Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English (Canadian Literature) at
Laurentian University.

Frye himself points out that Words with Power is not a sequel to The
Great Code, as he had originally intended it to be. The reason it is not
a sequel, although Frye does allow that it is a “continuation,” is
that Frye does not think or write sequentially. Rather, he thinks and
writes in parallel, congruently, with the literature that concerns him,
including the Bible.

Words with Power is fascinating to readers familiar with Frye’s work,
in part because in this book he most explicitly and self-consciously
acknowledges what we have long guessed: that he, as a critic, is every
bit as creative as poets, novelists, and dramatists—“creativity,”
he writes, “being an attribute of a writer’s mind and not of the
genres he happens to be working in.” For the reader freshly
encountering Frye, this acknowledgement of his rhetorical stance makes
Words with Power an apt place to begin the acquaintance.

The subject of Words with Power is the Bible’s connection with
Western literary tradition. The book’s creative—or, more exactly,
the re-creative—attempt is, as with most of Frye’s work, didactic:
to offer the reader an opportunity to identify imaginatively with the
whole body of Western literature. Such a vision empowers the reader to
move beyond her or his present context, to take the next step; “except
that,” as Frye notes, “where it takes place there are no next
steps.” Like the relationship Frye has studied between literature and
mythology, the reflective relationship of literature to the Bible (a
relationship he calls his “‘great code’ principle”) is also the
pattern of the reader’s interaction with Words with Power. The
reader’s understanding metamorphoses into the critic’s, becomes an
understanding of the coherence yet inexhaustibility of criticism. The
abundant allusions and ingenious patterns Frye works out (typical
aspects of his work) are designed to draw the reader into literary and
critical structures, configuring in him or her an experience, no matter
how limited, of consciously participating in making the Word flesh, as
the Bible puts it—or, to repeat Frye’s metaphor, of ascending the
ladder with no steps.