Archetypal Approach

Archetypal criticism, also called the totemic, mythological or ritualistic criticism, has the salient features of other critical methods also – it studies the text closely like the formalistic critic, concerns itself with humanistic values like the moral critic, analyses arts’ appeal to an audience as the psychological critic. I.A. Richards does the poem-reader relationship, probes basic cultural patterns like the sociological critic, and investigates a social past like the historical critic.

•Archetypal criticism was initiated by two men, Frazer, and Jung. Frazer was a  scottish anthropologist. His book The Golden Bough appeared in twelve volumes from 1890 to 1915.

•It is a monumental study of magic and religion, tracing numerous myths back to prehistoric times. Carl Gustav Jung, another prominent archetypal critic, propounded the theory of the collective unconsciousness. He believed that civilized man preserves, though unconsciously, prehistorical areas of knowledge and articulates them obliquely in myth.

•Another anthropologist of note is Jesse Weston from whose From Ritual to Romance T.S.Eliot drew comparisons and contrasts to the contemporary Wasteland. Twentieth century writers like James Joyce and W.B.Yeats have used the ancient myth of Psyche and Cupid to re-tell modern man’s struggle toward eternal love.

•Archetypal critics engage themselves in discovering the hidden mythological patterns in literary works. For these critics, the myth is a ‘protoplastic’ pattern of the race which the individual unconsciously repeats. A myth is, as Eric Fromm said, ‘a message from ourselves to ourselves’. The creative writer is a ‘shaman, a myth-maker, speaking out of his unconscious a primordial truth’.

•The archetypal critic functions in two ways. First, he discovers the mythological patterns which a writer has consciously or unconsciously used in his works.

•Many critics have traced ancient Eastern and Western myths in T.S.Eliot’s The Wasteland. Another way in which the archetypal critic works is to set up modern fictitious characters as new mythological figures representing the plights and problems of moderns.

•Thus, in his

Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence views characters in American fiction such as Natty Bumppo and Hester Prynne as mythological figures expressing modern American’s position.

 •Maud Bodkin’s Archetypal Patterns in poetry is another such study, investing the characters in modern poems with mythological dimensions. Kenneth Burke, in his essay Antony in Behalf of the Play, projects Antony as a mythological figure, representing the audience’s attitude towards ‘authority’, revolution and scapegoat. The modern American critic Leslie Fiedler views the boyhood gangs in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick as mythological figures pointing to the upsurge of homosexuality in our age.

•Some objections have been raised against archetypal criticism. One basic objection is that archetypal criticism does not evaluate literature but merely explains the reason for the appeal of certain kinds of writings. The second charge is that the archetypal critics are known more for their ingenuity than for the validity of what they have to say. Anyhow, it must be accepted that archetypal criticism has rendered one important service. It has linked the modern man, despite his rationality and scientific bent, with his ancient roots.

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