Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks, 1982-1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World

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.

These two volumes reproduce the numerous notebooks compiled by Frye
while he was preparing his second Bible book, Words with Power (1990),
and the posthumously published lectures, The Double Vision (1991). They
reveal the extraordinary difficulty that he encountered in getting his
views concerning the Bible into a coherent and appropriate form. Indeed,
these notes are often compulsively repetitive, as if he felt that
constant rephrasing of his current intentions would achieve a sufficient
momentum to allow the material to develop and flow as it should.

These notebooks fill over 700 pages of closely printed text and provide
fascinating documentation for those interested in the processes of
Frye’s thought. Inevitably, these are matters for specialists, but
they show Frye meditating (even agonizing) on the issues of doubt and
faith that he tends to brush aside in his more formal writings. We get
glimpses here of the uncertain, occasionally forgetful, sometimes even
desperate human being who is generally written out of the published
books. Above all, we encounter the aging Frye, poignantly conscious of
the fact that he has only a few years left and that there is so much
that still needs to be thought and expressed.

At the same time, despite some self-conscious denials, one is also
aware of a rage for diagrammatic symmetry that sometimes verges on
obsession. Often he gives the impression of searching for literary or
biblical examples that will corroborate and justify a preconceived
pattern that thereby threatens to appear more important than the
“double vision” itself. Anyone interested in exploring Frye’s
psychology (the psychology of a very remarkable scholar and thinker)
would find valuable evidence here.

This daunting material has been exhaustively and impeccably edited by
Robert D. Denham, who not only offers succinct identifications of
allusions but also provides useful cross-references between individual
entries and between notes and published books. These two volumes
represent a significant contribution to a well-conceived and elegantly
produced series.