Codes and Coping: A Nursing Tribute to Northrop Frye

Abstract

In this essay I will outline features of Northrop Frye's (1982) work The Great Code: The Bible and Literature which are of vital interest to nurses and nursing. It is my belief that nursing as a healing art is ever involved in drama, live performance with real-life actors. Images in combination bring forth birth and death, comedy and tragedy, suffering and sorrow, comfort and joy, and are all conceived and interpreted from within one's heritage or tradition. What Frye does in The Great Code is elaborate and illuminate the Western tradition upon which Judeo-Christian society and culture, and healing, adapting, and coping, are based. He brings to consciousness what for most of us remains in the unconscious, hidden, realms of our behaviour, our body language and our speech acts. He exposes the vehicles of meaning we use in the production of our art of nursing. Each practitioner has in common with Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Blake, etc. (admittedly, along with all our ancestors and everyone alive today) that the reality he creates and participates in, draws from the images of our heritage. Frye shows how the poignant and significant images appearing in literature down through the ages of Western culture are coded (i.e., have their blueprint) in the Bible. Drawing from Frye, I will advocate a basis for interpretation, one of the fundamental arts in nursing: attending to the actual images that people express in what nurses call coping, to the structure of the meaning implicit in situations and experience (insofar as that is possible) that is, to the codes or symbolic logic of the images, and to the potential transformations or reformulations embodied in the social and political context, which is usually referenced in the images, and which nurses and patients are a part of.