The Great Code: The Bible and Literature First Edition

Note: This review takes a look at Frye’s remarkable book on the Bible as a literary work. Frye steers clear of any preaching or evangelizing in this work and everything I have read by him. I connect his scholarly approach to the overheated rhetoric of the New Atheism in a speculative, not a descriptive spirit. If you read this book, you may see where I am grounding this brief review in Frye’s analysis. If you do not, my apologies.

I have always thought that the Bible should come with an instruction book. This book by Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, is that book. Of course, I am half-jesting about the need for such a book. But, half-jesting means half-not-jesting.

The vogue of the New Atheists has come and gone, but the effects of their onslaught on religious belief stretch far and wide. Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins would do well to consult Prof. Frye's erudite exposition of the construction, conventions, and literary dimensions of the text they presume to know so well and deride so thoroughly. The unsophisticated approach taken by the New Atheists is really a ruse to throw everything into the same kettle and set it to boiling. Little else is accomplished with their faux explication.

Frye shows how correctly to order the pieces that make up the whole and demonstrates the relationships between and among these component pieces.

Northrop Frye was arguably the greatest literary critic of the 20th century. There are hints in this work of seeds of responses to New Historicism, reader response, and even deconstructive approaches to the Bible in the conclusion. It strikes me as funny that the intellectuals I mentioned above steer far clear of any new literary analysis approach to the Bible. Frye does not develop his sprouts of ideas, but I see hints that might prove interesting to pursue.

Anyone who is interested in figuring out what the Bible is doing would certainly be better served reading Northrop Frye than listening to most preachers or Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins and Dennett.

What has always fascinated me about Frye is his incredible skill in systematizing his ideas and clearly communicating the structure of his ideas. One chart or table of Frye's is worth hundreds of pages of the continuous prose of many other critics. 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. If you read it, you will be glad you did.

Amazon forced me to select stupid options in my review. The Great Code isn't a novel but rather one of the best scholarly analyses of the Bible as literature by a premier literature scholar, Northrop Frye. As one would expect, Frye is especially strong on the archetypal elements of the Bible, but I also enjoyed his discussion of intertextuality--the repeated images and motifs, the many ways in which the various writers of the books in the Old and New Testaments referred to the language of earlier texts in the canon in the later texts. If you could only read two books on the Bible as literature, read The Great Code and Robert Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative.

I'm a big fan of the work of the late Northrup Frye, whom I consider to be a champion of literary criticism. Of all his books, this was designed to be his magnum opus. It's intriguing, post-graduate level material and worthy of study for anyone serious about exploring the foundations of western culture and the belief systems woven throughout it.

For readers this is an incredible boring book. I loved it. It shows how the Bible does a great circle and is a fantastic place for metaphors.

After his "Anatomy of Criticism" (the very best and most important work of Canadian critic Northrop Frye, IMHO), and "Fearful Symmetry", add this book to your reading list of literary criticism.

Recommended!

My husband loved it

I recently finished this book and still haven't lost the sensation and the sweet taste of the author style. A very special one indeed. Other reviewers have talked about the topic of the book and the thesis that the author in fact conveys, but to me, what matters is the way in which he does it. I mean, professor Frye not only was trying to say something, he was saying it. He doesn't try, he does it. This characteristic is essential to understand my recommendation. Northrop Frye writes to be understood and this is his primary interest. And you as a reader do notice and appreciates it.

Now, the topic is not easy. It is about transmitting the way in which the Bible was written --or produced. It was set up in so different epochs and with so different literary resources or "tropes," as you can imagine. We are so linked to our own time that it is hard to see that literature wasn't always the same. So we not always had metaphors, allegories, ironies as we see them today. And in showing you this, professor Frye is unequivocal. He gives you lots of illustrative examples that serve to clear every single point.

Furthermore, to do this, professor Frye is reading the AV (Authorized Version) of the Bible in detail and as a whole, so he is able to connect, for example, the beginning in the Genesis with the end in the Revelation. As long as he does it, everything began to emerge as a machinery, a very original one because it doesn't have an author as we understand that figure today. In the Bible, more important than the author is the editor, the person that in different times was binding different patches of several hundreds or thousands of documents and commentaries in order to present them as a one solid body of contents. This happened many many times, so the task for any researcher consists in doing something as decoding the book as a biologist does with the DNA. That's the reason, perhaps, behind the title that professor Frye put on the cover.

I have read several books on this same topic and if you have done the same, then this book is not going to be one more, is going to be a real advance both in knowledge as in understanding. The Bible Code is a literary review of the Bible not a historical one. This is not a book about the history of another, even though history is present as a point of fact. It's not possible to bypass or to jump over history if you are talking about the Bible. But Frye touches the point without falling in the historical account which is not his field. He just shows you the context by recurring to what the experts and scholars know about the topic. And then he follows with the literary tree (a very loaded one, really).

Who should read this book? Anyone interested in literature or religion or history, or those three put together. This book is not for losing the Christian faith. Not to become an atheist. Is just for knowing how the Bible was built, what were the state of the art at the time for writing about God before Jesus time and some years after his dead, why the Bible is so important for the ulterior development of literature and the way we see and talk about the world around us. The Bible laid the foundation of our ethos as the Euclidean geometry was the foundation of mathematics. So this book is a fountain of everything we read as literature: there are the tropes, the conventions, the legends, the beliefs, whatever you want. The Bible is in the very origin of our imagination and The Code Book conveys exactly that.

Finally: In terms of style I would say that the author writes every sentence as the last. He writes beautifully with no imperfections, he uses the written language for illuminating the room in a sense that could be classical. He is far from being ornamental, he is self contained and --as the good writers do-- has always the reader in his mind. And that is always appreciated.

Five stars for a comprehensive and highly readable book which is, like some others, but not many, a perfect essay.

Very interesting book.