The New Poetics: An Archetypal Aesthetic Critical Theory

A literary theory is a theory that attempts to account for questions that arise in the study of literature -- questions of form and substance, of quality and impact. Thousands of pages of ink have been spilled in trying to understand why Shakespeare's writing is so much richer than that of other writers, why he is able to take a plot that is really quite common-place (and often ripped-off from a long forgotten source) and turn it into a scintillating masterpeice that holds audiences enthralled centuries after it was written. Thousands more have been written analyzing modern films, trying to understand why we are so happy to see the shoot-out at the end of the Western, and why we are bored to tears when we see a similar conflict emerge at the end of a poorly made romance.

This course attempts to investigate the answers to these questions, to provide insights in narrative structure that allow students of literature to better understand the works that they study, and to help writers of stories to sharpen and clarify their work so that it has the maximum possible appeal.

Understanding narrative requires us to look at a variety of works: not only the towering masterpeices of Hugo and Dostoyevski, but also the more mundane offerins of Lucas and Spielberg, the childhood wonders of Grimm and Anderson, and the mythological realms of Greek and Norse mythologies. The goal is to be able to understand why something that is, in the final analysis, really quite predictable and familiar can become an enduring classic, and why something that is completely original and doesn't contain a single trite scene can fall by the wayside, unread by any but the most undiscerning of pretentious post-modernists.

Unfortunately, most of us have been spoiled by our high-school and university encounters with literary criticism. The idea of analyzing a work sends shivers down our spine as we recall endless quote-hunting, seeking out proof texts to demonstrate self-evident conclusions such as "Procrastination: the downfall of Hamlet," or "Religious themes influenced the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins." Perhaps we recall opening up a Tale of Two Cities to sate our curiosity on a delightful feast of socialist implications. Or comparing Macbeth to Machiavelli's The Prince in order to demonstrate the the main character of the play was a raving megalomaniac who ruled by fear instead of love.

And yet literary criticism need not be such a sawdust discipline. It is capable of answering much more interesting questions. Why, for example, when we read Agatha Christie's And Then there were None, do we not feel cheated by the ending, in spite of the fact that there was so little in the rest of the text to suggest the solution to the reader? On the other hand, why does an inferior mystery writer produce a clever, twisting solution that falls utterly flat, so that even though every clue lines up we just don't believe that it is credible? Why does every person in the world remember Cinderella until they are old and grey, and not a single person over the age of eight can recall a single line of the Franklin stories that their parents read them ad nauseum in their younger years? How is it that I can perfectly recall every plot point in Hans Christian Anderson's version of The Little Mermaid -- even though I read it only once in second grade -- and have to struggle to remember the Disney version, which I saw about seventy-seven times during my teen-age years as a babysitter? Why will a reader endure endless pages of Victor Hugo's ranting about progress in order to get to the little scraps of Jean Valjean that Hugo occasionally throws us, and why are we actually enthralled with Ishmael's philosophical musings in Moby Dick?

These questions are interesting because they answer questions about the relationship between literature and audience, between what we read and the depths of the human person which are stirred up by a storyteller's words. They are of particular interest to those who are trying to craft works of literature: whether one is writing a novel, a poem, a play, or a screenplay, one needs to call on the narrative muse. It is helpful to know whether your suicide scene is going to be a masterful and shattering psychological revelation, like Smerdiakov's self-annihilation in The Brother's Karamazov, or a seemingly contrived means of getting rid of an inconvenient villain.

In this course, we will examine these questions through the lens of archetype. Like literary analysis in general, the idea of literary archetypes is one that has suffered considerably at the hands of modern teachers of English literature. Part of the difficulty is that one is presented with a hodge-podge of largely unrelated archetypes, in a way that is almost completely useless. Knowing that there is a such a thing as a Virgin, a Fool, a Witch, and a Temptress will do you very little good if these are the only archetypes that you ever learn, and if you are not taught how to tell the difference, for example, between a Siren, a Temptress, and a Whore. Another difficulty is that character archetypes are often confused with relational archetypes: we are told that there is a Hero and a Sidekick, and that the Hero may meet a Crone during his travels through the Forest of Fear. Yet we neglect to notice that a Crone may well be a Hero in her own story -- as, for example, Agatha Christie's Ms. Marple -- or that a Warrior's Sidekick is likely to be a very different character from the Sidekick of a Prince.

The archetypal tools that we will be examining over the following set of lectures will allow you to understand why it is that in The Three Musketeers the reader is one the edge of his seat wondering whether D'Artagnan will successfully recover the diamond tags in time for the Queen to wear them to the ball, while in countless ill-executed science-fiction tales, the reader could not care less that the fate of an entire solar system hangs in the balance. They will also provide insight in the lesser fare that makes up the majority of a work -- why, for example, Javert's patently ridiculous suicide note reads as a masterful and thrillingly appropriate end to the policeman's life, or why we are so relieved every time Indiana Jones rescues his hat.

The answer to all of these questions is essentially the same: that what Indiana's hat, Ishmael's Neo-Platonism, the Queen of France's diamond tags, Smerdyokov's hanging, and Anderson's self-sacrificing mermaid have in common is that they are resonate archetypally. They reveal something that exists deep within the psyche of the reader. In the hightest works of literature, this intuitive knowledge is brought to the fore and then expanded upon, so that the reader goes away with a richer understanding of the contents of his own mind. In the merely popular classics, the archetypal tropes are played out in a way that reminds us of the deeper world that exists behind the superficial facts of everyday life. An understanding of these concerns allows us a greater appreciation of both, and may, in the final analysis, also leave us with a greater understanding of the human person, who is ultimately the subject of all narrative, great and small.

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