Northrop Frye on Myth by Russell Ford

Author:Russell, Ford.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

First Stage

According to Frye, the first stage in Jung’s individuation process is that “the ego must come to terms with the shadow and recognize its essential continuity with it” (NFCL, 117). The shadow is the first of the psychological archetypes that the ego encounters. It comprises “one’s suppressed or ignored desires” (NFCL, 117). When the ego does come to terms with the shadow, then “the center of the psyche ... shifts back from the ego to a balancing point between ego and shadow” (NFCL, 117). “The outer psyche now becomes a ‘persona,’ or social mask,” Frye says, “and the inner one a ‘soul,’ or focus of love” (NFCL, 118).

In Frye’s theory of myths, the first stage is that each of the relatively objective entities for analyzing a literary work becomes readerinformed. Frye takes his terms for these entities from chapter six of Aristotle’s Poetics. He Starts from the terms “plot,” “character,” and “theme” because these are among the established verbal tokens of literary critical discussion. Frye differs from many of the critics at the time in several ways. While others focused upon a particular literary work, he is interested in the relations between works. While others were primarily engaged in identifying the theme of a work, he begins his discussions of comedy, romance, tragedy, and satire by identifying the typical or normal plot structures of these story types, and then goes on to discuss their character types and their recurrent thematic phases. “Plot,” “character,” and “theme” are terms he shares with others, but the terms he uses, in the theory of myths, are “plot structure,” not plot, “character type,” not character, and “thematic phase,” not theme.4 What is the difference? It resides in the way relatively objective terms have already become imbued with meaning by the reader. Plot, character, and theme are “objective” in the sense that they are “in” a literary work, but that work depends upon a reader and Frye’s reader has the capacity to recognize them as elements in his experience of literature. Hence, the first stage of Frye’s theory of reading has already crossed over from the New Critic’s “assumption,” which is “that the work of literature is an object set over against us” (SM, 119). In Frye’s first stage of reading, “plot structure,” “character type,” and “thematic phase” constitute a dass of terms. The theory of myths, as we shall see, has three classes of terms. Together, these classes move from a latent-to-manifest pattern. These classes represent the increasing structuration of a reader’s experience. Frye organizes his discussion with some help from Jung’s Two Essays.5 He works from Jung in presenting the development of the reader’s experience of literature in the same way he works from Freud in presenting how writers, over time, displace and then condense myth.

The middle stage, in Jung, involves the surpassing of a second crisis. If the first consists of the tendency to consider the shadow as enemy, an alien outside the ego, then the second is for the newly established

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