This is a lovely collection of three lectures and a fourth chapter, united together under the subtitle "Language and Meaning in Religion". Lovely are the turns of phrase especially those signaled by Johan Aitken's prefatory "Appreciation". These are epithets that twinkle with irony, especially "rutting in rubber" and that "celebrated ceramic" in reference to Keats's Grecian urn. The deliciousness here is of course imagining the borrowing of these gems and watching them course through new settings such as learnèd treatises about the impact of culture wars on canon formation or the pandemic influences on appeals to the emancipation of erotic impulses. "Allusions to AIDS and Multiculturalism in the Late Frye" would certainly occupy some interdisciplinary scholar while some pomo poet/artist celebrates in a proliferating parody the heifer-bearing artefact in a set of bathroom tiles.

If this treatment sounds slightly irreverent, it is. Frye himself expressed the opinion in the Anatomy of Criticism that the arts "cannot help releasing the powerful acids of satire, realism, ribaldry, and fantasy". Of course, criticism is itself a type of art.

Frye introduces the release of those acids at the conclusion of his considerations of ethical criticism (the second essay of the Anatomy) where the fourfold model of exegesis (literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogic) is taken as a trajectory. Frye places at the terminus of this exegetical trajectory the anagogic which he defines in the glossary of the Anatomy of Criticism as "relating to literature as a total order of words".

The anagogic is an important key for the appreciation not only of Frye's last book but much of his oeuvre. Let us juxtapose a passage from the Anatomy:

The study of literature takes us toward seeing poetry as the imitation of infinite social action and infinite human thought, the mind of a man who is all men, the universal creative word which is all words.

with an extensive note on his use of "Man's consciousness" in The Double Vision:

The English language, in its illogical unwisdom, established the convention many centuries ago that "man" means "men and women" and "mankind" humanity. Other languages preserve the same conventions. In my view it is better to let such vestigial constructions fossilize rather than to attempt the pedantries of a uniform "common language." The fossilizing process does take place: we no longer think of a "Quaker" as a hysteric or of "Christmas" as a mass. Again, it is a distrust of metaphorical thinking that is involved. A seldom noticed aspect of this question is the language of pietistic hymns, on of which begins: "Safe in the arms of Jesus, / Safe on his gentle breast." The essential religious feeling here is that the risen Christ, at least, is quite as female as male.

One could trust the process of fossilization if one always imagined upon hearing the word "Quaker" a member of the Society of Friends and that in that act of imagination there were no trembling trace of gender. However in imitation of infinite action and thought, one might in the totality of literature find other examples such as the use of "breast" by the implicitly male speaker in Walt Whitman's "When I Heard at the Close of the Day" who is happy to find the lover wrapping his arm around his, the speaker's, breast.

The goose and the gander are of one species. Interesting how gander is gender-specific as goose is not. While cocks crow and hens lay, chickens roost. The critical barnyard is full of clatter as Frye celebrates in his final chapter of The Double Vision a single type of exegesis:

Above the allegorical level, in the medieval system is the moral or tropological level, the reading of the Bible that takes us past the story into the reordering and redirecting of one's life.

Although it may be argued that the order of the chapters in The Double Vision (Language, Nature, Time, God) implies the completeness of a full fourfold exegesis, Frye does not explicitly address the anagogic. The exegetical trajectory has hit a ceiling.

To view the other side of the roof may well require a detour to the root cellar or at least a review of the architect's blueprints or the space planer's traffic flows. If a "life" is as much a building as a voyage, a story, a habitation as much as a vehicle, it may be well worth rereading the sections of the Anatomy that align anagogical exegesis with a container-contained paradox.

On the archetypal level proper, where poetry is an artifact of human civilization, nature is the container of man. On the anagogic level, man is the container of nature, and his cities and gardens are no longer little hollowings on the surface of the earth, but the forms of a human universe.

Note how the container contained commonplace replicates center/circumference mappings traced earlier by Frye:

In the anagogic phase, literature imitates the total dream of man, and so imitates the thought of a human mind which is at the circumference and not at the center of its reality.

If there is a total dream in the making, is there not some place that is neither circumference nor centre, some moving point through which the restless human mind thinks as it contains its containing? Somewhere towards the pointing of the geese?