In his native Canada, Northrop Frye holds a unique position as the sole humanistic academic guru. [The Great Code: The Bible and Literature] received unprecedented publicity in the year before it appeared, has become a bestseller by local standards, and has been enthusiastically received in the popular press. But that reception has not been related to any close study of what the book has attempted or what it has achieved, concentrating rather on the image of itself the book projects. Among academic readers, whose expectations were high, its reception has not as yet proved enthusiastic. One hears expressions of disappointment, even of dismay. By academic standards it is indeed an appallingly bad book—just as the Bible, as Frye points out, if it is a literary work, is an implausibly bad one.

Expectations were very high because the "big book on the Bible," which rumor had long promised and of which the present volume turns out after all to be merely the prolegomena, should have been the capstone of Frye's life work. Fearful Symmetry, his first book, was also his longest, his strongest, and his most visionary and revelatory; the Anatomy of Criticism, his second, was his most systematic. The two books established his reputation and his theoretical identity in a form which nothing in the quarter-century since then has changed. The Critical Path seemed to supply some necessary corrections, but in the main the steady stream of his later publications has consisted of applications and parerga. Yet something was missing from the system. Frye's general theory calls for the literature of a civilization to be the working out and maintenance of its mythology, the interrelated set of metaphors and narratives that articulates the imaginative world within which the civilization lives. It has been a key contention of his that the Bible presents the mythology that performs this function for Western civilization and makes Western literature intelligible. A great deal seems therefore to depend on Frye's being able to vindicate this claim for the Bible's centrality in some convincing (and, one would think, striking and interesting) way. Somehow or other, it needed to be shown that the Bible really does enshrine the unique mythology to which all Western literary works are uniquely related, and that this is not because most Western writers have been doctrinally committed to accepting all or part of it as revealed truth but because it provided the literary imagination with its controlling forms. Somehow or other one had come to dream that Frye could either bring this off, or would make a brave attempt to do so, recapturing the trenchant vision of his youth. In the mumbling, rambling, self-indulgent, beslippered vagueness of the volume before us, these hopes seem to be brought to nothing. If Frye could have done it, he would have; and if he cannot, no one can. One ends the book feeling that one has learned nothing about the Bible, or about literature, or about the relations between them; and that that is because there is nothing along these lines to be learned.

Frye is not to be blamed for our foolishness. It was absurd of us to have raised our hopes so high. We should have reflected that everything Frye had to say would have been implicit already in his earlier work. How could it have been otherwise? A different vision of the Bible could only have undercut the earlier structure, not have confirmed it. All Frye could have been expected to do was what he has in fact done and says he meant to do: to remind readers ignorant of the Bible of what it actually contains, or what it must seem to contain if one thinks as Frye does. Anyone who, like the present reviewer, has lived with the Bible and with Frye's work for many years is being merely stupid if he reads the book as if it were meant for him, and hopes to be surprised or converted by it.

It was stupid, too, to expect Frye in his full maturity to recapture the vigor of his youth. As scholars and writers grow old they become confident in the use of their personal powers. "The years have brought me an elastic conscience and a tenure appointment," Frye writes appositely. Frye is hardly an old man, as age goes these days; but this is unmistakably an old man's book. (pp. 180-81)

The book reads like what (Frye tells us—he anticipates in an amused way most of our objections and doubts) it came from: a course of lectures given year after year to rather uncritical students. The material has been repeated so often that the lecturer cannot always remember why he is saying what he is, and may be talking nonsense because it sounds like what used to make sense. Frye twice tells us that a teacher should not answer a student's questions, because to answer is to reinforce the mental set from which the question issues. And so it may; but to refuse to answer is to reject any challenge to one's own mental set. Frye's discourse is entirely free—to my mind, distressingly so—from any sense of challenges met and difficulties overcome. But once again we incur an ambiguity. From one point of view, Frye appears as a complacent dogmatist, dispensing in a tone at once avuncular and homiletic the panaceas of a gutless theological modernism. From another point of view he is exemplifying his own view of the teacher's role, not imparting doctrines but opening up possibilities that the student may come to make his own; for it is his view that in poetic discourse questions of truth and falsehood are irrelevant, and surely an exposition of the ground rules of poetic discourse must claim the same privilege. If we feel that we are being lectured at, so we are; but if we feel compelled to believe what the lecturer tells us, we have no one to blame for that neurotic anxiety but ourselves.

Frye's exploration of biblical imagery makes much of the sea-monster that is also the ungovernable sea itself, the diabolical accuser who is both the opponent of and an opposing element within the divine order, the chaos whose relation to creation can never quite be pinned down. In setting myself against Frye's order I am made to feel Satanic—I come from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. The vision of poetry that Frye doth see is my vision's chiefest enemy. I am infected with what Frye sees as the ultimate heresy against poetic vision, the Faustian claim that in the beginning was not the word but the actuality—the claim that calls up Mephistopheles in Goethe's play. Frye's poetic world is a real world with imaginary toads in it; there is another view of poetry that calls for an imaginary garden with real toads. A toad cannot be a metaphor for anything unless it is already a toad and goes on being a toad. Frye's method of reading has rather the effect of cancelling the literal meaning of its allegorical, moral and anagogical interpretations…. It seems to be a principle of Frye's criticism that a metaphorical equivalence, once established in a literature, is always in place: there is little sense of where a metaphor is present and where it is absent, where it governs the sense and where it functions only as a suggestion. In this instance, as in others, it seems to me that what guides the reading is neither literary principle nor literary tact, but theological animus; and that is precisely what this book set out to avoid. It is not that the interpretation is untenable as an interpretation at (I suppose) an anagogical level; it is rather that in face of the interpretation the literal reading loses its rights and the text loses its identity.

The objection to Frye's method of reading which I have just presented, that it substitutes critical construction for poetic particularity, is a standard one, and is regarded by Frye as naive and unscientific. But in relation to this book it takes on a specific point,… which has a bearing on the singular difficulty of coming to terms with the book itself. The program of the book is to present the Bible as enshrining the ruling mythology of Western literature. But the Bible itself is not a work of literature: even as we purport to read it as one, we cannot help realizing that it would be an implausibly bad shot at being a work. It is, rather, a mythology, a presentation of a world for literature—or of the world for a literature. But, when we read the Book of Job, we deal with it precisely as the work of literature which it is, and in doing so relate it to its mythology. But of that mythology it forms a proper part. A reading of it therefore takes on a peculiarly floating quality; and it is this peculiar quality that Frye's work in fact sets out to present. Small wonder that a prosaic and literal-minded reader finds himself often bewildered. Frye's calmly and ironically exegetical manner masks a set of indefinitely paradoxical relationships, which one could hardly expect to find expounded in a systematic way. (pp. 181-83)

The Bible that Frye deals with is the Bible as literature has encountered it, as a single collection of writings of varied human authorship produced under divine inspiration (that is, in such a way that there must be some sense in which everything it contains is true and important), proceeding in a historical sequence from creation to apocalypse, the beginning and end of all things. It is the Bible of the traditional translation (the "Authorized Version"), but subject to correction because it is part of the tradition that there is a ministry trained in the original languages of the translated texts and ready to impart this knowledge to the rest of the community. It seems at first strange that Frye in fact frequently abandons this standpoint, which is surely essential to his project, by introducing little bits of Quellenforschung, though these cannot be evident to the reader and have played no part in the Bible's literary influence in the relevant period. But on reflection it is not strange at all. Frye's real stance is not that of literary critic so much as that of pastoral exegete, in whose habitual repertoire these materials are familiar equipment. And that stance is the natural one, because after all the writers and readers whose imaginations have been shaped by the Bible have in no case taken it as a source of literary materials but have in every case taken it as a source of true or false doctrine. That is how it was read, and it is futile to pretend that it can be understood as having been read otherwise. To have treated the Bible as his project appears to require would have been absurdly artificial.

Frye's presentation of the Bible as a cultural monument calls for him to place it in a cultural setting on the largest scale. He does so, with results that any pedant must find embarrassingly awful. Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, the Stoics appear as in a hazy recollection of childhood reading. Ludicrous generalizations abound: about the relation of science to polytheism, about the relation between causality and "continuous prose" (apparently in the belief that it is only in such prose that simple declarative sentences occur), about the seventeenth-century origins of the correspondence theory of truth. Surely no less eminent scholar would have got such rubbish past his editor. Often he descends to mere gibberish, as when he describes Aristotelian prose as involving "subjects pursuing objects through all the obstacles of predicates" like the Macedonian phalanx marching across Asia…. But if we ignore the requirements of clarity and factuality and let it all wash over us, what we end up with makes enough sense—this is, after all, neither an encyclopedia nor a philosophical monograph, but a meditation on possibilities. The basic thesis about the Bible is, after all, that though it presents a narrative with a beginning and an ending the events in the narrative have no special importance, because its pattern as manifested in each of its parts is equally meaningful, and its deepest meaning lies in the perpetual possibility of its movements as movements: it is to return us to an Edenic state of innocence in which we wander but are not lost because we are not trying to get anywhere, change being no longer "dominated by the single direction toward nothingness and death."… And when linearity goes factuality goes: poetic universality has nothing to do with any form of truth, and metaphysics and history are left equally far behind…. (pp. 184-85)

Two master theses of the book have to do with the language of the Bible and with its structure. As to its language, Frye borrows from Vico a distinction between metaphorical and metonymic and descriptive uses of language—a distinction which has not, I think, hitherto figured largely in his criticism. What these really are are three ways of looking at the world—the attempts to relate them to linguistic features are ill-thought out and sometimes apparently confused, as in the equation between the use of simple declarative sentences and a prosaic world view. The world is seen as animate, as mere symbol of a higher reality, and as the totality of what there is. Frye argues that Biblical language is none of these: as creationist, its stance and language are kerygmatic, purporting to establish the reality it announced; and this goes with a particularly chatty use of descriptive language, because within a created world everything is very down to earth…. This seems to me well and illuminatingly described (including the telling remark that speech inaugurates but vision terminates). But what has it to do with the Bible in its relation to literature? It cannot be meant that this way of speaking and thinking is paradigmatic for literature, for it is peculiarly appropriate to the Bible's being the kind of sacred book it is taken to be. Criticism here enables us to come to terms with the Bible, certainly; but, if anything, the argument works against the presumed thesis of the book, that we cannot be critics without understanding the Bible. Frye seems unaware of any problem.

A second master thesis has to do with the internal structure of the Bible as it has come down to us. The Bible is typologically unified. Almost everything that happens in it is the fulfillment of an earlier pattern (its type) or the foreshadowing of a later one (its antitype) or both. The same pattern of exile and return is repeated in smaller and larger versions, acquiring varied and subtle resonance from its manipulations. This, of course, is a commonplace of Biblical criticism, though Frye's supposedly ignorant readers may need to be told of it. But what is its relevance for literature in general? Is it suggested that the relationship between type and antitype is a basic literary resource that the Bible opens up? Or that the Bible is the antitype of which literary works are types? Frye does not seem to think his project calls for him to go into such questions; but what can his project be, if it does not call for that? Perhaps the promised second volume will make things plainer, but nothing said in the present volume leads us to expect that. (pp. 185-86)

A revolutionary book ought not to seem revolutionary. True prophecy should be unwelcome, should scandalize and disconcert its hearers. In refusing answers to our questions, in offending against academic proprieties, in withholding the insight he seemed to offer, Frye is doing just what a good teacher and a true prophet should do. The trouble is, of course, that the same could be said of any mishmash that really met no standards and had nothing to offer. It is unlikely that Frye's book will persuade anyone that reading the Bible is important, let alone essential, to the understanding of literature. In fact, Frye offers no evidence or argument that has much bearing on that point, which is supposed to be the point at issue. But the book might have some quite different value…. I began this review by saying that one ends Frye's book feeling that one has learned nothing about the Bible or about literature or about the relations between them. But the length and tone of the review as a whole may suggest that a reading of the book will not leave the reader unchallenged or unchanged. (pp. 188-89)