Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Two things strike me about this collection of essays in honour of Northrop Frye on his seventieth birthday. The first is that the collective knowledge of its individual contributors is probably less than that of Frye. That is a breathtaking proposition, for the book, in its four parts, covers a lot of ground, including the relation between the Bible and later literature, romanticism, irony, Canadian literature, drama, Freud, plot, catharsis, and metaphor. The table of contents is, in itself, a tribute to Frye.

The second thing is that most of these essays fall short of one of Frye’s greatest assets: intelligibility for the general reader. Frye has always claimed that his criticism grew out of his life as a teacher. He makes things clearer and even at his most difficult he is straining to explain. He always has an audience of learners in mind. Most of the essays here are written by high-flying scholars for other high-flying scholars. Literature is one of mankind’s most precious inheritances; the scholar who makes it more accessible to its beneficiaries is the one who is doing his job properly. In this collection the job is done best by Thomas Willard in “Alchemy and the Bible” and Milton Wilson in “Bodies in Motion: Wordsworth’s Myths of Natural Philosophy.” As for the others: if you’re doing a graduate degree in English, one or two may help you in a seminar. If you’re not, just pass them by.