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The Words We Live By
| Article
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19752 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1991 |
3,089 Words |
| Author
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Hugh Kenner
Hugh Kenner is professor of English at Johns Hopkins Univesity
and the author of many celebrated books, particularly on Ezra
Pound. |
WORDS WITH POWER
Being a Second Study of "The Bible and Literature"
Northrop Frye
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990
313 pp., $24.95
Slowly doubt broadened down, from precedent to precedent. By the middle of the nineteenth century the list of things Westerners were growing doubtful about had lengthened to include items of more moment than, say, the possibility that Africa somewhere contained unicorns, or that Creation could be assigned to the year 4004 B.C. For it was coming to seem plausible to many that there had never been any historical Jesus, let alone any Garden of Eden. And as for the Trojan War, wasn't that something that likely never occurred? For that matter, had there really been a Homer? And could Moses really have written Genesis, Exodus ...? But it remained unthinkable to abandon the Bible and Homeric epos, those two anchor points of Western civilization. So, by emergency decree, both became literature. Indeed, literature had come to be a code word for something very elevating that need not be believed.
You can watch the ongoing rot with especial plainness when Matthew Arnold, writing I n 1861, instructs his Oxford audience that Homer is noble and plainspoken and plain-thinking and has other estimable British qualities; always, he skirts the question of whether Homer's assertions rest on anything substantive, the way those of Robinson Crusoe assuredly do. (For there had been a "Crusoe," named Alexander Selkirk and even if there hadn't been, there were assuredly such things as musket and compasses and gunpowder, answering to all the nouns the book parades. That order of fact at least was reassuring.)
The disengagement of the Bible from fact was a much longer and more delicate process; but by 1936 few protests would be heard when Ernest Sutherland Bates edited a big book called The Bible Designed to be Read as Living Literature, to be distinguished, apparently, from the Bible of our forefathers, the one intended to be read as merely dead dogma.
That sort of thing had happened before, in a way that's illuminated by the fortunes of the word myth. Its vagaries begin with its Greek ancestor mythos, which as Homer used it meant just anything said: an oration for instance, a remark, a promise, even a rumor. Homer's usage didn't touch on truth or falsehood at all. But by Plato's time, mythos explicitly meant a tale that wasn't true.
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