Great Code or Great Codex? Northop Frye, William Blake, and Construals of the Bible

Abstract

Abstract This article reconsiders Northrop Frye’s classic study of the Bible and literature, The Great Code (1982), in order to question whether his application of that titular phrase might not significantly distort the meaning the phrase must have borne for its coiner, William Blake. My contention is that Blake’s engraving of the Laocoön, in which the “Great Code” aphorism appears, is itself a code of sorts, but not in Frye’s sense of a key to be used to unlock the meanings of works of art and literature – or to unlock anything else, for that matter. Nothing in the Laocoön, or in any of Blake’s other works, suggests that this was what Blake meant by “code.” Nor do any of the connotations the term bore in English usage in Blake’s time suggest such a meaning. My suggestion is that, far from promoting the Bible as a forward-functioning key by which to decipher the mythology of post-biblical literature, Blake’s Laocoön is a work fixated upon its own complex, synthesizing reception of the biblical and classical past, a tradition of strong creative misprisions about whose all-powerful influence Frye’s own work betrays an unmistakable anxiety in Harold Bloom’s sense of the phrase.