Alvin A. Lee

TRIBUTE TO H. NORTHROP FRYE 11 they are revealed in literature. He lived his real life, then, as a literary critic, and one may say of him, as Keats said of Shakespeare, that he 'led a life of allegory: his works are the comments on it: Even while we mark the loss of his presence among us, then, we may rejoice in his continuing presence in the future through his twenty-four books, which have established him as a major literary critic of the twentieth century, the only critic with a world-wide reputation, and the only critic who addresses a wide reading public. No one matches his imaginative, critical insight into the nature and function of works of literature, and of literature as a whole, which allowed him to show how the works ofwriters from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton to Blake and Shelley, to Joyce and Stevens, not only relate to their society and to culture as a whole but also address central and enduring human concerns, desires, and fears. As a critic he is uniquely distinguished by his effort to communicate to his readers his vision of all literary works seen together as an order of words, or a secular scripture, within the divine scripture. In 1976, he remarked: 'The feeling that death is inevitable comes to us from ordinary experience; the feeling that new life is inevitable comes to us from myth and fable: and adds: 'The latter is therefore both more true and more important.' I think we can see now what he meant. Northrop Frye lives with us, and will continue to live with future generations, in his books, each of which deserves the title given one of them - Fables of Identity - for each seeks to reveal how our individual lives become one through the mythical structures of literature. ALVIN A. LEE Like many hundrec;ls of others, I first encountered Northrop Frye in the now-legendary English Bible course at Victoria College. For me, first as a student and then as a scholar, a teacher, a university administrator, and a human being, his influence has been major and long-lasting. In recent weeks, probably like many of you, I have been reading and thinking about the two books that had their origins in that course. The Great Code and Words with Power may be the least anxious books ever written about the Bible. In them we see at work a very great mind playing broadly and deeply over the words of a civilization from Homer until now, demonstrating as it moves none of the anxiety or false humility or failure of nerve that normally precludes a fully awakened response to the vast structure of wisdom and energy that is the Bible. With immense learning but no pomposity Northrop Frye has done for verbal culture, working here in the University of Toronto, what Einstein did for physics. In The Great Code, which he called 'an enormous Hegelian preface: and also in Words with Power he describes how language can take us beyond the subject-object 12 TRIBUTE TO H. NORTHROP FRYE split of Hegelian dialectic to a level of reality in which we human beings no longer want to avoid freedom and responsibility for our world by collapsing back into unconsciousness. That level is glimpsed and described by many of the writers among whose works Northrop Frye lived his abundant life. One of them, a faculty member of this university, puts it in these words: THE ANAGOGIC MAN Noah walks with head bent down; For between his nape and crown He carries, balancing with care, A golden bubble round and rare. Its gently shinunering sides surround All us and our worlds, and bound Art and life, and wit and sense, Innocence and experience. Forbear to startle him, lest some Poor soul to its destruction come, Slipped out of mind and past recall As if it never was at all. o you that pass, if still he seems One absent-minded or in dreams, Consider that your senses keep A death far deeper than his sleep. Angel, declare: what sways when Noah nods? The sun, the stars, the figures of the gods. EVA KUSHNER Today, the...