18 Mythic-Archetypal Criticism: An Introduction

Dr. Valiur Rehman

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Objective

 

This chapter aims at introducing the Mythic-Archetypal Criticism, its assumptions and its practitioners.

 

What is Myth and Archetype? 

 

The word myth derives from the Greek mythos, signifying “word” or “story.” Myth is defined from anthropological, folk, psychological, literary, and critical perspectives. Commonly, myth is known for stories about uncommon events, unreal characterizations, and incredible worlds. The legendary stories about the incredible power of Dasānana, Bāli, Hanumān, Kumbhkarna, and Karna, the flying horse of the Prophet, the Passover (Moses led his people and their safe flight across the Red Sea) and so on are examples of mythic characters and incidents. Their incredible powers are the subjects of oral poetic narration sung by people from generation to generation. Stories and legends of these incredible characters are still popular. Their good or bad deeds are touchstones to justify the characters of people we have in the society. The Hindu people often compare the character of Rām with our good deeds and characters. They often regard the Rām Sétu Floating Stone in Rāmeswaram as paradigm of the paramount of the faith in Devine Truth. The popular parable represents these mythical characters. There are many festivals based on the mythical stories. We can have many examples to illustrate how myth is important to our existence. Diwāli is a ritual in Hindu religion, which rests on the myth of Rām’s return to home. Holi rests on the mythical theme, which recalls Prahlād’s devotion to Visnu, the incarnation of Visnu as Narsimhavtār and Prahlād’s safety on the pyre. Baqrīd or Eid al-Adha is a remembering day for the “Feast of the Sacrifice” rests on the story about the sacrifice of a son, named Ismael by a father, named Ibrahim on the command of God but God saved Ismael. The Passover is a celebrating day for the faith in God who helped Moses’ people in the Red Sea. Easter is a recalling day of resurrection of Jesus Christ. These examples engrain the words, rituals, cultures, and faiths. The compilation of stories about such characters who represent the strength and weakness; deeds and results of the whole humanity is called mythology. Myths are thus metaphors of our existence. King Arthur is one the best mythical characters in the history of English Literature, for example.

 

They have some universal motifs, patterns, and codes that represent the characters, instincts, habits, the causes of rise and fall of human beings. Bāli, Hanumān, Kumbhkarna, Karna, Oedipus, and Helen are mythical figures yet they are the parts of rituals and beliefs. Motifs of the Myth maybe represented by the properties of nature like fruitless tree, poisonous bush, mountain, water, rose, etc. They are represented symbolically through seasons like autumn, spring, summer, and winter. They are also represented through color properties like black, white, blue, yellow etc. etc. These motifs consist in symbols of nature, color symbols, and season symbols. Their sources are the folk or legendry stories that have the beginning, middle, and an end. The major  archetypal literary critic Northrop Frye developed the theory of literature and criticism on the three basic symbols that represent mythos and their imageries i.e. motifs.

 

Thus, Mythic-Archetypal criticism tends to observe universal motifs in symbols, imageries and characterization in literature. Myths, being unreal, destine our realities of existence. The Motifs of Myths is recurring phenomena in the history of existence. Motifs can only be observed when we compare two myths or myths popularized in two different places. Resurrection of Jesus  Christ is a motif, for example. This motif cannot be understood unless we compare the myth of resurrection with the appearance of Kabirdās and Saibābā after their death.

 

Development of Mythic-Archetypal Criticism 

 

By 1940, English literary criticism had the specified area of studying literature. Literary critics were looking for either at works of art or their creators. They would interpret a work of art in relation to either its meaning or its artistic devices (Formalists) or its contents (New Critics) or interpret in relation to the intention of its author (mimetic critics and impressionists); its affiliations to society, history and culture (the Arnoldians, Leavisites, New- Aristotelian culture critics); its sublimity, style, experimentation, self-sufficiency and completeness (Aestheticism; Art for Art’s Sake); and its hidden motifs, indefinite meanings and perspectives (psychoanalytic, anarchists or liberalists). They worked as critics for a particular discipline of human sciences called literature was defined in terms of the representation of life.

 

Along with psychoanalytic criticism, which was interdisciplinary in nature, a very significant antecedent of the literary criticism in terms of the myth and archetype came into existence in England. It was also interdisciplinary in nature. A group of comparative anthropologists at Cambridge University started to study myth. James G. Fraze (1854–1941) was one of active members of that group. His investigated the patterns of myth and ritual that recur in the legends and ceremonials of diverse and widely distributed cultures, civilizations, and religions. Paul Evis writes, “For Frazer, myth was false science just as legend was false history. In The Golden Bough and his voluminous other writings, Frazer assumed that primitive people perceived the world as a series of intellectual problems and attempted to produce theories to solve them.” (1999: 111) His masterpiece The Golden Bough (1890-1915) had run for three great editions and seventeen volumes. It was a seminal work for studying sociology, anthropology, and psychology. It had been a source of illustration for Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), Freud (1856-1939), Carl Jung and Levi Strauss. Paul Evis has described three groups of theories of Myth:

 

1. Scientistic cognitivism:

 

The overtones of falsehood that ‘myth’ carries in popular speech harks back to the rationalistic view of myth that emerged in the Enlightenment and received its most extreme expression at the hands of J.G.Frazer (1854–1941).

 

2.   Social functionalism

 

In contrast to what we might call Frazer’s scientistic theory of myth, we have Malinowski’s social theory. In his Myth in Primitive Psychology of 1926, Malinowski gave an interpretation of the myths of the Tobriand Islanders of Melanesia. Myth is not merely ‘a story told but a reality lived’. It cannot simply be gathered from texts but must be seen in its context of social organisation, morals, customs, and rituals. Myth is ‘a narrative resurrection of a primeval reality, told in satisfaction of deep religious wants, moral cravings, social submissions, assertions, even practical requirements’.

 

3.  Structuralism

 

Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist approach to myth has something in common with Frazer’s cognitivism because it assumes that the so-called primitive mind is impelled to try to understand the world. It differs from Frazer’s rationalism in broadening the scope of primitive thinking: it is not crude scientific explanation that myth is attempting, but a grasp of the totality of experience, a view of the meaning of existence, and understanding of both nature and society. But Lévi- Strauss lines up with Frazer in holding that the cognitive achievement of myth is illusory: ‘Myth…gives man… the illusion that he can understand the universe and that he does understand the universe. It is, of course, only an illusion’.

 

The Swiss Psychiatrist Carl G. Jung (1875-1961) has applied the term, ‘archetype’ for ‘primordial images’. These images are the psychic residue of recurring patterns of common human experience and condition in the lives of our very ancient ancestors. They survive in the ‘collective unconscious’ of the human race and are expressed in myths, religion, dreams, and individual’s fantasies, as well as in works of literature. Jung in his Four Archetypes (1957; 2003) writes about the nature of archetypes. “can rearise spontaneously, at any time, at any place, and without any outside influence … perform and continuously influence our thoughts and feelings and actions.” (12) Also Nietzsche has concedes that myth is ‘the concentrated image of the world’ (Nietzsche, 1993, p. 109). Jung, for example, has elaborated aspects of mother archetypes in relation with Indian philosophy of goddess Kāli and three attributes (teen gunas): goodness (satva), passion (rajas), and darkness (tamas) of prākrit (matter). He cited Sānkhya philosophy in order to justify it and writes:

 

These are three essential aspects of the mother: her cherishing and nourishing goodness, her orgiastic emotionality, and her Stygian depths. The special feature of the philosophical myth, which shows Prākrti dancing before Purusha in order to remind him of “discriminating knowledge,” does not belong to the mother archetype but to the archetype of the anima, which in a man’s psychology invariably appears, at first, mingled with the mother-image. (2003:16)

 

It is a matter of fact that the goddess Kāli is a divine figure who occurs in Hindu mythology as destroyer of satanic forces. The goddess Kāli and Jung’s interpretation of satva, rajas, and tamas are supposed to be the attributes of human being. These attributes are still surviving in the system of human consciousness or psyche. Thus, the human consciousness is not new. The human consciousness carries out the traces of the ancients.

 

For Jung, there are two axes of the psyche: vertical and horizontal. The vertical axis extends down from consciousness through the personal unconscious to the collective unconscious, which is the seat of archetypes and myths. Jung’s most important archetypes are the animus and anima (the woman’s composite, innate image of man and the man’s image of woman), the shadow (the dark side of human nature “arising from the infantile tendency … to divide persons into black and white”) and the wise old man (the embodiment of “superior insight”). Although “archetype” and “myth” are used interchangeably, in the strict sense the archetype is a motif, which comes into view in myth. American critic Joseph Campbell (1904-87), in his seminal study of world mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), exemplifies this interchangeability of ‘archetype’ and ‘myth’ citing the Biblical story of the virgin birth:

 

The story is recounted everywhere; and with such striking uniformity of the main contours, that the early Christian missionaries were forced to think that the devil himself must be throwing up mockeries of their teaching wherever they set their hand. (1968:309)

 

Campbell looked for “separation-initiation-return: which might be named the nuclear unit of monomyth” in literature. (1968: 30) He analyzed a single hero as a recurring pattern in the world mythology. In his study of ‘myth as a hero’, he justifies that there is a single pattern of heroicness that all history of rituals, cultures, civilization share this essential pattern in their various heroic myths.

 

Maud Bodkin’s Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934) introduced Archetypal literary criticism and later Canadian Northrop Frye flourished it during the 1950-60. Frye believes that “the Tower of Babel” recurs in literature. The ‘Tower of Babel’ presents the myth of the fall of a universal religion due to irrational dare, the unity of people with differences, the creation of languages and a misunderstanding among people. It also presents the destruction of Divinely Governed (Babel- Fathered) classless society. The themes related to Tower of Babel are identical myths to Rāvan’s destruction of his an irrational dare, Duryodhana’s destruction for heinous crime, Kans’ destruction for his presumption to kill the cause of his death. They tell us about an unconscious product of the collective experience of the entire species. Literature is the mouthpiece of such collective experiences. The basic contention of archetypal criticism is that literary expression is an unconscious product of the collective experience of the entire species. As such, literature is therefore integrally related with man’s cultural past. 

 

Since the publication of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, myth criticism has become the most important successor to formalist criticism, which had dominated academic literary study from the early twenties in Britain and from the late thirties in America. (Michael Payne: 1974) Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler, Daniel Hoffman, and Philip Wheelwright practised as mythic literary critics. ‘Drawing on the findings of anthropology and psychology regarding universal myths, rituals, and folktales, these critics were intent on restoring spiritual content to a world they saw as alienated, fragmented, and ruled by scientism, empiricism, positivism, and technology.’

 

Assumptions of Archetypal Criticism 

 

The critics have studied archetypal criticism as a structuralist approach to literature because it advocates myth as signifiers of recurring imageries in literature. Northrop Frye as literary critic shows interest in reading literature from mythic-semiotic points of view. Mythic-Archetypal Criticism depends on the assumptions of Northrop Frye’s five phases of symbolism, ideas of imageries, myths and their temporal source to what he called ‘monad’. Archetypal criticism seems an eclectic approach to literature because as formalism it focuses to importance of literary devices; as New Criticism it emphasizes close-reading; as structuralism it instructs reader to become conscious of sets and apparatuses of language; and as New Aristotelian criticism it affirms that an organic whole engrains literature. The assumptions of Archetypal Criticism are:

  1. An archetypal Critic observes criticism conceptually as a science. Frye writes in this connection, “just as there is an order of nature behind the natural sciences, so literature is not just a piled aggregate of “works” but an “order of words” (p. 17). Thus literature is not ‘aggregation’ but order of words. In the Second chapter of Anatomy of Criticism, he characterizes the ‘order’ of words as literary ‘monad.’ (115-22)
  2. The Archetypal Criticism studies structures, sets, and apparatuses of myths and archetypes in literature. Literature does not speak of itself, though it ‘is a specialized form of language, as language is of communication.’ (75) This ‘specialized form’ is the monad of ‘autonomous structure of motifs’ and ‘hypothetical structure of sign’ in terms of Frye’s mythic theory of literature. These two are the aspects of literary monad made of phases of symbolism, displacement, and historicity of human condition.
  3. Thus, a critic’s task is to find out imageries and symbols as the displacement of myth in literature. Myth is not pure because it is a residual in breached condition refracted through imageries and symbols—the medium of representing the archetypes.
  4. These archetypes, besides representing the historicity of human condition, represent signs of contemporary societal truth: “total human imitation of nature that we call civilization” (p. 105). Thus, Mythic or Archetypal criticism studies literature in the context of civilization. An archetypal critic is a developer of culture and civilization.
  5. Literature is a self-contained universe. For an archetype critic, Literature is not an imitation of human psyche, human life, and human condition. It is a monad of mythos, and symbols, which carry the sense of the motifs about the human condition, which affects the society, culture, and civilization. Considering this notion, Frye has developed and illustrated the concept of a larger whole of archetype he has called it a “symbol as monad” or the ‘totality of the order of words’ in Archetypes of Literature. However, monad is an imaginative and hypothetical fiction. It is dialectic in nature. Its phase is yet to come. Derrida’s idea of semantic aporia is identical with this characteristic of monad in Fryean literary theory. The totality of monad is inclusive whereas mythically it is in a hypothetical form.
  6. The basic contention of Archetypal criticism rests on thinking about literature as multidisciplinary genre. An Archetypal critic thinks that ‘psychology, anthropology, theology, history, law, and everything else built out of words have been informed or constructed by the same kind of myths and metaphors that we find in their original hypothetical form in literature.
  7. This universe of myth (i.e. literature) is a reflex of truth engrained in the history of human condition and retains same as timeless imageries.

Frye as Mythic-Archetypal Critic

 

Claude Levi Strauss, a Structural Anthropologist of France, who studied humankind, evolution of human habits, culture, society, and history encoded or structured in language influenced Northrop Frye’s ideas. Frye has also studied human impulses by reading myths and recurring  images i.e. archetypes in literature. Thus, Frye’s Archetypal criticism demands a close reader of theology, mythology, anthropology, and psychology as apparatus of Literature. European literary theorists quickly overtook Archetypal criticism with the rise of a structuralism. It, stemming from Russian formalism and the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, received a new lease of life through the post-war anthropological texts of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

 

Archetypal criticism consists in the art of ‘close reading,’ as New Critics think but does not assume literature as an ‘autotelic’ work of art. It tends to explicate the text in relation with reading the codes of mythos embedded in literary pieces with unique artistry. Thus it has two basic aims as Frye states, ‘criticism will always have two aspects, one turned toward  the structure of literature and one turned toward the other cultural phenomena that form the social environment of literature’ (The Critical Path: 1971, 25). However, both ‘structure of literature’ and ‘social environment of literature’ are made of ‘a centripetal structure of meaning’ in the guise of ‘myth’. He says further, ‘A myth being a centripetal structure of meaning, it can be made to mean an indefinite number of things, and it is more fruitful to study what in fact myths have been made to mean.’ These myths directly or indirectly recur in literature. They represent human psyche, its struggle, and effects of its struggle. In the third chapter of Archetypes of Criticism, the Blake scholar Northrop Frye develops the idea of archetypes in literature and imageries through which they represent birth, death, and struggle in life, which occurs between period of birth and death.

 

Three Types of Imageries

 

These myths have codes of meaning. Frye clarified these myths through illustrating three types of imageries: Apocalyptic imageries, Demonic imageries, and Analogical imageries.

  1. Apocalyptic Imageries (the city, garden, sheepfold, and lamb): There are literatures, which mostly carry out these imageries to produce impact of divinity upon the audience’s mind. Shakespeare’s forest and garden imageries in his Romantic comedies, John Donne’s metaphysical poems, Wordsworth’s pantheistic imageries, pictorial imageries in D.G. Rossetti’s Damsel have much of such imagery.
  2. Demonic Imageries (anti-apocalyptic beast, hydra, harlot, witch, siren, wolf, vulture, earth bound serpent, erotic women imageries): Browning’s Childe Roland and Eliot’s Waste Land have much of such imagery.
  3. Analogical Imageries (relationship of man with God under some patron figure like wise old men with magical powers like Prospero, or friendly guardian spirits like Raphael before Adam’s fall): Milton’s Paradise Lost, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus have many of such imageries which exemplify analogical imageries.

The Analogical imageries refer to analogy of innocence and experience which ‘represent the adaptation of myth to nature: they give us, not the city and the garden at the final goal of human vision, but the process of building and planting.’ Reading of these imageries unties the mystery of the process of life, ‘the fundamental form of process is cyclical movement, the alternation of success and decline, effort and repose, life and death which is the rhythm of process’ Frye contends. It has elements of both the low and high mimetic imageries. The high mimetic imageries stand for chastity, magic, love, form, nature and reason; has analogy of innocence. The low mimetic imageries stand for ‘analogy of experience’ and which ‘bears a relation to the demonic.’ Frye exemplifies high mimetic observing them in great literature of all times:

Chastity, innocent characters, purity symbols like women—Dante’s Matelda and Shakespeare’s Miranda… Fire in the innocent world is usually a purifying symbol… the pastoral sheep and lambs… unicorn, the traditional emblem of chastity… The dramatic festival of the ass, no less than that of the Boy Bishop, belongs to this structure of imagery, and when Shakespeare put an ass’s head in Fairyland he was not doing something unique… Birds, butterflies … . The animals are those of proud beauty: the eagle and the lion stand for the vision of the royal by the loyal, the horse and falcon for “chivalry” or the aristocracy on horseback; the peacock and the swan are the birds of cynosure, and the phoenix or unique fire-bird is a favorite poetic emblem, especially, in England, for Queen Elizabeth.  Just as the organizing ideas of romance are chastity and magic, so the organizing ideas of the high mimetic area seem to be love and form. And as the field of romantic images may be called an analogy of innocence, so the field of high mimetic imagery may be called an analogy of nature and reason.

 

The analogical imageries untie the world in which a process of intrusion is a dominant symbol. Imageries, which fall under this category, reflex the intrusion of the dark world into the pure world; reflects the intervention of the world of experience in innocence.

 

In the low mimetic area we enter a world that we may call the analogy of experience, and which bears a relation to the demonic world corresponding to the relation of the romantic innocent world to the apocalyptic one…  The low mimetic treatment of human society reflects, of course, Wordsworth’s doctrine that the essential human situations, for the poet, are the common and typical ones. Along with this goes a good deal of parody of the idealization of life in romance, a parody that extends to religious and aesthetic experience…(153) The relation of innocence and experience to apocalyptic and demonic imagery illustrates an aspect of displacement which we have so far said little about: displacement in the direction of the moral. The two dialectical structures are, radically, the desirable and the undesirable…  The apocalyptic and demonic worlds, being structures of pure metaphorical identity, suggest the eternally unchanging, and lend themselves very readily to being projected existentially as heaven and hell, where there is continuous life but no process of life….(158) The analogies of innocence and experience represent the adaptation of myth to nature: they give us, not the city and the garden at the final goal of human vision, but the process of building and planting. The fundamental form of process is cyclical movement, the alternation of success and decline, effort and repose, life and death which is the rhythm of process.

 

Frye illustrates the theory of Mythos as imageries to what he termed, ‘Romance’, ‘High Mimetic’, and ‘Low Mimetic’. These three intermediate structures of imagery are constellations of images, when found in organized form, make up what Frye called “atmosphere.” The mode of romance presents an idealized world: in romance heroes are brave, heroines beautiful, villains villainous, and the frustrations, ambiguities, and embarrassments of ordinary life are made little of. Hence, its imagery presents a human counterpart of the apocalyptic world which we may call the analogy of innocence.

 

Romance, for Frye, is not concerned with a particular period but has concerns with the process he called romanticizings. It is best known to us, not from the age of romance itself, but from later romanticizings: Comus (1634), The Tempest (1610-11) and the third book of The Faerie Queene (1590-96) in the Renaissance, Blake’s songs of innocence and “Beulah” imagery, Keats’s Endymion (1818) and Shelley’s Epipsychidion (1821) in the Romantic period proper.

 

“Atmosphere” reflects the seven categories of images as different forms of rotary or cyclical movement.

  1. The continuum of identity in the individual life from birth to death is extended from death to rebirth
  2. The doctrine of reincarnation a newborn light threatened by the powers of darkness
  3. duality between experience and innocence
  4. human and animal imageries
  5. harvest and vintage; vegetable imageries
  6. nostalgia, regret, exultation imageries and
  7. water-symbolism: coming back symbols.

Each cyclical symbol of seven categories of images is traced out in three major myths: apocalyptic, demonic and analogical. ‘These cyclical symbols are usually divided into four main phases, the four seasons of the year being the type for four periods of the day (morning, noon, evening, night), four aspects of the water-cycle (rain, fountains, rivers, sea or snow), four periods of life (youth, maturity, age, death), and the like.’ (AC: 160) These four phases, seasons, periods are metaphorical signs of stages of culture, which reflect human civilization and forms of human universe.

 

Northrop Frye’s exposition of mythos expresses poetry as “an artifact of human civilization.” (Anatomy of Criticism 145) For him, mythos survives in both the nature and man. Both, on archetypal and anagogical level, nourish each other respectively: “nature is the container of man…man is container of nature.” (ibid 145) Thus, mythos is the form of a human universe. He illustrates that

 

We find a great number of symbols from phases one and two in Keats’s Endymion, and of symbols from phases three and four in The Waste Land (where we have to add four stages of Western culture, medieval, Renaissance, eighteenth-century, and contemporary).

 

He adds:

 

We may note that there is no cycle of air: the wind bloweth where it listeth, and images dealing with the movement of “spirit” are likely to be associated with the theme of unpredictability or sudden crisis.

 

In this light of thought, Frye defends literature as self-contained universe which mystifies the whole pseudo-scientific world of three spirits, four humors, five elements, seven planets, nine spheres, twelve zodiacal signs, can only be demystified by one who knows what he termed ‘the grammar of literary imagery.’

 

Roland Barthes furthers this idea in his Mythologies (1957), talking about the codes of literature that reflect secret cultural meanings of life. Later, Northrop Frye’s The Great Code (1981) has testified codes of literature as codes of the Bible (he illustrated these codes as apocalyptic imageries in the third chapter of Anatomy of Literature) and as medium of decoding the western literary forms. Let us see how Frye as Myth critic has observed apocalyptic imageries in Spenser’s The Faire Queene:

 

We may take the first book of The Faerie Queene as representing perhaps the closest following of the Biblical quest-romance theme in English literature: it is closer even than The Pilgrim’s Progress, which resembles it because they both resemble the Bible. Attempts to compare Bunyan and Spenser without reference to the Bible, or to trace their similarities to a common origin in secular romance, are more or less perverse. In Spenser’s account of the quest of St. George, the patron saint of England, the protagonist represents the Christian Church in England, and hence his quest is an imitation of that of Christ. Spenser’s Redcross Knight is led by the lady Una (who is veiled in black) to the kingdom of her parents, which is being laid waste by a dragon. The dragon is of somewhat unusual size, at least allegorically. We are told that Una’s parents held “all the world” in their control until the dragon “Forwasted all their land, and them expelled.” Una’s parents are Adam and Eve; their kingdom is Eden or the unfallen world, and the dragon, who is the entire fallen world, is identified with the leviathan, the serpent of Eden, Satan, and the beast of Revelation. Thus St. George’s mission, a repetition of that of Christ, is by killing the dragon to raise Eden in the wilderness and restore England to the status of Eden. The association of an ideal England with Eden, assisted by legends of a happy island in the western ocean and by the similarity of the Hesperides story to that of Eden, runs through English literature at least from the end of Greene’s Friar Bacon to Blake’s “Jerusalem” hymn. St. George’s wanderings with Una, or without her, are parallel to the wandering of the Israelites in the wilderness, between Egypt and the Promised Land, bearing the veiled ark of the covenant and yet ready to worship a golden calf. The battle with the dragon lasts, of course, three days: at the end of each of the first two days St. George is beaten back and is strengthened, first by the water of life, then by the tree of life. These represent the two sacraments which the reformed church accepted; they are the two features of the garden of Eden to be restored to man in the apocalypse, and they have also a more general Eucharist connection. St. George’s emblem is a red cross on a white ground, which is the flag borne by Christ in traditional iconography when he returns in triumph from the prostrate dragon of hell. The red and white symbolize the two aspects of the risen body, flesh and blood, bread and wine, and in Spenser they have a historical connection with the union of red and white roses in the reigning head of the church. The link between the sacramental and the sexual aspects of the red and white symbolism is indicated in alchemy, with which Spenser was clearly acquainted, in which a crucial phase of the production of the elixir of immortality is known as the union of the red king and the white queen. 

 

The above-cited extract gives us clue to understand Biblical references mystified with symbols and images in a work of art. Frye illustrates The Faire Queene as a representative work of art with special reference to Biblical theme. These Biblical references codified with imageries tell about the the history of imageries occurred in the history of literature as well as the history of the psyche of people. Frye culminated his idea of the pattern of imagery in the Bible and of its various categories and of ramifications of imageries in literature in Biblical and Classical Myths (2004). Thus, mythic- archetypal criticism was the first literary theory, before Paul de Man’s deconstructive practices in America, which emphasized multidisciplinary approach to literary understanding.

Wilbur S. Scott has rightly remarked that Archetypal Criticism occupies “a curious position among other methods: it requires close textual readings, like the formalistic, and yet it is concerned humanistically with more than the intrinsic value of aesthetic satisfaction; it seems psychological insofar as it analyzes the work of art’s appeal to the audience … and yet sociological in its attendance upon basic cultural patterns as central to that appeal; it is historical in its investigation of a cultural or social past, but nonhistorical in its demonstration of literature’s timeless value, independent of particular periods. (1966: 247) Richard Chase, in “Myth Revisited” has also observed, “As the psychoanalyst learns about the workings of the normal mind from the study of neurosis, so the literary critic learns about the literary imagination from the study of myths.” (1950: 890).

 

Cues for Studying Mythic-Archetypal Patterns in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan

 

Train to Pakistan (1956) is mostly studied from trauma and memory perspectives. It is observed as an unrepresentable or inarticulatable narrative of violence and reminiscences. Many critics have read it from Musirul Hasan’s documentative vision, contained in India’s Partition; Gyanendra Pandey’s points of view observed in Remembering Partition; Tarun K. Saint’s Witnessing Partition; and other holocaust or apartheid narrative theorists. It is studied as a Mano Majra tragic narrative.

 

For Archetypal critic, it does not only narrate the history of 1947 India but also its root which  lies in the engrained mythical accidents made of imageries of exile, separation, disobedience and anti-apocalyptic wisdom. It is not the tragic tale but a tale of irony expressed through analogical imageries. It may be appreciated on given color imageries, natural imageries, pictorial descriptions of the train, railway station, Nooran’s condition, Jagga’s mother and her reaction to Nooran at her home. Imageries are not new, nor their referents. They connote Anti-semitic reaction of the Nazi in Germany, Vienna, and Austria in 1925-39, Odessa’s massacre in 1905 to the fall of the Babel Tower, dissemination of people of the one Fatherland to anonymity, and production of languages that created confusion among people resulting battle for existence to expulsion of Adam from Paradise and separation from Eve. The Archetypal critic will do it by tracing out the mythos in literature.

If we read a piece of literature from standpoints of mythic-archetypal criticism, literature remains no more a literature of art as it is classically thought but literature of truth and reality of human civilization.

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References

  • Fraser, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 4 vols. London: Macmillan, 1894–1904. Print.
  • Frye, Northrop.    Anatomy of Criticism Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. 1957. Print.
  • —-       The Critical Path. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1971. p. 25. Print.
  • —-    The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic Press. Canada. 1982. Print. Frye, Northrop & Macpherson, Jay.(1962) Biblical and Classical Myths. Toronto:TUP. 2004. Print.
  • Jung, Carl Gustav. (1953). Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge. 2003
  • Gordon, Walter K. Ed. Introduction to Literature in Critical Perspectives (New York: 1968), p. 499.