THE ARCHETYPES OF LITERATURE Northrop Frye (Detailed Summary)--REVISED APRIL 2022

 

Importance of archetypes

 

Literary criticism should have “something of the methodological discipline and coherence of the sciences.” We can attain these only through total consistency in criticism. The primary source of coherence in criticism, according to Frye, is the "recurrence of certain archetypes in the literature of all periods and cultures.”

 

Criticism as Science

 

Frye states that the study of art must be systematic. That study is called criticism. We cannot expect literature to behave like science, but we can expect criticism to act as a science. 

 

The "criticism" we find in journals and scholarly monographs has every characteristic of science. The examination of evidence is scientific, and so is text-editing. "Prosody is scientific in structure, so is phonetics, (and) so is philology". And yet, in studying this type of critical science, the student may feel he is moving away from literature. He finds that literature is flanked on one side by history and on the other by philosophy.

 

Getting rid of meaningless criticism

 

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, says Frye, is to recognize and get rid of meaningless criticism.

 

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

 

The literary chit-chat which makes the 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 such criticism cannot be part of any systematic study. The systematic always progresses. “Whatever dithers or vacillates or reacts is merely leisure-class conversation”.

 

The importance of structural analysis

 

We aim to keep the study of literature centripetal, asserts Frye. The structural analysis of the literary work must be the basis of the study. The texture of any work of art is complex, and for explaining it, we may seek the help of history or philosophy. But, we must never forget the subject of study. "If we forget it we may find that in our anxiety to write about literature, we have forgotten how to read it".

 

The only weakness in the structural approach is that it is conceived primarily as "the antithesis of centrifugal or 'background' criticism". Frye does not view the structural approach as an antithesis of the 'background' study, and he suggests that it is better to avoid the antithetical way of stating the problem.   

 

Critical apprehension begins with a rhetorical or structural analysis of a work of art. However, a purely structural approach has got many problems. It has the same limitation in criticism it has in biology. It is "simply a series of analyses based on the mere existence of the literary structure". It does not explain how the "structure came to be" or "what it was and what its nearest relatives are".

The structural analysis brings rhetoric back to criticism, but we also need new poetics. Any effort to construct a poetics out of rhetoric would only make rhetorical terms “sterile jargons”. What is missing from criticism is a coordinating principle, a central hypothesis that, as the theory of evolution in Biology, will see the phenomena as a whole.

 

The concept of total coherence is the first supposition, as in any science. Belief in the order of nature is necessary for the intelligibility of the natural sciences. If the natural sciences demonstrate the total order, they will exhaust their subject. Criticism, as a science, is intelligible. Literature, as the subject of science, is an "inexhaustible source of new critical discoveries."

 

Frye points out that it takes a long time for a science to discover that it is an individual science.” Till that time, it remains “an embryo” within the body of some other subject.  Physics was born from natural philosophy; sociology from moral philosophy. Physics and astronomy assumed modern forms in the Renaissance, "chemistry in the eighteenth century, biology in the nineteenth and the social sciences in the twentieth.” If systematic criticism develops in the modern age, it is not an anachronism. 

 

         

The classifying principles

 

Frye speaks about the classifying principles lying between the two points: 

The two points are—

i. The preliminary effort of criticism, the structural analysis of the work of art.

ii. The assumption that there is such a subject as criticism and that it makes or could make complete sense. 

 

“We may proceed inductively from structural analysis trying to see larger patterns in them, or we may proceed deductively, with the consequences that follow from postulating the unity of criticism”.

 

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".

·      Poems like poets are born and not made. The task (of the poet) is to deliver it in "as uninjured a state as possible".

·      A poem if alive 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".

·      The "critic takes over where the poet leaves". Criticism survives by connecting "the psychology of the poem" with (the psychology of) the poet.

    

·      Every poet has his private mythology—his unique formation symbols. The same psychological analysis may extend to the study of characters.

 

The question of genres

 

The formal cause of a poem is a question of genres. The social and cultural conditions of a period create a genre. 

 

All poets have their peculiar formation of images. But when so many poets use the same images, "there are much bigger critical problems involved than the biographical ones".

 

The sea image

 

Many poets have used the sea image. It cannot remain within the poetry of Shelley or Keats, or Coleridge but is "bound to expand over many poets to become an archetypal symbol."

Likewise, drama as a genre originated from medieval religion. This origin of drama is similar to its birth from Greek religion centuries before.  Hence, there may be archetypes of genres and images.

 

“It is clear that criticism cannot be systematic unless there is a quality in literature which enables it to be so; an order of words corresponding to the order of nature in natural sciences”, writes Frye. An archetype is not only a “unifying category of criticism but itself a part of a total form”.

 

What form of criticism can be there in literature? Here, we sense the “possibility of seeing literature as a complication” of a limited and modest “group of formulas” in primitive culture.

 

Search for archetypes as literary anthropology

 

The search for archetypes is a kind of literary anthropology concerned with the way literature is "informed by pre-literary categories such as ritual, myth and folk tale." We find them reappearing in the classics—there seems to be a general tendency in the classics to revert to them. The great masterpieces take us to a point where we can see an “enormous number of converging patterns of significance”. Here we wonder if we cannot see literature not only as “complicating itself in time”, but also as spread out in “conceptual space from some unseen centre”.

 

Inductive movement—a process of backing up

 

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 brushwork.

 

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 that 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 can see the archetypes of the scene—the hero’s ‘Liebestod’ (a German word that 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

·      Some arts move in time like music; others in space, like painting.  "Organizing principle" in both is "recurrence".

·      Temporal recurrence is rhythm; spatial is pattern. "All arts may be conceived both temporally and spatially".

·      Literature seems to be intermediate between music and painting. The words form rhythms that approach a musical sequence of sounds.

·      The words create pictorial images.

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

·      We hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a total pattern,  we 'see' what the writer means”.

 

Rhythm and Ritual

Rhythm is a recurrent movement founded on the natural cycle. Everything in nature grows out of a "profound synchronization between an organism and the rhythms" of its environment.

 

With animals, some "expressions of synchronization," such as the mating dance of birds, could almost be called rituals. But in human life, ritual seems a voluntary effort to recapture a lost rapport with nature.

 

A farmer must harvest his crop at a particular time every year. Therefore, the process of harvesting is involuntary and not a ritual. The deliberate expression of a will to synchronize human and natural energies produces the harvest songs, harvest sacrifices and harvest folk customs that we call rituals.

 

In ritual, we may find the origin of narrative. A ritual is a "temporal sequence of acts" in which "the conscious meaning or significance is latent". An observer can see it, but it remains concealed from the “participators” themselves. The pull of ritual is towards pure narrative, which is "automatic and unconscious repetition".

 

Encyclopedic tendency of Rituals

 

We must also notice the tendency of rituals to become encyclopedic. All the recurrences in nature, the day, the phases of the moon, and the seasons get "rituals attached" to them. Many higher religions have a "definite total body of rituals" suggestive of the "entire range of potentially significant actions in human life".

 

Oracular pattern of imagery

 

Patterns of imagery or "fragments of significance" are oracular. They derive from "epiphany", a flash of instantaneous comprehension. They reach us in the form of proverbs, riddles and "commandments" with a considerable element of narrative". They are also encyclopedic in tendency, building up a complete "structure of significance or doctrine from random or empiric fragments." They communicate with humans through a narrative structure. 

 

The Myth as Archetype

 

The myth is the "central informing power that gives archetypal significance" to the ritual and "archetypal narrative" to the oracle. Hence 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."

 

The crucial importance of myth has been “forced on” literary critics by Jung and Frazer.  But, Frye feels that the several books available on it are not always systematic in their approach.  Therefore, he provides a table of the different phases.

 

Phases	Myths	Archetype
The dawn, spring and birth.	The birth of the hero, revival and resurrection, creation and the defeat of the powers of darkness—winter and death.	Romance and most dithyrambic and rhapsodic poetry.
The zenith, summer, and marriage or triumph.	The sacred marriage, and  entering paradise.	Comedy, pastoral and idyll.
The sunset, autumn and death.	Fall, the dying god, violent death and sacrifice. Isolation of the hero.	Tragedy and elegy.
The darkness, winter and dissolution.	The flood and the return of chaos. The defeat of the hero.	Satire

 

 

The centrality of the Quest-Myth.

 

The quest (of the hero) assimilates oracular and random verbal structures to become the central myth. In higher religions, the quest myth that emerges from ritual becomes the centre, as the Messiah myth becomes the narrative structure of the oracles of Judaism. Finally, “the tendency of ritual and epiphany to become encyclopedic is realized in the definitive body of myth which constitutes the sacred scriptures of religions”.

A comprehensive view of the subject takes us from archetypes to genres.

·      The drama, as a genre, emerges from the ritual side of myth.

·      The lyrics originate from the epiphanic or fragmented side, and

·      The epic carries on the central encyclopedic structure.

 

We have identified the central myth of literature (in its narrative aspect) with the quest-myth. If we wish to see this central myth as a pattern of meaning, we have to start with the workings of the subconscious (dreams) where the epiphany originates. The human cycle of waking and dreaming corresponds closely to the natural succession of light and darkness, and in this correspondence begins the imaginative life. 

 

Frye points out an antithesis in the correspondence mentioned above. He says that it is in daylight that man is really in the power of darkness, a prey to frustration and weakness; it is in the night that the 'libido' or conquering heroic self awakes.

 

The "final cause" of art is the resolution of the antithesis—"the mingling of the sun and the hero". That will lead to "the realization of a world where the inner desire and the outward circumstance coincide". Thus "the central myth of art must be the vision of the end of social effort, the innocent world of fulfilled desires, a free human society".

 

"The importance of the god or hero in the myth lies in the fact that such characters... in human likeness and yet have more power over nature, gradually build up the vision of an omnipotent personal community beyond an indifferent nature".

 

The second table of contents

 

Frye concludes with a second table of contents, in which he attempts to set forth the central pattern of the comic and tragic visions.

 

 

The comic vision	The tragic vision
The human world is a community—the hero represents the wish-fulfilment of the reader. The archetype of images of symposium, communion, order, friendship and love. Marriage or some equivalent consummation.	In the tragic vision the human world is a tyranny or anarchy. The isolated man is the leader with his back to his followers. A bullying giant/ betrayed hero. The harlot, the witch and other varieties of Jung's 'terrible mother'.
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.	Beasts of prey, wolves, vulture, serpents, dragons and the like.
The vegetable world is a garden, grove or park or a tree of life or a rose or lotus.	It is a sinister forest, or a heath or wilderness, or a tree of death.
The mineral world is a city, or one building or a temple. The archetype of geometrical images, ‘the starlit dome’	The mineral word is seen in terms of deserts, rocks, and ruins, or of sinister geometrical images like the cross.
The unformed world is a river, traditionally fourfold—the Renaissance image of the temperate body with its four humours.	The world usually the sea—the flood myth. combination of the sea and beast gives the leviathan and similar water-monsters

 

A great variety of poetic images and forms will be found to fit the table. Yeats's 'Sailing to Byzantium' has many—the city, the tree, the bird, the community of sages, the geometrical gyre, and the detachment from the cyclic world. There are also relatively neutral archetypes like the island, which may be Prospero's or Circe's.

 

Concluding remarks

 

Frye admits that the tables are not only "elementary” but also "grossly over-simplified."

He says that there are deficiencies in inductive and deductive studies but hopes these will meet in the middle "somewhere and somehow". A "systematic and comprehensive development of criticism" will be possible when they meet.

[2759 words]

 Dr S. Sreekumar,

Retired Professor of English

Disclaimer 

All the essays in this blog are for the undergraduate and postgraduate students of Indian Universities. They do not substitute the originals.  The students must necessarily go through the original texts. The writer hopes to help the students from the underdeveloped areas of our country.