Reading Bob’s post on archetype reminds me how readily I have over the years slipped into referring to just about every verbal phenomenon in Frye as an “archeype” of some sort.  I have done so on the principle –which (as Bob also notes) Frye himself acknowledges — that he is an “archetypal critic” in the sense that archetype refers to a recurring pattern of signfication.  This seems consisent with Frye’s critical nomenclature generally: the dialectic at work in all of his criticism means that certain terms seem inevitably to expand their reference.  For scholars of my generation, for example, the key terms to understanding Frye seem invariably to be “myth,” “metaphor,” and “archetype.”  Without an expansive understanding of those words (but also with a very specific understanding that they possess immanent and not transcendental reference), we’d hardly know where to begin at all.

To Clayton Chrusch on “archetype“:

Frye explaining “archetype” from “Criticism, Visible and Invisible”, The Stubborn Structure:

It is true that I call the elements of imagery archetypes, because I want a word which suggest something that changes its context but not its essence. James Beattie, in ‘The Ministrel’ [poem]…adds a footnote to the last phrase: “General ideas of excellence, the immediate archetypes of sublime imitation, both in painting and in poetry”… I think of the term [archetype] as indigenous to criticism, not as transferred from Neoplatonic philosophy or Jungian psychology. However, I would not fight for a word, and I hold to no “method” of criticism beyond assuming that the structure and imagery of literature are central considerations of criticism.

To Jonathan Allan on “theory“:

As Frye said, the present revolution in criticism must exhaust itself, before the subject can be coordinated again. Too many contemporary theorists dismiss Frye because they want to fight: Marxist Crit, Feminism, Post-Structuralism are militant criticisms which bag whatever targets they try to hit; and when the game is short, they turn their target to literature. Frye’s criticism sees literature as the language of love. Kuhn was right in a way that may have surprised him: if every age produces a paradigm which shifts, then Kuhn’s Paradigm Shift is itself a paradigm which has shifted, and the direction is back to what Frye said all along: knowledge has continuity and repetition. If only the warring schools of criticism would drop their swords.

At the risk of being provocative, let me ask if am I the only one to think that Frye’s use of the word archetype is his single biggest error in judgement as a literary theorist, possibly one of the biggest errors of judgement in literary studies of all time, on par with the loss of Aristotle’s treatise on comedy?

Not only does no one know what the word means, not only is Frye’s meaning overwhelmed by and confused with other closely related meanings, but the sheer Greekness and thus foreignness of the word lends it to easy dismissal.

The word convention would have been so much more acceptable, so much harder to attack, so much harder to misconstrue, and in particular would make it clear from the beginning that literature is a human and social construct.

This last point, which Frye himself insists on may seem at first blush like a capitulation to the determinists, but in fact it undermines their accusation against Frye of essentialism (whatever that means) while exposing their own attempts to impose determinism on literature as an attempt to impose determinism on human beings.

Am I wrong?