The Persistence of the Archetype
Bert O. States
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 2. (Winter, 1980), pp. 333-344.
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The Persistence of the Archetype Bert 0. States
The image of the past preserved internally is alluring, so much so
that it still holds us in thrall. T o justify it, we commonly borrow
from biology the notion of phylogenetic inheritance, as did Freud,
for example, in his theory of "primal scenes." Myths and archetypes lay claim to the same status: their antecedence in the
genetic order seems to assure them, perforce, a central position
and function in the structural order, as though their belonging to
the past of the species were credentials sufficient to make them the
interiority (the inside) of the individual.
-JEAN
STAROBINSKI'
The lure of myth and the primal scene feeds this marvelous and enduring casuistry: it enables us to put the outside on the inside, where nostalgia tells us it ought to belong. In criticism, it takes the form of a reverse
colonization whereby we vigorously annex our literature to the past. If
we end with nothing of our own, we inherit all of history, which is to say
that history somehow inhabits us-thanks to the persistence of the archetype.
Starobinski views this so-called history of assimilation as being, in
reality, a "history of successive evictions" which leaves us stranded on the
"hazardous outside," looking back into the Sacred Grove through a
chink in history's thickening wall. The question I would pose for criticism, as an extension of this thesis, is: What is it then thatpersists? What is an
1. Jean Starobinski, "The Inside and the Outside,"HudsonReview 28 (Autumn 1975):
333.
0 1980 by T h e University of Chicago. 0093-189618010702-0004$01.00
334
Bert 0. States
The Persistence of the Archetype
archetype? At best, surely, a felt presence, a sort of quark in the structure
of time whose existence we can only posit as being necessary to explain
the phenomenon of unintentional recurrence. In fact, unlike the quark
(which, as I write, we have just caught streaking boldly through matter),
the archetype is not discrete at all but the ghost of a former form,
endlessly migratory, infinitely tolerant of new content, ever fresh, ever
archaic. But to come down to cases: What exactly are we perceiving when
we discover an old myth in the basement of a newer literary work?
Some years ago I had a characteristic "mythic" experience which in
fact marks the beginning of these speculations. I was rereading Cyrano de
Bergerac, and it suddenly dawned on me that I knew this plot from
another source. Here, it seemed to me, were the basic ingredients of the
myth of Philoctetes, the Greek warrior who was exiled from the Troybound army because of an offensive wound; in exiling Philoctetes however, the army had inadvertently exiled Hercules' famed bow without
which Troy cduld not be taken-hence the necessity of somehow bringing Philoctetes, bad smell and all, back into the society of his fellow
warriors. A number of important points must be screened out to make
the Philoctetes story fit Rostand's play, but this much at least captures
what Edmund Wilson some years ago identified as the archetypal interest of the Philoctetes plot: the pariahlsavior who stands in what we might
call a minuslplus relation to society. Like Philoctetes, Cyrano is, on one
hand, physically offensive because of his grotesque nose but, on the
other, gifted in the skills of swordsmanship and eloquence which are
indispensable for successful campaigns in this courtly world. In short,
what Cyrano has in common with the Philoctetes story is, as Wilson says,
the idea of "genius and disease," superior strength and disability, bound
inextricably together.
Following the experience, I began seeing Philoctetes everywhere: in
all those tales, for example, which center about ugly people, or ducklings, who are discovered to have beautiful souls and in that broad class
of fairy tales and novellas in which frogs are converted to princes and
kitchen maids are discovered to be of royal birth or, by virtue of their
undeserved hardships, to have attracted the patronage of fairy godmothers: moreover, are not many stories of overcompensation based on
just this principle of the gifted pariah? And what of the genre of the
moral tale? Consider the story of Rudolph, that lovable Horatio Alger of
the reindeer world, whose grotesque electronic nose saves Christmas by
piloting Santa's sleigh through the foggy night. Any shelf of children's
Bert 0. States, professor of dramatic art at the University of
California at Santa Barbara, is the author of Irony and Drama: A Poetics
and The Shape of Paradox: A n Essay on "Waitingfor Godot." He is currently
writing a book on the phenomenology of theater.
Critical Inquiry
Winter 1980
335
literature is bound to turn up at least one story titled "The Little Train
That Could," "Tommy Saves the Town," or "Billy Saves the Space
ProgramM-all of which are designed to teach the wonderful lesson that
inferiority or "wounds" are only skin deep and that you had better think
twice before you write off the weakling, the young, the different, or the
out~ider.~
It would be absurd to say that these fictions have anything to do with
the Philoctetes myth being somehow imprinted on our consciousness.
Yet the criticism of m y t h - o r at least of unintentional myth3-tacitly or
openly makes some such assumption and rests on little more evidence of
"debt" than I have mustered here. My suggestion is that it would be much
more reasonable to view all of these fictions as tragic, comic, folkloric,
and didactic variations of a social tension that is as old as society itself. In
short, society, like Starobinski's history of evictions, unavoidably consists,
among other things, of insiders and outsiders ("No inside is conceivable
. . . without the complicity of an outside on which it reliesv),*and in the
2. This same story situation, referred to by some anthropologists as the rnyth of
Cinderella o r the outcast hero, is also prevalent in the mythology of North American
Indians where it serves quite different social functions. According to Dmitry M. Segal, it
refers to "the facts of the social organization of primitive tribes, to the great importance of
the collectivity in primitive social organization, to the enormous significance of the transition from the state of exclusion from the collectivity which goes with being young
(synonymous with rejection), and to the entry into the collectivity" ("The Connection
between the Semantics and the Formal Structure of a Text," in Mythology: Selected Readzngs,
ed. Pierre hlaranda [n.p., 19721, p. 220). T h e Cinderella situation is also widespread in the
folklore of the Ulithi Atoll in the western Pacific, as documented by William A. Lessa
("Discoverer-of-the-Sun: Mythology as a Reflection of Culture," in ,Wythology). For example: "The reversal of fortune by heroes who conquer the odds and emerge triumphant
constitutes an important stylistic theme in Ulithian stories. T h e winners are tender-aged,
deformed, insane, poor, low-caste, scorned, o r otherwise without apparent prospect of
success. . . . Out of my original collection of twenty-four tales I have ascertained that almost
half have as their dominant idea the triumph of the handicapped underdog" (p. 99).
There are significant differences between these tales and the Philoctetes situation, of
course. My point is that the situation of the outcast or handicapped hero is endlessly useful:
thematically, it is a way of dealing with a whole set of perennial social problems concerned
with the reabsorption of the rejected outsider into the group; and, as pure fiction, it
gratifies our natural interest in stories with strong pathos (an undeserving victim), a
maxirnutn reversal (coming from behind to win), and a liberal dose of poetic justice.
3. By unintentional myth I mean the possible presence in a work of literature of
mythic materials (fragments, structures, images, etc.) not intended by the author. It is, of
course, a moot point as to whether an author knows (and how he knows) he is dealing in
myth. In any case, I am not concerned with the conscious use of myth and archetype that
we find in Racine (Euripides), Milton (the Bible), o r Joyce (Homer). I realize that Sophocles' Phzloctetes and other Greek plays to be discussed here are not myths at all but selfconscious literary works that may have grown out of myths. Rightly o r wrongly, however,
such plays, along w ~ t hthe Homeric epics and the Bible, constitute the chief source of
archetypes in later literature to which rnyth criticism addresses itself.
4. Starobinski, "The Inside and the Outside," p. 342. Starobinski is talking about an
altogether different sort of inside and outside in this essay; but certain aspects of his
argument are appropriate here.
336
Bert 0. States
The Persistence of the Archetype
drama of human relations there are always times when you can't tell
which is which. The "Philoctetes-Cyrano situation" is thus a highly versatile model of an inevitable problem. Reverse the emphasis-put the
plus before the minus, the savior before the pariah-and you have
Christ and Ibsen's Dr. Stockman, or the exile and/or destruction of the
"strong man" who stands alone and becomes the enemy of the people he
would rescue from their own sins.
If this is true, where does that leave the archetype? If you think of
the similarities in these stories as springing from the realm of social
problem solving or problem putting, what Kenneth Burke calls "literature as equipment for living," what happens to our concept of the archetype as the persistence of the archaic word? I am not denying that
there is at times a subtler relation between myth and fiction or that a poet
might consciously or unconsciously create a work that depends for its
deepest effect on an oscillation with myth; I'm simply suggesting that
what we often call an archetype (imbedded in a later fiction) may not be
an archetype at all--or if so, that archetypes, so broadly defined, are
impossible to avoid in literature, having much the same inevitability as
the curve, the straight line, and the angle in painting and architecture.
Let us take a more difficult case, one of the best-known transmigrations of an archetype in literature. Surely, as Gilbert Murray was the first
English critic to note, there must be a line of mythic continuity between
Hamlet and Orestes, the son of Greek myth who was ordained to avenge
his father's foul and unnatural murder. There are impressive analogues
between Aegisthus and Claudius, Clytemnestra and Gertrude, Pylades
and Horatio, and Electra and Ophelia. Jan Kott has recently suggested
that the Orestes-Electra energy is further condensed into Hamlet himself: "From the end of the first scene of Act V, Hamlet is in the situation
of Orestes, while through the first four acts he was in the situation of
Electraaeprived of his rights, dependent on his father's murderer,
threatened, like Electra, with exile or death."j Moreover, as Kott goes on
to show, a good many of Electra's mother-hatred and father-love
speeches can be put "almost literally" in Hamlet's mouth.
This latter point seems like an interesting apercu until you try to
imagine how it could have been otherwise. All Kott is really saying is that
for four acts Hamlet must manifest some form of powerlessness or that
the dramatist must invent some sort of Electra energy to keep his hero
from dispatching his enemy early on, just as he must have a form of
Orestes or "killer" energy to conclude the play. The most interesting
thing I learn from Kott's idea, in fact, is the way it inadvertently emphasizes the difference between the Greek way of developing a plot and the
Shakespearean way. Without any qualms at all, the Greek playwright
5. Jan Kott, The Eatzng of the Gods: An Interpretatzon of Greek Tragedy, trans. Boleslaw
Taborski and Edward J . Czerwinski (New York, 1973), p. 254.
Critical Inquiry
Winter 1980
337
could use the "diptych" technique of dividing his heroic energy between
two characters who could perform successive functions in the plot.
Shakespeare tried this occasionally (e.g.,Julius Caesar) and, as the record
shows, gave us all sorts of interesting work defending the unity of the
play.
As for the larger parallels: if your drama is about filial vengeance,
you inherit a more or less basic set of plot and character functions-at
the least, the memory (or ghost) of a father, his murderer, and a son or
daughter, or both. This isn't really a very promising fiction, however,
until you begin putting impediments in the avenger's path, giving him
allies with whom he can talk and plan, and accounting for the other
parent who lives on. Needless to say, the very curve of the plot would
naturally provoke certain set speeches (the lament for the dead fatherking, hatred for his murderer, the hero's moral confusion at the idea of
blood-vengeance, and so on), without which the drama would be unimaginable. Obviously there are other ways of handling revenge drama,
and it is quite possible that the Orestes story may indeed have been
passed textually or by folk tradition to Saxo Grammaticus, who put it in
modern European dress for Belleforest, the author of the Ur-Hamlet,
and Shakespeare. But the "debt" could be accounted for even without
such a palpable history and certainly without the murky assumption of
an "internal" transmission.%iven the fact that until recently society's
(and hence drama's) main concerns have centered about the problems of
"degree, priority, and place . . . , Office, and custom, in all line of order"
(as Ulysses puts it), wouldn't it be surprising if a situation involving such
basic parent-offspring relationships, unfolding at the very pitch of social
hierarchy, had died on the Greek vine and didn't reappear spontaneously in something like the saga of Amleth? Surely such a relevant situation requires no archetypal passage-unless, once again, by archetype we
mean something as general as Northrop Frye's "symbol . . . which recurs
often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one's
literary experience as a whole"' or, as I am putting the case here, recognizable as an element of man's social experience as a whole.
T o trace variants of such an archetype through the literature of the
world is, to be sure, a fascinating project. If nothing else, it appeals to the
metaphorical pleasure we take in coupling like forms. But somewhere
along the line studies of the recurrence of myth in later literature tend to
fall victim to what we might call the homing instinct. Once the idea of
priority exerts its pull, along with the assumption that the archaic word is
6. Gilbert Murray, for instance, finds "a strange, unanalyzed vibration below the
surface" of the Orestes and Hamlet stories, "an undercurrent of desires and fears and
passions, long slumbering yet eternally familiar, which have for thousands of years lain
near the root of our most intimate emotions and been wrought into the fabric of our most
magical dreams" (The Classical Tradition zn Poet? [Cambridge, Mass.. 19271, pp. 23'3110).
7 . Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.. 1957), p. 365.
338
Bert 0 . States
The Persistence of t h Archetype
~
somehow purer and closer to nature, the critic can only view the newer
term in the archetypal metaphor as a post hoc displacement of the
"original" and not as a thing in its own right which may simply have
adapted a standard design in the structural order for altogether different purposes. The paradigm of this kind of thinking-and certainly its
scientific authorization-was of course established by Freud. With respect to drama, it appears most succinctly in his comparison of Oedipus
and Hamlet. Oedipus is nearer to its raw source in "primaeval dreammaterial," as expressed in Jocasta's line about men "ere now" dreaming
of laying with their mothers. But in Hamlet "the changed treatment of the
same material reveals the whole difference in the mental life of these two
widely separated epochs of civilization: the secular advance of repression
in the emotional life of mankind" (italics mine).$ In other words, what
Freud poses as the operative "difference" between the epochs of Sophocles and Shakespeare is the advance of a defense mechanism, which is
hardly an advance at all: the psychic materials of myth simply sink
deeper beneath the crust of a censored exteriority where they magically
exert their influence in symbolic forms.
This concept of "living" myth made it possible to explain any recurrence of an old structure as the persistence of primal psychic energy
or-what amounts to the same thing-its corruption by the discontents
of civilization.Verhaps the best way to bring the argument out of the
abstract is to examine myth criticism in practice. T h e work of Herbert
Weisinger, in particular "The Myth and Ritual Approach to Shakespearean Tragedy,"'" is especially relevant to my purposes because it is
8. Sigmund Freud, Thr lnterprrtation of Drrams, trans. James Strachey (New York,
1959), p. 264.
9. The concept of repression serves two important functions in myth criticism: it
provides a hypothetical causal explanation of how mythic materials are able to reappear in
disguised form, and it dignifies the enterprise as one which explores the deepest reaches of
the unconscious and defines man as sub spr'cir aeternitatis. Without it, o r some such construct. much myth criticism would be reduced to a pointless sorting of vegetables on the
basis of shape and size. This point is made more persuasively by William Righter in .Myth
and Literature (London and Boston, 1975), one of the best recent books on the abuses of
myth criticism. For example:
But the use of the mythical comparison implies a slightly different kind of force, for
the resemblance claimed is not entirely of particular to particular, but of particular
to something larger-if not universal. to something that goes beyond a given case in
such a way that the particular can be assimilated to a variety of others. . . . O n e fallacy
of the "deeper level" is that of supposing that somewhere, beyond the normal range
of human experience and feeling, lies a special world of the mythic, and literary
works may enter into this world even when it is impossible to describe what that level
is o r to say what its existence implies. [Pp. 49, 551
10. T h e essay, written in 1957, appears in Weisinger's The Agony and the Triumph:
Papers on the Use and Abuse of Myth (East Lansing, Mich., 1964); all further references to this
work will be included in the text. The essay is reprinted in ,Myth and Litcraturr: Contrmpora~
Critical Inquiry
Winter 1980
339
the most ambitious attempt to link our chief dramatic poet to the master
myth of Western culture. Weisinger suggests that the "seedbed" of
tragedy, and especially Shakespearean tragedy, is the myth and ritual
pattern of birth, struggle, death, and revival: that is, the dying god who
is reborn in myth is mirrored in tragedy as the hero "in whom is subsumed the well-being of the people and the welfare of the state"; he
engages in a conflict with "a representation of darkness and evil; a temporary defeat is inflicted on [him] but after shame and suffering he
emerges triumphant as the symbol of the victory of light and good over
darkness and evil" (p. 103). The pattern is more complicated than this,
but the point is that this Ur-myth is the "stuff out of which [tragedy] was
ultimately formed" (p. 99). The mythlritual pattern and tragedy, he
repeatedly warns us, are not the same and, in fact, there is "unfortunately" no real proof of a debt, since there is "no such thing as the
myth and ritual pattern per se" (p. 95). But the m/r pattern and tragedy
share "the same shape and the same intent" (p. 99), though they differ
significantly in the manner of their creation and in the methods of
achieving their purposes. The pattern has an "ability to change shape
while retaining its potency" (p. 100).
Weisinger wants to use this pattern modestly for its possible values
in seeing how Shakespeare's tragic vision changes. But in a very few
pages what began as a useful way to throw "new light" on Shakespeare
has been translated into a structural model against which his plays' very
quality (not to be confused with excellence) will be evaluated. Thus the
m / r pattern becomes the exemplary form which Shakespeare raised "to
the heights of its most moving and significant expression" but could not
"hold . . . there for long" (p. 116). He could sustain it "but tentatively" in
Hamlet, "most fully" in Othello, "barely" in King Lear, and "hardly at all" in
Macbeth. It failed him altogether in the last plays, in which it appears as
"mere machinery, virtually in burlesque fashion, and not as [the] informing and sustaining spirit" of his work (p. 94).
Weisinger cautions us in several essays about applying the pattern
too strictly. But the language of his argument speaks for itself. Returning to the idea three years later in 1960, he says, "as much as I would like
to say that the closer a work of art comes to the myth and ritual pattern
the greater it is, the last vestige of scholarly honesty in me prevents me
from doing so" (p. 260). He concludes by saying that he does not mean
this "failure" to hold the pattern should make us regard Shakespeare as
"less than, say, Sophocles or Milton" but that, on the contrary, "the
application of the pattern to Shakespeare's plays discriminates between
Theorj and Practice, ed. John B. Vickery (Lincoln, Nebr., 1966), and in Myth and Mythmaking,
ed. Henry A. Murray (Boston, 1968).
340
Bert 0. States
The Persistence of the Archetype
them with nicety, it intensifies our awareness of the unique qualities of
the individual plays, and it enables us to respond to Shakespeare on a
most profound level of understanding" (p. 116). Still, the fact remains:
against this model Shakespeare's progress in drama marks "the disintegration of the tragic pattern"; he "paid for the cost of the tragic
vision by its loss" (p. 117).
But the only basis on which Weisinger has distinguished the major
tragedies is their failure to follow, in form and spirit, a pattern that does
not exist "per se." Aside from a certain undefined spiritual loss which
overcame Shakespeare when he realized he had left Iago alive on the
stage, nothing is said about the possibility that having chosen different
plots he would have perhaps inherited different structures and different
tragic issues. It strikes one, for instance, that the plot ofMacbeth, in which
Shakespeare followed the m/r pattern "hardly at all," yields a very different kind of profundity than that in Othello. It is hard to see how the
raw materials of Holinshed's Macbeth story could yield anything like the
"faith in the goodness and justice of the world" which Weisinger finds
(though I cannot) in Othello. Is Shakespeare's very choice of the Macbeth
story, then, proof that he was drifting even farther from the mir pattern
(having been on target really only once)? Has it nothing to do with the
fact that James had come to the throne? That Shakespeare, being a
player as well as a visionary, took "great" plots where he could find
them? That artists simply get tired of "doing the same thing"? And
finally that the tragic vision itself is not the mtr pattern but an evershifting glass through which the dramatist examines the whole scene of
hurnan value and loss?"
The questions we must ask about myth and tragedy are simple ones:
Is there any model for tragedy, or for myth itself, more central to hurnan
experience than one based on birth, struggle, death, and revival? What
other course could Western myth possibly have taken than one which
depicted the Divine King's combat with "an opposing power," his suffering, death, and resurrection? What other course could tragedy conceivably have taken than the depiction of a similar cycle in earthly terms,
things being what they are on earth? In short, in a world of change,
bound by birth and death and the continuance of a surviving orderbound, one might say, by a sun which not only rose and fell but rose
again, dependably-what other master pattern could be relevant to two
11. There is another proble~nhere: If the mir pattern itself varies so widely from
version to version, why is it that Shakespeare cannot be granted the same latitude (assuming, for a moment, that he was in some sense following it at all)? If, as Righter says in Myth
and Literatzcre, "the life of myth is dependent o n the death of individual myths" (p. 114).
why can one not say that Shakespeare was perpetuating a certain life in the m l r pattern,
along Renaissance lines, even when he was departing from it? Why must his divergence be
described as a "loss"? Or, if he has diverged so widely, beyond any recognizable analogy (as
in ,Macb~thand Lear), what is the value of evoking the pattern as a standard of comparison?
Critical Inquiry
Winter 1980
341
forms which are designed to treat final matters? These are the facts of
existence. That myth deals with them very differently than tragedy
surely has little to do with tragedy's altering a pattern. Tragedy needed
no myth whatsoever to give it birth; o r at least there is no proof that it
did. Existence itself provided the seed, and poetry was the midwife.
It is difficult, finally, to understand exactly in what sense Shakespeare, or any dramatist, "knew" the master myth. Weisinger favors
Freud's view that the individual, like the species, somehow carries "permanent traces" of "repressed materials" which come to life again in the
form of neurotic symptoms. He reduces it "generally to that initial impact of experience which produced the archetypes of belief, and
specifically, to the archetype of rebirth as crystallized out of the archetype of belief. Unfortunately, no real proof of this process is possible,
for the events which generated the primary shock of belief are now too
deep and too dim in the racial memory of man to be exhumed by archeological means" (p. 95).12In any event, Shakespeare's use of the mlr
pattern seems to "be symptomatic of his increasing inability to bear the
burden of the tragic vision" (p. 109)-though, paradoxically, it did not
prevent him from writing, by the world's common consent, at least four
of its greatest tragedies.
It is possible, of course, that this theory has a certain validity and
that the mir pattern does indeed persist internally. Certainly it would be
presumptuous to set limits on the brain's capacity to store experience.
But for the time being there is an explanation which is much nearer at
hand. What of the brain's capacity to order fresh experience by submitting it to natural patterns of thought? It is curious, for instance, that
most of our familiar archetypes, or at least those we encounter most
often in literature, are based on paradoxical situations or on what I have
elsewhere called terminal discrepancies. The most common are concerned with incest and kin-murder, though even in the Philoctetes story
we have a radical coupling of opposed elements. I have suggested that
this pattern of organization comes very near the basis of dramatic art in
which acts do not simply produce further acts (or history)but counteracts.
Thus the extreme potentiality of a dramatic situation, in a novel, poem,
o r play, is the promise of a paradox in the making.13 So too the great
archetypes of Western myth. And if we look at the mlr pattern in its
gross shape we see that it also, beneath its primitive form, is a typical
12. In Tragedy and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall (East Lansing, Mich., 1953).
Weisinger quotes the passage from Gilbert Murray (see n. 6 above) and adds: "The mystery
of o u r response to tragedy . . . is thus given a deeply-rooted psychological basis which in its
turn is found buried in the innermost layers of the group consciousness" (p. 26).
13. See my Irony and Drama: A Poetics (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971), pp. 227-28. As for the
relevance of paradox to the realms of social, scientific, artistic, and spiritual problem
solving, see Howard A. Slaatte's The Pertznence of the Paradox: The Dialectzcs of Reason in
Exzstace (New York, 1968).
342
Bert 0. States
The Persistence of the Archetype
product of the dramatic imagination. For the god's combat with an opposing power, leading to death and ending in the double reversal of a
resurrection (an event beyond the "last" event), is really the most thorough and paradoxical outcome imaginable (though the paradox is finally
resolved, in keeping with communal needs). This is also what we have in
tragedy, the secular form which attempts to do the most thorough justice
to human possibilities: it presents the conceivable in terms of the real. One
of these conceivabilities is that the hero, in dying-and in contributing
causally to his own death-should undergo a kind of resurrection or an
understanding of something much more important than the fact of
death itself. And in this sense though a tragedy like Macbeth may seem
far removed from the spiritual triumph of the mlr pattern (as Weisinger
interprets it), it follows its line of paradoxical realization perfectly-in
Shakespearean terms, of course. For the paradox at work in Macbeth is
that Macbeth's deeds do not coincide with his character as a tragic vessel.
Macbeth is a genius whom Shakespeare sends to hell in order to tell us
what hell is like. Clearly Banquo or Macduff or Malcolm, who are better
men morally, would have botched the job. But in the tortured imaginings of Micbeth, who can summon a vision of apocalypse, we have the
paradox of an exquisite sensibility (Shakespeare's own, of course) inhabiting the body of a hellhound. What survives Macbeth is not only the
continuance of kingship and order in Malcolm but the record of soul left
by the fiend who made it all possible; and this is what keeps the play from
being a depressing exercise in Websterian pessimism. There is a sense in
which the conclusion of Everyman is justified here: "Now hath he suffered that we all shall endure." Or, to put it in tragic terms, in Macbeth's
sufferings the constructs of morality and retribution endure, Macbeth's
body being something of an irrelevance.
On the near side of tragedy, we find the same logic of paradox
operating to still another purpose. In fact, perhaps the most complete
incarnation of the mlr pattern occurs in comic books. Superman, for
example, regularly undergoes the agony and triumph of the pattern: his
adventures against the opposing powers of darkness and evil would be
almost unthinkable without an episode near the climax in which he is,
for all intents, hopelessly trapped, deprived of his superpowers, and
destined for certain death. But of course, like the mlr god, he must
survive, otherwise the myth would be cutting its own throat and writing
off the whole principle of the superhero. Finally, I might add that the
adventures of our latest superhero, the Incredible Hulk, perfectly follow
both the mlr pattern and the PhiloctetesICyrano archetype; that is, every
time handsome, mild-mannered David Banner finds himself under intense pressure, faced with death, he "hulks out" (as he puts it) and turns
into a grotesque green beast who destroys the social enemy, rescues the
girl, buys a new shirt, and hitchhikes off to the next town. This is not
intended as a whimsical parallel. I see no reason why our instinctive
Critical Inquiry
Winter 1980
343
appetite for the structure of the m/r pattern can't be said to be gratified
even more thoroughly in such popular fiction than it is in tragedy, which
is clearly concerned with much darker and more complex issues.14
Obviously there are other ways in which poets express reality, and
these-for example, the principle of the lyrical or the rapturous-can be
found in myth as well. I am only saying that as apure imaginative instinct,
the dramatic, or paradoxical, is anterior to both the m/r pattern and
tragedy, though we find it embodied first in myth by virtue of historical
precedence. "In myth," as Frye says, "we see the structural principles of
literature i~olated."'~
What this means, ultimately, is that myth grew
naturally out of one of the universal processes of thought by which man
realizes the possibilities of his world. The primitive who discovered the
principle of the wheel was, in a sense, an ironist who saw how nature
could be tricked into doing his work for him. Sitting on a rock behind
this bright fellow was an even more farsighted ironist who smiled and
said, "We are now on the road to perdition." And if Oedipus had never
existed in vegetable myths o r in Greek tragedy, some ironist in an
eighteenth-century periwig would have invented him out of the whole
cloth of his highly patterned culture-which is to say that the corpus of
world drama without an Oedipus, or someone in his radical situation,
would be as unimaginable as an alphabet which lacked a certain vowel
whose sound could be produced by the human voice.
If we are looking for an Ur-explanation for the persistence of the
Ur-myth, o r any other myth, in our literature, could we not more directly find it in the structure of a mind which does not have to remember
in order to imitate? The occasion of both myth and literature is the social
14. As a critical text which fills out this general idea, at least in regards to the
"entelechial" satisfactions of the combat myth, I recommend Kenneth Burke's "Myth,
Poetry, and Philosophy," Language as Symbolzc Action (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966), pp.
380-409. I am not sure that Burke, who has both strong sympathies and occasional quarrels with Freudian repression, would agree with my larger premise in this essay.
15. Frye. Anatomy of Criticism, p. 136. I quote Frye here out of the context of his very
different perspective on myth. His basic concern is the relation of literature to myth and
myth to the cycle of nature; mine is with the relation of literature to what we might call the
cycle ofsocial nature, myth being simply the first expression of a set of themes destined for
a long history of literary "displacement." I n Fables ,$Identity: Studies in Poptic 214ytholo~
(New
York and London, 1963), he says that in every age "poets who are thinkers. . . can hardly
find a literary theme that does not coincide with a myth" (p. 33); but "literary shape cannot
come from life: it comes only from literary tradition, and so ultimately from myth" (p. 36).
I doubt that Frye is arguing for an "autonomous" world of literature, o r "words," separate
from life; this is simply his emphasis. He is not much interested, that is, in the highway by
which we get from myth to literature but only in the cargo of conventional imagery that
travels on it. In any case, we are apparently in agreement that the idea of a "collective
unconscious" is "an unnecessary hypothesis in literary criticism" for explaining why serpents keep showing up in gardens o r why heroes and gods keep dying and returning to life
(Anatomy, p. 112); if such things can't be explained by literary tradition they can be explained by the persistent realities of fear and desire out of which natural objects and cycles
are endowed with symbolic meaning.
344
Bert 0. States
The Persistence of the Archetype
life of the species which, in Starobinski's sense, is a history of continual
eviction; but as regards the apparatus of thought by which this social life
is reflected in art it is more a history of assimilation and repetition. "The
work of the brain," to cite a recent article in Scientijic American, "is to
create a model of a possible world rather than to record and transmit to
the mind a world that is metaphysically true. . . . Different worlds are
presumably constructed by different species."'%nd, presumably, similar worlds are constructed by similar species. Weisinger hints briefly at
something like this in his essay "The Mythic Origins of the Creative
Process," but one has the clear impression, as his title suggests, that he
would like to have the mlr cart before the creative horse (p. 250). However much this may satisfy our longing to crown our literature, if not
creativity itself, with a mythic genealogy, it seems a wistful hypothesis.
One might just as well look upon the remains of early man's shelters,
marvel that they too had roofs, just like ours, and conclude that therefore our roofs have their origin in theirs.
16. Harry J. Jerison. "Paleoneurology and the Evolution of' Mind," Scientijic American, January 1976, p. 99.