JAMES C. NOHRNBERG 

                                        THE MASTER OF THE MYTH OF LITERATURE:  
                                        AN INTERPENETRATIVE OGDOAD FOR NORTHROP FRYE

"The Master of the Myth of Literature" discusses the work of Northrop Frye in view of the "inventor’s laboratory" of his lately revealed Notebooks and their discussion in David Boyd’s and Imre Salusinsky’s recently edited volume of eight studies, Rereading Frye (University of  Toronto Press, 1998).

Robert Denham begins the collection with a synopsis of the literary and autobiographical remains, "The Frye Papers." His second and concluding contribution surveys "interpenetration" in the Notebooks as a "key" to Frye’s thinking. Two other such keys follow Denham’s initial inspection: Michael Dolzani’s evidence for a unified, "ogdoadic" agenda in the creation of Frye’s canon, and Salusinszky’s analogy for Frye’s organization in the "art of memory." Preceding Denham’s final essay are two studies of Frye’s relation to recent literary culture: A.C. Hamilton on Anglo-American academic studies, and Frye’s Hungarian translator Péter Pásztor on current Hungarian letters. At the book’s center are two essays on key "essentialist" and "logocentric" ideas: Jonathan Hart on the "creative word" sought by Frye in himself as the potential writer of novels, and Joseph Adamson on the autonomy of "imaginative culture" as defended by Frye from ideological appropriation by a conspiracy of clerks. The esoteric/exoteric structure of the book under review mimes that of the "Ogdoad" Frye once projected for the shape of his own oeuvre, two groups of four books each; "the second group of four[...] to be Blakean ‘emanations’ or counterparts of the first four," like the "the ‘double mirror’ structure of  The Great Code." Following the same structure, the reviewer-essayist takes up major points from each contributor, in order to re-visit Frye’s views and practice, and to elaborate on the following list of topics: Frye’s self-construction through a writing ego that is Canadian, and through a reconstruction of literature that is a putative whole; the Anatomy of Criticism as a self-enclosed Modernist poem and Mallarméan Grand Oeuvre, and a re-member-able, re-invokable Bardo-world of literary purgations; the Linnaean array of the literary species in a Platonic, archetypal view or construction, vs. their Darwinian origin according to a more social, empirical, and demographic view; the genetic relations of culture, myth, literature and ideology in Frye’s thought and in others’ theories; the recurrence of myth in the development of conceptual thought and in the formation of national identity; the possibility of literature’s and criticism’s transcendence of the politically embedded discourse proposed by New Historicist tenets, through some kind of metaphysical skyhook of critical self-awareness or mythical thinking  and some sources and rationale for Frye’s monadic description of literature as Scripture. Frye’s garrisonning of culture may be the reaction of an introvert, defensively withdrawn from potentially damaging engagements with the outside world; yet it is also the colonizing strategy of a proselytizer, for whom the unity of doctrine is a necessary prerequisite for either an evangelical mission to convert the gentiles or a provocative one to confront the Philistines.