The Great Code

Bible students, especially those sympathetic to interpretive maximalism, might enjoy:

Frye, Northrop, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature Collected Works of Northrop Frye Volume 19 edited by Alvin A. Lee (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2006) Originally published 1982. (And perhaps the subsequent Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature” (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990)).

I only had a short time to flick through it in the library. Has anyone read it?

Frye was not a Bible scholar and I think maybe not a believer, certainly not a traditional evangelical. He taught English literature at university level and realised that to understand Blake, Shakespeare, Eliot - indeed, pretty much anything written in English - his students really needed to know the symbolic and imaginative world of the Bible.


The title is taken from Blake who said that: “The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art” (p10).

The book is Frye's personal encounter with the English Bible, and its role in shaping the human imagination and western culture.

Frye speaks of an “imaginative literalism” (pxvii) and describes metaphorical, allegorical and descriptive conceptions of language. He sees “allegorical, or metonymic [language], characterized by monotheism and a sense that there is a divine force transcending nature, so that words get their meanings allegorically by reference to ideas in the divine mind;…” (pxxxvi).

The Bible contains elements of the metaphorical, allegorical and descriptive but for Frye it is best seen as oratorical rhetoric, metaphorical and poetic language being used with existential idioms, direct address and kerygma. It is above all a proclamation (pxxxvii). The imagery and narrative of the Bible forms a mythological universe (p5). There is, apparently, ladder of “polysemous (multilevelled) sense” (p8), whatever that is!

I smiled to read Frye's reflection that even some readers of good will “may feel that to attempt a fresh and firsthand look at the Bible is mere foolhardiness, and of course they may be right, but the years have brought me an elastic conscience and a tenure appointment.” (p17).

No doubt there is plenty of wierd and wonderful stuff in the book showing how the Bible has been misunderstood as well as understood, but it looked like there might be some great Jordanesque insights along the way about the meaning of watery trees, gardens, bread, wine and so on.

Here are the chapter headings: (You've got to love the fact that Frye's book shares the chiastic mirror structure he sees between Old and New Testaments).

PART ONE: The Order of Words

Ch 1: Language I

Ch 2: Myth I

Ch 3: Metaphor I

Ch 4: Typology I

PART TWO: The Order of Types

Ch 5: Typology II: Phases of Revelation

Ch 6: Metaphor II: Imagery

Ch 7: Myth II: Narrative

Ch 8: Language II: Rhetoric