Northrop Frye and American Fiction by Claude Le Fustec (review)

In Northrop Frye and American Fiction, Claude Le Fustec takes up the priestly or prophetic strain of the great Canadian critic's work and applies it to an assessment of six major American novels – Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Henry James's The Europeans, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. She deploys a small set of key concepts ultimately rooted in biblical Christianity but also inflected by their placement in Northrop Frye's grand literary-historical schemata: "transcendence," "spirituality," "kerygma," "redemption," "resurrection," "regeneration," and "communion." "Spirituality" and "transcendence," especially, are the two central ideas of the book as a whole. Le Fustec sometimes invokes these two terms in frustratingly imprecise ways, but generally they seem to indicate states of expanded or intensified consciousness in which the relationship of mind/self to the cosmos moves beyond the alienated subject/object condition toward sustained, energized, and supra-rational participation in a joyful higher unity. "Kerygma" is the special type of powerful language – not only the preserve of prophets and evangelists but also used by "secular" writers – that brings about such higher states. "Communion" is then the social correlative of "transcendence" – a state of enhanced sympathy and loving solidarity between spiritually awakened human beings. And "redemption," "resurrection," and "regeneration" all refer loosely to processes of psychic renewal by means of which a person moves from an ordinary condition of selfenclosed fallen-ness to a state of "open" spirituality or transcendence. Literature, again, sacred and secular, may be an agent of such renewals.

Of the six novels Le Fustec discusses, The Scarlet Letter and The Grapes of Wrath are the two that most fully represent and, thus, most clearly illustrate the spiritual-moral ascent she seeks both to describe and prescribe. Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter both traverse a similar "spiritual" arc. They move from an initial burden of intense guilt in relation to their transgression of the sexually repressive code of their inherited faith to a regenerative apprehension of their own and others' natural innocence and beauty as loving bodily creatures. The narrative of Hester's long suffering in solidarity with Salem's outcasts and Dimmesdale's self-crucifixion and self-revelation to his parishioners thus paradoxically both repeat and improve upon a traditional Christian mythos. On Le Fustec's account, the novel thus retains, but reorients, an ancient religious symbolic structure toward a newer non-doctrinaire spirituality of which the happy child Pearl – the spontaneously free, loving, and intractable fruit of Hester's and Dimmesdale's illicit union – becomes the embodied image. Similarly, in The Grapes of Wrath, Le Fustec argues, both Casy and Tom Joad are paradoxically empowered to embrace a truly Christian and transcendent charity toward all human beings by actions or ideas that break with more narrowly understood Christian moral conventions. Casy's sacrificial bonding with the atheistic Wobblies and Tom's eloquent promise of solidarity with all of the oppressed after killing Casy's attacker both tap into Christic symbolism but, again, redirect the moral energies of this imagery toward a more universal, non-sectarian community.

The largest intuition driving Le Fustec's book is valid. She is surely right to see that Frye's criticism and these works of American literature (among many others) are shaped in rich and complex ways by the largescale and long-unfolding cultural-historical phenomenon generally known as secularization. And the counter-orientation(s) that she champions with the enlisted assistance of Frye under the banners of "spirituality" and "transcendence" are certainly appealing. Who could object to nondoctrinaire receptivity to a re-enchanted physical cosmos or to enlarged and intensified social affections? Who would not hope to find divine energies and illuminations long deferred to the afterlife immanent in our ordinary relationships and perceptions? But there remains much question as to whether these desirable states of consciousness are best described or advocated in religious terms. And there...