Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 2, August 2005
Special Issue: Literary Universals
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Denham, Robert D, Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World, London, University of Virginia Press, 2004. pp. 373, 0-8139-2299-2, £27.50.
Reviewed by
University of Newcastle
Robert Denham’s recent re-evaluation of the role of religion in the works of Northrop Frye recognises the importance of Frye’s personal notebooks to understanding his religiously charged language. Denham is particularly interested in tracing Frye’s thought from his early book, Fearful Symmetry, through his two studies of the Bible and The Double Vision, printed fifty years later. Firstly Denham examines the language of Frye’s speculations in relation to the mirror metaphor. Quoting Words and Power Denham explains, “If we ask what the speculation is a mirror of, the traditional answer is being, a conceptual totality that transcends, not only individual beings, but the total aggregate of beings” (29).
One key concept that recurs in Frye’s notebooks and it central to understanding his theological development is interpenetration. But noticeably Frye applies the term in a variety of different contexts: a kind of experience, a way of understanding, a process of enlightenment, a religious final clause, and a visionary perception. Frye’s considerations on the principle of interpenetration in his notebooks confirm that he developed his own complex definition that breaks down the distinction between signifier and signified. Denham concludes, “in such a totally verbal world, words are spiritual realities” (60).
Denham seeks to sheds light on Frye’s broad speculations on metaphor. They are unique, he argues, because metaphors are at the centre of his theory of identity. Frye determined that by a series of identities, language moves epigrammatically towards agape, or higher love: “The language of metaphor is the language of the spirit and the language of the spirit is the language of love and the language of love is the language of God” (88).
Through his reading of Frye’s notebooks Denham uncovers the influence of a wide range of texts in both Eastern religious texts and in esoteric traditions, from astrology to the Kabala. Frye recognised the vast distinction between Eastern religions and Christianity, “[they have] no clear sense of the resurrected spiritual body, of a personal god, and of the existential transformation that is found in Christianity outside its institutional forms” (128), he said. Yet Frye still maintained that Western Christianity can “learn infinitely and indefinitely from Oriental religions”. The Avatamsaka is the only Mahayana sutra Frye mentions in his published work but Denham shows how various aspects of the different Eastern religions appealed to Frye. The Notebooks and Frye’s diaries uncover his conscious attempts to assimilate the East into his vision of Christianity.
Frye’s personal and religious speculations into the different doctrines and institutions of Christianity are firmly rooted in both Western and Eastern exoteric traditions. Denham outlines Frye’s inherited understanding of to the word “esoteric” according to the work of scholars Antoine Faivre and Wouter J. Hanegraaff. The features of Gnosticism as a religious and philosophical attitude that Frye was especially drawn to include, but are not limited to; ethical dualism, the stages of spiritual development and hierarchical constructs, the distance of its vision from New Testament Christianity, and its personification of wisdom as female (205). He read Gnosticism in the William Blake’s notion of the Fall and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s commitment to absolute mind. Frye defined Gnosticism in one notebook as a “naked mythology, uncorrected & unchecked by a genuinely creative impulse” (cited on 205). In his discussions on the matter, Frye relocates questions of Gnostic belief and doctrine to the perimeters and places visionary experience and imaginative power at the centre (208).
In Denham’s detail of Frye’s engagement with the Occult he says that the notebooks reveal his preoccupation with the Hermetic dimension of esotericism. In the early 1980s Frye turned his attentions towards science fiction novels that derive from the recent success of the Tolkien trilogy. Denham notes Frye’s interest in the “Druid analogy” for referring to myths and rituals of natural religion of a primitive form. At the time Frye was writing Fearful Symmetry theories about Druidism had particular resonance with contemporary cultural; “the spectre of Nazism was hanging over Europe, the association of Druidism with National Socialism was in the back of [Frye’s] mind” (213). For Frye, the word “Druid” has its origin in Blake, who supported the idea that the druids were a race of giants in the mythological past who honoured serpents and trees and sacrificed humans to their god. For Blake Druidism was sinister and violent. But Frye considered the Druid analogy to extend beyond the demonic. He came to understand the Druid analogy in positive terms rather than a demonic parody and noting that Druidism is “the key to all mythologies”.
This detailed perspective into the role of religion in Frye’s works traces his methodology and development as a writer and philosopher. Denham concludes with a summary of Frye’s personal journey, as evidenced in his works and supported by in the notebooks. Denham’s book uses Frye’s notebooks alongside the texts to show how Frye’s journey, from his early Fearful Symmetry to the later The Double Vision, moved in full circle: “It is a matter of pure coincidence – but perhaps one of Jung’s meaningful coincidences nevertheless – that Frye’s Late Notebooks begins with an entry on original sin and 3,684 entries later end with one on the Sabbath vision, suggesting that Frye’s quest as it is played out in that extraordinary record of his imaginative life had come full circle” (267).