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 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
2. Towards Reconciling the Solitudes
Joe Velaidum ........................................................................................23
3. “The Humanized God”: Biblical Paradigms of
Recognition in Frye's Final Three Books
David Gay ............................................................................................39
4. The Ashes of the Stars: Northrop Frye and the Trickster-God
Michael Dolzani ..................................................................................59
5. Northrop Frye and the Poetry in Biblical Hermeneutics
James M. Kee ........................................................................................75
6. Early Modern Women’s Words with Power: Absence and Presence
Patricia Demers....................................................................................89
7. From Archetype to Antitype: A Look at Frygian Archetypology
Margaret Burgess ..............................................................................103
8. Modeling Biblical Narrative: Frye and D. H. Lawrence
William Robins ..................................................................................125

RESPONSES

9. 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 David Jobling

Department of Comparative Literature St. Andrew’s College
University of California, Berkeley Saskatoon, SK S7N 0W3
Berkeley, CA 94720 CANADA
altcos@uclink4.berkeley.edu jobling@sask.usask.ca

Margaret Burgess James M. Kee

Northrop Frye Centre Department of English
Victoria College College of the Holy Cross
73 Queen’s Park Crescent Worcester, MA 01610
Toronto, ON M5S 1K7 jkee@holycross.edu
CANADA
margaret.burgess@utoronto.ca J. Russell Perkin
Department of English
Robert Cording Saint Mary’s University
Department of English Halifax, NS B3H 3C3
College of the Holy Cross CANADA
Worcester, MA 01610 russell.perkin@stmarys.ca
rcording@holycross.edu
William Robins
Patricia Demers Victoria College
Department of English University of Toronto
University of Alberta 73 Queen’s Park Crescent
Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5 Toronto, ON M5S 1K7
CANADA CANADA
patricia.demers@ualberta.ca william.robins@utoronto.ca

Michael Dolzani Joe Velaidum

Department of English
Baldwin-Wallace College
275 Eastland Road
Berea, Ohio 44130
mdolzani@stratos.net
Department of Religious Studies
McMaster University
Hamilton, ON L8S 4K1
CANADA
jvelaidum@continuum.org

David Gay
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5
CANADA
david.gay@ualberta.ca
 INTRODUCTION
James M. Kee
College of the Holy Cross

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

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2 semeia

For the difficulties faced by the participants in the conference are not new.
They are at least as old as the “aporias,” as Paul Ricoeur calls them, that have
plagued modern hermeneutics since its beginnings: tensions between roman-
tic and critical imperatives with which Schleiermacher and Dilthey wrestled
are still felt in the contrast between truth and method that Gadamer
addresses (Ricoeur: 43–62). Both of these imperatives arise from a common
experience: processes of historical change have left us feeling distanced, if not
outright alienated, from traditionally important texts. And both call upon us
to overcome, in some sense, this distance. The “romantic” imperative does so
by calling for an imaginative, intuitive act of understanding that would
restore fullness of life to the dead words of tradition. Those who would
respond to this imperative fear that forms of critique, left to themselves, will
ultimately “murder to dissect” (Wordsworth: 107, line 28). Those who would
respond to the “critical” imperative, however, see little hope for overcoming
historical distance in ways that are at best unsystematic and at worst
hopelessly subjective. They would overcome such distance by critically
reconstructing texts as historical objects. They see the need, furthermore, to
guard vigilantly against the blind spots in tradition.
Ricoeur, in his own work, has sought to find ways beyond such aporias
by establishing a dialogue, if not a dialectic, between these romantic and crit-
ical imperatives. There can be no question, ultimately, of responding to one
by excluding the other. Indeed, “distanciation,” according to Ricoeur, can
provide conditions for the critical development of sympathetic understand-
ing (131–44). The back-and-forth movement of thought that characterizes
such development has suggested the order in which the essays in this
volume are presented. The first essay is written by Robert Alter, one of the
few literary scholars who might be said to rank with Frye as a student of
the Bible and literature. Alter offers the most far-reaching critique of Frye’s
work contained in the volume, one that argues, finally, on both literary-
critical and historical-critical grounds, that Frye’s work ought not to
provide occasion for reviving an inherently “typological” style of reading
the Bible. Alter’s essay is followed by four essays that seek sympatheti-
cally to explicate or develop Frye’s insights. The first three of these deal
with Frye’s relationship to the Romantic revolution and especially to
Blake. Joe Velaidum seeks to bridge the gulf between Frye and historical-
critical scholars by demonstrating how Frye’s readings of the Bible are
informed by a Blakean epistemology. David Gay focuses similarly on the
presence of Blake in Frye’s work, demonstrating affinities between para-
digmatic moments of recognition in both Frye’s and Blake’s readings of
biblical books such as Job. Michael Dolzani argues that while the early
Northrop Frye may essentially have been a Blakean revolutionary, the late
Frye differentiates himself from the dilemmas of such a romanticism by
focusing upon the trickster-God found in stories such as Jacob’s and Job’s.
 kee: introduction 3

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 criti-
cal 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 expe-
riences in light of biblical paradigms and in doing so developed a rich
symbology that illuminated their status as women within their communi-
ties. 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 antici-
pates speculatively the reemergence of the “Goddess-Woman” as a
supplement to biblical figurations of the divine. William Robins offers a cri-
tique 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 sympa-
thetic explications of Frye’s project, Joe Velaidum’s and my own. General
Editor of Semeia and a long-time practitioner of experimental forms of bibli-
cal 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 expan-
sive approach to the Bible while still being critical of Frye’s desire for a
“transcendental perspective” that ultimately subordinates the “Old Testa-
ment” to the “New.” With Velaidum and me, Jobling calls for “a biblical
studies with a Frygian vision rather than a Frygian biblical studies.” J. Rus-
sell 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 imagina-
tion. 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 consid-
ers together the critique of Frye offered by Alter and the sympathetic
4 semeia

expositions found in the essays by Gay and Dolzani. Based upon his own
close reading of Frye’s last three books, Cording defends Frye against
Alter’s charges, claiming that they are based upon unsympathetic misread-
ings of Frye’s texts and intentions. Cording argues that Frye’s intentions
are, in fact, often deeply consonant with Alter’s own as these are presented
in Alter’s books on the Bible. He then analyzes Gay’s and Dolzani’s essays
in order to evoke the distinctly spiritual dimensions in Frye’s relationship
to the Bible—dimensions, he argues, that Alter misses.
Since the final page of this volume is not intended to mark the close of
the dialogue, I would like to raise some questions that might suggest ways to
continue the conversational inquiry. First, need the opposition between myth
and history be as sharply drawn as it often seems to be by both Frye and his
critics, or are there ways in which the opposition can be mediated? While
Frye counts himself among those who have come to think that “mythological
thinking cannot be superseded, because it forms the framework and context
for all thinking” (1990:xvi), it would be profoundly incorrect to say that his
work is not informed by critical-historical awareness. The meanings of
“myth” and “history” and their relationship to one another need to be
explored more critically. Secondly, just what is the identity of the Bible? Is it
the historically reconstructed collection of books that, as we now know, were
written over a period of more than a millennium under a variety of vastly
different circumstances? Or is its identity in some sense a function of the
ways in which these books have been shaped into canons and read within a
variety of traditions? How are these different identities that the Bible unques-
tionably has today to be related to one another? Finally, does the meaning of
“typology”—a figure central to Frye’s understanding of the Bible as well as
to the way in which his Christian tradition read the Bible for 1800 years—
necessarily imply a supersessionist understanding of the relationship
between the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible? Or does “typology,”
freed from the narrow confines of a certain type of exegetical practice and
understood as a poetic figure, harbor dialectical possibilities that might tran-
scend the supersessionism of Christian exegetical practice? Such dialectical
possibilities, I would argue, are implied by A. C. Charity’s analysis of “the
dialectic of Christian typology” in Events and Their Afterlife. I have entitled
this volume “Northrop Frye and the Afterlife of the Word” in the hope that
Frye’s understanding of typology need not necessitate supersessionism.
Northrop Frye never tried to hide the place from which his writings on
the Bible and literature emerged. He was not writing “a work of Biblical
scholarship” but “express[ing] only [his] own personal encounter with the
Bible” (1982:xi). At no point does he seek to speak “with the authority of a
scholarly consensus.” He also insisted, however, that any understanding of
the Bible would involve such a concerned personal dimension. The Bible,
finally, is about mysteries “that can never be objectified” (1990:312). We
 kee: introduction 5

must engage it as “participants” if we hope to understand; we cannot,

ultimately, be mere “observers” (1990:75). Frye devoted considerable imagi-
native 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 with-
out 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.
6 semeia

Ricoeur, Paul
1981 Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and
Interpretation. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Wordsworth, William
1965 Selected Poems and Prefaces. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
ESSAYS
 NORTHROP FRYE BETWEEN ARCHETYPE AND TYPOLOGY
Robert Alter
University of California, Berkeley

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

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

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10 semeia

sake” (57). He immediately goes on to propose that the Bible is just such a
structure, and he cites the predominance of metaphor and other kinds of fig-
uration in the Bible as evidence of its self-referential literary character. This
assertion, which is central to The Great Code, is vulnerable from two direc-
tions—from the point of view of literary theory and in regard to the
descriptive claim about the nature of the Bible. Let me comment briefly on
the former consideration, and then I shall go on to discuss in detail the
account Frye renders of the Bible, which strikes me as imaginatively con-
ceived, often beguiling, and based on a series of more or less systematic
misrepresentations of the biblical texts.
Is it true that metaphoric language implies linguistic self-referentiality,
directing us centripetally from world to text? Frye posits what he calls a
“descriptive phase of language” that “invokes the criterion of verifiable
truth,” in part by a renunciation of metaphor (58). It is not altogether clear
how this process of verification is to be implemented, and the very assump-
tion of verifiability—is that the only way we relate to reality?—seems oddly
scientistic. A plausible case can be made, with the greatest variety of exam-
ples from both ancient and modern literature, that metaphor, far from being
directed toward the system of language, is very often a more precise instru-
ment of reference to the world of nature and experience than ordinary,
nonfigurative language. When Job, in the great death-wish poem that pre-
cedes the cycle of debate with his three friends, says of the day on which he
was born, “let it not see the eyelids of the dawn” (3:9; this and all subsequent
translations from the Bible are my own), that striking metaphor, which will
be invoked again antiphonally by the Voice from the Whirlwind, is some-
thing other than an act of verbal self-reference. The first thin crack of light at
daybreak is associated analogically and also causally (because light rouses
the sleeper) with the fluttering open of the eyelids to take in the world.
There is a suggestive mirroring of the act of observation as the eyelids lift
and the world’s returning to visibility as the east begins to brighten. The
metaphor thus realizes—a Russian Formalist would say, defamiliarizes—
the visual aspect of dawn, an eternally repeated sight, and also endows it
with a palpable emotional or even kinesthetic valence as a moment of dis-
covery and renewal. It is all this that Job, longing for sightlessness and the
enveloping womb/tomb of oblivion, would like to blot out. Metaphor, in
this biblical instance and in countless others all the way to Dickens and Wal-
lace Stevens, is not a verbal structure existing for its own sake but a vehicle
for giving precise and arresting form to a certain vision of the world, to the
look and feel of the world as they impress the mind and, indeed, the body of
the experiencer.
In any case, is it true that metaphor and other kinds of figuration are pre-
dominant in the Bible? Metaphor is of course prominent in biblical poetry,
but poetry is clearly a minority genre in the Hebrew Bible, limited to Psalms,
 alter: northrop frye between archetype and typology 11

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

verbal artifact, which is part of the much larger verbal artifact that is the
David story, but it presents itself not as a linguistic gesture ultimately point-
ing to itself, or to the system of language through which it is enacted, but as a
factual report of historical events that is also a strong moral and political
interpretation of them, which is to say, a kind of intervention in them. Frye’s
notion of literature, and of the literature of the Bible, as an autotelic activity
thus runs directly against the grain of the whole literary enterprise of the
Bible, which aspires to make a profound difference in history and in the real-
ization of humanity’s potential by offering a strong representation of their
actual unfolding.
For the Bible’s commitment to the actual, Frye consistently substitutes
an adherence to the symbolic. Let me hasten to say that he effects this sub-
stitution with remarkable interpretive resourcefulness, a quality that is one
of the chief sources of what I have called the beguiling character of The Great
Code. Although his eye, as we shall see, is fixed on overarching schemata, his
lively and athletic intelligence does enable him on occasion to produce
evocative insights into particular biblical texts. He notes, for example, that
Lot’s wife is the sole instance in the Bible of a metamorphosis, triggered by
her looking back into what he designates archetypically as “a demonic
world.” Then, more interestingly, he goes on to observe: “The Bible . . . thinks
rather in terms of a future metamorphosis of nature in an upward direction,
when it will gain the power of articulateness instead of losing it,” and Isa
55:12 is happily cited as prooftext, with its imagery of the hills bursting out
in song and the trees of the field clapping their hands (97). There is a certain
homiletic touch in such reading because a poetic hyperbole used by
Deutero-Isaiah to express a grand vision of exultation in the return to Zion
is translated into a programmatic scheme of spiritual progress, part of a
large mythological plot informing the whole biblical corpus. The homily, in
any case, is an attractive one, proposing a suggestive horizon of meaning
beyond any that the anonymous poet of the Babylonian exile was likely to
have had in sight.
What is most original in The Great Code—and also, I would argue, what
is ultimately most misleading—is the fecundity with which it proffers ele-
gant schemata to explain the design and purpose of the Bible. The book
abounds in tables of sequenced phases of language-use, categories of
imagery, graphic illustrations of a proposed U-shaped pattern of the biblical
story as a whole and of its constituent parts, tabulated columns to correlate
Old Testament topography with New Testament spiritual process and
eschatology. The last of the schemata I have just mentioned is doubly symp-
tomatic of Frye’s whole project. It suggests the degree to which he embraces
a rather traditional Christian typological reading of the Old Testament as a
prefiguration of the New—a way of reading that leads him to many odd
claims about what is really going on in the Hebrew texts. Typology also
 alter: northrop frye between archetype and typology 13

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 sug-
gests 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 composi-
tional 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 audi-
ences. 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
14 semeia

imaginative use of antecedent literature, and one more or less expects that
the antecedent texts will often be drastically recontextualized, semantically
flipped. The business of the poet, after all, is not necessarily to provide a
persuasive or plausible reading of the earlier text but to use it as an expres-
sive resource for making new literature. We need have no qualms, then,
about Dante’s or Milton’s typological use of Hebrew Scriptures. It is quite
another matter when a critic purports to show us how the Bible works as lit-
erature, which is what Frye claims to do. The elision between the project of
poetry and the project of criticism is facilitated for him because, as we have
already noted, literature is conceived above all as a self-reflexive system
encompassing a sequence of mythological patterns. What The Great Code
makes clear is that the ultimate source of this comprehensive conception of
literature is the Christian typological reading of the Bible, which it seeks to
rehabilitate. (Frye’s early training as a seminarian appears to have had a
profound and enduring effect on his conception of both literature and the
Bible. The traditional apparatus of Christian typology has in turn been rein-
forced and complicated by Blake’s strong mythopoeic reading of Scripture.)
Frye prominently uses both “typology” and “archetype” as terms of analy-
sis, and in the course of The Great Code it becomes evident that the symbolic
equivalence between Old Testament type and New Testament antitype
offers him a model for the symbolic equivalence between different manifes-
tations of the same archetype in all literature. One may infer why he objects
to what he views as the peculiarity of Jung’s use of the concept of archetype.
For Frye, the archetype is not the product of a conjectured collective uncon-
scious but is rather a lexical item in the symbolic vocabulary of a literary
corpus, as each articulated image, figure, or event in the Old Testament is
seen to be reflected in the literary mirror of the New Testament. Beyond the
Bible, Western literature is seen as a quasi-biblical arrangement of mirroring
structures that exhibit elaborate symbolic equivalencies analogous to those
identified in Frye’s typological account of the Bible, as when he observes,
“the garden of Eden, the Promised Land, Jerusalem, and Mount Zion are
interchangeable synonyms for the home of the soul, and in Christian
imagery they are all identical in their ‘spiritual’ form . . . with the kingdom
of God spoken by Jesus” (171).
It is worth noting how uncompromising Frye’s typological language is.
These different moments of the biblical corpus in his formulation “are all
identical,” “interchangeable,” “synonyms” of each other. I shall argue that
just as languages have no true synonyms, there is no such thing as a truly
synonymous narrative event or literary articulation. The essential weakness
of Frye’s critical system, which is particularly transparent in his treatment of
the Bible, is that it is interested in the individual literary text chiefly as a con-
firmation of the general pattern, and hence it has no adequate instruments
of attention for the compelling or surprising peculiarities of the individual
 alter: northrop frye between archetype and typology 15

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

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 manifesta-
tion 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 identifi-
cation 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 Nin-
eveh 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 rep-
resents 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 com-
passion. 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
 alter: northrop frye between archetype and typology 17

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 def-
inite 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 consider-
able 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 princi-
pal 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 magnifi-
cently 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
18 semeia

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 concor-
dance 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 passage-
way 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 Ver-
sion) 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 fanci-
fulness 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 disap-
pears 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<olam. The only image that might minimally encourage a
metaphorical reading is the report of the spirit/wind (rua˙) of God hovering
 alter: northrop frye between archetype and typology 19

over the face of the deep, but even that seems intended as a setting of the
actual physical scene of the primordial realm just before God begins to
speak the world into being.
Interpretive matters are made considerably worse by the insistence on
archetypes. Thus, we are invited to contemplate the “traces” of an Oedipal
plot “in the story of Adam, whose ‘mother,’ in so far as he had one, was the
feminine adamah or dust of the ground, to whose body he returned after
breaking the link with his father” (156). The ingenuity of the reading must
be conceded, but it is extremely far-fetched. There is nothing in the story
that would allow one to imagine Adam aspiring to kill or displace God, who
in any case is not figured in it as a father. Moreover, the adamah out of which
Adam is fashioned is clearly represented by the writer not as a mother but
as the raw material from which God shapes him: the verb used for the
making of the first man is the one usually attached to the activity of the
potter, and if there is any metaphor in this second version of the creation of
humankind, it is drawn from manufacture, not biology. The fact that adamah
is a feminine noun is scarcely evidence for discovering a mother figure in
this primordial soil. All Hebrew nouns are either masculine or feminine,
and by this line of grammatico-psychoanalytic reasoning, the recurrent bib-
lical image of the “devouring sword” could end up being read, because the
Hebrew for “sword,” ˙erev, is feminine, as a figure of vagina edentata.
The most crucial aspect of biblical literature that is skewed by arche-
typal reading is its representation of character. Individual character was one
of the profound discoveries of the ancient Hebrew prose-writers. Perhaps
they may have been encouraged in their representation of insistent, some-
times unfathomable individuality by their belief in the idea that each human
is created in the image of God, like God not subject to stereotype, formula,
or prediction. In the patriarchal tales, such figures as Rebekah, Jacob, Joseph,
Judah, Tamar, even a scoundrel like Laban, are splendidly, stubbornly, their
own peculiar selves. The story of David offers us the greatest representation
of an individual life evolving through time in all of ancient literature, and
even its incidental characters—the shrewd and resourceful Abigail, the
impetuous Abishai, the pathetically devoted Paltiel, the two-faced
Shimei—are memorably etched individuals. But individuality of character
and the specificity of relationships between individuals evaporate when
every personage is assimilated to an archetype. Let me offer a final example
from The Great Code that is especially symptomatic of its interpretive bias.
David, we recall, after conquering Jerusalem from the Jebusites, brings up
the ark of the covenant to his new capital, dancing and gyrating in the tri-
umphal procession. His first wife, Michal the daughter of Saul, who has
been given back to him on his insistence after years of forced separation,
observes him from the palace window with withering scorn. There ensues
an angry confrontation between the two in which Michal excoriates David
20 semeia

for exposing himself to the slave-girls, and he responds that he, after all, is
God’s chosen ruler and he is the one who will decide what is honorable and
what is disgraceful. Oddly enough, Frye associates this scene with a pur-
ported practice among the Babylonians in which the king underwent an
annual ritual of humiliation, being slapped in the face, “in order to renew
his title to the kingdom” (90). This move of comparative anthropology
enables Frye to associate the story in 2 Samuel 6 with the story of the humil-
iation of the King of Kings in the Gospels. The compelling interest of
individual lives played out in the theater of politics in the David story dis-
appears in a fog of archetypes. The narrative in Samuel contains not the
slightest hint that a ritual of royal humiliation is being enacted. The story of
Michal and David is a story of politics and love. At its beginning, we are
told that she loves him, and she risks her neck to help him escape from her
father’s assassins. About David’s early feelings toward Michal we are told
nothing, though we can infer that the marriage is politically useful to him.
He surely has political utility in mind when he makes it a condition of the
peace treaty with the Saulide forces that Michal be returned to him, though
by this point he has collected other wives. At the moment of her return, we
are also made aware of the love her second husband, Paltiel, feels for her.
When the great explosion of Michal’s feelings takes place after David’s
dancing before the ark, there is both an edge of sexual jealousy in her
words—her anger over his exposing himself to the slave-girls—and a politi-
cal chasm between them: Michal now identifies herself with her father’s
house and accuses David of behaving in a manner unfit for a king, while his
sharp rejoinder is that God has chosen him instead of Saul to reign over
Israel. The last moment of this story is the report that Michal had no child
till her dying day. Is this divine punishment, or a simple consequence of
permanent estrangement of the spouses, or perhaps even a punitive frustra-
tion of David’s political ambition, whereby he might have reinforced his
claim to found a dynasty by fathering a child with the daughter of his pred-
ecessor on the throne?1 All such fascinating psychological and political
complexities of this remarkable story vanish when the confrontation
between husband and wife is explained as a type of the humiliated king.
There is, I think, a lesson to be learned here about literary interpretation
that goes beyond considerations of reading the Bible. The revelatory power
of the literary imagination manifests itself in the intricate weave of details of
each individual text. On occasion it can be quite useful to see the larger
frameworks of convention, genre, mythology, and recurring plot shared by
different texts. The identification of overarching patterns was Frye’s great

1 I owe the last of these three possibilities to Rabbi Israel C. Stein, written communication.
 alter: northrop frye between archetype and typology 21

strength as a critic, enabling him to make lasting contributions to the under-

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

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

-23-
24 semeia

From the point of view of religious studies, these rebuttals did not account
for what they saw as the obvious methodological problems inherent in Frye’s
interpretation of the Bible. Conversely, those who attempted to explicate
Frye’s understanding of religion within the context of his literary-critical
principles defended Frye against what they saw as an incorrect evaluation of
Frye’s reading of the Bible in terms of a methodology not applicable to his
aims. The result was a respectful silence between these two academic fields.
The silence was unsettling, given the mandate for the conference and the fact
that Frye, as the most important modern literary critic interested in the Bible,
offers a place where true interdisciplinary dialogue might occur.
The underlying problem results not from the shortcomings of one group
or the other but from a lack of understanding on both sides. It is true that
Frye scholars for the most part do not understand that Frye’s methodology
runs contrary to many of the larger theoretical principles of biblical studies.
It is also true that many biblical scholars who have read only The Great Code
and Words with Power do not understand that Frye’s approach to the Bible is
informed by his own larger theoretical principles.
In order to find a place where genuine dialogue between religious-
studies scholars and literary critics on the topic of Frye’s understanding of
religion might be possible, the oeuvre of Frye’s criticism must be considered.
Once we understand how Frye envisions reality and the place of religion
within that context, we can begin to comprehend more fully Frye’s method
in studying the Bible.
Frye’s larger theoretical principles hinge on the most common spatial
metaphor in his writings: ascent and descent. In one of his notebooks he
writes that he is fixated on “meander-and-descent patterns” and that much
of what interests him in literature is “katabasis” (1964:356). Throughout his
published writings, Frye constantly alludes to a world above the regular
world we inhabit now. It is not a separate world but rather a perspective on
this world where boundless imaginative energy creates infinite possibilities
for humanity. He also describes a world below the one we inhabit now. This
too is not a separate world but rather a perception of this world as a sub-
human world of nature, which for Frye means a world of cruelty and tyranny.
This metaphorical elevator, up to a world above and down to a world
below, is found with many variations in Frye’s works. It appears in his dis-
cussion of the development of society in The Educated Imagination, where
civilization develops from a primitive identification with the brutalities of
nature to a utopian vision where the imagination is left free to contemplate
the best form of human society. In the second half of Words with Power, the
main focus is the movement of consciousness upwards and downwards. In
his discussion of his theological beliefs in The Double Vision, he continually
looks down to a single vision of nature, space, time, and God, and up to the
double vision of these things. In his first book, Fearful Symmetry, his masterful
 velaidum: towards reconciling the solitudes 25

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

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

me, and no biographer could possibly take the smallest interest in me. . . .
And it is clear to me, though not demonstrable to anyone else, that this has
been imitated, on a level that consciousness and memory cannot reach,
from Blake, who similarly obliterated incident in his own life and for simi-
lar reasons. (1976b:15–16)

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 under-
lying 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 founda-
tion 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 sig-
nificant 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 dis-
cerned 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 phi-
losophy. He argues that since the existence of a human perceiver is beyond doubt, and since
something cannot come from nothing, there must be a God who is eternal (619–30).
 velaidum: towards reconciling the solitudes 27

concept of God. As noted by Michael Ferber, Blake had much in common

with the Dissenters of his day, who also rebelled against traditional authori-
ties.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 second-
ary qualities, furthermore, require the perceiver in order to be realized,
while primary qualities inhere in things, independent of the perceiver.
Therefore, for Locke, true knowledge comes from the primary qualities of
objects and therefore comes only from what can be objectified.4
Blake, however, accepts innate ideas: “Innate Ideas are in Every Man,
Born with him, they are truly Himself” (648). As Frye notes, Blake is here
following George Berkeley’s critique of Locke’s empiricism:

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

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

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 expe-
rience in perceived forms; there are no primary qualities. However, the
perception of an object is not only known through the organ that per-
ceives 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 depend-
ent 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 sen-
sation, and Blake always refers to Locke’s reflection as “memory.” Memory
of an image must always be less than the perception of the image. . . . Sensa-
tion is always in the plural: when we see a tree we see a multitude of
particular facts about the tree, and the more intently we look the more there
are to see. . . . The first point in Blake to get clear, then, is the infinite superi-
ority of the distinct perception of things to the attempt of the memory to
classify them into general principles. (1947:15–16)

Blake and Locke agree that knowledge can emerge only from experi-
ence. For Blake this experience originates in the perceiver who actively
creates the experience and therefore actively creates reality, while Locke
emphasizes the way in which reality offers experience to the human per-
ceiver. Despite their epistemological differences, both Locke and Blake must
account for how we can obtain an idea of categories of things if all knowl-
edge is specific. Since it is true that “Every Eye sees differently,” and if
reality is known by experience, in either case, how can we go from knowing
a “man” to knowing “Mankind,” for example?
Locke accounts for our ability to form generalized concepts as either
bringing separate ideas together into a relational whole or as the act of
 velaidum: towards reconciling the solitudes 29

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 lim-
ited 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 possi-
ble, 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 com-
pound ideas are made. (2) The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex together,
and setting them by one another, so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into
one; by which way it gets all its ideas of relations. (3) The third is separating them from all other
ideas that accompany them in their real existence; this is called abstraction” (163).
30 semeia

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 Com-
pounded 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 per-
ceive. 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 Cor-
poreal 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 imagi-
nation, 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 conclu-
sion 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 per-
ception of unity, which aligns with the greatest visionaries and is ultimately
the perception of God.
 velaidum: towards reconciling the solitudes 31

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. Cre-
ating 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 pos-
sible 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
32 semeia

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

Thus we are confronted with two forces: a human world that gives existence
to objective reality, and a God who gives existence to us.
God is universal perception; in every act of universal perception we per-
ceive as God perceives. When the imagination is at the peak of its power as a
unifying instrument, there comes a point, for Frye, where one realizes that
there is not only a human agent at work in the journey of consciousness but
also “an infinitely active personality that both enters us and eludes us,” illu-
minating the “mysterium tremendum, the mystery that is really a revelation”
(1990a:107). For Frye, God in some sense remains distant from humanity
since he gives us our existence. But since God is the universal act of unified
perception, we can access God only through our own acts of unified percep-
tion. We must, then, at the level of the imagination be willing to view God as
both “a being surrounded by experience as it descends from creation to the
final identity of incarnation” and as an aspect of “human consciousness sur-
rounding experience, as it ascends from its ‘fallen’ state towards what it was
designed to be” (1980:47). If we do not view God in a manner that recognizes
both an external and internal reality, united as it is in the imagination, we
end up like Narcissus, staring back at our own reflection (1976a:61).
So when Frye claims that God is a “spiritual Other” we must under-
stand that this does not simply mean that God is an external reality
(1991:20). We must connect this to the type of experience that is engen-
dered at each level of the axis. If God, as a spiritual Other, is understood at
the level of nature, then we have idolatry. The Other at this level is nature,
“red in tooth and claw,” and therefore there is nothing to admire, nothing
 velaidum: towards reconciling the solitudes 33

worth aspiring toward. It is for this reason that Frye finds little redeeming
value in Natural Theology, with the possible exception of Teilhard de
Chardin (1980:15–16). If God as Other is understood at the level of human
civilization and work, then self-idolatry ensues—the worshiping of human
accomplishments and structures, including the idolatry of art and any
other human creation, even the Bible (1991:39). It is only when the Other-
ness of God is equated with the human imagination that, in Frye’s words,
the “otherness of the spirit . . . may become ourselves” (1976b:96), and that
“one strives with God only by striving with or through oneself to obtain
a spiritual vision of God” (1991:79). Only in this act of imaginative percep-
tion is humanity able to break free from the single vision that chains us to what
both nature and civilization offer: in the unified perception of the greatest
art, Guernica, or Finnegan’s Wake; in the unified perception of great science
such as Einstein’s insights into space and time in his general and special
theories of relativity, or the elegance of Newtonian mechanics; in the
unified theories of literature and art of Aristotle, and, some would say,
the theories of Frye himself, humans are able to imaginatively re-create
the world, overcome the subject/object bifurcation that pervades the
level of civilization or the level of nature, and mimic the unified percep-
tion of God.

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 Enlight-
enment, 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 his-
toricity, according to Frye, will not get very far:
[Biblical critics] are well aware that the Bible will only confuse and exasper-
ate 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)
34 semeia

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

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

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

For Richardson, The Great Code is actually a modern apologetic in the sense
that it seeks to authenticate the validity of Christian scripture. However,
Richardson also believes that this apologetic motive is not intended by Frye
and that his goal was to show the main structure of the Bible itself. Richard-
son then concludes:
The book itself sounds as if Frye believes he has actually grasped the essen-
tial character of the bible, not as if he is trying to make it appealing to
 velaidum: towards reconciling the solitudes 35

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

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

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

WORKS CONSULTED
Alter, Robert
1983 Review of Frye, 1982. Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 17:20–22.
Blake, William
1965 The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman. New York:
Doubleday.
Eliade, Mircea
1954 The Myth of the Eternal Return. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Pan-
theon.
1961 Images and Symbols. Trans. Phillip Mairet. London: Harvill.
Ferber, Michael
1985 The Social Vision of William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press.
Frye, Northrop
1947 Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press.
1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press.
1963 The Educated Imagination. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
1964 Notebook 19. To be published as part of The Collected Works of Northrop
Frye by the University of Toronto Press.
1976a The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
1976b Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press.
 velaidum: towards reconciling the solitudes 37

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 Contem-
porary 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; Gene-
sis 32, Jacob’s struggle with the angel; and the book of Job. Of these three,
the book of Job functions as a microcosm of the entire Bible in Frye’s final
three books. Frye assimilates William Blake’s interpretation of the book of
Job to the structure and purpose of his final books in order to demonstrate
for his readers the release of imaginative power needed to undertake cre-
ative and restorative work in the spheres of culture, education, and religion.

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

-39-
40 semeia

the 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 bibli-
cal narratives and associates with the humanizing, social goals of criticism.
As such, the humanized God is not an object of sense perception but the per-
ceptual 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 con-
cept 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 rela-
tionship 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
 gay: the “humanized god” 41

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 per-
ception in Blake’s system. Recognition for Albion is thus the subjectivity of
vision in and through the actualization of his imagination, which is the fac-
ulty 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 con-
sciousness—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 apoc-
alypse. 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.”
42 semeia

eighth eye, subdivided into two distinct forms of apocalypse that comprise
the seventh and eighth phases. The seventh consists of a “panoramic” apoc-
alypse, or the idea of apocalypse as an objective, perceivable spectacle; the
eighth becomes the “participatory” visionary apocalypse that signals the
awakening of the reader in Albion’s place. Thus “the reader completes the
visionary operation of the Bible by throwing out the subjective fallacy along
with the objective one. The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the
ego has disappeared” (1982:138).
Although Frye suggests that no improvement takes place through the
seven phases of revelation, an increasing comprehension of the power of the
humanized God does emerge through a process of dialectical tension. Emer-
gence is perhaps an operative term in Frye’s clarification of the humanized
God. In the second, participatory apocalypse “the creator-creature, divine-
human antithetical tension has ceased to exist, and the sense of the
transcendent person and the split of subject and object no longer limit our
vision. After the ‘Last Judgment,’ the Law loses its last hold on us, which is
the hold of the legal vision that ends there” (1982:137). Like Blake’s Albion,
the reader emerges from the restricted view of legality as a mechanism of
condemnation (a view too often superficially equated with Old Testament
“law” in some Christian writings) and gains, from the typological perspec-
tive of the apocalypse, a wider view of Torah as a vehicle of community.
Frye is therefore linking the phases of gospel and apocalypse in the same
way that Blake links Jesus and Albion: the first is the historical incarnation
of god-as-man; the second is the potential manifestation of the humanized
God in the present. All seven phases, like the significance of sevens in
Zechariah and Revelation, make the processes of recreation and restoration
in the course of time the antitypes of the seven days of creation in Genesis.
As I will later demonstrate, the typology of creation and re-creation is cen-
tral to Frye’s reading of Job.
The disavowal of progress as improvement in the sequence of the bibli-
cal canon also declines any sense of the absolute superiority of one phase of
revelation over another; instead, the seven phases gain their significance in
the context of their various relationships. This context is analogous to the
intertextual, signifying relationships that elevate biblical myth and
metaphor to the level of kerygma, the rhetoric of proclamation that has as its
ultimate message the identity of the divine and the human. The disavowal
of a naïve form of progress leads Frye to repudiate terms such as optimism or
pessimism as descriptions of his own religious thinking. His final book, The
Double Vision, does, however, anticipate a better future. He speaks, for
example, of gaining a “growing insight into our own conditioned limits,” a
phrase that connects Frye to the purposes of much contemporary critical
theory. And he imagines a Christianity no longer burdened by the demonic
aspects of its past: “I think immense changes could be brought about by a
 gay: the “humanized god” 43

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

least the way to it, is the world created through man by God” (1991:79). The
“mingling” Frye speaks of is a confusion of divine and demonic characteris-
tics in the human perception of God. For Frye, social and literary criticism,
in addition to literature, can be a part of the creative effort to distinguish
divine and demonic characteristics, and thus “clean up the human image of
God” (1991:xv).
The process of purifying the divine image consists of three stages:
demonic parody, redemptive power, and apocalyptic vision (1991:79–80).
On the binding of Isaac, Frye observes that the story

has a demonic basis: the sacrifice of human children that was practiced
around Israel but forbidden to the Israelites themselves. This story also sets
up a demonic situation and then moves in a redemptive direction, where
Abraham becomes aware of the uncompromising priority of God’s right to
human devotion against the closest of earthly ties. We may compare Jesus’
remark in the Gospels that he had come to bring not peace but a sword, and
cause division even among families. (80)

Even in this compressed reading of the story, Frye articulates the redemp-
tive as a countervailing movement that divides and distinguishes the divine
from the demonic in human consciousness. His reading of Genesis 32, Jacob’s
struggle with the angel, illustrates the same patterns. The demonic basis of the
story consists in its initial association of the angel with local demons or night
creatures. The struggle then initiates a redemptive countermovement as Jacob
demands a blessing from the angel. Finally, by verse 30,

we have a very strong hint that in some way and some sense Jacob has been
striving with God himself, though surely one can strive with God only by
striving with or through oneself to obtain a spiritual vision of God. So we
have, first, a demon of darkness who attacks or mutilates those who
encounter him, then a redemptive context in which Jacob demands a bless-
ing from an angel, and a final outcome in which Jacob is transformed by
divine power into Israel, the individual centre and starting point of God’s
people. (ibid.)

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

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

Frye appears to some readers to submerge the concrete details of bib-

lical 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 intro-
duces 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 high-
est 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 dialec-
tic of time that Frye constructs in his view of the Bible. Movements toward
 gay: the “humanized god” 47

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 “lead-
ing 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 transmis-
sion 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 exu-
berance 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 “pro-
gressive 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 vig-
orous 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 Criti-
cism, 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
48 semeia

disciples after the resurrection; the apocalypse concludes with the marriage
supper of the Lamb and the return of the tree of life. As James Whedbee
argues in The Bible and the Comic Vision, the movement from tragedy to
comedy in the Hebrew Bible is “not simply sequential but includes a dialec-
tic interplay between tragedy and comedy with comedy typically having
the last word” (285).
Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are non-narrative poetic texts and do not fully
illustrate the dialectical relationship between comedy and tragedy in biblical
narrative. The biblical narrative that best illustrates this dialectical opposi-
tion in Frye’s thinking is the book of Job. In The Great Code, Frye calls Job the
epitome of biblical narrative. While Job is normally classified as a poetic
wisdom text with Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, Frye treats it as biblical narra-
tive because the linear direction of time emphasized in wisdom literature is
amalgamated with the prophetic perspective of loss, deliverance, and
restoration that Frye approximates as a “U-shaped story” (1982:193). In The
Great Code, Frye considers Job a comedy through its final emphasis on the
restoration of the human community (198). In Words with Power Frye con-
cludes by exploring the reverse transformation of Job from tragedy into
comedy through Job’s participation in God’s speech at the close of the poem.
The Double Vision reiterates these readings in a compressed manner by
emphasizing the broadest alignment of the biblical vision with comedy in
the temporal movement from creation to apocalypse. Like Job, the binding
of Isaac and Jacob’s struggle with the angel emulate this pattern within
more confined narrative units. In fact, Frye concludes his discussion of Job
in The Great Code by comparing Jacob’s struggle to the double movement of
time: “The inference for the reader seems to be that the angel of time that
man clings to until daybreak (Gen 32:36) is both an enemy and an ally, a
power that both enlightens and cripples, and disappears only when all that
can be experienced has been experienced” (1982:198).
Frye notes that the book of Job is “usually classified among the tragedies,”
but he rarely elaborates in detail on the critical history of a biblical text
(1982:196). James Whedbee considers the treatment of Job as tragedy, which
includes arguments for its dependence on Greek tragedy, and includes, for
example, Terrien’s view of Job as a unique “festal tragedy” that presents the
“theme of royal expiation that centers in the vicarious suffering of the king”
(222–23). Whedbee argues that comedy explains the overarching structure of
Job, yet he asks, “How can a book so filled with agony and despair, so domi-
nated with the images of suffering and death, be considered a comedy?”
(224). Here we need to consider that Frye’s approach to Job as a comedy of
restoration depends heavily on William Blake’s interpretation of Job in his
illustrations to the book. In his study of Blake’s illustrations, Frye observes
that Job is “technically comedy by virtue of Job’s restoration in the last few
verses, but the comic conclusion seems so wrenched and arbitrary that it is
 gay: the “humanized god” 49

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 previ-
ous daughters. (241)

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

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 spec-
tator 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, shew-
ing himself that he is God. (2 Thess 2:3–4)
 gay: the “humanized god” 51

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.
52 semeia

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 illustra-
tion 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 sig-
nifies 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 emu-
late 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 cre-
ation 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 individ-
ual” (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 counter-
movements 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).
 gay: the “humanized god” 53

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.
54 semeia

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

In the same manner, God’s speech from the whirlwind completes Job’s
exploration of the fallen world in both space and time. The Great Code and
Words with Power are similarly works of extension. The Great Code extends
the Bible in time through a horizontal typological sequence from creation to
apocalypse; Words with Power extends the Bible in space through a vertical
survey of imagery from the furnace to the mountain. In Frye’s assimilation
of Blake’s poetics, The Great Code and Words with Power are to The Double
 gay: the “humanized god” 55

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 begin-
ning” (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 con-
temporary 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 through-
out 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 com-
mentary 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 twen-
tieth 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 recog-
nition. 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
56 semeia

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 Genesis: Translation and Commentary. New York: Norton.
Aristotle
1984 Poetics. Pp. 63–124 in Literary Criticism from Plato to Dryden. Ed. Allan H.
Gilbert. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Blake, William
1988 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman. New
York: Doubleday.
Damon, S. Foster
1966 Blake’s Job: William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job. Providence, R.I.:
Brown University Press.
Frye, Northrop
1947 Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press.
1957 The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press.
1967 Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
1976 “Blake’s Reading of the Book of Job.” Pp. 228–44 in Spiritus Mundi: Essays
on Literature, Myth and Society. Richmond Hill: Fitzhenry & Whiteside.
1982 The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic Press.
1990a “Blake’s Bible.” Pp. 270–88 in Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays. Ed.
Robert Denham. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
1990b Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.”
Toronto: Penguin.
 gay: the “humanized god” 57

1991 The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
Schreiner, Susan
1994 Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Calvin’s Exegesis of Job from Medieval and
Modern Perspectives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Whedbee, James
1998 The Bible and the Comic Vision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 THE ASHES OF THE STARS:
NORTHROP FRYE AND THE TRICKSTER-GOD
Michael Dolzani
Baldwin-Wallace College

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

Upon the ashes of stars, the undivided ones of the family, lay the poor
character, after having drunk the drop of nothingness lacking to the
sea. . . . Nothingness having departed, there remains the castle of purity.
Mallarmé, Igitur (trans. Mary Ann Caws)

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 think-
ing, “all the vicissitudes of the outer and inner life have a meaning and

-59-
60 semeia

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 charac-
ter 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 num-
bers 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 call-
ing “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 exem-
plifies 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 dis-
cussion 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 uni-
verse, 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.
 dolzani: the ashes of the stars 61

a God, some numinous presence, as the source of that secret order. But
what a God! Edinger is right to associate him with the God of Job.
Throughout his trials, Job keeps challenging God to step out from behind
the curtains and answer him. Perhaps he was thinking of something like
Blake’s “How do you know but that ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,/Is
an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” (35, plate 5). But
Blake’s aphorism is what he would have called an augury of innocence,
and Job is not in the land of innocence. Be careful what you wish for, espe-
cially if it is a vision of God; when God finally turns from deus absconditus
into deus ex machina, he speaks as a storm god out of a whirlwind. His
speech does indeed unfold a world of delight, a sabbath vision of creation
in which the morning stars sang together—but it ends unpredictably,
when God hangs Leviathan in front of Job’s nose and says, in effect, he
who made the lamb also made this: draw your own conclusions. True, he
restores everything Job has lost; but that seems to be because he has bet on
Job like a gangster on a racehorse and is in a magnanimous mood after the
bet pays off.
Nor is this Godfather confined to the book of Job. In the traditional
interpretation of the atonement, God gives his Son’s life over to Satan as
payment for his previous lost bet on Adam and Eve; typical mobster, he
cheats, because this is the one life over which death has no power. When the
Christians cheat Shylock of a death in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, their
modus operandi is that of their own God—and Shylock cannot complain,
because he has himself invoked as precedent for his financial practices some
of the shadier wheelings and dealings of the Old Testament trickster Jacob,
of whom more in a moment.
But the God of Job is also the God of our own lives. Most of the Old
Testament is preoccupied with the deeds of the chosen ones, the tribal lead-
ers and judges and kings and prophets and wise men who make history. But
Job is just an ordinary guy, though an affluent and successful one, not even
an Israelite; as an Edomite, he is perhaps by implication in the position of
Joyce’s Leopold Bloom in the society of Dublin. His God is the God of
Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts, who will throw a child suddenly in front of
Lily Tomlin’s car on her way home from work; who will rock Los Angeles,
city of angels, with an earthquake, apparently for no greater reason than
that it is Los Angeles, thereby distracting its occupants momentarily from
their preoccupation with their own neuroses. I find myself wondering what
the readers of Good Housekeeping Magazine, where the interview with Jung
was published, made of his comment, for his is definitely not a God of good
housekeeping. In fact, he’s a homewrecker, as Job himself found out and as
Frye says in an unpublished note: “Jehovah is not a theologian’s God; he’s
an intensely humanized figure as violent and unpredictable as King Lear.
He does silly and vicious things; as a human being we wouldn’t let him into
62 semeia

our front parlors” (Notes 54.1, par. 22). (He is even destructive of the gram-
mar in that last sentence.)
He is in short a trickster-God, and the fact that he is featured in crucial
passages in both of Frye’s final works shows Frye’s preoccupation with him
during the final years of his life. In The Double Vision, Frye asks (74–75):
What, for example, are we to do with a God who drowns the world in a fit
of anger and repeoples it in a fit of remorse, promising never to do it again
(Gen 9:11); a God who curses the ground Adam is forced to cultivate after
his fall, but removes the curse after Noah makes a tremendous holocaust of
animals, the smell of their burning flesh being grateful to his nose (Gen
8:21); a God who rejects Saul as king after he spares his enemy Agag out of
human decency (because he should have been offered to God as a sacrifice)
and inspires Samuel to hew Agag in pieces and tell Saul that he has com-
mitted an unforgivable sin (1 Sam 15); a God who observes children
mocking the prophet Elisha and sends bears to eat up the children (2 Kgs
2:23), and so on? All mythologies have a trickster God, and Jehovah’s treat-
ment of the Exodus Pharaoh (hardening his heart), of Abraham, perhaps
even of Job, shows clear trickster affinities. Some of the most horrendous of
his capers, such as the sacrifice of Isaac, are tests or trials of faith, implying
a lack of knowledge of what is already in Abraham’s mind and will.

An almost verbatim passage in Words with Power adds (106–7) the “long bar-
gaining scene with Abraham about the number of righteous men needed to
save Sodom.”
If you have such a God on your hands, you are going to have to strug-
gle. In Frye’s later work, this struggle is what he means by the purgatorial;
its telos is re-creation, one of the keys to his thought. Frye’s Bible books
struggle with the Word in an attempt to re-create both its aspects: as text
and as vision of God. The following unpublished note indicates how his role
model was the figure who was lamed in a wrestling match with God, but
was compensated by a visionary dream of the axis mundi that is the organiz-
ing image of Words with Power: “Powerful pull toward the primitive
submission to doctrine: I’ve always been attracted to those who took reli-
gion seriously enough to use it as a basis, but then struggled with it like
Jacob with the angel. Blake, Emily Dickinson, Yeats, perhaps Rimbaud,
certainly Baudelaire. Nobody gets converted to Protestantism: it doesn’t
provide the right primitive basis. It provides only a medium for struggle”
(Notes 53, par. 103). Far from being the struggle of Frye alone, however, re-
creation becomes the dialectical evolution of religious consciousness: “The
central image of man trying to make his divine creature into a decent God is
Jacob (Israel) wrestling with the angel” (Notes 54.1, par. 66). This is Heils-
geschichte, the shape of sacred history: “Purgatorio in history is the wrestling
of Jacob or Israel with the angel or God. The swallowing of the sky-bugger”
(Notes 54.1, par. 3). Thus in the exercise of our imagination or re-creative
 dolzani: the ashes of the stars 63

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 his-
tory of commentary: that the only interesting responses to the darkness of
God are going to be those that do not nervously try to absolve the trickster-
God by allegory or any other mode of rationalization, but that do not merely
reject him either, like the Gnostics and Marcionites who wanted to expur-
gate 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 interpene-
tration 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 ex-
hodos 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
64 semeia

us that all our illusions of presence are a desperate defense against the real-
ity of loss in its various forms of difference in space and deferring in time,
the ultimate denial being, as Ernest Becker said, the denial of death. We are
such things as dreams are made on, says Prospero in The Tempest. Milton’s
Paradise Regained is explicitly modeled on the book of Job, but Christ’s rejec-
tion of Satan’s temptations in it also has overtones of the Preacher’s “Vanity
of vanities” in Ecclesiastes. Again and again in the notebooks these two
works are grouped with a third, Blake’s Milton, as a kind of purgatorial
triad; in the latter poem, Milton descends from eternity to clarify his own
vision, and this involves both standing in his own shadow and wrestling
with Urizen, the sky-bugger version of God, on the banks of the Jordan, thus
recapitulating the wrestling of Jacob with the angel on the banks of the
Jabbok, a tributary of the Jordan (112, plate 19).
Frye of course learned his Jacobean wrestling-moves from Blake, who,
like the rest of the Romantic revolution, saw that a perfectly good God who
nevertheless signs off on all the miseries of human history is only a projec-
tion of an authoritarian ideology, the trickster-God pressed into the service
of the status quo. The cosmos of authority pushes all the blame on us: the
agony of the human condition results from our failure to obey, original sin,
innate depravity. But these are just the ploys of power; if there is anything
truly creative, and therefore deserving of the epithet “divine,” it is the
power of the human imagination that has brought everything into being,
including God himself, who is only a projection of human creative power
into the sky. Chapter 7 of Words with Power recapitulates what Frye has
explained often before, how, beginning with the Romantics, the imaginative
cosmos or symbolic universe has been inverted so that the quest for a divine
vision is now downward and inward; the top of the ladder is now merely
the vision of alienation.
A consequence of this reversal is the transfer of the trickster persona: the
real trickster now is creative man, Prometheus, Blake’s rebel-hero Orc. All
the imagery of the trickster-shaman is transferred over to a figure of uprising
revolutionary energy, whose ideological implications are expounded politi-
cally by Marx; psychologically by Freud, or at least by the sixties revisionists
of Freud, whose revolutionary sentiments were sympatico with all the merry
pranksterism of that era; artistically by poète maudit figures whose manic-
depressive responses range from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell to Un Saison
en Enfer. This is the trickster-God’s first rehabilitation, as he turns from alien
other into a mask of Promethean humanity in its revolt against social con-
ventions whose repressive uniformity, according to the power-structure, is
necessary for our security, even our survival, and is therefore inscribed in
both natural and supernatural law: “Predictable history is the one great hope
of primary societies. God being interested in the individual, he’s a trickster, a
lying spirit, a genius of the unpredictable” (Notes 53, par. 232).
 dolzani: the ashes of the stars 65

When Blake spoke of composing his own Bible of hell, he knew that it
would not be a mere contradiction but would have its roots in the shadow-
side of the Bible itself. Frye believed that the Romantics were the first
culturally ascendant manifestation of a permanent phase of religious con-
sciousness, an everlasting nay that begins in the Bible’s own revolutionary
basis. In some of the unpublished notebooks, he calls this the second aware-
ness, locked in a cyclical historical conflict with a conservative and
authoritarian first awareness; usually these just go around in a circle resem-
bling Blake’s Orc cycle, but there is always the possibility of a resolving
third awareness, whose advent would usher in Joachim of Floris’s third Age
of the Spirit.
As for Classical parallels, there is of course Prometheus, the titan who
defies the gods to be friend to man. There is also a generic parallel: in
“Romance As Masque” (1976b) Frye traces the affinities of the idealizing
forms of naïve romance and Classical New Comedy with the Christian com-
media, then goes on to suggest that the revolutionary contrary of such a
plot-pattern would bear some kinship to the agon-structure of Old Comedy.
As the Iliad was an influence on later tragedy, the Odyssey is said to be an
influence on the later development of romance and New Comedy. But in
one brilliant flash in the notebooks, Frye speaks of “the Odyssey as a narra-
tive Old Comedy, labyrinth followed by dialectic emergence of identity of
Odysseus at Ithaca” (NB 12, par. 143). If the daylight side of the Odyssey is
New Comedy and romance, its underside is Old Comedy, and its hero is
one of the great trickster-figures in all literature.
Romanticism, or at least its more Blakean forms, emerged out of the far-
left inner-light wing of the great second-awareness upheaval known as
Protestantism. Those of us who came to Frye before his three Bible books
were written knew his religious views primarily through Fearful Symmetry,
and perhaps some of us tended to assume that Frye was of the devil’s party
and knew it. A deep identification with Blake is certainly there, early and
late; when asked in an interview by David Cayley, “You’re with Blake?”
Frye immediately responds, “Oh, yes” (1992:100). And in the privacy of the
notebooks he is capable of sounding every bit as antinomian as his mentor:
in Notebook 12, the ordained United Church minister says that “The effect
of organized and institutional religion on society, for the most part, is evil. It
isn’t just reactionary or superstitious; it is evil, and stinks in the nose of
God” (par. 347). Elsewhere, he says that “there’s a special viciousness in reli-
gion that’s found nowhere else” (Notes 53, par. 25).
Therefore it seemed mildly astounding to hear Frye say, in a review of
Blake studies in 1957, “The student interested in Blake’s religious views
should first get what few contemporary critics have, a coherent idea of
Protestantism, and then investigate the doctrine technically known as pre-
existence: the doctrine that Christ’s humanity is coeternal with his divinity.
66 semeia

This doctrine is not strictly a heresy, in the sense of being a doctrine incon-
sistent with Christian tradition (a little before Blake’s day it was held by
Isaac Watts), but it is the only unusual feature of Blake’s religious beliefs
granted his Protestant premises” (1966:19). To most Christians, Blake’s view
that the creation and the fall were the same event, in which part of God fell
along with man, and in which redemptive power is identified with the cre-
ative imagination, might seem just a wee bit unusual. But we get a more
coherent view of Frye’s Protestantism when, in the same review article, he
criticizes one Blake scholar for having “a somewhat pedestrian concept of
orthodoxy which leaves little room for paradox in statement” (19). The stan-
dard of orthodoxy is the true Christianity that Blake called the everlasting
gospel, and not the pronouncements of the ideological establishment that
some notebook entries dismiss as “the magisterium.”
For all that, between Blake and Frye there would seem to be, borrowing
a phrase from Coleridge that Frye was fond of, a distinction without divi-
sion. For Romanticism is a tragically failed project, and it is because it failed
that we have lived the two centuries of alienation, irony, and nihilism that
we have been living, the nightmare of history from which we have utterly
failed to awake. The very first chapter of Fearful Symmetry tells us that the
reason for the continued failure to realize primary concerns in human life is
not merely a repressive social order or even deep psychological hang-ups:
these are symptoms of the real limitation of the human condition, the
subject-object division that Blake in his trickster mode calls a cloven fiction.
Blake’s solution, at least early on, was basically phenomenological: a phrase
like Berkeley’s “To be is to be perceived” suggests that expansion of percep-
tion in the narrowly constricted ego-subject will result in a transformation,
indeed in the ultimate elimination, of an alienated external world. “As the
Eye, Such the Object,” and in this mode Blake speaks about cleansing the
doors of perception. As opposed to what? As opposed to rejecting the
phenomenal in order to find some hidden reality behind it: the ideal is to
transform the phenomenal itself, expanding it from a minimal ego-center of
consciousness to a maximal level of apocalyptic vision. Following Blake, the
younger Frye had little use for the alternative strain of hidden-reality
Romanticism, mainly (yuck) German, whose line runs from Jakob Boehme
and the occult tradition via Kant’s noumenal reality to Heidegger and Jung.
He expresses his impatience in his 1947 article “Yeats and the Language of
Symbolism” (Frye, 1963)—significantly, one of the few pieces of writing
whose formulations he later regretted and expressed the wish to revise.
Some of Frye’s later religious formulations remain close to the Blakean
mode of expression, for instance his oft-repeated re-creation of the Christian
virtues of faith, hope, and love. He begins with hope, which he defines as
having a particular relation to the arts, providing as they potentially do the
models of a world of gratified desire (and of its anxious opposites) from
 dolzani: the ashes of the stars 67

which anyone may find a “myth to live by.” This link with hope in the sense
that the arts begin with fictions of desire that are known to be illusions is the
core of truth in Freud’s idea that art (along with religion) is a kind of wish-
fulfillment. But faith, when it takes over from hope, is not the belief in what
you know ain’t so but is rather the creative process itself, committing itself
to a fictional and illusory model as a myth to live by and going on to realize
it in experience. Frye’s example of the Wright brothers getting a plane off
the ground when everybody knows, or else should know, that if God
wanted human beings to fly he’d have given them wings, is not so stock as
it seems: there are eloquent passages in Mircea Eliade about flight as one of
the oldest and most powerful symbols of human transcendence, the trick-
ster-shaman’s “flight of the wild gander.”2 Forty years later, engineers
swore that it was aerodynamically impossible to break the sound barrier,
and less scientific types, according to the film The Right Stuff, spoke of
demons that would tear your plane apart as you approached Mach 1. Since
this essay is into hermetic number-symbolism, it should be pointed out that
Chuck Yaeger broke the sound barrier, mostly by ignoring the doubters, in
1947, the year Fearful Symmetry was published.
When Frye says to David Cayley that “The criterion for faith to me is a
pragmatic rather than a dogmatic one. Faith is something that works. . . . It’s
a process of turning into reality what has been either a matter of hope or a
matter of illusion” (1992:190–91), he is being even more accurate than he may
seem. His frequent reference to “the faith defined by the schoolboy when he
said, ‘Faith is when you believe something that you know ain’t true’” comes
from William James’s famous essay “The Will to Believe”—the wording I
have just quoted is in fact James’s (1956b:29). In his follow-up essay, “Is Life
Worth Living?” James is very much in the Romantic trickster tradition when
he says that it feels “as if there were something really wild in the universe
which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem;
and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a
half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is adapted” (1956a:61).
But the problem with the phenomenological-expansion version of re-
creation is that, without a contrary, it will result in what Jung called inflation,
when the ego puffs itself up into a transcendental ego that is merely, in Wal-
lace Stevens’s phrase, “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” (209). The only thing
that can follow, in a manic-depressive cycle, is deflation. In the Cayley inter-
views, Frye says, “Human nature is corrupt at the source, because it has

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

grown out of physical nature. It has various ideals and hopes and wishes
and concerns, but its attempts to realize these things are often abominable,
cruel, and psychotic. I feel there must be something that transcends all this,
or else.” Cayley asks, “Or else what?” Frye responds: “Or else despair. . . . I
think if I didn’t read the Bible and were confronted with all these dire
prophecies about the possibility of the human race disappearing from the
planet, I would be inclined to say, ‘The sooner the better.’ It’s like in the
question asked Job: what is there in life for him unless he has a vision of
something else?” (1992:189–90). This sounds much more orthodox and less
Promethean, because it implies that the project of making ourselves into
God by building monuments of unaging intellect is only another version of
the tower of Babel and is due for a collapse.
Hence Frye begins to be interested in a line of thinking he was ambiva-
lent about before. Early evidence of this includes the gusto of the essay on
Beddoes in A Study of English Romanticism and, in the notebooks, a great
influx of commentary on Boehme, Schelling, the second part of Goethe’s
Faust with its descent to the Mothers, Sartre, Heidegger, and above all
Hegel, who may have complained that Schelling’s Absolute was the night in
which all cows are black but whose own version of a climb toward the
vision of the Absolute Spirit in plenitude, of God as “all in all,” goes through
the valley of negation. Subject and object, along with all the subsidiary
cloven fictions that ramify from their division, have to be negated or decre-
ated; re-creation can then be only the negation of a negation, a concept in
Hegel that Frye believes was influenced by Boehme. The German tradition
was supplemented by French symbolisme and above all by Mallarmé.
The end result of Frye’s attempt to turn the mythologies of authority
and revolution into a Yeatsian double gyre is the dialectic of Word and
Spirit that is the heart of Words with Power. Here, the transforming human
creative power we have been speaking of is revealed as the Spirit, the inner
light or divine spark of creativity in the darkness of our corruption. But that
is not the whole story, for the Spirit cries out like Job for an answering
response and, like Job, receives one as the Word descends in a vision of
order, pattern, and meaning that in-forms the human imagination and pro-
vides the Logos or paradigm from which it works. The trickster-God
descends again, but this time, as a result of our striving, he has been trans-
figured, as Jung says the trickster-spirit Mercurius is transfigured in
alchemy from the spirit of chaos to the lapis itself. Out of absurdity, he is the
wonderful counterabsurdity of order and pattern that is all we know of the
true, the beautiful, and the good, and all we need to know. The Word
descends and becomes the substance of things hoped for. If there is such a
thing as a paradoxical orthodoxy, Frye is shooting for it here. The descend-
ing Word satisfies our need for what the Preface to Spiritus Mundi calls
“otherness, what the imagination is not and has to struggle with,” or again,
 dolzani: the ashes of the stars 69

“a spiritual reality, an otherness of a creative power not ourselves.” The con-

text 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 con-
ception 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 one-
sided argument is only a euphemism for stupidity. It stands to reason that
what Milton called “this great argument” would require the greatest possi-
ble tension between the bow and the lyre. But wisdom does not turn itself
into an unhappy consciousness making itself ill with unresolvable contra-
dictions; 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
70 semeia

many, and not all of them are conventionally respectable. This is his mode of
survival, of living by his wits, in a dangerous world whose emblem is Pro-
teus. He knows he is in for a Job-like ordeal, but he cries out on Calypso’s
island, “Let the trial come” (5.233). And sure enough, he has to go by the way
of vacancy—it is the provision of the Cyclops’s curse that he shall lose every-
thing, like Job—and he does so, even down to his identity, becoming
“Noman.” But by doing so he earns the response of two trickster deities,
Hermes and Athena; from the latter he gets the unparalleled comment, “Two
of a kind, we are,/contrivers, both” (13.379–380). And it is Athena’s help that
enables him to pull off his miracle, turning a beat-up beggar into the long-
lost ruler, father, and lover.
For in love everyone is a trickster: inexplicable, exasperating, sometimes
hurtful to the beloved, whether intentionally, inadvertently, or despite one-
self. When it is our own turn to be on the receiving end, the only possible
response if we choose to continue to love is Cordelia’s “No cause, no cause.”
Cordelia is not masochistically deluding herself about Lear, like some
abused housewife. She loves Lear as we love anyone truly: sometimes blam-
ing and angry (though she mostly leaves that up to Kent); sometimes
because the very unpredictability of “otherness” is fascinating, full of an
excitement and attraction; sometimes out of a sense of identification with a
kindred spirit. At any rate, the only possible response in love is: I love you,
nevertheless. You are my contrary, and thus bring out a hidden energy from
me, often by your very contrariness. Buber’s I and Thou was one of the
works that Frye regarded as truly kerygmatic, and our loving response to
the trickster deity may be, in the end if not in the beginning, “No cause, no
cause.” This does not so much solve the problem of theodicy as leap over it
like the bull-leapers in Minoan frescoes.
Contraries are the unfolded form of the final, enfolded form Frye calls
interpenetration. Again the best way to approach the unapproachable is via
the analogy with human love. The center of “orthodox” or relatively conser-
vative Christianity is the incarnation, in which agape or divine love repeats the
original creation as a vision of descending order. Revolutionary Christianity
insists, however, on the creative contrary of incarnation, the resurrection,
which repeats the Exodus and prefigures the total resurrection of the apoca-
lypse. The individual and inward antitype of the resurrection is, in Frye’s
Protestant tradition, conversion. Just as resurrection means more than a
coming back to life or immortality, conversion means more than becoming a
believer or joining a church. It means metamorphosis, re-creation, transfigu-
ration, inner illumination—but even those words fall far short of the
ultimate implications of Paul’s “We shall be changed,” whether we are
thinking about change in our inner life or our afterlife.
In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, often linked by Frye with the
Odyssey because of the shared pattern of the disguised ruler reclaiming his
 dolzani: the ashes of the stars 71

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 mar-
ries 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 atti-
tude; 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 res-
urrected. 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
72 semeia

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

WORKS CONSULTED
Blake, William
1982 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman.
Rev. ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Denham, Robert D.
1999 “Interpenetration As a Key Concept in Frye’s Critical Vision.” Pp. 140–
63 in Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works. Ed. David
Boyd and Imre Salusinszky. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Edinger, Edward F.
1972 Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche.
Boston and London: Shambala.
Eliade, Mircea
1967 “The Magic Flight.” Pp. 99–110 in Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The
Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities. Trans. Philip
Mairet. New York and Evanston: Harper Torchbooks.
1986 “Brancusi and Mythology.” Pp. 93–101 in Symbolism, the Sacred, and the
Arts. Ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona. New York: Crossroads.
 dolzani: the ashes of the stars 73

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 Uni-
versity 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 Iden-
tity: 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. Car-
olyn Washburn Houtchens and Lawrence Huston Houtchens. New
York: New York University Press for the Modern Language Associa-
tion 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 Litera-
ture, 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 Sym-
metry, which transformed our capacity to understand the poetry of William
Blake, he has been recognized as a critic for whom the Bible was an
immensely important text. For most of his career the presence of the Bible in
his work was implicit. During the last decade of his life, however, Frye pub-
lished three books that dealt explicitly with the Bible and its relationship to
literature: The Great Code, Words with Power, and The Double Vision. While
these works provide an immense range of resources for recognizing rela-
tionships between Western literary texts and the Bible, they also suggest a
conception of biblical hermeneutics more capacious than the historical-
critical one that has shaped interpretation of the Bible for the last two
centuries, a conception in which poetry plays an essential role. In this essay
I would like to describe some of the new dimensions of biblical hermeneu-
tics that are suggested by Frye’s work.
I come to this topic as a literary critic with a special concern for older
poems that are intimately linked to the Bible, such as Dante’s Commedia,

-75-
76 semeia

Langland’s Piers Plowman, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. These poems can prod
one, not just to want to understand them, but to ask about the nature of the
understanding one seeks. Somehow understanding these works seems to
call for more than discerning what their authors intended or describing how
their parts fit together into formal unities. The word “hermeneutics” refers
to a rich tradition of reflection upon problems such as these, one that
derives, in part, from the challenges of understanding the Bible. Twentieth-
century thinkers belonging to this tradition include Heidegger, Gadamer,
Ricoeur, and, more recently, Gerald Bruns.
From this hermeneutical tradition we have learned that understanding
does indeed involve more than reconstructing an author’s ideas or arriving
at a grasp of formal unities. It means experiencing a happening of truth,
taking part in a historical event that will inevitably involve both disclosures
and concealments—both insights and blind spots, as De Man might say. To
be sure, the search for understanding requires us to attend to the contexts in
which a work was written, but it also calls upon us to attend to the contexts
in which we encounter the work today as well as the variety of ways in
which it has been transmitted and received.
Although Northrop Frye is not conventionally associated with this
tradition, his work on the Bible and literature offers hermeneutical resources
for understanding poems such as those mentioned above. In his literary-
critical efforts Frye had always sought to defend the imaginative, the poetic,
the literary against efforts to construe them in terms of something else,
including religion. In The Great Code, however, he began to confront explicitly
the relationship between his insights into the poetic and his understanding of
the Bible. He sought to identify an irreducibly poetic element in the Bible’s
language. He thereby opened up possibilities for understanding the Bible in
ways mediated by the poetic traditions that derive from it.
Several features of Frye’s argument in The Great Code can instruct us how
better to read poets such as Dante, Langland, and Milton in relation to each
other and to the Bible. The first is Frye’s claim that, in the literary traditions
associated with the Christian Bible, the Bible was traditionally read as a uni-
fied narrative having a beginning, a middle, and an end—whatever the
results of the modern critical-historical study of it (1982:xiii). One can hardly
overestimate how intensely poets have sought to understand the Bible’s
vision of the Whole in its unity. Second is Frye’s assertion that the literal level
of the biblical narrative is radically metaphorical (1982:24). While this is not
the place to take up the numerous problems associated with the Bible’s his-
toricity, let me hasten to emphasize that Frye’s claim does not lead
necessarily to a denial of, say, the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth. The claim
means primarily that the most important experiences brought to language in
the Bible can only be articulated in poetic language. This language, therefore,
should not be subjected to extraneous, nonpoetic criteria of truthfulness. For
 kee: frye and the poetry in biblical hermeneutics 77

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 pri-
marily 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 his-
tory 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 meta-
phorical 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 specu-
lative 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 domina-
tion 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 imagi-
nations even as we seek to do so more humbly than we have in the past,
guarding against the forms of blindness that they can impose. The value of
78 semeia

Frye’s schema lies in the ways it helps us better to engage poems like the
Commedia, Piers Plowman, and Paradise Lost and to see, in particular, how
their poetic forms and strategies reflect their different places within the bib-
lical traditions.
Let me briefly indicate how. As the theologian Hans Frei has argued in
The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, Christians who lived before the development
of critical-historical consciousness were challenged existentially by the con-
viction of their tradition that the Bible was a unified narrative. If the world
unfolded in the biblical narrative “was indeed the one and only real world,
it must in principle embrace the experience of any present age and reader”
(3). The believer, therefore, had to come to understand how the shape of his
or her life—how the shape of his or her epoch—fit into the world unfolded
in the biblical story. The events of one’s life and times had to be read as
types of the biblical events; the biblical events, in turn, provided metaphori-
cal schemas within which to try to make sense of one’s life and times.
Dante makes such an effort when, in the middle of “our life,” as he calls
it, he finds himself lost in a “dark wood” (1982:1.1–2). He writes a poem char-
acteristic of Frye’s second phase of langage, the phase in which metaphorical
language is subordinated to metonymic or conceptual language. That is, he
writes an allegory in which, to quote Frye, “a metaphorical narrative runs par-
allel with a conceptual one but defers to it” (1982:24). Although conceptual
language is, finally, authoritative for Dante in a way that his poem does
acknowledge, the poem’s metaphorical narrative does not merely “dress up”
the conceptual, so to speak. It generates a disclosive power that is absolutely
essential to the poem’s conceptual luminosity and vitality.
Dante’s first dream in Canto IX of the Purgatorio may serve initially to
illustrate the way in which the conceptual and metaphorical poles of the
allegory interact in the poem as a whole (1984:9.13–69). Dante is still just
outside Purgatory proper, unable to continue his journey up the mountain
because night has fallen. He sleeps, and at an hour close to dawn, when
“our intellect’s envisionings become almost divine,” he dreams that an
eagle, “terrible as lightning,” swoops down and snatches him, carrying him
in a terrifying flight up to the sphere of fire, just below the moon. The
“imagined conflagration scorched [him] so” that he was awakened. When
he awakens, utterly disoriented and still terrified, his experience is
redescribed to him by Virgil, his guide. Saint Lucia, part of the chain of fig-
ures who has mediated divine grace to Dante from the start, had taken hold
of him while he slept and carried him into Purgatory proper to speed him
along. “Have no fear,” Virgil tells him; “be confident, for we are well along
our way.”
Conceptually, the episode illustrates how Dante’s journey toward the
freedom that will make him capable of seeing God requires the assistance
of divine grace—especially when he arrives at certain thresholds on the
 kee: frye and the poetry in biblical hermeneutics 79

journey. The metaphorical narrative, however, dramatizes the pathos expe-

rienced 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 concep-
tual 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 expe-
rience 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 under-
standing 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 symboliza-
tions 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 resurrec-
tion 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
80 semeia

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 lan-
guage 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 cru-
cial 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 nar-
rative 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 pro-
ceeds 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 disor-
der 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 contem-
porary fourteenth-century society. The second vision responds to this
 kee: frye and the poetry in biblical hermeneutics 81

imperative by imagining that the sacramental processes associated with

penance can be applied to society at large. Reason preaches a sermon call-
ing 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 multi-
layered 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 seri-
ous 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
82 semeia

by many features indicating that the effort has required Milton to be respon-
sive to a criterion of truth belonging to descriptive language.
According to Frye, the “cultural ascendancy” of descriptive language at
the beginning of the modern epoch is part of a larger process, an index of a
transformed way in which human beings understand themselves, the
world, and their relationship to that world. The process “start[s] with”
a clear separation of subject and object, in which the subject exposes itself, in
sense experience, to the impact of an objective world. The objective world is
the order of nature; thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense
experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection. (1982:13)

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 sub-
ject’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). Hei-
degger argues that human being has not always served as the “subject” of knowledge—i.e., the
subiectum, that which “has been placed under” and thus “takes over the role of the ground” (27).
He traces the emergence of human being as subject on pp. 26–28.
2 Frye’s claim that descriptive language is culturally ascendant in the modern epoch also
receives support from Timothy Reiss’s analysis of the “discourse of modernism.” See in partic-
ular Reiss’s description of what he calls “analytico-referential discourse” (31–54).
3 For a fuller development of the argument, see Kee: 156–64.
 kee: frye and the poetry in biblical hermeneutics 83

First, at numerous places in the poem an epistemology based upon

observation is assumed. For example, the poem includes no fewer than thir-
teen 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 authorita-
tive 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 col-
lection 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 conscious-
nesses 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 eventu-
ally “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
84 semeia

space filled with different voices—in Bakhtin’s phrase, a “dialogized het-

eroglossia” (Bruns, 1984:15).
Secondly, the dialogical search for understanding is concerned, not
primarily with an author’s intentions or with an original audience’s under-
standing (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 partici-
pating 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 think-
ing that unfolds within it moves between poles of disclosure and
concealment, insight and blindness, knowledge and ignorance. Most signif-
icantly, 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 histor-
ical 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 under-
standing, 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 differ-
ences 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 stud-
ies of the relationships between “hermeneutics and the critique of ideology” and “science and
ideology” (1981:63–100, 222–46).
 kee: frye and the poetry in biblical hermeneutics 85

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 synec-
doche 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 differ-
ence, 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 con-
tribute 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, Hei-
degger 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 Hof-
stadter’s otherwise excellent translation. Hofstadter’s text reads, “to create is to cause [my
emphasis] something to emerge as a thing that has been brought forth.” For Krell’s modifica-
tion, see Heidegger, 1977:180. Given Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of causality (see,
e.g., Heidegger, 1973:10–20), the connotations associated with “cause” are misleading for trans-
lating an activity that Heidegger is repeatedly describing in terms of the verb lassen (to let, to
allow) and its related forms. The original reads, “können wir das Schaffen als das Hervorgehenlassen
in ein Hervorgebrachtes kennzeichnen” (1963:49).
86 semeia

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

WORKS CONSULTED
Alighieri, Dante
1982 The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum.
Toronto: Bantam.
1984 The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Purgatorio. Trans. Allen Mandel-
baum. Toronto: Bantam.
Bergin, Thomas Goddard, and Max Harold Fisch, trans.
1968 The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Bruns, Gerald R.
1984 “Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Hermeneutics.” Diacritics 14:12–23.
1992 Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press.
Charity, A. C.
1966 Events and Their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible
and Dante. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Man, Paul
1971 Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Eliot, T. S.
1971 “Burnt Norton.” Pp. 13–20 in Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich. [Orig. 1943]
Frei, Hans W.
1974 The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Cen-
tury Hermeneutics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Frye, Northrop
1970 Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press. [Orig. 1947]
1982 The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich.
 kee: frye and the poetry in biblical hermeneutics 87

1990 Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” San
Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
1991 The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg
1980 Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato. Trans.
P. Christopher Smith. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
1989 Truth and Method. 2d ed. Trans. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and
Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad.
Heidegger, Martin
1963 “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.” Pp. 7–68 in Holzwege. 4th ed. Frank-
furt: Klostermann.
1971 “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Pp. 15–87 in Poetry, Language, Thought.
Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row.
1973 “Metaphysics As History of Being.” Pp. 1–54 in The End of Philosophy.
Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row.
1977 Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row.
Kee, James M.
1990 “Typology and Tradition: Refiguring the Bible in Milton’s Paradise
Lost.” Semeia 51:155–75.
Langland, William
1995 The Vision of Piers Plowman. Ed. A. V. C. Schmidt. 2d ed. London: J. M.
Dent.
Milton, John
1981 Paradise Lost. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis: The Odyssey Press.
[Orig. 1962]
Reiss, Timothy
1982 The Discourse of Modernism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Ricoeur, Paul
1977 The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning
in Language. Trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John
Costello. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
1981 Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and
Interpretation. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
 EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S WORDS WITH POWER:
ABSENCE AND PRESENCE
Patricia Demers
University of Alberta

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

[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 execu-
tion, 1554)

-89-
90 semeia

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, . . . clip-
ping 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 cul-
tures of their canonized and commented-on contemporaries.
Accordingly, this essay explores the turns of double meanings so pro-
ductive 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 repre-
sentative 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 transforma-
tion 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 “com-
mand of both the Bible and colloquial English” propelled their attempts to
articulate an idiosyncratic vision or “a re-vision of received tradition” (Ezell:
 demers: early modern women’s words with power 91

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

extend each of his provisional “female symbols.” The exploration of a sepa-

rate 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 cate-
gories, 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 cre-
ative 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 pat-
terns, 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 tin-
kerer” (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 over-
ornamented, 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 con-
trast 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 simul-
taneous 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.
 demers: early modern women’s words with power 93

demonstrates “how great weaknesse there is euen in the best and most
excellent men” (Gilby: 126). The rhetorically ornamented force of Pem-
broke’s opening stanza,

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 peni-
tent’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 pos-
sible 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 ref-
erences to dancing even when present in the original Hebrew” (1993:31). Anne Lock’s Sonnet
12, “Sinne and despair have so possest my hart” (Felch: 68), dwells obsessively on the weight of
sin, while petitions to cancel sin’s register impart a more buoyant, hope-filled, propulsive mood
to Pembroke’s metaphrase. The sharpest difference between Lock’s negativity and Pembroke’s
94 semeia

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” (Gold-
ing: 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, conven-
tionally “broken,” as “broosed bones that thou with paine/Hast made to weake my feble corps
to beare”; these bones, she attests, “Shall leape for joy, to shewe myne inward chere.” Pembroke,
as Hannay observes, never suggests that God caused the “brused bones”; not content with
inward cheer, these revivified bones will show their new life by dancing “awaie their sadness”
(line 28). For further background on Lock and her circle, see Hannay (1992); Woods; and Felch
(i–lxxxvii).
3 Theodore Steinberg (7–8) cites Pembroke’s “references to cleansing the leprosy of the
mind, since the Talmudic commentaries on these verses identified leprosy as the punishment
for slander,” as reflecting her “familiarity with the Hebrew originals.”
 demers: early modern women’s words with power 95

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

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 Gov-
ernors, 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
96 semeia

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 dis-
appointment. 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 seventeenth-
century millenarianism: its basis in “new scholarly approaches to the Bible”
that wrestle with “mathematical as well as historical and linguistic prob-
lems” (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
 demers: early modern women’s words with power 97

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 Pen-
ington and the Behmenist mystic Jane Lead use biblical symbols to locate
themselves within a political reality, their interest appears to lie in a sacral-
ization 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 hus-
band “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 internal-
ized, 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 pres-
ence 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 complex-
ion ruddy; piercing dominion in his countenance, splendid with affability,
great gentleness and kindness. The woman resembled him in features and
complexion; but appeared tender and bashful, yet quick-sighted. . . . [W]e in
a sense of their majesty did reverence to them, . . . at which the man
ascended, but the woman came down to us, and spoke to us with great
gravity and sweetness; the words I have forgotten, but the purport of them
was that we should not be formal, nor fall out. (50–51)

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

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 Educa-
tion” (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 inclu-
sion 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
 demers: early modern women’s words with power 99

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 Eng-
lish 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 com-
plex symbology. Whether integrated with or read alongside their
commented-on contemporaries, women’s exegeses offer striking redesig-
nations 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 under-
standing of the full consciousness, challenging contestations and diversity of
subjects in the early modern community.
100 semeia

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

1648 The Resurrection of the Witnesses; and Englands Fall from the Mysticall
Babylon Rome. London: Giles Calvert.

1651 A New and More Exact Mappe, or Description of New Jerusalems Glory
When Jesus Christ and His Saints with Him Shall Reign on Earth a Thousand
Years, and Possess All Kingdoms. London: W. H.

1653 Twelve Proposals to the Supreme Governours of the Three Nations Now
Assembled at Westminster, concerning the Propagation of the Gospel, New
Modling of the Universities, Reform of the Laws, Supply of the Necessities of
the Poor. London: Henry Hills.

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.
 demers: early modern women’s words with power 101

1991 The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
Gilby, Anthony, trans.
1581 Théodore de Bèze, The Psalmes of David. London: Henry Denham.
Golding, Arthur, trans.
1571 John Calvin: The Psalms of David and Others. London: H. Middleton.
Hannay, Margaret P.
1992 “ ‘Strengthening the Walles of . . . Ierusalem’: Anne Vaughan Lok’s
Dedication to the Countess of Warwick.” ANQ 5:71–75.
1993 “ ‘Unlock My Lipps’: The Miserere mei Deus of Anne Vaughan Lok and
Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.” Pp. 19–36 in Privileging
Gender in Early Modern England. Ed. Jean R. Brink. Kirksville, Mo.: Six-
teenth Century Journal Publishers.
Herbert, Mary Sidney
1998 The Collected Works. Ed. M. P. Hannay, N. Kinnamon, M. Brennan.
2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hill, Christopher
1994 The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. London: Pen-
guin.
Hinds, Hilary
1996 God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and
Feminist Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Kernan, Alvin
1999 In Plato’s Cave. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Lanham, Richard
1965 The Old Arcadia. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Lead, Jane
1694 The Enochian Walks with God. London: D. Edwards.
1695 The Wonders of God’s Creation. London: T. Sowle.
1696 The Tree of Faith. London: J. Bradford.
1696–1701 A Fountain of Gardens. 3 vols. London: J. Bradford.
1699 The Ascent to the Mount of Vision. London: J. Bradford.
Matchinske, Megan
1998 Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and
the Female Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meeks, Wayne A.
1974 “The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a Symbol in Earliest
Christianity.” History of Religions 13:165–203.
102 semeia

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

My point of departure in this paper will be the relationship between

Frye’s archetypal theory and his appropriation and application of tradi-
tional 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 Criti-
cism 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 liter-
ary 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 arche-
typal 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.

-103-
104 semeia

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 lit-
erary 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 con-
struct,” 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 “heuris-
tic 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 prebib-
lical 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 anti-
types will themselves become types of new, postbiblical antitypes,
represented in the “recreation” said in The Great Code to be part of the sev-
enth, “apocalyptic” phase of revelation (138), but suggested in one of the
late notebooks to represent a possible eighth phase, designated in that con-
text 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).
 burgess: from archetype to antitype 105

My own interest in the “archetypological” connection to be investi-

gated 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 repeat-
ing 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 antici-
pates 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
106 semeia

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

2 For additional parallels not discussed here, such as the creation of the heavenly bodies
and of dry land, see Heidel, esp. ch. 3 on “Old Testament Parallels.”
3 For Frye’s discussion of this myth, see 1982:146.
 burgess: from archetype to antitype 107

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

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

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 affec-
tionate 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 dis-
cern 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 Cash-
ford, however, write of “the great serpent or dragon that was the image of the winding rivers
and the fierce, inundating floods of winter, which turned the Babylonian plain into a watery
chaos” (275).
 burgess: from archetype to antitype 109

Figure 1. The goddess Kuan Yin riding on a dragon.

(From the author’s private collection.)
110 semeia

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

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
 burgess: from archetype to antitype 111

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 repre-
sentation 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 mis-
trust in the mythologies that had previously celebrated her—for her
consorts inevitably met the same harsh fate as the grain that they personi-
fied. “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).
112 semeia

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

11 The catalogue of the previous lovers of Ishtar named by Gilgamesh in the epic seems to
be largely poetic, as it includes the many-colored roller (a bird), the lion, the stallion magnificent
in battle, the shepherd of the flock, and Ishullanu the gardener as well as Tammuz, the “lover of
[her] youth, for whom [she] decreed wailing, year after year” (Sandars: 86–87). Frymer-Kensky,
however, sheds a rather different light on the situation in her discussion of early Sumerian epics
that treat the rivalry between several of the Sumerian city-states (all of whom claimed Inanna as
their patron) in terms of the ability of their king to retain the favor of the goddess, and especially
in her description of the devastation experienced by Enmerkar, Lord of Kullab, who interpreted
his failure in battle against Aratta as an indication that Inanna had deserted him and no longer
desired him as a partner (62–63). The result of this, she says, is that although the kings of Akkad
might have attributed their victory to Inanna/Ishtar, the religion of later Sumer envisions a
world in which such historical rise and fall depends on the god Enlil rather than on the goddess
(66). Strikingly, Gilgamesh’s name is preceded on the Sumerian King List by that of Dumuzi,
the Sumerian equivalent of the Babylonian or Akkadian Tammuz (Jakobsen: 1939:142 and table
1, following p. 180).
 burgess: from archetype to antitype 113

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

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

Canaanite goddess Anath or Anat. Anat is never named in the Bible, but
throughout the Old Testament there are numerous exhortations against “wor-
shiping the Baals and the Asherahs” (Judg 3:7 NRSV; cf. NIV), the stylized
wooden trees that were the sacred images of the Canaanite religion, and it has
been suggested that the Canaanite mother goddess Asherah or Astarte (Ash-
toreth or Ashtaroth in the AV) may at one time even have been worshiped in
the temple of Jerusalem as a consort of Yahweh (Metzger and Coogan: 64, 62).
The main “curse” from the biblical point of view, however, is clearly
that said to have been brought upon the entire human race by Eve through
her dealings with the serpent in the second, Jahwist, creation account in Gen
2:4–3:24. What it is important to note about this account for my purposes
here is that it involves another encounter with a so-called demonic animal
and that this encounter also reflects a parallel with Sumerian and Akkadian
mythology. For on Mesopotamian cylinder seals and other artifacts dating
back to as early as the third millennium B.C.E. there are numerous carved
illustrations reminiscent of the primal scene in the garden of Eden in which
images of a goddess, serpents, and a tree of life are juxtaposed. Joseph
Campbell, in a section entitled “The Mother Goddess Eve” contained in a
chapter devoted to “The Serpent’s Bride” in his book The Masks of God: Occi-
dental Mythology, writes that

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 iden-
tifies Gula as a counterpart of Baba/Ba’u, who occupied the same position in the Sumerian
pantheon (221). It should be pointed out also that the drawing of the cylinder seal used here by
Campbell, rather strikingly, depicts only one serpent, the one standing behind the goddess, as
 burgess: from archetype to antitype 115

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 elab-
orates that “the Mother Goddess of ancient Near Eastern religions, by
whatever name she was called, was honored and worshipped with the title
‘the Mother of All the Living,’ ” which is “the meaning of Hawwah, or Eve,
the name given by Adam to the first woman” (3). Moreover, commenting on
the story of the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib, he notes that “in Sumerian
religion the cuneiform signs NIN.TI could be read as either ‘lady of life’ (a
title for a goddess) or ‘lady of the rib’” (28).
Under the circumstances, the words given by Milton to Eve’s tempter in
the garden in Paradise Lost assume the utmost irony:

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 reproduc-
tion showing both (1974:295), as do Baring and Cashford (43).
116 semeia

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 Sym-
metry 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 womb-
worship, a desire to prolong the helplessness of the perceiver and his
dependence on the body of nature which surrounds him. . . . All female-
worship 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 con-
structed 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 patri-
archal 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 descrip-
tion 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.
 burgess: from archetype to antitype 117

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 Perse-

phone (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
118 semeia

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

15 “If ‘All is possible with’ him/As he besides concedes/He will refund us finally/Our
confiscated Gods—” (qtd. in Frye, 1963:209; cf. also 1990:134–35).
16 Speaking specifically about poets, however, in an introduction to an anthology that was
to have been published by Harcourt, Brace and World, Frye writes: “During a time when sexual
sublimation was about the most highly approved of all social acts, it would not be surprising, on
the face of it, that poets, deprived of what Emily Dickinson calls ‘our confiscated gods,’ should
have decided that, while they could get along without Jupiter, certainly without Mars, the loss of
Venus was intolerable” (Frye, 2002:112).
17 In addition to the passage from the extracanonical Gospel of Thomas cited here, I have in
mind the following instances: (a) comments in the Pistis Sophia attributed, as in the Gospel of
Thomas, to Peter, e.g.: “My Lord, we will not endure this woman [Mary Magdalene], for she
taketh the opportunity from us and hath let none of us speak, but she discourseth many times”
(Mead: 47); (b) Paul’s statement in 1 Tim 2:11–12: “Let a woman learn in silence with all submis-
siveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent”; (c) the
statement attributed to Jesus in the second century by Clement of Alexandria in the Stromateis:
“They say that the Savior himself said: ‘I come to undo the works of women,’ meaning by this
‘female,’ sexual desire, and by ‘work,’ birth and the corruption of death” (qtd. in Brown: 85).
18 The commentary on this verse in The Complete Gospels (Miller: 323) notes that “in the
extra-canonical tradition Peter is portrayed as critical of Mary in particular (e.g. in the Gospel of
Mary and the Pistis Sophia),” indicating that the Mary referred to is Mary Magdalene; however,
Frye may be reading the passage as referring to the Virgin Mary, as this would help to explain
his theory of “redeemable man . . . conceived in female form as the Virgin Mary” (2000b:2:444).
 burgess: from archetype to antitype 119

making male & female sexes the symbols of human subject and natural
object was confusing & perhaps wrong, but we’re stuck with it”
(2000b:1:333)—with the result that he is left musing on such imponderables
as man “whoring around” as woman (2:453) and his “theory that
redeemable man is symbolically woman” (2:464, 573).
Also disturbing is the way in which earthly nature merges in Frye’s
thought with physical human nature. “Why do we call both art and nature
beautiful?” he asks in one notebook entry. “It seems absurd on the face of it
to apply the same term to a Mozart divertimento and some cutie in a bathing
suit” (2:622; emphasis mine). Both forms of nature are, to his way of think-
ing, equally in need of redemption, the reason for this being that in his
model of the old four-level cosmos of authority the original paradisal nature
was held to have fallen to its present lower level simultaneously with the
fall of Adam. Thus, according to Frye, “human history is the record of the
only animal in nature more repulsive than nature,” and “we can hope for
nothing in either man or nature: there has to be an apocalypse within man”
(1:368). Thus also his preoccupation with the cultural productions of art and
literature—“human creativity has in it the quality of re-creation, of salvaging
something with a human meaning out of the alienation of nature”
(1982:138)—and his especial emphasis on the written message of the Bible.

The Bible is, to me, the body of words through which I can see the world as a
cosmos, as an order, and where I can see human nature as something
redeemable, something with a right to survive. Otherwise you’re left with
human nature and physical nature. Physical nature doesn’t seem to have very
much conversation. It’s a totally inarticulate world. Human nature is corrupt
at the source because it’s grown out of physical nature. (1991–1992:10)

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 inter-
ests 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 ani-
mals—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 recur-
rent 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
120 semeia

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

This dramatic change in mind-set, he asserts, was also responsible for

the religious shift in focus from images—henceforth proclaimed to be idola-
trous, 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 domina-
tion 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 left-
brained, 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 mascu-
line (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 catego-
rization 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). Tradi-
tionally 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
 burgess: from archetype to antitype 121

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

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
122 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 spiri-
tual 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?

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1991 The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. London: Viking.
Blake, William
1988 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman.
Rev. ed. New York: Doubleday.
Brown, Peter
1988 The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early
Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Campbell, Joseph
1964 The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology. Harmondsworth, England: Pen-
guin.
1974 The Mythic Image. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Catullus
1995 Poems 61–68. Ed. and trans. John Godwin. Warminster, England: Aris &
Phillips.
Das, Surya
1997 Awakening the Buddha Within: Eight Steps to Enlightenment: Tibetan
Wisdom for the Western World. New York: Broadway.
Frankfort, Henri
1948 Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion As the
Integration of Society and Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Frazer, Sir James George
1976 The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion. London: Macmillan.
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 burgess: from archetype to antitype 123

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
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1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
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1963 Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace &
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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 Transforma-
tion 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.
124 semeia

Jacobsen, Thorkild
1939 The Sumerian King List. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1987 The Harps That Once. . . : Sumerian Poetry in Translation. New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press.
Layton, Bentley, ed. and trans.
1987 The Gnostic Scriptures. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
Mead, G. R. S.
1974 Pistis Sophia: Challenge to Early Christianity. Secaucus, N.J.: University
Books.
Metzger, Bruce M., and Michael D. Coogan, eds.
1993 The Oxford Companion to the Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Miller, Robert J., ed.
1994 The Complete Gospels: Annotated Scholars Version. Rev. and expanded ed.
San Francisco: Harper Collins.
Milton, John
1962 Paradise Lost. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Ovid
1977 Metamorphoses. Vol. 1. Trans. Frank Justus Miller. 3d ed., rev. G. P.
Goold. LCL. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
1986 Metamorphoses. Trans. A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Phillips, John A.
1984 Eve: The History of an Idea. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Pound, Ezra
1964 The Cantos of Ezra Pound. London: Faber & Faber.
Pritchard, James B., ed.
1955 Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. 2d ed. Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Sandars, N. K., trans. and introd.
1972 The Epic of Gilgamesh. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin.
Shlain, Leonard
1998 The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image.
Harmondsworth, England: Viking Penguin.
Wolkstein, Diane, and Samuel Noah Kramer
1983 Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Legends from Sumer.
New York: Harper & Row.
 MODELING BIBLICAL NARRATIVE:
FRYE AND D. H. LAWRENCE
William Robins
University of Toronto

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

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 dis-
placed 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 sec-
tions 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 sym-
bolic equivalences (the Lamb is the Tree is the Water). This concentrated mix

-125-
126 semeia

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 typol-
ogy, symbolic identity, and apocalyptic vision.
Frye’s preferred guides to the intertextual presence of the Bible are pri-
marily 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 uni-
versalized 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 com-
mitted to the mythic powers of fiction. The difference is that Lawrence’s
techniques of literary representation are those of a novelist. Does this differ-
ence 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 fol-
lowing 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 con-
ceives 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
 robins: modeling biblical narrative 127

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, unsat-
isfied 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 under-
lies 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
128 semeia

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 recapit-
ulation of the Christian story of salvation, the clustering of familiar biblical
symbols, and the achievement of a kind of “apocalyptic” vision on the part
of the main character, Aaron’s Rod seems to confirm the general validity of
Frye’s model of biblical intertextuality.
There are, however, two difficulties. The first concerns the divergent
kinds of visionary truth unleashed by the myth of rebirth. Lawrence gives
his novel a proto-fascist conclusion: realize the truth of the world, dissolve
your own concern for your ego, and you will joyfully submit to a greater
man’s power. Frye’s apocalypticism encodes his own United Church liber-
alism: cleanse the doors of perception and you will break free of ideologies.
Frye is adamant that any visionary claim that leads to fascism is a false
vision, but this remains a point of faith on Frye’s part. For Lawrence, any
spiritual growth that found fulfillment in democracy was spiritually false.
Even if most of us following in Frye’s wake are sympathetic to his moral
stance, and would like to believe that the imagination ultimately reveals
truths that are palatable, nevertheless, the archetypal narrativity of the bibli-
cal tradition does not necessarily always take liberal forms.
The second difficulty is posed by the structure of this novel. A plot of
continual deferral animates the first twenty of the twenty-one chapters of
Aaron’s Rod, and bringing that plot to a formal closure presented Lawrence
with a significant difficulty; in a letter he admits: “I did more than half of
Aaron’s Rod, but can’t end it: the flowering end missing, I suppose”
(1984:626). When he does conclude the novel, he does so by veering sharply
away from the picaresque genre of Sisson’s wandering. The consensus of its
readers is that this closing chapter stands in stark disharmony with the rest
of Aaron’s Rod, both in the sentiments expressed and in the preacherly mode
of delivery. Daleski is typical in seeing it as Lawrence’s attempt “to blatantly
force Aaron into a yielding which would negate a great deal of what has
gone before. . . . [I]t is not clear why yielding in the name of ‘life-submission’
should not be as much a ‘cul-de-sac’ as less pretentious forms of surrender”
(207). In other words, this conclusion, which seems to align Aaron’s Rod with
a Frygian understanding of biblical narrative, is inappropriately imposed
upon the rest of the novel, which seems to bring into play different narrative
 robins: modeling biblical narrative 129

expectations and, as we will see, a different mode of engaging with the text
of the Bible.
In modeling his novel upon the story of the Israelites’ wandering in the
wilderness, and especially upon the story of Aaron’s difficult priesthood,
Lawrence adopts a technique that I will speak of as “parallel tracking.” He
has approached the biblical text of Exodus and Numbers as a series of dis-
crete episodes strung together according to an irregular rhythm of the
appearance and disappearance of a vital connection to God. With the plot of
the exodus stripped to these narrative bones, the skeleton has been taken up
by Lawrence to provide the scaffolding for his novel. This parallel tracking
is represented schematically in my accompanying table (table 1).

Table 1
Correspondences of Aaron’s Rod with Exodus and Numbers

Aaron’s Rod Exodus Numbers

(ch.)
1 Captivity 1–2
2 Egypt 1–2
3 Burning Bush 3–4
4 Passover 12
5 Egypt Follows 13
6 Murmuring 14a
7 Red Sea 14b–15
8 Backsliding/Manna 15b–17a
9 Amalek/Anointing 17b–31
10 Remembrance/Calling 17b–31 [Aaron’s Rod]
11 Old Gods/Promise 32–33
12 Red Sea/Wilderness 15–17a Journeying/Mannah, Quails 10–11
13 Red Sea/Wilderness 15–17a Miriam and Aaron 12
14 Amalek/Gershom 17b–18 Spies 13
15 Journey to Sinai 19a Spying the Land 13
16 Sinai 19b–31 Promised Land Denied 14
17 Sinai 19b–31 Laws 15
18 Golden Calf 32 Aaron’s Rod 16–17
19 Golden Calf 32 Korah’s Destruction 16–17
20 Stripping of Ornaments 33 Meribah/Death of Aaron 18–20

21 ? ?

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
130 semeia

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 nor-
malcy. 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 nar-
rative 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 March-
esa 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 trans-
gress 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 wilder-
ness. The names of the two men Sisson meets in Milan, Guest and Dekker,
 robins: modeling biblical narrative 131

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

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 para-
digms 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 strate-
gies of visionary poetics—and, on the other hand, an attention to “novelistic
narrativity”—aligned with the mechanics of the Hebrew Bible, with charac-
terological 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 unknow-
able 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 (Ker-
mode), 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 inter-
textual 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 nar-
rative 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 subtle-
interrelatedness 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
 robins: modeling biblical narrative 133

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

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 novelis-
tic 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 attend-
ing 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. Har-
mondsworth, England: Penguin.
Alter, Robert
1981 The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books.
Auerbach, Erich
1953 Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans.
Willard R. Trask. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Baker, Paul G.
1983 “Biblical Analogue and Symbolism in Aaron’s Rod.” Pp. 39–60 in A
Reassessment of D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod. Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press.
Daleski, H. M.
1965 The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence. London: Faber & Faber.
 robins: modeling biblical narrative 135

Ford, George H.
1965 The Double Measure: A Study of the Novels and Stories of D. H. Lawrence.
New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Frye, Northrop
1976 The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
1982 The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich.
1990 Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” San
Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Hyde, Virginia
1992 The Risen Adam: D. H. Lawrence’s Revisionist Typology. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press.
Josipovici, Gabriel
1988 The Book of God: A Response to the Bible. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-
versity Press.
Kalnins, Mara
1988 “Introduction.” Pp. xvii–xliv in Lawrence, 1988.
Kermode, Frank
1971 “D. H. Lawrence and the Apocalyptic Types.” Pp. 153–81 in Modern
Essays. London: Collins. [Partly reprinted as “Lawrence and Apocalyp-
tic Types.” Pp. 59–71 in Modern Critical Views: D. H. Lawrence. Ed.
Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.]
Lawrence, D. H.
1936 “Morality and the Novel.” Pp. 527–32 in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers
of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Edward D. McDonald. London: Heinemann.
1968 “The Novel.” Pp. 416–26 in Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished and
Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T.
Moore. New York: Viking.
1984 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Vol. 3: October 1916–June 1921. Ed. James T.
Boulton and Andrew Robertson. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
1988 Aaron’s Rod. Ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
RESPONSES
 BIBLICAL STUDIES ON A MORE CAPACIOUS CANVAS:
A RESPONSE TO JOE VELAIDUM AND JAMES M. KEE
David Jobling
St. Andrew’s College, Saskatoon

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

-139-
140 semeia

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

The greatness of Frye, and the radical difference between his work and
that of the great bulk of garden-variety myth criticism, lies in his willing-
ness to raise the issue of community and to draw basic, essentially social,
interpretive consequences from the nature of religion as collective repre-
sentation. (69)

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 appreci-
ates 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 sug-
gests that, while the realistic mode has been successfully tamed (“reified”)
within late capitalism, romance still opens a way of “sensing other histori-
cal rhythms” (104). He notes with special appreciation that Frye’s reading
of romance “does not involve the substitution of some more ideal realm for
 jobling: biblical studies on a more capacious canvas 141

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 “pos-
itive” 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 cele-
bration 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 insis-
tence 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 Christ-
ian 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
142 semeia

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 com-
mensurate 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 confer-
ence, 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 disci-
plinary 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 bib-
lical 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.
 jobling: biblical studies on a more capacious canvas 143

After his preamble, Velaidum moves abruptly into Frye’s understand-

ing 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 con-
stantly 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 impor-
tant 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 implica-
tion 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 evi-
dence 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
144 semeia

modern texts. Reading his work on Dante, Langland, and Milton was for me
primarily an experience of learning. But I fully affirm the hermeneutical
implication that he intends this work to have for biblical studies. The ques-
tion that arises is this: Is what Kee is doing “biblical studies,” in the sense
that this sort of thing should be included in biblical studies’ regular and
normal self-definition? The answer, for me, is a resounding Yes.
Kee’s choice of subjects makes us see the Bible functioning within a
large reach of history, from the early fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury, and in a variety of social and political circumstances. True to “the
irreducibly social character” of Frye’s hermeneutic, he insists on reading his
texts in their specific social and political contexts, and shows us how these
find expression in the works themselves: not by simple “reflection,” but in
ways discernible only by subtle analysis. This resembles Jameson’s
approach and insights.
If Kee did no more, these would be substantial accomplishments. But he
goes further. By the brilliant organization of his essay, he puts a significant
question to Frye, and helps me with my own ambiguity about Frye.
Dante operates with ontological confidence out of a vision of cosmic
unity, and his control over his work expresses this (he is contemporary, of
course, with the heyday of the fourfold biblical hermeneutic so important to
Jameson; this was a time that “knew” how to read the Bible). For Langland,
the unity and confidence are fading; for Milton, they are gone; and in both,
authorial control has correspondingly become a critical issue. Langland
must mend by metaphor the allegorical assurance that has been broken, and
Milton can make at best a “heroic attempt” to control his material at all.
These dynamics can be translated into political terms. Langland (as I learned
from Kee) “is engaged with the personal, social, and historical disorders of
his day in intensely concrete ways,” and the same could surely be said of
Milton with at least equal truth. In their modes of political engagement they
again differ from Dante, for whom political roles, from pope and emperor
down, are “divinely ordained” (Kee: 80).
What Kee does is to make Langland and Milton deconstruct Dante and
then, in a parallel move, make a hermeneutician like Gerald Bruns decon-
struct Frye’s straining for the Dantesque unity—all the while acknowledging
that it is Frye himself who provides the framework within which such
changes can be rung! (I have called this sort of thing “friendly deconstruc-
tion”; Derrida does it to Marx.) By reading Frye against himself, Kee reveals
a Frye who “knows” the limits of the oneness that he passionately projects
for the mending of society, whose method carries him into “indeterminate
Two-ness” (84).
Both Velaidum and Kee expressly desire renewal in biblical studies and
draw on Frye to express their desire. They don’t want exactly what Frye
wanted—Kee especially distances himself from Frye—but both acknowledge
 jobling: biblical studies on a more capacious canvas 145

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

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

1982 The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Jameson, Fredric
1981 The Political Unconscious: Narrative As a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Jobling, David
1988 “The Canon of the Hebrew Bible As a Literary Work.” Unpublished
paper delivered at the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies Annual
Meeting, University of Windsor, Ontario.
1998 1 Samuel. Berit Olam: Studies in Hebrew Narrative and Poetry. Col-
legeville, Minn.: Liturgical.
Josipovici, Gabriel
1988 The Book of God. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude
1963 “Réponse à quelques questions.” Esprit 31:628–53.
Parker, Kim Ian
1996 “John Locke and the Enlightenment Metanarrative: A Biblical Correc-
tive to a Reasoned World.” SJT 49:57–73.
Patte, Daniel
1998 “Critical Biblical Studies from a Semiotic Perspective.” Semeia 81:3–23.
 RECONFIGURING THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION:
A RESPONSE TO MARGARET BURGESS, PATRICIA
DEMERS, AND WILLIAM ROBINS
J. Russell Perkin
Saint Mary’s University

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 empha-
size 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 argu-
ment 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 “pre-
ceptor” 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 fundamental-
ism 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 interpreta-
tion, and having declared the irrelevance of the methods and findings of

-147-
148 semeia

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 under-
standing 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 edu-
cated 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 per-
spectives, 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 com-
pletely 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 kalei-
doscopic 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 relat-
ing 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 femi-
nist 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 “reconfig-
uring them” (85). Burgess, Demers, and Robins all suggest or imply ways in
which Frye’s approach can be reconfigured.
 perkin: reconfiguring the liberal imagination 149

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 think-
ing 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 struc-
tures 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 repre-
sent the two poles of Restoration culture, between which the liberal-minded
might wish to find a middle way. With Sade the issue becomes more prob-
lematic, as one wonders whether he is, or should be, part of “culture.”
Perhaps my doubt arises because in its biblical context, the idea of a lion
lying down with a lamb is an image of the transcendence of violence and
bloodshed, whereas in the context of Sade and Jane Austen it is hard to
avoid the suggestion of Frye’s aggressively masculine sense of humour, con-
templating with amusement the idea of the two writers in a sexual
juxtaposition. Austen, of course, was far less tolerant of the figure of the
rake, as several of her novels reveal. Without becoming an advocate of cen-
sorship, it may be possible to quibble with Frye’s use of the word “equally”
and to suggest that his masculine viewpoint sometimes constitutes a blind
spot in Frye’s liberal humanism. My own idea of liberal education would
make far more room for Jane Austen than for Sade. Bogdan has her own list
of problematic passages in Frye (92, 94n17)—to which Burgess adds one or
two more examples (see, e.g., 116, 118–19)—and she argues against Frye that
“literary experience could be negative as well as positive” (88). Such a ques-
tioning and qualifying of Frye’s liberalism as an adequate basis for biblical
hermeneutics unites each of the three essays under consideration here. The
150 semeia

need for such efforts is brought home poignantly by William Robins’s con-
clusion that Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod arrives at its “fascism” as “a result of
adhering to the archetypal narrativity of the Christian Bible” (134; emphasis
added). Frye tended, without thorough scrutiny, to associate this structure
of thinking only with liberal creative freedom (Robins: 128).
Frye was certainly a more robust liberal than Matthew Arnold, and he
sometimes notes the lacunae in Arnold’s liberalism (e.g., Cayley: 117).
Arnold ridicules the racial theories of Emile Burnouf in Literature and Dogma,
but as Frye observed in a marginal annotation in his own copy of that work,
“yet Arnold expresses a sneaking fondness for this sort of thing in, I think,
Celtic Lit.” (Arnold, 1877:119; Frye is referring to Arnold’s collection of
essays on Celtic literature, which sometimes indulge in speculation about
racial characteristics: see Arnold, 1867). Frye regarded John Stuart Mill as a
more genuine liberal than Arnold. Frye’s moments of unreflective masculin-
ity are one weakness in his own liberalism; another may be the way that he
was unwilling or unable to see—perhaps because of the very power of his
own imaginative response to literature—that others could put literary texts
to very different uses in a manner that could be resisted only by evaluative
criticism. In this context, Arnold’s insistence on the critic’s task as “a disin-
terested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and
thought in the world” (1992:602) may be preferable to Frye’s rejection of the
critical task of evaluation. I referred earlier to the susceptibility of liberal the-
ology to becoming an expression of the fashionable ideas of the moment. In
the nineteenth century, it was vulnerable to accommodation with racial the-
orizing, as a number of scholarly studies have demonstrated (e.g., Davies,
1975, 1980; Heschel) and as Frye implies in his marginal comment on
Arnold’s Literature and Dogma. Robins notes a related case in his discussion
of Lawrence’s fascistic reformulation of Christianity (128, 133–34). Typology
separated from its original historical and doctrinal matrix is indeed a dan-
gerous model for the interpreter.
Robins suggests that Frye’s archetypal approach is less applicable to
modernist fiction than the more novelistic approach to the Bible of inter-
preters like Robert Alter. It is interesting in this context that Frye was never
very interested in the realist tradition in European fiction, and his major
examples of figural typology come from poetry and romance. Robins’s dis-
cussion could be developed further by a consideration of James Joyce,
whose poetics of course owe a great debt to the Catholic sacramental tradi-
tion, even though he rejected its doctrinal basis. Joyce’s fiction is full of
parodic typology, but it is also dense with realistic detail of a kind that
relates it more to the “novelistic narrativity” that Robins associates with
Alter’s commentary on the Jewish scriptures and that could as well be associ-
ated with Frank Kermode’s literary analysis of the Gospels. (Kermode
includes a discussion of Ulysses as well as the Gospel narratives in The Genesis
 perkin: reconfiguring the liberal imagination 151

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 sug-
gests 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 treat-
ment of the female principle. Burgess notes that the metaphor of the double
mirror is contradicted by the statement that “the Old Testament contains anti-
types for which the prebiblical mythologies provide the types,” while the
New Testament figures will themselves be types of “new, postbiblical anti-
types” (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 prob-
lematic. 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 rela-
tions 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 theolog-
ical 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 inter-
preters 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 indi-
cate a direction for further critical endeavour. The history of female
interpretation of the Bible is certainly worth placing alongside the schol-
arly investigation of female figures in prebiblical religions as means of
rethinking Frye’s biblical criticism.
152 semeia

In interpreting the Bible, as in interpreting literature, there is no guar-

antee 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 han-
dling 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 asso-
ciated 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 Crit-
ical Theory since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. Rev. ed. Fort Worth:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Arnold, Matthew
1867 On the Study of Celtic Literature. London: Smith, Elder.
1877 Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the
Bible. New York: Macmillan. (Frye’s copy with his marginal annota-
tions, in the Northrop Frye Collection, E. J. Pratt Library, Victoria
College, no. 334.)
1992 “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Pp. 592–603 in Critical
Theory since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. Rev. ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich.
 perkin: reconfiguring the liberal imagination 153

Ayre, John
1989 Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M.
1981 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bogdan, Deanne
1994 “The (Re)Educated Imagination.” Pp. 84–96 in The Legacy of Northrop
Frye. Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Cayley, David
1992 Northrop Frye in Conversation. Toronto: Anansi.
Davies, Alan T.
1975 “The Aryan Christ: A Motif in Christian Anti-Semitism.” Journal of Ecu-
menical Studies 12:569–79.
1980 “Racism and German Protestant Theology: A Prelude to the Holo-
caust.” Pp. 20–34 in Reflections on the Holocaust: Historical, Philosophical,
and Educational Dimensions. Ed. Irene G. Shur, Franklin H. Littell, and
Marvin E. Wolfgang. Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science 450. Philadelphia: AAPSS.
Frye, Northrop
1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press.
1982 The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic Press.
1990 Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.”
Markham: Viking.
1991 The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
2000 “The Double Mirror.” Pp. 83–90 in Northrop Frye on Religion. Ed. Alvin A.
Lee and Jean O’Grady. Vol. 4 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Heschel, Suzanne
1994 “The Image of Judaism in Nineteenth-Century Christian New Testa-
ment Scholarship in Germany.” Pp. 215–40 in Jewish-Christian Encounters
over the Centuries: Symbiosis, Prejudice, Holocaust, Dialogue. Ed. Marvin
Perry and Frederick Schweitzer. New York: Peter Lang.
Kermode, Frank
1979 The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
 New and Recent Titles

Other Ways of Reading The Labour of Reading

African Women and the Bible
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
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Featured methods include storytelling,
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Responses locate the collection along a
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and African male theologians. This book,
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Code: 060807 264 pages 2001
Paper: $24.95ISBN: 1-58983-009-1
Desire, Alienation, and Biblical
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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

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

-155-
156 semeia

events and persons, what Frye calls for, then, is an “imaginative literalism”
that recognizes that the “literal basis of faith in Christianity is a mythical and
metaphorical basis, not one founded on historical facts or logical propositions”
(1991:17). For Frye, myth and metaphor are a “primitive form of awareness,
established long before the distinction of subject and object became normal”
(1990:xviii). Just as myth is neither historical nor antihistorical, but counter-
historical, metaphor is neither logical nor illogical, but counterlogical. As
such, the question we should bring to biblical stories is not the objective—did
the events happen just as we are told?—but rather: how do we stand with
respect to the events’ revelation of God? If we approach the Bible solely as
literary critics, then its stories, no matter how beautifully wrought in terms
of their imaginative vision and formal properties, are “simply stories, con-
sidered with the suspended judgment of the imagination without relation to
the area we vaguely describe as truth” (1991:76). Thus beyond the usual
metaphorical-literal level where stories are only stories, there is for Frye the
“polysemous” nature of the Bible in which the unity of the biblical stories
form a myth to live by, “transformed from the kind of story we can con-
struct ourselves to a spiritual story of what has created and continues to
re-create us” (1991:77).
I want, for a moment, to read Frye’s ideas of “metaphorical literalism”
in the context of Gerald Bruns’s book Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern,
specifically his chapter on Luther. Luther argues first and foremost that
Scripture “does not tolerate the division of letter and Spirit” (Bruns: 144).
Spirit here means something like a mode of being, a state of living in God’s
Spirit, as opposed to an intellectual state “of conceptual agreement with
what the text says (not a philosophical state of knowledge or theological
state of doctrinal assent).” As Luther put it, he did not wish to understand
Scripture by his spirit or others’ but solely by its spirit. Scripture, then, is not
“so much an object of understanding as a component of it; what one under-
stands when one understands the Scriptural texts is not anything conceptual
and extractable as a meaning” (Bruns: 144–45). What does one understand?
The life of faith that seeks understanding as informed by the Scriptures. As
in Augustine, one must already have understood a text (in the sense of that
which it teaches) to be able to interpret its language. As Bruns formulates it,
the hermeneutical situation that Luther describes is one in which “the reader
is not so much the interpreter as the interpreted” (146). This is Luther’s great
reform: to encounter the Bible in the spirit in which it was written, an
encounter that is not concerned with deciphering a text’s meanings but with
“the event of the interpretation itself.” Scripture must be experienced. The
reader cannot be a “disengaged rational subject” (149). As opposed to the
idea of a text as a purely analytical object on which interpretation is done,
Luther posits a text that inscribes itself in the reader. In Frye, too, the text is
something that confronts the reader: “sooner or later we have to study . . . our
 cording: the “something more” in the bible 157

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

Frye lays out this schema for two reasons: our understanding of the Bible
today depends in part on understanding how the Bible has been inter-
preted within a tradition in which the criteria for truthfulness have
privileged discursive discourse over metaphorical discourse. The result is
that we are left with myths that have become purely literary. Though Frye
admits that much of the Bible is “contemporary with the second-phase sep-
aration of the dialectical from the poetic” (1982:27), he argues that the
Bible’s origins lie in the first, metaphorical phase. Biblical language never
falls “wholly into the conventions of the second phase” because there are
“no true rational arguments in the Bible” (1982:27). For Frye biblical
Hebrew is an “obsessively concrete language” that eschews abstraction;
and the New Testament, despite its late date, shares this attitude toward
language. Such concreteness is a trait, Frye argues, that belongs to the
metaphorical phase of language. Once we recognize the Bible’s essentially
metaphorical language despite the “domination” (1982:23) of the later
phases, we can begin the arduous task of finding our way back to a God
who “may not be so much dead as entombed in a dead language”
(1982:18). Thus Frye’s task in The Great Code and Words with Power is to
restore the mythical and metaphorical basis of the Bible (and in so doing
restore, paradoxically, the literal basis of faith).
With this admittedly simplified background in mind, I will turn now to
Robert Alter’s essay, “Northrop Frye between Archetype and Typology.”
Alter’s books, especially The World of Biblical Literature, are interested in the
same question as Frye—how is the Bible a unique work of literature? Alter
and Frye agree that historical criticism of the Bible is rooted “in a view of
truth associated with nineteenth century positivism that does not sit well
with any sense of the moral or spiritual authority of Scripture” (Alter: 203).
Alter and Frye, that is, both share the same interest in closing the distance
between reader and text that I spoke about earlier. Finally, Alter’s interest in
bringing the tools of literary analysis to bear on the Bible, like Frye’s, is in
the service of “opening ourselves to something that deserves to be called
their authority, whether we attribute that authority solely to the power of
the human imagination or to a transcendent source of illumination that kin-
dled the imagination of the writers to express itself through . . . particular
literary means” (Alter: 204, emphasis mine). But here is also the place where
the two part company. Alter, who, perhaps, more than any recent writer on
the Bible has taught us how to attend to the poetic and narrative properties
of the Bible, is not only content with that “or” but is highly suspicious of
anyone who would push for “more.” As Alter concludes: “the covenantal
urgency of the biblical writers impelled them on a bold and finally impossi-
ble project: they sought to use literature to go irrevocably beyond itself”
(46). To Alter, Frye’s “imaginative refurbishing of Christian typology as a
beautifully interlocked system of symmetrically arranged archetypes,”
 cording: the “something more” in the bible 159

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

“defamiliarize” so that the world can be seen again in its uniqueness. Frye
notes the creative and imaginative quality of myth because he sees a link
between myth and the primary function of literature: “to keep re-creating
the first or metaphorical phase of language” (1982:23). In Frye, literary his-
tory is the constant attempt on the part of poets to restore our original
relationship to what Wallace Stevens called the “muddy center” (1954:383).
As Frye understands, the poet’s task is always, as Eliot said, to purify the
language of the tribe so that we might see what kind of world we are really
in, so that we might have, as Stevens said, the “intensest rendezvous with
the world” (1954:524).
Myths are autonomous, then, because they are creative and imaginative,
because their truth is inside their verbal structure, not outside it. But this is
only half the picture, as Frye well knows. Just as the oratorical style of the
Bible united the poetic and the concerned for Frye, myth also unites both its
poetic aspect as a story with its social function. In both its poetic and its
social aspects, myth is a “program of action for a specific society.” More
importantly for Frye, in both these aspects myth “relates not to the actual
but to the possible.” Myth and the mythic mode of the Bible are crucial
because they keep confronting us with fundamental realities that are not of
our own making. To move toward the “possible” involves, as Frye says,
seeing “an element of illusion in what is really there, and something real in
fantasies about what might be there instead.” It is here that the imaginative
and the concerned “begin to unite” (1982:50).
Alter seems to collapse Frye’s understanding of how the imaginative
and the concerned are always united in the linguistic idiom of the Bible.
Summing up his reading of the David and Bathsheba story, Alter states this
objection against Frye:

This verse is, of course, a verbal artifact, which is part of the much larger
verbal artifact that is the David story, but it presents itself not as a linguistic
gesture ultimately pointing to itself, or to the system of language through
which it is enacted, but as a factual report of historical events that is also a
strong moral and political interpretation of them, which is to say a kind of
intervention in them. Frye’s notion of literature, and of the literature of the
Bible, as an autotelic activity thus runs directly against the grain of the
whole literary enterprise of the Bible, which aspires to make a profound dif-
ference in history and in the realization of humanity’s potential by offering
a strong representation of their actual unfolding. (11–12)

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 “descrip-
tively accurate” and lose their power if we’re entrapped by seeing them as
stories that we have grown beyond intellectually). More importantly, Frye
 cording: the “something more” in the bible 161

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

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 identi-
fied 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 ene-
mies 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 com-
fortable 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
 cording: the “something more” in the bible 163

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

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

The Great Code extends the Bible in time through a horizontal typological
sequence from creation to apocalypse; Words with Power extends the Bible in
space through a vertical survey of imagery from the furnace to the moun-
tain. . . . The Double Vision identifies . . . the crises in language, nature, time,
and ultimately in the human perception of God . . . that create the condi-
tions of recognition. (54–55)

He recognizes as well the relationship between “perception and interpreta-

tion” 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
 cording: the “something more” in the bible 165

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 lan-
guage that says “both ‘is’ and ‘is not’ ” (1990:109) simultaneously. Unity in
Frye is never synonymous with uniformity, as Frye points out in his discus-
sion 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 experi-
ence of language.” Here is Heidegger in his essay “The Nature of Language”:
“To undergo an experience with something—be it a thing, a person, or a
god—means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us and
transforms us.... [T]he experience is not of our own making” (57). The Bible,
for Frye, is kergymatic because rather than persuade, it proclaims, taking “one
out of oneself.” Frye goes on to note that such an “utterance” is “one charged
with such intensity, urgency or authority that it penetrates the defenses of the
166 semeia

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 egocen-
tric 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 para-
graph: “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 hus-
band” (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 divesti-
ture 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 com-
mits 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 revela-
tion 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, “with-
out 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
 cording: the “something more” in the bible 167

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 trickster-
God 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 terri-
tory 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 vision-
ary 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 counter-
balance 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 differ-
ent 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 paradig-
matic 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 restrict-
ing 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 conven-
tions 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
168 semeia

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 wel-
come 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.
 cording: the “something more” in the bible 169

Stevens, Wallace
1942 “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” Pp. 1–36 in The Necessary
Angel. New York: Vintage.
1954 Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf.
Weil, Simone
1963 “Contradiction.” Pp. 151–56 in Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge.
 New and Recent Titles

Dynamics of Diselection
Ambiguity in Genesis 12–36 and Ethnic
Boundaries in Post-Exilic Judah
R. Christopher Heard
Code: 060639 224 pages 2001
Paper: $29.95ISBN: 1-58983-001-6
Knowing Kings
Knowledge, Power, and Narcissism in the
Hebrew Bible
Stuart Lasine
“Stuart Lasine skillfully guides his readers
through the labyrinthine and largely unexplored
tunnel system connecting the courts of the
biblical kings and their heavenly counterpart,
Yahweh, with those of a dizzying array of other
monarchs across a broad range of cultures and
historical epochs. In the process, our under-
standing of biblical kings, both human and
divine, is deepened and thoroughly
defamiliarized. This is a consummately literate
and erudite study that richly repays reading and Mikhail Bakhtin and Biblical
rereading.”—Stephen D. Moore, The Theological Scholarship
School, Drew University An Introduction
Code: 060640 360 pages 2001 Barbara Green
Paper: $39.95ISBN: 1-58983-004-0
Code: 060638 216 pages 2000
Paper: $24.95ISBN: 0-88414-020-2

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 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

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