T O W A R D S A L A N G U A G E O F L O V E A N D F R E E D O M : F R Y E D E C I P H E R S T H E G R E A T C O D E ALV IN A. L E E McMaster University lh e Great Code1 is meant to demonstrate that “the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring imagery that ‘freezes’ into a single metaphor cluster, the metaphors all being identified with the body of the Messiah, the man who is all men, the totality of logoi who is one Logos, the grain of sand that is the world” (224). At the same time it is suggested throughout the pages of this two-part, double mirrors book that the Bible is more than literature, that what Frye calls “ the metaphysic of presence meets us at every turn” (213) and that some principle beyond those of literary criticism is necessary if we are to understand how the Bible is “more” than a work of literature. The principle indicated is that of polysemous meaning, a notion that has been around for most of the last two thousand years but has fallen into disuse in recent centuries. It is my purpose in this article to examine this principle, articulated in the closing pages of The Great Code, in an attempt to show what it involves, how it is used in the book, and finally what it suggests the second volume of this proposed two-volume work might provide. Not to be greedy and always asking for more, however, from a critic and scholar who has already given much, I shall conclude with a few brief thoughts about the kind of impact The Great Code could or might have on our world in the late twentieth century, for it, in my view, is a work that could and should have a very powerful and creative influence on a world badly in need of what Frye calls a new language of love and freedom. The general thesis of The Great Code is “ that the Bible comes to us as a written book, an absence invoking a historical presence ‘behind’ it, as Der rida would say, and that the background presence gradually shifts to a fore ground, the re-creation of that reality in the reader’s mind” (xxii). The revelation that re-creates the reality moves in a dialectical progression through seven phases, each of which brings a wider perspective on its prede cessor. The seven are traditional and familiar: creation, exodus (or revolu tion) , law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalyse. Chapter eight is the E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C anada, x ii, 2, June 1986 last in the book and brings us back to Frye’s central concern with the role of the reader as he or she tries to make sense of the vast structure of wisdom and energy that the Bible is. The discussion of polysemous meaning in the last pages of The Great Code is the culmination of many observations and insights throughout the book but it arises specifically out of a discussion in chapter eight of the capacity of the greatest music and literature to transcend itself. In listening to the “Kyries” of the Bach B Minor Mass, for example, or the Mozart Requiem we have “a sense of listening to the voice of music itself,” of experiencing what music is all about, “ the kind of thing it exists to say” (216-17). Similarly it is “ the voice of drama itself that we hear in Shakespeare or Sophocles, and the sense of a totality of dramatic experience, of what drama exists to set forth. . . ” (217). Such experience, Frye suggests, raises ques tions to do with the role of the “objective” in the arts, “of the degrees of authority and persuasive power in the works of any given cultural heritage.” In particular, such experience leads us to consider “ the meeting point of...