Prefatory Note present essay, which centers on Northrop Frye's interest in the Bible, derives from two lectures he gave in 1979, only few years before his first on the Bible, Great Code: and Literature was published (1982). Frye's interest in the can be traced to his childhood: his mother taught him stories at an early age, even introducing him to Josephus, and as child he read Hurlbut's Story of the (1904), well-traveled retelling of 168 Biblical stories which is still in print. But Great Code derived ultimately from the course on the English that Frye taught for some forty years before the was published. Even before he began teaching The English Bible in the mid-1940s, he had led an informal discussion for small group of students, sponsored by the Student Christian Movement, on Biblical symbolism and typology. In the Preface to Great Code Frye remarked, The (with its successor) has been on my mind for long time (ix), and indeed his intention to write on the can be traced to entries in his earliest notebooks. As we learn from 1939 notebook, as yet unpublished, study of the literary symbolism of the was part of the plan Frye sketched for his first book, antedating even Fearful Symmetry. His intention to write on the goes back, then, almost four-and-a-half decades before Great Code finally appeared. Anatomy of Criticism contained sketch of typological study of the in the context of epic forms, and following the completion of Anatomy, Frye considered writing on the epic, its three parts being devoted to Homer and Virgil, the Bible, and Dante. plans for the that was to succeed the Anatomy--what Frye called his book--went through numerous and complicated outlines: sometimes he speaks of separate and at other times of section or chapter of the book Frye was never able to write this third in the grand continuous form he had outlined, but parts of the design did split off into smaller projects. One of these was the 1971 Birks Lectures at McGill University, project he began planning in 1969. But sometime after April 1971 he began to see the on religion that would issue from the Birks lectures as merging with his handbook on Biblical symbolism. He contemplated doing a small on the literary uses of the Bible but eventually decided he really was going to write big on the Bible the Birks lectures being now displaced by seven-section book, the thirty-two chapters of which he outlined in some detail. This plan, as was typical of Frye's major writing projects, went through numerous other schematic formulations during the next ten years, and in the present lectures these are distilled into two broad topics--language and meaning. first lecture is an embryonic form of the theory of language that Frye developed in the opening chapter of Great Code and to which he returned in the first chapter of his second on the Bible, Words with Power (1990). second lecture focuses on the theory of of in Frye's title--a reconsideration of Dante's theory of polysemous meaning that formed the backbone of the theory of symbols in Anatomy of Criticism. Frye turns to Dante's ladder of meaning in the final chapter of Great Code, and he turns to it again, eight years later, in the opening chapter of Words with Power. present lectures, then, represent fairly late, succinct, and informal account of Frye's thinking on the language of the and its levels of meaning. two lectures were given on successive evenings at Emory & Henry College, Emory, Virginia, 15-16 March 1979. Frye spoke, not from manuscript, but from set of notes he had jotted down on two sheets of paper. In transcribing the lectures from an audio-recording, I have altered Frye's radical of presentation from an oral form into written one, imitating the process of much biblical transmission itself and so preserving what would otherwise be unknown or forgotten. …
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Feb 15, 2024
Geordie Williamson 
Open Access
