Northrop Frye and American Fiction by Claude LeFustec

Abstract

Reviewed by: Northrop Frye and American Fiction by Claude LeFustec Mervyn Nicholson Claude LeFustec. Northrop Frye and American Fiction. University of Toronto Press, 2015. 238 pp. $55.00. Tackling Big Americans Northrop Frye is so remote now that a kind of introduction is needed when discussion of Frye comes up. Claude LeFustec's study of Frye and American literature is unusual in its use of Frye. At one time, literary studies regularly drew upon the ideas of Northrop Frye, but that is not so common today. Frye's ideas—his concepts of imagination, myth, the social function of literature, archetype, metaphor, mode (literary history), genre, his approach to plot construction, and his study of cosmology—all were once familiar reference points. Then deconstruction swept all that away, as it also swept away structuralism and pretty much everything else. Beginning at Yale, the Vatican of English studies, deconstruction became suddenly hegemonic, the new law for everyone, especially graduate students. But power is fickle, and the New Historicism swept deconstruction away in turn—deconstruction in its more Neanderthal formations, of the "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" or "tout autre est tout autre" variety, at least. Gender and postcolonial studies surged along with New Historicism—a relief after the sameness of deconstruction in its extreme phase. But Frye's ideas have actually never had the proper hearing they deserve, because they were—are—caricatured and reduced to caricature. Something about Frye's ideas made academics uncomfortable from the beginning. One has the sense that he was driven out, not just left behind like an error that has been corrected. One area of Frye that has slowly made a comeback—or first arrival, since it never had much attention—is the late Frye, the Frye of his Bible [End Page 205] books in particular.1 And it is this Frye that Professor LeFustec is interested in and that she draws upon for her thoughtful discussion of work by canonic American novelists (Hawthorne, James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Morrison). This Frye is the Frye of "interpenetration," "excluded initiatives," "otherness of spirit," and above all of "kerygma"—concepts that LeFustec draws upon. This late Frye sounds religious and deals with belief and responds, fairly directly, to the more nihilistic anxieties of postmodernism. I say that these parts of Frye sound religious, because in so many ways "religion" is a misleading category to attach to Frye's thought, and LeFustec notes her caution about the religion label. Frye knew a lot about religion, but he was not a "believer" in the usual sense (or an atheist in the usual sense). He was preoccupied, to borrow one of his titles, with "the secular scripture," not just with the "sacred" version thereof. Still, Frye's understanding of the divine is sort of the containing form of his entire project. When David Cayley asked him what his own "myth" was, he replied: "creation." The title of one of his late and most original books is Creation and Recreation. The divine is the power to create. Frye has to be understood by way of his reading of Blake, and hence Fearful Symmetry (his first book) is the primary text for understanding Frye generally. Frye's ideas evolved and expanded, but they did not deviate from the basic principles laid out in his earliest writing. Fearful Symmetry is essentially about the meaning of the word "God"—or the re-meaning of that word, in a radical, Blakean re-creation of how to understand the divine, what the divine is. In The Critical Path, Frye argues that the crisis of belief that develops in the nineteenth century—basically the focus of LeFustec's study—is a crisis about how to understand the language of belief and not about whether God exists or not or what doctrines are the right doctrines. Hence the "God" word does not mean an external being, a ruler, or magical/supernatural authority figure dwelling in a realm beyond our reality. God—the divine—is an aspect of ourselves, of human beings, of our experience in the world we live in. "God is not a sorcerer," as Paul Tillich puts it—God acts in and through human...