Archetypes of Literature

While reading the 'Archetypes of Literature' I was struck by how scientific sounding it was. I felt like I was reading Darwin's 'Origins of Species' but about literature. This is not a bad thing, because I find it fascinating to read about something in a variety of ways, but strange none-the-less. It is scientific, but also poetic, this is a strange idea to me, one that I had never pondered before this class. That something can talk about science in a poetic way is brilliant. I'm sure that if Milton or Shakespeare would have written about the periodic table or blood cells I would have learned it so much better! And I'd probably even like it. I understand that as an English major I have a bias towards literary works such as these, and that scientist would 'goff' at this, but I really think that Frye had something going. Lines like: "Art, like nature, is the subject of a systematic study, and has to be distinguished from the study itself, which is criticism," "If such a pattern exists, then criticism would be to art what philosophy is to wisdom and history to action," and "The only weakness in this approach is that it is conceived primarily as the antithesis of centrifugal or 'background' criticism, and so lands us in a somewhat unreal dilemma, like the conflict of internal and external relations in philosophy." Before my biological anthropology class in community college, I would have read this and instantly fallen asleep. But like I learned then about Darwin, and now about Frye, patently waiting for the author to get to the point is generally worth it. My absolute favorite line from this essay was "we hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer's total pattern we 'see' what he means." When Frye describes this moment of epiphany that will inevitably follow any in depth reading of literature, he described the truth. In an epiphany you actually 'see' what the words mean. It is much more than a moment of understanding, it is a moment of clear vision.