Oldal 62 [62]
TIBOR FABINY
On the other hand the literary critic Northrop Frye said in his The Great
Code (1982) “one of the central issues of the present book [is] the nature of
‘literal’ meaning”.*' This literal meaning, he says, is warranted by the “shape”
of the Bible when read it as a unity of narrative and imagery. “... the primary
and literal meaning of the Bible... is its centripetal or poetic meaning... This
primary meaning... arises simply from the interconnection of words, is the
metaphorical meaning...” So just as Tyndale said that the literal sense is the
spiritual sense, Frye asserted that the literal sense is the metaphorical sense.
To describe the effect of reading on meaning, Frye has adopted Dante’s
term of “polysemous” meaning. This expression does not imply many differ¬
ent meanings, nor does it contradict the primacy of the literal meaning. The
Reformers’ and Tyndale’s formula that “no passage is to be interpreted in more
than one sense” remains unchallenged. Frye describes what he means by this
term as follows:
“One of the commonest experiences in 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... that every time we read it we get so¬
mething 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... ."??
Commenting on Dante’s four senses Frye writes: “What is implied here is a
single process growing in subtlety and comprehensiveness, not different senses,
but different intensities or wider contexts of a continuous sense, unfolding like
a plant out of a seed...”34
CONCLUSION
William Tyndale’s and John Frith’s idea of the dynamism and openness of the
literal sense and their idea of the “process of the text” is quite unique terminol¬
ogy in English which, according to my knowledge, has no direct equivalence in
Latin or German. This category, so familiar to us in the age of word-processors,
conforms not only to the hermeneutics of the church Fathers and the Reformers
but also to Paul Ricoeur’s and Northrop Frye’s views on textuality. All these
31 Frye, Northrop, The Great Code. The Bible and Literature, London, Routledge, 1982, 45.
32 Frye, The Great Code, 61-2.
% FRYE, The Great Code, 220.
34 Frye, The Great Code, 221.
* 60 °