The Secular Scripture, A Study of the Structure of Romance by Northrop Frye (review)

HUMANITIES 4"5 and remains a major one -far more profound, certainly, than the 'deep apple pie' ofF.R. Scott's 'Bonne Entente.' Cultural bridge? if SO, there has been some rather shoddy construction this year. Open door? perhaps, though a number of impediments often prevent our direct entry. Still, a few translators have followed their blueprints carefully and given us easier access by fashioning keys that have unlocked for our investigation other rooms in our cultural house. (JOHN J. O'CONNOR) HUMANITIES Northrop Frye. The Secular Scripture, A Study ofthe Structure a/Romance.Harvard University Press. viii, 199· $8·95 Those addicted to detective stories, sentimental romances, and Hollywood westerns will find justification for their truancy from high seriousness in this learned, witty, and wide-ranging book, a revision of the Norton Lectures presented by Professor Frye at Harvard in "975. For romance, as he understands it, is 'the structural core of all fiction: being directly descended from folktale, it brings us closer than any other aspect of literature to the sense of fiction, considered as a whole, as the epic of the creature, man's vision of his own life as a quest' (p 18). This large claim develops ideas suggested in Frye's earlier writings, notably in the essay on archetypal criticism included in Anatomy of Criticism and in the lectures on Shakespeare's romances printed under the title A Natural Perspective. Distinguishing the tendency of romance from that which seeks correspondence with 'reality: representation in words of the world we live in, Frye observes the remarkable persistence and ubiquity of the same unrealistic story patterns in the world's myth and fiction, whether religious or secular, primitive, popular, elite, or sophisticated. These patterns remain recognizable even when they are rationalized or 'displaced' to make them conform to the ways of the objective world, or 'kidnapped' to serve moral, social, or political ends. In order to demonstrate their universality, Frye draws his illustrations from China and India as well as from Europe, from antiquity and modem times, from literary masterpieces and from penny dreadfuls and soap operas. The main line of romance, as he describes it, runs from Heliodorus's Ethiopica and Apuleius's Golden Ass to Scott, William Morris, and Tolkien. He finds examples, too, in many works not usually thought of as romances: the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes, the comedies of Plautus, Terence, and Bernard Shaw, the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost. He makes only 416 LETTERS IN CANADA 1976 fleeting reference, however, to the tales of Arthur and Charlemagne and the great body of medieval story that gave romance its name. Because he finds in them common or related structural principles, Frye argues that secular stories, like their counterparts in religious mythology , coalesce to constitute the 'secular scripture' of his title: 'a total verbal order, with the outlines of an imaginative universe also in it' (p 15). As a member of such an order, a particular fiction means more than what it individually says, for that of which it is part speaks through it. Frye therefore finds it possible to relate fragmentary narrative patterns, in themselves perhaps trivial or meaningless, to others in fictions of widely different origin and character in order to reconstruct the archetypal structure lying beneath, the structure which particular stories reflect or distort. The 'total story' of the 'secular scripture' so established becomes a tale of descent from some higher realm to a demonic world of confusion, trial, and anguish followed by an ascent, a recovery or rather recreation of what had been lost. The movement corresponds to the cycle of nature, and also to that of divine scripture - Eden, Fall, the New Jerusalem. But the human story is not merely one turn of a wheel whirling in place, nor does it end, as the divine one does, in a continuing city comprising the single body of humanity, or like comedy in a harmonious reconciliation to the natural order. Rather, that which is recaptured and recreated is what Frye calls 'identity.' In one sense, the word designates that about which there is nothing to write -the state obtaining before the beginning of the story and that after its end...