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 Lucus 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.

What is an Archetype?

An archetype is essentially a person, place, object, situation, image, creature – a noun – which functions like a form or pattern. They are universal, discoverable not only in literary and artistic narratives, but also in the private narratives that we create to order our lives and our histories. Archetypal characters, in their simplest forms, are instantly recognizable, and a great deal of primitive story-telling relies on the listener's ability to provide a wealth of associations to characters that are otherwise shallow, or practically non-dimensional. In fairy-tales, for example, if one encounters a Princess, one naturally assumes that she is virtuous, beautiful, and available to be wed, unless the tale specifically states otherwise.

This is not the same thing as stereotype. Archetypes are generally quite flexible. It is possible to have a Princess who is humble, like Cinderella, or who is ugly, or who ends tragically without ever meeting a Prince. A Princess could be a ballerina, or a piano player, or a leader of rebel forces opposing an evil empire. So long as most of the essential characteristics of the character are maintained, and those that are abandoned are deliberately excised, the archetype will still ring true. Stereotypes on the other hand, are limited: the beautiful, helpless, spotlessly virtuous damsel captured by a dragon is a stereotype, Princess Leia is a distinctive character who happens to archetypally be a Princess.

In the construction of narratives, archetypes are essential because they tap into the contents that are already present in the sub-conscious. This has several significant effects: it heightens the reader's engagement in the narrative, it allows readers to make important decisions about whether or not they find a story believable, and it allows authors to produce impactful text with great efficiency.

Readers generally latch on to things that they find familiar. This is why science fiction, in particular, always has to walk a careful line between the alien and the comprehensible: if a story includes notions like “the aliens don't see human colours, but a completely different spectrum unknown to the human eye,” and then proceeds to give labels to these alternative colours, a human reader has no way of relating, and will either artificially associate their own colour-experiences onto those that the author describes, or simply won't picture any colour at all. The same thing happens, on a subtler level, with themes and characters. A reader will generally reserve judgement on a character until they are able to relate them to someone similar – either real people that they know, or characters that they have seen in other stories. If the character is stereotypical, the reader will identify them quickly: this can often be used to comic effect, or to people a bustling narrative with minor characters who can't afford to be given proper development. Many readers, however, will quickly get bored if the main characters remain on the level of stereotype. Archetypal characters, on the other hand, provide the reader with a sense of familiarity, a framework from which to understand and relate to the character, while still providing the feeling that one is meeting a new and unique creation, and not merely a rehash of the same sword-weilding barbarian that we've seen a hundred times before.

Once the audience has, consciously or sub-consciously, identified an archetypal character, they feel safe making judgements about him: he's a hero, or she's a no-good woman. Such judgements are essential to building narrative: if an audience doesn't know who they are supposed to sympathize with, and they are forced to distrust everyone, they will feel very alienated from the story. This is why detectives in mystery stories are usually above suspicion. It is also why Twin Peaks, in which Agent Cooper is so obviously virtuous and heroic, is so successful, while HBO's Carnivale, in which the good characters aren't really particularly any more good than the evil ones, becomes progressively more disappointing before it finally collapses under its own weight. This is also why fans are so often incensed when someone in a long-running television series acts “out of character.” It is not that the viewer has seen that particular character, in that particular mood, in that particular situation before, and knows that they would do something different, but rather that the reader recognizes that the character has broken from their archetypal constraints without sufficient justification. It's as obviously wrong as Cinderella marching into the ball with a sword and demanding the Prince's hand in marriage or his head: it might be amusing as a Monty Python sketch, but it clearly is not the same character.

The sense of familiarity also allows for a kind of sub-conscious short-hand: the reader provides information from a wealth of sub-conscious archetypal associations and automatically fills in details that the author doesn't have time to provide. We are willing to accept, for example, that the narrator in Poe's “Cask of Amontillado” might believably trick a man into descending into some catacombs, there to brick him up and leave him to die for the sake of a minor insult, because we recognize something archetypal in him. His motivations don't seem insufficient because the content of our own subconscious, and our experience of literature and narrative in general, provides them.

On the level of character, archetypes are fairly universal. The same basic types can be found across cultures, though there do seem to be differences in terms of symbolism, colours, and names associated with those characters. Sorting this out is, unfortunately, often something of a mess, particularly because there is not a univerally accepted catalogue of names for archetypes, characters are often lumped together with one another on the basis of superficial details. One example is the common appearance of “Tricksters” in various different cultures. It is certainly true that self-interested, scheming characters that often engage heroes in deceptive contests or bets can be found in the mythology and folk-lore of nearly every culture, and that these characters are all archetypally Tricksters. However, the Trickster label is also sometimes used to identify gods or characters who use riddles to teach, or tricks to bring culprits to justice. This is quite sloppy: everyone knows that the riddling teacher is a sympathetic character who the incompetent and wayward hero ought to obey, just as surely as everyone knows that the fox gambling in the glen is trouble, no matter how nicely he speaks.

Squares

A plot is essentially a story constructed around the archetypal tensions and relationships of a group of characters, centering on a common goal or concern. This can be something as all-encompassing as “saving Middle Earth from a second darkness,” or something as small and specific as an old wood-carver's puppet becoming a real boy. In general, the degree to which a story impacts its audience – the degree to which it is something that will stay with the reader and be remembered as great several years after they have read it – is the degree to which this plot centres on significant human concerns and universal themes. A movie about which pizza-parlour is going to gain the patronage of the after-school crowd might provide some ephemeral amusement for a gaggle of thirteen year olds, but unless it finds a way to dove-tail pepperoni and double cheese with the eternal destiny of the human person it will ultimately get relegated to a back-closet of the mind, along with the theme-song from Barnie and Friends, and the secret codes for Super Mario Brothers.

All good plots are built on something which can be roughly described as a “square” of relationships. There are eight points on the square – four corners, and four sides. The corners represent the Hero, his (or her) Lover, the Villain, and the Hero's Nemesis. The Hero and the Villain are of the same gender; the Lover and the Nemesis are of the opposite sex. Some readers may object that there are stories where the Hero has a same-sex Lover, or where the Villain is of the opposite sex from the Hero. There are numerous possible reasons why this might be the case, and they will be treated at a later stage: however, it is necessary to look at the rules in their simplest form before we can start talking about exceptions. A simple plot is made using any two of these relationships: a simple Romance is made using a Hero and a Lover; a simple Heroic narrative is made using a Hero and a Villain; a simple tragedy is made using a Hero and a Nemesis. More complicated plots use three of these points – the Hero, for example, may be fighting with the Villain to see who gets the Lover; the Nemesis may be lurking in the shadows allowing the Villain to defeat the Hero, and so forth. A complicated and complete story can be made using all four points and nothing more – this is often the case, for example, in classic Film Noir – but most stories will neglect at least one of the corners and include several characters from along the sides of the square – that is to say, characters that support the action and perform important roles, but who aren't absolutely essential in defining the plot and determining the type of story.

These characters are the Sidekick, the Villain's Lieutenant, the Ball and Chain, and the Hapless Love. It is obvious from the lack of clear, single-word titles for most of these relationships that they are less common, and less imporant to most stories, than the relationships listed above, and that they need more explanation. The Sidekick is self-explanatory enough: Puck to Oberon, Jiminy to Pinnochio, Watson to Sherlocke Holmes – essentially, a character of the same sex who is friends with and assists the hero in completing the quest. The Villain's Lieutenant is the main henchman of the evil one; some writers on the subject of archetypal stories have opined that the Lieutenant is, in fact, more dangeous and imposing than the Villain (as in the case of Cinderella, where the Step-sisters are technically her direct rivals for the hand of the Prince, but there is no question that the Stepmother is the greater obstacle). This is not necessarily true (for reasons that we will discuss later), and in some cases the Lieutenant is a largely comic or impotent character – the photo-journalist in Apocalypse Now, for example, holds the position of Kurtz's Lieutenant but really isn't formidable in his own right so much as he serves to showcase how insane and formidable the Villain is.

The Ball and Chain is a form of minor villain; someone of the opposite sex who the Hero gets saddled with and who acts as an obstacle – often a comic obstacle – throughout the course of the story. In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the ditzy blonde is in a Ball and Chain relationship to Indy: she doesn't really do anything, and she isn't a serious impediment to his completion of his quest, but she is an irritation that he can't get rid of. Situation comedies are frequently built around this relationship: the Hero is married to his Ball and Chain, and the show deals with the ultimately trivial inconveniences that this occasions. The Hapless Lover is also of the opposite sex, obviously, but is a minor heroic character; depending on the type of plot she may be in love with the hero but unworthy of him, or the hero may be in love with her, but unworthy of her love. The relationship is one of unrequited love – Echo persuing Narcissus, for example. It can resolve only in a romantic tragedy, like the Hollywood Classic “Roman Holiday,” or in a Deus ex Machina that makes the hapless lover worthy of her love, as in the story of Cupid and Psyche.

It is possible to build a plot around these secondary relationships, but it is uncommon, and it usually involves making a work whose scope and implications are less serious, or less important than a plot built around the corners of the square. Simple childhood stories about a boy and his dog, or a frog and a toad, are Sidekick stories. They're touching stories about the power of friendship and co-operation, but unless a Villain, Nemesis or Lover is introduced, the stakes remain predictably low. Stories about a Hero destroying the Villain's Lieutenant are also common in children's television and literature – remember the endless cartoons where the Superhero would beat one after another of the Villain's mignions, but the Villain would always live to find a new Lieutenant and fight again? In general, plots built using one corner and one side of a square are good if you want to have a long-running series where the action never quite resolves itself – which may explain why so many light-weight night-time dramas involve a nauseatingly interminable unresolved affair between a heroine and a man who she is half in love with, but who is either never quite worthy of her, or whom she never quite manages to deserve. Gilmore Girls, I understand, has managed to keep this sort of Hapless Lover tale going for several seasons.

But, you might object, those Saturday morning cartoons did have a Villain, and often the Hero even had a Lover, so how can they be dismissed as Hero-Lieutenant stories? This is because a plot is built by deciding which character is going to be the foundational character for the story, and then choosing a primary relationship, which determines what sort of plot it will be. The character on whom the plot is founded will not necessarily be either the hero or the perspective character. Lord of the Rings, for example, is built around Sauron: without the dark Lord and his Ring, there is no story – Frodo would have lived a relatively quiet life at Bag End, and Aragorn would have been just another Ranger wandering around an elven forest, preserving the blood of the Dunedain for another generation. Rocky, on the other hand, is built around the character of Rocky: precisely whom his opponent happens to be is largely irrelevant (as evidenced by the fact that there are six Rocky movies, each with a different villain); the story is essentially about Rocky becoming all that Rocky can be.

These types only cover one of the types of archetype: archetype of relationship. A clean understanding of the relationships on a square (covered in introduction to square mechanics) is a good starting point for crafting a story, and has some use as a simple analytic tool, but until these archetypal relationships are being filled by archetypal characters, there is a great deal that can go wrong with the narrative. This is because there is not merely one square on which a story can take place, but five, each of which has a specific cast of archetypal characters, and a particular set of thematic concerns that are peculiar to it. Since there is no language spefically designed to refer to these five different types of plot-character squares, we will refer to them by assigning each a colour.

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Red

The red square is the province of thrones and true loves, treasures and seduction, conquering dragons and conquered shrews. The vast majority of romance stories take place on the red square, as do traditional treasure-hunting tales, pirate stories, and stories of battle for an ancient throne. Many very old narratives, such as the Illiad and the Odyssey, are red-square stories, as is the tale of David and Bathsheba, and most of the tales of the Brothers Grimm.

The colour red, as it is used here, is associated with the World, Wonder, the Body, Conquest, and Reward. Like all of the colours, this is an attempt to get at some idea or ideal that is fundamental and archetypal – and generally that doesn't have a single good word in English. The concept designated by red concerns the created realm, and the authority that exists within that realm. So, for example, if we wanted to speak of a “red” occupation, we might speak of politics, or of weaving: these are both areas of human life that are essentially bound to the service of the basic physical and political needs of a society; they both involve the imposition of a kind of order onto the stuff of existence, and they are, in some sense, an image of God's authorship of the Universe, spefically in terms of Him laying down an order or a law from which all things spring, and according to which everything thrives.

A red square plot is often concerned with order in the material world, which the breaking of that order, and with its restoration. This can be about the political order – as is the case, for example, in the legends of Robin Hood, in which the return of the rightful King brings to and end the corruption of authority, and returns the “outlaws” to an ordered place in society: since the laws are no longer unjust, it ceased to be lawful to break them for the sake of a higher justice. It can also be about the order of the heart: the Illiad is started because the rightful order of Meneleus' marriage is broken by the usurpation of Helen.

It can also be about marriage. There is a sense in which a marriage is a high symbol of order, of the integration of the created world, and of the prosperity and fertility that spring from the union of husband and wife. This is an idea that is somewhere lost in the modern world, because all of our images of marriage and the family are based on a disfunctionality model: we rarely conceive of marriage in terms of fertility and creativeness, but archetypally, these are the concerns that underly the union of the sexes. Indeed, if we look at the narrative of creation presented in Genesis – and at nearly every creation narrative presented across cultures – we find that there is, in the beginning, a separation of things: darkness from light, sea from firmament, day from night, sky from earth, and finally, male from female. All of these separations are necessary to creation: before them there is nothing, and the world is “without form and void,” but it also creates a dilemma: “It is not good that man should be alone.” Thus there needs to be a union, a “two-becoming one” in order to resolve the series of separations and legislations the give definition to the created world. This is also why, on an archetypal level, so many early myths refer to the sky as a husband and the earth as a wife. It is also why marriages are so often essential to stories about the destruction and renewal of the world: it is fitting that Persephone's marriage to Pluto leads to barreness and the loss of joy in the living world, and it is equally fitting that the entire Kingdom returns to life when the Prince kisses the Sleeping Beauty.

All of the stories about a rightful King seeking to reclaim his throne are Red Square stories, as are the vast majority of Romances. Of course, not all stories on the square take place with the “Right hand” characters – with those who are on the four corner positions. Stories of Princes and Princesses tend to be High Romance, and stories of Princes and Usurpers fill all of the “game of thrones” type plots. Stories about Princes and Sirens are relatively rare, but they cover the great tragic romances, as well as more obscure fairy tales, like the story of Princess Fioramanda, who lures the Princes that she is supposed to marry into her garden with her singing, only to entrap them as beads on her magic necklace.

So what of the other four characters? The Rogue, the Trickster, the Shrew and the Nymph? What sort of stories do they have, and why are they also considered to be “red” characters? Essentially, these characters take centre stage when you want to have a red square story that takes place, in a sense, on a lower level: one in which either the stakes are less grandiose, where the action is more realistic, grittier, more comic, etc. Take Indiana Jones, for example: a classic Rogue. While there is a sense in which the entire world hangs in the balance because, in some usually ill-defined way, the Nazis are guaranteed to win World War II if they're able to get hold of whatever treasure Indiana is seeking, this is not something that the viewer particularly believes, nor does it seem to be primary reason for the action of the story: indeed, we are repeatedly shown, in the mini-adventures at the beginning of each movie, that Indiana is primarily concerned with treasure, and he is willing to pursue it regardless of whether there are Nazis involved or not. This is even more pronounced in a tale like Treasure Island where there isn't even a pretence that the entire world is going to be plunged into darkness if Long John Silver gets the gold.

Likewise in the stories of a shrewish girl who refuses to eat, refuses to listen to her father, and gets into an endless series of ego-battles with the hero – but which inevitably ends with both the girl and her roguish young man laying aside their pride and prejudice in order to live happily ever after – there is usually nothing more at stake than the happiness of two young people and their families. The girl doesn't have half the Kingdom for a dowry, flowers don't spring up beneath her feet at every step, and if she happens to fall asleep the rest of the world will happily get on with its business undeterred. Or, in a story like “The Big Sleep,” the world is sure to go on as usual even if Humphrey Bogart doesn't end up with Lauren Becall or find out who has been demanding black-mail from the old man.

These stories are still on the Red Square: they deal with the same essential content, but scaled down. The marriage is no longer a cosmic reality that will bring harmony back to the world, but it is still a marriage, and it will still bring harmony to the lives of those who are enjoying it. The treasure is not a Kingdom, and the Rogue who takes possession of it doesn't have the power to renew the face of the earth, but there is always some sense in which he is either the rightful owner, or will return the treasure to its rightful place.

Yellow

The Yellow square is concerned primarily with the intangibles: unlike the Red Square, where prizes usually come in the form of a throne, a pile of gold, or a Princess, the stakes on the Yellow Square are usually more abstract: a championship, personal growth, illumination, success.

This is fitting because the colour Yellow refers to the realm of the abstract; to Ideas, Truth, Reason, Wisdom, Understanding. Typical Yellow occupations might include teaching and engineering; occupations in which there is some element of a puzzle that needs to be solved, or of wisdom that needs to be communicated.

It is worth noting that when you look at the Yellow Square heroes (the Magus, Mother, Disciple and Orphan), there is a relationship between the “right hand” characters (Magus and Mother) and the “left hand” characters (Disciple and Orphan) in their relationship to the world of the intellect. The Disciple and the Orphan are typically exceedingly intelligent in a traditional, book-smart way – like Marius from Les Miserables or Anne from Anne of Green Gables. The Magus and the Mother, on the other hand, often look like they ought to be stupid, when they are, in fact, wise.

A common theme in Yellow plots is the difference between appearance and reality. The villains will generally try to look as though they are working in the best interests of those around them, while the heroes will often appear to be selfish. Take, for example, the story of Daniel: the Wise Men are angry because Daniel has shown them up and won the King's favour by interpreting a dream (a very archetypal thing for a Magus to do), so they go to the King and say “Hey, wouldn't it be great if there was a law saying that people could only pray to you.” To the King, it looks as if they are thinking about him, and trying to help him do what will bring him greater glory, when in fact they are only motivated by their own vain ambitions. A similar situation is found in Sunset Boulevard – Norma Desmond, a classic Parasite, behaves as though the gifts that she gives to Joe are for his benefit, when in fact it becomes increasingly clear that they are a means of entrapping him so that she can play out her own demented dreams of stardom.

Yellow Square heroes, on the other hand, frequently strike a pose that seems proud, selfish, defiant, or even cruel – qualities that in any other story would instantly brand them a villain, or else in need of taming (like the Shrew on the Red Square). Marius marches out on his poor old grandfather; Heidi's grandfather leaves poor Clara to fend for herself without her wheel-chair on a alpine mountain-top; Mr. Miaggi makes Daniel paint his fence and wax his car; Maria flagrantly disobeys Captain Von Trappe and dresses his children in clothing made from old drapes. Yet it is clear in all of these stories – and particularly in those involving a Mother or a Magus, that what appears to be insensitivity or disobedience is actually a means of fulfilling the hero's duties towards those whom they love: Marius marches out on his grandfather and in doing so becomes the sort of man that his grandfather can be proud of; Clara, by being abandoned, relearns to walk; Daniel learns Karate by fixing Mr. Miagi's garden; and Maria's defiance allows her to give Captain Von Trappe the happiness, music, and family that he lost when he was widowed.

All of this is a means of playing out the notion of paradox which is essential to the highest forms of truth: that God is One, and also Three; that it is in losing one's life that one gains it; that it is the poor, the meek, the mourning, and the persecuted who are Blessed; that if you are hungry, you should give your bread to the starving; and so forth.

Ultimately, yellow square stories centre on two spheres of existence: on the idea of a home, and of belonging in the abstract, and on the idea of knowledge and insight, the exploitation of a gift. This is why Sunset Boulevard is a tragedy: Joe becomes so entrapped in Norma's obsession over gifts that she used and lost a long time ago, that he is unable to use his own gifts. In Star Wars, on the other hand, Luke rises to the challenges that Obiwan and Yoda set for him, and he becomes a Jedi warrior. Maria uses her talents to bring music to a group of children, and finds herself a family in the process. Anne of Green Gables fulfills her calling to be a writer, and also gains a family and a home.

Green

The green square centres on the realm of the human heart -- not in the romantic sense, but in terms of sinfulness, disease, hunger, hatred, vengeance, law, mercy, forgiveness, love. The essence of a green square plot is always relational -- if there are few characters, then loneliness and isolation may become significant features of the story.

Most modern war movies, the majority of westerns, many Victorian psychological novels, and nearly all Film Noir takes place on the Green square.

The right hand heroes on this square are concerned, primarily, with the care and salvation of others. They may have a flock that they are specifically responsible for (Schindler with his flock of Jewish prisoners), they may intercede for the sake of a specific group (Esmeralda pleading the cause of the gypsies), or they might seek the salvation of a single individual (Colonel Trautman calling Rambo peacefully home.) They are often to be found attending to the sick and dying, suffering with those who are commended to them, offering support and courage to flagging spirits, standing steadfastly alongside those whom they love.

The left-hand heroes are a different ball of wax entirely. They are, in some ways, the darkest of heroic types, and the most likely to appear to behave like villains. The Avenger and the Adulteress are often out-casts from society, people who have lost everything and been denied all human comforts for the sake of their sins. They may, like Anna Karenina, lose their family and children; they may be hunted by the law and despised by men, like Joe Money in Unforgiven. At the lighter end of the spectrum, they are men like Jean Valjean who have been unjustly persecuted for minor infractions, and whose deep and heart-felt contrition is truly inspiring because they have so much less to atone for than most of us, and have already been made to suffer far more for their trifling sins than we have for shaking our fists in the face of God. On the darker end, you find someone like Raskolnikov, who has committed an unjust murder, and who is redeemed by embracing his guilt and expiating it through suffering. For both left hand heroes, the price of redemption is confession: when their stories end well, it is because they accept and apologize for their guilt, and thus unite their darkest deeds into the "happy sin of Adam" which won us Christ's redemption.

The right-hand villains, in contradistinction to the left-hand heroes, are likely to believe that they are heroic and justified, when they are evil in fact. These are the white-washed sepulchres, the phariseeical and the self-righteous, the good wife and the upright man in their worst possible incarnation. Like the police-chief in First Blood, Javert in Les Miserables, and Jezebel in the biblical story, these are people who appear to be respectable, who have the support and force of the law behind them, who are unimpeachable in the eyes of society. They are fanatically devoted to their duties, to their families, their husbands, their own kind -- but this devotion creates in them a blindness to their own faults, and to the goodness of those who are not like them. World War II movies find themselves so often on the Green square because the Nazi officer, perfectly obedient, ruthless in applying the law, and celebrated amongst his own kind, is a perfect type of The Law. Their villainy, ultimately, rests in the fact that they are incapable of mercy, and that they cannot recognize the face of God in the poor, the unfortunate, the down-trodden and the outsider.

The left-hand villains on this square are the most forgivable and comprehensible of villains, and often the most sympathetic. Theirs are the vices that most of us are prone to succumb to -- we may find it impossible to understand why someone would want to consume human livers, or murder their brother for a pailful of berries and some red slippers, but we are all capable of understanding why someone might do evil for fear of the consequences of doing good. The Coward and the Whore are essentially in the same boat as the the Adulteress and the Avenger: they must all choose between worldly comfort and moral goodness; security and justice. The Coward doesn't, strictly speaking, do anything, and he doesn't want to be associated with evil: he is the classic Pontius Pilate, who makes a good show of pleading for Christ's release, but then washes his hands of the whole affair when it becomes clear that he will not be able to do what is right without sacrificing the respect of the world. The Whore says of her sins, "I was born in poverty, I was deprived of all that others have been given, I have been made to suffer -- therefore my transgressions are the fault of someone else. How could I have been other than what I am?" Carmen is a classic example, dancing from one petty piece of villainy to another, leaving behind her a wake of broken hearts and shattered lives for which she accepts no responsibility, but which ultimately lead to her destruction.

In the end, the characters of a Green Square plot are made or broken on the strength of their humility, their ability to offer and accept mercy, their commitment or failure to do what is just. Their stories sound out the reaches of the human heart, and map the face of self-sacrificing love.

Blue

       
The blue square is, in many ways, the darkest of the squares. This is the long dark night of the archetypal soul: its villains are consummate or insane in their villainy, its heroes can succeed only through suffering and death. Its themes are courage, strength, perseverance, victory, insanity, martyrdom, and rape.

Epic fantasy, horror, Gothic novels, Norse legends, and suspense thrillers tend to place themselves on the Blue Square. Lord of the Rings, the Last Unicorn, The Ring of the Niebelung, Rocky, Cape Fear and Apocalypse Now are classic examples of Blue Square plots.

The essence of a good Blue Square story lies in the fact that it is impossible for the heroes to win. In the case of the right-hand heroes -- the Virgin and the Prophet -- this is particularly pronounced. Like Selma in Dancer in the Dark, they are defenseless innocents in the shadow of inconquerable evils. Ultimately, they win -- but unless they are saved by a timely deus ex machina, like the eagle that swoops down to pick up Sam and Frodo from the sinking shores of Mordor, they win by dying.

For the Valkyrie and the Warrior, success is a little easier to attain: they look like a long shot, doomed from the outset, but provided that they are willing to make inhuman acts of courage and perseverance, victory is in hand. If Rocky is willing to be punched in the head for long enough, eventually his weakness (left-handedness) will become his strength, and he'll be able to win. Provided Chyna in Dean Koontz's Intensity has the courage to follow the insane serial killer to his lair, to keep her head, struggle against any obstacle, and keep dragging her weary carcasse around after it's battered to the point of near uselessness, she's sure to make it out alive and save the girl to boot.

On the villains side, the Blue Square provides the greatest opportunity for terror and incomprehensible evil. Here you find the demented mad-men who want to destroy the world -- not for any particularly clear reason -- who hope to cover Middle Earth in a second darkness, who take delight and pleasure in savagery and violation. Villains on this square cannot be reasoned with, they are immune to compassion and understanding, they tend to know that they are evil and to revel in it, or else to have redefined "good" in such a way that it is indistinguishable from atrocity.

The insanity of the Blue Square hero lies in the fact that they are willing to hope against hope. The Prophet, to the world, may seem to be a raving lunatic; the Virgin's willingness to sacrifice herself looks like folly; the Warrior seems like a stupid lunk; and the Valkyrie seems to weak and feminine to do the serious, masculine work of fighting beasts. It is, in any case, and insanity that lies in a fanatical devotion to goodness, for which the heroes are willing to lay down their lives.

The insanity of the villains is the classic, inhuman type of insanity. The Sun-King may appear to be polished, powerful, and world-wise, but, like King Haggard in The Last Unicorn, he is willing to go to reckless lengths to realize an ultimately insane vision. The Victim is a woman who is devoted to her own self-destruction, who takes delight in seeing herself immolated, who positively steeps in the wrongs that have been done to her -- the ghost in the Japanese horror classic Ringu is a good example of a Victim: she is willing to do insanely creepy things, and even to kill, for the sake of having her victimhood trumpeted before the world. The Amazon is intent on thinking of herself as a man, often to the point of actually hating other women, and even of offering them up as rape victims to her lover, the Beast. The Beast, of course, is completely mad -- though the majority of well done Beasts, unlike their opponent, the Warrior, are not stupid, but possess a hideously deformed intelligence. Kurtz in Apocolypse Now is a perfect example of the type: he sees himself as a sort of philosopher, but as the climactic comparisons between the slaughtering of the man and the slaughter of a sacrificial cow makes so clear, he has, in fact, completely lost his humanity.

Blue Square stories often contain a supernatural element -- the Victim frequently appears as a Ghost and Beasts may easily be replaced by slavering monsters, and Sun-Kings may well resort to sorcery to realize their visions. On the heroic side, victory can often not be attained in this world; if the story is to end with the heroes triumphant, then there must be the implication, if not the explicit appearance, of another world, higher and greater than this.

White

White is, in a sense, the consummation of the colour structure that we are using. Like the notion of “quintessence” in the ancient theory of elements, White represents wholeness, integration, and the highest reality. It can be called Beauty, in the sense that beauty is a fusion of form and content; Self, because the self is the inegration of all of the elements of personality; Justice, in the sense that justice is the culmination of the world; or Order, the proper alignment of everything according to its essence.

In narrative, the White square is fundamentally concerned with the restoration of justice under the aegis of truth, with the possibility of order arising out of apparent choas or randomness, and with the notion that reality inevitably reveals itself and nothing can be swept under the rug.

Several classic White square stories include: mysteries, which account for the majority of modern work on this square; folk stories about a Fool who goes out to seek his fortune; and comedies in which a Mule and a Fool mutually destroy each other.

Comedy, in fact, is a major element of most works on the White square – perhaps because there is a certain sort of detachment, and a certainty of the underlying order of the work that allows the reader to see the humour in things. Alfred Hitchcock's works, which are almost exclusively White square stories, are typical in this sense – comedic elements often emerge naturally, seemlessly, and appropriately in stories about murder and suspense.

The right hand characters are less likely than those on the left to find themselves in a conspicuously comic role. Poirot, Columbo and Ms. Marple – two classic Judges and a Crone – certainly have comic elements, but ultimately they have be taken seriously, and they are very dangerous to those who presume otherwise. It is worth noting that in their stories, it is not the consequences that are important, but finding the truth. In a Green square Avenger plot, for example, it is extremely important to the reader to see that justice is done – the Avenger must not only confront the evil one, he must also exact the price of the villain's sins. On the White square this is almost irrelevant. No one reading a mystery is really particularly concerned that the villain be brought to justice; it is somehow assumed that once their villainy has been brought into the light, justice will follow as a natural consequence.

Left hand heroes on the White square are very often comic. The Fool and the Simpleton sound like they would be stupid, but they often are not – one classic device often found in Grimm's fairy tales is the appearance of a “clever” girl whose intelligence is world-reknowned, but whose lack of basic common sense turns her cleverness into a curse. Basically, it's a matter of authorial intent: a Fool or Simpleton who is too smart for their own good has wonderful comic appeal, while the same characters, when made “simple” in the traditional sense, gain a vulnerability that is extremely sympathetic and appealing. Forrest Gump is an excellent example. The essence of their stories lies in the idea that, by going willy-nilly from one thing to another, without planning or knowing what will happen next, the hero may succeed. These characters are “feathers on the breath of God,” endowed with an infallible ability to make plans go awry, and an equally infallible luck that turns failure on its head and brings about victory in spite of the hero's incompetence.

Character studies of the right-hand villains are difficult, because, like the Judge and Crone, they generally try to keep a low profile, and to remain unassuming, but unlike the right-hand heroes, the story is rarely from their perspective. They are, essentially, concealing something, but there is generally a sense that they are running out of places to hide as the narrative progresses. The Witch often has a supply of beauty – traditionally symbolized by teeth – which, when it runs out, will show the world what she really is. Agatha Christie in “A Murder is Announced,” uses this to great effect: when the villainess is finally revealed, a choker of pearls is pulled off to reveal a disfiguring scar that proves her guilt. The Accuser has a supply of excuses and misdirections – often clues that specifically point to, or accuse, another character of his crimes. Almost every episode of Columbo is essentially the story of a Judge following around an Accuser, listening to his accusations, and waiting until his excuses run out and he is trapped in a web of his own lies.

The left-hand villains are an odd pair: the Mule is almost never seen in anything but a comic manifestation, and Cripple is usually sinister. Part of this has to do with mystery plotting – Cripples are archetypally inclined to commit elaborate murders, so they make good villains in murder mysteries. They also provide excellent material for character studies of the warped and insane; Dostoyevski's “Underground Man,” and the narrator of Poe's “A Cask of Amontillado” are both Cripples of this type. It should be noted that the Cripple need not necessarily be crippled in a physical sense: his deformity or disability may be mental, social, professional, or moral, though a game leg or a touch of epilepsy helps to give it away to the reader. The Mule, on the other hand, is a meddler, a sticker-of-fingers into other people's business, a woman who is so busy imposing her idea of order on the lives of others that her own life falls into disorder. They are also useful in mysteries – usually as the victim. They also make excellent comic wives for Fools and Judges: in the former case, their marriage will be a litany of choas, like that of Cybil and Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers, in the latter the Mule will be a source of comic inconvenience to the hero, as Hilda is to Rumpole.

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.

Applications and Implications

What is the use of knowing the archetypal relationships between characters, the symbols that haunt various literary traditions, and the types of stories that emerge from the tensions and desires of different archetypal people?

The most obvious application is for the composer of narrative: whether you are a story-teller, a novelist, a poet, a film-maker, a dramatist, or an actor, archetype is the fabric of your artistic life. For someone crafting a narrative, an understanding of archetypal tensions can be instrumental in culling parts of a story that somehow just don't work, in weeding out unnecessary complications and characters who are a poor fit, and in adding more psychological punch to scenes. This is not a substitute for inspiration: several Hollywood Writer's seminars seem to have stumbled across a couple of the archetypal rubrics – particularly the Princess/Prince/Usurper story, and the Warrior and Valkyrie vs. Sun-King story. Uninspired, card-board characters are plonked down into the story, symbols are used with relatively little meaning or impact, and everything proceeds very straight-forwardly, without surprises. The result is a devolution into stereotype: the archetypal content is not revealed in a new and surprising way, but merely repeated, with superficial variation. An understanding of narrative and character absolutely cannot be substituted for inspirations, images, and real characters who are actually alive within the psyche of the author. It can, however, be used to hone and focus inspirations that have already been unearthed.

For poets, visual artists, and prose writers, an understanding of archetype can key the psyche into some of the words and images that ring true within the human mind. Certain words, ideas, and symbols have tremendous power – what I usually call “archetypal resonance,” particularly when they are paired with similar or related archetypal ideals. This is why something like Tennyson's “Lady of Shallot,” which is practically incomprehensible viewed as a literal narrative, and which immediately becomes disappointing or debased the moment that it is straight-jacketed into any sort of allegorical rubric, is so successful. Even if the story does not, strictly, make sense, we recognize its archetypal truth, and so it is meaningful.

For actors and directors, an understanding of archetype can be useful in developing an interpretation of a play. Discussions of different “interpretations” of a story or a character are often the result of archetypal transpositions: did this particular company choose to play Ophelia as a plucky Orphan who eventually falls into a fantasy world and goes insane, or did they decide to make her a miserable and vaguely spectral Victim from the first scene of the play? Good scripts are often open to many different archetypal interpretations – and an understanding of archetypal relationships can mean the difference between a successful, ground-breaking production that explores the characters in a new, but still entirely valid, way, and one which breaks the play apart at the seams and turns it into a hopelessly pretentious “avant-garde” mess.

Archetypal theory is also of benefit to critics – both “literary” critics who seek to understand the nature and meaning of works, and also for “popular” critics, who decide what is good, and what is bad, and what ought to be recommended to Joe and Jane. So often, one has the feeling that something is wrong, but can't quite put one's finger on it. This character seems out of place, that plot-line seems hackneyed. Seeing how the story has strayed from archetype very often makes these matters clear. It also makes it clear why some things seem to have merit, and others do not.

Finally, an understanding of archetype stands as a bulward against modern theories of art which make it impossible to judge or distinguish “good” art from “bad,” except on the grounds of subjective opinion. Philosophy of art has floundered, in recent years, when asked to provide some sort of standards. The theories of Aristotle are too simple to be fully applicable to all modern art forms. The aristocratic idea of a “cultivated taste” is nonsensical if the cultivation doesn't amount to something concrete, that could be described to the masses. People are understandingly unwilling to accept the argument that good works will survive the “test of time” -- especially since they want to know which of the movies in the theatre they ought to go and see this week-end. More to the point, though, we want to understand why the great works survived: what made that great arbiter, Chronos, single them out as worthy of longevity?

Archetype seems to be a way of penetrating these questions, of providing the service which criticism is meant to provide: of showing what is good, in order that others, by understanding the principles of Truth and Beauty, may create new Masterpeices to enlighten the world.

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