Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye ed. by Eleanor Cook, et al. (review)

HUMANITIES 411 Humanities Eleanor Cook, Chaviva Hosek, Jay Macpherson, Patricia Parker, and Julian Patrick, editors. Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye University of Toronto Press. 346. $35.00 The 'centre' in the title of this collection is Frye, whose seventieth birthday the collection celebrates; the 'labyrinth' is the twenty essays contributed by fellow theorists, colleagues, and former students. The title may also refer to the central place in literary study of Frye's definitions of metaphor, romance, irony, and the great code, and to an explorative criticism, based on 'what the whole of literature actually does: which finds its way back to these concerns. Again, the centre is the vision of the organized myth of human experience that has compelled Frye's civilizing influence in modern letters; labyrinth, patentlyin this volume, is literature as the signifying maze through which Frye's sense of literature as a quest is variously dispersed. This book, then, represents an inspired intellectual scholarship that honours its pioneer while signalling the voice of literary criticism in the 1980s. The essays will be identified here because they are important ones. At the outset, four contributions to the general theory of literature. Paul Ricoeur begins by elucidating dilemmas in the anagogical grounding of Frye's typologies. Francis Sparshott shines new light on 'The Riddle of Katharsis' and, by extension, on attempts to define literature in relation to transformation in society. In one of the most fascinating pieces in the collection, Patricia Parker approaches 'Anagogic Metaphor' as the breaking down of the wall of partition, finding echoes of this imagery from Ephesians in Shakespeare's concern with metaphor and in the stranger who takes over the house in Wuthering Heights. The fourth theoretical essay, by Michael Dolzani, reflects on Frye's fondness for the anatomy form as a vehicle for subversion, and compares its deconstructive and liberatingaim with the more detached and ironic position of the Derridean 'language of experience.' The next group of essays turns to relations between literature and the Bible. John Freccero, in 'Manfred's Wounds and the Poetics of the Purgatorio: finds a theory of creation and poetic inspiration in the image of the wounded perfect body such that for Dante 'both history and sin are analogues for writing itself.' James Nohrnberg has contributed a long Freudian essay on the egoistic and vocational self in Paradise Regained and its author. In 'Alchemy and the Bible: Thomas Willard surveys the tradition of alchemical interpretation of Scripture from the Alexandrian syncretists to Carl Jung. James Carscallen reveals biblical motifs and narrative patterns everywhere in Alice Munro's stories. Finally, David Staines outlines a source of Frye's critical vision in Hugh of St Victor's accommodation of the Pauline account of history to the four seasons of the liturgical year. Now a wandering passage through romance and romanticism. Julian Patrick on The Tempest discerns an experience of unexpected supplement to time that makes the theatre-audience at once marginal and necessary to the closure of that play. Helen Vendler contributes a detailed account of the structure of To Autumn that revalues Frye's remark about 'revealed Nature' in the sacramental images of the great Keats odes. In 'Bodies in Motion: Milton Wilson ascribes a distinctive energy in Wordsworth's diction to the convergence of physics, physiology, and psychology in the eighteenth-century language of science. Geoffrey Hartman identifies in the ode To Psyche a double movement towards a hard enlightenment knowledge and towards a dreamy consciousness, as Keats attempts to create a new romance idiom. Eleanor Cook's 'Riddles, Charms and Fictions' deciphers some ofWallace Stevens's parodies of the arbitrariness of words and idealized world-building. In the last series of essays (stray corridors; the partition of the volume is also an arbitrary puzzle), W. David Shaw surveys theories of truth from J.S. Mill to F.H. Bradley and their impact on Victorian poetry, mainly Tennyson's. Jennifer Levine discusses 'Oxen of the Sun' and 'Ithaca' to demonstrate Joyce involving the reader in the quandary of language that aspires (with Bloom) to reveal the world and (like Stephen) makes its self-reflexive tum away from meaning. Eli Mandel discusses the contentious shifting...