Lecture
Archetypes are frequently recurring images, plots, and motifs found in various types of narratives: folkloric and literary works, operas, films, television series, and so on.
In the mid-20th century, the archetypal approach[eng.] to the analysis of literary and other narrative structures became widespread in Western countries; it consisted in identifying and comparing the archetypes embedded within them. The most influential exponent of this approach was the Canadian literary scholar Northrop Frye.
An archetypal character is a stable, formulaic type of character that serves the audience (readers, viewers, listeners) as a convenient point of reference and is instantly recognized thanks to its regular recurrence across the most diverse narratives and cultural traditions. Examples include the cunning trickster, the handsome prince, and the helpless beauty. The entire commedia dell'arte was built on the use of simplified, one-dimensional types (Pierrot, Pantalone, Pulcinella, and so on).
Archetypal plots are fundamental, recurring models of stories that reflect basic human experiences, conflicts, and dreams. Examples of archetypal plots cited by Christopher Booker in his book «The Seven Basic Plots»[ukr.]:
Besides archetypal plots, one can also speak of the existence of archetypal plot situations. As early as 1895, Georges Polti counted 36 standard dramatic situations in literature. One example is the love triangle — a conflict arising from romantic feelings among three characters, often with elements of jealousy, betrayal, and choice.
The migrationist school of the 19th century (Theodor Benfey, Alexander Veselovsky, and others) attempted to explain the similarity of many folkloric plots (above all fairy-tale plots) by their movement along the Great Silk Road from people to people. Such borrowed plots came to be called wandering plots. Within this approach, Antti Aarne compiled an index of folk-tale plots, later refined and expanded by subsequent folklorists.
Within the comparative-mythological school it has been established that motifs such as the creation of man, the first man, the flood myth, the myth of the dying and resurrecting god, the world axis, the underworld, and the end of time recur widely among peoples at different ends of Eurasia. An influential body of data on comparative mythology was published from 1890 to 1915 by J. Frazer under the title «The Golden Bough».
Studies by Yuri Berezkin at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries demonstrated a fundamental difference between the mythological motifs of various regions of the world — in particular, between the northern and western halves of Eurasia on the one hand and the equatorial regions (including sub-Saharan Africa) on the other. As of 2020, Berezkin's group had collected 2,264 narrative motifs from the folklore of 934 peoples of the world into a database.
In his classic work «Morphology of the Folktale» (1928), Vladimir Propp used the example of a single type of plot — the magic tale — to demonstrate that beneath the surface of the endless diversity of fairy-tale plots lies a stable, recurring, deep, universal structure of archetypal functions and roles. He identified a limited set of narrative functions (31 in all), performed by the characters in a definite sequence.
According to Robert Segal, the common features of heroic myths have been analyzed at least since 1871, when the anthropologist E. B. Tylor drew attention to universal patterns in the plots of heroes' wanderings. In 1876, J. G. von Hahn compiled a list of standard situations of Indo-European mythology. The findings of comparative mythology were supplemented by the psychoanalyst Otto Rank (in 1909) and the amateur anthropologist Lord Raglan (in 1936): both compiled their own lists of motifs frequently found in tales about heroes of various peoples, including mythical ones.
The problem of the artistic refraction of archetypes in a literary work particularly attracted the attention of 20th-century researchers. In accordance with the analytical psychology created by C. G. Jung, the archetypal prototypes, primal forms, or, in the final version of their name, archetypes, which together form the «collective unconscious», accompany humanity across the centuries and manifest themselves in the images, characters, and plots of mythology, religion, and art. A multitude of literary-artistic images and/or motifs grows out of a certain archetypal core, conceptually enriching its original «scheme», its «crystal system» (C. G. Jung).
In the first half of the 20th century, in the wake of S. Freud's psychoanalytic studies, the detection of echoes of mythopoeic consciousness at various cultural levels became almost dominant (the mytho-ritual approach of J. G. Frazer, the ethnographic approach of L. Lévy-Bruhl, the symbological approach of E. Cassirer, the structural anthropology of C. Lévi-Strauss). The mythological criticism of the second half of the 20th century built its inquiries along two conceptions — conventionally speaking, the Frazerian (mytho-ritual) and the Jungian (archetypal). Representatives of the ritual-mythological school — M. Bodkin (England), N. Frye (Canada), R. Chase and F. Watts (USA) — first, engaged in detecting conscious and unconscious mythological motifs in literary-artistic works and, second, paid great attention to the reproduction of the ritual schemes of initiation rites, which, in their view, were equivalent to the psychological archetype of death and rebirth.
During the same period, literary scholarship increasingly came to recognize that no less important in the analysis of a literary-artistic work than the reconstruction of the mythopoeic stratum is the determination of the ideological load of particular archetypal components. M. Bodkin herself already noted a paradigm of changes in the basic archetypes, a kind of evolution of them in the course of historical-literary development into literary forms, in which the most important feature becomes typological recurrence (the «long lines», as the scholar called them). Following Bodkin, A. Yu. Bolshakova speaks of the high degree of generalization and typological stability of the literary archetype. The Jungian interpretation of the archetype in Soviet-era literary scholarship was examined by S. S. Averintsev (the article «C. G. Jung's „Analytical Psychology“ and the Regularities of Creative Imagination») and E. M. Meletinsky (the book «The Poetics of Myth»).
Researchers conclude that the term «archetype» denotes the most general, fundamental, and universally human mythological motifs that underlie any artistic and mythological structures «already without a mandatory connection to Jungianism as such». E. M. Meletinsky («The Poetics of Myth», «Analytical Psychology and the Problem of the Origin of Archetypal Plots») and A. Yu. Bolshakova («The Theory of the Archetype at the Turn of the 20th–21st Centuries», «The Literary Archetype») hold that in the 20th century a tendency develops toward a transition from a purely mythological and psychological understanding of the archetype to the acceptance of a model of the literary archetype.
By the definition of the literary scholar A. Yu. Bolshakova, the literary archetype is a «transversal», «generative model» which, despite its capacity for external change, conceals within itself an invariable value-and-meaning core. In her article «The Literary Archetype» she distinguishes several meanings of the «archetype» as a literary category:
One of the principal properties of the literary archetype is its typological stability and high degree of generalization. In the opinion of A. A. Faustov, the archetype may denote a «universal image or plot element, or their stable combinations of various natures and various scales (down to authorial archetypes)».
In the literary works of the 20th century, the transformative authorial principle comes to the fore, while the mythopoeic and psychological core of a given archetype experiences ever greater conceptual «tension» from the whole system of artistic coordinates. Under the influence of historical and social changes, the literary archetype increasingly reveals a topical meaning «built into» the artistic design and realized in the work. Examples of fundamental archetypes at the psychological and general-cultural levels include the notions of «home», «the road», and «the child». These archetypal principles, judging by their frequency, appear to be dominant in the literary-artistic work as well.
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