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PHILIP HALLIE
particulars, questions it makes no sense to ask about standing back:
what do you drop out from a given work? And why drop it out?
What aspects of Blake's and/or Shelley's suns do we drop out, and why?
Archetypal Criticism
is
really not an inductive study of poems
and plays. It is a purely question-begging or tautological enterprise, a
boldly arbitrary insistence on a deep verbal distinction (between form
and content), an insistence that can neither be tested by the facts nor
help us to choose between the facts. To use Blake's phrase, Archetypal
Criticism, like the whole of Frye's system, is a "Cloven Fiction" be–
tween universal and particular, not a factually testable and inductively
useful hypothesis.
It seems plain that Frye's "supreme" system cannot be taught or
learned, let alone further developed, because it is made up of impene–
trable paradox, profound incoherence, and a bold but ultimately arbitrary
disregard for the facts of literary experience.
~
~
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intage
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Philip P. Hallie
The Fall 1964 Issue of
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