Discovering the Bible

NORTHROP FRYE AND THE BIBLE 141 acknowledged at the outset, I think: that while the Bible explicitly asks that authority be granted to the author (or Author), we tend to want to retain authority for ourselves, even if sometimes we do this in the name of 'consensus: or 'logic: or 'system: I am not, of course, saying that the Bible's way is the only way to read it; I am saying that a peculiar feature of the biblical anthology is that it repeatedly asks for this, that this feature is central to its manner of 'telling' (or narrative) as well as its 'telling forth' (the kerygma of which Frye speaks). The question of authority in the Bible or (to speak at Frye's metaphorical level) of ultimate authorship is, if anything, even more important to the Bible's view of itself as text than is its commitment to history or its care for language, and it deserves to be more straightforwardly recognized. Frye has written a thoughtful and provocative book, one which goes far towards giving us a sense of the genesis (as much as a concluding revelation) ofhis own codeand system. As the simultaneous release of his commercial television video series under the heading The Bible and Literature suggests, the tendency will be for 'the media' as well as teachers of literature to use this book as though it were an authoritative pronouncement on its advertised subject. This would be a mistake. Perhaps the fault lies as much with the title as with anything else. Beyond that, one must have hopes for the promised second volume, that Frye's powers as literary critic will be directed more than they have been towards the core narratives and foundational language of his principal text. For what is most conspicuous by its absence from Frye's Great Code is an integral sense of the Bible itself. Discovering the Bible EMERO STIEGMAN In The Great Code a major thinker of the century, who has deeply affected our understanding of literature and of language itself, proposes to show that, in some measure, traditional Christian reading of the Bible is unknowing, that the scholarship cultivated to remedy this is wrongheaded , and that our literary tradition and some major elemental currents of our thinking are conditioned by the Bible. So conditioned are they that to be unaware of this is to be denied a portion of that self-consciousness by which we are human. In each of these efforts I think Northrop Frye succeeds. He demonstrates that editorial continuity through the generations produced such a unity of narrative and metaphor in biblical literature that these texts should be read as one book. Beyond that, because of its dominantly metaphOrical mode and its typolOgical strucUNfVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 52, NUMBER 2, WINTER 19B2I) 0042-024718)10200-0141-0149$01.5010 0 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 142 EMERO STIEGMAN ture, the book should be read centripetally; centrifugal referents to history and theology are secondary. The study of western literature and language either begins in the Bible or is consummated there. It was Frye's attention to the Bible that led him into 'the larger verbal context of which literature forms a part.' The polysemous meaning he finds in the Bible is 'a feature of all deeply serious writing.' Only in the sense that its meaning expands and deepens to an unparalleled extent will the Bible be considered by the criticas more than literature. Itis a work of imagination, but its perspective is one that 'only God is assumed to be able to attain.' Its concern for human life 'goes far beyond the purely imaginative.' Yet, since it is not granted the status of a literary exception, its appropriateness as a focus and source of literary theory is vindicated. As eagerly as I look forward to Frye's second instalment on 'The Bible and Literature: I cannot imagine a greater contribution than the one he has given us on the Bible and our language itself. No one but the author of Fearful Symmetry and The Anatomy of Criticism could have conceived this book. It tells us what those who once knew meantby speaking ofthe West as a...