The Father, the Son, and the Tetragrammaton: Frye's Notebooks on the Bible

Robert D. Denham, editor. Northrop Frye's Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts. Volume 13 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press 2003. lvii, 740. $125.00 Northrop Frye to Roy Daniells, 1 April 1975: 'I think I decided very early ... I was not going to worship a god whose actions, judged by human standards, were contemptible. That was where old Blake helped me so much: he taught me that the lugubrious old stinker in the sky that I had heard so much about existed all right, but that his name was Satan, that his function was to promote tyranny in society and repression in the mind. That meant that the Methodist church down at the corner was consecrated mainly to devil worship' (qtd in Ayre, 45). Written between 1969 and 1980, twelve of the fourteen notebooks published in volume 13 of the Collected Works 'are a record of Frye's efforts to formulate and fill in ... the structure of The Great Code,' to quote Robert Denham (xlv).1 They are also a record of Frye's efforts to deal with 'the lugubrious old stinker in the sky,' whose epithets include: 'old thunderfart in the sky' (180); 'the farting corpse-sniffer' (278); 'the Stinker' (301); 'Noah's corpse-snuffler' (342); 'the heavenly stinker' (306); 'Thunderfart' (335); and 'the cerulean shit' (342).2 [End Page 934] Frye's 'intention to write a book on the Bible goes back ... almost four-and-a-half decades before The Great Code finally appeared' (xliv). An entry in the 'mystical notebook' of 1946–48 reads: 'I'd like to do a potboiler on the Bible in four chapters, outlining among other things my theory of its symmetry' (53). By late 1969, Frye's 'potboiler' is in the planning stage: 'I don't know about the Bible book: I'll have the outline of that by the end of the year. I want to make money out of it, and that means a careful selection of material' (114). Dated 'Easter Sunday, April 11, 1971,' another entry reads: 'it is beginning to look as though ... I really am going to do a "big book on the Bible"' (165). And somewhat later: 'this will be one of the great books of the world if I bring it all off' (202). Before looking at notebooks written in the 1960s and 1970s, we should focus briefly on Frye's 'mystical' notebook. 'We must cling to a God who approves of blasphemy because he hates Jehovah & Nobodaddy & Zeus & Isvara & all the other kings of terrors & tyrants of the soul' (19). Next: 'I can take no religion seriously, for reasons I don't need to go into here, that doesn't radiate from a God-Man' (46). Forging a 'link between Freud's superego and Jung's shadow,' Frye intuits: 'The shadow can only be the diabolos or accuser, the agent of the moral law' (61). Frye's term 'the moral law' (the moral and ethical commandments handed down at Sinai, one presumes) may encompass the 'ceremonial law': 'The ceremonial & moral law are ultimately the same thing,' he writes (61). Compare this passage from Fearful Symmetry (1947), Frye's reading of Blake's reading of the Bible: Jesus 'found the Jews worshiping their own version of Nobodaddy, a sulky and jealous thundergod who extracted the most punctilious obedience to a ceremonial law and moral code. He tore this code to pieces and broke all ten commandments, in theory at least' (FS, 78–79). Inching ahead to a notebook from 1969–70, we discover a 'storm god': 'For revolutionary monotheism, such as we have in Judaism, the one God is rather a storm god, benignant in rain (Zechariah & Mt. Carmel) which breaks the tyranny of the sun, destructive in thunderbolts' (84). And then: 'I wonder if the whole father-in-the-sky-making-the-world...

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.