FRYE IN CANBERRA

Abstract

Frye's speech at the Australian National University on 27 June, 1986-around which the Humanities Research Centre's Northrop Frye Seminar was based-was titled Myth, Metaphor and Identity. speech-and Frye's visit-took place in the context of Frye's preparation of the successor to Great Code: a volume which will take up the theme of The Bible and Literature (as Great Code is subtitled) again, but this time more from the perspective of secular literature. Canberra talk confirmed what Frye's longstanding readers would already have suspected: that the new volume will be anything but a tracing of allusions or direct influences operative between the Bible and literature. As usual, Frye is trying to see his subject, not historically-as distributed through time-but typologically: as spread out in some kind of conceptual space. And here, as in Great Code and the Anatomy of Criticism, the organizing categories of that space will be called Myth and Metaphor. Frye's thinking-more, perhaps, than that of any other significant twentieth-century critic-has always been holistic, fearfully symmetrical, tending towards a unity of theme and a consistency of purpose. As a result, his work has been characterized less by progress or development or revision than by a spiralling movement of thought-one in which a limited set of central themes is repeatedly returned to and progressively unfolded. Myth, Metaphor and Identity was no exception to this rule, and was full of resonances with Frye's past-and future-writings. This was obvious right from the start, when Frye situated the speech in terms of the central polemical thrust of the Anatomy: his search, throughout his critical life, for a conception of criticism that would make it independent of the art it deals with and, more importantly, of such neighbouring disciplines as history and philosophy. If criticism is to avoid becoming an allegory of theology or psychology or aesthetics, then it will need to establish a clearer sense of the authority of the art it deals with. authority of literature has never been as clearly recognized as that of, say, science: an authority which has rendered science, to some degree, independent of governing ideologies and institutions. It is this question of establishing the nature of the poet's authority