Archetypal Criticism: Jung and Frye PDF

32 Archetypal Criticism: Jung and Frye Glen Robert Gill Richter, David, Ed. 2018. A Companion to Literary Theory. West Sussex and Oxford: John Wiley and Sons Ltd. The concept of the archetype and the practice of archetypal criticism, as...

32 Archetypal Criticism: Jung and Frye Glen Robert Gill Richter, David, Ed. 2018. A Companion to Literary Theory. West Sussex and Oxford: John Wiley and Sons Ltd. The concept of the archetype and the practice of archetypal criticism, as typified by the writings of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye, were integral to the development of literary theory in the twentieth century, and while few concepts and practices have been as extensively critiqued, they remain so in the twenty‐first. Archetypal criticism (which is central to but does not encompass the field of “myth criticism”) theorizes the existence of discrete and interrelated symbols, including narrative forms and character types, in ancient and traditional myths, and examines their recurrence in and uses them to critically interpret later literatures and cultures. The nature of these mythic symbols, called “archetypes,” which was most notably theorized by Jung and Frye, is thus bound up, if not a core issue, in critical debates over the efficacy of ­signification, social structure and ideology, and the philosophical question of cultural ­universals: matters which are never definitively settled, and constantly under revision. The term archetype, compounding the Greek arche (“first” or “original”) and typos (“form” or “model”), is itself ancient, descending from the Heraclitean concept of a transcendent logos or word and the Platonic concept of eidos, idea or ideal form. The word archetypos recurs in the letters of Cicero, Philo’s On the Creation, Plotinus’ Enneads, the Gnostic Corpus Hermeticum, and Pseudo‐Dionysius’ On the Celestial Hierarchy (all cited by Jung), where it refers to a metaphysical first cause that structures the material world, as in Augustine’s “principal ideas … contained in the Divine Intelligence” (Augustine 1982: 46). Frye found precedents and analogues for the use of the archetype as a critical device in the medi- eval concept of anagogy, the highest level of meaning in the polysemous system of Dante’s Convivio, and in Enlightenment philosopher Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova, with its principles of verum factum (“truth is made”) and sensis communis (“communal sense”), and its theory that language proceeds historically through divine, heroic, and democratic phases, followed by a ricorso to myth (Cotrupi 2000: 49–75). Jung noted the idea of mythic A Companion to Literary Theory, First Edition. Edited by David H. Richter. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.  Archetypal Criticism: Jung and Frye 397 r­ecurrence through dreams in the philosophy of Nietzsche, and by the late nineteenth century, conditions were ripe for attempts to demonstrate the cross‐cultural recurrence of mythic symbols as reflective or constituent of an aspect of consciousness that remains more or less stable through history. The results included French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s concept of conscience collective and German ethnographer Adolf Bastian’s theory of elementargedanken (“elementary ideas”). But its apex was surely anthropologist James Frazer’s twelve‐volume The Golden Bough, a worldwide survey of fertility myths which argued convincingly for the existence of at least one vast multivalent archetype: the figure of the dying‐rising god and its annual resurrec- tion. The significance of The Golden Bough as a founding text of archetypal criticism is difficult to overstate: both Jung and Frye were influenced by its suggestion that this common god‐figure (of which Christ is an example) is “the effect of similar causes acting alike on the similar constitution of the human mind” (Frazer 1922: 448). Both learned from Frazer the “comparative method,” the critical juxtaposition of comparable narratives and symbols for analysis. Frye in particular maintained that the primary importance of The Golden Bough was not anthropological but as literary criticism (Frye 1957: 109; see also Frye 1982: 35). Frazer’s work was one of several developments, alongside analysis of his own dreams (see Jung 1965: 158–62), that led Jung to break with his mentor Sigmund Freud in 1912 to study myths not as expressions of Freudian pathologies dominated by one “Oedipal” arche- type, but as indicative of a human psychology influenced by many. Jung’s initial theorizing was both personal, as expressed in his illuminated dream‐journal The Red Book, and professional, as delivered in his first major study, Psychology of the Unconscious, which spec- ulated that the relation of the mythic hero to the mother is not the product of an incest drive but signifies a quest for rebirth. Many essays on the mythic nature of psychology, some applied to literature, followed, including “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry” in 1922 (citing the name of his theory, in contrast to Freud’s “psychoanalysis”), “Psychology and Literature” in 1930, and a paper on Joyce’s Ulysses in 1934 (see Jung 1966). In these and other writings, Jung theorized the psychological function of the “pri- mordial image” or “mythologem,” settling finally on the term “archetype,” and by the time he had composed the papers that became The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, his ideas had more or less cohered. It is impossible to outline here the full breadth of Jungian psychology, but Jung theo- rized that archetypes emerge from a level of the psyche (the entirety of the human mind) deeper than the unconscious of Freud: the collective unconscious, so‐called because its presence and function is universal, preceding and underlying all individual qualities. “The collective unconscious,” Jung writes, “is simply the psychic expression of … brain structure irrespec- tive of all racial differences” (Jung 1968: 11). “The whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious,” he surmises (Jung 1960: 152). “Myths and symbols … arise autochthonously in every corner of the earth and yet are identical because they are fashioned out of the same worldwide human unconscious” (Jung 1921: 120). Such myths and symbols are products of archetypes as such (an sich), and although Jung speculated that archetypes are “patterns of instinctual behavior” (Jung 1958: 43) based in the “anatomical disposition of the brain” (Jung 1921: 443), he also suggested that they appear “increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished by the 398 Glen Robert Gill body’s materiality” (Jung 1958: 173), and are therefore mental or spiritual factors. In particular, Jung theorized that archetypes are “inherited possibilities of ideas” denoting “potential existence only,” and that the archetype is “determined as to its content only when it has become conscious and … filled out with the material of conscious experience” (1958: 66, 179, 79): a process Jung called projection or constellation. The archetype can ­therefore be distinguished from what he called the archetypal image, the perceptible mythic symbol: “The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal … a possibility of representa- tion which is given a priori” (1958: 79). Jungian archetypes may thus be considered meta- physical principles, similar to Platonic eidoi, a relation Jung conceded although he maintained they are more like Kant’s “categories of understanding,” and that their psychological basis means they are not properly metaphysical (Jung 1958: 76). But his assertion that a sense of numinosity (i.e. of the noumenal, as opposed to the phenomenal or material) accompanies the archetype complicates this claim, for as Paul Kugler observes, Jung’s Kantian archetype is still transcendent: “Platonic metaphysics had located the tran- scendent realm in eternity … Kant … established a new ground within the human mind, but transcendent to the knowing subject” (Young‐Eisendrath and Dawson 2008: 84). Jung identified at least six major archetypes, which he found to be figural, the natures and functions of which are broad and quite fluid, insofar as they may interrelate or blend together. These archetypes tend to appear successively, if not as a hierarchy of deepening levels (Jung 1958: 183). The first to appear is usually the figure of the shadow, an antithet- ical persona associated with evil and aggression (1958: 262); impulses which the conscious is reluctant to acknowledge (thus it may overlap with the Freudian “personal” uncon- scious). This figure often gives way to the trickster, a mysterious amoral persona whose deceitful and disturbing actions nevertheless advance necessary or productive ends (1958: 255–72). In these beneficial goals, the figure Jung called the wise old man or magus person- ality may be revealed, a paternalistic mentor whose wisdom or magical powers connote deeper regions of the unconscious (1958: 207–54). This guide‐figure typically reveals the deepest archetype, which Jung calls the anima (feminine “soul” or “spirit”) when observed in the male psyche, or the animus (the masculine equivalent) if the psyche is female (1958: 75–112, 182–206). This “contrasexual” archetype produces the youthful kore (“maiden”) figure and the great or chthonic (“Earth”) mother for males, and corresponding masculine figures (like the “wise old man”) for females, such that the anima‐animus archetype ulti- mately represents, Jung suggests, the impulses of eros or love and logos or logic, respec- tively. Through encounters with these figures, the archetype of the self or the supraordinate personality, often represented by the puer aeternus (“eternal child” or “youth”), is developed (1958: 151–80). These various archetypes represent aspects of the human psyche that must be acknowledged and integrated into the conscious through a process of symbolic analysis (often using the comparative method) that Jung called amplification, the goal of which is to accomplish individuation, the development of balanced, mature personhood (1958: 275–354). While Jung theorized individuation as a process of psychological analysis, the relation of these archetypes to the gods, devils and saviors of religion, and the heroes, vil- lains, tricky slaves, mentors, and monsters of romance, make them useful in critically interpreting the psychological significance of literature and culture. The process through which Northrop Frye developed his archetypal theory is markedly different from this, as Frye’s work is rooted in the study of literature itself (an observation  Archetypal Criticism: Jung and Frye 399 which helps dispel the misconception that Frye’s theory of the archetype is Jungian, which it is not). Frye began to theorize the nature and function of the archetype through his efforts to comprehend the complex and then ill‐understood poetry of William Blake, which Frye suspected was not only mythic but emblematic of all literature. In an epiphany of February 1934, Frye intuited that what made Blake’s poetry mythic, what made it sim- ilar to and allusive of the work of other major authors like Milton and exemplary of liter- ature itself, was its use of a “mythological framework” derived mainly from the Bible and Classical myth (Frye 1976: 17; see also Cayley 1992: 47). In October 1934, Frye read The Golden Bough, whose dying‐rising god cycle struck him as the core of this framework and “the very life‐blood of art” (Frye 1996: 355). For twelve years Frye worked to decipher Blake’s poetry, which he found “consisted almost entirely in the articulation of archetypes” (Frye 2005: 203), recurrent literary symbols whose origin and function were clarified by Blake’s poetics. The outcome was Frye’s first book Fearful Symmetry, published in 1947. According to Frye, Blake’s work reveals that what we would call archetypes originate in the faculty conventionally known as the imagination, a creative function of consciousness that unites physical sensations with mental processes, and thus refutes the Cartesian assumption of a purely mental subjectivity separate from both body and world. The latter is the error Blake saw as fostered by John Locke’s notion of the mind as a tabula rasa grad- ually filled with concepts abstracted from objective reality by empirical “reflection”: Blake called this “Two Horn’d Reasoning, Cloven Fiction” (Frye 1969: 18), because it errone- ously severs subject and object. “There can … be no distinction between mental and bodily acts,” Frye deduces, because “man perceiving is a former or imaginer.” The imagination operates in the simplest acts of perception to bring reality into existence in relation to it: “The Sun’s Light when he unfolds it / Depends on the organ that beholds it,” Blake writes. “To be perceived, therefore, means to be imagined,” Frye explains, and “therefore nothing is real beyond the imaginative patterns men make of reality” (1969: 19). Mobilized with greater discipline in art and motivated by desire, the imagination creates reality in increas- ingly visionary forms, relating to them on higher levels, until their universal significance is revealed (Gill 2006: 101–77). The “Giant Forms” Blake imagined this way in his personal mythology are what Frye first theorized as archetypes, which he found to be struc- tured by the poet in a cosmos of four levels: each of the figures, events, and settings of these levels is “an archetype created in the unfallen world and existing now in a form appropriate to a fallen one” (Frye 1969: 248). Blake’s poetry, Frye finds, depicts the ascent from “Ulro,” a postlapsarian desert‐state of abstraction in which the tyrannical sky‐father Urizen oppresses the young hero Orc, repre- senting thwarted desire and the “imagination trying to burst out of the body” (1969: 136). This creates or accesses “Generation,” in which Orc struggles recurrently against and is sacrificed and reanimated by Enitharmon and Vala (time‐history and hostile nature) in the Frazerian dying‐rising god cycle. Transcending this opens “Beulah,” a garden‐state “bet- ween spiritual and physical existence” in which “the perceiving consciousness of our world becomes a lover or child and the nature of our world beautiful and beloved, a mistress or mother” (1969: 232, 229–30). Through this, finally, we reach “Eden,” in which humanity mounts Blake’s “chariots of fire,” enters the eternal city of Golgonooza, and Orc is revealed to be (or be the son of) Los, the divine blacksmith, who built it out of “the ruins of time.” While this structure resembles Jungian individuation, it is more reminiscent of the 400 Glen Robert Gill sequence of mythic types found in the Bible and other mythologies, and is driven by Blake’s “apocalyptic theory of perception,” the imaginative desire to see “the complete transformation of both nature and human nature into the same form” (Frye 2005: 204, 193). “Properly interpreted, all works of art are phases of that archetypal vision” (Frye 1969: 108). “A comparative study of dreams and rituals can lead us only to a vague and intuitive sense of the unity of the human mind; a comparative study of works of art should demonstrate it beyond conjecture,” Frye concludes. “It is conceivable that such a study – the study of anagogy … would supply us with the missing piece in contemporary thought” (1969: 424–5). In Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Frye attempts to provide this study by applying his theory to literature at large, which requires him to consider the critical function of arche- types prior to their origin. The literary symbol, Frye suggests, can be interpreted in basic ways, as a literal or descriptive sign or formal image, which belong to initial critical processes (Frye 1957: 71–94). The concept of the archetype as “a typical or recurring image,” however, allows literature to be understood finally as “one of the techniques of civilization” and “the focus of a community”: I mean by an archetype a symbol which connects one poem to another and thereby helps to unify our literary experience … [A]rchetypal criticism is primarily concerned with literature as social fact and a mode of communication … If we do not accept the archetypal or conven- tional element … that connects one poem to another, it is impossible to get any systematic mental training out of the reading of literature. (Frye 1957: 99–100) What results from such training is the understanding that archetypes are “impelled by the force we have called desire” (1957: 105), and the goal of this training is the recognition that some archetypes therefore possess anagogic or universal significance and implications: If archetypes are communicable symbols, and there is a center of archetypes, we should expect to find, at that center, a group of universal symbols … [S]ome symbols are images of things common to all men, and therefore have a communicable power which is potentially unlim- ited. Such symbols include those of food and drink, of the quest or journey, of light and dark- ness, and of sexual fulfilment … It is inadvisable to assume that an Adonis or Oedipus myth is universal, or that certain associations, such as the serpent with the phallus, are universal, because when we discover a group of people who know nothing of such matters we must assume that they did know and have forgotten, or do know and won’t tell, or are not members of the human race. On the other hand, they may be confidently excluded from the human race if they cannot understand the conception of food, and so any symbolism founded on food is universal in the sense of having an indefinitely extensive scope. That is, there are no limits to its intelligibility … When we pass into anagogy … the archetypal symbols, the city, the garden, the quest, the marriage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs inside nature, but are themselves the forms of nature. Nature is now inside the mind of an infinite man … This is not reality, but it is the conceivable or imaginative limit of desire, which is infinite, eternal, and hence apocalyptic. (Frye 1957: 118–19) It is worth noting that this remarkable theoretical leap, which incidentally renders “a theory of a collective unconscious … an unnecessary hypothesis” (1957: 112), is neverthe- less based in an understanding of the archetype as “a humanistic construct” requiring “no metaphysical sanction” (Krieger 1966: 21).  Archetypal Criticism: Jung and Frye 401 Through this conception, Frye theorizes literature as a “total order of words” (Frye 1957: 121) that envisions the fulfillment and frustration of human desire in the dialectic of what he calls apocalyptic and demonic symbolism, respectively (which can be tempered by the ten- dency to present archetypes in displaced or realistic forms). The total structure of literature, however, is cyclical, a vast system of apocalyptic and demonic archetypes constituting innumerable myths and literary works, which revolve through four mythoi or literary genres between the poles of total fulfillment and total frustration: There is comedy, the mythos of spring, in which a young hero overcomes, with help from allied characters, social obstacles to a sexual union and thus represents a new model of society. This gives way to romance, the mythos of summer, the quest‐myth of life versus death in which a hero battles a dragon or other personification of hostile nature and is slain and reborn in the Frazerian pattern. This is followed by tragedy, the mythos of autumn, the opposite of comedy and a “mimesis of sacrifice” (Frye 1957: 214), in which the hero finally experiences “a morally intelligible downfall” (1957: 210). Lastly, there is irony and satire, the mythos of winter, a parody of romance in which anti‐heroes representing death dominate a society in bondage, at which point the cycle begins anew. Each mythos is associated with a season to demonstrate how the entire structure is romance and the dying‐rising god cycle writ large: a “central ­unifying myth” of human desire confronting nature in which any recurring literary image, character, or narrative can be critically positioned and examined (1957: 192). Both Jung’s and Frye’s theories were considered groundbreaking for literary studies, although the growth of Jungian literary criticism did not keep pace with that of Jungian psychology. But the early impact of Maud Bodkin’s Archetypal Patterns in Poetry and Jung’s general prestige served to create a misconception that all archetypes are Jungian. Jung’s work did inspire a universal typology of hero myths in the form of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book whose notoriety rivals that of Jung’s and Frye’s work, but whose theory is less coherent and authoritative (Gill 2006: 73–99). Morris Philipson’s Outline of a Jungian Aesthetics and several studies of fairy‐tales by Marie‐Louise von Franz continued to demonstrate the value of Jungian archetypal theory to literary criticism, as did the substantial anthology Jungian Literary Criticism (Sugg 1992). The impact of Frye’s work on literary criticism, however, was seismic, on account of its basis in literature and Frye’s many publications on specific genres, authors, and texts (compiled in the 30 vol- umes of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye, between 1996 and 2014). But Anatomy of Criticism singlehandedly widened the critical frame beyond the textual formalism of the New Critics, inaugurating the first great paradigm shift in modern literary theory. Frye was deemed to have “had an influence – indeed an absolute hold – on a generation of ­developing literary critics greater … than any one theorist in recent history” (Krieger 1966: 1). Yet even as he was called “the largest and most crucial literary critic in the English language” (Salusinszky 1987: 62), Frye’s influence was also developmental, as evinced by critics like Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, who adapted rather than emu- lated his methods. As theorists, however, both Jung and Frye were ultimately received as contributors to structuralism, the mid‐twentieth‐century interdisciplinary movement to discern essential structures in culture (to which anthropologist Claude Lévi‐Strauss was considered central), and as examples of modernism’s affinity for myth. As such, and even initially, critiques of Jung and Frye have been numerous. Jung’s ideas were immediately opposed by orthodox Freudians, irked by his reconceptualizing of the unconscious, and his influence has suffered from never having had the kind of innovating 402 Glen Robert Gill disciple that Freud had in Jacques Lacan. But Jung’s reputation has also been damaged by studies like Richard Noll’s The Jung Cult which connected his theories to occultism, anti- semitism and other “Volkish” movements that helped give rise to Nazi Germany. It is worth noting that Frye himself was among the first to note and resist these tendencies in Jung’s work when he wrote in 1954 that the “collective unconscious is actually the total mythopoeic power of humanity and has nothing to do with … groping about in the windy bowels of Teutonic exclusivism” (Frye 1978: 121). Charges of mystification, as Geoffrey Hartman notes, cannot be fairly applied to Frye’s effort to systematize and democratize literary criticism (Krieger 1966: 111–17). It follows from this that many of the problems with Jungian criticism resulting from its import from psychology do not hamper Frye’s theories, such as development from a narrow set of “case studies,” ambiguity about whether the psyche of the author, of a character or of the text itself is being analyzed, and the fact that it forces a multiplicity of literary symbols to conform to the small number of Jungian archetypes (see Young‐Eisendrath and Dawson 2008: 269–98). The latter has made Jungian literary criticism more likely to become a “vulgar Jungianism” engaged in mere “archetype‐spotting.” By far the most extensive critiques of Jung’s and Frye’s archetypal theories have resulted from the advent of postmodernism and the so‐called “linguistic turn.” The appearance of Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in 1966 initiated another shift toward criticism skeptical of theories of the efficacious symbol and inclined to dispense with structure (hence “poststructuralism”). Derrida’s critique of signification itself as assuming “a metaphysics of presence” which actually conceals absence, his claim that words and symbols work not by invocation but decentering ­différance, and specifically his undermining of arche and the “totalizing” structures of Lévi‐ Strauss, prompted a revaluation of archetypal theory (Derrida 1978: 278–93). Indeed, Lyotard’s characterization of postmodernity as “incredulity towards metanarrative” ­proclaimed a suspicion of myth altogether (Lyotard 1984: xxiv). Allied feminist and ideo- logical critics argued that archetypal criticism “essentializes” gender norms (consider Jung’s anima‐animus archetype) and social hierarchies, and is therefore deterministic and ultimately ahistorical. Jung endured fewer direct assaults, as if poststructuralism was agreed to have obviated his ideas, or perhaps taking Eric Gould’s assessment of Jung’s semiotic oversights as a verdict: [I]f we follow Jung … our conscious life is always condemned to be subservient to some kind of unattainable superior fact … Archetypes move hesitantly from the dimly lit world of unconscious figures, under mysterious conditions … [A] large part of our fascination with Jungian theories would seem to derive from this attempt to have one’s metaphysical cake and eat it too … But as far as literary theory is concerned, we must say that this is achieved by devious means, for no reliable theory of language as both the interpretative medium and the very process of coming‐to‐consciousness accompanies the argument. (Gould 1981: 21–3) Frye’s theories, however, sustained several broadsides, attesting to its cohesion and utility (something also implied by the admiration that often colors such critiques). Psychoanalytic critic Frederick Crews argues that Frye theorizes literature as “purified of  Archetypal Criticism: Jung and Frye 403 its actual origins in discontent,” a fantasy of “total imaginative control,” rather than as “symbolic manipulations to reconcile competing pressures” (Crews 1970: 5, 13). Frank Lentricchia questions how Frye, “unconstrained by cultural and historical determinates, carried on the wings of an unsituated critical discourse to a realm of transparent conscious- ness … believes … he can make letter‐perfect … reports on the structural foundations of literature,” and finds him the chief proponent of center and structure contra Derrida, branding him as Neo‐Kantian and inaccurately eliding him with Jung (Lentricchia 1980: 9, 14, 19). Fredric Jameson notes that “the greatness of Frye, and radical difference ­between his work and … the great bulk of garden‐variety myth criticism, lies in his willingness to raise the issue of community and to draw basic, essentially social, interpretive consequences from … collective representation,” but Jameson rejects his use of “a ‘positive’ hermeneutic which tends to filter out historical difference” over the “negative hermeneutic” of Marx and Derrida (Jameson 1981: 69, 130). Terry Eagleton claims simply that Frye’s work “is marked by a deep fear of the actual social world, a distaste for history itself” (Eagleton 1983: 81). Amid these critiques, however, are defenses: “The particular emphasis that Frye puts on the archetype … seems to me indeed an ethical requirement” writes Julia Kristeva, and Hayden White notes that the influence of “the prefigurement‐fulfillment model” of biblical typology on Frye’s theory gives it a historical dimension (Lee and Denham 1994: 336, 337). One oft‐repeated critique, that Frye’s wide‐reaching theories are “totalizing” and “schematic,” overlooks the fact that their component principles can and often are used separately. Jung did not live to see the postmodern period, and so the task of carrying his ideas for- ward has fallen to the “Post‐Jungians” (Samuels 1985; see also Barnaby and D’Acierno 1990). The major adaptation of Jung’s theories to postmodernity has been the “archetypal psychology” of James Hillman (see Hillman 1983), which abandons the metaphysics of the Jungian archetype to focus on the “archetypal image” as a product of the imagination and culture, and the development of subjectivity through the critical engagement of narrative (principles reminiscent of Frye’s, but resisted by “classical” Jungians). Similarly, Annis V. Pratt, in her contribution to Feminist Archetypal Theory, embraces Frye’s work because it “defines archetypes as recurring images … rather than as transcendent absolutes” (Lauter and Rupprecht 1985: 107). Alongside these modifications, Susan Rowland (1999 and 2002) has attempted to position Jung’s original ideas in the present critical landscape, but as Terence Dawson admits, with premature defeatism, “Jung has no part in mainstream academic debate today” (Young‐Eisendrath and Dawson 2008: 284). Frye’s theories, con- versely, benefited from the fact that he kept refining them until his death in 1991, and from critical reappraisals of his ideas (see Rampton 2009; Denham 2005; Donaldson and Mendelson 2004; Gill 2006; and Boyd and Salusinszky 1999). His last major work, Words with Power, is in fact a “successor” to Anatomy of Criticism and “a summing up and restate- ment” of his theories for the current critical milieu (Frye 1990: xii). In Words with Power, Frye answers postmodern critiques of the archetype by clarifying its semiotics and the relation of myth to history and ideology. Broadening his purview to the various cultural contexts of symbolism, Frye theorizes that language descends from myth, through ideological and conceptual modes, to its commonplace descriptive usage, the implications and failures of the latter of which are the foci of poststructuralism (Frye 1990: 4–28). Criticism must work through these literal, abstract, and social uses of 404 Glen Robert Gill l­anguage to consider the nature of myth, because the critic has an ethical obligation “to distinguish ideology from myth, to help reconstitute myth as a language, and to put liter- ature in its proper place” (Frye 2000: 355). What is revealed in this process is that ideology is essentially “applied mythology” (Frye 1990: 23), expressing secondary concerns which “include patriotic and other attachments of loyalty, religious beliefs, and class‐conditioned attitudes.” These are adapted from, and too often prioritized over, four primary concerns expressed in myth, which are specifications of the “desire” in which Frye had earlier rooted it: “food and drink, along with related bodily needs; sex; property (i.e. money, possessions, shelter, clothing); liberty of movement” (Frye 1990: 42). “[T]he vast number of ‘dying god’ myths assembled by Frazer,” for example, “seem to have a common origin in anxiety about the food supply” (1990: 43): [The] direction of development is toward the metaphorical, as the concern for food and drink develops into the Eucharist symbolism of the New Testament … [T]he metaphorical or “spiritual” direction is thought of as fulfilling the physical need in another dimension of existence: it may require sublimation, but does not cut off or abandon its physical roots. (Frye 1990: 45) This fulfillment occurs through the critical recognition that the body is the material, structuring basis of the imagination and language, and that images of primary concern therefore correspond to and satisfy the higher needs of consciousness: this is the real semi- otic of the archetype, a dynamic Frye calls kerygma (1990: 97–135). While Frye theorizes this as the development of the Pauline “spiritual body” out of the physical body, “spiritual” simply means “the highest intensity of consciousness” (1990: 124–8), and thus this physical‐metaphorical development accords with current conceptualizations of metaphor in cognitive linguistics, the corporeal semiotics of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous, and in poststructuralist terms is not a metaphysics of presence but a phenomenological resur- rection of it (Gill 2006: 180–201). It answers Gould’s call for an archetypal theory of lan- guage, elucidates Lentricchia’s “transparent consciousness,” and anticipates why Terry Eagleton in After Theory demands a new criticism recognizing that “we are universal ani- mals … because of the kind of bodies we are born with” (Eagleton 2003: 157). The pri- mary concerns create culture as movement through a vast mythic structure, a four‐tiered axis mundi composed of clusters of symbols Frye no longer calls archetypes but variations, since he now theorizes their apocalyptic and demonic aspects, and their ideological adaptation (Frye 1990: 139–313). There is the ascent imagery of The Mountain (towers, trees, sky‐ gods, etc.) created by the desire for freedom of movement or its denial, which fulfills or frustrates intellectual freedom and communication, and is ideologically applied to regulate social hierarchy. Below this is the natural imagery of The Garden (paradises, mother‐ goddesses, marriage rites) driven by sexual desire or frustration, which fulfills spiritual love or becomes sadism, and is adapted in ideological mechanisms of sexual repression. Underneath this is the descent imagery of The Cave (underworlds, quest, heroic death, and rebirth), generated by the concern for food and drink, which fulfills community (communion) in the sacrifice of the dying‐rising god or frustrates it through monstrous consumption, and is applied by institutions of social continuity. At bottom is the revolutionary imagery of The Furnace (fire, demiurgic gods, rebellion), fueled by the concern for shelter and property,  Archetypal Criticism: Jung and Frye 405 which fulfills or frustrates the need for technology, education, and arts, and is ideologically applied in uses and abuses of social power. As a structure of symbolism, this model allows both the mythic and ideological aspects of culture to be critically considered, both histor- ically and ahistorically. The archetypal theories of Jung and Frye may not be destined to resume the predomi- nant position they once had in literary criticism, but there are indications that whatever is to follow postmodernism will have need of them. Tom Turner’s conception of the “post‐ postmodern,” for instance, observes the need for a “pattern language” that is met by Jungian archetypes (Turner 1996: 28–30). “Grand narratives are as necessary as they are problematic,” notes Timotheus Vermeulen in conceptualizing “metamodernism” (Tank 2012), which also embraces the Blakean theory of perception (Dumitrescu 2007). In Words with Power, Frye seems to have foreseen that whatever succeeds postmodernism will seek “a reengagement with modernist method in order to address subject matter well outside the … interest of the modernists themselves” (Furlani 2002: 714). Whatever is to come, there- fore, archetypal criticism should not be seen as a closed chapter in the history of literary criticism, but a participant in its revisionary enterprise. References Augustine. 1982. De Diversis Quaestionibus Octogina Crews, Frederick (ed.). Psychoanalysis and Literary Tribus (Eighty‐Three Different Questions). Process. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop. Washington, DC: Catholic University of Dante Alighieri. 1931. The Convivio of Dante America Press. Alighieri. London: Dent and Sons. Barnaby, Karin and Pellegrino D’Acierno. 1990. Denham, Robert D. 2005. Northrop Frye: Religious C. G. Jung and the Humanities: Towards a Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World. Hermeneutics of Culture. 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