Between Religion and Literature: Mircea Eliade and Northrop Frye

Abstract

In 1959, Hudson Review published Northrop Frye's review of six works by Mircea Eliade that had recently become available in English: his paper and Eternity in Indian Thought, included in collection of Eranos papers, Man and Time (1957); his books Birth and Rebirth, Yoga, and Patterns in Comparative Religion, all published in 1958; and two more books, The Sacred and Profane and Cosmos and History, which appeared following year.' Frye evinces a deep appreciation for all six works, finding that they present a grammar of religious symbolism. What particularly captivates him is Eliade's analysis of the yoga doctrine that freedom and immortality are really same conception and can be found only in surmounting world of time.2 According to Frye, without an understanding of such doctrines as this and of cyclical and initiatory symbolism, it is impossible to deal adequately with contemporary literature, whose existentialist strain stems from sense of life in time as imaginatively intolerable, and whose frequent portrayal of heroes who grow wiser as their narratives evolve bears overtones of initiatory rite and its symbolism. The relevance of Eliade's studies to literary criticism is so immedi-