Archetypal Theory And Criticism |
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 Archetypal
theory and criticism, although often used synonymously with Myth
Theory and Criticism, has a distinct history and process. The term
"archetype" can be traced to Plato
(arche, "original"; typos, "form"), but
the concept gained currency in twentieth-century literary theory and
criticism through the work of the Swiss founder of analytical
psychology, C. G. Jung (1875-1961). Jung's Psychology
of the Unconscious (1916, B. M. Hinkle's translation of the 1911-12 Wandlungen
und Symbole der Libido) appeared in English one year after publication
of the concluding volume with bibliography of the third edition of J. G.
Frazer's The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (2 vols.,
1890, 3d ed., 12 vols., 1911-15). Frazer's and Jung's texts formed the
basis of two allied but ultimately different courses of influence on
literary history.Jung
most frequently used "myth" (or "mythologem") for the
narrative expression, "on the ethnological level" (Collected
9, pt. 1: 67), of the "archetypes," which he described as
patterns of psychic energy originating in the collective
unconscious and finding their "most common and most normal"
manifestation in dreams (8:287). Thus criticism evolving from his work is
more accurately named "archetypal" and is quite distinct from
"myth" criticism.For
Jung, "archetype is an explanatory paraphrase of the Platonic eidos"
(9, pt. 1: 4), but he distinguishes his concept and use of the term from
that of philosophical idealism as being more empirical and less
metaphysical, though most of his "empirical" data were dreams.
In addition, he modified and extended his concept over the many decades of
his professional life, often insisting that "archetype" named a
process, a perspective, and not a content, although this flexibility was
lost through the codifying, nominalizing tendencies of his followers.At
mid-century, Canadian critic Northrop
Frye (1912-91) introduced new distinctions in literary criticism
between myth and archetype. For Frye, as William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth
Brooks put it, "archetype, borrowed from Jung, means a primordial
image, a part of the collective unconscious, the psychic residue of
numberless experiences of the same kind, and thus part of the inherited
response-pattern of the race" (Literary Criticism 709). Frye
frequently acknowledged his debt to Jung, accepted some of Jung's
specifically named archetypes--"persona and anima and counsellor and
shadow" --and referred to his theory as Jungian criticism (Anatomy
291), a practice subsequently followed in some handbooks of literary terms
and histories of literary criticism, including one edited by Frye himself,
which obscured crucial differences and contributed to the confusion in
terminology reigning today (see C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon, A
Handbook to Literature, 5th ed., 1986; and Northrop Frye, Sheridan
Baker, and George Perkins, The Harper Handbook to Literature,
1985). Frye, however, notably in Anatomy of Criticism, essentially
redefined and relocated archetype on grounds that would remove him
unequivocally from the ranks of "Jungian" critics by severing
the connection between archetype and depth psychology: "This emphasis
on impersonal content has been developed by Jung and his school, where the
communicability of archetypes is accounted for by a theory of a collective
unconscious--an unnecessary hypothesis in literary criticism, so far as I
can judge" (111-12). Frye, then, first misinterprets Jungian theory
by insisting on a Lamarckian view of genetic transmission of archetypes,
which Jung explicitly rejected, and later settles on a concept of
"archetype" as a literary occurrence per se, an exclusively
intertextual recurring phenomenon resembling a convention (99).On
a general level, Jung's and Frye's theorizings about archetypes, however
labeled, overlap, and boundaries are elusive, but in the disciplines of
literature the two schools have largely ignored each other's work. Myth
criticism grew in part as a reaction to the formalism of New
Criticism, while archetypal criticism based on Jung was never linked
with any academic tradition and remained organically bound to its roots in
depth psychology: the individual and collective psyche, dreams, and the
analytic process. Further, myth critics, aligned with writers in
comparative anthropology and philosophy, are said to include Frazer,
Jessie Weston, Leslie Fiedler, Ernst Cassirer, Claude
Lévi-Strauss, Richard Chase, Joseph Campbell, Philip Wheelwright, and
Francis Fergusson. But Wheelwright, for example, barely mentions Jung (The
Burning Fountain, 1954), and he, Fergusson, and others often owe more
to Sigmund
Freud, Ernest Jones, Oedipus Rex, and the Oedipus complex than
to anything taken from Jung. Indeed, myth criticism seems singularly
unaffected by any of the archetypal theorists who have remained faithful
to the origins and traditions of depth, especially analytical,
psychology--James Hillman, Henri Corbin,
Gilbert Durand, Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, Evangelos Christou. This article,
then, treats the only form of literary theory and criticism consistent
with and derived directly from the psychological principles advanced by
Jung. Other forms previously labeled "Jungian" are here subsumed
under the term "archetypal" because whatever their immediate
specific focus, these forms operate on a set of assumptions derived from
Jung and accept the depth-psychological structure posited by Jung.
Further, Jung termed his own theory "analytical psychology," as
it is still known especially in Europe, but Jungian thought is more
commonly referred to today in all disciplines as "archetypal
psychology."The
first systematic application of Jung's ideas to literature was made in
1934 by Maud Bodkin in Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: "An
attempt is here made to bring psychological analysis and reflection to
bear upon the imaginative experience communicated by great poetry, and to
examine those forms or patterns in which the universal forces of our
nature there find objectification" (vii). This book established the
priority of interest in the archetypal over the mythological.The
next significant development in archetypal theory that affected literary
studies grew out of the effort made by U.S.-born, Zurich-trained analyst
James Hillman (b. 1924) "to move beyond clinical inquiry within the
consulting room of psychotherapy" to formulate archetypal theory as a
multidisciplinary field (Archetypal 1). Hillman invokes Henri
Corbin (1903-78), French scholar, philosopher, and mystic known for his
work on Islam, as the "second father" of archetypal psychology.
As Hillman puts it, Corbin's insight that Jung's "mundus archetypalis"
is also the "mundus imaginalis" that corresponds to the Islamic
"alam al-mithl" (3) was an early move toward "a reappraisal
of psychology itself as an activity of poesis" (24). Hillman
also discovers archetypal precursors in Neoplatonism,
Heraclitus, Plotinus, Proclus, Marsilio Ficino, and Giambattista
Vico. In Re-Visioning Psychology, the published text of his
1972 Yale Terry Lectures (the same lecture series Jung gave in 1937),
Hillman locates the archetypal neither "in the physiology of the
brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the
analysis of behavior, but in the processes of imagination" (xi).Archetypal
theory then took shape principally in the multidisciplinary journal
refounded by Hillman in 1970 in Zurich, Spring: An Annual of Archetypal
Psychology and Jungian Thought. According to Hillman, that discourse
was anticipated by Evangelos Christou's Logos of the Soul (1963)
and extended in religion (David L. Miller's New Polytheism, 1974),
philosophy (Edward Casey's Imagining: A Phenomenological Study,
1976), mythology (Rafael Lopez-Pedraza's Hermes and His Children,
1977), psycholinguistics (Paul Kugler's Alchemy of Discourse: An
Archetypal Approach to Language, 1982), and the theory of analysis
(Patricia Berry's Echo's Subtle Body, 1982).These
archetypalists, focusing on the imaginal and making central the concept
that in English they call "soul," assert their kinship with Semiotics
and Structuralism
but maintain an insistent focus on psychoid phenomena, which they
characterize as meaningful. Their discourse is conducted in poetic
language; that is, their notions of "soul-making" come from the
Romantics, especially William
Blake and John Keats. "By speaking of soul as a primary metaphor,
rather than defining soul substantively and attempting to derive its
ontological status from empirical demonstration or theological
(metaphysical) argument, archetypal psychology recognizes that psychic
reality is inextricably involved with rhetoric" (Hillman, Archetypal
19).This
burgeoning theoretical movement and the generally unsatisfying nature of
so much early "Jungian literary criticism" are both linked to
the problematic nature of Jung's own writing on literature, which
comprises a handful of essays: "The Type Problem in Poetry,"
"On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,"
"Psychology and Literature," "Ulysses: A
Monologue," and "Is There a Freudian Type of Poetry?" These
essays reveal Jung's lack of awareness as a reader despite his sense that
they "may show how ideas that play a considerable role in my work can
be applied to literary material" (Collected 15:109n). They
also attest to his self-confessed lack of interest in literature: "I
feel not naturally drawn to what one calls literature, but I am strangely
attracted by genuine fiction, i.e., fantastical invention" (Letters
1:509). This explains his fascination with a text like Rider Haggard's
novel She: The History of an Adventure (1886-87), with its
unmediated representation of the "anima." As Jung himself noted:
"Literary products of highly dubious merit are often of the greatest
interest to the psychologist" (Collected 15:87-88). Jung was
also more preoccupied with dreams and fantasies, because he saw them as
exclusively (purely) products of the unconscious, in contrast to
literature, which he oddly believed, citing Joyce's Ulysses as an
example, was created "in the full light of consciousness"
(15:123).Issues
of genre, period, and language were ignored or subjected to gross
generalization as Jung searched for universals in texts as disparate as
the fourth-century Shepherd of Hermas, the Divine Comedy,
Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), E. T. A.
Hoffman's tales, Pierre Benoit's L'Atlantide (1919-20), and Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow's "Hiawatha," as well as works by Carl
Spitteler and William Blake. But the great literary text for Jung's life
and work was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, not because of its
literary qualities but because he sensed that the drama expressed his own
personal myth (Letters 1:309-10). Further, the text offered
confirmation (and poetic representation) of the only direct contribution
Jung made to literary theory: a distinction between
"psychological" and "visionary" texts (Collected
15:89-90). This heuristic distinction was formed, however, solely on
psychobiographical grounds: Did the text originate in, and remain
principally shaped by, the author's experience of consciousness and the
personal unconscious or his or her experience at the level of the
archetypal collective unconscious? And concomitantly, on which of these
levels was the reader affected? Confirmation of this theory was Jung's
reading of Faust: part 1 was "psychological"; part 2,
"visionary."Thus
Jungian theory provided no clear avenue of access for those outside of
psychology, and orthodox Jungians were left with little in the way of
models for the psychological analysis of literature. Many fell prey to
Jung's idiosyncrasies as a reader, ranging widely and naively over genres,
periods, and languages in search of the universal archetypes, while
sweeping aside culture- and text-specific problems, ignoring their own
role in the act of reading and basing critical evaluation solely on a
text's contribution to the advancement of the reader's individuation
process, a kind of literature-as-therapy standard. This way of proceeding
had the effect of putting, and keeping, archetypal criticism on the
margins of academic discourse and outside the boundaries of traditional
academic disciplines and departments.Bettina
Knapp's 1984 effort at an authoritative demonstration of archetypal
literary criticism exemplified this pattern. Her Jungian Approach to
Literature attempts to cover the Finnish epic The Kalevala, the
Persian Atar's The Conference of the Birds, and texts by Euripides,
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Michel de Montaigne, Pierre Corneille, Goethe,
Novalis, Rabbi ben Simhah Nachman, and W. B. Yeats. And despite frequently
perceptive readings, the work is marred by the characteristic limitless
expansionism and psychological utilitarianism of her interpretive scheme.Given
this background, it is not surprising to find in a 1976 essay entitled
"Jungian Psychology in Criticism: Theoretical Problems" the
statement that "no purely Jungian criticism of literature has yet
appeared" (Baird 22). But Jos van Meurs's
critically annotated 1988 bibliography, Jungian Literary Criticism,
1920-1980, effectively challenges this claim. Despite his deliberately
selective focus on critical works written in English on literary texts
that are, for the most part, also written in English, van Meurs, with the
early assistance of John Kidd, has collected 902 entries, of which he
identifies slightly over 80 as valid and valuable literary criticism.While
acknowledging the grave weaknesses of much Jungian writing on literature
as "unsubtle and rigid application of preconceived psychological
notions and schemes" resulting in "particularly ill-judged or
distorted readings," van Meurs still finds that "sensitively,
flexibly and cautiously used, Jungian psychological theory may stimulate
illuminating literary interpretations" (14-15). The critical
annotations are astute and, given their brevity, surprisingly thorough and
suggestive. Van Meurs also does a service by resurrecting successful but
neglected early studies, such as Elizabeth Drew's of T. S. Eliot (1949),
and discovering value even in reductionist and impressionistic studies,
such as June Singer's of Blake. He notes that Singer's Unholy Bible: A
Psychological Interpretation of William Blake (1970), though
oversimplified in its psychobiographical approach and its treatment of
characters as psychological projections of the author, does make original
use in a literary context of such Jungian techniques of dream
interpretation as "amplification" and of such fantasy-evoking
procedures as "active imagination."Van
Meurs's bibliography conveys the great variety of Jungian writings on
literature even within one language, the increasingly recognized potential
for further development and use of Jung's ideas, and the growth in numbers
of literary scholars falling under the influence of Jung. A few names form
a core of writers in English (including many Canadians)--Martin Bickman,
Albert Gelpi, Elliott Gose, Evelyn Hinz, Henry Murray, Barton L. St.
Armand, Harold Schechter, and William Stein--though no single figure has
attracted the attention of academic literary specialists, and no
persistent commonalities fuse into a recognizable school critics who draw
on Jung's theories. To date, the British Journal of Analytical
Psychology and the retitled American Spring: A Journal of Archetype
and Culture are the best resources for archetypal criticism of
literature and the arts even though only a small percentage of their
published articles treat such topics.Thus,
with the archetypal theorists multiplying across disciplines on the one
hand and the clinically practicing followers serving as (generally
inadequate) critics on the other, archetypal literary theory and criticism
flourished in two independent streams in the 1960s and 1970s. From the
theorists, dissertations, articles, and books, often traditionally
academic in orientation, appeared; the productions of the practitioners
are chronicled and critiqued in van Meurs's bibliography. And the 1980s
saw a new, suggestive, and controversial direction in archetypal studies
of literature: the feminist. With some of its advocates supported through
early publication of their work in the journal Spring, feminist
archetypal theory and criticism of literature and the arts emerged
full-blown in three texts: Annis Pratt's Archetypal Patterns in Women's
Fiction (1981), which self-consciously evoked and critiqued Maud
Bodkin's 1934 text; Estella Lauter's Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and
Visual Art by Twentieth Century Women (1984); and Estella Lauter and
Carol Schreier Rupprecht's Feminist Archetypal Theory:
Interdisciplinary Re-Visions of Jungian Thought (1985). This last text
explicitly named the movement and demonstrated its appropriation of
archetypal theory for feminist ends in aesthetics, analysis, art, and
religion, as well as in literature.Feminist
archetypal theory, proceeding inductively, restored Jung's original
emphasis on the fluid, dynamic nature of the archetype, drawing on earlier
feminist theory as well as the work of Jungian Erich Neumann to reject
absolutist, ahistorical, essentialist, and transcendentalist
misinterpretations. Thus "archetype" is recognized as the
"tendency to form and reform images in relation to certain kinds of
repeated experience," which may vary in individual cultures, authors,
and readers (Lauter and Rupprecht 13-14). Considered according to this
definition, the concept becomes a useful tool for literary analysis that
explores the synthesis of the universal and the particular, seeks to
define the parameters of social construction of gender, and attempts to
construct theories of language, of the imaginal, and of meaning that take
gender into account.Ironically,
as in the feminist revisioning of explicitly male-biased Jungian theory,
the rise in the 1980s of Reader-Response
Theory and Criticism and the impetus for canon revision have begun to
contribute to a revaluation of Jung as a source of literary study. New
theoretical approaches appear to legitimize orthodox Jungian ways of
reading, sanction Jung's range of literary preferences from She to Faust,
and support his highly affective reaction to Ulysses, which he
himself identified (positively) as a "subjective confession"
(15:109n). And new theories increasingly give credence to the requirement,
historically asserted by Jungian readers, that each text elicit a
personal, affective, and not "merely intellectual" response.
Even French feminist Julia
Kristeva has been brought to praise a Jungian contribution to feminist
discourse on the maternal: recognition that the Catholic church's change
of signification in the assumption of the Virgin Mary to include her human
body represented a major shift in attitude toward female corporality
(113). In addition, many powerfully heuristic Jungian concepts, such as
"synchronicity," have yet to be tested in literary contexts.Archetypal
criticism, then, construed as that derived from Jung's theory and practice
of archetypal (analytical) psychology, is a fledgling and much
misconstrued field of inquiry with significant but still unrealized
potential for the study of literature and of aesthetics in general. Two
publishing events at the beginning of the 1990s in the United States may
signal the coming of age of this kind of archetypal criticism through its
convergence with postmodern critical thought, along with a commensurate
insistence on its roots in the depth psychology of Jung: the reissue of
Morris Philipson's 1963 Outline of a Jungian Aesthetic and the
appearance of Karin Barnaby and Pellegrino D'Acerino's multidisciplinary,
multicultural collection of essays, C. G. Jung and the Humanities:
Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture.Carol Schreier Rupprecht
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Notes and Bibliography |
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See also Anthropological
Theory and Criticism, Feminist
Theory and Criticism, Northrop
Frye, and Myth
Theory and Criticism. James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (1983), Re-Visioning Psychology (1975); C. G. Jung, Collected Works (ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, 20 vols., 1953-79), Letters (trans. R. F. C. Hull, 2 vols., 1973-75). James Baird, "Jungian Psychology in Criticism: Theoretical Problems," Literary Criticism and Psychology (ed. Joseph P. Strelka, 1976); Karin Barnaby and Pellegrino D'Acerino, eds., C. G. Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture (1990); Martin Bickman, The Unsounded Centre: Jungian Studies in American Romanticism (1980); Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies in Imagination (1934); Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957); Albert Gelpi, The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet (1975); Naomi Goldenberg, "Archetypal Theory after Jung," Spring (1975); Julia Kristeva, "Stabat Mater" (1977, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, trans. Léon S. Roudiez, 1986); Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht, Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-Visions of Jungian Thought (1985); Erich Neumann, Art and the Creative Unconscious: Four Essays (trans. Ralph Manheim, 1974); Morris Philipson, Outline of a Jungian Aesthetic (1963, reprint, 1991); Annis Pratt et al., Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction (1981); Jos van Meurs and John Kidd, Jungian Literary Criticism, 1920-1980: An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Works in English (with a Selection of Titles after 1980) (1988); William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957). |
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