198; line 3); epanalepsis or the echo sound (line 4); and ecphronesis or the outcry (lines 4, 5). Pembroke stamps the psalm with a subtle individuality reflective of her experience as a learned aristocrat. Her allusion to the privacy of the penitent’s schooling, “and inward truth: which hardlie els discerned,/my trewand soule in thie hid school hath learned” (lines 20–21), may owe some debt to Bèze’s declaration, “I confesse that thou hast taught me . . . as one of thy houshold priuately and most familiarly.” Another possible influence is Calvin’s commentary on the sinner who has been “taught by God as one of his household” and “become a froward scholer” (Golding: 104). Equally possible as a conscious and ironic (or, unconscious and embedded) source of the description of the “trewand soule in thie hid schoole” is Sidney’s image of taking up his “trewand pen” at the conclusion of the first sonnet of Astrophil and Stella (Ringler: 165). Pembroke’s ecstatic—almost aerobic—imploration “that brused bones maie daunce awaie their saddnes” (line 28) differs remarkably from Bèze’s more staid conclusion, in keeping with the Genevan practice of excising any reference to dancing, “So shalt thou soudenly refresh the bones which thou hast worthily broken.” The idea of sudden refreshment may have triggered the demonstrable proof of dancing for a woman as aware of court culture as Pembroke.2 Invoking the medicinal, absorptive,

2 Margaret Hannay notes that Bèze, Calvin, Anne Lock, and the Geneva Bible “take out references to dancing even when present in the original Hebrew” (1993:31). Anne Lock’s Sonnet 12, “Sinne and despair have so possest my hart” (Felch: 68), dwells obsessively on the weight of sin, while petitions to cancel sin’s register impart a more buoyant, hope-filled, propulsive mood to Pembroke’s metaphrase. The sharpest difference between Lock’s negativity and Pembroke’s

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spiritually purifying qualities of hyssop so prominent in the Pentateuch (Exod 12:22; Lev 14:4–6; Num 19:18), Pembroke’s speaker petitions: Then as thie self to leapers hast assign’d with Hisop, lord thie Hisop, purge me soe: and that shall clense the leaprie3 of my mind. (lines 22–24)

Interiority, “the fittest remedie” according to Calvin, means entering “into our selues, to gather all our wits vnto God,” recognizing “Gods spirituall sanctuaries, which cannot be buylded by hand and conning of men” (Golding: 205). Pembroke stresses the peacefulness of Providential architecture and engineering, as her penitent concludes Lastly, O lord how soe I stand or fall, leave not thy loved Sion to embrace: but with thie favor build up Salems wall, and still in peace, maintaine that peacefull place. (lines 50–53)

She blends pre- and postlapsarian moments, connecting the desire for a divinely created cleanness to “breathing grace”: create in me a pure, cleane, spottles hart: inspire a sprite where love of right maie raigne. ah! cast me not from thee: take not againe thie breathing grace: againe thie comfort send me, and let the guard of thy free sprite attend me. (lines 31–35)

Pembroke’s layered, incremental, unfettered work is far removed not only from the sturdy metres and ballad stanzas of Sternhold and Hopkins but also, in its experimentation and hopefulness, from Anne Vaughan Lock’s twenty-one sonnet paraphrase of Psalm 51, A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner (1560), expressing, as Lock’s subtitle attests, “the passioned minde of the penitent sinner” (Felch: 62). Craving “the crummes of all sufficing grace” (line 73), the narrator considers “the lothesome filthe of my disteined life” (line 5). For this Protestant nonconformist, a Londoner who moved to

devotional exuberance surfaces through apparent similarity. Lock describes the bones, conventionally “broken,” as “broosed bones that thou with paine/Hast made to weake my feble corps to beare”; these bones, she attests, “Shall leape for joy, to shewe myne inward chere.” Pembroke, as Hannay observes, never suggests that God caused the “brused bones”; not content with inward cheer, these revivified bones will show their new life by dancing “awaie their sadness” (line 28). For further background on Lock and her circle, see Hannay (1992); Woods; and Felch (i–lxxxvii). 3 Theodore Steinberg (7–8) cites Pembroke’s “references to cleansing the leprosy of the mind, since the Talmudic commentaries on these verses identified leprosy as the punishment for slander,” as reflecting her “familiarity with the Hebrew originals.”

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Geneva for a period to follow the preaching of John Knox and translated selected sermons of John Calvin, the unremitting emphasis is on the disabling aspect of sin: “My filth and fault are ever in my face” (line 142). While the self-conscious ventriloquization of voice in Pembroke and Lock hints only obliquely at political realities, women’s prose commentaries inspired by biblical language are generally more direct and unequivocal in their criticism, passing current events through the interpretative filter of explicit biblical narratives and warnings. Elizabeth Warren, Anna Trapnel, and Mary Cary Rande show an acute awareness of the political work devotional and biblical commentary can perform. Suffolk schoolmistress Elizabeth Warren combines Royalist sympathies and an extensive knowledge of the Vulgate, the church fathers, and classical authors, glosses from which fill the margins of Spiritual Thrift, to argue that the “unnaturall divisions” of civil war are “a tumour” to be lanced with “a piercing sword” (35). “Clavis est scientia scripturarum,” Warren observes: “Follow then the Scripture, as an infallible guide, which who so is led by shall never miscarry, because it is a key which openeth the cabinet of Gods sacred counsell concerning all mysteries” (80). Her lengthy periodic sentences, full of paratactic byways, aim at spiritual improvement, using biblical language to cloak her political stand: Much is the trouble which at this time the Church grones under concerning a way, which through Satans malice and mans miserable ataxie, hath ministred the matter of uncomfortable contests, for what can be more grievous to godly souls then to see faithfull brethren fall out by the way, when they that are one in fundamentall truths, shall yet be divided in circumstantiall differences, this is not to contend for the precious faith, delivered to the Saints in the sacred Scriptures, but rather a deviation by unnecessary bitternesse, from walking in the wayes both of truth and peace, which makes the hearts of the righteous sad and strengthens the wicked in their pride and prophanesse, who tell it in Gath to disgrace the Gospel, and publish it in Ashkelon to reproach our Religion. (68)

At the opposite end of the political—and rhetorical—spectrum, Fifth Monarchist Anna Trapnel uses the title page of Strange and Wonderful Newes from Whitehall to clarify the exceptional circumstances of her comments on Cromwell, the dissolution of the Barebones Parliament, the anticipated accession of King Jesus, and the exhortation of backsliding soldiers and clergy: “how she lay eleven dayes, and twelve nights in a Trance, without taking any sustenance, except a cup of small Beer once in 24 hours: during which time, she uttered many things herein mentioned, relating to the Governors, Churches, Ministry, Universities, and all the three Nations; full of Wonder and Admiration, for all that shall read and peruse the same.” In The Cry of a Stone the forcefulness of her judgements on Cromwell underscores

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that her self-representation as a woman prophet feeding upon Christ “also opens up a space for imagining female autonomy,” for making trances “a form of eating” (Purkiss: 147, 150). She asserts her disappointment with, her sense of betrayal by, Cromwell. During his campaign in Scotland Trapnel figured him as Gideon, “blowing the trumpet of courage and valour,” but with the dissolution of Parliament she perceives “the deadness of Gideons spirit toward the work of the Lord shewing me that he was laid aside” (1654a:6, 10). Her vision, blending powerfully direct prose and hymnlike verse, pictures Cromwell as a fawned-upon yet horned leader of “a great company of cattel” who becomes a persecutor of saints: He run at many precious Saints that stood in the way of him, that looked boldly in his face; he gave them many pushes, scratching them with his horn, and driving them into several houses, he ran still along, till at length there was a great silence, and suddenly there broke forth in the Earth great fury coming from the Clouds, and they presently were scattered, and their horns broken, and they tumbled into Graves. (13)

Equally fierce condemnation and lament inform her judgement of Cromwell. She longs “that he might be recovered out of that vain glorious Counsel, out of their Traps and Gins” and that his councillors imitate Mordecai not Haman: “let them be faithful and say unto him, thou art but a man that doth thus” (22). Fifth Monarchist and Parliament woman, Mary Cary, later Rande, also pinned her hopes on Cromwell, in whose leadership she registered no disappointment. She devoted her five radical works, two shorter tracts bracketing three lengthy millenarian commentaries, spanning the period from the establishment of the New Model Army to the proclamation of the Protectorate, to the building up of a new order, a holy city, a New English Jerusalem. Styling herself “the meanest of the servants of Jesus Christ” (1647), “a Minister of Jesus Christ and of all his Saints” (1648), and “an admirer and adorer of the good providence of God, in making such happy changes in these Nations” (1653), she defended civil war and regicide. Cary’s hermeneutic intensity exemplifies the key feature of seventeenthcentury millenarianism: its basis in “new scholarly approaches to the Bible” that wrestle with “mathematical as well as historical and linguistic problems” (Hill: 298–99). Her forecasted overthrow of the Antichristian Royalist forces, establishment of the rule of saints, heralding of the thousand-year reign of Christ, and extirpation of the mystical Babylon of papistry rely on biblical prophecy and predication. Rooted in her sense of the parallels between civil war realities and Israelite history, blending the executions of the Earl of Strafford and Archbishop Laud, revolts in Ireland, the string of Commander Fairfax’s victories from Naseby on, and the army’s control of London with the fates and visions of ancient kings and prophets, Cary

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presents the Commonwealth as biblically modeled space. She deliberately inverts pyramids of power, forecasting that “the Saints shall be abundantly filled with the Spirit; and not onely men, but women shall prophesie; not onely aged men, but young men; not onely superiours, but inferiours; not onely those that have University learning but those that have it not; even servants and handmaids” (1651:238). Her model for an apostolate of engaged believers is the early church; since “gifts are not given to be laid up in a napkin,” she challenges her readers to recall that “Prophesying and Evangelizing, and feeding, and teaching, and building up one another, was common to all in the Church, . . . not restrained only to be done by Bishops and Deacons” (1648:129). When such visionary women as the Quaker autobiographer Mary Penington and the Behmenist mystic Jane Lead use biblical symbols to locate themselves within a political reality, their interest appears to lie in a sacralization of the immediate moment, conveyed through the intimate experiences of dreams and visions, rather than in mobilizing a reformation of civic conduct. Their dedicated enactments of concepts of stillness and interiority prompt idiosyncratic uses of the Bible. Both exhibit a liberal blitheness in their treatment of the biblical text, which must always serve highly individualized, unconventional ends. Maintaining that “songs of praise must spring from the same source as prayers,” Mary Penington relates in Experiences how she and her first husband “tore out of our Bibles the common prayer, and also the singing psalms, as being the inventions of vain poets” (26). Liturgical guides, embellishments, or directives are unnecessary mediations for an internalized, particularized understanding of the revealed word. Her two dreams feature a divine couple, a deliberate partnership of male and female, with emphasis on their shared beauty and, especially, on the intervening presence of the female, the Lamb’s bride and wife. As Penington recalls, After a little while there appeared lower in the element, nearer the earth, in an oval, transparent glass, a man and a woman (not in resemblance, but real persons), the man wore a greater majesty and sweetness than I ever saw with mortal: his hair was brown, his eyes black and sparkling, his complexion ruddy; piercing dominion in his countenance, splendid with affability, great gentleness and kindness. The woman resembled him in features and complexion; but appeared tender and bashful, yet quick-sighted. . . . [W]e in a sense of their majesty did reverence to them, . . . at which the man ascended, but the woman came down to us, and spoke to us with great gravity and sweetness; the words I have forgotten, but the purport of them was that we should not be formal, nor fall out. (50–51)

The work of the woman’s spirit or principle in the world is the central concern of the obscure London widow Jane Lead. In over a dozen

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volumes of rhapsodic, symbolic commentary, her frequent allusions to the Virgin Sophia and the androgynous Adam underscore Lead’s Behmenist tutelage. Her three-volume spiritual diary stretching over thirty years, A Fountain of Gardens, as well as at least fourteen other visionary works, detail ecstasies, witness to the presence of the “Live Coal” (1696:61) in her hand, and fathom the “Abyssal Deep” (1696–1701:3:249) to offer Wisdom’s children “divine and spiritual Education” (1694:28). The concept that Adam was modeled after a divine image that was “masculofemimine” was “very common” in antiquity (Meeks: 185). Throughout her work Lead invokes the images of the “Deified Seed” within the “Paradisical Male and Female,” the male with “his Virgin in himself” and the female with “her Male Power.” She invests herself with the mission to open “new Volumes” of the divine mind that, to continue the emphasis on obliterated gender distinctions, are to be available to the illumined rather than reserved for those in orders. As she reasons in The Wonders of God’s Creation, The Old Testament having been appropriated to the Ministration of the Father, the New to the Son; now the Third Day is come, in which the Holy Ghost will have His, which will Excel all before it, to Unseal or Reveal what yet never was known or understood, that will be communicated to, and by such as are in an extraordinary manner sanctified and set apart for this holy Function. (8–9)

Never slackening in her veneration of the mercurial Virgin-Bride, -Mother, -Goddess, -Wisdom, Lead perorates in The Wonders about the Virgin Wisdom’s “secret deep” and “great and mighty Transmutation”: Wherefore it is given me to advise you, that you give way to this Live Coal within you, that so it may burn away all the Dross and Tin, so as nothing but the Golden Matter, for coagulation with the Deity may remain upon this Almighty and most sublime Thing, that is concealed in your inward Furnace. (79–80)

In sustained periodic sentences, her breathlessly honorific style—piling noun upon noun—directs the reader to strip “This Sin-Defiling-Garment,” to heed the “Mount-Sion-Principle” (1694:37–38), and to reach “to a Christed Stature” (1699:35). Does it matter that none of these writers—neither the aristocratic patron nor the nonconformist exile, the schoolmistress, the millenarian prophets, the autobiographer, the mystic—appears in Frye’s criticism? Would their inclusion alter “an examination of literature in terms of a conceptual framework derivable from an inductive survey of the literary field” (Frye, 1957:7)? The answer in both cases is yes. There are at least three reasons for saying so. Frye’s handling of literature as “a kaleidoscope that when shaken

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always revealed a structured and coherent field” (Kernan: 114) provides the continuing structuralist lures of integration and connectivity. Adding to the kaleidoscope’s components could yield more varied—or, similar— results. In addition, Frye’s contribution to a theoretical canon of methods was always alert to the inconsistencies and contradictions of language. Since “for Frye, theory was still in the service of an aesthetic project, a form of poetics” (Scholes: 147), his scheme could afford a first draft of the range and subtlety of early modern women’s textuality. Moreover, the coincidence of the growth industry of early modern women’s writing and the reconsideration of Frye in various attempts at what Robert Scholes calls “reconstructing English as a discipline” may indicate that the time has arrived for opening up Frygian constructs, symbols, and “innate properties of the mind” (Kernan: 115) to acknowledge these artists. The inclusion of early modern women’s words with power expands the survey field; it enlarges the kaleidoscopic construct while extending and challenging its primary symbols. Any study of the capacity of the word as a medium of signification and enactment in an early modern context is enriched by the range of their experimentations and complex symbology. Whether integrated with or read alongside their commented-on contemporaries, women’s exegeses offer striking redesignations and redefinitions, whose “value lies in their differences and their specificity, as much as in our ‘moments of recognition’ ” (Hinds: 208). Their work prompts a demystification and decoding of “History” in order to “reveal the absence of any single universal vocabulary defining it” and to “recognize the cultural dynamics within subject construction” (Matchinske: 22, 164). A consideration of their work also strengthens a grasp of the gendering of religion through the “many signs that private godliness and public morality were labelled as feminine concerns” (Mendelson and Crawford: 226). This essay’s epigraphs encapsulate, I hope, the powerful, pervasive presence of these women. Mildred Cecil (1526–1589), the eldest of Sir Anthony Cooke’s brilliant and carefully educated daughters, depicted Saint Basil’s “craftes” through such roles as hunter, wrestler, and soldier, roles that early modern women’s reading of the Bible appropriate and modify. The poignant declaration of the sixteen-year-old Lady Jane Grey Dudley on the eve of her execution for treason suggests the instances in which public and private coalesced. Recognizing that the retrieval of early modern women’s writing has grown into a major enterprise in the years following Frye’s death, I have been arguing for a particular kind of coalescence. A new mapping and anatomizing, an expanded code, and a re-vision of his literary biblical analysis to include early modern women could promote an understanding of the full consciousness, challenging contestations and diversity of subjects in the early modern community.

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WORKS CONSULTED Arber, Edward, ed. 1882 “The Passage of Our Most Dread Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth through the City of London to Westminster, the Day Before Her Coronation, 1558.” Pp. 247–48 in An English Arber: Ingatherings from our History and Literature. Vol. 4. Birmingham: E. Arber. Cary, Mary 1647 A Word in Season to the Kingdom of England: Or, A Precise Cordiall for a Distempered Kingdom. London: Giles Calvert. 1648

The Resurrection of the Witnesses; and Englands Fall from the Mysticall Babylon Rome. London: Giles Calvert.

1651

A New and More Exact Mappe, or Description of New Jerusalems Glory When Jesus Christ and His Saints with Him Shall Reign on Earth a Thousand Years, and Possess All Kingdoms. London: W. H.

1653

Twelve Proposals to the Supreme Governours of the Three Nations Now Assembled at Westminster, concerning the Propagation of the Gospel, New Modling of the Universities, Reform of the Laws, Supply of the Necessities of the Poor. London: Henry Hills.

Cecil, Mildred, Lady Burghley, trans. n.d. An Homilie or Sermon of Basile the great, Archebishopp of Caesaria, upon Ye Sayeng of Moyses in the Fifteenth Chapiter of Deuteronomie Take Hede to Thy Selfe. BL [British Library] MS Royal 17B. XVIII. Dudley, Lady Jane Grey 1828 “Letter to Her Sister Written the Day before Her Death 1554.” Pp. 21–23 in The Lady’s Monitor. London: Darton & Harvey. Ezell, Margaret J. M. 1993 Writing Women’s Literary History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Felch, Susan, ed. 1999 The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock. Tempe: Renaissance English Text Society. Freer, Coburn 1971 “The Countess of Pembroke in a World of Words.” Style 5:37–56. Frye, Northrop 1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1982

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic Press.

1990

Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Gilby, Anthony, trans. 1581 Théodore de Bèze, The Psalmes of David. London: Henry Denham. Golding, Arthur, trans. 1571 John Calvin: The Psalms of David and Others. London: H. Middleton. Hannay, Margaret P. 1992 “ ‘Strengthening the Walles of . . . Ierusalem’: Anne Vaughan Lok’s Dedication to the Countess of Warwick.” ANQ 5:71–75. 1993

“ ‘Unlock My Lipps’: The Miserere mei Deus of Anne Vaughan Lok and Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.” Pp. 19–36 in Privileging Gender in Early Modern England. Ed. Jean R. Brink. Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers.

Herbert, Mary Sidney 1998 The Collected Works. Ed. M. P. Hannay, N. Kinnamon, M. Brennan. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, Christopher 1994 The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. London: Penguin. Hinds, Hilary 1996 God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kernan, Alvin 1999 In Plato’s Cave. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Lanham, Richard 1965 The Old Arcadia. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Lead, Jane 1694

The Enochian Walks with God. London: D. Edwards.

1695

The Wonders of God’s Creation. London: T. Sowle.

1696

The Tree of Faith. London: J. Bradford.

1696–1701 A Fountain of Gardens. 3 vols. London: J. Bradford. 1699

The Ascent to the Mount of Vision. London: J. Bradford.

Matchinske, Megan 1998 Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meeks, Wayne A. 1974 “The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a Symbol in Earliest Christianity.” History of Religions 13:165–203.

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Mendelson, Sara, and Patricia Crawford 1998 Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Penington, Mary 1911 Experiences in the Life of Mary Penington. Ed. N. Penney. London: Headley. Purkiss, Diane 1992 “Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body: Women Prophets of the Seventeenth Century.” Pp. 139–58 in Women, Writing, History 1640–1740. Ed. I. Grundy and S. Wiseman. London: Batsford. Puttenham, George 1589 The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. G. Doidge. Cambridge: The University Press. [Repr. 1936] Ringler, William, Jr., ed. 1962 The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scholes, Robert 1998 The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English As a Discipline. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Shuger, Deborah 1990 Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics and the Dominant Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Steinberg, Theodore L. 1995 “The Sidneys and the Psalms.” Studies in Philology 92:1–17. Trapnel, Anna 1654a The Cry of a Stone; Or, a Relation of Something Spoken in Whitehall. London. 1654b

Strange and Wonderful Newes from Whitehall. London.

Waller, Gary 1979 Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: A Critical Study of Her Writings and Literary Milieu. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik and Amerikanistik. Warren, Elizabeth 1646 Spiritual Thrift. London: H. Shepherd. Woods, Susanne 1992 “The Body Penitent: A 1560 Calvinist Sonnet Sequence.” ANQ 5:137–40. Zim, Rivkah 1987 English Metrical Psalms: Poetry As Praise and Prayer 1535–1601. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

FROM ARCHETYPE TO ANTITYPE: A LOOK AT FRYGIAN ARCHETYPOLOGY* Margaret Burgess University of Victoria College

abstract Northrop Frye significantly, if unsystematically, expands upon the traditional conception of typology, which regards the Bible as a self-contained unity, by suggesting that the Old Testament provides antitypes of which prebiblical mythologies are the types, and that New Testament antitypes will themselves become types of new, postbiblical antitypes. This study explores the implications of Frye’s archetypological theory for our understanding of both the origins of our existing biblically derived mythology and possible metamorphoses that this mythology may undergo in the future. Extrapolating from the typological principle that the Old Testament anticipates and prefigures the New while the New Testament reveals and fulfils the Old, the essay asks whether the older might anticipate the newer—in other words, whether prebiblical mythologies might represent adumbrations, or indications in faint outline, of myths and mythologies yet to come.

My point of departure in this paper will be the relationship between Frye’s archetypal theory and his appropriation and application of traditional typology in his lectures and writings on the Bible. That the two are in fact related is not a matter for dispute. Frye opens his Anatomy of Criticism with a “prefatory statement” in which he says that it was his determination to apply the principles of literary symbolism and biblical typology that he had learned from Blake to another poet, namely, Spenser, that had led instead to the writing of the Anatomy (vii). He defines an “archetype” as a “typical or recurring image” or “symbol which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience” (99)—“typical” in this context being only a slight step away from “typological.” He states in his essay on “Archetypal Criticism” that “the structural principles of literature . . . are to be derived from archetypal and anagogic criticism, the only kinds that assume a larger context of

* I would like to thank Janet Ritch, Michael Dolzani, James Kee, Adele Reinhartz, and Bob Buller for reading this paper and offering valuable comments and suggestions.

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literature as a whole,” and indicates that he will be “using the symbolism of the Bible, and to a lesser extent Classical mythology, as a grammar of literary archetypes” (134, 135). Finally, he asserts that “higher” criticism would be interested in the “typological unity” that the activities of “lower,” or analytic, criticism were “originally intended to help construct,” and that a genuine higher criticism of the Bible would therefore be a synthesizing process that would start with the assumption that the Bible is “a definitive myth, a single archetypal structure extending from creation to apocalypse” (315). In a formulation that is reiterated almost verbatim some twenty-five years later in The Great Code, however, Frye then asserts that the “heuristic principle” of this higher criticism “would be St. Augustine’s axiom that the Old Testament is revealed in the New and the New concealed in the Old” (1957:315): “everything that happens in the Old Testament is a ‘type’ or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament,” and “what happens in the New Testament constitutes an ‘antitype,’ a realized form, of something foreshadowed in the Old Testament” (1982:79). Therefore, “the two testaments are not so much allegories of one another as metaphorical identifications of one another” (1957:315) and “form a double mirror, each reflecting the other but neither the world outside” (1982:78). What eludes the reader here is how the “typological unity” and “single archetypal structure” can be said to correspond when “type” and “antitype” are said to confine themselves to the Bible as a self-contained unit, whereas an “archetype” is free to repeat itself ad infinitum throughout the body of literature as a whole, or, as Frye prefers to call it, the “total order of words” (1957:96–97, 365). The answer to this question appears to reside in indications within The Great Code itself that the Bible is not such a hermetically sealed narrative unit after all. Rather, the Old Testament contains antitypes for which the prebiblical mythologies provide the types. “From its own point of view, surely,” Frye writes, “the Bible is providing the antitypes of which Canaanite and other pre-Biblical cults are the types” (92). And the New Testament antitypes will themselves become types of new, postbiblical antitypes, represented in the “recreation” said in The Great Code to be part of the seventh, “apocalyptic” phase of revelation (138), but suggested in one of the late notebooks to represent a possible eighth phase, designated in that context as “enlightenment” (2000b:1:102).1

1 An eighth phase is referred to, but not so named, in The Great Code, where Frye states that “two forms of apocalyptic vision are postulated, making eight in all” (xxii).

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My own interest in the “archetypological” connection to be investigated in this paper originates in Frye’s description of typology as “a figure of speech that moves in time,” constituting thereby “a mode of thought” that “both assumes and leads to . . . a theory of history, or more accurately of historical process” (1982:80–81). And the question that is thereby raised for me is this: If typology can be regarded as providing a bridge whereby archetypes initially viewed as recurring in isolation or in frozen patterns of imagery (what Frye calls dianoia) are reconstituted into the generic narratives or mythoi that are these structures of imagery in movement, what are the implications of Frye’s archetypological theory for the future metamorphosis or permutation of our present biblically derived mythology? To return for a moment to the image of the double mirror: it soon becomes apparent that Frye’s gloss of the image is an oversimplification. For in practice what one sees if one looks into two mirrors positioned opposite one another is not a simple mutual reflection, but rather an endlessly repeating succession of reflections fading into infinity. Applying Frye’s principle that such reflections are metaphorically equivalent even though not visually or narratologically identical, one arrives at an archaeology of myth, wherein successive variations of a myth are constructed upon the same mythological or psychological “site,” so to speak, in the human collective unconscious. And extrapolating from the typological principle that the Old Testament anticipates and prefigures the New while the New Testament reveals and fulfils the Old, one might also consider the possibility that the older anticipates the newer—in other words, that the prebiblical mythologies might represent adumbrations, or indications in faint outline, of myths and mythologies yet to come—in which case the deeper one is able to look into the past, the further one should be able to see into the future. It is with this hypothesis in mind that I would like to look at a number of parallels between biblical and prebiblical myths already drawn or pointed to by Frye, primarily in The Great Code and in his course on “The Mythological Framework of Western Culture,” but also in works such as Words with Power and the Late Notebooks. The prebiblical mythologies, it will be remembered, contained a divine feminine as well as a divine masculine principle, and for this reason my discussion will center around the types or archetypes of goddess and god. The first and most obvious of the parallels dealt with by Frye is the creation as dragon-slaying alluded to in the Psalms, the Prophets, and the book of Job (e.g., Pss 74:12–17; 104:5–9; Isa 51:9–10; Job 26:12–13; 41), and subliminally present in the opening verses of Genesis. The basis for the connection is found in the use of the words tohu and tehom for “without form” and “deep” in the sentence “And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep” in Gen 1:1, and in the

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image of the establishment of a firmament separating waters above from waters below in Gen 1:6–8.2 The words of the original Hebrew are said to be etymologically cognate with “Tiamat,” the name of the Babylonian goddess of the “bitter” waters (Heidel: 98–101; Phillips: 5), who in the Babylonian Creation Epic is slain and her body divided to form the earth and the sky.3 The actual contest between Tiamat and her slayer Marduk in the Enuma Elish (so named for the opening words of the Creation Epic, “When on high . . . ”) is represented as follows: Then joined issue Tiamat and Marduk, wisest of gods. They strove in single combat, locked in battle. The lord spread out his net to enfold her, The Evil Wind, which followed behind, he let loose in her face. When Tiamat opened her mouth to consume him, He drove in the Evil Wind that she close not her lips. As the fierce winds charged her belly, Her body was distended and her mouth was wide open. He released the arrow, it tore her belly, It cut through her insides, splitting the heart. Having subdued her, he extinguished her life. ... Then the lord paused to view her dead body, That he might divide the monster and do artful works. He split her like a shellfish into two parts; Half of her he set up and ceiled it as the sky, Pulled down the bar and posted guards. He bade them not to allow her waters to escape. (Pritchard: 67)

One is hardly prepared for the violence of this depiction by the atmosphere of charged and pregnant calm suggested by the opening lines of Genesis. “Oh,” said one young woman commenting on the passage during a tutorial discussion, “you mean a rape!” What I propose to argue here is that what is represented in this particular myth is the destruction of the Great Goddess who had dominated Near Eastern mythology up until the beginning of the patriarchal period and that the myth constitutes the prebiblical equivalent of the apocalyptic destruction and re-creation that Frye refers to as the “antitype of antitypes” at the culmination of his explication of the phases of revelation (1982:138). The first part of this argument is, of course, well supported in existing literature. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, for example, in

2 For additional parallels not discussed here, such as the creation of the heavenly bodies and of dry land, see Heidel, esp. ch. 3 on “Old Testament Parallels.” 3 For Frye’s discussion of this myth, see 1982:146.

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her book In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth, describes Tiamat’s role in the Creation Epic as representing “the ancient order which Marduk must defeat in order to become king of the gods” (75); Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, in The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, devote an entire chapter to “Tiamat of Babylon: The Defeat of the Goddess” (273–98); and John A. Phillips writes in Eve: The History of an Idea that “the great creation stories of ancient Near Eastern cultures . . . all presuppose or describe power struggles between masculine and feminine deities, usually with the masculine deities gaining the upper hand” and says of the book of Genesis that “its writers may be said to be a step beyond the Enuma Elish in the religious revolution [in that] here it is taken for granted that the Goddess is dead, and there is no sanguine procreation story to even tell of her demise” (6, 7). The second part, as Alvin Lee notes in his introduction to Northrop Frye on Religion (Frye, 2000a:xxix), is prepared for by Frye (1) in Creation and Recreation, where he writes that for Blake “the creation of the world, the fall of man, and the deluge of Noah were all the same event, and the fall was a fall of the divine as well as the human nature. Hence what has traditionally been called the creation is actually a ruin, and there is no creation except human recreation” (1980:56–57 = 2000a:70; emphasis mine), and also (2) in the Late Notebooks, where Frye observes that “the Bible owes its peculiarly piercing insight to the fact that it’s at the end of a long mythological process, not the beginning of one” (2:446–47). It will be asked at this point what the dragon has to do with the goddess. This is admittedly somewhat difficult for the modern mind to grasp. Because the myth is presented as a battle with cosmic forces, it is hard to reproduce the identification in the so-called primitive mind of cosmological attribution and divine personification. Frye himself is equivocal on this point: “Tiamat is not said explicitly to be a monster,” he says, “but she breeds monsters, and they must have got their heredity from somewhere” (1982:146–47). It might appear that Tiamat’s attribution as a dragon or monster has as much to do with her personification of the salt or “bitter” waters and with the attitude of her opponents toward these elements in nature as it does with her representation as a goddess, yet it remains a fact that dragons frequently appear in association with more humanized manifestations of the goddess.4 In Classical mythology—in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for

4 It should perhaps be noted here for those who may be unfamiliar with the myth that Tiamat’s consort Apsu, who represented the fresh or “sweet” waters, had been slain earlier by the younger gods, seemingly without event. Apsu was presumably also a dragon; however, either because he represented the fresh or beneficent waters or because he was male and less powerful than the goddess, he seems to have been regarded as much less of a threat. Moreover,

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example—“sacred teams” of “winged dragons” convey the chariots of Ceres and Medea on their journeys through the skies (7.217–223; 5.642–647, 659–661), while in Oriental mythology, where the dragon is regarded as “an age-old symbol of the highest spiritual essence, embodying wisdom, strength, and the divine power of transformation” (Fremantle and Trungpa: [i]), the goddess Kuan Yin is to this day regularly depicted in the company of a dragon with whom she is clearly on friendly or even affectionate terms (see fig. 1).5 It is not a large step from here, therefore, to consider the manifold occurrences in later myths of heroes who relentlessly pursue and conquer dragons as derivatives of an original and primary attack on the divine feminine, and if one looks into the background of the dragon-slaying depicted in the Babylonian Creation Epic one begins to discern the reasons why. The Creation Epic was recited annually in Babylon as part of a New Year’s celebration called the Akitu festival that was timed to coincide with the subsiding of the spring inundations and the resulting revival of vegetation that represented the end of winter dormancy and barrenness. During the twelve days of this celebration, rites were performed in which the inhabitants of the city “descended” to the “mountain” of the underworld, thought to have been represented by the city’s temple or ziggurat. They did this in order to vanquish the forces of the watery “chaos” embodied by Tiamat and release the patron god of the city from a period of “bondage” and powerlessness that represented the seasonal barrenness of nature. And at the culmination of the festivities the god, represented by the king, participated in a sacred marriage ritual that celebrated the renewal of nature and the restoration of the fertility, not only of flocks and fields, but also of gods and human beings, thereby ensuring the prosperity of the entire community for the year to come.6 This rudimentary outline of events notwithstanding, however, there are many questions that are raised by lacunae in the documents upon which it is based and in the available scholarship on the subject. The extant texts of

the Babylonian Tiamat is preceded in Sumerian mythology by the primordial mother Nammu, a benign creator figure (Frymer-Kensky: 71, 222). 5 This quotation appears as part of the explanation of the frontispiece that appears at the beginning of all Shambhala Dragon Editions of Eastern sacred texts. 6 The brief summary of the proceedings presented here is based primarily on Frankfort: 313–33. According to Frankfort, the New Year’s festival was celebrated in Babylon in the spring, whereas in Ur and Erech it was celebrated both in the spring and in the fall, when the return of the autumn rains signaled the end of the summer drought, and Frankfort emphasizes the importance in Mesopotamia of the spring as well as the autumn rains (314). Baring and Cashford, however, write of “the great serpent or dragon that was the image of the winding rivers and the fierce, inundating floods of winter, which turned the Babylonian plain into a watery chaos” (275).

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Figure 1. The goddess Kuan Yin riding on a dragon. (From the author’s private collection.)

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the Creation Epic itself derive from a relatively late date in the historical period—according to Pritchard, none of them antedates the first millennium B.C.E. (60)—and it has been suggested by Henri Frankfort, for example, that the role of the god Marduk was originally played by the storm god Enlil (234). Moreover, according to Frankfort the ritual of the sacred marriage was enacted only by some kings, and then apparently only at the behest of the goddess, upon whose immeasurably greater power and authority the semidivine status of the king was then conferred (297). The goddess in this case was the goddess Ishtar or one of her derivatives or equivalents in the various Babylonian city-states, and the Babylonian Ishtar in turn takes her lineage from the Sumerian Inanna. The occasion for the change from the invariable enactment of the sacred marriage would appear to be marked by the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh, king of Uruk or Erech, refuses the invitation of Ishtar to be her bridegroom—an interpretation supported by Sumerologist and Assyriologist Tikva Frymer-Kensky, who suggests that Gilgamesh’s rejection of Ishtar “may be a reflection of the rejection of the entire philosophy of kingship of the Akkadian and Ur III periods” (ca. 2300–2100 B.C.E. and ca. 2100–2000 B.C.E.). “During the Old Babylonian period” (the early part of the second millennium B.C.E.), she writes, “the sacred marriage disappeared, and with it, all the ideas of divinity-in-kingship,” and as the later kings “began to reenact the part of Marduk in the military and kingly role related by the Enuma Elish . . . [they] took part in a ritual that celebrated stability rather than fertility, order rather than union, monarchy rather than renewal” (77, 76). In light of the extant documentation of the proceedings, there would therefore seem to be a number of misunderstandings prevalent in the generally accepted interpretations of the myths—including Frye’s. One of these would appear to be in the depiction by Herodotus, remarked upon by Frye on several occasions in the Late Notebooks and in Words with Power, of the bed-chamber at the top of the ziggurat in which the bride of the god is said to have been laid out to await his descent from the heavens (1990:153, 206–7; 2000b:2:483, 492, 517, 583, 584).7 For, according to the information just given, even with a human priestess playing the part of the goddess, it would have been the mortal king preparing to receive the blessing of divine kingship through his union with her who would have ascended the ziggurat to meet the descended goddess.8 That this is the true and original form of the myth is

7 Frye’s use of Herodotus is generally mediated by Pound’s Canto 4 (lines 100–126), in which the image of the bride in the ziggurat is juxtaposed with that of Danae locked in the tower and her ravishment by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold. 8 According to Frymer-Kensky, the role of the goddess was played by a woman referred to as a nugig, which is a term for a woman of high rank who may have been a queen and/or a

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suggested by the verse with which a poem celebrating the sacred marriage culminates, in which the mortal queen who has played the part of Inanna in the rite is transposed into the goddess as the newly risen evening star: My lady looks in sweet wonder from heaven. The people of Sumer parade before the holy Inanna. The Lady Who Ascends into the Heavens, Inanna, is radiant. Mighty, majestic, radiant, and ever youthful— To you, Inanna, I sing! (Wolkstein and Kramer: 110)9

Another misconception that is also voiced repeatedly by Frye in the Late Notebooks and in Words with Power is that the “gardens of Adonis” bewailed by women mourners in rituals related to the Akitu festival elsewhere in the ancient Near East represent the female genitals (1982:152–53; 2000b:1:43, 2:446, 496, 690, 692). In fact, quite the opposite is the case, for in the representation of the renewal of nature in these mythologies it was the feminine earth that, temporarily infertile though it might have been, was considered to be the enduring and more powerful principle, while the masculine was personified in the short-lived growth period of the all-too-soon wilted or harvested vegetation or grain.10 The gardens of Adonis are thus, if seen in human terms, phallic symbols, equating the virility of the king and consort of the goddess with the brief growing season of the vegetation and grain (Frankfort: 290–91; Frazer: 429, 449–57). A far more extreme and graphic representation of this reading of the symbolism is found in the famous poem of Catullus also remarked upon by Frye, in which a devotee of the Syrian goddess Cybele castrates himself at the height of a period of ritual frenzy and then bitterly laments his action afterwards (Poem 63, in Catullus: 46–51; Frye, 2000b:2:716). For this reason it is not difficult to see why Gilgamesh rejected Ishtar and why the power of the goddess eventually came to inspire fear and mistrust in the mythologies that had previously celebrated her—for her consorts inevitably met the same harsh fate as the grain that they personified. “Which of your lovers did you love forever? What shepherd of yours has pleased you for all time?” Gilgamesh replies to Ishtar’s proposal. “And

priestess, and the king achieved a divine or quasi-divine status in the ritual (51, 238). Thorkild Jacobsen translates nugig (literally “sacred”/“taboo” person) as “holy one” and further explains that Inanna herself “belonged to this class of women and typified the women belonging to it” (1987:6). 9 For an alternate rendering, see Jacobsen, 1987:124. 10 As Baring and Cashford explain it, “in the goddess culture the conception of the relation between creator and creation was expressed in the image of the Mother as zoe, the eternal source, giving birth to the son as bios, the created life in time which lives and dies back into the source” (274).

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if you and I should be lovers, should not I be served in the same fashion as all these others whom you loved once?” (Sandars: 86, 87).11 Ishtar is replaced in Gilgamesh’s affections by Enkidu, of whom it is predicted that Gilgamesh will “love him as a woman” and will never be forsaken by him (66), and who declares upon his arrival that he has “come to change the old order” (65, 68). Together the two embark on a quest to make for themselves an “enduring name” (73), and when Enkidu is killed the grieving Gilgamesh sets out on a further journey to the garden of the gods in a search for the secret of “everlasting life” (97–107)—or, in other words, for an immortality that is not dependent on the goddess. The final defeat of the goddess is, of course, not immediate, and for a time both gods and goddesses are accorded their places in the various pantheons. During this period, however, there is increasing enmity between them, and the gods are depicted as promiscuous and/or bisexual, like Zeus and Apollo, or, as renunciant and celibate, like Yahweh. In the case of Zeus especially, promiscuity is clearly part of a larger game of conquest, as shrine after shrine of the goddess is captured and taken over by the god. And in ancient Babylonia as well, the roles and powers of the goddess were gradually being conquered. Ishtar, the goddess of love, is, of course, never identified or even remotely connected in the myths with Tiamat, the supposed “monster” of the watery deeps, and yet the connection is there, as I will try to show. In all of the so-called fertility myths, the goddess represents the tomb as well as the womb of life, its end as well as its source; consequently, the period of dormancy and decline is her domain as much as the season of life and growth. We see this fact reflected in the earlier Sumerian myth of the Descent of Inanna, which I personally am inclined to read as the predecessor of the conquest of chaos by Marduk depicted in the Babylonian Creation

11 The catalogue of the previous lovers of Ishtar named by Gilgamesh in the epic seems to be largely poetic, as it includes the many-colored roller (a bird), the lion, the stallion magnificent in battle, the shepherd of the flock, and Ishullanu the gardener as well as Tammuz, the “lover of [her] youth, for whom [she] decreed wailing, year after year” (Sandars: 86–87). Frymer-Kensky, however, sheds a rather different light on the situation in her discussion of early Sumerian epics that treat the rivalry between several of the Sumerian city-states (all of whom claimed Inanna as their patron) in terms of the ability of their king to retain the favor of the goddess, and especially in her description of the devastation experienced by Enmerkar, Lord of Kullab, who interpreted his failure in battle against Aratta as an indication that Inanna had deserted him and no longer desired him as a partner (62–63). The result of this, she says, is that although the kings of Akkad might have attributed their victory to Inanna/Ishtar, the religion of later Sumer envisions a world in which such historical rise and fall depends on the god Enlil rather than on the goddess (66). Strikingly, Gilgamesh’s name is preceded on the Sumerian King List by that of Dumuzi, the Sumerian equivalent of the Babylonian or Akkadian Tammuz (Jakobsen: 1939:142 and table 1, following p. 180).

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Epic. In this poem Inanna, already the “Queen of Heaven and Earth,” endeavors to extend her dominion to include the underworld by undertaking a perilous descent. The reasons for this descent are not explicitly stated; however, as the poem ends in Inanna’s rescue and return followed by her decree that her consort Dumuzi and his sister Geshtinanna should take turns serving as ransom for her in roles comparable to that of Persephone in Greek myth, it is difficult not to conclude that it is the same renewal of the seasonal cycle that is involved and that the “descent” and contest with the forces of death undertaken by the god in the Creation Epic were originally undertaken at the initiative of the goddess. Significantly, however, there is no externalized or objectified entity with whom Inanna contends or does battle; rather, in an anticipation of the crucifixion and harrowing of hell of Jesus, the goddess herself undergoes a three-day death and resurrection while in the underworld, and the boon that she brings back to life with her along with the renewal of nature is greater wisdom and power. Hence, the usurpation by the male deity of a function that was originally performed by the goddess and its transformation into an act of violence against a personified feminine attribute of nature, even though one markedly different from her humanized form, is a reflection of an early stage in the process of her ultimate defeat. In the biblical context, of course, the pagan gods as well as the goddesses are condemned, this time as expressions of “idolatry”—by which is understood both the worship of presences held to be divine in nature and their objectification in the form of concrete images. “For the Bible,” Frye writes, “there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence within nature itself” (1980:21 = 2000a:48), and “the gods take shape as projections of human hopes and anxieties into the more mysterious aspects of nature” (1991:59 = 2000a:214). “Nature is a fellow creature of man”; therefore, “to discover divine presences in nature is superstition, and to worship them is idolatry” (1980:21 = 2000a:48), an idol being essentially “a visual image of something authoritative or numinous in nature” (2000a:12). It is striking in this regard, although I have never come across evidence of any etymological connection between the two, that the Greek word anathema, which in current use is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “an accursed thing, a thing devoted to evil” but which originally meant “an offering, a thing set up to the gods,”12 recalls the name of the much-reviled

12 The Oxford Companion to the Bible explains the word anathema as “designating an object dedicated or devoted to a deity either for consecration or to be cursed (devoted to destruction). In the former sense, objects were dedicated to God and belonged to him. . . . Most occurrences of the term, however, describe something or someone accursed or given to God for destruction” (Metzger and Coogan: 26).

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Canaanite goddess Anath or Anat. Anat is never named in the Bible, but throughout the Old Testament there are numerous exhortations against “worshiping the Baals and the Asherahs” (Judg 3:7 NRSV; cf. NIV), the stylized wooden trees that were the sacred images of the Canaanite religion, and it has been suggested that the Canaanite mother goddess Asherah or Astarte (Ashtoreth or Ashtaroth in the AV) may at one time even have been worshiped in the temple of Jerusalem as a consort of Yahweh (Metzger and Coogan: 64, 62). The main “curse” from the biblical point of view, however, is clearly that said to have been brought upon the entire human race by Eve through her dealings with the serpent in the second, Jahwist, creation account in Gen 2:4–3:24. What it is important to note about this account for my purposes here is that it involves another encounter with a so-called demonic animal and that this encounter also reflects a parallel with Sumerian and Akkadian mythology. For on Mesopotamian cylinder seals and other artifacts dating back to as early as the third millennium B.C.E. there are numerous carved illustrations reminiscent of the primal scene in the garden of Eden in which images of a goddess, serpents, and a tree of life are juxtaposed. Joseph Campbell, in a section entitled “The Mother Goddess Eve” contained in a chapter devoted to “The Serpent’s Bride” in his book The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, writes that No one familiar with the mythologies of the goddess of the primitive, ancient, and Oriental worlds can turn to the Bible without recognizing counterparts on every page, transformed, however, to render an argument contrary to the older faiths. In Eve’s scene at the tree, for example, nothing is said to indicate that the serpent who appeared and spoke to her was a deity in his own right, who had been revered in the Levant for at least seven thousand years before the composition of the Book of Genesis. (9)

Campbell discusses a number of such images: one of these is an early Sumerian cylinder seal on which a goddess is seated to the left of a tree of life with an erect serpent standing behind her, while her consort is seated to the right of the tree with another erect serpent standing behind him (14; see my fig. 2);13 a second is a vase inscribed ca. 2025 B.C.E. by King Gudea of

13 Campbell identifies the female figure as “almost certainly the goddess Gula-Bau (a counterpart . . . of Demeter and Persephone),” and the male, whose identity as a god is indicated by his horned lunar crown, as her beloved son-husband Dumuzi, “Son of the Abyss: Lord of the Tree of Life” (14). Anne Baring and Jules Cashford do not name the figures but give the date of the seal as ca. 2500 B.C.E. (43). Tikva Frymer-Kensky does not discuss the seal but explains that Inanna is sometimes called Baba or Ba’u in the context of the sacred marriage hymns and identifies Gula as a counterpart of Baba/Ba’u, who occupied the same position in the Sumerian pantheon (221). It should be pointed out also that the drawing of the cylinder seal used here by Campbell, rather strikingly, depicts only one serpent, the one standing behind the goddess, as

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Image not reproduced here due to rights restrictions by the copyright holder; consult the print edition of Semeia 89 to see the illustration.

Figure 2. The goddess and her consort with serpents and the tree of life. From a Sumerian cylinder seal ca. 2500 B.C.E. (© Copyright The British Museum.) Lagash that depicts two serpents intertwined in the form of a caduceus and is dedicated to a late Sumerian manifestation of this consort of the goddess under his title Ningizzida, “Lord of the Tree of Truth” (9). John Phillips, writing in his book Eve: The History of an Idea, further elaborates that “the Mother Goddess of ancient Near Eastern religions, by whatever name she was called, was honored and worshipped with the title ‘the Mother of All the Living,’ ” which is “the meaning of Hawwah, or Eve, the name given by Adam to the first woman” (3). Moreover, commenting on the story of the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib, he notes that “in Sumerian religion the cuneiform signs NIN.TI could be read as either ‘lady of life’ (a title for a goddess) or ‘lady of the rib’” (28). Under the circumstances, the words given by Milton to Eve’s tempter in the garden in Paradise Lost assume the utmost irony: Fairest resemblance of thy Maker fair, Thee all living things gaze on, all things thine By gift, and thy Celestial Beauty adore With ravishment beheld, there best beheld Where universally admir’d: but here In this enclosure wild, these Beasts among, Beholders rude, and shallow to discern Half what in thee is fair, one man except, Who sees thee? (and what is one?) Who shouldst be seen A Goddess among Gods, ador’d and serv’d By Angels numberless, thy daily Train. (book 9, lines 537–548; emphasis mine)

does his discussion of the seal; in a later book, however, he includes a photographic reproduction showing both (1974:295), as do Baring and Cashford (43).

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Frye gives little indication that he is willing to countenance this irony. Writing early in his career and under the powerful influence of Blake, for whom “There is no natural religion” (Blake: 2), Frye states in Fearful Symmetry that The worship of a female principle . . . specifically a maternal principle, is not imaginative, and is only possible to natural religion. In Eden there is no Mother-God. In many religions God is certainly worshipped as a trinity of father, mother and child, as in Beulah, but in the more highly developed ones God is always the Supreme Male. . . . Mother-worship is wombworship, a desire to prolong the helplessness of the perceiver and his dependence on the body of nature which surrounds him. . . . All femaleworship is disguised nature-worship. (75)

Frequent reference is made in Frye’s writings to a “cultural envelope” that separates and insulates human beings from nature. Stating this thesis in Creation and Recreation, Frye writes that “man does not live directly and nakedly in nature like the animals, but within an envelope that he has constructed out of nature, the envelope usually called culture or civilization” (1980:5 = 2000a:37). Understood in this light, “the truth of the story of the fall of Adam and Eve . . . depends on its power to convey the present sense of alienation in human consciousness, the sense of being surrounded by a nature not ours” (1980:29–30 = 2000a:52–53). Yet by the end of The Double Vision the negativity of this view of nature is changing even for Frye, and what I would submit for consideration here is that our current cultural envelope is the patriarchal mind-set and that as such it is beginning to show signs of a few tears. In the second chapter of Creation and Recreation Frye presents a description of two types of creation myth—one a “sexual” creation myth dominated by an earth-mother goddess whose principal function is to give birth and whose mode of creation may thus be designated as procreation, and the other, which eventually superseded it, an “artificial” creation myth featuring a sky-father god whose primary mode of creation is “artificing” or making and whose reproductive role is to beget (1980:31–33 = 2000a:53–55; 1982:70). On the basis of the information presented earlier, however, it is clear that these categories represent a reductionist oversimplification. The Sumerian goddess Inanna, for example, was designated the Queen of Heaven and Earth and was shown to have harrowed hell several millennia before Christ, while in Egyptian mythology, which has not been covered in this paper, there is a complete reversal of these roles in the sky goddess Nut and the earth god Geb (see fig. 3).14 And Classical mythology, with its

14 Frye touches upon this fact in passing in The Great Code (70) but does not otherwise take it into consideration.

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Image not reproduced here due to rights restrictions by the copyright holder; consult the print edition of Semeia 89 to see the illustration.

Figure 3. The Egyptian sky goddess Nut and earth god Geb separated by their son Shu, personifying air or space. Detail of the Greenfield papyrus. (© Copyright The British Museum.) “Triple Goddess” or diva triformis constituted by Diana, Luna, and Persephone (Graves: 386), and its male triumvirate consisting of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, shows that the masculine principle as well is hardly adequately represented by a rigidly compartmentalized sky-father. Therefore, I suggest that what we might expect to find in the extending and compounding of the double mirror is a new mythology into which all attributes and functions are incorporated, and in which God and Goddess—or divine feminine as well as divine masculine principles—are finally reconciled. Frye himself speculates on this possibility in an indirect manner. “Poetry,” he asserts, “is always polytheistic, because the central form of metaphor is the god: the identification of some kind of personal spirit with some aspect of the order of nature,” and “the poets insisted on clinging to the great gods that were still immanent in the form of gigantic human powers” (1984:475; cf. also 1982:67; 1990:71). Following along in this vein, much of the Late Notebooks material revolves around Frye’s so-called “H-E-A-P” (Hermes-Eros-Adonis-Prometheus) scheme for the recovery of

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what he refers to as, in a phrase borrowed from Emily Dickinson, “the confiscated gods” (2:548).15 Nowhere, however, does he consider a similar treatment of the “confiscated goddesses”—his repeated references to the virgin goddess Diana are frankly obscene (e.g., 1:345)—and occasional speculations that the divine should contain a feminine as well as a masculine component are generally discarded: “I suppose the Spirit should have both sexes, a male god who carries the female body of the redeemed with him. This is not a fruitful line of investigation” (2:585).16 What is deeply disturbing about the sexual symbolism that Frye does employ is that it is founded in the rampantly misogynist thinking evident in some quarters at the dawn of the Christian era.17 He cites, for example, the passage from the Gospel of Thomas in which Simon Peter says to Jesus, “Make Mary leave us, for females don’t deserve life,”18 and Jesus’ answer that he “will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the domain of heaven” (114:1–2; qtd. from Miller: 322)—and he notes as he does so the “form-male matter-female metaphor” that the editor of the edition he is using cites to explain the passage: “it was a philosophical cliché that the material constituent of an entity was ‘female,’ while its form (or ideal form) was ‘male’” (2000b:2:393–94, 836; qtd. from Layton: 399). On one occasion Frye voices some doubt as to the efficacy of this kind of sexual symbolism, but he immediately overrides it—“I think I should say that

15 “If ‘All is possible with’ him/As he besides concedes/He will refund us finally/Our confiscated Gods—” (qtd. in Frye, 1963:209; cf. also 1990:134–35). 16 Speaking specifically about poets, however, in an introduction to an anthology that was to have been published by Harcourt, Brace and World, Frye writes: “During a time when sexual sublimation was about the most highly approved of all social acts, it would not be surprising, on the face of it, that poets, deprived of what Emily Dickinson calls ‘our confiscated gods,’ should have decided that, while they could get along without Jupiter, certainly without Mars, the loss of Venus was intolerable” (Frye, 2002:112). 17 In addition to the passage from the extracanonical Gospel of Thomas cited here, I have in mind the following instances: (a) comments in the Pistis Sophia attributed, as in the Gospel of Thomas, to Peter, e.g.: “My Lord, we will not endure this woman [Mary Magdalene], for she taketh the opportunity from us and hath let none of us speak, but she discourseth many times” (Mead: 47); (b) Paul’s statement in 1 Tim 2:11–12: “Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent”; (c) the statement attributed to Jesus in the second century by Clement of Alexandria in the Stromateis: “They say that the Savior himself said: ‘I come to undo the works of women,’ meaning by this ‘female,’ sexual desire, and by ‘work,’ birth and the corruption of death” (qtd. in Brown: 85). 18 The commentary on this verse in The Complete Gospels (Miller: 323) notes that “in the extra-canonical tradition Peter is portrayed as critical of Mary in particular (e.g. in the Gospel of Mary and the Pistis Sophia),” indicating that the Mary referred to is Mary Magdalene; however, Frye may be reading the passage as referring to the Virgin Mary, as this would help to explain his theory of “redeemable man . . . conceived in female form as the Virgin Mary” (2000b:2:444).

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making male & female sexes the symbols of human subject and natural object was confusing & perhaps wrong, but we’re stuck with it” (2000b:1:333)—with the result that he is left musing on such imponderables as man “whoring around” as woman (2:453) and his “theory that redeemable man is symbolically woman” (2:464, 573). Also disturbing is the way in which earthly nature merges in Frye’s thought with physical human nature. “Why do we call both art and nature beautiful?” he asks in one notebook entry. “It seems absurd on the face of it to apply the same term to a Mozart divertimento and some cutie in a bathing suit” (2:622; emphasis mine). Both forms of nature are, to his way of thinking, equally in need of redemption, the reason for this being that in his model of the old four-level cosmos of authority the original paradisal nature was held to have fallen to its present lower level simultaneously with the fall of Adam. Thus, according to Frye, “human history is the record of the only animal in nature more repulsive than nature,” and “we can hope for nothing in either man or nature: there has to be an apocalypse within man” (1:368). Thus also his preoccupation with the cultural productions of art and literature—“human creativity has in it the quality of re-creation, of salvaging something with a human meaning out of the alienation of nature” (1982:138)—and his especial emphasis on the written message of the Bible. The Bible is, to me, the body of words through which I can see the world as a cosmos, as an order, and where I can see human nature as something redeemable, something with a right to survive. Otherwise you’re left with human nature and physical nature. Physical nature doesn’t seem to have very much conversation. It’s a totally inarticulate world. Human nature is corrupt at the source because it’s grown out of physical nature. (1991–1992:10)

There is a high price to be paid, however, for this valorization of the verbal at the expense of the physical, and we see this in the Diaries as Frye’s alienation from and denial of his own bodily nature and needs in the interests of an extreme intellectual orientation and the rigors of his teaching and writing schedule comes back to haunt him in the form of dreams of animals—frequent symbols of the body in dreams. “I don’t know why I have such a horror of animals,” he remarks in an entry written in 1942. “A recurrent nightmare is badly hurting an animal and then stomping it furiously into a battered wreck in a paroxysm of cowardly mercy” (2001:14). Yet even so firmly ensconced a patriarchal thinker as Frye eventually comes to the realization that “the indifference of God to our fate in nature may be a product of our conscious feeling of separation from nature” and that “the alien nature of the ‘fallen’ world, the exploited and dominated nature, is a product of the subject-object split” (2000b:2:433). Author-physician Leonard Shlain, in his book The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image, advances the thesis that this

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split, along with the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, occurred precisely as a result of the invention of writing and the changes from right-brain to left-brain consciousness produced by literacy. “A feature of nonverbal communication,” he observes, “is that no symbolization interferes with the direct appreciation of reality” (19), and the introduction of the mediated symbolization that writing represents disrupts this directness of apprehension. To be able to leap from the particular and concrete to the general and abstract has allowed us to create art, logic, science, and philosophy. But this skill tore us out of the rich matrix of nature. The part torn away became the ego. The left brain cleaved the right brain’s integrated sense of wholeness into a duality that resulted in humans creating a distinction between me-in-here and world-out-there. The ego requires duality to gain perspective. (22)

This dramatic change in mind-set, he asserts, was also responsible for the religious shift in focus from images—henceforth proclaimed to be idolatrous, as noted by Frye above—to the sacred text, and from Goddess to God. “Goddess worship, feminine values, and women’s power depend on the ubiquity of the image. God worship, masculine values, and men’s domination of women are bound to the written word,” as “each monotheistic religion features an imageless Father deity whose authority shines through His revealed Word, sanctified in its written form” (7). The solution to the problem of the cloven patriarchal mind-set clearly does not lie in a simple reversion to a prepatriarchal worldview and belief system, nor in a sacrifice of the monumental gains in consciousness made by patriarchy; rather, it is to be found in a new synthesis of the positive values and achievements of both. Shlain and others have posited such a synthesis in the integration within the individual of right-brained, or feminine, and leftbrained, or masculine, functions, and of the holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete view of the world characteristic of the feminine outlook and the linear, sequential, reductionist, and abstract thinking that defines the masculine (1). To my own way of thinking, however, and primarily in reaction to the kinds of symbolic contortions witnessed in Frye above, it would be more realistic to dispense with the “masculine” and “feminine” tags in this categorization altogether. The foundation of the mythological cosmos, as Frye himself acknowledges in the notebooks, is the human anatomy, with its “backbone-tree analogy” of the axis mundi as a cosmic tree whose roots extend into the netherworld and its branches into the heavens (2000b:1:282). Traditionally the “higher” mental, abstract, and logical functions have been regarded as “masculine” and the “lower” generative, emotional, and intuitive as “feminine”; however, as every human anatomy, whether male or female, is equipped with the entire apparatus, and as the integration of all functions is increasingly regarded as the psychological ideal, it makes far more sense to think in terms of a balance of left-brain and right-brain capabilities rather

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than in the old, worn-out gendered terms. Frye himself notes that “a stabilized male-female relationship within the psyche is the basis for imaginative progress” (2000b:1:224), and the privileging of one gender at the expense of the other—even on a “purely” symbolic level, if that is in fact possible—no longer seems acceptable. Albert Einstein predicted that the religion of the future will be a cosmic religion: “Covering both the natural and the spiritual,” he speculated, it will be “based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity” (qtd. in Das: 1; emphasis mine). And what this will entail is a healing in the collective human consciousness of the masculine-feminine, mind-body, flesh-spirit, subject-object split. In his later writings, of course, Frye does speak of an imaginative transcendence of this split: “literature always assumes, in its metaphors, a relation between human consciousness and its natural environment that passes beyond—in fact, outrages and violates—the ordinary common sense based on a permanent separation of subject and object” (1990:71). He seems to see this more as a transcendence, however, than as an integration, and more as imaginative than as experiential. For in the new creation that becomes manifest in the second or “participating” apocalypse that constitutes Frye’s personal enlightenment vision in the seventh/eighth phase of revelation, human beings become participants by being “redeemed, or separated from the predatory and destructive elements acquired from [their] origin in nature.” As “the subject-object cleavage becomes increasingly unsatisfactory, subject and object merge in an intermediate verbal world, where a Word not our own, though also our own, proclaims and a Spirit not our own, though also our own, responds” (1990:135, 118; emphasis mine). Moreover, for Frye there is a significant difference between the Buddhist and the Christian enlightenments in that the latter is more militant and human beings have “to fight [their] way out of history and not simply awaken from it” (1982:133). Central to Frye’s conception of typology as a “figure of speech that moves in time” is this combination of a movement from the type of body and flesh to the antitype of spirit, or from the soma psychikon or physical or “natural” body to the soma pneumatikon or spiritual body, with a “vertical lift” that would take the process “out of the future and put an end to history” (2000b:1:183, 194, 358). Yet even this is ambiguous, as he also indicates that this movement is to be understood figuratively—for “what is symbolized by the destruction of the order of nature is the destruction of the way of seeing that order that keeps man confined to the world of time and history as we know them” (1982:136; emphasis mine). Buddhism, he says, is superior to Xy [Christianity] in the way it gets past the aural-visual time-space antithesis: Revelation gets to the panoramic apocalypse, invites us, like Rabelais, to have a drink, and that’s it. Buddhism understands that

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semeia the next step, or participating apocalypse, is interpenetration, which destroys the antithesis of the inclusive and exclusive. Hence being a Xn [Christian] is one way of being a Buddhist. Xy [Christianity] has the spiritual crusade, the effort to consolidate the death-principle & hell-principle, and get rid of them by clarifying their nature. (2000b:1:262–63)

Ultimately, what one would hope for in the participating apocalyptic vision would be the interpenetration of nature and spirit together with the integration of human and divine, or as Frye describes it, “the re-creation made through a union of God and man” (1982:131). And in the enlightened existence of such a new creation, one might also anticipate that the “Human form Divine” of the God-Man (Blake: 395; cf. also Frye: 1990–1991:6) would be complemented by the reemergence of the Goddess-Woman. Why, after all, should it be assumed that any Word is the last Word?

WORKS CONSULTED Baring, Anne, and Jules Cashford 1991 The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. London: Viking. Blake, William 1988 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. Rev. ed. New York: Doubleday. Brown, Peter 1988 The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press. Campbell, Joseph 1964 The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin. 1974 Catullus 1995 Das, Surya 1997

The Mythic Image. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Poems 61–68. Ed. and trans. John Godwin. Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips. Awakening the Buddha Within: Eight Steps to Enlightenment: Tibetan Wisdom for the Western World. New York: Broadway.

Frankfort, Henri 1948 Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion As the Integration of Society and Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frazer, Sir James George 1976 The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion. London: Macmillan. [Orig. 1922]

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Fremantle, Francesca, and Chögyam Trungpa, trans. with commentary 1987 The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo. Boston: Shambhala. Frye, Northrop 1947 Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1957

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

1963

Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

1980

Creation and Recreation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

1982

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic Press.

1984

“Myth As the Matrix of Literature.” Georgia Review 38:465–76.

1990

Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” Markham, Ont.: Viking.

1990–1991 “The Ideas of Northrop Frye.” Pt. 1. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Northrop Frye Newsletter 3:2–14. 1991

The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

1991–1992 “The Ideas of Northrop Frye.” Pt. 3. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Northrop Frye Newsletter 4:7–18. 2000a

Northrop Frye on Religion. Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

2000b

Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World. 2 vols. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

2001

The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942–1955. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

2002

Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Frymer-Kensky, Tikva 1992 In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth. New York: Macmillan. Graves, Robert 1961 The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. London: Faber & Faber. Heidel, Alexander 1963 The Babylonian Genesis: The Story of Creation. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Jacobsen, Thorkild 1939 The Sumerian King List. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1987

The Harps That Once. . . : Sumerian Poetry in Translation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Layton, Bentley, ed. and trans. 1987 The Gnostic Scriptures. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Mead, G. R. S. 1974 Pistis Sophia: Challenge to Early Christianity. Secaucus, N.J.: University Books. Metzger, Bruce M., and Michael D. Coogan, eds. 1993 The Oxford Companion to the Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, Robert J., ed. 1994 The Complete Gospels: Annotated Scholars Version. Rev. and expanded ed. San Francisco: Harper Collins. Milton, John 1962 Paradise Lost. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Ovid 1977 1986

Metamorphoses. Vol. 1. Trans. Frank Justus Miller. 3d ed., rev. G. P. Goold. LCL. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Metamorphoses. Trans. A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Phillips, John A. 1984 Eve: The History of an Idea. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Pound, Ezra 1964 The Cantos of Ezra Pound. London: Faber & Faber. Pritchard, James B., ed. 1955 Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. 2d ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Sandars, N. K., trans. and introd. 1972 The Epic of Gilgamesh. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin. Shlain, Leonard 1998 The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image. Harmondsworth, England: Viking Penguin. Wolkstein, Diane, and Samuel Noah Kramer 1983 Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Legends from Sumer. New York: Harper & Row.

MODELING BIBLICAL NARRATIVE: FRYE AND D. H. LAWRENCE William Robins University of Toronto

abstract Is Northrop Frye’s approach to studying the Bible and literature equally valid for different kinds of literary production, or does it extrapolate inappropriately from the biblical intertextuality of visionary poetics? This essay argues that Frye’s criticism is not fully suited to interpreting the biblical resources important to novelists. It takes as a test-case the novel Aaron’s Rod by D. H. Lawrence. In Aaron’s Rod two ways of engaging with biblical narrative are found to be in conflict. One involves attention to the archetypal narrativity of the Bible, such as Frye’s criticism is concerned with. The other involves attention to the novelistic narrativity of the Bible, for which critics other than Frye are more useful guides. Because it shows this conflict so clearly, Lawrence’s work can help us understand where Frye’s scheme might be appropriate to the task of literary elucidation and where it might actually be misleading.

Northrop Frye’s work presents a powerful paradigm for the study of the Bible and literature. As a corollary to his argument that literature is displaced mythology, Frye claims that Western literature possesses an “imaginative unity” derived from its biblical heritage. The central feature of this shared biblical myth is an archetypal narrative that begins with the fall, extends through the time of history, and culminates in a moment of redemption. Stated in other terms, the governing mythic pattern entails a movement of “descent” followed by a movement of “ascent,” of captivity or death followed by release or rebirth. The details of individual stories in the Bible can be dismissed by Frye as the different symbolic settings for the one mythic plot of redemption: “In this perspective the sequence of captivities and redemptions disappears and is replaced by a unique act of descent and return. But the act, in itself unique, has many symbolic settings” (1982:193). The identity of different parts of the Bible is guaranteed (1) by the canonical unity of the whole, with a beginning, middle, and end that individual sections replicate on a smaller scale; (2) by a narrative principle of typology, in which earlier and later events are seen as figures of each other (e.g., Adam and Christ); and (3) by an organization of metaphors into clusters of symbolic equivalences (the Lamb is the Tree is the Water). This concentrated mix

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of narrative and symbolism invites readers to behold the world anew, according to the categories of human desire, in a response that Frye speaks of as “apocalyptic,” a revelation of a higher vision of the truth of the world. When writers in the Western tradition draw upon the resources of the Bible, Frye argues, they avail themselves of this archetypal narrative of death and rebirth, achieved through the principles of canonical unity, narrative typology, symbolic identity, and apocalyptic vision. Frye’s preferred guides to the intertextual presence of the Bible are primarily the creators of magnificent Christian poetic universes—Dante, Spenser, Milton, Eliot, and above all Blake. A typical rhetorical strategy for Frye is to demonstrate that the biblical mythology is at work in these poems in the way he has described and then to assume that this must be the case for other kinds of literary production as well. As a consequence, his work on the Bible and literature leaves us with several nagging questions. Has Frye taken one particular mode of engaging with the biblical inheritance and universalized it? When non-Christian writers engage with the Bible, do they do so in terms of the same archetypal myth? What about writers, Christian or not, writing in modes other than that of poetic vision? Is there really only one dominant way of calling upon the literary power of the Bible? Where is Frye’s scheme appropriate to the task of literary elucidation, and where might it actually be misleading? In this essay, I want to examine the appropriateness of Frye’s approach for the genre of the novel, and I propose to do so by attending closely to a borderline case of great interest. D. H. Lawrence is one of the writers of the twentieth century who has grappled most unstintingly with the intertextual pressure exerted by the Bible, with several of his novels even serving as direct commentaries on biblical themes. Lawrence should be easily aligned with the poets that matter most to Frye, given that Lawrence belongs within a Christian, English literary tradition and that his works are forcefully committed to the mythic powers of fiction. The difference is that Lawrence’s techniques of literary representation are those of a novelist. Does this difference in genre and technique entail any important difference in how Lawrence engages with the Bible? Our test-case will be Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod, a novel that responds to the story of Aaron in the biblical books of Exodus and Numbers and that brings into view some of the problems of following Frye’s manner of modeling biblical narrative. As its title indicates, the plight of the protagonist of Aaron’s Rod, Aaron Sisson, is modeled on that of Aaron in the Bible: a man is singled out to be the priest of an unseen God but is not granted full comprehension of the responsibilities this covenant demands of him. Insofar as Lawrence conceives of character as the site of a spiritual predicament, rather than as the accumulation of personality traits, the events that Aaron Sisson experiences sometimes align him not only with Aaron but also with Moses or with the

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nation of the Israelites—called to deliverance but, with hindrances set in their ways, prone to confusion and backsliding. The ignorance that comes with serving an unseen God is transposed into a modern key: Sisson is urged by his soul to free himself from the constraints of a moribund modern society, but he remains unsure of how to observe such promptings. Aaron’s Rod chronicles the wanderings of Aaron Sisson in England and Italy, unsatisfied with his past life yet unable to find fulfillment in any new setting. To judge from the end of the novel, where the “descent” into a period of wandering in the wilderness is followed by a sudden “ascent” to a vision of rebirth, Frye’s paradigm of biblical narrative seems to be appropriate for interpreting Aaron’s Rod. In the penultimate chapter, Sisson’s flute is destroyed by a bomb blast: “the loss for him was symbolistic. It chimed with something in his soul: the bomb, the smashed flute, the end” (285). In the final chapter, Sisson dreams of passing through the underworld and wakes with an understanding that the new direction his life ought to take will be revealed to him by his friend Rawdon Lilly. Lilly lectures to Sisson that, first of all, he should not try to find justification through any God or creed or prescription outside of himself, for the only Godhead is in one’s own soul: “You are your own Tree of Life, roots and limbs and trunk. Somewhere within the wholeness of the tree lies the very self, the quick: its own innate Holy Ghost” (296). Secondly, Sisson is told that the pulsing of the innate Holy Spirit is not only compatible with but in fact is best attained through submission to a more heroic soul: “You, too, have the need livingly to yield to a more heroic soul, to give yourself. You know you have. And you know it isn’t love. It’s life-submission. And you know it. But you kick against the pricks” (299). For Lilly (as for Lawrence), the Holy Ghost of renewal is the only aspect of Christianity that is still vital, and it stands in contrast to the normative religion of Christ crucified that demands the sacrifice of one’s own desires. The notion of the submission of weaker souls to more heroic souls is Lawrence’s fascistic version of an imitatio Christi. Lilly’s discourse gives definition to Sisson’s yearnings and failures—he has been presuming to build personal attachments upon amorous affections and so has been stymied by yielding too much to the ego’s demands for external supports. The story of redemptive rebirth recounted in the New Testament underlies this closing chapter. After Sisson’s “symbolistic” death, and after his dream-passage through the underworld, he stands at the threshold of a new life, described in apostolic phrases: “the innate Holy Spirit” is also “your precious Easter egg of your own soul” (295), and Sisson, like Paul on the brink of conversion, is kicking against its pricks. Not only has the period of wandering in the wilderness yielded to a moment where the promised land is glimpsed, as we might get from a rewriting of the events of the exodus, but even that Old Testament story is reread in light of the Christian mythos. The novel follows the New Testament’s precedent for rereading the story of

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the exodus typologically, as preparatory for and as figurally signifying the coming of Christ: Moreover, brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; And were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; And did all eat the same spiritual meat; And did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ. (1 Cor 10:1–4)

Given the archetypal narrative of loss and salvation, the typological recapitulation of the Christian story of salvation, the clustering of familiar biblical symbols, and the achievement of a kind of “apocalyptic” vision on the part of the main character, Aaron’s Rod seems to confirm the general validity of Frye’s model of biblical intertextuality. There are, however, two difficulties. The first concerns the divergent kinds of visionary truth unleashed by the myth of rebirth. Lawrence gives his novel a proto-fascist conclusion: realize the truth of the world, dissolve your own concern for your ego, and you will joyfully submit to a greater man’s power. Frye’s apocalypticism encodes his own United Church liberalism: cleanse the doors of perception and you will break free of ideologies. Frye is adamant that any visionary claim that leads to fascism is a false vision, but this remains a point of faith on Frye’s part. For Lawrence, any spiritual growth that found fulfillment in democracy was spiritually false. Even if most of us following in Frye’s wake are sympathetic to his moral stance, and would like to believe that the imagination ultimately reveals truths that are palatable, nevertheless, the archetypal narrativity of the biblical tradition does not necessarily always take liberal forms. The second difficulty is posed by the structure of this novel. A plot of continual deferral animates the first twenty of the twenty-one chapters of Aaron’s Rod, and bringing that plot to a formal closure presented Lawrence with a significant difficulty; in a letter he admits: “I did more than half of Aaron’s Rod, but can’t end it: the flowering end missing, I suppose” (1984:626). When he does conclude the novel, he does so by veering sharply away from the picaresque genre of Sisson’s wandering. The consensus of its readers is that this closing chapter stands in stark disharmony with the rest of Aaron’s Rod, both in the sentiments expressed and in the preacherly mode of delivery. Daleski is typical in seeing it as Lawrence’s attempt “to blatantly force Aaron into a yielding which would negate a great deal of what has gone before. . . . [I]t is not clear why yielding in the name of ‘life-submission’ should not be as much a ‘cul-de-sac’ as less pretentious forms of surrender” (207). In other words, this conclusion, which seems to align Aaron’s Rod with a Frygian understanding of biblical narrative, is inappropriately imposed upon the rest of the novel, which seems to bring into play different narrative

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expectations and, as we will see, a different mode of engaging with the text of the Bible. In modeling his novel upon the story of the Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness, and especially upon the story of Aaron’s difficult priesthood, Lawrence adopts a technique that I will speak of as “parallel tracking.” He has approached the biblical text of Exodus and Numbers as a series of discrete episodes strung together according to an irregular rhythm of the appearance and disappearance of a vital connection to God. With the plot of the exodus stripped to these narrative bones, the skeleton has been taken up by Lawrence to provide the scaffolding for his novel. This parallel tracking is represented schematically in my accompanying table (table 1). Table 1 Correspondences of Aaron’s Rod with Exodus and Numbers Aaron’s Rod (ch.) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Exodus Captivity Egypt Burning Bush Passover Egypt Follows Murmuring Red Sea Backsliding/Manna Amalek/Anointing Remembrance/Calling Old Gods/Promise Red Sea/Wilderness Red Sea/Wilderness Amalek/Gershom Journey to Sinai Sinai Sinai Golden Calf Golden Calf Stripping of Ornaments ?

Numbers 1–2 1–2 3–4 12 13 14a 14b–15 15b–17a 17b–31 17b–31 32–33 15–17a 15–17a 17b–18 19a 19b–31 19b–31 32 32 33

[Aaron’s Rod] Journeying/Mannah, Quails Miriam and Aaron Spies Spying the Land Promised Land Denied Laws Aaron’s Rod Korah’s Destruction Meribah/Death of Aaron

10–11 12 13 13 14 15 16–17 16–17 18–20

?

Note: Boldface indicates correspondences also noted by Baker.

The first eleven chapters of Aaron’s Rod align themselves with the sequence of episodes in the book of Exodus, beginning with the captivity of

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Sisson in an oppressive domestic situation in a small mining town and ending with the call made upon Sisson’s soul by his charismatic friend, Rawdon Lilly, and with Sisson’s avoidance of backsliding into domestic normalcy. The subsequent chapters change the scene of Sisson’s picaresque movements from England to Italy, and Lawrence extends the reach of his parallel tracking by following the further adventures of the Israelites in the wilderness recounted in the book of Numbers, from the departure from Sinai to the death of Aaron. The intertextual skeleton of this second part is actually twofold, for Lawrence’s chapters not only follow the sequence of episodes in Numbers but also work through another series of correspondences to the material from Exodus. It is as if Lawrence realized that his own mode of narrative transformation was already sanctioned by biblical precedent, with Numbers built in just such a fashion upon the skeletal frame of Exodus. Sometimes the correspondences between Exodus and Aaron’s Rod are conspicuous, as is the case with the episodes listed in boldface in table 1. To take just one example, when Sisson seduces, and is seduced by, the Marchesa del Torre, he feels his phallic power expressed via his flute, his “Aaron’s rod,” his thoughts explicitly recalling how the blossoming of Aaron’s rod in the Bible confirmed his unique summons to the priesthood: “Aaron’s black rod of power, blossoming again with red Florentine lilies and fierce thorns. He moved about in the splendour of his own male lightning, invested in the thunder of male passion and power. He had got it back, the male godliness, the male godhead” (258). Yet the Marchesa del Torre turns out to be a false object of worship, described in terms that recall the golden calf, that greatest transgression committed by the biblical Aaron: “And then the beautiful limbs thrust out in that dress, and nakedly dusky as with gold dust. Her beautiful woman’s legs, slightly glistening, duskily. His one abiding instinct was to touch them, to kiss them.—He had never known a woman exercise such power over him. It was a bare, occult force, something he could not cope with” (250). By combining these scenes of priestly election and priestly misprision, Lawrence reads the biblical narrative in all its strange difficulty: How can one tell if following an urge will lead one to honour or to transgress the demands of a jealous God? “As he laid his flute on the table he looked at it and smiled. He remembered that Lilly had called it Aaron’s Rod. ‘So you blossom, do you?—and thorn as well,’ said he” (257). More often, the scaffolding taken from the exodus story only barely breaks the surface of Aaron’s Rod, producing an array of effects that, as far as I know, have not been noted. These include faint echoes occurring through imagery or personal names. The “rosemary sage and hyssop” (40) that Sisson notices by his doorway as he departs from his wife and children recall the hyssop of Passover, just as the quails served to him when he arrives in Italy are analogous to the quails fed to the Israelites in the wilderness. The names of the two men Sisson meets in Milan, Guest and Dekker,

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render into English and German respectively the names of Jethro’s two sons, Gershom and Eliezer, who join the Israelites in Exodus 18. These and other muted echoes are so unobtrusive that they cannot be meant to serve as crucial signals for the novel’s readers, appearing instead almost as traces remaining from the construction of the novel. Kermode has noted similarly muted allusions in Lawrence’s apocalypticism: “sometimes his allusions are so inexplicit that only if you are a naïve fundamentalist (in which case you probably won’t be reading Lawrence) or are on the lookout (in which case you are reading abnormally) will you pick them up” (158). Even if, as Baker claims, “one can scarcely scan a single page of Aaron’s Rod without encountering some reference, however oblique, to the biblical legend [of Moses and the wandering chosen people]” (46), yet the kind of biblical engagement that links Aaron’s Rod to Exodus and Numbers is not primarily one of citational allusion but of narrative disposition, following a deeply embedded sequential logic that breaks the allusive surface only in oblique ways. Aaron’s Rod follows the narrative texture of the exodus story in order to present a modern tale of a man who is, like the biblical Aaron, the priest of an unknown God. What is constantly in doubt, for both the main character and the readers, is access to any perspective that would explain the course of one’s life. This essential uncertainty is what makes the closing chapter of the novel so inappropriate aesthetically and thematically. It is also what makes the novel as a whole resistant to interpretation in Frye’s terms. Escape from captivity leads to another stage of captivity, not to redemption. Such is a response to the books of Exodus and Numbers read as novelistic texts in their own right. Christian typology and apocalyptic symbolism are felt to betray the central meaning of such a narrative of wandering. What alternative paradigms for speaking about the Bible and literature might provide more help than Frye’s for describing the intertextuality of Lawrence’s novel? The approach associated with readers like Erich Auerbach and Robert Alter would be more suited to attending to the biblical story as a plot of uncertainty. These readers pay close attention to the specifics of narrative texture rather than dismissing such specifics as symbolic settings for the Christian mythos of redemption. From this perspective, biblical characters are seen to act out the effects of religious impulses in ways that are open-ended and morally complex. “Indeed,” writes Alter, “an essential aim of the innovative technique of fiction worked out by the ancient Hebrew writers was to produce a certain indeterminacy of meaning, especially in regard to motive, moral character, and psychology” (12). Biblical narration—reticent, abrupt, ambiguous, “fraught with background” (Auerbach: 12)—conveys the problematic claims made upon individuals by a divine covenant. Such elaboration of how we are “enmeshed in uncertainty” is much more a constitutive feature of the Hebrew Bible than of the Christian Bible (Josipovici: 87).

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Whereas the informing logic behind Frye’s approach is that of figural typology, the exegetical tradition behind these considerations is closer to midrash. The Bible that Frye examines is the Christian Bible, but the Bible that matters in this attention to narrative texture is, above all, the Hebrew Bible. Frye’s literary guides are the poetic universes of Dante, Milton, and Blake, while for a critic like Alter the most informative literary analogues are works of novelistic fiction by Kafka, Proust, or Faulkner. These two paradigms for modeling biblical narrative can be distinguished as, on the one hand, an attention to “archetypal narrativity”—closely associated with the design of the Christian Bible, with typological exegesis, and with the strategies of visionary poetics—and, on the other hand, an attention to “novelistic narrativity”—aligned with the mechanics of the Hebrew Bible, with characterological exegesis, and with the techniques of novelistic fiction. In his essay “The Novel,” Lawrence affirms that great novels present the quickness of life in a manner similar to that found in the Old Testament: “In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all. Just as God is the pivotal interest in the books of the Old Testament” (1968:419). In Aaron’s Rod, Lawrence tries to render the flickering of that unknown and unknowable flame through the parallel ordering of episodes, taking the Hebrew Bible as a model for how to represent the “odd sort of fluid, changing, grotesque or beautiful relatedness” of man with all that surrounds him (1968:420). The critical approach that best illuminates this dimension of Lawrence’s engagement with the Bible is that which focuses on novelistic, rather than archetypal, concerns. Studies of Lawrence’s use of the Bible, however, have been limited to a consideration of the Bible as a symbolic resource—whether construed archetypally (Ford), apocalyptically (Kermode), or typologically (Hyde)—but not as a forceful model for novelistic techniques. Not a single commentator, for instance, has noted the strategy of parallel tracking in Aaron’s Rod, a strategy that becomes discernible once the Bible itself is grasped novelistically. To be sure, understanding the intertextual pressure of the Bible in terms of Christian archetypal narrative and symbolism does elucidate certain aspects of Lawrence’s writing, but the danger is that it will also blind us to crucial features of how Lawrence read the Bible with a novelist’s eyes. The end of Aaron’s Rod shows that Lawrence felt a need to end his narrative of uncertainty with a “flowering ending,” forcefully bringing his stubborn novel in line with a myth of rebirth and apocalyptic vision. Rawdon Lilly’s speechifying to Sisson violates Lawrence’s own instincts about the novel as an art form: “The novel is the highest example of subtleinterrelatedness that man has discovered. Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside of its own place, time, circumstance. If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the

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novel gets up and walks away with the nail” (1936:528). Although Lawrence here has in mind novels like Tolstoy’s, that prescribe a doctrine of Christian self-sacrifice, Aaron’s Rod proves that a credo of the innate Holy Ghost can be just as doctrinaire, and just as contradictory to the real thrust of the work. The biblical inheritance exerts two different kinds of pressure upon Lawrence as he shapes this novel. On the one hand, as a novelist concerned with the complex interrelatedness of human beings to all aspects of their world, Lawrence takes inspiration from the narrative techniques in the stories of the Hebrew Bible. Lawrence admitted to preferring the books of the Old Testament to the Gospels as novels, for there is “too much Sermon-on-themounting” in the Gospels, while “Greater novels, to my mind, are the books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, Kings, by authors whose purpose was so big, it didn’t quarrel with their passionate inspiration” (1968:418). On the other hand, as a preacher, Lawrence was deeply committed to identifying the nameless flame that might reawaken modern man; in this task he espouses a transformed Christianity (resurrection without the sacrifice) by adopting the “Sermon-on-the-mounting” and the didactic “nailing down” that he knows go against the grain of the novel as an art form. This apostolic Lawrence makes common cause with the archetypal narrativity of the Christian Bible, in which all stories converge in a lesson of personal conversion. The sharp disjunction felt in Aaron’s Rod shows that attention dedicated either to novelistic or to archetypal designs will illuminate only one aspect of what Lawrence is trying to do, thereby falsifying the complexity of Lawrence’s contest with the Bible. Lawrence inherited two distinct traditions for reading the Bible. As he became intent upon turning the modern novel into a biblically inspired literary form, these traditions offered powerful assumptions about the logic of biblical narrative, and Lawrence, it seems, could feel entirely comfortable with neither. The result is a novel so deeply conflicted as to be, in a sense, about the competing pressures exerted by these two different ways of reading biblical narrative. Frye’s approach to the Bible and literature overlooks what I have here called the novelistic narrativity of the Bible, and the consequence is that Frye’s paradigms, however useful for speaking about the poems of Milton and Blake, may fall wide of the mark when brought to bear upon novelistic writings. With regard to Lawrence in particular, Frye’s criticism will leave important dimensions of Lawrence’s struggle with the Bible unaccounted for. Frye was appalled by the proto-Nazi tendencies of the novels of Lawrence’s middle period, Aaron’s Rod and The Plumed Serpent, and he identified Lawrence’s The Man Who Died as an unsuccessful attempt to unite an archetypal movement of ascent with an oppressive ideology (1976:151). Nevertheless, Lawrence is not just somebody who tried to draw upon the Bible but got it wrong (i.e., put it into fascist terms). Rather, Lawrence is a writer for whom there were two different, at times conflicting ways of

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modeling biblical narrative. The fascism of Aaron’s Rod is largely a result of adhering to the archetypal narrativity of the Christian Bible, and using it to close down the portrayal of uncertainty that draws upon the Bible’s novelistic features. The words of Lawrence that Frye was fondest of were the dictum to “trust the tale.” In Words with Power, in the context of establishing the endurance of archetypes in literature, he paraphrases Lawrence’s axiom: “we should trust no writer’s beliefs or attitudes, but concentrate on his myth, which is infinitely wiser than he is” (1990:60). This is a tendentious translation. Trusting the tale, for Lawrence, does not mean complying with an Ur-plot that has existed for centuries, but rather yielding to the novel’s capacious attentiveness to the “subtle interrelatedness” of persons with their environment. It entails disregarding an author’s conscious attempts to “nail down” his work’s meaning. Applied to Aaron’s Rod, this dictum would mean trusting the story of uncertainty and misprision, and rejecting Lawrence’s own imposition of an ending. We can see how this is the opposite of the use Frye makes of the axiom. For Frye, it means attending to the mythic archetype and downplaying the detailed specifics of any particular poem or novel; for Lawrence it means relishing the complexities of a novel and treating any mythic archetype with suspicion. Frye and Lawrence may share a deep respect for the imaginative power of the Bible, but their fundamental disagreement about the priority of archetypal or novelistic aspects of literature leads them to divergent ways of modeling biblical narrative.

WORKS CONSULTED Aldington, Richard 1950 “Introduction.” Pp. 7–10 in Aaron’s Rod. By D. H. Lawrence. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin. Alter, Robert 1981 The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books. Auerbach, Erich 1953 Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Baker, Paul G. 1983 “Biblical Analogue and Symbolism in Aaron’s Rod.” Pp. 39–60 in A Reassessment of D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Daleski, H. M. 1965 The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence. London: Faber & Faber.

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Ford, George H. 1965 The Double Measure: A Study of the Novels and Stories of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Frye, Northrop 1976 The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1982

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

1990

Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Hyde, Virginia 1992 The Risen Adam: D. H. Lawrence’s Revisionist Typology. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Josipovici, Gabriel 1988 The Book of God: A Response to the Bible. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Kalnins, Mara 1988 “Introduction.” Pp. xvii–xliv in Lawrence, 1988. Kermode, Frank 1971 “D. H. Lawrence and the Apocalyptic Types.” Pp. 153–81 in Modern Essays. London: Collins. [Partly reprinted as “Lawrence and Apocalyptic Types.” Pp. 59–71 in Modern Critical Views: D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.] Lawrence, D. H. 1936 “Morality and the Novel.” Pp. 527–32 in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Edward D. McDonald. London: Heinemann. 1968

“The Novel.” Pp. 416–26 in Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore. New York: Viking.

1984

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Vol. 3: October 1916–June 1921. Ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1988

Aaron’s Rod. Ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

RESPONSES

BIBLICAL STUDIES ON A MORE CAPACIOUS CANVAS: A RESPONSE TO JOE VELAIDUM AND JAMES M. KEE David Jobling St. Andrew’s College, Saskatoon

I was sadly unable to attend the McMaster conference out of which this volume came and am correspondingly glad to be invited to become, as it were, a participant at second hand. This invitation has made me confront my own relationship to and use of Northrop Frye, and I find it paradoxical. Given the many ways and the long time that he has been a significant presence for me, my direct use of him has been strangely small. Like Frye (though in my case adoptively) I am Canadian. I serve professionally the United Church of Canada, the Christian denomination in which he was, long ago, an ordained minister. The United Church is, among the Canadian denominations, the one most defined by its social engagement, and in this respect Frye’s association with it is far from accidental. When The Great Code came out in 1982, I devoted a month to it in a seminary course on “Emerging Approaches in Biblical Studies,” but I have not used Frye in such depth since; the appearance of Words with Power or The Double Vision had no impact on my teaching. The one part of Frye’s biblical work that I continue to use, and have incorporated into my introductory course on the Jewish Bible, is chapter 5 of The Great Code, “Phases of Revelation.” Here Frye argues that the (Christian) Bible, taken as a whole, can and must be read as a single literary work. This invites the question of how the Jewish Bible might function as a single literary work, and with what consequences. I shall return to this in a moment. Actually, my personal “Frye” was formed mainly before 1982 and is not directly related to his biblical trilogy. When in the early 1970s I made the key turn in my career, to structuralism, I read some Frye, especially Anatomy of Criticism. I don’t recall who suggested him to me, but I recognized in him many affinities to the theoreticians I was mostly reading at that time: V. Propp, Claude Lévi-Strauss, A. J. Greimas. Yet it was these (and others), rather than Frye, who came to shape my work. Writing this response has made me ask myself, in particular, why, in my constant insistence that the Bible needs to be read as myth (see, e.g., Jobling, 1998:5–6 and passim), I have always invoked Lévi-Strauss—who, as it happens, denies that the Bible can be myth in his sense (1963:631–32)!—rather than Frye. The single work that has most formed my view of Frye came out, as it happened, the year before The Great Code: Fredric Jameson’s The Political

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Unconscious (1981). (At just that time, as it further happened, I spent a month in Toronto at the International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies and first saw the portrait of Frye, seated in an armchair which rests on clouds, that dominates the library of Victoria College.) Jameson’s thesis is that literature is formed by and forms societies, providing a way of dealing with “contradictions” (in the Marxist sense) within and between social formations and “modes of production.” This thesis he argues on the largest possible historical scale, from ancient and traditional literatures to the modern novel. As a Marxist, he is not only descriptive but also theorizes the conditions for a “Utopian” transformation of society. Literature symbolizes “the destiny of community” (70). Jameson repeatedly acknowledges (esp. 12–13, 285) a number of privileged sites and figures for his investigation, his “precursors.” These include Freud, Lukács, Bakhtin, Ernst Bloch, major semioticians and structuralists (esp. Greimas and Lévi-Strauss), and also “a certain Christian hermeneutics” (12), by which he means the medieval fourfold scheme of interpretation (literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical; 31). In this great tradition he emphatically includes Frye, whom he discusses at length (esp. 68–74, 104–7, 110–13, 129–30). What Jameson above all values in Frye is his social vision: The greatness of Frye, and the radical difference between his work and that of the great bulk of garden-variety myth criticism, lies in his willingness to raise the issue of community and to draw basic, essentially social, interpretive consequences from the nature of religion as collective representation. (69)

He first introduces Frye alongside Freud, crediting both with a “valorization of desire,” in Frye’s case an explicitly social desire (Jameson: 68). Frye’s work achieves a “contemporary reinvention” of the medieval fourfold hermeneutic (69, with special reference to Frye, 1957), with its insistence that biblical interpretation focus on the ultimate destiny of humanity. Though literature is “a weaker form” of the religious myth that supported the medieval scheme, Frye’s accomplishment is to make its mythic power reemerge (70). In another section, on Marxist approaches to genre, Jameson appreciates Frye’s contribution in a second major area, his rehabilitation of romance as “the ultimate source and paradigm of all storytelling,” able to express humanity’s “Utopian longings” (105, noting Frye, 1976:28–31). Aware of treading on thin ice with his fellow Marxist critics, Jameson suggests that, while the realistic mode has been successfully tamed (“reified”) within late capitalism, romance still opens a way of “sensing other historical rhythms” (104). He notes with special appreciation that Frye’s reading of romance “does not involve the substitution of some more ideal realm for

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ordinary reality” but, rather, envisions “a process of transforming ordinary reality” (110). Jameson is not uncritical of Frye. He faults Frye’s preference for a “positive” hermeneutic, based on maximizing the similarities between ancient and modern and neglecting historical difference, and insists on a critical hermeneutic based on the analysis of historical “modes of production” with their fundamental differences (130; cf. 68–69). He also accuses Frye of dulling his social and political edge by effectively reversing (while keeping the terminology) the third and fourth levels of the medieval scheme, so that the “political and collective imagery” finally subserves a “privatizing celebration of . . . individual experience” (72–74; quote from 74). This sketch enables me to sum up my ambiguity about Frye. I am won to the scope of his vision, commensurate with Jameson’s, and to his insistence on the social and the political. It is only to a biblical studies with this breadth of desire, and this focus of concern, that I can give my allegiance. Again, on the specific question of how the Bible works in society, I affirm that it works primarily as a single “mythic” thing, which is what Frye has said more clearly than anyone. But at this point comes a serious parting of the ways. The question to which I referred earlier, of the Jewish Bible as a single literary work—a question I might never have posed if Frye had not stimulated it— makes me reject his approach to the Bible at a fundamental point. He continues a “typological” tradition that makes the New Testament regulatory for the reading of the “Old.” I follow Gabriel Josipovici and others in putting the shoe on the other foot: the New Testament acquires its literary character, and hence its power to function as myth, only from its being bound together with the Jewish Bible (passim in Josipovici: 210–94). The most obvious point of difference between the Jewish and Christian Bibles as literary works is that the Jewish Bible lacks the “sense of an ending”; the Jewish order of Prophets and Writings (reversed in the Christian canon) makes the Jewish Bible end in a miscellany of voices, rather than in the univocity of the Apocalypse (on this see Josipovici: 36–49 and Jobling, 1988). The consequences are profound; the Bible’s mythos—as I find it in the Jewish Bible—is compounded of myriad different and often contradictory mythic elements. This is why I have always turned to Lévi-Strauss, for whom “contradiction” is a fundamental category of myth-analysis, rather than to Frye. Yet—precisely as this strange compound—the Jewish Bible functions no less than the Christian one, in religion and beyond, as a single thing: Frye is right about that! Joe Velaidum and James Kee immediately pull me into their essays because both write out of a desire which they don’t conceal, and which is expansive—on the scale of Frye or Jameson. This is clear already from their abstracts, both of which focus more on what the essayist broadly wants than on summary of what in his essay he specifically does. Velaidum wants a new

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relationship between biblical studies and other disciplines, especially literary criticism; Kee wants a “more capacious” (75) biblical hermeneutics. Both, in different ways, raise as I have the question of an adequate vocation for biblical studies. My definition of a biblical scholar has changed over the thirty years that I have been one: I think of myself no longer as one who masters and adds to a body of expert knowledge, but as one who takes responsibility for many and various ways in which the Bible functions in culture and society for good or ill (by “taking responsibility” I don’t mean feeling guilty when someone uses the Bible in antisocial ways, but rather being able to account for what it is about the Bible that makes it usable in such ways). From this starting point, it is not only right but absolutely necessary that we read the Bible in ways commensurate with Frye’s vision of it, and with his insistence on its social and political effects. There is still some professional reluctance to let such breadth of reading define the discipline of “biblical studies.” But Semeia exists to force such a redefinition, and that is why I am its General Editor. Velaidum introduces us directly to the politics of professional biblical scholarship, as enacted at the McMaster conference. He describes a line drawn between “religious-studies scholars and literary critics” at the conference, over a problem “never fully articulated or directly addressed,” left undealt-with in “respectful silence” (23–24). For “religious-studies scholars” I tend to read “biblical scholars”—at any rate it is about the latter that I have some authority to speak. The lack of dialogue that Velaidum laments is but a microcosm of the failure of the biblical studies to engage seriously, at least until recently, with anything outside which threatens to transgress its disciplinary boundary. This has been particularly true of established biblical studies in Canada. Only with the greatest difficulty and slowness has the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, for example (in sharp contrast to the American Society of Biblical Literature) opened itself to the interdisciplinary meetings that have been such a feature of the postmodern scene. Frye’s work on the Bible, which is (among many other things) a national treasure, has generally been seen (when seen at all) as a national embarrassment. So I would not have been so polite and even-handed as Velaidum is in his introductory paragraphs. Scholars from a variety of other disciplines, not only in the humanities but also in the social sciences, come to traditional biblical studies asking for bread, and are often offered a stone. Velaidum’s own point of view, and his impatience, come across in the later parts of his essay. I can assure him, at any rate, that the real dialogue which he missed at the conference is happening between biblical studies and literary criticism, and beyond, in many ways, through many publications, in many classrooms. But Frye’s work has not yet been the beneficiary of these disciplinary changes. This is the main reason why the conference and the publication of its proceedings is to be greatly welcomed, despite the lack of sympathetic input from the biblical studies side.

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After his preamble, Velaidum moves abruptly into Frye’s understanding of history as struggle, in the conflict between “upper” and “lower” worlds (24–25; Jameson: 111 says it almost identically). Conflict continues as a theme in the next section, on Blake versus Locke. Here I found myself constantly thinking how directly the terms he uses for this contrast could be applied to the dominant tradition in biblical studies: “passive” (28) before the givenness of the text; wanting to “perceive” but not to “create reality” (28); confining itself to a work of “memory” rather than “imagination” (28– 29). But exactly here, as it happens, Velaidum enters an area where important work is being done in Canada, on the impact of Locke’s use of the Bible on the development of political science (see Parker; Parker is also working on a book on this topic). As Velaidum indicates, Locke and Blake represent at least in a general way establishment and dissent in political and religious arenas. Conflicts in the West like the one between Locke’s point of view and Blake’s, whatever social and political differences they may cloak, and in whatever philosophical terms (e.g., empiricism/idealism) they may be expressed, have very often been mappable onto different views of the Bible (anyone who wants to see the truth of this in the present need only visit South Africa, and might not even have to go so far). For reasons that I have already given, I found my response to Velaidum fluctuating. I found his sense of historical struggle, and the Bible’s implication in it, welcome. But then I had trouble with his seeming affirmation of Frye’s epistemology as applied to the Bible. The notion of a transcendent perspective, to which we must aspire and from which everything will be seen as unified, seems to me to be a bit of ideology ultimately derived from the Bible but then read back into the Bible to “prove” that it is a mythic unity. The Bible is for me a product of historical struggle, not some sort of overcoming of struggle. Any appearance of transcendent unity I read as evidence of a power struggle in which one side was more effective in getting its point across; but such effects of power can and must be deconstructed (this sentence defines, more or less, the aim of my own work on the Bible). Thus far I resist Velaidum. But in face of the criticisms of Frye that he discusses (34–35, on Alter, Richardson, and Jeffery), I am quickly back on his and Frye’s side, for here the basic issue is one I discussed earlier, whether the Bible functions culturally as a single entity. In this latter section, Velaidum unwittingly creates two triads (the second in his quote from Jeffery), which prompt me to the naughty question (perhaps better left as rhetorical): Would I rather bring to my study of the Bible the resources of Hegel, Derrida, and Kenneth Burke, or those of Alter, Richardson, and Jeffery? Kee expresses his desire for a renewed biblical hermeneutic mostly by enacting it. He takes me into territory where I can follow him with even less expertise than I can Velaidum, into technical criticism of medieval and early

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modern texts. Reading his work on Dante, Langland, and Milton was for me primarily an experience of learning. But I fully affirm the hermeneutical implication that he intends this work to have for biblical studies. The question that arises is this: Is what Kee is doing “biblical studies,” in the sense that this sort of thing should be included in biblical studies’ regular and normal self-definition? The answer, for me, is a resounding Yes. Kee’s choice of subjects makes us see the Bible functioning within a large reach of history, from the early fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, and in a variety of social and political circumstances. True to “the irreducibly social character” of Frye’s hermeneutic, he insists on reading his texts in their specific social and political contexts, and shows us how these find expression in the works themselves: not by simple “reflection,” but in ways discernible only by subtle analysis. This resembles Jameson’s approach and insights. If Kee did no more, these would be substantial accomplishments. But he goes further. By the brilliant organization of his essay, he puts a significant question to Frye, and helps me with my own ambiguity about Frye. Dante operates with ontological confidence out of a vision of cosmic unity, and his control over his work expresses this (he is contemporary, of course, with the heyday of the fourfold biblical hermeneutic so important to Jameson; this was a time that “knew” how to read the Bible). For Langland, the unity and confidence are fading; for Milton, they are gone; and in both, authorial control has correspondingly become a critical issue. Langland must mend by metaphor the allegorical assurance that has been broken, and Milton can make at best a “heroic attempt” to control his material at all. These dynamics can be translated into political terms. Langland (as I learned from Kee) “is engaged with the personal, social, and historical disorders of his day in intensely concrete ways,” and the same could surely be said of Milton with at least equal truth. In their modes of political engagement they again differ from Dante, for whom political roles, from pope and emperor down, are “divinely ordained” (Kee: 80). What Kee does is to make Langland and Milton deconstruct Dante and then, in a parallel move, make a hermeneutician like Gerald Bruns deconstruct Frye’s straining for the Dantesque unity—all the while acknowledging that it is Frye himself who provides the framework within which such changes can be rung! (I have called this sort of thing “friendly deconstruction”; Derrida does it to Marx.) By reading Frye against himself, Kee reveals a Frye who “knows” the limits of the oneness that he passionately projects for the mending of society, whose method carries him into “indeterminate Two-ness” (84). Both Velaidum and Kee expressly desire renewal in biblical studies and draw on Frye to express their desire. They don’t want exactly what Frye wanted—Kee especially distances himself from Frye—but both acknowledge

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how Frye himself has shaped their wish-lists. What they imply, and I profoundly agree, is that we need a biblical studies with Frygian vision, rather than a Frygian biblical studies! What is annoying, and even tragic, about Frye’s critics in biblical studies is that they consistently objectify (Jameson would say “reify”) his work in terms of what they are already doing, rather that imagining how his work could add to theirs. In doing so they exactly miss the point and reenact the very dynamics (of reason and imagination) that Velaidum expounds in his treatment of Blake and Locke. The idea actually visited me that Frye’s contribution to biblical studies might have been more salutary if he hadn’t written his specifically biblical books. This is perhaps an outrageous thought, but it fits with my own experience that Frye made his contribution to transforming my biblical work before he published those books. To conclude: The canvas of biblical studies is enlarged by these essays, and by all the essays in this volume. This is to the good. We are still, in my view, in a period when sheer proliferation is a positive. New voices are being heard in biblical studies, and what they are saying really is new. And at least some of the older voices are letting themselves be renewed. However, the need is growing for critical conversation about methods old and new, the serious meeting of minds that Velaidum sought and missed at the conference. Where, given the cornucopia, does our ethical responsibility— ”our attempt to participate . . . responsibly” (Kee: 84)—as “public scholars” lie? It was a wonderful bonus for me at the end of Velaidum’s essay—like turning a corner at the end of a long walk and sighting one’s destination— that he invoked Daniel Patte, my own main mentor and my predecessor as General Editor of this journal (whom just a few days before this writing we honored with a special session and a Festschrift at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting). Velaidum is right: Patte shows us better than any other recent biblical scholar how we may “process,” as the social and ethical beings that Frye insisted we be, the myriad methodological options currently available for biblical studies.

WORKS CONSULTED Derrida, Jacques 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Intro. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg. New York and London: Routledge. Frye, Northrop 1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1976

The Secular Scripture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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semeia The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Jameson, Fredric 1981 The Political Unconscious: Narrative As a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Jobling, David 1988 “The Canon of the Hebrew Bible As a Literary Work.” Unpublished paper delivered at the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies Annual Meeting, University of Windsor, Ontario. 1998

1 Samuel. Berit Olam: Studies in Hebrew Narrative and Poetry. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical.

Josipovici, Gabriel 1988 The Book of God. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1963 “Réponse à quelques questions.” Esprit 31:628–53. Parker, Kim Ian 1996 “John Locke and the Enlightenment Metanarrative: A Biblical Corrective to a Reasoned World.” SJT 49:57–73. Patte, Daniel 1998 “Critical Biblical Studies from a Semiotic Perspective.” Semeia 81:3–23.

RECONFIGURING THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION: A RESPONSE TO MARGARET BURGESS, PATRICIA DEMERS, AND WILLIAM ROBINS J. Russell Perkin Saint Mary’s University

As William Robins points out in his paper on Frye and D. H. Lawrence, the “informing logic behind Frye’s approach” to the Bible is that of “figural typology,” in which the whole Bible is a kaleidoscopic refraction of the story of Christ (132). While it is certainly true that Frye’s way of reading the Bible is in a general sense typological, the difference between his approach and traditional Christian typology lies in a point that Frye is at pains to emphasize in all of his writings on the Bible: for him, the Bible is much more like a literary work than it is like a scientific history. In “The Double Mirror,” an address which was given shortly before the publication of The Great Code and in which he explores one of the key organizing metaphors of that book, he says: In short, the Bible is explicitly antireferential in structure, and deliberately blocks off any world of presence behind itself. In Christianity, everything in the Old Testament is a “type” of which the “antitype” or existential reality is in the New Testament. This turns the Bible into a double mirror reflecting only to itself. (2000:85)

Traditional Catholic typology, on the other hand, identified the literal level of meaning, which for Frye was the poetic meaning of the text (1982:64), with the historical. In Aquinas’s view of the polysemous nature of scripture, a multiplicity of senses does not produce confusion, “for all the senses are founded on one—the literal—from which alone can any argument be drawn,” and the literal or historical level is that at which words refer to things (118). In rejecting this basis for typology, Frye frees the biblical text for a literary interpretation that is based on a radical Protestantism akin to that of his “preceptor” William Blake. Much of the energy lying behind Frye’s re-imagining of the Bible is based in his opposition to biblical fundamentalism, which he rejected early in his life (Ayre: 44). The continuing strength of fundamentalism and the political company it tends to keep give Frye’s arguments an ongoing significance. However, the danger of Frye’s literary hermeneutics of the Bible is that, having rejected orthodox doctrine as the basis of interpretation, and having declared the irrelevance of the methods and findings of

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critical-historical scholarship for a literary reading, the Frygian interpreter is vulnerable to projecting his or her own values and conceptual assumptions into the biblical text. This is the besetting sin of liberal theology, and it is a point I will return to later. Furthermore, in the fields of both literary criticism and biblical interpretation, Frye’s hermeneutics seems to raise problems at the stage of application, in that its ethical implications are not always consistent with Frye’s own declared goals and values. In this response I will seek to sketch an account of the reasons for this inconsistency, drawing on the papers by Burgess, Demers, and Robins to consider how Frye’s view of the understanding and interpretation of the Bible might need to be modified. Margaret Burgess, Patricia Demers, and William Robins all suggest or imply limitations in Frye’s approach to the Bible that could be said to result from his model of biblical hermeneutics. Robins’s argument could be expressed in different terms by saying that Frye presupposes that the educated imagination is synonymous with the liberal imagination, since he optimistically assumes that literary experience is necessarily liberalizing, an assumption that, as Robins’s fine reading of Lawrence demonstrates, may be too sweepingly optimistic. Demers and Burgess, from quite different perspectives, look at the way that Frye’s reading of the Bible is conditioned by his assumptions about gender. Frye confidently identified nature as female and God as male, and could be vulgarly dismissive of attempts to rethink the traditional gendering of mythological and literary concepts and images. Burgess suggests that Frye does not succeed in viewing the Bible as a completely self-contained artifact, which has the further consequence, as she demonstrates, of making his discussion of gendered images in the biblical text open to question from the point of view of recent developments in the critical-historical scholarship that Frye sought to banish from his approach. By looking at some early modern women who interpreted the Bible from within a variety of Protestant traditions, Demers seeks to enlarge “the kaleidoscopic construct” of Frye’s biblical criticism “while extending and challenging its primary symbols” (99). Her goal is to draw on the particular female perspective in these interpreters to address a gap that Frye himself recognized in the study of biblical imagery and symbols. This way of relating the three papers to one another owes a considerable debt to Deanne Bogdan’s essay “The (Re)Educated Imagination.” Her struggle with the powerful influence of her intellectual mentor, and her articulation of a feminist response to Frye’s criticism, provide a valuable account of some of the limitations of his liberalism. I have thus taken my title from her description of the process whereby she moved from a first stage of discipleship to the principles of “the educated imagination,” to a second stage of separation from them, and finally to a third stage of return made possible by “reconfiguring them” (85). Burgess, Demers, and Robins all suggest or imply ways in which Frye’s approach can be reconfigured.

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Frye liked to describe himself—in part no doubt because it was a description that he knew would inflame some of his critics, combining as it did two of the most pejorative words in their vocabulary—as a “bourgeois liberal” (e.g., 1991:9). He certainly held a consistently liberal position about literary experience, arguing that books are never dangerous if they are read properly. He regarded literary experience as liberating and thought that humanistic education would always tend to develop liberal habits of thinking and behaving. This confidence in the educated imagination is at the basis of Frye’s refutation of ethical judgments about works of literature, and indeed of all value judgments, which he insisted were no business of the critic. Hence he could value as examples of significant metaphorical structures the works of writers whose ideological commitments he found distasteful and even abhorrent (e.g., Dante, Eliot, Pound, Yeats). He wrote in Anatomy of Criticism: It is an elementary axiom in criticism that morally the lion lies down with the lamb. Bunyan and Rochester, Sade and Jane Austen, The Miller’s Tale and The Second Nun’s Tale, are all equally elements of a liberal education, and the only moral criterion to be applied to them is that of decorum. (114; emphasis added)

No one would question that the two tales that Frye cites are part of the overall vision of The Canterbury Tales, though there is plenty of room to argue about whether The Parson’s Tale articulates the fundamental standard that underlies all of the other tales. Similarly, Rochester and Bunyan represent the two poles of Restoration culture, between which the liberal-minded might wish to find a middle way. With Sade the issue becomes more problematic, as one wonders whether he is, or should be, part of “culture.” Perhaps my doubt arises because in its biblical context, the idea of a lion lying down with a lamb is an image of the transcendence of violence and bloodshed, whereas in the context of Sade and Jane Austen it is hard to avoid the suggestion of Frye’s aggressively masculine sense of humour, contemplating with amusement the idea of the two writers in a sexual juxtaposition. Austen, of course, was far less tolerant of the figure of the rake, as several of her novels reveal. Without becoming an advocate of censorship, it may be possible to quibble with Frye’s use of the word “equally” and to suggest that his masculine viewpoint sometimes constitutes a blind spot in Frye’s liberal humanism. My own idea of liberal education would make far more room for Jane Austen than for Sade. Bogdan has her own list of problematic passages in Frye (92, 94n17)—to which Burgess adds one or two more examples (see, e.g., 116, 118–19)—and she argues against Frye that “literary experience could be negative as well as positive” (88). Such a questioning and qualifying of Frye’s liberalism as an adequate basis for biblical hermeneutics unites each of the three essays under consideration here. The

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need for such efforts is brought home poignantly by William Robins’s conclusion that Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod arrives at its “fascism” as “a result of adhering to the archetypal narrativity of the Christian Bible” (134; emphasis added). Frye tended, without thorough scrutiny, to associate this structure of thinking only with liberal creative freedom (Robins: 128). Frye was certainly a more robust liberal than Matthew Arnold, and he sometimes notes the lacunae in Arnold’s liberalism (e.g., Cayley: 117). Arnold ridicules the racial theories of Emile Burnouf in Literature and Dogma, but as Frye observed in a marginal annotation in his own copy of that work, “yet Arnold expresses a sneaking fondness for this sort of thing in, I think, Celtic Lit.” (Arnold, 1877:119; Frye is referring to Arnold’s collection of essays on Celtic literature, which sometimes indulge in speculation about racial characteristics: see Arnold, 1867). Frye regarded John Stuart Mill as a more genuine liberal than Arnold. Frye’s moments of unreflective masculinity are one weakness in his own liberalism; another may be the way that he was unwilling or unable to see—perhaps because of the very power of his own imaginative response to literature—that others could put literary texts to very different uses in a manner that could be resisted only by evaluative criticism. In this context, Arnold’s insistence on the critic’s task as “a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world” (1992:602) may be preferable to Frye’s rejection of the critical task of evaluation. I referred earlier to the susceptibility of liberal theology to becoming an expression of the fashionable ideas of the moment. In the nineteenth century, it was vulnerable to accommodation with racial theorizing, as a number of scholarly studies have demonstrated (e.g., Davies, 1975, 1980; Heschel) and as Frye implies in his marginal comment on Arnold’s Literature and Dogma. Robins notes a related case in his discussion of Lawrence’s fascistic reformulation of Christianity (128, 133–34). Typology separated from its original historical and doctrinal matrix is indeed a dangerous model for the interpreter. Robins suggests that Frye’s archetypal approach is less applicable to modernist fiction than the more novelistic approach to the Bible of interpreters like Robert Alter. It is interesting in this context that Frye was never very interested in the realist tradition in European fiction, and his major examples of figural typology come from poetry and romance. Robins’s discussion could be developed further by a consideration of James Joyce, whose poetics of course owe a great debt to the Catholic sacramental tradition, even though he rejected its doctrinal basis. Joyce’s fiction is full of parodic typology, but it is also dense with realistic detail of a kind that relates it more to the “novelistic narrativity” that Robins associates with Alter’s commentary on the Jewish scriptures and that could as well be associated with Frank Kermode’s literary analysis of the Gospels. (Kermode includes a discussion of Ulysses as well as the Gospel narratives in The Genesis

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of Secrecy: see 49–73).) In terms of the political and ethical implications of interpretive methods, Joyce’s cosmopolitan liberalism makes a revealing contrast to Lawrence’s misogyny and fascism. Bogdan refers to Frye’s mistrust of ordinary experience, which she suggests is the basis of his desire to separate the literary universe from the historical world (86). She writes that “For all of Frye’s ardency about the educated imagination as ‘education for life,’ his literary epistemology, it seemed to me, posited a disembodied, certainly ungendered, reader” (87). Perhaps this is why he preferred literature whose difference from the world of lived experience was obvious, literature with an overt romance structure rather than realism. However, Frye’s writing is seldom as categorical as it might seem on a superficial reading, and Margaret Burgess’s close reading of The Great Code reveals a contradiction that allows a point of entry for historical scholarship and that in turn enables her to suggest a correction to Frye’s treatment of the female principle. Burgess notes that the metaphor of the double mirror is contradicted by the statement that “the Old Testament contains antitypes for which the prebiblical mythologies provide the types,” while the New Testament figures will themselves be types of “new, postbiblical antitypes” (104). The result of Burgess’s summary of scholarly investigation of prebiblical creation mythology is that Frye’s opposition, expressed in Blakean language, to worship of a female principle is rendered more problematic. Like Bogdan, Burgess identifies an alienation in Frye from bodily nature; her reconfiguration of Frye’s visionary reading of the Bible looks toward a reintegration of nature and spirit that “would be complemented by the reemergence of the Goddess-Woman” (122). Patricia Demers begins with Frye’s own comment on the paucity of effort “to put into critical language the mythical and metaphorical relations of the traditionally female symbols of the Bible” (Frye, 1990:203). She demonstrates that in the early modern period, which saw the defining examples of Protestant biblical commentary, a significant number of female interpreters were writing about the Bible from a variety of theological and social positions, and she suggests that their perspectives modify Frye’s schema of female symbols in the Bible. I am not sure that there is enough of a critical difference in the examples Demers quotes from early modern women to establish a new understanding of these symbols; what I was struck by in these examples was more the way that the female interpreters occupy similar theological and political positions to their male counterparts in the conflicts of the period. The tentativeness of Demers’s own language in her conclusion suggests that her main desire is to indicate a direction for further critical endeavour. The history of female interpretation of the Bible is certainly worth placing alongside the scholarly investigation of female figures in prebiblical religions as means of rethinking Frye’s biblical criticism.

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In interpreting the Bible, as in interpreting literature, there is no guarantee that a literary approach will produce a liberal or liberating experience. However, my reading of the papers by Burgess, Demers, and Robins suggests that such a result may be encouraged by means of three different reconfigurations of Frye’s biblical hermeneutics. Literary analysis of the Bible should be attentive to texture and idiosyncratic detail, learning from the poetics of the novel (e.g., Mikhail Bakhtin) and from the biblical studies of Robert Alter; it should also be open to critical and historical scholarship, as Burgess’s and Demers’s essays imply. Thirdly, Frye’s handling of female symbols needs to be rethought from a perspective that does not simply equate transcendence with masculinity and immanence with femininity. Frye sought in his work on the Bible and literature to combat literalism or fundamentalism and the social and personal anxieties he associated with that approach. In order to continue his imaginative revisioning of the Bible, those who look to him for guidance will have to be willing to modify his approach in the ways I have suggested. If they do not, the result may paradoxically reinforce the kind of unreflective reading Frye deplored. A literary reading of the Bible that is not attentive to texture and detail and that insists on the truth of the tale without attending to the complexity of the tale, and to what the tale really has to say about, for example, the female figures and symbols it employs, could equally be the product of a blinkered literalism or the projection of some sort of totalizing ideology. To preserve Frye’s liberal ideal it may therefore be necessary to incorporate some of the methods and perspectives he ruled out in his own writing on the Bible.

WORKS CONSULTED Aquinas, St. Thomas 1992 “From the Nature and Domain of Sacred Doctrine.” Pp. 117–19 in Critical Theory since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. Rev. ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Arnold, Matthew 1867 On the Study of Celtic Literature. London: Smith, Elder. 1877

Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible. New York: Macmillan. (Frye’s copy with his marginal annotations, in the Northrop Frye Collection, E. J. Pratt Library, Victoria College, no. 334.)

1992

“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Pp. 592–603 in Critical Theory since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. Rev. ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bogdan, Deanne 1994 “The (Re)Educated Imagination.” Pp. 84–96 in The Legacy of Northrop Frye. Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cayley, David 1992 Northrop Frye in Conversation. Toronto: Anansi. Davies, Alan T. 1975 “The Aryan Christ: A Motif in Christian Anti-Semitism.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 12:569–79. 1980

“Racism and German Protestant Theology: A Prelude to the Holocaust.” Pp. 20–34 in Reflections on the Holocaust: Historical, Philosophical, and Educational Dimensions. Ed. Irene G. Shur, Franklin H. Littell, and Marvin E. Wolfgang. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 450. Philadelphia: AAPSS.

Frye, Northrop 1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1982

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic Press.

1990

Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” Markham: Viking.

1991

The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

2000

“The Double Mirror.” Pp. 83–90 in Northrop Frye on Religion. Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. Vol. 4 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Heschel, Suzanne 1994 “The Image of Judaism in Nineteenth-Century Christian New Testament Scholarship in Germany.” Pp. 215–40 in Jewish-Christian Encounters over the Centuries: Symbiosis, Prejudice, Holocaust, Dialogue. Ed. Marvin Perry and Frederick Schweitzer. New York: Peter Lang. Kermode, Frank 1979 The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

New and Recent Titles

Other Ways of Reading

The Labour of Reading

African Women and the Bible

Desire, Alienation, and Biblical Interpretation

Musa W. Dube, editor This volume of essays, the first of its kind, highlights some of the unique ways in which African women read and interpret the Bible in their diverse historical and cultural contexts. Featured methods include storytelling, postcolonial feminist reading, womanhood/ bosadi and womanist reading, divination, and reading from and with grassroots communities. Responses locate the collection along a spectrum of scholarship including that of Western feminists, African women theologians, and African male theologians. This book, originating from the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, is a significant contribution to global biblical scholarship and hermeneutical reflection. Code: 060807 264 pages 2001 Paper: $24.95ISBN: 1-58983-009-1

Fiona C. Black, Roland Boer, and Erin Runions, editors How might the task of reading the Bible be regarded as labor? What happens when biblical texts are read in ways that highlight the work of interpretation? The Labour of Reading provides a collection of new and distinct readings of biblical texts. Gathered to honor the scholarship and teaching of Robert Culley, these essays seek to carry on his legacy. Covering both the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, they range through cultural and literary studies, philosophy, sociology and feminism, among other disciplines. The unifying motif is the need to work hard at and labor with the text: the legacy of Robert Culley. Code: 060636 336 pages 1999 Paper: $30.00ISBN: 0-88414-011-3

Society of Biblical Literature • P.O. Box 2243 • Williston, VT 05495-2243 Phone: 877-725-3334 (toll-free) or 802-864-6185 • Fax: 802-864-7626 Online catalog: http://sbl-site.org/Publications/catalog Shipping and handling extra

THE “SOMETHING MORE” IN THE BIBLE: A RESPONSE TO ROBERT ALTER, DAVID GAY, AND MICHAEL DOLZANI Robert Cording College of the Holy Cross

In his review of The Literary Guide to the Bible for The New Yorker, George Steiner warned against the separation “made in the name of current rationalism and agnosticism” between a “theological religious experiencing of biblical texts and a literary one” (97). Steiner argued instead for writing that would help us “to understand in what ways the Bible and the demands of answerability it puts upon us” (96–97) are unlike other literary texts. Northrop Frye’s The Great Code and the two books that followed, Words with Power and The Double Vision, all address the complicated problems of “answerability” that the Bible presents to its readers. Although Frye explicitly states that his approach to the Bible is that of a literary critic, and although these works certainly provide a critical apparatus for recognizing relationships between Western literary texts and the Bible, Frye’s task from the outset has been to establish how the Bible is “more” than a work of literature, “whatever more means” (1982:xvi). My response to articles by Robert Alter, David Gay, and Michael Dolzani will keep the complex nature of that “more” as its focus. In all three essays the significant issue is how the Bible is encountered by Frye. For Alter, Frye’s penchant for systematizing ignores the disparate, concrete particulars of individual texts and what David Damrosch, in his book The Narrative Covenant, has called the Bible’s “purposeful patchwork” (324); Gay’s and Dolzani’s essays look at the purgatorial journey that Frye undertakes as he tries to re-create the Bible both as a myth and as a myth to live by. For Frye, the way in which the Bible is “more” than a work of literature begins with his concept—certainly not new with him, as Frye acknowledges—of “metaphorical literalism” (1991:69; called “literary literalism” in Words with Power). Frye understands the paradoxical nature of his claim. While the narrative the Bible tells, stretching from creation to apocalypse, is literal and true, the true literal meaning is imaginative and poetic. Frye is quick to point out the usual fallacy of what is meant by literally true, namely, what is “descriptively accurate” (1991:14). Literalism of this kind is what Paul calls the letter that kills (2 Cor 3:6). Such literalism is simply false and connected, for Frye, to the worst elements of organized religions—bigotry, cruelty, intolerance, hatred. While not denying the historicity of biblical

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events and persons, what Frye calls for, then, is an “imaginative literalism” that recognizes that the “literal basis of faith in Christianity is a mythical and metaphorical basis, not one founded on historical facts or logical propositions” (1991:17). For Frye, myth and metaphor are a “primitive form of awareness, established long before the distinction of subject and object became normal” (1990:xviii). Just as myth is neither historical nor antihistorical, but counterhistorical, metaphor is neither logical nor illogical, but counterlogical. As such, the question we should bring to biblical stories is not the objective—did the events happen just as we are told?—but rather: how do we stand with respect to the events’ revelation of God? If we approach the Bible solely as literary critics, then its stories, no matter how beautifully wrought in terms of their imaginative vision and formal properties, are “simply stories, considered with the suspended judgment of the imagination without relation to the area we vaguely describe as truth” (1991:76). Thus beyond the usual metaphorical-literal level where stories are only stories, there is for Frye the “polysemous” nature of the Bible in which the unity of the biblical stories form a myth to live by, “transformed from the kind of story we can construct ourselves to a spiritual story of what has created and continues to re-create us” (1991:77). I want, for a moment, to read Frye’s ideas of “metaphorical literalism” in the context of Gerald Bruns’s book Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern, specifically his chapter on Luther. Luther argues first and foremost that Scripture “does not tolerate the division of letter and Spirit” (Bruns: 144). Spirit here means something like a mode of being, a state of living in God’s Spirit, as opposed to an intellectual state “of conceptual agreement with what the text says (not a philosophical state of knowledge or theological state of doctrinal assent).” As Luther put it, he did not wish to understand Scripture by his spirit or others’ but solely by its spirit. Scripture, then, is not “so much an object of understanding as a component of it; what one understands when one understands the Scriptural texts is not anything conceptual and extractable as a meaning” (Bruns: 144–45). What does one understand? The life of faith that seeks understanding as informed by the Scriptures. As in Augustine, one must already have understood a text (in the sense of that which it teaches) to be able to interpret its language. As Bruns formulates it, the hermeneutical situation that Luther describes is one in which “the reader is not so much the interpreter as the interpreted” (146). This is Luther’s great reform: to encounter the Bible in the spirit in which it was written, an encounter that is not concerned with deciphering a text’s meanings but with “the event of the interpretation itself.” Scripture must be experienced. The reader cannot be a “disengaged rational subject” (149). As opposed to the idea of a text as a purely analytical object on which interpretation is done, Luther posits a text that inscribes itself in the reader. In Frye, too, the text is something that confronts the reader: “sooner or later we have to study . . . our

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own experience in reading it” (1990:75); the reader in Frye is exposed to the Bible, made vulnerable by a God who “drowns the world in a fit of anger and repeoples it in a fit of remorse,” a trickster-God who calls all our human formulations into question. Frye’s “double vision” entails both a growing insight into our conditioned limits and the growing ability (as we are transformed by the biblical myth) to separate our human mirror of God from God’s reality (1991:83). Frye’s “double vision” requires, as it did for Luther, the rehabilitation of Scripture as a “pneumatic text” in which the meaning of a word “is its force” (Bruns: 147). While the Bible is written in the language of literature, in the language of myth and metaphor, its language, according to Frye, is intended to convey a vision of spiritual life; its “metaphors become, as purely literary metaphors cannot, metaphors to live in” (1991:17). As Gabriel Josipovici puts it in The Book of God, the Bible wants to “draw me out of myself” (14). Understandably, then, Frye’s great hope in both The Great Code and Words with Power is that we have come to a new phase in our understanding of language and, subsequently, are in a position to restore some of the original resources of language in which words were “words with power.” More than anything else, Frye seeks to understand the linguistic idiom of the Bible, a form of expression for which he adopts the term kerygma. Kerygma is a mode of rhetoric that must be seen, Frye says, from “both of its two aspects—metaphor and concern” (1982:29). “Concern” is best glossed by Frye: “in concerned address a much more comprehensive response from all aspects of the personality is called for” (1982:29). Though it would have been helpful if Frye had written more specifically about his understanding of kerygma, what Bruns says about Luther’s hermeneutics might be applied here: it “presupposes a relationship to the Scripture that is not a grammarian’s relationship to a textual object but that of a listener to a voice” (147). To restore our sense of “words with power” requires an experiencing of metaphor and myth that is not an intellectual hunt for archetypes and typologies (though Frye’s charts may sometimes make it feel this way to readers like Alter), but rather a radically metaphorical disclosure of the “truth” of the biblical narrative. To help with this restoration, Frye, employing a schema from Vico’s New Science, divides the history of Western langage into three phases. The first phase is poetic or metaphorical discourse in which the later distinction between figured and literal language hardly exists. The second phase (from around the time of Plato) is called the metonymic phase by Frye; in this phase words become the outward expression of inner thoughts, and metaphorical discourse becomes subordinate to the truth of metonymic or conceptual discourse. The third phase dates from the sixteenth century; in this phase both metaphorical and metonymic language are subject to the truth of language that is primarily descriptive of an objective natural order.

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Frye lays out this schema for two reasons: our understanding of the Bible today depends in part on understanding how the Bible has been interpreted within a tradition in which the criteria for truthfulness have privileged discursive discourse over metaphorical discourse. The result is that we are left with myths that have become purely literary. Though Frye admits that much of the Bible is “contemporary with the second-phase separation of the dialectical from the poetic” (1982:27), he argues that the Bible’s origins lie in the first, metaphorical phase. Biblical language never falls “wholly into the conventions of the second phase” because there are “no true rational arguments in the Bible” (1982:27). For Frye biblical Hebrew is an “obsessively concrete language” that eschews abstraction; and the New Testament, despite its late date, shares this attitude toward language. Such concreteness is a trait, Frye argues, that belongs to the metaphorical phase of language. Once we recognize the Bible’s essentially metaphorical language despite the “domination” (1982:23) of the later phases, we can begin the arduous task of finding our way back to a God who “may not be so much dead as entombed in a dead language” (1982:18). Thus Frye’s task in The Great Code and Words with Power is to restore the mythical and metaphorical basis of the Bible (and in so doing restore, paradoxically, the literal basis of faith). With this admittedly simplified background in mind, I will turn now to Robert Alter’s essay, “Northrop Frye between Archetype and Typology.” Alter’s books, especially The World of Biblical Literature, are interested in the same question as Frye—how is the Bible a unique work of literature? Alter and Frye agree that historical criticism of the Bible is rooted “in a view of truth associated with nineteenth century positivism that does not sit well with any sense of the moral or spiritual authority of Scripture” (Alter: 203). Alter and Frye, that is, both share the same interest in closing the distance between reader and text that I spoke about earlier. Finally, Alter’s interest in bringing the tools of literary analysis to bear on the Bible, like Frye’s, is in the service of “opening ourselves to something that deserves to be called their authority, whether we attribute that authority solely to the power of the human imagination or to a transcendent source of illumination that kindled the imagination of the writers to express itself through . . . particular literary means” (Alter: 204, emphasis mine). But here is also the place where the two part company. Alter, who, perhaps, more than any recent writer on the Bible has taught us how to attend to the poetic and narrative properties of the Bible, is not only content with that “or” but is highly suspicious of anyone who would push for “more.” As Alter concludes: “the covenantal urgency of the biblical writers impelled them on a bold and finally impossible project: they sought to use literature to go irrevocably beyond itself” (46). To Alter, Frye’s “imaginative refurbishing of Christian typology as a beautifully interlocked system of symmetrically arranged archetypes,”

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proves only that the Bible is an “extreme and exemplary instance of literature in general” (26). We might say that, in the end, Alter is comfortable with interpretation that attends with acumen and a generous spirit to the infinite particularities of the Bible’s poetic and narrative authority. Frye, on the other hand, despite the systematizing that Alter limits him to, wants to attend to the “event of the interpretation itself.” As Bruns says about Luther’s hermeneutics: “interpretation is an event that moves in two directions. It is not possible to interpret a text without being interpreted by it in turn” (156). It is this latter aspect that Alter ignores in Frye or at least does not see as the motivating force of his “systematizing.” In this essay for Semeia, Alter renews this earlier suspicion. He takes issue with what he sees as Frye’s premises in The Great Code: one, that Frye’s “conception of the insulating function of mythology is directly linked to Frye’s polemic stress on the autotelic character of literature”; and two, that the Bible’s “self-referential literary character” is made evident by what Frye cites as “the predominance of metaphor and other kinds of figuration in the Bible” (10). In the first instance, Alter seems to ignore the context of Frye’s remarks regarding mythology. Frye makes his remark about the “imaginative insulation of myth” (1982:37) in the context of explaining why we cannot talk about the Bible in simple either/or terms (history or fiction). Myth is neither history nor fiction; mythic knowledge is always a matter of recognition—myths’ proclamation, as Frye says, is not “so much this is true as this is what you must know” (1990:31). Myths are stories that “tell a society what is important for it to know” (1982:33). Myth’s haunting power for Frye is linked to the way it is not a literal explanation of something in the world (this is why he stresses what Alter quotes about the “imaginative insulation” of myths that separate us from the environment), but an expression of the primitive, in the sense that the primitive expresses a “fundamental and persisting link with reality” (1982:37). Frye situates both his Viconian schema and his discussion of myth and metaphor beside the debate between Peacock and Shelley. Frye agrees with Shelley’s claim that “ ‘progress’ is always a progress toward disaster,” since such progress ignores what poets have always known: “every mind is a primitive mind” (1982:37). The Viconian schema of the metaphorical-metonymic-descriptive sequence is provided for us so that we recognize that such a sequence is not progress, but rather a means of occluding the very nature of metaphor and myth, of poetry and the arts of which mythology is a part. As Frye points out, “literature always assumes, in its metaphors, a relation between human consciousness and its natural environment that passes beyond—in fact, outrages and violates—the ordinary common sense based on a permanent separation of subject and object” (1990:71). Although Alter charges Frye with directing us toward his “system of language” (10), Frye is, in fact, directing us precisely toward what Alter realizes is the great gift of metaphor: to

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“defamiliarize” so that the world can be seen again in its uniqueness. Frye notes the creative and imaginative quality of myth because he sees a link between myth and the primary function of literature: “to keep re-creating the first or metaphorical phase of language” (1982:23). In Frye, literary history is the constant attempt on the part of poets to restore our original relationship to what Wallace Stevens called the “muddy center” (1954:383). As Frye understands, the poet’s task is always, as Eliot said, to purify the language of the tribe so that we might see what kind of world we are really in, so that we might have, as Stevens said, the “intensest rendezvous with the world” (1954:524). Myths are autonomous, then, because they are creative and imaginative, because their truth is inside their verbal structure, not outside it. But this is only half the picture, as Frye well knows. Just as the oratorical style of the Bible united the poetic and the concerned for Frye, myth also unites both its poetic aspect as a story with its social function. In both its poetic and its social aspects, myth is a “program of action for a specific society.” More importantly for Frye, in both these aspects myth “relates not to the actual but to the possible.” Myth and the mythic mode of the Bible are crucial because they keep confronting us with fundamental realities that are not of our own making. To move toward the “possible” involves, as Frye says, seeing “an element of illusion in what is really there, and something real in fantasies about what might be there instead.” It is here that the imaginative and the concerned “begin to unite” (1982:50). Alter seems to collapse Frye’s understanding of how the imaginative and the concerned are always united in the linguistic idiom of the Bible. Summing up his reading of the David and Bathsheba story, Alter states this objection against Frye: This verse is, of course, a verbal artifact, which is part of the much larger verbal artifact that is the David story, but it presents itself not as a linguistic gesture ultimately pointing to itself, or to the system of language through which it is enacted, but as a factual report of historical events that is also a strong moral and political interpretation of them, which is to say a kind of intervention in them. Frye’s notion of literature, and of the literature of the Bible, as an autotelic activity thus runs directly against the grain of the whole literary enterprise of the Bible, which aspires to make a profound difference in history and in the realization of humanity’s potential by offering a strong representation of their actual unfolding. (11–12)

Alter’s statement here, as I’ve tried to demonstrate, misrepresents the reasons behind Frye’s argument for why myths should be seen, in part, as autotelic (i.e., because they are not literally true in the sense of “descriptively accurate” and lose their power if we’re entrapped by seeing them as stories that we have grown beyond intellectually). More importantly, Frye

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would agree with Alter’s key point regarding the literary enterprise of the Bible: “to make a profound difference in history and in the realization of humanity’s potential.” Here’s Frye: “The general principle involved here (the kernel of actual history in biblical stories) is that if anything historically true is in the Bible, it is there not because it is historically true but for different reasons. The reasons have presumably to do with spiritual profundity or significance” (1982:40). Frye’s point is simply that proving the historicity of biblical passages is a fruitless enterprise when weighed against their significance as stories that teach us more about the “possible” than the actual. Alter’s objections to Frye have mostly to do with Alter’s limiting sense of what Frye means by metaphor and the metaphorical phase of language in his Viconian schema. Metaphor for Frye is the vehicle for those dual aspects—the poetic and the concerned—of myth. For Frye, remember, the letter of the biblical text is radically metaphorical. Alter seems to confuse the Bible’s use of individual literary metaphors with Frye’s idea that the origins of the Bible’s mode of discourse are metaphorical (see Alter’s discussion of the Esau and Jacob, David and Bathsheba passages). Alter’s argument against Frye revolves around this question: “is it true that metaphor and other kinds of figuration are predominant in the Bible [Frye’s claim, according to Alter]?” (10). Alter’s answer is emphatically no; in fact, “in the predominant prose narratives of the Hebrew Bible, only the most sparing use is made of either metaphor or simile” (11). True enough, and again Frye would not disagree. But when Frye argues that the Bible’s origins are connected to the metaphorical phase of language, he is not talking about the use of metaphors (of figurations that embellish a narrative), but rather pointing out the Bible’s “mode of symbolization” (see James Kee’s discussion of Frye’s understanding of metaphor in his essay included in this volume [85]). It is not important that the David and Bathsheba story contains very little figuration; what is important is the way even the historically rooted David story is itself radically metaphorical in its complex articulation. “Radically” because the story is not simply a part of some self-reflective system of interlocking archetypes that Alter would limit Frye to, but rather a story that contains the power to interpret us, to make us see past our own conditioned limits and help us toward a truer understanding of the mysteries of our living and dying. While it may be true that Frye looks for patterns and that such a search is less interested in the representation of individual character (19), Frye’s goal is much closer to Alter’s than Alter realizes. Frye, too, wants to address the “unfathomable individuality” (19) of David. Far from disappearing in a “fog of archetypes” (20), David and the events of David’s life as seen by Frye provide a metaphorical schema within which we try to make sense of our own lives. What is important is the way David’s and our self-identity is interrupted by the unfolding of the story’s events.

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Because Alter sees Frye as interested only in a “self-reflexive system encompassing a sequence of mythological patterns” (14), he seems to sell Frye short at every opportunity. Which is to say, Alter continually trots out criticisms of Frye that have been around since Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. The Frye that encounters the Bible as the key to freedom, both spiritual and social, is too easily dismissed as a product of his seminary training. I want to end my discussion of Alter by looking at the way he criticizes Frye’s reading of the book of Job. Once again Alter accuses Frye of sacrificing the particular for a pattern, in this case a mythological image (of the Leviathan) for a “mythic plot nowhere in evidence in the biblical text” (17). Here is Alter’s main objection: “from Frye’s archetypal perspective, however, Leviathan is identified with the ‘realm of the demonic’ ” rather than, as Alter points out, a “manifestation of the fierce and unfathomable beauty of God’s creation that the mere human Job cannot grasp” (17). Proof that Leviathan is identified with the realm of the demonic for Alter lies in this passage of Frye’s: “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” (1982:195). Let me say first that I agree completely with Alter’s reading of the Leviathan figure and with his reading of the Job story. But I think his reading of Frye takes the spirit of Frye’s comment for the letter. Just before the passage from Frye (“Job lives in. . . ”) that Alter quotes as his proof, Frye returns the reader to the biblical account of creation, which he says is “ambiguous in the sense that darkness and chaos are first outside the created order and are then dialectically incorporated into it” (1982:194). Frye goes on to say, “hence Leviathan and Satan may be thought of either as enemies of God outside his creation, or as creatures of God within it.” Then Frye concludes: “In the Book of Job . . . the latter perspective is adopted. Satan the adversary is a tolerated visitor in God’s court, and Leviathan is a creature of whom God seems to be rather proud” (1982:194–95, emphasis mine). Thus, while Leviathan may be associated with the “realm of the demonic,” Leviathan in Job, for Frye as well as Alter, is a creature within God’s creation. When we turn to the passage quoted above (“Job lives. . . ”) in this context, we realize that Frye cannot be saying what Alter accuses him of saying—that the “world of time and space [in Job] is dominated by demonic powers” (14). Frye is not looking for a mythological plot where there is none, but rather trying to frame the Job story in terms that Alter would be quite comfortable with: the “enemy territory” is the “arbitrary process of nature and fortune” that Frye refers to earlier in the same paragraph (1982:195). Job, as Frye well understands, is “groping toward a realization that no causal explanation of his alienated plight was possible” (1982:196)—what Alter refers to as the “impenetrable contradictions of violence and beauty” (17). The “belly of the leviathan” (note the lowercase “l”) is not the Leviathan that

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God reveals to Job in the whirlwind but “symbolically” the alienated state of Job’s “egocentric perception” before God speaks from the whirlwind. Caught within the legal framework of cause-and-effect logic, Job does indeed belong at first to “the endless extent of time and space.” The book of Job also figures prominently in David Gay’s essay, “ ‘The Humanized God’: Biblical Paradigms of Recognition in Frye’s Final Three Books.” Part of Gay’s concern is with the way the book of Job, as Frye himself says in The Great Code, functions as a kind of paradigm of the U-shaped narrative of the Bible. In addition, Gay wants to situate Frye’s reading of Job, and the Bible in general, alongside William Blake’s. Gay’s focus is the way Frye applies Aristotle’s concept of recognition and Blake’s exhortation to his readers to “actualize his or her divine humanity” to a biblical context whereby the reader becomes an active participant in the Bible’s vision of a “humanized” God. The “humanized God” of Gay’s title is the final section title of chapter 4 of Frye’s last book, The Double Vision. To Gay, Frye’s humanized God is identical “with a release of human imaginative power” (39) and the actualization of one’s own divine humanity. Finally, Gay locates the humanized God within Frye’s social vision of the “educated imagination” in which the “emancipation of scripture” (43) (from the wrong forms of literalism) is part of criticism’s “work of transforming and renovating society” (39). Three biblical narratives act as paradigms for the humanized God: Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac; Genesis 32, Jacob’s struggle with the angel; and the book of Job. Gay argues that in these three paradigmatic biblical stories, the humanized God is “not an object of sense perception but the perceptual power of the creative imagination itself, a condition that Frye and Blake equate with the term ‘vision’” (40). “Vision” here is related to a shift in the “cognitive disposition of the reader from passive receptor to active participant” (40). The question of course is how the reader’s creative imagination is awakened and how one’s “vision” escapes the charges of being personal and solipsistic. In what to me is the weakest part of Gay’s essay, Gay struggles to connect the process of Albion’s awakening in Blake (the seven attempts made by God to awaken Albion) to the seven phases of revelation in The Great Code. The aim here, I take it, is to demonstrate how a kind of Coleridgean Primary Act of the Imagination has to occur if we are, like Albion, to escape the “continuum of fallen history” (41). The problem is how this process of awakening occurs: through a “progression of antitypes” at one moment, through a “process of dialectal tension” at another (41–42). The process itself is never adequately explained. Similarly, the distinction that Gay draws between a “sequence” of phases that is not progressive but creates “a wider and clearer perspective” (41) remains equally unsatisfying. But when Gay turns to the biblical paradigms, the essay reaches firmer ground. Gay rightly sets these three stories in the context of Frye’s effort in

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his last three books to distinguish between “divine and demonic characteristics in the human perception of God” (44). This effort is connected, as I mentioned earlier, to Frye’s “double vision,” which entails the recognition of our own “conditioned limits” and a separating of our human mirror of God from God’s reality. As Gay points out, this process of “purifying the divine image” is connected to the way these paradigmatic Bible stories exhibit the three levels Frye spoke of in connection with Milton’s Paradise Regained: demonic parody, redemptive power, and apocalyptic vision. While Gay adequately explains these stages as they are seen in the stories of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the angel, and, later in the essay, in the story of Job, his essay veers away somewhat from the central issue: how the demonic level is connected to our imprisonment in what Frye calls our single vision that “sees in him (God) the reflection of human panic and rage, its love of cruelty and domination, and, when it accepts such a God, calls on him to justify the maintaining of these things in human life” (1991:83). The demonic state of being is always connected to a lack of awareness of our own “conditioned limits.” We see, as Job first saw, a God who should be (we think) but is not acting according to human standards of justice. That God of course is what Frye calls the “human mirror.” The redemptive level cannot begin until we allow ourselves to be questioned, until we run up against what cannot be explained by any human formulation. As Simone Weil understands, the “contradictions the mind comes up against—these are the only realities: they are the criterion of the real” (151). When contradictions are experienced at the very depths of our being, according to Weil, “it is the cross.” The cross, where the dying of our human understanding of God takes place, is the threshold of the apocalyptic state or what Frye sometimes calls the “ecstatic” state and is linked to his “double vision” in which we recognize at last, as Job recognized, we have taken the “face of God in vain” (1991:83). The strength of David Gay’s essay lies in the way he sees, as Alter does not, what lies behind all of Frye’s charts, graphs, and comparative tables. Gay recognizes how Frye’s final books go together quite well, and eloquently: The Great Code extends the Bible in time through a horizontal typological sequence from creation to apocalypse; Words with Power extends the Bible in space through a vertical survey of imagery from the furnace to the mountain. . . . The Double Vision identifies . . . the crises in language, nature, time, and ultimately in the human perception of God . . . that create the conditions of recognition. (54–55)

He recognizes as well the relationship between “perception and interpretation” that underlies Frye’s “journey of understanding” as a reader of biblical texts. My complaint is that in tracing all the connections between Frye and Blake (which is clearly important in and of itself), Gay tends to collapse the

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purgatorial difficulty of Frye’s journey. To my mind, Gay’s humanized God is too easily identified with the human. Or to put it another way, he doesn’t maintain the “dialectic of Word and Spirit” that Michael Dolzani writes so brilliantly about in his essay, “The Ashes of the Stars: Northrop Frye and the Trickster-God.” Dolzani writes that Frye “began his career identifying with the Romantic revolutionary solution of Blake, who rejected the negative trickster-God as a symbol of false authority, and found the true trickster deity in the creative spirit of humanity.” If I have read Gay correctly, this identification is pretty much maintained by his essay. Dolzani, and I agree here, posits a different late Frye, one who “supplements such a solution with the vision of a positive trickster-God as a mysterious Other who may liberate us by breaking through the egocentric limitations of our own ambitions and desires” (59). It is this Other that breaks through our “egocentric limitations” that I was hoping to catch in my placement of Frye alongside Weil rather than Blake. Dolzani is alive to an aspect of Frye that Alter, in his stress on Frye the systematizer, ignores: that despite the impulse for unity in Frye, Frye’s unity does not “unfold,” as James Kee notes in this volume, “without a pole of indeterminate Two-ness” (85). Metaphor and mythical language are at the heart of Frye’s reading of the Bible because they are the only mode of language that says “both ‘is’ and ‘is not’ ” (1990:109) simultaneously. Unity in Frye is never synonymous with uniformity, as Frye points out in his discussion of a God who is “irascible and whimsical,” (1990:108), the trickster-God that Dolzani defines with an oft-repeated passage of Frye (1991:74–75 and 1990:106–7): What, for example, are we to do with a God who drowns the world in a fit of anger and repeoples it in a fit of remorse, promising never to do it again (Gen 6:11); 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. . . ? (62)

As Dolzani nicely puts it: “if you have such a God on your hands, you are going to have to struggle.” The struggle in Frye, as Dolzani understands, is “with the Word in an attempt to re-create both its aspects: as text and as vision of God” (62). Such a struggle involves what Heidegger called “undergoing an experience of language.” Here is Heidegger in his essay “The Nature of Language”: “To undergo an experience with something—be it a thing, a person, or a god—means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us and transforms us.... [T]he experience is not of our own making” (57). The Bible, for Frye, is kergymatic because rather than persuade, it proclaims, taking “one out of oneself.” Frye goes on to note that such an “utterance” is “one charged with such intensity, urgency or authority that it penetrates the defenses of the

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human receiving apparatus and creates a new channel of response” (1990:111–12). As I tried to lay out in my turning to Bruns and Luther, the reading experience for Frye contains an experience of divestiture, or as Dolzani puts it “a purgatorial way of vacancy” (63). We must be divested of all our familiar human concepts that we rely on to make sense of the world. Dolzani quotes this notebook entry of Frye: “All reading begins in the revolt against narcissism: when a book stops reflecting your own prejudices, whether for or against what 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 and you are wrestling with an angel” (63). At the heart of Dolzani’s insight into Frye is the interrelationship between the way of vacancy (“the katabasis or descent into the ‘nothing’ ”), the “negation of a negation,” and the possible transformation that may take place with the vision of a mysterious Other who breaks through our egocentric limitations. The descent is into the dark side of the divine nature that we are forced to confront (if we can bear it) in the realities of loss that collapse all our illusions of presence. As Dolzani puts it in a beautifully worded paragraph: “He [God] takes away paradise from Adam and Eve, everything from Job, himself from Jesus, . . . Beatrice from Dante, Regina Olsen from Kierkegaard, the entire past from Marcel Proust, Helen Frye from her husband” (63). This descent may lead to the “negation of a negation” (68). Though we must be divested of our “conditioned limits” in the descent, divested of the mirror of God we create out of our needs and desires through a process of loss that leaves us exposed and vulnerable, this divestiture also makes it possible for the reader to be transformed. It makes possible the “negation of a negation,” which involves both a struggle against what Frye calls an “otherness, what the imagination is not” (Dolzani: 68) and an act of faith in the “creative process itself,” which commits itself “to a fictional and illusory model [see Dolzani’s little headnote (59) from The Thin Man] as a myth to live by” and goes on to “realize it in experience” (67). It makes possible what Wallace Stevens called “a revelation in words by means of words” (1942:33). Only in that emptied condition of being can the Spirit be experienced (as in Luther’s hermeneutics). Dolzani understands that the problem with what he calls the “Blakean phenomenological expansion” version is that, “without a contrary, it will result in what Jung called inflation, when the ego puffs itself up into a transcendental ego” (67). Instead, the ego, which cannot escape the world of subject and object, must be descended into. It must be experienced for what it produces: the darkness of corruption. The contrary to the ego is Spirit, which Dolzani defines this way: “not just human natural energy, Freud’s libido, Blake’s Orc, but rather the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, our deepest identity that is nevertheless also our identity with the divine” (69). Spirit, as Frye tells us, is “identified in the New Testament both

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with God and with the kind of understanding response it wants us to develop about God” (1990:24). Spirit, in the sense of this “understanding response,” is characterized by an intimacy in which understanding takes place, an intimacy whereby one’s self-identity is interrupted by the other (in Levinas’s sense). Dolzani’s essay catches what is most difficult in Frye. First, a tricksterGod is necessary because such a God, everywhere apparent in the Bible, crosses our own willful paths with a reality not of our making. Only such a God can explode the “impasses of our own contradictory and impossible desires” (72). Secondly, as Frye notes in Words with Power, to arrive at any kind of verbal understanding of the Bible we have to “go through the territory of literature” (101). The territory of literature, of course, is myth and metaphor, and the counterhistorical and counterlogical worlds they open. As Dolzani puts it, 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” (69). Thirdly, while the imaginative world of literature offers us a model of the essential freedom that is needed if the reader is to interpret and be interpreted by the text, the Bible is also a different kind of text: it is uniquely kerygmatic for Frye because it offers a myth to live by, a means of “reordering the direction of one’s life” (1990:117). If we “go through” the territory of literature, we also have to go “out of it on our way to something else” (1990:101). The “something else” is the genuinely kerygmatic which, Frye tells us, is the point at which “subject and object merge in an immediate verbal world, where a Word not our own, though also our own, proclaims and a Spirit not our own, though also our own, responds” (1990:118). At the end of Words with Power, Northrop Frye returns to the paradigmatic tale of Job. Job cannot see at first what kind of trial he is undergoing once everything is taken from him. Though Job mistakenly thinks his trial is one of accusation and judgment, his trial, Frye explains, is really one that is purgatorial, “a testing and refining operation” directed toward “what one can still be” (1990:310, 311). Our position as readers in relation to the Bible is also a purgatorial trial for Frye. The God we encounter there is, as in Job, beyond all else, utterly baffling, utterly outside our human ideas of what God should be. And so it must be. Explaining the phrase, “he that hath ears to hear, let him hear,” Frye notes that it is “not an elitism restricting the message only to those previously chosen to hear it,” but rather “an appeal to make one’s response depend as little as possible on the conventions of one’s conditioning and prejudices” (1990:110–11). Only with such “an understanding response” can the Bible begin to interpret us. When God speaks from the whirlwind, then, it is not to answer Job’s why but to direct him toward what he “can still be.” Of course, no objective answer could

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ever suffice: “the mysteries represented in metaphor by the first creation in Genesis, the mysteries of birth and death and ‘thrownness,’ can never be understood because they can never be objectified” (1990:312). And Job has to become an entirely different person—one who realizes that his question, “Why is this happening to me?” is entirely irrelevant. As Frye knows, Job has to become a “participant” in the initial creation that God re-presents to him. As we must. To Frye, the Bible’s mode of discourse creates such encounters. The force of its words exhorts us to “be/In the difficulty of what it is to be” (Stevens, 1954:381). More than anything else, Northrop Frye’s last three books try to clear a space in which we can experience the “double vision” for which the Bible prepares us: the recognition of our own limits of understanding; and, after that, “perhaps the terrifying and welcome voice” that “annihilate[s] everything we thought we knew, and restore[s] everything we never lost” (1990:313).

WORKS CONSULTED Alter, Robert 1992 The World of Biblical Literature. New York: Basic Books. Bruns, Gerald 1992 Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Damrosch, David 1987 The Narrative Covenant. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Frye, Northrop 1964 The Educated Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1982

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

1990

Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

1991

The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Heidegger, Martin 1971 “The Nature of Language.” Pp. 57–108 in On the Way to Language. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Josipovici, Gabriel 1988 The Book of God. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Steiner, George 1988 “The Good Books.” The New Yorker, January 11:94–98.

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Stevens, Wallace 1942 “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” Pp. 1–36 in The Necessary Angel. New York: Vintage. 1954

Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf.

Weil, Simone 1963 “Contradiction.” Pp. 151–56 in Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge.

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Stuart Lasine “Stuart Lasine skillfully guides his readers through the labyrinthine and largely unexplored tunnel system connecting the courts of the biblical kings and their heavenly counterpart, Yahweh, with those of a dizzying array of other monarchs across a broad range of cultures and historical epochs. In the process, our understanding of biblical kings, both human and divine, is deepened and thoroughly defamiliarized. This is a consummately literate and erudite study that richly repays reading and rereading.”—Stephen D. Moore, The Theological School, Drew University Code: 060640 360 pages 2001 Paper: $39.95ISBN: 1-58983-004-0

Mikhail Bakhtin and Biblical Scholarship An Introduction

Barbara Green Code: 060638 216 pages 2000 Paper: $24.95ISBN: 0-88414-020-2

Society of Biblical Literature • P.O. Box 2243 • Williston, VT 05495-2243 Phone: 877-725-3334 (toll-free) or 802-864-6185 • Fax: 802-864-7626 Online catalog: http://sbl-site.org/Publications/catalog Shipping and handling extra

Future Issues of Semeia Titles are descriptive rather than final, and the order given here is not necessarily definitive.

The Bible in Asian America Tat-siong Benny Liew, Chicago Theological Seminary Gale A. Yee, Board Editor

Levinas and Biblical Studies Tamara Eskenazi, Hebrew Union College Gary A. Phillips, University of the South

“Yet with a Steady Beat”: U. S. Afrocentric Biblical Interpretation Randall C. Bailey, Interdenominational Theological Center

Pregnant Passion: Gender, Sex, and Violence in the Bible Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, Graduate Theological Union

The Recycled Bible: Autobiographical Encounters with Biblical Afterlives Fiona C. Black, Mt. Allison University Stephen D. Moore, Board Editor

Semeia: An Experimental Journal for Biblical Criticism (ISSN 0095-571X) is published by the Society of Biblical Literature, 825 Houston Mill Road, Atlanta, GA 30329. Postage is paid at Atlanta, GA and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Society of Biblical Literature, P.O. Box 2243, Williston, VT 05495-2243.