I’ve just finished rereading Northrop Frye’s 1962 lecture series The Educated Imagination. Because Frye is such a clear writer and a synthesizing thinker, his work has given me a more holistic vision of covenantal literature would look like, though the actual content of his work is at odds with that vision. Here’s where I would start.
- The study of literature begins with the study of The Bible. Frye admits as much. In the series’ fifth lecture, he advocates starting literary education with the Bible: “It should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind, where everything that comes along later can settle on it.” Frye considers the Bible a compendium of compelling myths,. This does not necessarily mean for Frye that the stories in the Bible are untrue, but it does mean that their origin is human, not divine. The covenantal revision to Frye’s point is that yes, The Bible should be the starting point for any study and particularly literature because it comes to us as literature, complete with poems and typology and symbolism and other hallmarks of literary writing. This necessarily means that a definition of literature that confines it to “make believe” stories is inadequate and leads us to our second point.
- The key to understanding literature is understanding the human imagination. Frye distinguishes three levels of human thought and language. The first is about self-expression and occurs in most of conversations, either with ourselves or others. The second is about practical application and occurs in any applied sciences: from a sermon to a business report. The third is “the level of imagination, which produces the literary language of poems and plays and novels.” The primary goal of this level, Frye claims, is to absorb the natural world into the human one. The covenantal revision is to say that the human imagination is a way of exercising God’s dominion in the world. The goal is not to absorb nature into human nature but to redeem the world so that God’s kingdom “is in earth as it is in heaven.” The redeemed imagination is not autonomous. It images forth the divine creator.
- The fundamental rules of literature are structural. They have to do with the shape of stories more than their content. While content changes with particular times and cultures, Frye argues that literary structures stay the same. Frye finds four dominant literary structures, patterned after the seasons: “[T]he structure of the great literary forms…are the pair familiar to us from drama, tragedy and comedy [and] another pair of opposites, which I should call romance and irony.” The covenantal revision to this claim, of course, is to see the COVENANT as both the dominant structure for God’s verbal revelation and the verbal creations of human beings. Romance and Irony correspond to stories with positive and negative sanctions. Comedy and Tragedy correspond to stories with and without futures, respectively.
- Literature plays a part in determining a society’s success or failure. In a really odd moment, Frye says that the myth underlying his six lectures is the story of the Tower of Babel. Society, Frye says, is a tower that initially looks impressive but is actually “a crazy ramshackle building.” Given the fact that Frye has defined literature in totally human terms–a human recreation of the natural world–this is fitting. On the other hand, he also says that literature’s great story is recaptured paradise, a return to identification with a world that was lost. Because literature processes not the world that is but the world as we wish it was, it provides a means for uncovering the hell or heaven of our own desires. The covenantal revision is that God’s verbal revelation–The Bible–is the means by which a society succeeds or fails. In fact, it is a society’s ability to transform the natural world into the literary images of city and kingdom from scripture through the covenant that enables ultimate success.
- Literature cannot progress, only its study and application. This is a fascinating insight Frye uses to distinguish the arts and sciences. His point is that a modern a physicist may not be a greater scientist than Newton but that he knows more than Newton did about how the world works. However, no one will write a greater play than Oedipus Rex or King Lear, though some contemporary playwright may equal Sophocles or Shakespeare. Literature does not “get better” over time. It only grows and absorbs more of the natural world into itself. The covenantal revision would agree if “literature” is defined purely as God’s word. His word does not change, but the application of human dominion and working out of God’s covenantal structure in time can indeed progress. Sanctification is definitive at our moment of justification, but it is also progressive. We must pray for God’s kingdom to be established on earth as it is in heaven. Heaven, however, need not change.
Experiments in Criticism 