Sources of Archetype

If it is to be argued that these concerns, these characters, and these conceits are archetype, and not merely stereotype or convention, then they must be universal. If the Witch's supply of beauty was merely a standard stock-in-trade of mystery writers, then it could easily be dismissed as nothing more than a motif typical of the genre. Archetypes are archetypal because they are equally applicable to works that cross boundaries of culture, time, and genre.

There are five basic sources that we have consulted in order to discover the system of archetypal relations that underlies the literature of the West. It is worth noting that it is, specifically, the archetypal system of the Western world – not because it is fundamentally inapplicable to the East, but because the Eastern scale of archetypes is something like the quarter tone musical scale: it is based on the same essential principles, but it rings out notes that are foreign to the Western ear and makes the notes to which we are accustomed to sound in a way that is unfamiliar. For the moment, however, we will assume a primarily Western readership, and will stick with Western sources.

These sources are of five major types: Mythic, Scriptural, Poetic, Literary, and Dramatic. Dramatic, here, includes the modern drama of the silver screen. The divide between the mythic and the scriptural is essentially one of historicity: a scripture is a record of historical events, filtered through an archetypal lens so that they reflect eternal truths, whereas a myth is an expression of archetype divorced from time – hence the fact that most myth cycles occur in the time before man came into existence, or even before the world had come to be, and that there is no coincidence between the events within the myth and actual, discoverable historical facts.

The simplest forms from which to extract archetypal information are those which have been through a process of oral tradition: retellings, extending from an original story-teller through successive generations, will generally distill a plot down to its archetypal resonances. Stories that are cross cultural – such as the story of Cupid and Psyche, which appears in various cultural retellings such as “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” -- are particularly valuable, because reading multiple versions makes it easy to disentangle the particular limbs of flourishes of the individual storyteller from the archetypal essence of the story. For this reason, in forming a preliminary understanding of archetype it is often best to go back to the classics – to Homer, to Grimm, and to the myths of Greece, Egypt and Scandinavia. Other particularly rich fields are Hollywood's Golden Age in the early to middle 20^th Century, and the classic of literature in any culture. Generally, works with the strongest archetypal content are those that are able to succeed outside of their particularly cultural and temporal melieux.

Poetry is a particularly interesting source, because in successful narrative poems, one often finds archetypal material divorced from the necessities of plot and character. Tennyson's “Lady of Shallot” is a perfect example: read as a literal depiction of events, it is almost complete nonsense. Read as a set of archetypal images and events, it makes complete sense. This is why it has resonated so strongly with readers in the century and a half since it was composed. Homer's great epic – the Oddysey – is similar, though not exactly the same. Odysseus' wanderings make for a great story, but they don't exactly follow naturally, one from the other. In many ways, they are a series of disconnected episodes, and not a single mimetic plot (unlike, for example, that other great work of Greek literature that Aristotle uses as one of the great examples of mimesis: Oedipus the King). These episodes do, however, posses a strong cohesive force because they are archetypally linked. The inhabitants of the various islands that Odysseus encounters are not random; they are a progression that makes archetypal sense, and they are unified by their archetypal relations to the hero.

Scripture is, in many ways, the most difficult to analyse, because it always contains a mixture of the historical and the eternal. This means that the characters are not pure archetype: real human beings will generally spread beyonds the bounds of their own archetypal boundaries, and may fulfill multiple archetypal roles in relation to different people and situations in their lives. People in scripture may demonstrate the same tendencies, so while scriptures remain a good source of archetypal events – often containing archetypal material in a very pure form – it is often difficult (though generally not impossible) to interpret the life of any given scriptural persona in the light of archetypal form.

Drama presents another interesting challenge, because there is always the matter of interpretation. Whereas a book is more or less a finished work, with set characters and action, a play or screen-play is a malleable script. Like a musical composition, much is set down, but much remains to the particular interpretation of the performers. Many of the greatest works of the stage are difficult to analyze because of this versatility: any given performance, if it is inspired and well-directed, will include a clear archetypal pattern; but there may be mutiple patterns possible within the same play. This is particularly true of the great masters of theatre, and especially in Shakespeare (a matter that we will treat in detail in a later course.) Movies are simpler because one rarely reads a screen-play apart from its realization on film, and so there is a single “orthodox” interpretation of the script, set down by the actors and the director of the work. This is part of the reason that certain directors tend to produce works centred on a particular square – Alfred Hitchcock's love of the White square, for example, or Tarkovski's fixation on Yellow plots.

Literature tends to provide the most detailed information on complicated transformations of archetypal relationships and plots. Great literature – whether it is Dostoyevski or Moby Dick – will tend to play with archetype in interesting ways. As a source for starting to understand archetypal relations, this can make it confusing. While many of the great works provide excellent examples of archetype, they can be perplexing because they may rely on sophisticated devices that use multiple different plots or squares, that knit together two archetypes to form a single character, and so forth. Generally, when analyzing literature for archetypal form, it's best to stick to relatively simple works, or only try to work out the relationships between the most important and closely related characters to begin with, and then work outwards into the more complicated areas of the plot.

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