THE ARCHETYPES OF LITERATURE

Northrop Frye

(Abridged)

 

Importance of Archetypes

Literary criticism should have the 'methodological discipline and coherence' of science. Critics can reach these only through total consistency in criticism. The primary source of consistency in criticism is the 'recurrence of certain archetypes in the literature of all periods and cultures.'

 

Criticism as a Science

The criticism we find in journals and scholarly monographs possesses all the qualities of science. "Prosody is scientific in structure, so is phonetics, (and) .... Philology". Yet, in studying ‘this type of critical science’, the student may feel inclined to move away from literature.

 

Meaningless criticism

At present, most of the ‘central area of criticism’ is commentary. However, 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 avoid meaningless criticism.

 

The structural analysis of literary work

We aim to keep the study of literature centripetal, asserts Frye.  Structural analysis of the literary work must be the basis.

The texture of any work of art is complex, and we may seek the help of history or philosophy to explain it. But we must never forget the subject of study (literature). "If we forget it, we may find that in our anxiety to write about literature, we have forgotten how to read it".

 

Systematic criticism—not an anachronism

Frye points out that it takes a long time for a branch of science to discover that it is an independent discipline. Before that, it remains “an embryo” within the body of some other subject. 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. 

 

Classifying principles

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

 

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

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

 

We may proceed inductively from structural analysis by trying to see larger patterns in them, or we may proceed deductively by 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".

• Building on this idea of artistic unity, poems (like poets) are born and not made. The task (of the poet) is to deliver it in "as uninjured a state as possible".
• Extending this, a poem, if alive, is "equally anxious to get rid of the poet".
• The "critic takes over where the poet leaves". Criticism survives by connecting "the psychology of the poem" with the poet.  
• Every poet has his private mythology—his unique formation of symbols.

 

Search for archetypes-- literary Anthropology.

The search for archetypes is a mode of literary anthropology. We find archetypes reappearing in the classics. The classics revert to them. The great masterpieces take us to a point where we can see an “enormous number of converging patterns of significance”.

 

Inductive movement with an example from Hamlet

The inductive movement towards the archetype is a process of ‘backing up’. As we retreat from a painting, we see the composition and not the brushwork. Frye quotes an example from Hamlet.

In the foreground, we see the intricate verbal structure—the puns of the first clown. When we take 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, and we see the psychological relationships that interested Bradley. If we take another step back, we are in the Stoll and Shaw group and see the scene as part of a conventional drama. If we step back further, we can see the archetypes of the scene—the hero’s ‘Liebestod’ (a German word meaning 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 draws closer to the archetypal form, which Shakespeare has recreated.

 

 

 

Deductive Study

• Some arts move in time, resembling music; others in space, like painting.  "Organizing principle in both is "recurrence".
• Literature seems to be an intermediate between music and painting. The words form rhythms that approach a musical sequence. The words create pictorial images.
• "The rhythm of literature is narrative, the simultaneous grasp of the verbal structure and the meaning or significance.

 

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. However, in human life, ritual often appears voluntary, an effort to recapture a lost rapport with nature.

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.

Myth as Archetype

The myth is the 'central informing power that gives archetypal significance' to the ritual and to the oracle. Hence, myth is the archetype. The crucial importance of myth has been 'forced on' literary critics by Jung and Frazer.  However, 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, —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.	Tragedy and elegy.
The darkness, winter and dissolution.	The flood and the return of chaos. The defeat of the hero.	Satire

 

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 (as the Messiah-myth) becomes the narrative structure of the oracles of Judaism. A comprehensive view of the subject encompasses a range 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.

Frye concludes with the 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 lambs, or one of the gentler birds, usually a dove. The archetype of pastoral images.	Beasts of prey, wolves, vultures, serpents, dragons and the like.
The vegetable world is a garden, a grove or park, 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 world 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 is usually the sea—the flood myth. The combination of the sea and beast gives the leviathan and similar water-monsters

 

Frye admits that the tables are elementary and grossly oversimplified. He says 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. [1407]

Revised on 20/01/26

Dr S. Sreekumar, Retd. Professor of English, Govt. Arts College, Coimbatore-18.