Frye and the Archetypes

    Northrop Frye is a sort of Miltonic figure, a self-reliant iconoclast who writes beautifully without losing his critical edge. To him, "criticism deals with the arts and may well be something of an art itself, but it does not follow that it must be unsystematic," (Frye 1305) and he highlights the Henry James axiom of the only difference that matters is one that makes a difference when he says "for a systematic study can only progress: whatever dithers or vacillates or reacts is merely leisure-class conversation." (Frye 1306)  Therefore, he looks not to take the right or lefthand path, but to steer a path between the two, nothing that '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." (Frye 1306) If any criticism of Frye abounds, it is that his work can be too general, but that is the very space he sought to occupy in his systematic search. He is a little reactionary, as when he asserts that "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," (Frye 1307) which highlights a concept known as inevitability of language, which is the sense one gets when reading a classic work or passage and finding not one word superfluous, or capable of being removed while keeping that work or passage intact. Of the archetypes, those symbols and story arcs which reappear in works across too far a reach of culture and time to be a mistake, Frye notes that "there seems to be a general tendency on the part of great classics to revert to them." (Frye 1309) This might be why classics are accessible to so many more people than period pieces are, but the archetypes can hardly be thought of as transplanted in the works. They simply arise, especially when a work is viewed from afar.  Speaking of completeness, Frye says that "properly used as critical terms, an author's narrative is his linear movement; his meaning is the integrity of his completed form." (Frye 1310) This is a most different image than the dialogical concept of Bakhtin, centering the strength of a work on the strength of the person composing it, which appears abstractly in the language. Frye connects narrative to ritual, commonplace activities that elude to those who have done them before and so a sort of timelessness, and notes the lightning bolt recognition of that timelessness (highly related to the archetypes) as "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" (Frye 1311) Through a relationship of many works, Frye isolates certain common recurrences, which seems a sort of translated Poetics of Aristotelian narrative (1. dawn, spring, and birth phase.' 2. the zenith, summer, and marriage, or triumph phase. 3. the sunset, autumn, and death phase. 4. The darkness, winter, and dissolution phase.) To Frye, "art deals not with the real but with the conceivable," (Frye 1313) and the great work can conceive of new ideas in a kind of unbounded method-out-of-chaos. It is not about what IS but about the extent of desire and the artist can conceive of great orders to find a center in themselves, culminating in the master archetype: "this gives us our central pattern of archetypal images, the vision of innocence which sees the world in terms of total human intelligibility." (Frye 1314)

 Frye. "The Archetypes in Literature." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.