Review: The Great Code: The Bible and Literature

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature by Northrop Frye
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

'If we insist that the Bible is "more" than a work of literature, we ought at least to stick to the word "more," and try to see what if means.

'What I think it means is that we have to turn again to the traditional but still neglected theory of "polysemous" meaning. One of the commonest experiences of reading is the sense of further discoveries to be made within the same structure of words. The feeling is approximately "there is more to be got out of this," or we may say, of something we particularly admire, that every time we read it we get something new out of it. This "something new" is not necessarily something we have overlooked before, but may come rather from a new context in our experience. The implication is that when we start to read, some kind of dialectical process begins to unfold, so that any given understanding of what we read is one of a series of phases or stages of comprehension.'

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