Words with Power: Being a Second Study of «The Bible and Literature».

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Words with Power was Northrop Frye’s last major book. Its subtitle, Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature, indicates that he offered it as an accompanying volume to The Great Code, and so it has generally been regarded. But Michael Dolzani, in a decidedly useful introduction, sees it rather as his “most openly visionary book since Fearful Symmetry” (about William Blake), and argues that these two works share “the strongest affinities.” There is a double appropriateness here. The beginning and the end of his scholarly career thus come full circle, a pattern Frye himself would have welcomed, and Dolzani’s insight underlines the fact that Blake, however un- or even anti-sectarian, was a religious poet while the Bible, originally written to a considerable extent in the form of verse, owes much of its effectiveness (or “power”) to an essentially poetic vision.

So much for the timeless qualities of Frye’s subject matter. But Dolzani goes on to argue that Frye was also responding to the cultural situation in the late 1980s. His book “hurls itself recklessly in the teeth of the predominant academic view that criticism is nothing but the study of both literature and mythology as ideology, as an expression of power relations and … social values.” That heresy is, alas, still with us, and Words with Power, with its emphasis on biblical metaphors and imagery, thus represents an important retaliatory salvo in the interests of Eliot’s “common pursuit of true judgment.” It also addresses itself, unfashionably, to a non-specialist reading public.

As is customary in this Collected Works, Frye’s original book contains helpful notes by the editor that intersperse with Frye’s own, as well as the additional introduction I have already praised. And as is also customary, the volume has been prepared with an admirable punctiliousness. Finally, a superb photograph of the aged Frye that so many of us remember aptly balances several snapshots of the young Frye that appeared in the opening double volume devoted to correspondence to and from his first wife. An admirable touch.