The Critical Reception of The Great Code

Abstract

<p>Northrop Frye remains a widely read but profoundly misunderstood critic. This survey of critical responses to The Great Code is intended to demonstrate that Frye's theory of language, despite the misapprehensions of his many critics, is radically dialectical, a conception of language that reveals centres and presences rather than margins and absences. This kerygmatic property of language is, according to Frye, the legacy of the Bible whose typological organization of myth and metaphor provides a unique verbal paradigm. What the prophetic language proper to the Bible reveals is "royal metaphor," the imaginative and decentralized expression of concern that identifies without subordinating. As the survey of The Great Code's reviews illustrates, Frye's dialectical account of language is often incompletely appreciated and substituted by what is here characterized as some form of "metonymic fallacy"--the presumption not that language generates meaning from within, but merely attempts to represent external phenomena somehow assumed to be more "real." Frye's kerygmatic conception of language, however, extends beyond metonymic bias to identify words with power as possessing the power of the Word.</p>