Literary Theory

Series I: Handout #17

“Luke, you must go to the Dagobah

System. There you will find Yoda.”

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961): Swiss Psychoanalyst, renegade student of Freud (thought Freud put too much emphasis on sex); Jung blends religion, spirituality and psychology (loved by New Age followers, like George Lucas, who studied with Jung’s student Joseph Campbell—see The Power of Myth); best known for distinction between personal unconscious and collective unconscious: the latter being the collective myths of human experience (involving archetypes such as the hero’s quest) that form the structure of world literature, religion, and spirituality. In other words, we have an intuitive, inborn knowledge of the collective stories of human experience.

On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry (1922): resists the subordination of art and religion to psychology; art is not a science; art is not reducible to the author’s conflict with his or her parents—this is reductive (a general term in theory); the psychoanalyst reduces art or literature to neurosis/sickness; Freud’s method is medical, not artistic; Symbols in literature and art are signs for intuitions that cannot yet be expressed in a verbal way—not simply symptoms of neuroses; Jung offers support for the later New Critical study of literary works in isolation, though not its formalism: “the special significance of a work of art resides in the fact that it has escaped from the limitations of the personal and has soared beyond the personal concerns of the creator.” Introverted art comes from the assertion of the artist’s own intentions; extraverted art subordinates the artist to the demands of the work: the artist “fancies he is swimming, but in reality an unseen current sweeps him along.” The current is the collective unconscious (“a sphere of unconscious mythology whose primordial images are the common heritage of all mankind,” a priori ideas in the structures of the brain, “the psychic residua of innumerable experiences of the same type”) and it struggles with the personal unconscious of the individual. The collective unconscious, demonstrated in art, puts us in touch with our archetypal selves and we thereby experience connection with humanity over time and place. Art conjures the forms in which the age is most lacking (e.g., romaticism of art in a rational age).

Q: Is literature/art a means of working out psychological tensions? Is it merely or largely Neurotic? A form of therapy?

Q: Does psychology work by saying something formerly forbidden (i.e., sexual) that SEEMS to be revealing/liberating because it was once forbidden (in the previous, Victorian era, or in the repressed classroom context)? Did it pass this tendency along to post-structuralism?

Q: Does art draw on the collective human experience and address the needs of its time? Or is that naïve?

Consider how Jung might be applied to any of the following (DISCUS): Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the paintings of Jackson Pollack, The Family of Man, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, or Where the Wild Things Are.

“My readings are so deep

it hurts me, here.”

Northrop Frye (1912-1991): Canadian; challenged the New Criticism in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957); offers archetypal or myth criticism as an alternative, drawing heavily on Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious; looks for repeating images in literature, which he sees as forming a “total schematic order”; hated by political critics for his seemingly apolitical universalism, and accused of being even more rigidly formal than New Criticism (i.e., puts everything into a few mythic categories).

“The Archetypes of Literature” (1951): desires a rigorous, scientific approach to literature; offers four myths from which the archetypes are drawn: 1. Dawn/birth/spring/resurrection/romance; 2. Noon/summer/marriage/triumph; 3. Sunset/autumn/death/the Fall/tragedy; 4. Darkness/winter/flood/satire. All of these categories can relate to the hero’s quest, which is the central myth of literature. Works nicely with Levi-Strauss and other structuralists, although Frye seems over-determined, excessively universal, not paying enough attention to specific cultures.

Q: Can we identify works of literature/art that correspond to Frye’s archetypes (DISCUS)?

Q. What are some advantages to the “myth and symbol school of criticism”? Where does it begin to seem reductive?