ARCHETYPES OF LITERATURE-- NORTHROP FRYE--Criticism & Theory

ARCHETYPES OF LTERATURE

NORTHROP FRYE

Literary criticism should acquire something of the methodological discipline and coherence of the sciences. This can be attained only by assuming a total coherence in criticism. The primary source of this coherence is the recurrence of certain archetypes in literature of all periods and cultures. This theory is expounded in the present essay. [This essay is very important—S. Sree Kumar]

           

Ü   Frye begins this essay by stating that art can be studied systematically. That study is called criticism.

Ü   We cannot expect literature to behave like a science. But we can expect criticism to behave like a science.

Ü    Criticism as we find it in journals and scholarly monographs has every characteristic of a science.

Ü    Evidence is examined scientifically, texts are edited scientifically. Prosody is scientific in structure, so is phonetics; so is philology.

Ü    And yet in studying this kind of critical science the student may feel he is moving away from literature.

Ü   He finds that literature is flanked on one side by and on the other by philosophy.

           

At present most of the central area of criticism is commentary. But the commentators are not within any scientific discipline. They are engaged in brightening the corner where they are. Our first step is to recognize and get rid of meaningless criticism.

 Casual value judgements belong not to criticism but to the   history of taste. Semimetal judgements are based either on non-existent categories or antitheses—“Shakespeare studied life; Milton books”. Frye compares such school of pseudo criticism to a stock-exchange and writes:

The literary chit-chat which makes reputation of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock exchange is pseudo-criticism. That wealthy investor Mr. Eliot, after dumping Milton on the market, is now buying him again; Donne has probably reached his peak and will begin to taper off; Tennyson may be in for a slight flutter but the Shelley stocks are still bearish.

Frye says that this sort of criticism cannot be part of any systematic study, for a systematic study can only progress. “Whatever dithers or vacillates or reacts is merely leisure class conversation”.

            Our aim is to keep the study of literature centripetal. The study must be based on a structural analysis of the literary work itself. The texture of any work of art is complex and for explaining the complexities we may seek the help of history or philosophy. But the subject of study must not be forgotten. If we forget it we may find that in our anxiety to write about literature we have forgotten how to read it.

            However a purely structural approach has got its own difficulties. It has the same limitation in criticism that it has in biology. In itself it is simply a series of analyses based on the mere existence of the literary structure. It does not give any explanation of how the structure came to be what it was and what its nearest relatives are. 

            Structural analysis brings rhetoric back to criticism but we need a new poetics as well. What is at present missing from criticism is a co-ordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in Biology, will see the phenomena as a whole.

            Now Frye looks for classifying principles, a must for any scientific study. We can reach these principles either inductively or deductively.

Inductive study

The unity of a work of art is the basis for structural analysis. This unity is not produced solely by the unconditional will of the artist.

Ö     Poems like poets are born and not made. The poet’s task is to deliver it as uninjured a state as possible.

Ö     If the poem is alive it is equally anxious to get rid of the poet. It screams to be cut loose from his private memories and associations and the other strings and tubes of his ego.

Ö     The critic takes over where the poet leaves. Criticism survives by connecting the psychology of the poem with the psychology of the poet.

Ö     Every poet has his private mythology—his own private formation of symbols. The same psychological analysis can be extended to the study of characters.

The formal cause of a poem is a question of genres. The sea image is used by so many poets. It becomes an archetypal symbol of literature. The genre of drama originated from medieval religion in a way so strikingly similar to the way it emerged from Greek religion centuries before. So it suggests that there may be archetypes of genres as well as of images. (This point is very important—Sree Kumar) 

It is clear that criticism cannot be systematic unless there is a quality in literature which enables it to be so. An archetype is not only a unifying category of criticism, but itself a part of a total form. The search for archetypes is a kind of literary anthropology, concerned with the way that literature is informed by pre-literary categories such as ritual, myth and folk tale. We find them reappearing in the great classics—there seems to be a general tendency in the classics to revert to them.

            The inductive movement towards the archetype is a process of backing up, as we back up from a painting if we want to see composition instead of brush work.

Example—the grave digger scene in Hamlet.

In the foreground we see the intricate verbal structure—the puns of the first clown. One step back we are in the Wilson Knight and Spurgeon group of critics, listening to the steady rain of images of corruption and decay. One more step back we see the psychological relationships which were the main interest of Bradley. If we take yet another step back we are in the Stoll and Shaw group and see the scene as part of a conventional drama. If we further step back we an see the archetypes of the scene—the hero’s ‘Liebestod’ ( a German word which means the convergence of love and death). Thus the literary anthropologist who chases the source of the Hamlet legend from the pre-Shakespeare play to Saxo and from Saxo to nature myths is not running away from Shakespeare. He is drawing closer to the archetypal form which Shakespeare has recreated.

Deductive Study

Ü Literature seems to be intermediate between music and painting. Its words form rhythms which approach a musical sequence of sounds. They also form a pictorial image.

Ü The rhythm of literature is narrative, the simultaneous grasp of the verbal structure and the meaning or significance.

Ü Rhythm is a recurrent movement deeply founded on the natural cycle. Everything in nature—be it a flower or a bird’s song—grows out of a profound synchronisation between an organism and the rhythms of its environment.

Ü With animals some expression of synchronisation like the mating dance of birds could almost be called rituals. But in human life a ritual seems something of a voluntary effort to recapture a lost rapport with the natural cycle.

Ü A farmer must harvest his crop at a certain time every year. This is involuntary; therefore harvesting itself is not a ritual. It is the deliberate expression of a will to synchronize human and natural energies at that time which produces the harvest songs; harvest sacrifices and harvest folk customs that we call rituals.

Ü We must also notice the tendency of ritual to become encyclopaedic. All the important recurrences in nature, the day, the phases of the moon, the seasons get rituals attached to them. Most of the higher religions are equipped with a definite total body of rituals suggestive of the entire range of potentially significant actions in human life.

            Patterns of imagery are oracular in origin. They derive from the epiphanic moment, the flash of instantaneous comprehension.  We get them in the form of proverbs, riddles and commandments. They are also encyclopaedic in tendency, building up a total structure of significance, or doctrine from random or empiric fragments.

            The myth is the central informing power that gives archetypal significance to the ritual and archetypal narrative to the oracle. Hence the myth is the archetype. In the solar cycle of the day, the seasonal cycle of the year, and the organic cycle of human life there is a single pattern of significance out of which myth constructs a central narrative around a figure who is partly the sun, partly fertility, and partly a god or archetypal human being.

Frye also supplies a table of the different phases of myth.

1. Dawn, spring and birth phase—the birth of the hero, revival and resurrection, of creation and of the defeat of the powers of darkness—winter and death.
2. the zenith—summer and marriage phase
3. The sunset, autumn and death phase. Myth of fall, of the dying god of violent death and sacrifice
4. the darkness, winter and dissolution phase—myth of the flood and the return of chaos, of the defeat of the hero

Frye concludes with a second table of contents.

1. In the comic vision the human world is a community—the hero represents the wish-fulfilment of the reader. Marriage or some equivalent consummation belongs to the comic vision. In the tragic vision the human world is a tyranny or anarchy
2. In the comic vision the animal world is a community of domesticated animals—a flock of sheep or lamb, or one of the gentler birds, usually a dove. The archetype of pastoral images.  The tragic world is seen in terms of beasts of prey, wolves, vulture, serpents, dragons and the like.
3. In the comic vision the vegetable world is a garden, grove or park, or a tree of life or a rose or lotus. In the tragic vision, it is a sinister forest, or a heath or wilderness, or a tree of death.
4. In the comic vision the mineral world is a city, or one building or a temple. In the tragic vision the mineral word is seen in terms of deserts, rocks, and ruins, or of sinister geometrical images.
5. In the comic vision the unformed world is a river, traditionally fourfold—the renaissance image of the temperate body with its four humours. In the tragic vision the world usually becomes the sea.