Between Religion and Literature: Mircea Eliade ... - Lafayette College

Eliade and Frye
path" that will "lead to some view of the place of literature in civilization as
a whole."2'
Notwithstanding this third concern, Eliade and Frye also share a tendency
to divorce their subjects of study from the particularities of time or
history and to construe them instead in the context of all-embracing,
synthetic structures-such as Eliade's cross-cultural "morphology" of
hierophanies in Patterns and his thematic anthology of religious sources
(From Primitives to Zen [1967]) and Frye's "synoptic" typologies and
schemes of biblical and Western literary mythoi, "phases," and "modes" in
the Anatomy and later in The Great Code (1983) and its sequel Words with
Power.22 Such holistic systematizations of religious and literary phenomena
make the two scholars vulnerable to similar attacks. Anthropologists
criticize Eliade for failing to take into sufficient account the historicalcultural
contexts of religious manifestations,23 while certain literary theorists
fault Frye for isolating literature from its relation to life.24 And just as
Eliade is accused of making "shamanic" generalizations25 and of producing
a "premature" and "misplaced" holism,26 so Frye's attempt to reveal
Western literature's "total universe" is disparagingly likened to the apocalyptic
vision of a religious mystic.27
On what grounds might Eliade and Frye be defended against charges of
ahistoricism and of unwarranted generalization? The first charge assumes
that both scholars' structuralism lacks a historical dimension, as does Levi-
Strauss's. But while structure is, by definition, atemporal, Eliade explicitly
rejects the structuralism of Levi-Strauss and embraces the morphological
method passed on from Goethe to Propp, viewing structure as being-in
Norman Girardot's words-"indissolubly linked with historical experience."28
At the same time, as Paul Ricoeur argues (in terms that might be
21
Frye, Critical Path, p. 14. Compare Northrop Frye, The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on
Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), p. 9: "The arts and
sciences thus have two poles, a social pole of origin in the human sense of concern, and an
opposite pole in the structure of the art or science itself."
....
22 Mircea Eliade, From Primitives to Zen: A Thematic Sourcebook of the History of Religions (San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977); Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983); Words with Power: Being a Second Study of "The Bible and
Literature" (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990).
23 For example, John A. Saliba, "Homo Religiosus" in Mircea Eliade: An Anthropological Evaluation
(Leiden: Brill, 1976), esp. pp. 114-15.
24 For example, W. K. Wimsatt, "Northrop Frye: Criticism as Myth," in Krieger, ed. (n. 9
above), pp. 75-107.
25 Edmund Leach, "Sermons by a Man on a Ladder," New York Review of Books (October 20,
1966).
26
Gregory D. Alles, "Wach, Eliade, and the Critique from Totality," Numen 35 (1988): 120.
27 Walter Sutton, Modern American Criticism (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p.
258.
28 Norman Girardot, "Introduction," Imagination and Meaning: The Scholarly and Literary
Worlds of Mircea Eliade, ed. Norman Girardot and Mac Linscott Ricketts (New York: Seabury,
503