1250 / N o r t h r o p F r ye

In defining genuine criticism, Frye shows that it is connected to but different

from philosophy, theology, history, and the social sciences, meriting autonomy as a
rigorous and comprehensive professional university discipline. He finds the work of
cultural anthropologists particularly valuable in his search for a “co-ordinating
principle,’’ and from Frazer, Jung, and others he develops his theory of “archetypes,”
such as the quest of the hero. Knowledge of the archetypes enables us to perceive
the shared myths that literary works rely on and explore: through this awareness we
can glimpse the underlying structure of the structures of all works.
Like Jung, Frye uses terms with a looseness that can make his writing both sugges-
tive and exasperating. Sometimes he refers to archetype as different from myth;
sometimes he states that the archetype is itself a myth, like the quest. While his
theory, supported by a rich and wide range of reading, allows him to make connec-
tions between many texts, he rarely if ever attends to the text’s language. We could
also point out that Fryes canon, while capacious, is not capacious enough: few
women and minorities figure in it. In this respect Frye is no different from most other
critics and theorists of his generation, but his theory could be said to have a built-in
answer to the charge: the nature of archetypes ensures that they also structure the
literature he himself fails to discuss, and thus in a sense he has included it after all.
Frye is an extraordinary synthesizer, whose system building is matched in early to
mid-twentieth-century literary criticism and theory only by the very different sys-
tem building of I. A. Richards and Kenneth Burke. At a certain point, however, the
categories, patterns, classifications, lists, and charts in Frye’s major theoretical works
threaten to become formulaic, as perhaps happens at the close of the selection below.
Many texts are briefly touched on and connections among them made, but none of
them is really brought into focus. Curiously enough, Frye now often seems most
rewarding less for his bold vision of literature as a whole than for the essays on spe-
cific texts that he did produce. When he writes about Milton’s elegy “Lycidas” (in
Fables o f Identity) or Hamlet (in Northrop Frye on Shakespeare), he demonstrates a
subtle, sensitive, compelling feeling for the text in its own right— the text as related to
countless other texts but a discrete literary experience nonetheless. Frye’s work as a
practical critic departs on occasion from the tenets of his theory, and is arguably the
better for it.

“The Archetypes o f L iterature” Keywords: The Canon/Tradition, Defense of

Criticism, Interpretation Theory, Literary History, Narrative Theory, Religion,
Structuralism

The Archetypes o f L iteratu re1

Every organized body of knowledge can be learned progressively; and experi-

ence shows that there is also something progressive about the learning of
literature. Our opening sentence has already got us into a semantic diffi-
culty. Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student
of it says that he is learning physics, not that he is learning nature. Art, like
nature, is the subject of a systematic study, and has to be distinguished from
the study itself, which is criticism. It is therefore impossible to “learn litera-
ture”: one learns about it in a certain way, but what one learns, transitively,
is the criticism of literature. Similarly, the difficulty often felt in “teaching
literature” arises from the fact that it cannot be done: the criticism of litera-

1. F irst published in the Kenyon Review series “My C redo.”

 T h e A r c h e t y pe s o f L it e r a t u r e / 1251

ture is all that can be directly taught. So while no one expects literature itself
to behave like a science, there is surely no reason why criticism, as a sys-
tematic and organized study, should not be, at least partly, a science. Not
a “pure” or “exact” science, perhaps, but these phrases form part of a 19th
Century cosmology which is no longer with us. Criticism deals with the arts
and may well be something of an art itself, but it does not follow that it must
be unsystematic. If it is to be related to the sciences too, it does not follow
that it must be deprived of the graces of culture.
Certainly criticism as we find it in learned journals and scholarly mono-
graphs has every characteristic of a science. Evidence is examined scien-
tifically; previous authorities are used scientifically; fields are investigated
scientifically; texts are edited scientifically. Prosody is scientific in structure;
so is phonetics; so is philology. And yet in studying this kind of critical sci-
ence the student becomes aware of a centrifugal movement carrying him
away from literature. He finds that literature is the central division of the
“humanities,” flanked on one side by history and on the other by philosophy.
Criticism so far ranks only as a subdivision of literature; and hence, for the
systematic mental organization of the subject, the student has to turn to the
conceptual framework of the historian for events, and to that of the philoso-
pher for ideas. Even the more centrally placed critical sciences, such as tex-
tual editing, seem to be part of a “background” that recedes into history or
some other non-literary field. The thought suggests itself that the ancillary
critical disciplines may be related to a central expanding pattern of system-
atic comprehension which has not yet been established, but which, if it were
established, would prevent them from being centrifugal. If such a pattern
exists, then criticism would be to art what philosophy is to wisdom and his-
tory to action.
Most of the central area of criticism is at present, and doubtless always will
be, the area of commentary. But the commentators have little sense, unlike
the researchers, of being contained within some sort of scientific discipline:
they are chiefly engaged, in the words of the gospel hymn, in brightening the
corner where they are. If we attempt to get a more comprehensive idea of
what criticism is about, we find ourselves wandering over quaking bogs of
generalities, judicious pronouncements of value, reflective comments, perora-
tions to works of research, and other consequences of taking the large view.
But this part of the critical field is so full of pseudo-propositions, sonorous
nonsense that contains no truth and no falsehood, that it obviously exists only
because criticism, like nature, prefers a waste space to an empty one.
The term “pseudo-proposition” may imply some sort of logical positivist2
attitude on my own part. But I would not confuse the significant proposition
with the factual one; nor should I consider it advisable to muddle the study
of literature with a schizophrenic dichotomy between subjective-emotional
and objective-descriptive aspects of meaning, considering that in order to
produce any literary meaning at all one has to ignore this dichotomy. I say
only that the principles by which one can distinguish a significant from a
meaningless statement in criticism are not clearly defined. Our first step,
therefore, is to recognize and get rid of meaningless criticism: that is, talking

2. C h aracteristic o f the philosophy that views all be proved true or false is nonsense (i.e., a
knowledge as deriving from empirical experience “pseudo-proposition"),
and logical reasoning; any statem ent that cannot
1252 / N o r t h r o p F r ye

about literature in a way that cannot help to build up a systematic structure

of knowledge. Casual value-judgments belong not to criticism but to the his-
tory of taste, and reflect, at best, only the social and psychological compul-
sions which prompted their utterance. All judgments in which the values are
not based on literary experience but are sentimental or derived from reli-
gious or political prejudice may be regarded as casual. Sentimental judg-
ments are usually based either on non-existent categories or antitheses
(“Shakespeare studied life, Milton books”) or on a visceral reaction to the
writer’s personality. The literary chit-chat which makes the reputations 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.3 This sort of thing 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.
We next meet a more serious group of critics who say: the foreground of
criticism is the impact of literature on the reader. Let us, then, keep the
study of literature centripetal, and base the learning process on a structural
analysis of the literary work itself. The texture of any great work of art is com-
plex and ambiguous, and in unravelling the complexities we may take in as
much history and philosophy as we please, if the subject of our study remains
at the center. If it does not, we may find that in our anxiety to write about
literature we have forgotten how to read it.
The only weakness in this approach is that it is conceived primarily as
the antithesis of centrifugal or “background” criticism, and so lands us in a
somewhat unreal dilemma, like the conflict of internal and external rela-
tions in philosophy. Antitheses are usually resolved, not by picking one side
and refuting the other, or by making eclectic choices between them, but by
trying to get past the antithetical way of stating the problem. It is right that
the first effort of critical apprehension should take the form of a rhetorical
or structural analysis of a work of art. But a purely structural approach has
the same limitation in criticism that it has in biology. In itself it is simply a
discrete series of analyses based on the mere existence of the literary struc-
ture, without developing 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, and the attempt
to construct a new poetics out of rhetoric alone can hardly avoid a mere
complication of rhetorical terms into a sterile jargon. I suggest that what is
at present missing from literary criticism is a co-ordinating principle, a cen-
tral hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the
phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole. Such a principle, though it
would retain the centripetal perspective of structural analysis, would try to
give the same perspective to other kinds of criticism too.
The first postulate of this hypothesis is the same as that of any science:
the assumption of total coherence. The assumption refers to the science, not
to what it deals with. A belief in an order of nature is an inference from the

3. Frye is referring to the evaluations of poets that f . r . l e a v i s (1 8 95 —1978) and the Am erican Yvor
the poet and critic T. s. e l i o t (1 8 8 8 -1 9 6 5 ) made, W inters (1 9 0 0 -1 9 6 8 )— subsequently reinforced,
and that others— for example, the English critic modified, or disputed.
 T h e A r c h e t y pe s o f L it e r a t u r e / 1253

intelligibility of the natural sciences; and if the natural sciences ever com-
pletely demonstrated the order of nature they would presumably exhaust
their subject. Criticism, as a science, is totally intelligible; literature, as the
subject of a science, is, so far as we know, an inexhaustible source of new
critical discoveries, and would be even if new works of literature ceased to
be written. If so, then the search for a limiting principle in literature in order
to discourage the development of criticism is mistaken. The assertion that
the critic should not look for more in a poem than the poet may safely be
assumed to have been conscious of putting there is a common form of what
may be called the fallacy of premature teleology.4 It corresponds to the asser-
tion that a natural phenomenon is as it is because Providence in its inscru-
table wisdom made it so.
Simple as the assumption appears, it takes a long time for a science to dis-
cover that it is in fact a totally intelligible body of knowledge. Until it makes
this discovery it has not been born as an individual science, but remains
an embryo within the body of some other subject. The birth of physics from
“natural philosophy” and of sociology from “moral philosophy” will illustrate
the process. It is also very approximately true that the modern sciences have
developed in the order of their closeness to mathematics. Thus physics and
astronomy assumed their modern form in the Renaissance, chemistry in the
18th Century, biology in the 19th, and the social sciences in the 20th. If sys-
tematic criticism, then, is developing only in our day, the fact is at least not
an anachronism.
We are now looking for classifying principles lying in an area between two
points that we have fixed. The first of these is the preliminary effort of criti-
cism, the structural analysis of the work of art. The second is the assumption
that there is such a subject as criticism, and that it makes, or could make,
complete sense. We may next proceed inductively from structural analysis,
associating the data we collect and trying to see larger patterns in them. Or
we may proceed deductively, with the consequences that follow from postu-
lating the unity of criticism. It is clear, of course, that neither procedure will
work indefinitely without correction from the other. Pure induction will get
us lost in haphazard guessing; pure deduction will lead to inflexible and
over-simplified pigeon-holing. Let us now attempt a few tentative steps in
each direction, beginning with the inductive one.

II
The unity of a work of art, the basis of structural analysis, has not been
produced solely by the unconditioned will of the artist, for the artist is only
its efficient cause: it has form, and consequently a formal cause.5 The fact
that revision is possible, that the poet makes changes not because he likes
them better but because they are better, means that poems, like poets, are
born and not made. The poet’s task is to deliver the poem in as uninjured a
state as possible, and if the poem is alive, it is equally anxious to be rid of

4. Th at is, the assumption that everything is were four types of cause or explanation: m aterial
directed toward a particular end or shaped by a (what a thing is made from ), form al (a th in g ’s
specific purpose. shape or definition), efficient (the primary source
5. Terms borrowed from the Greek philosopher of change in a thing), and final (the end or goal
a r i s t o t l e (3 8 4 -3 2 2 b . c . e .), who argued that there for which a thing is done).
1254 / N o r t h r o p F r ye

him, and screams to be cut loose from his private memories and associa-
tions, his desire for self-expression, and all the other navel-strings and feed-
ing tubes of his ego. The critic takes over where the poet leaves off, and
criticism can hardly do without a kind of literary psychology connecting the
poet with the poem. Part of this may be a psychological study of the poet,
though this is useful chiefly in analysing the failures in his expression, the
things in him which are still attached to his work. More important is the
fact that every poet has his private mythology, his own spectroscopic band
or peculiar formation of symbols, of much of which he is quite unconscious.
In works with characters of their own, such as dramas and novels, the same
psychological analysis may be extended to the interplay of characters,
though of course literary psychology would analyse the behavior of such
characters only in relation to literary convention.
There is still before us the problem of the formal cause of the poem, a
problem deeply involved with the question of genres. We cannot say much
about genres, for criticism does not know much about them. A good many
critical efforts to grapple with such words as “novel” or “epic” are chiefly
interesting as examples of the psychology of rumor. Two conceptions of the
genre, however, are obviously fallacious, and as they are opposite extremes,
the truth must lie somewhere between them. One is the pseudo-Platonic
conception of genres as existing prior to and independently of creation,6
which confuses them with mere conventions of form like the sonnet. The
other is that pseudo-biological conception of them as evolving species
which turns up in so many surveys of the “development” of this or that
form.
We next inquire for the origin of the genre, and turn first of all to the social
conditions and cultural demands which produced it— in other words to the
material cause of the work of art. This leads us into literary history, which
differs from ordinary history in that its containing categories, “Gothic,”
“Baroque,” “Romantic,” and the like are cultural categories, of little use to
the ordinary historian. Most literary history does not get as far as these cat-
egories, but even so we know more about it than about most kinds of critical
scholarship. The historian treats literature and philosophy historically; the
philosopher treats history and literature philosophically; and the so-called
“history of ideas” approach marks the beginning of an attempt to treat history
and philosophy from the point of view of an autonomous criticism.
But still we feel that there is something missing. We say that every poet has
his own peculiar formation of images. But when so many poets use so many
of the same images, surely there are much bigger critical problems involved
than biographical ones. As Mr. Auden s brilliant essay T he E nchafed Flood7
shows, an important symbol like the sea cannot remain within the poetry of
Shelley or Keats or Coleridge:8 it is bound to expand over many poets into an
archetypal symbol of literature. And if the genre has a historical origin, why
does the genre of drama emerge from medieval religion in a way so strikingly
similar to the way it emerged from Greek religion centuries before? This is

6 . According to the Greek philosopher p l a t o (ca. critic W. H. Auden (1 9 0 7 -1 9 7 3 ) in 1950.

4 2 7 -c a . 347 b . c . e .), all phenomena derive from a 8. T hree English Romantic poets: p e r c y b y s s h e
realm o f perfect and immutable transcendent SH ELLEY (1 7 9 2 -1 8 2 2 ), John Keats (1 7 9 5 -18 2 1 ),
Forms or Ideas. and SAM UEL TAYLOR C OL ER ID G E (1 7 7 2 -1 8 3 4 ).
7. A set o f lectu res published by the poet and
 T h e A r c h e t y pe s o f L it e r a t u r e / 1255

a problem of structure rather than origin, and suggests that there may be
archetypes of genres as well as of 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 the natural sciences. An archetype should be not only a
unifying category of criticism, but itself a part of a total form, and it leads us
at once to the question of what sort of total form criticism can see in litera-
ture. Our survey of critical techniques has taken us as far as literary history.
Total literary history moves from the primitive to the sophisticated, and here
we glimpse the possibility of seeing literature as a complication of a relatively
restricted and simple group of formulas that can be studied in primitive cul-
ture. If so, then 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 next realize that the relation between
these categories and literature is by no means purely one of descent, as we find
them reappearing in the greatest classics— in fact there seems to be a general
tendency on the part of great classics to revert to them. This coincides with a
feeling that we have all had: that the study of mediocre works of art, however
energetic, obstinately remains a random and peripheral form of critical experi-
ence, whereas the profound masterpiece seems to draw us to a point at which
we can see an enormous number of converging patterns of significance. Here
we begin to wonder if we cannot see literature, not only as complicating itself
in time, but as spread out in conceptual space from some unseen center.
This inductive movement towards the archetype is a process of backing up,
as it were, from structural analysis, as we back up from a painting if we want
to see composition instead of brushwork. In the foreground of the grave-
digger scene in Hamlet, for instance, is an intricate verbal texture, ranging
from the puns of the first clown to the danse m acabre9 of the Yorick soliloquy,
which we study in the printed text. One step back, and we are in the Wilson
Knight and Spurgeon group of critics,1 listening to the steady rain of images
of corruption and decay. Here too, as the sense of the place of this scene in
the whole play begins to dawn on us, we are in the network of psychological
relationships which were the main interest of Bradley.2 But after all, we say,
we are forgetting the genre: Hamlet is a play, and an Elizabethan play. So we
take another step back into the Stoll and Shaw3 group and see the scene
conventionally as part of its dramatic context. One step more, and we can
begin to glimpse the archetype of the scene, as the hero’s Liebestod4 and first
unequivocal declaration of his love, his struggle with Laertes and the sealing
of his own fate, and the sudden sobering of his mood that marks the transi-
tion to the final scene, all take shape around a leap into and return from the
grave that has so weirdly yawned open on the stage.
At each stage of understanding this scene we are dependent on a certain
kind of scholarly organization. We need first an editor to clean up the text

9. Dance of death (French). See Hamlet (ca. 1600), 3. The playwright and critic George Bernard
5.1. Shaw (1 8 5 6 -1 9 5 0 ). E. E. Stoll (1 8 7 4-1 95 9 ), critic
1. C ritics who call attention to Shakespeare’s who focused in his scholarship on the relation-
patterns o f imagery and symbolism , led by Caro- ship o f Shakespeare’s plays to the dramatic con -
iine Spurgeon (1869—1941) and G. W ilson Knight ventions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age.
(1 8 9 7 -1 9 8 5 ). 4. Literally, “death of love” (German); the Liebe-
2. A. C. Bradley (1 8 5 1 -1 93 5 ); his S hakespearean stod is specifically an operatic aria or duet on the
Tragedy (1904) provided a detailed study o f “char- suicide of lovers and, more generally, the them atic
acter.” linking o f love and death.
1256 / N o r t h r o p F r ye

for us, then the rhetorician and philologist, then the literary psychologist.
We cannot study the genre without the help of the literary social historian,
the literary philosopher and the student of the “history of ideas/’ and for the
archetype we need a literary anthropologist. But now that we have got our
central pattern of criticism established, all these interests are seen as con-
verging on literary criticism instead of receding from it into psychology and
history and the rest. In particular, the literary anthropologist who chases the
source of the Hamlet legend from the pre-Shakespeare play to Saxo,5 and
from Saxo to nature-myths, is not running away from Shakespeare: he is
drawing closer to the archetypal form which Shakespeare recreated. A
minor result of our new perspective is that contradictions among critics, and
assertions that this and not that critical approach is the right one, show a
remarkable tendency to dissolve into unreality. Let us now see what we can
get from the deductive end.

I ll
Some arts move in time, like music; others are presented in space, like paint-
ing. In both cases the organizing principle is recurrence, which is called
rhythm when it is temporal and pattern when it is spatial. Thus we speak of
the rhythm of music and the pattern of painting; but later, to show off our
sophistication, we may begin to speak of the rhythm of painting and the pat-
tern of music. In other words, all arts may be conceived both temporally and
spatially. The score of a musical composition may be studied all at once; a
picture may be seen as the track of an intricate dance of the eye. Literature
seems to be intermediate between music and painting: its words form
rhythms which approach a musical sequence of sounds at one of its boundar-
ies, and form patterns which approach the hieroglyphic or pictorial image
at the other. The attempts to get as near to these boundaries as possible form
the main body of what is called experimental writing. We may call the
rhythm of literature the narrative, and the pattern, the simultaneous mental
grasp of the verbal structure, the meaning or significance. We hear or listen
to a narrative, but when we grasp a writers total pattern we “see” what he
means.
The criticism of literature is much more hampered by the representational
fallacy than even the criticism of painting. That is why we are apt to think of
narrative as a sequential representation of events in an outside “life,” and of
meaning as a reflection of some external “idea.” Properly used as critical
terms, an author’s narrative is his linear movement; his meaning is the
integrity of his completed form. Similarly an image is not merely a verbal
replica of an external object, but any unit of a verbal structure seen as part
of a total pattern or rhythm. Even the letters an author spells his words with
form part of his imagery, though only in special cases (such as alliteration)
would they call for critical notice. Narrative and meaning thus become
respectively, to borrow musical terms, the melodic and harmonic contexts of
the imagery.

5. Saxo Gram m aticus (12 th —13th c.), Danish historian whose Gesta Danorum (Deeds o f the Danes)
includes the Hamlet story.
 T h e A r c h e t y pe s o f L it e r a t u r e / 1257

Rhythm, or recurrent movement, is deeply founded on the natural cycle,

and everything in nature that we think of as having some analogy with
works of art, like the flower or the bird’s song, grows out of a profound
synchronization between an organism and the rhythms of its environment,
especially that of the solar year. With animals some expressions of synchro-
nization, like the mating dances of birds, could almost be called rituals. But
in human life a ritual seems to be something of a voluntary effort (hence the
magical element in it) to recapture a lost rapport with the natural cycle. A
farmer must harvest his crop at a certain time of year, but because this is
involuntary, harvesting itself is not precisely 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 cus-
toms that we call rituals. In ritual, then, we may find the origin of narrative,
a ritual being a temporal sequence of acts in which the conscious meaning
or significance is latent: it can be seen by an observer, but is largely con-
cealed from the participators themselves. The pull of ritual is toward pure
narrative, which, if there could be such a thing, would be automatic and
unconscious repetition. We should notice too the regular tendency of ritual
to become encyclopedic. All the important recurrences in nature, the day,
the phases of the moon, the seasons and solstices of the year, the crises of
existence from birth to death, get rituals attached to them, and most of the
higher religions are equipped with a definitive total body of rituals sugges-
tive, if we may put it so, of the entire range of potentially significant actions
in human life.
Patterns of imagery, on the other hand, or fragments of significance, are
oracular in origin, and derive from the epiphanic moment, the flash of
instantaneous comprehension with no direct reference to time, the impor-
tance of which is indicated by Cassirer in Myth and Language.6 By the time
we get them, in the form of proverbs, riddles, commandments and etiologi-
cal folk tales, there is already a considerable element of narrative in them.
They too are encyclopedic in tendency, building up a total structure of sig-
nificance, or doctrine, from random and empiric fragments. And just as
pure narrative would be unconscious act, so pure significance would be an
incommunicable state of consciousness, for communication begins by con-
structing narrative.
The myth is the central informing power that gives archetypal signifi-
cance to the ritual and archetypal narrative to the oracle. Hence the myth
is the archetype, though it might be convenient to say myth only when
referring to narrative, and archetype when speaking of significance. 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
vegetative fertility and partly a god or archetypal human being. The crucial
importance of this myth has been forced on literary critics by Jung and
Frazer7 in particular, but the several books now available on it are not always

6. Properly, Language and Myth (1925), by the G olden Bough (12 vols., 1 8 9 0 -1 9 1 5 ) is largely
Germ an philosopher and historian of ideas concerned with the fertility figure. Carl Gustav
E rnst C assirer (1 8 7 4 -1 9 4 5 ). Jun g (1 8 7 5 -1 9 6 1 ), Swiss psychiatrist and th e o -
7. Sir Jam es G eorge Frazer (1 8 5 4 -1 9 4 1 ), Sco t- rist o f archetypes.
tish anthropologist and folklorist, whose The
1258 / N o r t h r o p F r ye

systematic in their approach, for which reason I supply the following table of
its phases:

1.
The dawn, spring and birth phase. Myths of the birth of the hero, of revival
and resurrection, of creation and (because the four phases are a cycle) of
the defeat of the powers of darkness, winter and death. Subordinate char-
acters: the father and the mother. The archetype of romance and of most
dithyrambic and rhapsodic poetry.

2.
The zenith, summer, and marriage or triumph phase. Myths of apotheosis,
of the sacred marriage, and of entering into Paradise. Subordinate charac-
ters: the companion and the bride. The archetype of comedy, pastoral and
idyll.

3.
The sunset, autumn and death phase. Myths of fall, of the dying god, of vio-
lent death and sacrifice and of the isolation of the hero. Subordinate charac-
ters: the traitor and that siren. The archetype of tragedy and elegy.

4.
The darkness, winter and dissolution phase. Myths of the triumph of these
powers; myths of floods and the return of chaos, of the defeat of the hero,
and Gotterdammerung8 myths. Subordinate characters: the ogre and the
witch. The archetype of satire (see, for instance, the conclusion of T he
D unciad9).

The quest of the hero also tends to assimilate the oracular and random
verbal structures, as we can see when we watch the chaos of local legends
that results from prophetic epiphanies consolidating into a narrative mythol-
ogy of departmental gods. In most of the higher religions this in turn has
become the same central quest-myth that emerges from ritual, as the Mes-
siah myth became the narrative structure of the oracles of Judaism. A local
flood may beget a folk tale by accident, but a comparison of flood stories
will show how quickly such tales become examples of the myth of dissolu-
tion. Finally, the tendency of both ritual and epiphany to become encyclo-
pedic is realized in the definitive body of myth which constitutes the sacred
scriptures of religions. These sacred scriptures are consequently the first
documents that the literary critic has to study to gain a comprehensive view
of his subject. After he has understood their structure, then he can descend
from archetypes to genres, and see how the drama emerges from the ritual
side of myth and lyric from the epiphanic or fragmented side, while the epic
carries on the central encyclopedic structure.

8. Literally, “the twilight of the gods” (German), and disorder.

and the title of an opera (1876) by the G erm an 9. M ock-heroic satire (17 28—43) by ALEXANDER
com poser R ichard W agner. M ore generally, the po pe .
term refers to catastrophic collapse into violence
 T h e A r c h e t y pe s o f L it e r a t u r e / 1259

Some words of caution and encouragement are necessary before literary

criticism has clearly staked out its boundaries in these fields. It is part of the
critic s business to show how all literary genres are derived from the quest-
myth, but the derivation is a logical one within the science of criticism: the
quest-myth will constitute the first chapter of whatever future handbooks
of criticism may be written that will be based on enough organized critical
knowledge to call themselves “introductions” or “outlines” and still be able
to live up to their titles. It is only when we try to expound the derivation
chronologically that we find ourselves writing pseudo-prehistorical fictions
and theories of mythological contract. Again, because psychology and anthro-
pology are more highly developed sciences, the critic who deals with this
kind of material is bound to appear, for some time, a dilettante of those sub-
jects. These two phases of criticism are largely undeveloped in comparison
with literary history and rhetoric, the reason being the later development of
the sciences they are related to. But the fascination which T he Golden Bough
and Jungs book on libido symbols1 have for literary critics is not based on
dilettantism, but on the fact that these books are primarily studies in literary
criticism, and very important ones.
In any case the critic who is studying the principles of literary form has a
quite different interest from the psychologist’s concern with states of mind
or the anthropologist s with social institutions. For instance: the mental
response to narrative is mainly passive; to significance mainly active. From
this fact Ruth Benedict s2 Patterns o f Culture develops a distinction between
“Apollonian” cultures based on obedience to ritual and “Dionysiac” ones
based on a tense exposure of the prophetic mind to epiphany. The critic
would tend rather to note how popular literature which appeals to the iner-
tia of the untrained mind puts a heavy emphasis on narrative values, whereas
a sophisticated attempt to disrupt the connection between the poet and his
environment produces the Rimbaud type of illum ination, Joyce s solitary
epiphanies, and Baudelaire s3 conception of nature as a source of oracles.
Also how literature, as it develops from the primitive to the self-conscious,
shows a gradual shift of the poet s attention from narrative to significant val-
ues, this shift of attention being the basis of Schillers distinction between
naive and sentimental poetry.4
The relation of criticism to religion, when they deal with the same docu-
ments, is more complicated. In criticism, as in history, the divine is always
treated as a human artifact. God for the critic, whether he finds him in Para-
dise Lost5 or the Bible, is a character in a human story; and for the critic all
epiphanies are explained, not in terms of the riddle of a possessing god
or devil, but as mental phenomena closely associated in their origin with
dreams. This once established, it is then necessary to say that nothing in
criticism or art compels the critic to take the attitude of ordinary waking

1. Transformations and Symbols o f the Libido bolist poet. A rthur Rimbaud (18 5 4 -1 8 91 ), French
(1912; trans. first as Psychology o f the Uncon- sym bolist poet. Ja m es Joyce (1 8 8 2 —1941), Irish
scious and then as Symbols o f Transformation). novelist who extended the term “epiphany” to refer
2. American anthropologist (18 8 7-1 9 4 8 ); Patterns to peak moments recorded in literature.
o f Culture was published in 1934. On the opposi- 4. See On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1 7 9 5 -
tion between A pollonian and D ionysian, see 96) by FRI EDR ICH VON S CH ILLER (1 7 59 -18 0 5),
FRI E DR ICH Ni e t z s c h e ’s T he Birth o f Tragedy Germ an dram atist, poet, and historian.
(1872), above. 5. Epic poem (1667) by John M ilton (1608 -16 7 4).
3. Charles Baudelaire (1 8 2 1 -1 8 6 7 ), French sym-
1260 / N o r t h r o p F r ye

consciousness towards the dream or the god. Art deals not with the real but
with the conceivable; and criticism, though it will eventually have to have
some theory of conceivability, can never be justified in trying to develop,
much less assume, any theory of actuality. It is necessary to understand this
before our next and final point can be made.
We have identified the central myth of literature, in its narrative aspect,
with the quest-myth. Now if we wish to see this central myth as a pattern
of meaning also, we have to start with the workings of the subconscious
where the epiphany originates, in other words in the dream. The human
cycle of waking and dreaming corresponds closely to the natural cycle of
light and darkness, and it is perhaps in this correspondence that all imagina-
tive life begins. The correspondence is largely an antithesis: it is in daylight
that man is really in the power of darkness, a prey to frustration and weak-
ness; it is in the darkness of nature that the “libido” or conquering heroic self
awakes. Hence art, which Plato called a dream for awakened minds,6 seems
to have as its final cause the resolution of the antithesis, the mingling of the
sun and the hero, the realizing of a world in which the inner desire and the
outward circumstance coincide. This is the same goal, of course, that the
attempt to combine human and natural power in ritual has. The social func-
tion of the arts, therefore, seems to be closely connected with visualizing the
goal of work in human life. So in terms of significance, the central myth of
art must be the vision of the end of social effort, the innocent world of ful-
filled desires, the free human society. Once this is understood, the integral
place of criticism among the other social sciences, in interpreting and system-
atizing the vision of the artist, will be easier to see. It is at this point that we
can see how religious conceptions of the final cause of human effort are as
relevant as any others to criticism.
The importance of the god or hero in the myth lies in the fact that such
characters, who are conceived in human likeness and yet have more power
over nature, gradually build up the vision of an omnipotent personal com-
munity beyond an indifferent nature. It is this community which the hero
regularly enters in his apotheosis. The world of this apotheosis thus begins
to pull away from the rotary cycle of the quest in which all triumph is tem-
porary. Hence if we look at the quest-myth as a pattern of imagery, we see
the heros quest first of all in terms of its fulfillment. This gives us our cen-
tral pattern of archetypal images, the vision of innocence which sees the
world in terms of total human intelligibility. It corresponds to, and is usu-
ally found in the form of, the vision of the unfallen world or heaven in reli-
gion. We may call it the comic vision of life, in contrast to the tragic vision,
which sees the quest only in the form of its ordained cycle.
We conclude with a second table of contents, in which we shall attempt
to set forth the central pattern of the comic and tragic visions. One essen-
tial principle of archetypal criticism is that the individual and the universal
forms of an image are identical, the reasons being too complicated for us
just now. We proceed according to the general plan of the game of Twenty
Questions, or, if we prefer, of the Great Chain of Being:7

6. See Plato, Sophist 2 6 6 c . American philosopher andintellectual historian

7. The notion of the universe as a hierarchical Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain o f Being
order consisting of an enormous (or even infinite) (1936).
number o f links; Frye probably has in mind the
 T h e A rc h ety p e s o f L it e r a tu r e / 1261

1.
In the comic vision the human world is a community, or a hero who repre-
sents the wish-fulfillment of the reader. The archetype of images of sympo-
sium, communion, order, friendship and love. In the tragic vision the human
world is a tyranny or anarchy, or an individual or isolated man, the leader
with his back to his followers, the bullying giant of romance, the deserted or
betrayed hero. Marriage or some equivalent consummation belongs to the
comic vision; the harlot, witch and other varieties of Jungs “terrible mother”
belong to the tragic one. All divine, heroic, angelic or other superhuman
communities follow the human pattern.

2.
In the comic vision the anim al world is a community of domesticated ani-
mals, usually a flock of sheep, or a lamb, or one of the gentler birds, usually a
dove. The archetype of pastoral images. In the tragic vision the animal world
is seen in terms of beasts and birds of prey, wolves, vultures, serpents, drag-
ons 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. The archetype of Arcadian images, such as that of Mar-
vell's green world or of Shakespeare’s forest comedies.8 In the tragic vision it is
a sinister forest like the one in Comus or at the opening of the Inferno,9 or a
heath or wilderness, or a tree of death.

4.
In the comic vision the m ineral world is a city, or one building or temple, or
one stone, normally a glowing precious stone— in fact the whole comic series,
especially the tree, can be conceived as luminous or fiery. The archetype of
geometrical images: the “starlit dome”1 belongs here. In the tragic vision the
mineral world is seen in terms of deserts, rocks and ruins, or of sinister geo-
metrical images like the cross.

5.
In the comic vision the unformed world is a river, traditionally fourfold, which
influenced the Renaissance image of the temperate body with its four humors.2
In the tragic vision this world usually becomes the sea, as the narrative myth
of dissolution is so often a flood myth. The combination of the sea and beast
images gives us the leviathan and similar water-monsters.

8. Shakespeare’s forest (that is, pastoral) com e- 1. See, for example, Coleridge’s poem “Kubla
dies include As You Like It (ca. 1599). For the K han” (written 1797; pub. 1816), which refers to
“green world” of Andrew Marvell (1621 -16 78 ), Kubla K han’s “stately pleasure-dome.”
English metaphysical poet, see especially “T he 2. T he four fluids o f the body— blood, phlegm,
Garden” (1681). choler, and black bile— whose relative proportions
9. T h e first book of d a n t e A l i g h i e r i ’s Divine were thought to determine a person’s disposition
Comedy (1321). Comus (1634), a religious masque and general health.
by M ilton.
1262 / R o l a n d B a r t h e s

Obvious as this table looks, a great variety of poetic images and forms will
be found to fit it. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,”3 to take a famous example of
the comic vision at random, has the city, the tree, the bird, the community
of sages, the geometrical gyre and the detachment from the cyclic world. It is,
of course, only the general comic or tragic context that determines the inter-
pretation of any symbol: this is obvious with relatively neutral archetypes like
the island, which may be Prospero’s island or Circe’s.4
Our tables are, of course, not only elementary but grossly over-simplified,
just as our inductive approach to the archetype was a mere hunch. The
important point is not the deficiencies of either procedure, taken by itself, but
the fact that, somewhere and somehow, the two are clearly going to meet in
the middle. And if they do meet, the ground plan of a systematic and compre-
hensive development of criticism has been established.
1951

3. Poem (1927) by the Irish poet W illiam B utler men land in Homer’s Odyssey). Prospero’s island:
Yeats (1 8 6 5 -1 9 3 9 ). the setting of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest
4. In G reek mythology, a sorceress who lived on (1611).
the island of A caea (where Odysseus and his

ROLAND BARTHES
1 9 1 5 - 1 9 8 0

Generally considered one of the leading figures in French structuralism, Roland

Barthes is, as Jonathan Culler puts it, “famous for contradictory reasons.” On the
one hand, there is the scientific Barthes: the one who sought a universal grammar
of narrative in his influential essay “Introduction to the Structural Study of Narra-
tive” (1966), or who explored F e r d i n a n d d e s a u s s u r e s notion of semiology— a broad
science of signs in human culture, of which linguistics would provide a model— in
such works as Elements of Semiology (1965) and The Fashion System (1967). But on
the other hand, there is the hedonist and connoisseur: the Barthes who wrote play-
fully and allusively about pleasure in The Pleasure of the Text (1973) and in A Lov-
er’s Discourse (1977). Even his literary tastes seemed contradictory: he promoted
avant-garde writers (Robbe-Grillet, Brecht, Sollers), but he also loved and wrote
about the most traditional of French authors (La Bruyere, Racine, Chateaubri-
and, Balzac, Proust). And he who questioned the importance of the author was
himself preeminently an author— indeed, the only author to have written his own
volume in a series of “perennial masters” (Roland Barthes hy Roland Barthes, 1975).
A quintessential “man of letters” in the traditional sense, he was also a man of let-
ters in an idiosyncratic, literal sense, organizing three of his books alphabetically so
as to avoid thematic or logical organization, and highlighting the material form of
letters in one of his book titles, S/Z (1970). He was less a path breaker than a habit
breaker, resolutely committed to unlearning the routines of intelligibility, even
those he himself had helped promote.
Roland Barthes was born in Cherbourg, France. His father, a naval officer, was
killed a year later, and Barthess mother moved to the paternal family home in Bay-
onne in southern France. The theorist of the death of the author thus grew up with-
out a father, living with or near his mother until her death in 1977, three years before