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

by Northrop Frye

Frye continues his exploration, begun in The Great Code, of the influence of Biblical themes and forms of expression on Western literature, with discussions of authors ranging from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Yeats and Eliot. Frye identifies four key elements found in the Bible-the mountain, the garden, the cave, and the furnace-and describes how they recur in later secular writings. Indices.

Genres: Religion, Literary Criticism, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Christianity, Literature, Criticism

372 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1990

About the author

Born in Quebec but raised in New Brunswick, Frye studied at the University of Toronto and Victoria University. He was ordained to the ministry of the United Church of Canada and studied at Oxford before returning to UofT.

His first book, Fearful Symmetry, was published in 1947 to international acclaim. Until then, the prophetic poetry of William Blake had long been poorly understood, considered by some to be delusional ramblings. Frye found in it a system of metaphor derived from Paradise Lost and the Bible. His study of Blake's poetry was a major contribution. Moreover, Frye outlined an innovative manner of studying literature that was to deeply influence the study of literature in general. He was a major influence on, among others, Harold Bloom and Margaret Atwood.

In 1974-1975 Frye was the Norton professor at Harvard University.

Frye married Helen Kemp, an educator, editor and artist, in 1937. She died in Australia while accompanying Frye on a lecture tour. Two years after her death in 1986 he married Elizabeth Brown. He died in 1991 and was interred in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, Ontario. The Northrop Frye Centre at Victoria College at the University of Toronto was named in his honour.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop...

Reviews

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Many critics today are still unwilling or unable to get past the ideological stage in dealing with literature, because they are less interested in literature than in the relation of literature to some primary ideological interest, religious, historical, radical, feminist or whatever. In such approaches literature is subordinated to something else which by definition is more important and urgent. I think there should be some critics, however, interested in dealing with literature in terms of its own mythical and metaphorical language, for whom nothing is prior in significance to literature itself. This is not to deny the ideological relations of literature, or belittle their importance, but to ascertain more clearly what it is that is being related.”

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't read the first study, "The Great Code",that Frye did before this study. I was expecting a close reading of the Bible, instead it was an overview of the myths contained with in the scriptures. Frye doesn't equate myth with fable, rather as a powerful story telling particular spiritual truths. Frye compares stories like Jacob's Ladder, Jesus's harrowing of Hell, with other myths. I was particularly impressed with his drawing on the idea of axis mundi, or the human attempt to reach Heaven such as Dante's Divine Comedy, the building of towers on the Middle East. I kept thinking of James Kugel's saying, the Bible may not be true but it is true what it says about God.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Words with Power: Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature" is effectively the second volume of Northrop's Frye "The Great Code" in which he endeavoured to demonstrate that the Bible was the great organizing force of the imaginative universe of Western Civilization. While a number of GR readers indicated that they read it without having read "The Great Code", I strongly feel that the best path is to read "The Great Code" before "Words with Power".
"Words with Power" is divided into two parts; the first is entitled 'Gibberish of the Vulgate' while the second is called "Variations on a Theme". 'Gibberish of the Vulgate' deals with five modes of writing found on the horizontal axis or Axis mundi of the imaginative universe. 'Variations on a Theme' addresses the Like most GR reviewers I found that the second half of the book to be much better than the first.
The table below summarizes my understanding of the Four Modes of the 'Gibberish of the Vulgate'

1. Descriptive Mode - Presents Facts - Answers the question: What?
2. Conceptual Mode -Presents a Metaphysical Vision - Answers the question: Why?
Rhetorical -Presents an argument - Answers the question: What should one believe?
or ideological mode
3. Imaginative mode- Presents a Myth - Answers the question: What does one hope for?
4. Prophetic -Presents the Mythic Symbols - Answers the question: What is to be done?
or Kergymatic Mode

Whatever the merits of his model, Frye fails to convince. He does much better in the second part of his book.
On page 179, Frye presents his own table for the Axis Mundi in the 'Variations on a theme':

1. Heaven -Time as total now or real presence. - Space as total here or real presence
2. Unfallen World - Time as Exuberance or inner energy (music, dance, play) -Space as "there" (objective environment
3. Fallen World of Experience - Time as then (Linear and cyclical) - What should one believe?
4. Demonic World - Time as pure duration and power of annihilation - Space as alienation

In short Frye argues that the Bible has bequeathed its vertical axis to the literature of Western Civilization. The good that we strive for is above us. We live in a pure natural world before experiencing the tests of life. Those who cannot mount to heaven are relegated to hell. He uses his encyclopaedic knowledge of literature to convince us that his model is correct.
I still than that Frye's thesis is much easier to understand if one reads "The Great Code" first and urge all readers to do so before undertaking: "Words with Power".

[Christopher Good · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eight out of ten.

Frye is a fascinating thinker. I think I'd like to read more of him, perhaps his criticism of Blake. That and Anatomy of Criticism . . .

This book is largely what I had originally expected from The Great Code. There are two parts. Im the first part, Frye discusses how poetic discourse, with its emphasis on metaphor, is more primitive and more powerful than descriptive, logical, or rhetorical discourses. He then constructs a (relatively) unique status for Biblical discourse, attempting to show that its kerygmatic mode lies on the far side of the poetic. I don't recall him saying this anywhere, but I might postulate that for Frye archetype is to the kerygmatic mode as metaphor is to the poetic. Then again, Frye's conception of metaphor is quite robust in itself.

In the second part, Frye provides four of these archetypal or mythic images - the mountain, the cave, and the furnace - and attempts to demonstrate how they, along with their idealized and demonically parodied versions, constitute human experience. There are some interesting connections here, and perhaps I should have read a little more slowly. In general terms, Frye is further from (even liberal) Christianity than I was perhaps expecting - though he is not secular. Some of the theory reminds me of Frazer (not that I've read Frazer), and eventually Frye cites The Golden Bough . . . The commonalities between Frye and some modern thinkers, like early Peterson, are pronounced, and I'm curious why he is not mentioned more in contemporary cultural discussion.

I'd recommend this book to students of language, especially poetry, and of Western culture.

[Lia Jackson · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was not what I expected and therefore was disappointing. There was not much mention of the Bible, even in the chapters the author claimed would be about it. When the Scriptures were referenced, I felt the author had not understood the meaning behind the words and so I could not agree with his conclusions. In many cases, I could not follow why/how the literature/theme alluded to was connected with the Bible and the ideas he was trying to propound.
It was a very intellectual read, and much went over my head, perhaps because I had not read all the literature he did refer to, or perhaps because I had not read his previous book on the topic, The Great Code.
For me, it lacked a continuity that would tie the title and the expectations it aroused about the Bible and Literature into the substance of the book.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional book. The shear scope of his references is impressive and, I must admit, I often found myself googling the works he cited or using Google Translate for the French, German, and Latin excerpts. Worth the work though. If you are intrigued by Freud, Jung, or Campbell, I highly recommend this book as the ultimate secular anlysis of the Bible (partnered with it's partner The Great Code).

[Erika Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

The subject of independent study with my mentor, M.D., whose own mentor, "the famous literary critic, Northrop Frye," wrote this book. 😂

[Hooper Bring]

I read online that in the introduction to this, Frye writes on Poe’s purloined letter.

[Milanimal · Rating 3 out of 5]

l have learned little and understood less

[Anne Hamilton · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the books that it's impossible to digest in one reading. It needs rumination.

Notes:
xii - Vico presents the understanding that all major verbal structures have descended historically from poetic and mythological ones.

xxiv - the Greek word for truth, aletheia, means unforgetting

13-14 - justice as a decision of law-makers, as influenced by sophistry and rhetorical ability; and justice as the opposite of injustice to be reached by dialectic

43 - a reader of romance might be pardoned for sometimes thinking that romance has no subject except sexual frustration, even when that frustration is resolved on the last page or so

70 - after the initiates of the Mysteries of Eleusis were shown a reaped ear of corn as the climax of their initiation, they were known as 'epoptae', seers. Zen Buddhism also has similar eucharistic emblems whose purpose is to enjoin "seeing".

80 - Yeats opens his poem, The Statues on the erotic nature of Greek statuary of the influence of Pythagoras.

82 - The discoverer of the principle that all verbal structures descend from mythological origins is Vico. His axiom was verum factum: what is true for us is what we have made.

91 - sunflower is a symbol of repressed or frustrated desire (regarding issues of life)

91 - 'derek' is Hebrew for the way; its Greek cognate is 'hodos'

147 - in Milton's Paradise Regained, Jesus is tempted to be a Greek philosopher

153 - one early name for Osiris is 'the god at the top of the staircase'; 'klimax' is the Greek word for ladder

164 - in early medieval times, the concept of the cycle of empires became consolidated as the wheel of fortune

197 - 'beulah' is the married land

205-206 - mystics such as John of the Cross used Song of Songs as an important element of their imagery. Henry Vaughan's Regeneration is a significant example of this.

244 - Blake's developed mythology includes Urizen (horizon), Orc (Orcus or hell) and Luvah (spirit of rebellion, identical with Orc but stressing the sacrificial aspect)

268 - a divided state of life is depicted by a head separated from a body. In such literary works as Poe's, A Predicament, and Yeats' King of the Great Clock Tower, which both feature a clock tower and a severed head. As does Mallarme's Cantique de Saint-Jean.

281 - Iago responds with silence.

[David Riemer]

Along with its companion volume, the Great Code, this book should be required reading for anyone who wants to talk about religion in the West, atheism, or the Bible. I have always said that the Bible required a guide book; well, this is it. Strictly speaking, these two works are literary criticism. They are this and so much more: cultural geography, history of Western civilization, philosophy, linguistics, you-name-it.

The books are easy to read and comprehend if you pay attention. Northrop Frye's lucid mind is reflected in his highly organized writing and his penchant for tables and diagrams enhances readability.

These works' most significant contribution, I believe, is to dig deeply into the Bible as a literary enterprise, and in so doing to dismiss simplistic fundamentalism (not to mention deliberate fundamentalist misreading such as the bulk of "analysis" of the Bible generated by the "New" Atheists.)

Frye's approach is heavily drawn from the radical reevaluation of the Bible undertaken by two of his literary luminaries, John Milton and William Blake. Because of this the Christ who appears fleetingly in both works is an unsettling force, who by virtue of his earthly, corporeal existence is focused on the things of this world as well as his father's business. (God's, not Joseph's.)

In Words of Power, Frye applies the scholarly methodology, developed in his first book, Fearful Symmetry--a groundbreaking study of Blake's poetry--to the Bible in what would be his last book. In so doing, he liberates the Bible from the misapprehension of literalists and the cynical misconstruing of people who should know and do better, such as Christopher Hitchens.

Immanent in this work, and peeking through or penetrating this world's dimensions, is a radical reconfiguration of what it means to be human and why so many brilliant, thoughtful people believe in Jesus and his revolutionary teachings and ethos.

This book is provocative without trying to be and fascinating without attitude. Just watching Professor Frye laying out his argument, developing the logical connections that fuse the Bible into unity is a lesson in language, reasoning and intellectual discipline. These are all in short supply.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

I should have read the Great Code first but this book stands by itself for an excellent understanding of scripture.

[A. Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

So far, so good from this scholar-sceptic. A book for lit critics--but not a barnburner (which is why I did not give it a higher rating)