Summary of Chapter 3
This “Third Essay” is “Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths.” In the previous essay, Frye defined archetypes as symbols that recur throughout a culture, in multiple works of art. For instance, there is the archetype of the tree of life. In this essay, Frye turns to myths, which are bundles of archetypal symbols. His task is first to classify the different mythical categories of archetypal imagery, and then to derive some general patterns that deal with categories of literature. Myth, he finally argues, structures literature; individual works of literature draw from the different funds of imagery that different myths provide.
For Frye, there are seven major categories of archetypal imagery, divided according the seven “worlds” of the Great Chain of Being. Derived eventually from Aristotle, but by way of Middle Age Christianity, "The Great Chain of Being" is a hierarchical system for categorizing life. In the version Frye uses, there are seven levels in this hierarchy. From the top to the bottom they are: the divine world, the human world, the animal world, the vegetable world, the mineral world, the fire world, and the watery world. Each of these seven categories can in turn be broken down into five types of imagery, which are similar to the five modes from the First Essay. These are: apocalyptic, romantic, high mimetic, realistic, and demonic.
Remember that, in the First Essay, the modes moving from mythic to ironic were from more divine and powerful to more vulgar and inferior. By analogy, the types of imagery move from the apocalyptic, which is more godly, to the demonic, which is more base and ironic. In between, you have the types of imagery that are more humanistic. Within each “world” of imagery, there is a similar cascade. Let’s start with the “divine world.” Here, moving from the demonic to the apocalyptic is moving from dumb fate to the society of gods. The same can be said of each of the other seven worlds. Here, for instance, is the breakdown of the vegetable world: demonic archetypes are of an evil or enchanted forest; realistic (low mimetic) archetypes are of farms where peasants toil and labor; high mimetic archetypes are of beautiful gardens; romantic archetypes are even better gardens, like the Garden of Eden; and, finally, the apocalyptic vegetable world is Paradise.
Frye fills in all the “mythical” possibilities given the seven different worlds and the five different types. That’s 35 categories! But this is not the main point of the essay. Instead, what really interests Frye are patterns shared by all categories. In particular, he notices that there is a similar cyclical pattern within each myth. Fascinatingly, within each world, there tends to be a division of the cycle into four main phases: “the four seasons of the year being the type for four periods of the day (morning, noon, evening, night), four aspects of the water-cycle (rain, fountains, rivers, sea or snow), four periods of life (youth, maturity, age, death), and the like.” It is this kind of pattern—transcending the different groupings of archetype—that Frye goes on to theorize.
Frye calls the four phases of the mythical cycles “mythoi.” These are structures of myths, which are in turn structures of archetypes. He calls the four mythoi comedy, romance, tragedy, and satire, and he associates each one with a season of the year: spring (comedy), summer (romance), autumn (tragedy), and winter (satire). Each of these mythoi has a particular mood, because each is attached to a phase in the life cycle. Comedy, the mythoi of spring, is about birth and joy, for instance, while satire, about wintry death, is bitter and cold. Each mythoi’s mood is an effect of the kinds of archetypal imagery and movement they involve. Thus, Frye has derived four major categories of literary experience by synthesizing what he has written so far about modes, symbols, and myths.
The remainder of this chapter is about the different types of story within each of these mythoi. Frye calls these types of story “phases,” and each mythoi, Frye argues, has six main phases. Comedy, which is about the birth of a society, goes from (1) an ironic phase about the birth of a new society to (2) a quixotic phase in which a society is young to (3) a “typical” phase in which a society comes of age to (4) a “green-world phase” in which society matures to (5) an “Arcadian” phase in which a society settles down and finally (6) a gothic phase in which society collapses.
Romance, which is about individual adventure, goes from (1) the birth of the hero to (2) the innocence of the hero to the (3) quest of the hero to (4) the continued innocence of the hero despite worldliness to (5) an idyllic phase of reflection and finally (5) a melancholic phase of contemplation, an adventure of the mind. Notice both comedy and romance go through phases that look roughly like the life cycle of a person from birth to death; in comedy, these are phases of a society, whereas in romance these are phases of a hero.
Satire’s six phases are (1) satire of the vulgar character or lowly braggart, (2) “quixotic” satire of a rascal, (3) satire of a hero, (4) satire of realism, for instance in the story of the average man who brings about his own downfall, (5) satire of fatalism, for instance in the story of a man defeated by bad luck, and (6) satire of social tyranny, like in dystopian fiction. Tragedy’s six phases are (1) tragedy of lost innocence, such as a fallen woman, (2) tragedy of innocence, such as an unfortunate youth, (3) tragedy of the ascending hero, like the story of the passion of Christ, (4) tragedy of the fallen hero, like most Greek tragedy where heroes have an epic flaw, (5) tragedy of a lack of freedom, as in the star-crossed and therefore helpless lovers Romeo and Juliet, and (6) tragedy of horror, in which the hero is tortured or mutilated. Note that the six phases do not correspond so much to phases of life, but to levels of power.
Analysis of Chapter 3
This is another complicated chapter, because it looks for patterns on multiple scales. First, it groups imagery into seven domains. But it only does this because it wants to see patterns that repeat across the domains. Thus, the mythoi of the chapter are not the seven domain themselves, but a cycle that repeats within each domain: the cycle of life, which takes the primary form of the four seasons. Sometimes, it is easy to lose sight of which pattern is the most important: the level of imagery or the cycle within it. But where Frye ends up is with the cycle, and the four phases of the cycle structure everything else that happens. This is the primary system of this chapter. In chapter 1, it was a gradient of power; in chapter 2, it was a scale of reference, from the most internal to the most external; now, in chapter 3, the primary system is a lifecycle.
Frye calls the four mythoi—comedy, tragedy, romance, and satire—“pregeneric.” That means they come before genres, which are what Frye discusses in the next chapter. The meaning of this “pre” is complex, and in fact Frye means two slightly different things by this. On the one hand, mythoi come before genres in the sense that they exist, historically, before them. Comedies exist whether or not books exist; the mythoi of comedy pre-exists the genre of the printed book. On the other hand, Frye means mythoi are logically prior to genres. That means the existence of genres requires the existence of mythoi. Theologically, this kind of relation is often talked about in terms of creation. In theological systems, God is "logically" prior to man. Without God (or gods), you can’t have man. Similarly, Frye seems to be saying that without mythoi, there wouldn’t be genres. It’s not only that comedy and tragedy come before novels; it’s that novels need comedy and tragedy in order to come into existence. The mythoi are more fundamental than the genres.
You will probably have noticed that Frye is using some terms—tragedy, comedy, myth—differently from how he used them in chapter 1. There, myth referred to the highest mode, and tragedy and comedy were types of fiction in which the different modes were explored. Tragedy and comedy, there, were defined in terms of a hero’s relation to society. Here, they are defined in terms of a particular phase of imagery, associated with a particular mood. This is one of the consequences of Frye’s ambition in Anatomy of Criticism. At times, he uses words in their common-sense understanding. The distinction between comedy and tragedy as a distinction of social integration is widely known in literary studies, thus he relied upon it in Chapter 1 because he was primarily interested in explaining the modes, and he did not want to engage with definitions of comedy and tragedy. But now he is interested in comedy and tragedy themselves, and he has to derive a definition of them instead of just using the one everyone else uses. Words take on different meanings according to whether they are being actively derived or simply re-used.
The confusion between this chapter and the first chapter also indicates Frye’s method. He seems to be progressively zooming out. The first chapter was on modes, which are internal to a work of literature. Then he looked at symbols. Now, he is looking at myths, which are collections of symbols. Each chapter synthesizes aspects of the previous one and moves to a higher or larger scale of analysis. This is also why the lengths of the chapters seem to increase as we go. Things get more and more complicated because they have to synthesize everything that came before while also deriving new things to come.
No matter how complicated things get, and even when they look unwieldy, we should remember just how tight Frye’s system is. Once he decides on a principle, he tries to apply it to as many things as possible. In this chapter, for instance, he considers six “phases” within each of the mythoi. This provides for some correspondence between each mythoi. In turn, Frye gives himself—and us—a sort of guide through this thick terrain. We know there have to be six phases, and because each mythoi has its own system, moving from birth to death or from small to large, we can fill in the six phases as positions along a gradient. Thus, the general method of filling in the logical blanks of a given system or subsystem remains consistent in Frye’s work.
