Professional Documents
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From Cliche To Archetype (With Wilfred Watson)
From Cliche To Archetype (With Wilfred Watson)
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"New means
vices create
create
new
was
exist."
new ends
discomforts."
we
Inc.
by
as
new
ser-
FROM
II
MARSHALL McLUHAN
T O
r\R C H E T Y P E
PUBLISHED BY
POCKET J BOOKS
NEW YORK
POCKET BOOK
1970
POCKET BOOK
This
contained
in
in
the U.S.A.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Cambridge University Press: Excerpts from The Forms
at
Common Law
of Action
by F. W. Maitland.
Chatto and Windus Ltd. and Q. D. Leavis: Excerpts from Fiction and
the Reading Public by Q. D. Leavis.
Constable & Company Limited: Excerpt from Words and Idioms by
Logan Pearsall Smith.
Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc., and Miss D. Collins and J. M. Dent
& Sons: "The Donkey" by G. K. Chesterton. From The Collected Poems
of G. K. Chesterton and from The Wild Knight and Other Poems. Copyright 1932 by Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. Copyright renewed.
Doubleday & Company, Inc. Excerpts from The Silent Language by
Edward T. Hall. Copyright
1959 by Edward T. Hall.
Faber and Faber Ltd. and Mrs. Valerie Eliot, the copyright owner:
Excerpts from "Ulysses, Order and Myth" by T. S. Eliot. First published in The Dial, 1923.
:
Horizon Press, New York: Excerpts from The Tradition of the New
by Harold Rosenberg. Copyright 1959 by Horizon Press.
Mrs. Wyndham Lewis: Excerpts from The Diabolical Principle by
Wyndham Lewis (Chatto and Windus, London). Excerpts from "Vortex No. One
Art Vortex Be Thyself" from Blast No. 1 by Wyndham
Lewis (The Bodley Head, London)
The Macmillan Company: Excerpts from The Scholar Adventurers
by Richard P. Altick. Copyright 1950 by Richard P. Altick. The Macmillan Company, Mr. M. B. Yeats and The Macmillan Company of
Canada: Extracts from "The Circus Animals' Desertion" and from
"The Apparitions" by William Butler Yeats. From Collected Poems
by William Butler Yeats. Copyright 1940 by Georgie Yeats, renewed
1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Butler Yeats, and Anne Yeats.
Extracts from "A Coat" by William Butler Yeats. From Collected Poems
by William Butler Yeats. Copyright 1916 by The Macmillan Company,
renewed 1944 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. Extracts from "Sailing to
Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats. From Collected Poems by William
Butler Yeats. Copyright 1928 by The Macmillan Company, renewed
1956 by Georgie Yeats. The Macmillan Company and Routledge &
Kegan Paul Ltd.: Excerpts from A Dictionary of Cliches by Eric Partridge. Published in the United States in 1950 by The Macmillan
Company.
Main Currents
From June 28, 1964, "Speaking of Books" section of The New York
Times Book Review. Copyright 1964 by The New York Times Company.
by W. K. Wimsatt.
The Viking Press, Inc., and Victor Gollancz Ltd.: Excerpt from
Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti. Copyright
Victor Gollancz Ltd.
1962. The Viking Press, Inc., and The Society of Authors as the literary
representatives of the Estate of James Joyce Excerpts from Finnegans
Wake by James Joyce. Copyright 1939 by James Joyce, Copyright
renewed 1967 by George Joyce and Lucia Joyce. The Viking Press, Inc.
and Faber and Faber Ltd. Excerpts from Letters of James Joyce, Volume I, edited by Stuart Gilbert. Copyright
1957, 1966 by The Viking
from The
by Robert Graves.
The World Publishing Company: Excerpt from Miami and the
Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer. Copyright
1968 by Norman
II,
Mailer.
=
to
Bergman makes
he
is
it
mass-man
is
better than a
This commonplace
is like
nin underneath. It
is
Robinsonism, that
an ugly, ignoble
is
no
woman
is,
it
isolation. In the
says:
Wake
To
have been startled because what was really a cult of the absurd
to Jarry's
Ubu
Critics
to
From
Cliche to Archetype
theater
cult of the
much
nineteenth century,
and the
Surrealists, cubism,
and Dadaism.
first
drama
in 1948,
As he studied
in the week,
W.C."
he
to ferment,
is
it
costs too
too
book
much,
warm, where
it
don't
is
the
began
We go
on speaking as if we were stricken by some sort of amnesia.
So Ionesco wrote his anti-play in which the Smiths and the
represented very well the collapse of our daily lives.
Martins
it,
cocktail party.
The characters
serves us as a
way
of
is
life.
the
all these
to the Smiths.
liter-
ary French which presented the English in the most absurd aspect
possible.
it's
fish
Mr. Smith
we
is
live in the
suburbs of London
Smith.
Mrs. Smith: Potatoes are very good fried in fat; the salad
oil was not rancid. The oil from the grocer at the corner
is better quality than the oil from the grocer across the
street. It is
bottom of the
However,
street.
oil
I
prefer not to
at the
them
tell
play
this
is
become
is
inter-
up
to
daylight inspection.
Pascal, in the seventeenth century, tells us that the heart has
many
the
The Theater
Absurd
is
essentially a
communicating
to the
hundred
years
had
it
of
head of some of
world the languages of the heart were pushed down into the unconscious by the dominant print cliche. In the contemporary world
the unconscious
is
awareness. This
is
Edward
T. Hall in
He
tells
is
in the
snifff
sniff
time.
first
.
snifff
The dialogue
.
goes: "Sniff
."
to
is
the
way
in
characteristic effect
is
a sort of
It is
from oral
to written,
and
it is
From
Cliche to Archetype
absurdist frisson
is
new environmental
technologies.
man now
what happens
is
it
by Ionesco?"
tentative
answer
is
Tragedy presupposes
guilt, despair,
moderation, lucidity,
Punch-and-Judy show
more
are no
"We
guilty
and
also,
happen."
And
no responsible men.
"We
didn't really
It is
always,
want
that to
is
dragged
down
We
in the sins of
our
guilt: guilt
is
We
a religious deed.
Comedy
alone
is
Our world
is
only a
way
making us perceive
we seem
to
dox, so also in
still to
art,
exist only
and
in
bomb
at times
seems
of the bomb.
We
is still
possible even
if
pure tragedy
forth as a frightening
denly; indeed,
many
We
moment, as an abyss
is not.
can bring
it
In The Bald Soprano the Fire Chief waits to ensure that all the
fires
first
My
of an engineer
Mr. Martin:
on a hornet's
if
nest.
left a widow
Mr. Smith: Like my
.
wife.
Had married
Fire Chief:
man
whose cousin, a
fly fisher-
Mr. Martin:
Fire Chief:
fly
by night?
Had married
From
Cliche to Archetype
named Marie,
too,
ada by an old
to
another
must be Marie.
And whose father had been reared in Canwoman who was the niece of a priest whose
else,
Wake
in the Berlitz
words when
But
talk to you."
bad
cess to
archetypt!
The
fall or
Finnegans
archetypal cesspool.
you for an
As a precursor of
Wake
same
is
prepared
to re-
an admirer of
theater, directs
farce. It
can be used
to
if
for Godot.
Hugh Kenner
No
Samuel
Beckett, as a son of
James Joyce,
a dramatist of the
impasse.
Why
from
their
now
drama
explicitly a
high
Wake
as
not without
its
Finnegans
much
is
rides on the
The absurd
is
Ibscenist
is
realism
nansence,
(Ibscenist
Finnegans
if
you turn up
You might
Theatre,, in
article
its
ment as coming
to
fairly large
is
life. It is
it
realistic effect.
But
may
be
this
move-
so. Nevertheless,
number
as Brustein's
Arnaud
is
At
essentially archetypalizing.
and
it
which
Double (1937).
in several manifestoes
Its
do so
The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the
Direction of the Marquis de Sade had turned his Arnaudian
made environment
satellites, the
that ends
planet
is
enclosed in a man-
into a
all the
From
Cliche to Archetype
It,
Act
II,
justi-
to
"do
their thing"
and
roles
everywhere. Shakespeare's
So
"0000
intelligent."
of the
that Shakespeherian
new global
Rag
/It's so elegant/
up
the
theme
acceptance of jazz.
It
&
10
jazz catches
its
confused, evanescent
aura, dispersing the mist to reveal very clear ghosts similar to living
yet of greater stature, not only does
it
men
by
saying "I can do without you," but society, too, gradually becomes
incapable of giving the
zigzagging
down
lie to
the somnambulist.
boh, boh, bee bee boh boh" or grimacing with gritted teeth and narrowed
eyes,
no opposition or
dream
in
criticism;
which he
is
Elemire
Zolla,
Intellectual
Since Sputnik put the globe in a "proscenium arch," and the global
village has been transformed into a global theater, the result, quite
literally, is the
planet parenthesized by a
offers
itself
everybody
else's joint"
is
not the only latest form of cliche probe but merely the largest and
most perceptible.
It is just
12
all
Anesthesia
that they
become anesthetized
whole process.
to the
alert.
world
attempting to
is
Sound-light shows, as
new
cliche,
It is
a state
As information itself
banks know more
about individual people than the people do themselves. The more
the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
The old hardware city, congested and polluted, appeals to many
as a psychedelic experience. Urban renewal is a macroform of
surgery, made possible by the anesthesia of town planners and
publicity barrages that numb all public awareness. The negative
nesses form into massive conglomerates.
the wreckers
disease,
comes
and the
slicing of the
thruways and
The negative
media permit
the wrecking
minds of
my
generation
by the public
city.
Ginsberg).
J.
and
I,
image
when
is
etherised
the evening
is
upon a
you
"Like a patient
table."
has,
on the whole,
its
thousands of years
The West,
effects. It is
to
SI/SC
sensory
input or
is
more inclined
today to give the SI side of things a go, while the West, undergoing
13
From
Cliche to Archetype
retribalization,
may appear
to
The outer
trip has
trip
has been echological and Oriental. Both kinds of trips are clicheprobes. Each has
its
preferences of retrieval
The inner
trip
trip prefers
There
is
is to
explain
how
Satan,
is
that
created intelligence, should immediately be able to intuit the results of any sin. Therefore the problem is: how can he be said to
commit sin and be of high order of intelligence? Milton solves
this problem wittily by showing how Satan uses language to obscure
bub
in
Book
of Paradise Lost:
in the
how
fall'n!
how chang'd
And hazard
Joynd with
me
once,
He
is
."
the situation.
He
is
still
lying
half submerged. Flat on his back he turns, rolling his eyes, and
mind
".
so
As
comes
to
confuse
Who now
triumphs, and in
th'
excess of joy
14
God
as created Being to
Anesthesia
uncreated Being, and he has forgotten the defeat which had been
inflicted
form
linguistic
describe what
is
to
the
grass
at the beginning
who consider
e.g.,
may
at
any moment
is:
"A sym-
in literature to
It
perience
In B.
is
is
is
M. Hinkle's Introduction
to
had
first
operation archetype.
from
insensibility to psychedeliciousness:
his
gum,
who asked
cine.
The sequel
to
to these
adventures
is
Martha.
15
From
Cliche to Archetype
Woe
to
you,
my
you
shall see
when I come. I
you are plump. And
Princess,
till
who
is
my
last severe
am
just
me
now busy
man who
depression
little
girl
who
to the heights in a
wonderful fashion.
16
if
body. In
you quite
you are forward
will kiss
ARCHETYPI
unknown
ca.
1946-55; nor
is it
today.
Robert Graves
to
tional literary
mind naturally
tries to
to
visual
approach
"adding omissions"
to as
is
What Carpenter
refers
and
interfaces:
am
getting at
is
myths
into
What
what
None
of this interests
me
problem and,
like a
come up
most important
that,
block access to
cites
18
it,
it.
Archetype
the
cramping brevity of
tradi-
in such tight
forms?")
The West was discovering the power of discontinuity just when the
East was taking on the excitement of the novelty of the Western
continuum.
Lauriat Lane,
Jr.,
archetypal question:
therefore,
it
is
is
a mythological figure. If
we
we
subject
discover them to be
it
"On
the
1928).
The crux
mind. Complete
scientific
proof of such an
it is
is
important to recog-
investigation,
is
his distinction
to
any discussion
by a particular author.
Lauriat Lane,
It
of "cliche":
When
I.
why
is it
Jr.
to
its
association?
at the University of
Wisconsin,
19
From
Cliche to Archetype
still
an unconscious con-
in
The Cardinal
"Saved by a
stock response."
is
its
guage
The
is
is
is at all
shared by lan-
human
We
artifacts
A mound
Old
Old
Who
I
keeps the
must
lie
till.
Now
down where
that
my
all the
ladder's gone,
ladders
start,
W.
The human
B. Yeats,
complexity of functions
is
is,
thus "a
The clue
in a word, "complete."
The most
masterful images, when complete, are tossed aside and the process
begins anew. Language
human
is
human
artifacts are,
by
words
20
word
is
an example of such
Archetype
The ancient
way
"Speak
saying,
that
may
see thee,"
was a popular
word.
If the
world of
kettles
and
bottles
it
till
becomes easier
to see the
bond
that
The archetype
limits of
intensi-
word or phrase.
is
consequently a retrieved
an
cliche*
It
man, an archetype
is
new
is
one technology
to another:
window
an
mold and
its
casting
is
a national
flag, it
can retrieve
The
cliche, in other
adhere
to
it.
is
retrieve
we
is
When we
we unconsciously
words,
others;
and
this
retrieval
recurs in
we exclude; and
this quotation of
21
From
Cliche to Archetype
Examples of
What
to
be recollected by
takes,
it
is
retrieval of
symbol
or, as in Yeats,
it
tinguished from
type
is
its
is to
be
dis-
is
is
an
ele-
ment of our psychic structure and thus a vital and necessary component in our psychic economy. It represents or personifies certain
instinctive data of the
roots of consciousness."
to
Jung
is
Insuffi-
numinous appeal
Communism
is
an archaic,
primitive and therefore highly insidious pattern which characterizes primitive social groups. It implies lawless chieftain-
my
concept of the
22
Archetype
inherited patterns of thought or as a kind of philosophical
dynamic
certain
by means of the
is
no
scientific
well aware
is
memory
is
based
in arti-
power of
new computer
the
in
restoring to contemporary
The
Ching
is
from modern
life,
understandable;
it is
its
No
puter
is
a refuge
its
the
same way
computer
that the
dependent upon,
is
once again
its
functioning
is
system
the
much
is
is
works.
it
structure
the
in consulting the
Ching.
It is
programmerquerent,
and of the output, the I Ching can be viewed as a psychic computer. Given the development of computers with all the atin terms of the nature of the input of the
it
The
is
is
we mentioned
earlier on, in
many people
its
functioning
of the
the
23
All
my poems
are on parole.
Alfeo Marzi
A
I
COAT
made my song a
coat
there's
more
enterprise
In walking naked.
W. B. Yeats
Donald M. Frame's biography, Montaigne, provides many observations from Montaigne on the transformations in author and in
public that result from a man's image being circulated as a public
probe.
The mere
printed form
is
from the
assume
La Boetie had
written in the
"Letter writing
think
lived,
form of
...
have some
is
letters:
a kind of
ability.
And
form to publish my
needed what I once had, a certain relationship to
lead me on, sustain me, and raise me up. ... I would have
been more attentive and confident, with a strong friend to
adopt
this
to talk to. I
25
From
Cliche to Archetype
address, than
am
more
now, when
And
a whole public.
if I
am
not mistaken,
successful."
owe a complete
dom
of
my lesson
The
wis-
daughters.
the folly of
no great harm.
The novelty of
self-expression in print
seemed
to inspire
Mon-
strongly
is
by Montaigne:
stressed
The sense
of loneliness:
hope for
this other
advantage, that
my humors
if
happen
to please
to
"Amusing
tell
anyone,
notion:
I tell
send
exactly.
things that
the public;
many
my
."
The comic
"Each one of
my
re-
feet."
man
the
body
26
to
And no
"makes me
makes
other
me more
man
properly a
Now
he offers his
"We
much more
and
imagine
by
demeanor
his
his ability."
nonintellectual he asks:
"Won't they
wives?" His
final
paragraph (his
last
finale)
now ends
we
still sitting
are
thus:
"On
only on our
own rump."
As
To
it
perched on their
that
had
be
to
literal.
decency
"not
to
us to do in private"
W. H. Auden
in
"In
seemed
Memory
of
it
is
decent for
stupid.
W.
He
By mourning tongues
The death of
the poet
his
poems.
the living.
work even
One
is
probe
27
From
Cliche to Archetype
my
it
"My
in a phrase:
con-
producers?"
Perhaps
all
make
God"
in
some degree
for their
God Percy
is
projecting,
is
challenged to
be that he is an image of himself as created by the broadmedium. The new means of amplifying the dimension of
author's image in the magnetic city tends to project him so
seems
to
casting
the
God
28
artist, is Lilliputian.
CASUISTRY
(ART AS LIE)
The Nunestans
of the Written
Bond
Word
Picasso
Tell arts they
have no soundness,
And
If arts
stand too
want profoundness,
much on
and schools
seeming.
reply,
lie.
One way
medium
difficult
when one
is
is
to
say that
much more
make
and
outer,
When
"truth"
is
reduced
to
words out of
30
than matching.
their senses," as a
wag
noted.
It is
matching of
to the
whole game of
many
The harmonizing of
the Scriptures
became an obsession.
Bacon's essay "Of Truth" opens with allusion to the new games
of casuistry that had sprung up with the printed retrieval of whole
What
is
a bondage to
it
fix
And though
dis-
But
much blood
it is
in
them as was
when
it is
lie itself.
One
what should be
neither they
make
it
take in
imposeth
to think
men
found
in
it,
that
men
of the later
is at
should love
a stand
lies,
where
lie's
sake. But
tell:
this
31
From
Cliche to Archetype
takes a
He
is,
which were
developed
at the
by the new
Othello:
Give me the ocular proof;
Or by the worth of mine eternal soul
Thou hadst been better have been born a dog
Than answer my wak'd wrath!
Iago:
Is't come to this?
Othello: Make me to see 't; or, at the least, so prove
.
it
To hang
a doubt on; or
life!
-^Othello, Act
Iachimo:
If
For further
satisfying,
III,
Scene 3
you seek
kiss'd
To
it,
and
it
gave
me
present hunger
You do remember
Posthumus:
Another
Were
Ay, and
there no
more but
it
doth confirm
can hold,
it.
Cymbeline, Act
The popular game of
(Act
casuistry appears in
II,
Scene 5
Scene 7)
II,
Menas:
.
all the
me
poor,
am
the
man
world.
Pompey:
Hast thou drunk well?
Menas: No, Pompey, I have kept me from the cup.
Thou art, if thou dar'st be, the earthly Jove.
32
Casuistry (Art as Lie)
Is thine, if
inclips,
ha't.
is
thine.
Pompey:
And
Ah,
this
me
is
not
my
Mine honour,
profit that
it.
't
villainy;
is
is
it
is
the
Ben Franklin
in his
man
little bits,
which leads
to the
mined
to give a
week's
strict attention to
cessively."
token
it
to
human
expression
by casuistry
is,
new cliche
new cliches.
the
The
pre-
inherent in the
of print
33
From
Cliche to Archetype
The man
that Carter
He was
equally
temperamentally disinclined
to
per-
collectors,
who was
Today
ness.
We
becomes
34
the
speak of a
lie as "credibility
METAPHOR
in organizing
affect
This can be proved by the part that symbolic systems as images have
played in the history of culture; they are connected with emotions and
are widely employed in art, in the theatre,
etc., to
organize
affect.
Many
It
Will
helps to
Upon completion
of the relationship,
It
is
A kettle
is
i.e.,
syncopation.
conflicting suggestions if
definition of a
he were
to
and
literature
which can be
the
inseparable from the study of the sacra pagina, the sacred page of
Scripture.
The "Book
36
of Creatures"
Adam
became
the
we
are told
Centennial Metaphor
work of
Adam was
the viewing
and naming
of creatures.
Days'
Work
modern
Book
the two
Book of Nature
to the
Book
of Scripture in the
name
of the higher
criticism.
By the time
Concerning
Human
By
the
equivalent to the
Book of
a preference because
compared
is
is
to the arbitrary
it
like
Thomas
Book
Paine, or, on the other hand, writers like William Blake, the
of Nature has developed as
many
Book of Revelation.
Newton was in a continuous
difficulties
or stumbling blocks
as the
commentary on
the
pression of the
living in divided
and distinguished
both the page of Nature and the page of Scripture had been desacralized.
and
man
37
From
Cliche to Archetype
this chain.
reading:
all
the Essay
is
the alternative
without a plan," or
"A mighty
When
became
came
the journalistic
and Nature
The nineteenth century
to the entire
human
when
Taylor Coleridge with the world of the novel, and distressing him
with the spectacle of the corruption of taste and morals through
this
a liaison between the public and the writer every twenty-four hours,
the printed
into
Arnold, who saw the new situation as tragic. But just when the press
had established
this
new
cliche
and corporate,
tribal past
its
recover the
human
to retrieve a mythic,
power
seemed
to create
to
high culture in
new
38
Centennial Metaphor
the
all
new techniques
dams, and new kinds of
sorts of
interest in
agricultural machinery.
With
this
general
The clock
the machine.
cliche,
is
in his
ume
of creatures.
He
Sterne in Tristram
thinks of
Shandy
to the
Book of Nature
as a vol-
as a chain of being.
it
a comic
is
artist
He
in the
down, wearing
machine.
sees the
to
machine as running
weak
point,
becomes
word implies:
which
is
It
Symbolism
is
It is
It is
the
The chem-
is
is
The
whether
sloughed
off as old
Euclidean
It
may
be that the cue for selection occurs when, from the rationale
we make
a deprecatory adjustment
of that cliche
e.g.,
39
From
Cliche to Archetype
way
of these at a time.
e.g.,
new
centennial meta-
phor.
NASA
locked up
still
loyal
"chain reactions."
Language
stresses the
tures of awareness
new awareness
of languages as struc-
The can-may
many
dif-
Another type
known
is
is
technically
adjectival
first
and a nominal
is
identified
For
ex-
40
(where
Centennial Metaphor
plants are grown), and the Green house (house
is
owned by
The French,
The new
appear,
rules of
may
grammar
for English,
41
w
s
m
a
i
a
-
Wyndham
is
is
the mirth
To prepare
And
time for
to
all the
T.
Eliot refers to the
what Eliade
create,
S. Eliot,
work
is
the ritual
world and
of J. Alfred Prufrock"
repetition of the
Eliot's
murder and
life
hymn
of
through
into the
The moment of
truth created
by the
man
artist
The
Allah
is
he who
effects
is
it
43
From
Cliche to Archetype
all barriers
(is
at this
is
then in preparation,
they can hope for a return to life that will be enduring and
concrete.
in
From Dream
to
As
moment
moment
of awakening, that
intuitive
of going to sleep
between two
is,
ideas
states:
commonly
pre-
happen
to
like to
go over
my
problem
middle
even
and paper
wake up always keeping
or
of the night
in the
pencil
if I
within
cites in
Satan:
Before
The
thir eyes in
dark
And
stand.
him
II
Macbeth
It
44
If
it
'tis
If the assassination
We'd jump
We
still
Bloody
am
his
kinsman and
his subject,
Who
itself.
"We
will proceed
no further in
up a school
in
which
"A
left to retrieve
burning would
lieb
By scrapping
all
"bloody
in-
is,
this business."
monarchy
The cliche
destroy monarchy
Duncan, that
is
moment of Macbeth's
come to dance inane.
."
.
far
more
by Anatol Rappoport
dilemma
is
The experience of
the
Second World
War was
described
on War:
an exhilarat-
45
From
Cliche to Archetype
American imagination as an extreme effort which one undertakes only when provoked, hence only when one is in the right.
Such an effort, to Americans' way of thinking, was bound to
be victorious. In other words, identification with the protagonists of
good (as
in mass-entertainment
The
dilemma of
common
"the
is
"massive retaliations"
"trammel up")
dramas) and a
the majority of
volving
became
to
Arthur Koestler
in
field:
it
and
its
genres, "move-
reached where
is
then embarks on a
all is
New
cliche,
is
new technology
new
services create
New means
new discomforts. New
new ends
new
speed-up, a
mankind and
new
all the
46
by the new
political goals.
end."
new
if
The
"When
CLICHE
AS
IKKVKDOWX
worm
my
You've hissed
You
will leave
mystery lectures
Don
You
to delinquent
undergraduates
Our
final
hope
Is flat despair.
down
the razor-blade of
life.
Tom Lehrer
The way
to
make
a film
begin with
is to
to
a climax.
C. B. De Mille
One
"With us Americans
vulgar, that
it
is
so bad, so ignorant, so
citizenship.
is
is
.
The
superior to
Jew, Leo Rosten points out, has always been accustomed to handling
48
Cliche as
Breakdown
three or
is
destruction.
It is
merely additive, as
in cities or industries.
IS
ONLY ROUTE
Star,
March
26, 1969
little
cubic capsules
all
done
is
in raving color.
Must
baby carriage
way
in
in the
stair-
reality), dwelling
man who
is
a doltish self-
judgment.
Of course
It is
the
baby carriage
in
Odessa
is
a sentimen-
49
From
Cliche to Archetype
tality
to
manner, since
merge them.
Thus
e.g.,
in all
is
metamorphic
its
situations.
and a subplot,
pursues Adonis, and Adonis pursues the boar. She bores him
more
to death.
all the
love.
silly,
dumb
Shakespeare smashes
through
The movie,
cliches,
which charac-
the old
and involvement.
When
new Mustang
it
becomes a
from private
society
and
to corporate
politics.
is
awareness in nineteenth-century
is
They
Any
carriages, of justice.
cliche,
50
pushed
to a
high degree,
is
Cliche as
which
may be
archetype
old archetype as
new
e.g.,
Breakdown
old cliche as
new
cliche.
its
logical
economy: "therefore
is
51
CLICHE AS PROBE
Slander,
him
homogenius man,
as a
mass-man
his personality as a
damn
is
reflected: at
He
says, if
cannot encompass
comprehensible?
about
once boundlessly
And
if
Wake
his
is
he
his
comprehension
don't really
work
is
know much
it."
is
illustrated in the
following passage:
What, therefore,
is
justify a definition.
of the term
may
is
the sub-
53
From
Cliche to Archetype
click"; dicker
is
typed expression
as
is
were
it
a stereo-
and
this
came
early 'eighties,
moutons (cliche).
to
England
cliche
ca.
an outworn commonplace; a
is
become
so
hackneyed that
its
use
an
is
be-
it
to
now
all
intents
and pur-
and
from me
to
their freshness
Duke")
.")
through
and most of
their
("the Iron
significance
but not inebriate"), and foreign phrases that are tags ("longo
intervallo", "bete noire").
as a "worn-out expression."
The notion
by
the
that
The
studies extend
from The
it
emotion."
54
What
is
common
as with
to all these
Kafka
are
approaches
is
the basis of
the awareness
Cliche as Probe
that cliche
is
it is
also an active,
life.
guage. Print was, before the electric age, the principal cliche
past.
from serious
cliche
attention
The Theater of
Because there
is
safety in derision
Or seem
plausible to a
man
of sense,
Whether
it
be bold or
sly.
as they understand
it.
They are
made much
of the cliche
to get great critical attention. Its real significance lies in the fact
tudinous areas of
is
information
but very often provides mere retrieval of old cliches. The starting
point of this book, then,
is
between
The resemblances
tacular.
Language
fact,
is,
all of his
sensory
life.
55
, ,
From
Cliche to Archetype
very
"Lovecomparison,
me,
my dog,"
specialized and
in
love
or "Love thy
human
sig-
nificance even
derived from the use of dogs in hunting and the chase. In principle,
these illustrate the genetic origins of all cliches:
To bristle up,
To set by the ears ( ? )
To fly in the face of,
To turn tail,
To go off with one's
tween one's
A
A
A
A
dog
in the
Any
tail
be-
my
its
of contention,
sly dog,
Too old
hang-dog look,
Not
Top dog,
Under dog,
have a
to heel,
hound
it
new
word
bite,
tricks,
throw
to
hold in leash,
hit
to
is
to learn
to a dog.
come
dog,
day,
puddings,
A bone
manger,
His bark
To
To
To
To
To
To
To
To
to beat
legs,
lucky dog,
To
good enough
stick
a dog with,
to,
on,
off [the scent],
hunt down,
To
To
To
To
To
To
throw
throw
make
to the pack,
off the scent,
a dead set
at,
be on the track of
?)
?)
?)
In full cry,
In at the death,
for,
To run to earth,
To run with the hare and hunt
red herring,
Hue and
cry.
56
way
in
illus-
Cliche as Probe
sensory
life
cliches
its
range of probe.
of atten-
limits of
tion
rim -spin of the planet arranges the components of high- and lowpressure areas, so the environments created by linguistic and other
extensions of our powers are constantly creating
new climates of
show on an ever-increasing
kind of sound-
scale.
These hidden symbolic systems are completely phony, or resonating pseudo-events of our
to
its
shall
make
which
to express
it.
Every concept
that
and
all
its
its
ready
we're not far from that point.
Every year fewer
and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little
.
smaller.
."
Some might
ask,
what
is
literati, for
whom
all
nonverbal modes of
Hamlet:
It
queen"
57
From
Cliche to Archetype
Hamlet: "The
'mobled' queen"?
Polonius: That's good; "'mobled' queen"
good.
is
Hamlet, Act
Polonius
hit
II,
Scene 2
Hamlet
is
to
him, or he to Hecuba,
Had he
That
the motive
have?
He would drown
Yet
I,
And can
my
cause,
Hamlet, Act
II,
Scene 3
numbed and
is
a break-
head mentions
in Science
of discovery.
creativity has
the
He
down
readier
way
to solve a
problem
is to
break
it
parts and to keep running over these again and again in his
until
he "intuits" a solution
Another approach
that
is,
until a
mind
breakthrough occurs.
more deeply
is
examined further
in the
Eye-Ear
section.)
May
58
Cliche as Probe
old songs and nursery rhymes, derives from the involvement they
demand? Literary
culture,
by
and de-
The
is
man
to the
art never
is
had
much
so
to
do as
"Make
it
new"
Hamlet and
The nuncstans
constitute
Marlowe
like
"now"
"now."
The revolution
became universal in the nine-
its
new obsession
in his injunction to
"The
and lancing
like the
blowpipe flame,
."
Hopkins, in
literate culture,
beginning with
The
59
From
Cliche to Archetype
sudden
seemed
by
an opportunist and an
theater, Iago,
be called "the
to
who shaped
lives
by
his
it
necessary to
One
(miss-stress).
is
in the
world
creep"
is still
of Action at
an indictable offense. F.
Common Law
as
W.
common
law,
is
no remedy there
is
no
wrong.
rule has been that no one can bring an action in the king's
courts of
rule in Bracton
we may indeed
day.
The
first
which a
plaintiff
own
this
rule
is to
obtain a
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with the rise of writs, all
From Status to
initiated
by written forms,
so Maitland shows
how
large sovereign
or nationalist states arose via the same agency of the writ (and the
But now, when the forms of action are gone, when we are
no longer under any temptation to make them more rational
than they were, the truth might be discovered and be told,
60
is
assuredly
this, that
throughout
Cliche as Probe
an element
is
stand them
justice,
we must
The old cliches of oral evidence came into stark conflict with
the new writs of the eleventh century (under William the Conqueror) and of the twelfth century. The great disaster date of
British history is not 1066 but 1086, the year of The Domesday
Book.
Many
demand
to
rights.
and
scribal resources,
were able
to forge
like Chaucer's
Man
of Law,
who could
more
enlight-
drama,
in
ened times.
As an example
of
how
may
action.'
be as
many forms
III
every wrong"
is
is
fit
to
be a remedy for
no remedy there
is
no wrong." That
must
" This suggests, truly enough for us, that in order of logic,
there
is,
"Where
if
there
is
no
remedy. In our own time, judges, when they hand down suspended
sentences,
recognize prisons
as
infallible
receipts
for
making
criminals.
61
What
call the
"auditory imagination"
is
and
levels of
returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning
It
current,
meanings
trite,
and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most
the
civilized
mentality.
T.
S. Eliot
man
is
be said
to
thrusts
back into
achieved by strategic
artist, it
mind
is
to
into awareness.
the past.
63
From
Cliche to Archetype
day by a
action of Finnegans
.
wiped
at
Wake:
as freely as
Reading
is
excremuncted
any frothblower.
at several
meaning
surd, since
is
at the
it
Yet
is
to concentrate solely
this:
on the
literal
as
vision her
plump and
it
it
is
just
some
The
city as a
in
the
for miles,
64
Consciousness
head trolley
each
and
its
just behind,
and
that penultimate
would push the voltage up, drive the current back and
further back into the screams of every animal upside down
and hanging from that clanking overhead trolley, bare electric
bulbs screaming into the animal eye and brain, gurglings and
awesome hollows of sound coming back from the open plumbthroat
if
along some underground river, and the fear and absolute anguish of beasts dying upside
along the
line,
back even
who knew
back
back
all the
animals
still
in boxcars, back,
farm where
to the
first
to the train.
by
all the
The
of the world."
of artifacts
The
is
theme of
the
museum
to Ulysses.
middenheap of
my
ruins"
(T. S. Eliot,
and the
the literate
voured
us.'
illiterate classes in
man
is
a feudal society.
the peasant,
"
To
which
first
House
of the
Dead
like
an
and
then echoing
again and again in the later sections. The most persistent and
all-pervasive
theme of
this
kind
is
member
of the "gentry,"
who was
the
distinguished
65
From
Cliche to Archetype
in Russia primarily
by
and
his education
only when a
member
For
among
themselves could he ever truly know
"They
gentry]
[the
tells his
is
this
who
readers,
only becomes
is
this in-
makes
it
young
and
Books
like
his parents
and
life involve-
their set,
he
is
to
mean
The Graduate simply presents Oedipus backward. The agon of the hero is to scrap his private identity and to
plunge back into the tribal complex. He is seduced by his own
the phony, the ersatz.
his
incest, geneticists
own
seem
"sister."
to say, there
could be no species.
world where
66
all is
DOUBT
Dubito ergo sum was Descartes' original opening line of his Discourse, Berkeley replied:
"double," or "echo,"
Arthur
in
Avalon
i.e.,
unlike the
from
is
tells
us
Roman
haps
is
easily led to feel that something has been left out. Per-
my
folk saying
is
"Seeing
is
truth." "Faith
is
is
eyes."
The
God's own
inconceivable
new
in a preliterate society.
The technique of
the doubt as a
cliche
Non
when Nicholas
Biathanatos
Donne,
Who
To
is
seize
No
T.
S. Eliot,
"Whispers of Immortality"
68
Doubt
ing."
if
It
can mean "if you nothing knew," or "if you nothing me,"
I'll
destroy you.
The daughters
meaning:
"We
i'
at the
still
the heat."
is
end of
with a de-
Edgar
the "foul
69
Gya
EMOTIO.\;SE\TIMEXT
I
j
iiiiiiiiif l iitiiinnul^
The Emotion
The native
act
of Multitude
and figure of
my
dagger that
B. Yeats
heart.
Othello, Act
Is this a
see before
I,
Scene
me?
Macbeth, Act
II,
Scene
When
Hamlet, Act
The motif must be sobby;
sob, so
we
it
III,
Scene
is
reduced
is
make
all
to the
we can be
us aware of
by traces
up
him
same time
he might
which
by an
his self-
popping out of
71
From
Cliche to Archetype
mass-man
of the
t
else.
is
this:
know
am
worm, but so
maxim
everyone
is
... the image of the knife raises fear only when that image
common
has elements in
with instinct.
when it
(repressed) complex impelled by
complex
to
The image of
the
part of an unconscious
is
instinctual forces.
is
While
is
asso-
the energetic
It
The image
and presented aspect and also a partly unconscious, nonpresented and undefined aspect.
conscious image
is
a causa
efficiens, the
unconscious image a
to
emo-
tion.
At the conclusion of
We
come
emotion
is
know
sets
going.
it
we have
to the
It
is,
what
it
achieves or what
is
a "gift"
spirit.
Thus
its
danger
72
It
Emotion-Sentiment
psyche as a whole
Emotion
lived.
risk.
To be known
it
must be
which
is
relevant
is
always therefore a
is
is itself
hyphen
situation
rieties of
and
(from
"poignant"
"thrill"
Emotion as cliche-probe
or
hole,
thirl,
e.g.,
many
{
f
dance inane"
1 fire
the essential
words
piercing),
etc.
retrieves
all va-
the
is
come
to
Buddha
in the
sermon:
Everything, Bhikkhus,
on
is
fire?
The eye
on
pain.
fire,
be
fire,
pleasure, be
it
By what
fire is it
What
fire.
everything, Bhikkhus,
the visible
fire,
on
is
is
on
is
on
is
on
is
fire,
the knowl-
is on
from the contact with the visible
it
pain, be
By
kindled?
it
it
by the
fire
it is
kindled, thus
The ear
say. The nose
say. The tongue
say.
The body
say. The mind
say.
Knowing this, Bhikkhus, the wise man, following the Aryan
path, learned in the law, becomes weary of the eye, he becomes
weary of the visible, he becomes weary of the knowledge of
the visible, he becomes weary of the contact of the visible, he
becomes weary of the feeling which arises from the contact of
I
say.
the visible, be
it
pleasure, be
it
pain, be
it
neither pleasure
He becomes
weary of the nose
pain. He becomes weary of the tongue
pain. He becomes weary of the body
pain. He becomes weary of the mind
pain.
When he is weary of these things, he becomes empty of
desire. When he is empty of desire, he becomes free. When
he is free he knows that he is free, that rebirth is at an end,
nor pain.
He becomes weary
of the ear
pain.
73
From
Cliche to Archetype
no more returning
is
to this
distinction
is
movement based on
from the
Emotion
is
is
"passionate because
its
motion
is
It is
Chaos (gap)."
"emotion"
not stress
tactility
that
is
a hyphenated gap, as
is
is
"gap" or "interval"
it
is
is
particularly
human
the
we might say
its
is
its
There
External ob-
is
life.
'heart' is objectless."
kinds of
in
identity
we can say
."
In
that emotion
way
in
American mistrust
of,
is
hostility
going counter to
Maslow opens up
ment and
society:
much more
instance,
it
74
expressing hostility
Emotion-Sentiment
our society. Some people think that
this is
Hostility
retrieval
What Maslow
is
discussing here
is
stated
by
James Hillman:
Another alternative of curing emotion through emotion
is
we
we
is
live
often
one
fully.
This
recommended
way
of passion.
if
The emotion
is
lived fully
and
fanatically.
75
ENVIRONMENT
(AS
CMC UK)
ill
feel
no pain.
Hippocrates
It is
dormition.
Wake
James Joyce
and Architecture
much
to the
just as
Time
Hans
Selye tackled the "pharmacology of dirt," or the whole environment, in The Stress of Life. Giedion approaches the entire man-
made environment
as architecture.
Most of
this
environment
is
anonymous
much
as
all the
"unintended
meanings" or ambiguities.
In Propaganda, Jacques Ellul contends that
culture in action that
propaganda
is
is
is
the total
by the
it
to the level
of conscious appreciation.
Service environments which depend upon cliches or
new
tech-
77
From
Cliche to Archetype
human
whether
totalities
One
is
that two
create less total service than one, or, in other words, the addition
possible to consider
It is
as dependent
upon a multiplicity of
human
settlements or cities
service environments.
very
upon a
we can
from evidence
see
extent of
much
at present available,
is
true to
some
it
becomes drastically
to
city
figurative as literal.
street.
No
creature in the
jungle would
service environment,
by providing more or
less
city.
impersonal,
automatic services, kills or numbs the natural probing and exploring instincts of man.
A
78
The
city
comparable situation
becomes superjungle.
to that of the
is
By removing
sterile
husk.
Augean
It's
all the
as
if
some Herculean
of his creations.
analogous
to
cliche
him
all
and
city (political)
itself
124 shows
imagery.
Love, he says,
fears not policy, that heretic
But
all
That
it
79
Formal patterns
America hold
in
we
that
cry.
Crying, too,
may
when we want
... In Japan,
not necessarily
mean
mean
as
to express joy
we
many an American
Americans,
means
that
state explicitly
what the
to
rules are.
ones. This
to
them when
Edward
T. Hall,
In any area that falls outside our visual culture, North Americans
tend to be hung
so
many
up
in
it
little
Why
me
What
is
puzzling
is
sudden need
italics
(in
Our
81
From
Cliche to Archetype
least the
mett.
NEW PUNCTUATION
Why,
suddenly necessary?
Toronto
was Heisenberg
It
The
classic
in
bond of
as the physical
Daily Star
on the subject
is
Linus Pauling.
Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda:
that
"When
propaganda
dialogue begins,
is
why propaganda
once, explains
The
total life of
reason.
It
all
media
at
be "propaganda" for
this
is
by the
artist
indispensable to sur-
and freedom.
image of man.*.
may
see thee."
is
stile
the
."
theme.)
"Tenour"
in his
is
"Elegy":
strife,
82
allusion
is
made
to radio.
Eye, Ear
jazz.
Radio
or symbolism. Beat
is
means but
its
form and
is,
the world
therefore,
was
jazz propagated
by
electric
spaces since they tend to accept the activity of the eye in isolation
space created by the visual sense in isolation from the other senses
Under
Western
is
space
is
itself.
of space generated by
new
visually-oriented scientists in
anthropology,
terials
make only
man
forms
many
fields,
from mathematics
to
ma-
The return of
literature.
and
Much modern
poetry today
study of English
in the
is
The
written to be sung.
boundaries between the written and the oral are becoming very
elusive.
The range of
is
unlimited.
biguity,
It
situations affected
by the
shift
from eye
in
ear
to
Am-
The
first
is effective
ways
at once."
This
is
language so considered
is
From
a "rag-and-bone
%
Shakespeare,
Sonnet
lxxiii
83
Many
of the
to
the theory of
Hamlet,
more circumstantial
sor Frye says,
came each
in classifying the
modes
is
in which, as Profes-
in front of a spectator,
much
."
larger store
comedy,
pastoral,
pastoral,
history,
pastoral,
pastoral-comical,
historical-
tragical-comical-historical-
tragical-historical,
scene individable, or
poem
unlimited; Seneca
light.
Working
entirely
II,
Scene 2
individual
it
media as well:
"audience"
itself
it
is
book as an audi-
ence.
85
From
Cliche to Archetype
been as extensive as
it
Time magazine
fication.
March
for
7,
The Time
editors
have no idea of why the "yung and easily freudened" are now as
passe as "Getting Gertie's Garter." The arrival of "tribulation" (re-
man)
tribalized
isolation that
in the
A Runaway World?
in
TV
how
The "nuclear" or
society in
isolated family of
were unbearable. "Sex" also separated out from the general social
life in the
travel
is
not homosexuality
TV
generation.
own
arts
into
its
cate-
the hands
of
but herein
we
are already
learned men,
The
illustrate
(Book
."
legal world
3,
is full
Chapter 4.)
it
is
easy to
from F. W. Maitland:
English law knows a certain number of forms of action,
each with
its
the per
and
cui,
impedit, an action of covenant, debt, detinue, replevin, trespass, assumpsit, ejectment, case. This choice is not merely a
86
Genres
choice between a
number
it
is
is
it
quite impos-
Dryden be."
was
It
son's dictionary
By
language that
many
is,
will
Dr. John-
felt
(1755) constrained.
Frye
cultures, Professor
apply
this flux in
to a recent
segment that
is
up a system of
sets
classifications that
rapidly dissolving. If
we
subject enriched
commentary on
from Homer
to the present
by thousands of
their works
is
resignedly ignored.
Today
of jazz, of song and speech and dance, has created a complex world
if
he has any
temporary
man
with
new genres of
its rivals.
all
provided con-
is,
is
with
Coleridge,
as wide as psychedelia
and has
members
another posture
is
out," "high,"
and "stoned,"
etc.
87
From
the
Cliche to Archetype
major
W. H. Auden
begins his
"The Guilty
known sin, but by the
of
title
Confession
once
finished
Secondly,
it.
to certain
begin one,
formulas
immediacy.
it
(I find
it
very
difficult,
Mr. Auden
is
have
for example, to
read
it
again.
If,
have finished
its
and
it,
as sometimes happens,
before,
till
must conform
the story
is
have no wish
start
specificity
this
if I
its
to get
have read
cannot go on.
a classifier
who misses
the
the
poem
backwards. How-
some heed
it
is
written
to the
He
is,
who
suffers
from a sense of
dream" literature.
The espionage thriller
is
most fascinating of
all
spy story
to
end
all
spy
as exemplified today
She smiled
"Is
It
it
and counterespionage
stories.
The quest
by Agatha Christie
at
in
is
is
The
an an-
thriller
this
Murder
after
Hours:
him.
a bargain, M. Poirot?"
was quite an
Madame,
88
sin."
does find the genre excludes him from other forms of "day-
it is
effort for
not a bargain."
Hercule Poirot
to
say,
"No,
Genres
whole
he wanted, very
simply because Lucy Angkatell asked him do
He wanted
badly, to
let the
drop
The
like
to
detective story in
bounding
lines,
ventional novel,
narrative
is
is
thing
so.
but are given the realistic treatment of a cona very strange hybrid. For one thing, the
it is
deliberately in-
terrupted and lacking in important connectives that the psychological novel relies
upon
to reveal character.
When
character
is
pushed
to a conventional
ing line that contains all facets of the character at once, the
narrative function
displaced.
is
Drama and
the
traces the
moved from
Waste Land,
in
are
flat,
experiences.
cliche
is
It
is
collective
is
flat
It is
the
same
in painting.
The
flat
tudinous layers of significance, whereas the three-dimensional perspective illusion necessarily specializes in one facet at a time.
The
the malcontent,
The
is
of the individual
stylized
and iconic
is
new
is
why
89
From
Cliche to Archetype
dissolution, so
two ways.
He
is
the
modern
was a
and
He
is
ous. Hamlet, too, has a double orientation, like the whole of Shake-
speare's vision.
On
its
the one
hand there
is
is
same ambiguity
scious,
is
own time
the
world of
the
new
literate individualism.
This uneasy state appears everywhere in Greek drama and in modern symbolism. Zolla comments:
new genres
invent
wrote in a
letter to
new
style of existence.
Longfellow in 1841
Magazine
ature.
You
way
will
the condensed,
and
Thus he
suited to the
liter-
lies in this
The
brief,
Owen
to the
whodunit
is
the
a prototype.
The theme is the quest for identity on the frontier between two
worlds. The Virginian is a stereotype, representative of the Western
civilized man, detached, poised, and aristocratic. On the frontier,
everyone is a nobody and must prove himself each day. He has no
"place" in the world. Thus the Western is a paradigm of the condition of
The
man
in a rapidly
ritualistic
in
an
by human artifacts, has made the Western a natural form for the media of both movie and TV.
One of the most successful genres of this age is the book title
environment
90
little
affected
Genres
a "youdunit."
itself as
It
titles
as:
Time and Western Man; The Revolt of the Masses; The Managerial
Revolution; The Organization Man; The Affluent Society; Time,
Space and Architecture; The Impossible Theatre; Management and
Machiavelli; Gods, Graves and Scholars; The Hidden Persuaders;
Doctors and Drugs; The Death of God; The Double Helix; The
Biological Time Bomb. Replacing the encyclopedias of earlier
centuries, such books are all "guides to understanding." Jay's
same overall
modern management
and
as such that
it is
managerial practices
to
nated to
it
"When
is,
however, subordi-
an ego-inflating drug,
In
It is
it
is
and
asks,
to the
horse
concerns
itself basically
comfortable suburban
the
life
men
ultraconservative, the
types, the
women always
men
or newspaper
and smartly
perfectly coiffed
evil neatly
attired,
opposed, love
himself.
to
word, she
is
woman
which would, of
sitting at the
execu-
sit-in.
"The
What he
says
is
91
From
Cliche to Archetype
he goes on
to
natural has
made
manifest."
itself
sees
MIMIC MASTERS
A
Wayne
Western saddle.
The mythical
simultaneously, or sometimes
figures, as
we know
man and
plant.
is
is
and as
brand-new
at the
both.
What
tually
are
is it
we
to
we must remember
to
make
we
What
ac-
common
could a
man
how
fluid the
has
It
to
which are nothing but particular metamorphoses fixed and made permanent. The figure which men
cling to, which becomes a life-giving tradition enacted and
tain figures stand out,
is
The mask
is
at will
its
92
is
.
transformation by
his face.
The play of
it
varying and
his features
is
far richer
Genres
than that of any animal and he has, too, the richest experience
of transformation.
It is
inconceivable
time to study
all the
had
One
reveals.
it
decorum or
by Quintilian
(c.
is
and expression
defini-
There
we may
is
it
is
held,
them
The first is termed the plain, the second grand and
forcible, and the third intermediate. The nature of these three
styles is, broadly speaking, as follows. The first would seem
differentiate three styles of speaking, all of
correct.
and the
would have it, conciliating
the audience; for instruction the quality most needed is acumen, for conciliation gentleness, and for stirring the emotions
force. Consequently it is mainly in the plain style that we
shall state our facts and advance our proofs, though it should
be borne in mind that this style will often be sufficiently full
in itself without any assistance whatever from the other two.
The intermediate style will have more frequent recourse to
metaphor and will make more attractive use of figures, while
it will introduce alluring digressions, will be neat in rhythm
and pleasing in its reflections: its flow, however, will be gentle,
best adapted for instructing, the second for moving,
third for
charming
or, as others
from
its
own banks
This
is
sweep
to
or pity, and while he speaks the judge will call upon the gods
and weep, following him wherever he sweeps him from one
emotion to another, and no longer asking merely for instruc-
93
From
Cliche to Archetype
tion.
Wherefore
if
adapted
to the
it is
who
to
be selected
by far
the strongest
speech sweeter than honey, than which assuredly we can conceive no greater delight: but
when he
Whereas
Havelock
calls
it
little
men
was concerned
with the
Milton. In
modern poetry
prominence
in
Pound,
Eliot,
this
form
is
is
and
effect in
little
others.
McLuhan:
The so-called art of the little epic (the idyll and epyllion)
was a late Greek form associated with magical rituals. It was
especially cultivated by Theocritus, who was Tennyson's
favorite poet. Theocritus and the Alexandrian school were di.
94
new poetry"
of Catullus, Ovid,
Genres
and
Virgil.
Catullus, Ovid,
and
is
Crump
hundred
five
lines.
life
new
on the
stories
.
is
it
Whereas
Homer, moves on
is to
say,
it is
not so
man. From
this
Petrarch's Sonnets,
in the
is
is
much
is
it
is
the single
little
epic
"the tale of
a history of collective
to justify the
a seasonal cycle of
ways of God
Memoriam,"
little
like
epics or idylls
The twelve
idylls
follow the cycle of the zodiac, each book corresponding faithfully to the traditional character of the twelve "houses" of the
zodiac.
By
The pattern of
of history.
prominent salva-
is
his philosophy
95
From
Cliche to Archetype
culture-hero,
been suggested
him by
to
and
its
night
home is located in a
home in a negative or
feminine sign.
The epyllion
is
The
The meeting with
is
mask of
that
it is
The
little
it
etc., is
means
its
also insists
incorporated massive
Theater, with
it,
He
to the
and
ironically.
What
It
may
this
probed
classical scholar.
The
tarian reader.
It
The modern
Most works of
art
The Trial or
and the
anti-totali-
would be easy
as that indicated
96
Genres
New points
out
how Marx
drama"
that
Marx
as a genre-maker
is
tures of the
is
really
summing up
the fea-
One
return to the
till
the
among
young damsell,
the
of
is
homo
the
same
life, sur-
hand against
effec-
97
From
Cliche to Archetype
not any
The
game
symbol of an
and
idle
strictly
All that
is
necessary
is
the
is
useless life;
Had
mow down
his
game
in
to
appeal
to a
man
or
woman
of the world.
when it has
some pleasure -value or vanity-value. Shooting or trapping
as a sport does so only
other animals has these values. Also the pictorial representation of objects, the
vanity-value.
still
people
They
at
same character
who
finally
it.
The
produced with
last tile
upon
the roof, or
the driving of the last rivet into the flank of the beflagged ship.
98
Genres
the
new form
is
the
maggies seen
all."
This wall
Humpty-Dumpty tumbles
is
magazine
is
ammuni-
a storehouse of
Humpty-Dumpty
is
the
mask
nological change.
the flow-
times."
Wake
from cliche
to
and pastimes of a
archetype
become
is
of one age
When
the games
number of
so vast as to create
is
this
kind of hendiadys-dialogue
is
and
autonomy.
cites several
modes
of the figures
He
notes: ".
is
this
kind of
Pardoner.
attribute
."
."
to
If
ye will
dombe
crea-
"counterfait" action:
99
From
Cliche to Archetype
feast,
and
..."
activity:
merge with
sit-ins
The writer and the actor both have to "put on" their audiences.
The nighttown ("Circe") episode in Ulysses as a virtuoso exhibition
of contemporary masking makes multileveled demands upon the
attention of
readers.
its
An
attention
X-ray radiologist
if
mime
its
the eye
world. Most of our ideas of the visual are not related to visual
action so
much
as to the conceptual
artist
series
many
painters are
to this, particularly
with
more abstract pictures. The eyes of both men, howwere drawn to discontinuities, including the edges of the
respect to
ever,
picture
itself.
might also be expected from the fact that the border defines
the shape
and
is
is
may
constitute
an impediment
if
100
Genres
down and
Our
fields,
and
On
films adequately.
own
time.
of
fictions
the
painter's eye:
My
And
body
is
the
the painter
table of
frame wherein
perspective
it
is
my
heart;
held,
'tis
this
cunning want
his skill,
see,
know
all fronts.
That
is,
the
the intervals
the Oriental
to discover,
art:
quite different
languages involved.
or nouns, as
we know them
in
Western
101
From
Cliche to Archetype
is
is
life.
grammar,
makes no
is
flexible.
is
form and
the combination of
Negative
"Ma"
is
is
temporal.
is
is
whereby the
is
non-existent
by himself but
"Ma"
of
is
"Ma"
is
a network of obligations.
is
mind created by
"Ma"
is
symbols.
...
It is
interesting
this
was
thinking. The
Japanese preferred
to
settle
The "Ma"
of architecture
is
Note
travelled through
Western "Logic."
102
To Hashira No Aida."
in India,
different
and
from
Genres
should like to demonstrate
if
we were
to take
this
what
in
static
and secure.
V) draws
attention to the
The
as interval.
bond
in
One
of the
mentioned
who
in the Introduction to
said: "Voltaire
discussion
is
this
from the
it
(It's
a very waggish
level of
propaganda
to that of literature."
Mary
these tales,
Shelley's Frankenstein.
Snow. W.
stories of C. P.
They tend
S.
to
to
Adam
Smith
in
sets
up a similar
prin-
and contentment
in his
all possible
all will
harmony
to
i.e., if
result.
The
difficulty arises
the
to con-
maximum
of
human happiness.
conflict
gloomy
which insures
its
is to
content. In
its
Random
103
From
Cliche to Archetype
House Dictionary
of the English
forming characteristics of
Language points
to the
group-
dialects.
1.
varieties of the
guage that
differs
esp.
when
con-
sidered as substandard.
Though
it
is
it is
still
more useful
to think of
is
A mask
Conversely, a genre
is
furniture. In a world
dialect,
satellite is the
latest
to
produce a milieu
genre
is
so,
and
if
word
is
significant:
is
-us),
n,
.
104
Genres
dialogue between two cultures can produce a rich
mask
humor
new "Yinglish."
and
off stage.
my
part, I
am
surprised by the
number
of
language
Take
How
word
recently
dubbed
Much more
significant,
affection,
think,
the adoption
to
by English of
convey nuances of
is
Yiddish in origin,
linguistic devices,
Examples abound:
3.
tried to shoot
himself."
in
Yiddish
may
men
power."
.
rewards. Insight,
think,
to
became a
weapons:
105
From
Cliche to Archetype
one way
to
is to
know him
better than
he knows himself.
Jews had
to
become
markably
names
rich in
made Yiddish
re-
contained in
inhabit the
Were
pressible.
Few
life,
story, its
ambience
.
in one word,
its
would not
style,
its
life
hesitate: irre-
instruments of
led so parlous a
opposition.
And
know
given
106
it
birth:
Jews themselves.
that
had
e
a
r
h
99
e
99
man may do
agreement in the
sir,
nest.
next year, be
For her
it fly,
be
it
What
moult, be
socioscientific sense is
hatch, be
sound as a
it
bell,
to lay
L. P. Smith in
Wake
attention to a mysterious
to the
("one through
new forms
mythos.
James Hillman
calls in Emotion "isomorphic unity." Phrases like "song and
dance," "words and music" draw attention to the different senses
and media that are encountered in doublets. It is one of Shakespeare's favorite figures: "The slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune," "grunt and sweat," "to lie in cold obstruction and to rot,"
"here upon
this
of what
in
worth and Coleridge, Barnum and Bailey, Plato and Aristotle, art
and
life,
People seem
etc.
if
may know
e.g.,
Nobody has
108
investigated
Iseult.
roses"
is
more
Why
"skittles" are?
com-
mom,"
anarchy," "the
flesh
may
These pairs
is
is
may
into the
in
forma-
be a useful way of
word unable
to
speak a word. Or
is it
by
interface,
by
the shock of
A much
aspect of this
in
its
is
larger
studied
vision
and
My
and
view
at their
unreality.
is
Augustans were,
at their best
amusing and
the
into
word,"
the "true
Wit." The peculiar feat of the Augustan poet was the art of
upon
of casting
and a per-
spective vision.
That
is
Augustanism
is
"one
clear,
light."
109
From
Cliche to Archetype
illustrates
is itself
Romanae
et
"obstruc-
Britannicae,
attention of
"To
"To
it
in the
ground." Imme-
make up
"To
lie in
cold
the
same
"Here upon
this
Macbeth:
of two nets, one with fine and one with coarse holes.
The
It
the fine net into one of the large holes of the coarse net.)
110
consists
fish
pushes
9
H
go
and
my
my
to
race.
my
Who
Wake
man
Emerson
silhouette
Of Sweeney straddled
in the sun.)
T.
S. Eliot,
"Sweeney Erect"
ment within
the
cifically defined
God, and
human
by
this is the
the Stoics:
road
"For mortal
to eternal glory."
ele-
mortal
this is
noble formula,
this,
which Cicero develops: "Those men have within them a supernatural element and are destined for eternal life
selves as born into the world to help
away to
their
would never
had
built
The
antithesis of this
image
is
that portrayed in
a group
of parasites
who
The Apes of
are the apes
Identity
man
prepared
is
the Culture
Hero
to
is
title.
qualifies
Rasselas,
society. In
to
him:
"He must
of mankind,
thoughts and
ever be a poet."
What Imlac
is
own
unacknowledged
legis-
lators of the world." In the Shelley context the poet is the "missing
with
its
planet, everyone
is
total
to think of
retrieval
gap
himself as a creative
and purgation.
the
encouraged
and
it is
concept of resonance-as-bond.
artist,
own time
our time:
as
it
goes on in
high school, tends to be a process of renunciation of differences. This conflicts directly, of course, with the adolescent
need for
self -definition;
is
so
masked
in in-
113
From
Cliche to Archetype
become aware of
not
engenders.
it
In
He must
it.
still
in the
is
ing technologies.
image of
is
their
identity.
agon of redefinition of
tragic
new kind
make room
new
ones:
which
enough
to
is
at criticism of
ently comical.
You
some graver
contemporary
get conservatives
for the
would be not
if
we
who want
art inher-
overthrow
to
any
we have seen
in
mere
American ex-
tradition,
attack everything
you
new on
the
ground
be
"My
it
artist
comedy.
Is
it
illus-
attitude?
The
is
elaborated in the
fifth
labor of Heracles, the task of removing the dung from the folds,
stables, and yards of King Augeias, son of Helios, the Sun-god.
The dung had not been removed in a great while, and its environmental effects on the population of the Peloponnese had become
114
Identity
the Culture
Hero
whole job
mersed in a
in a day.
make gaps
yard
The rushing
streams cleansed not only the yard and the stables but also the
Eliot
by Heracles. Language
people each day.
create
The
new gaps or
fissures so
fresh
new
linguistic
It
is
is
who
smog.
115
liVTH
!Tfo*
Between the ancient and the modern worlds there has been a kind
discoverer of
archaic
man language
is
an immediate evoker of
reality, a
magical
form. In the same way, he thinks of the "apple of his eye" as constituting his visual world, not as receiving
is
it.
is
is,
according to Heisen-
it is
The poetry of
perfectly
roots in
its
and desires."
more
as
experiences are
now
The ancient
world had fewer means and fewer motives for retrieving the past
just in the
degree to which
it
considered
The medieval need for the retrieval of ancient Greek and Latin
and Hebrew for scriptural study began a cult of historical scholarship under modest conditions of manuscript culture.
Today
the
117
From
Cliche to Archetype
means of
that
and events
is
so extensive
it
As we meditate upon
the literal
man
is
in
Anatomy
repetition
in other words, a
Rex
or
Tom
is
in
most un-
by much
enough
artifacts
form of
produced
cliche.
For the
the process
by which new
cliches or
new
technological probes
effect of liquidating or
scrapping the
preceding cliches of cultures and environments created by preceding technologies. The world of archaeology and musicology
today
is
It is in
mals' Desertion" that Yeats reviews this whole process, which was
inherent in his entire creative procedure, as can be seen in "Leda
James Joyce's
would seem
to
this archetype-
in
The Balinese
say, "We have no art, we do everything as well as possible." The
artist in the Middle Ages, Renaissance, or the era up to the nineteenth century was regarded as a unique, exceptional person bethe medieval period
it
is
118
Introduction
and so he
is
in this sense
man who
an
as well as the
man had
archaic
influence
and
man today
artist
to purge, cleanse
them by
rhythms in order
ricorso, so
modern
to
electric
technologies require such timing and precision that only the following of processes in nature can be tolerated.
The immediately
pre-
and educa-
and
political establishments.
succeeded print,
it
archetype.
Any
as
The
ceaseless use
to reverberate
with
dis-
states:
man, acknowledges no
act
His
who was
not a man.
else,
some other
before.
initiated
by
others.
tribal man there was no past, no history. Always
Today we experience a return to that outlook when technological breakthroughs have become so massive as to create one
environment upon another, from telegraph to radio to TV to satellite. These forms give us instant access to all pasts. As for tribal
For archaic or
present.
man, there
man
a
is
is
studied by Eliade.
a probe into
the
first
"rag-
119
From
Cliche to Archetype
and-bone shop,"
house.
man
The
to
archetypal store-
first
civilized
first
The
of scripture.
was
not characteristic of the pagan world. For that world the words of
What does
mean
living
tional culture?
Above
extrahuman models,
means
for a
man who
means
all, it
belongs to a tradi-
there
Hence
is
it
nothing
amounted
to respecting the
Mo
And
if,
man
succeeded, as
we have
we could even say that he entered into these rhythms (we need
only remember how "real" night and day are to him, and the
seasons, the cycles of the
moon, the
solstices).
It
repudiated
to the
all technologies as
pagan
to
for technological
and
its
to
120
Introduction
human
ruin. Paradoxically,
Academy
scrutinizing neologisms.
in
The Lore and Language of School Children by Iona and Peter Opie.
Christian indifference to the pagan rituals of stability and renewal, as well as Christian contempt for the world as a wreck or
middenheap, tended
on a superior human
Our
reprograming of the
and archetype
totality of existence
new environments,
making possible a
on the planet.
It is
these
Since
to cliche
we have already
is
this innovation
can be
on several
page 122).
its
it is
is
cliche in
its
sacro-
The part may be a tooth. In a sense, teeth are not only the
body where repetition and lineality concur,
but when followed by "an allforabit" (alphabet) as their issue,
recall the fable of King Cadmus and "the dragon's teeth which
tion.
121
From
Cliche to Archetype
When
we soon grow
to use of
thrust
mnakes!
all
is
for
make
5 rox
roll.
vengeance.
thuck in
What
Wisha, wisha,
thoil
its
Olives,
beets,
kim-
10 (0 stoop to
11 quite
15
16
17
18
19
are
creakish
here,
12 grass.
See
Sss!
13 sworming
14
please!)
epsilene,
in
the
Axe on thwacks on
20
snake
sneaks.
Two
off
And
hundreadfilled
place one
plaus-
One by one
axenwise.
thracks,
with
unleavenweight
message
of
in
their
liberorumqueue
25
31.
in
nillohs
dieybos as yet no
still
us,
dugters
lumpend papeer
to
let
flee.
and I
35 you went
34
it!)
122
Introduction
THIS
IS
A PRINTING OFFICE
CROSSROADS OF CIVILIZATION
REFUGE OF ALL THE ARTS
AGAINST THE RAVAGES OF TIME
ARMOURY OF FEARLESS TRUTH
AGAINST WHISPERING RUMOUR
INCESSANT TRUMPET OF TRADE
FROM
THIS PLACE
WORDS
MAY
FLY ABROAD
NOT TO PERISH ON WAVES OF SOUND
NOT TO VARY WITH THE
WRITER'S HAND
IN TIME HAVING BEEN
VERIFIED IN PROOF
BUT FIXED
SACRED GROUND
THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE
123
From
Cliche to Archetype
letters of the
many
that offered
specialism in
military
life. It
"please
to stoop").
"stooping to conquer," in
ritual. It is
many
senses.
"Stoop"
is
It
is
and
on human
identity.
little
module
bits ("peteet
in-
peas").
Throughout the Wake the theme of the mass-man, whether preliterate or postliterate, is
porter pease."
society
is
alluded to
The condition of
is
merged
pea mashed.
pay
module,
many
the self as
many
roll.
It is
"mush of
in tribe or
the mashing,
Money, as
repetitive
marches on
is
alluded to under
many
tribal
The query
to
Irish, or
The "a"
is
for "apple," as
thuck in
its
thoil" (line 6)
it
is
bit,
were.
"Whydidtha?" follows
124
(line 6)
is
The image of
Introduction
"mness"
(line 7)
mimes
the
man
to
as
grows, he
it
mouth
full of apple, as
it
were.
"A
impulse of fallen
now
and a diversity of
objects
Man becomes
diets.
hoard of
a producer and a
The
[line 9]
money economy,
entire
page
is
kind of prototype of
i.e.
(lines 18-19).
ways of
all cliche
or breakthroughs.
is
One
of the princi-
New
same
orumqueue"
con an we can"
(line 25).
"lumpend paper"
(line 31).
denhide"
is
created by
new cliche or
the popular
techniques.
human language
all
was and
is,
environments
its
own
liter-
ate humanist.
and
moments of
human
(line
36),
new technology
is
it
125
From
Cliche to Archetype
ceeding generations.
many
others, is
bone shop
own
must
talent
ruins.
filch the
It is
an approach
the tradition
is
ciety,
and
so-
human
ac-
It is
complishment: "please
(line 10).
to
from
to stoop" (line
The need of
"0
2) and
stoop to please"
means of probing
to
of creation
As
is
abandoned
cliche.
this
book.
tion" by saying:
I
sought
Maybe
it
it
in vain,
at last,
My
circus animals
Those
woman and
Lion and
This
poem
were
is
all
the
What can
but
first
he rehearses
of his time.
126
into the
on show,
burnished chariot,
and experi-
Introduction
From
new
A mound
Cliche to Archetype:
poetic techniques
Old
Old
Who
keeps the
till.
done.
is
must
'I
From
lie
down where
Cliche to Archetype
when
all the
is
it
ladders start."
Our theme
in
all poetic
the heart"
that
is,
the world
of the archetype.
What about
down only
to
climb a
and
breakdown
the ascent
As
as a
new breakthrough,
retrieval of old
vision.
It is
to the
humanism from
The
who devoted
The recognition of
to
the
human element
good of
their fellow
men.
127
From
Cliche to Archetype
to accept a desacralized
Nuova
The encyclopedic
on a multi-leveled exegesis
literary analysis
via
the
basis. This
figurative,
"grammatical" method of
(moral), and
tropological
the
interpretation
is
re-
of pagan deities into his Hell, just as Plato had tossed all the
There
may
modern
pagan
art
and
ritual.
The
by an-
ing position.
The
archetypalist, having
come
who
insists
to
entities,
now
confronts
The gods
literary classification.
W. K. Wimsatt
in
man when he
turns to the
Anatomy
of
Some
128
Introduction
nounced
came
Blakean inspiration of an
to realization in his
Four
its
"Polemical Introduc-
This
is
it.
at
an astonishing invention,
is
cism
is
and
be
criti
never in fact squarely made, and not only that the Four
is
carried on,
is
notable
new
the
wisdom of
Book VI
is
in the
Homeric
tradition of consulting
the tribe.
is
a minutely
Hell
is
amazingly
specific,
cataloguing a great
cliches, Milton's
many
of the pagan
129
From
Cliche to Archetype
deities
attributes. It is not
pagan cultures,
him must have been the attractive technologies of
eloquence and poetry and speculative philosophy. Even his favorite
difficult to see
even what
music,
art,
to
is
In Paradise Lost
ful Milton's
"On
we have
the
its
Morning of
technological seductiveness.
the
the entire
which Milton
technologies and of the arts, Milton's Hell receives all the whole
to
rlell is
Hell
and
is
arts
senses.
There
is
by Euclidean
from the new
rational space
To wanton
human
it
Down
tossed
to Milton's Hell.
softly sliding
the
strikes a universall
130
Wake"
"Funferall at Finnegans
It is
know
forces
is
is
you want
to
ill
if
a kind of
jig.
And
so
it
is
if
was grim
"Satire
is
is
a bird, a
a sort of glass,
light.
motions.
that
swift in his
he plays throughout
is os-
stances in which he
also perpetrates
their consequences in
paradox
was
Wyndham Lewis,
it is
funny
bitterness. Social
the funny
man
with a griev-
to recall their
132
Erasmus, and
in
Jokes
Conversely, anyone can determine an area of social irritation
nam
jokes
is
small.
what
Manhattan and
see."
W.
collective irritation
At another
level,
and frustration
in a society.
indispensable
is
figure.
Again, without his clown, the emperor has no means of contact with
the public.
to illustrate
title
Wit and
came
to
insight:
is
an encyclopedia of humor
know him
better than he
way
to get
way
to
think,
became
is to
knows himself."
knowledge is the "supreme bully" and
is to
exercise
is
"getting
it
133
Armstrong
to
flea collars!
News
whole populations
want
to
to read
Pravda
body
lice,
enabling
in bed.
The Beatles
Mitt
me
Mutt.
Simple and
faithless as the
shake of a hand.
Laforgue
Shake hands and come out
It's
better to
fighting.
lost
Samuel
all.
Butler
and new
electric cultures.
135
From
Cliche to Archetype
We've squared
chain with
its
you
broken chromosomes.
Flower-people saying
In every tongue there
is
like the
know
like the
it
my hand" (visual?). In
palm of my hand" (iconic
back of
we may
say, "I
know
know it as if I had given birth to it" (proprioceptiveThe Americans say, "I know it inside out" (kineticmanipulatory?). The Thailanders say, "I know it like a snake
swimming in water" (the dance of thought among words?). In
German they say, "I know it like the inside of my pocket" (tactileinterface?). In French they say, "I know it au fond" (auditoryresonant?). The Japanese, masters of touch or interval, say, "I
know it from head to toe."
Perhaps when we say, "I have it on the tip of my tongue," we
mean that word or phrase is teetering between visual and audible
recall. When we say, "I have it at my fingertips," we indicate an
immediacy and profundity of access.
they say, "I
visceral?).
'
the
"Wung
of our senses.
Joyce
sets
up
to
nameform
convey con-
136
it
going."
path.
Jack
MATCHING SENSE
My
I
To
let
object
all
sublime
punishment
the
The punishment
And make
fit
fit
the crime,
the crime;
Unwilling represent
Of innocent merriment.
W.
Why
then
He
fit
S. Gilbert,
The Mikado
you. Hieronymo's
mad
againe.
T.
However, we must not
trust to the
S. Eliot,
of hearing.
Edwin G.
to the
American
Matching Sense
fine child
you have
there,
been scrapped
that has
has
is,
jet city.
Burma,
Now,
in the past,
have
as a species of
inconsistencies
to
version
Such an approach
to the data
makes
it
possible to represent
Kachin society as very simple. Confusions of practice are regarded as due to the fact that the
stupid Kachins fail to understand their own society or to obey
their
own
apparent that
to that of E. R.
Leach:
ways of
Myth
the
ritual ingredients
and there
will then be
an end
to all critical
problems."
In 1923, T. S. Eliot contributed to The Dial his essay on "Ulysses,
139
From
Cliche to Archetype
It is
a great importance.
covery.
No
before:
it
It
an epic
it
is
am
and
not begging
if
you
it is
is
call
it
simply
it
is
novel
all form to
Mr. Joyce has written one
The Portrait; Mr. Wyndham Lewis has written one
novel
Tarr.
feel the
need of something
It is, I
will ever
with James.
stricter.
think, because
felt
are unaware of
who
obsolescence.
its
more than
the scientist
who
is
pursu-
They
will
further investigations.
It is
panorama of
futility
is
immense
contemporary
his-
seriously be-
earnestly desires.
And
discipline in secret
140
It is, I
and without
aid, in a
their
own
Matching Sense
very
little
any use
in further-
Mr. Eliot
is
myth
is
as a structure of parallels
necessarily double.
Its
double-
ness
is
and
great
mass of
it is
book
Political
but the mere fact that two groups of people are of different
culture does not necessarily imply
assumed
at
assume
the contrary.
to correct a
at-
think
gists
it is
the
same point
essay
Myth
myth and
in Primitive
Psychology. According to
this
view
tion or charter for ritual action. Ritual action reflects the social structure, but
myth.
it is
relating
myth
it
t'embarass,
Homo
Vulgaris.
141
From
Cliche to Archetype
Joyce
is
ment
that inflicts
to stress the
importance of
this
comple-
human
experience.
The reader of The Mirror and the Lamp can easily adapt W. H.
Abrams' fine chapter on "Changing Metaphors of Mind" to the
complementary roles of cliche and archetype. Abrams shows how
richly Wordsworth and Coleridge contributed to the interplay of
mind and external Nature:
Which do both
give
it
As
and
artists alike
agreed
sees.
agrarian environment
It
its
dis-
read, and
Coleridge had studied intensively. In these writers, the familiar figure of the spirit of
man
as a candle of the
Lord
candle throwing
cite excerpts
142
its
beam
An
Matching Sense
Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, because it serves as a convenient inventory of analogies for the
mind
as receptor or projector
The
as a mirror or lamp.
and Culverwel
indifferently as
sets
"Now
the Spirit of
man
is
the
Name.
."
in co-existence with
of Poetry
is to
inclined to
rectify
make
"is to
produce
excite-
effect
Abrams
ob-
serves:
by
poete
makes him
at the
The tendency,
that
At
is,
least as
much
is to
become a probe
began
The
as the century
Dupin
is
moved
and the
artist
tended
to fuse,
Abrams
probing of poets:
Coleridge, with considerable justification, has been called the
143
From
Cliche to Archetype
which, for
its
power of
the
It
German organic
theorists.
The
new paradigm,
The
first
half of the
better
known
and
something in
common
men
like
numerous concepts of
electricity
had
guided
all scientific
more than
in part
a family resemblance.
Thomas
The main Cinderella
S.
plot of
My Fair Lady
is
Scientific Revolutions
repetition gets
144
Matching Sense
schools.
It
was a speech
that unconsciously
mimed
the
machine
Madame
Sosostris
.").
To speak
decades.
if in
American
jazz
modes of
the lower
middle classes
motor
car.
The mime
It is
of mechanization
not archetypal so
thus submerged,
it
much
is
as
it
is
My Fair Lady.
gains intensity. If
in
many
other processes.
mimes
the
"plastics."
mime
the
new
electric
and
tribalizing technology.
new technology
as
much
Ben spurns
Its discontinuities
as the mosaic
form of the
tele-
145
>II>II:SIS.
OR
>IVkl\(,
SENSE
The
and
faculties.
to
the
human body
Havelock's Preface
to Plato.
parallel
tosses aside
and metamorphosis.
E. H.
Gombrich
illustrates
how
the
for
to flourish in Plato's
is
describing
word ... a
total
technology
of
the
preserved
poetised statement.
well
if
... A modern
147
From
Cliche to Archetype
later
or what the poet had said about him. Such enormous powers
of poetic memorization could be purchased only at the cost
of total loss of objectivity.
to Plato's choice of the
experience.
This then
word mimesis
is
It
make
what he
saying
is
ised statement
what [Plato]
is
saying
is
that
any poet-
way
in such a
as to
make
citer
this
it
and understanding
One
drama within
a kind of
it, is
for
him
the
This polarity
is
instead of analysing
"enemy."
"making" (mac-ian).
is
is
We
is
a repeat of that
this
Wake
is
a ricorso, a
is
cates repetition of
That
mythology
is
page of
cognitive labyrinth as
it is
Minotaur. The
the
(cf.
Greek etymology).
Stephen's surname
is
i.e., "dead
"The Dead," and the last
relation of the young artist to the
148
lead: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of ex-
and
>erience
science of
smithy of
to forge in the
my race."
)f
repetitions
he
first
my
of the
cognitive
is
labyrinth,
the task of
which
making
is
on
traced
sense, of
waking
jet
ells
coverage.
rir-polluted metropolis, he
proceeded
make
nent,
namely "innisfree,"
Df the
probe
yi Innisfree,
cliche
in order to
and
an anti-environ-
to create
is
to retrieve
is
via cognition or of
"Thus,
if
made by Nature
now by art; and
they would come
it
if
things
to
in the
same way
by
it is
art,
by aligning
it
also
as
is
i.e.,
know-
by Joyce.
mouth of Perdita:
For
There
is
an
have heard
art
which
it
said
149
From
Cliche to Archetype
made
is
better
by no mean
to
so,
Nature,
is
over that
an
art,
art
The
The Metaphysics of
they are lived for themselves ; biogeneticists say today that a grow
ing organism, at every point in
whole organism
is
know what
growth, has to
its
the
and
polarity,
Yeats extended
this relation
is
My
is
the
theme of
art as a
means of
the keenest
ogy between
art
its
form.
hand
III,
and knowledge:
to the anal-
which
is
present
analogous
It
is
is
mind
is
to
a form
By way
existing things."
As
its
"The soul
is
ment of
A
sum
with.
150
artifacts
cliche
is
in a
extensions, probes
way
all
and shapes
its
extensions
man-made
environ-
and archetypes.
an act of consciousness:
we probe
is
upon
retrieval
The emphasis
a process
is
there
come
to
terms with the mini -module or the new structure of the electric
phenome-
posi-
literally
"simple-minded."
Kingston
Man
co-ordinate them
152
he
is to
and
not one
he must
MacLean
of the
the Mini
MacLean
said man's
re-
cently developed.
It
man
But
man
sees
The other
is
the "old
One
is
said.
his ancient
mammalian brain"
in-
that is con-
through multiplication.
He
is
among
1969
scientists is
discussed by
tions in
Thomas Kuhn
13,
Scentists
in
know what
characteristics
And because
The
may
know
it
may
is felt to
be relevant
to
153
From
-
Cliche to Archetype
me now
clarity
its
same
say what
the
all
first is
tific
games have
when he
in
really a corollary,
education. Scientists,
is
is
tries to
to
which
it
from the
start en-
A hew
theory
is
The perceptions of
It is
tists.
it
so that
some
would
to
it is
illusion of space as a
effects of
Western literacy
in according the
They are
erties
(a perfect sphere
whose center
make
is
is
that
iconic models of
DNA
particles
quantum
physicists con-
nonvisual, constructing
and the
prising that science has not a clue as to the nature of gravity and
With
154
the
i.e.
to
the Mini
consciousness.
for himself
level,
gest.
culture.
As he describes them,
man encompass
the
new
the
There seems
to
manifesting
itself
is
lives.
At the
is
beyond reduction;
to
To
Frank
Donald Judd,
a painter
this
means
is
"The cliches give way to words which have the value of rarity.
The volutes of the sentences are transformed into atomized
phrases so that each word, which
is
its
fragile
and tenuous,
155
From
Cliche to Archetype
now
there are
poems which
language in
itself."
PARADOX
what
it is
to a
bawd
Hamlet,
Hamlet's quip
now
from
Act
III,
it
truth.
Scene
We
ernize them.
"Book
of Peter Pan'*
unintentionally.
Oscar Wilde
mind
citizen
present probe tests cliche as the current technology, and the archetypal world as the "rag-and-bone shop" of old perceptions and
techniques. In the electric age there are far too
many
cliches avail-
158
Paradox
tself
all,
and scrap
all, in
a deluge
A
on's
is
G. K. Chester-
THE DONKEY
When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when
Then surely
the
was born.
And
The
walking parody
devil's
On
all
four-footed things.
keep
my
Fools! For
One
secret
also
still.
had
my
And palms
hour;
and sweet:
my
my
before
ears,
feet.
it
was based
and
that is
why he was
was no paradox
in
him whatever
dox
is
refused to be dictated
good enough
to beat a
dox
"Women
to so they
its
inception, there
is
turning
Chap-
159
From
Cliche to Archetype
ter 26:
"Agrippa said
Then Paul
yourself.'
may have
It
man
to
speak for
his defense.
the
to Paul,
wisdom and
fist.
elo-
In the
"Your
observation.
It is
great learning
is
is
a technical
The
and secular,
be found
to
is
in the sixth
Aristotle, to
refers in his
Summa
Theologica
is
I-II
it
remark of the
is
in-
The
Aquinas says
stantly or gradually.
which Aquinas
form,
it
is
under the
caterpillar as
it
it
became
the tradition at
Cambridge University
that the
offers
an encyclopedic
approach
to the
rhetorical
show
an orator and
to
to
160
Paradox
matrices. Scientific discovery, as
we
One
it
as so
many
ants crawling
around a balloon."
The
entire aesthetic of
Wyndham
You must
talk with
two tongues,
if
to
cause
confusion.
You must
You must
hip
There
is
You must be
number TWO.
a duet in everything.
you
is,
Why
try
consistent
and
in-
divisible personality?
You eae
may
object
that fat
161
From
Cliche to Archetype
You knead
into
it
yourself.
its
through yours.
Do
it,
Do not marry
Any machine
it,
either, to a
maiden.
Hurry up and
It is
on
tactic of standing
and
paradox equivocates.
it
doesn't.
and
It lies,
it
meanings
paradox
is, literally,
specu-
each
other."
is a major form of
upon an encyclopedic retrieval of older
No more extreme instance of this process
its
exercise.
am
my
have taken
engineers,
if
up because
this
am
know
You
No
see
And
am making
an engine
am
driving
at,
don't
is
a per-
you?
am
what
I tell
it's all
square.
162
and
classical
modes of paradox,
to learn both
how
Paradox
and how
to discover
same
the
My
to instruct,
arts:
title. I
crafts
to
do everything properly so
as to be in the fashion.
He moved from
all the
way through
the Narcissus
and feeding back the same image becomes a wheel, a cycle, able
memory,
as Oscar
Wilde pointed
out.
And
so
it
is
in science.
was
gravity
discoveries
would be
his discovery he
difficult.
Newton's idea of
to
be
men.
Another key facet of paradox
is
cited
I call
its
by
its
own
operation."
Bacon's essay Of Truth illustrates his awareness of the epistemological paradox, for in developing an essay
on
this
theme he
treats
the
mum
the lie."
the
title, is
paradox;
memory and
all
the
human
residue.
'fixed'
edge
is
stressed
by Rosalie Colie:
to
into
'subject.'
"
163
From
Cliche to Archetype
The "edge" of
is
always
at the
cliches
said, there is a
truth
it is
paradox
As we have often
moment of
activity.
and the
useless.
at once,
it is
to
Once
and method.
to question technique
is
paradoxical in
insists,
it
is
its
is
their authors
What
'happens' in
to the societies in
which
on the defective
real world."
It is,
many
is
can be
by the River
And
sail;
glass world.
."
is
much more
many dimensions
sophisticated,
from a world of
of non-Euclidean
the geometry of
Lobachevski.
164
its
".
written
first
as a very
Paradox
model commonwealth into higher relief,
book the description of his actual Engapparently unaware of the "little epic" form
More added
in the first
which More
is
is
history of
European
literatures. It
own
his
I is
II is the cliche-probe of
is,
obviously
to
one of
more
its
is
tion
Obscurorum Vivorum,
Idiot.
Once
the Epistolae
which reached
The
there
and beyond. As
in
a little-epic rela-
is
Sir
Thomas Browne,
theological truth,
in his
"Certum
est,
adherence
to Tertullian's test of
is
really keep-
in in this work.
The
title
is
multiplied.
Whoever gave
It
Browne engaged
work when
it
title to his
was pirated
Browne himself,
at the
practitioners
closely,
is
a set of variations
many
it
archetypes and
upon a theme
becomes a
vice.
He
that if a virtue is
much
165
From
Cliche to Archetype
in a world of religion
fate of being rejected
by both
religionists
and by
suffers the
scientists.
He was
Bishop Sprat,
Royal Society
in 1667, is
He
is
new
members.
its
nothing irreligious in a
the
it
an inquiry
is
into
Book
of Nature.
discoveries.
Paradox
is
is
mind when,
an opening.
rational
like a
Scientific
God
is
both
still
and arbitrary.
world where
that species
all is
change
it
is
a theory at once
doxical
is
Ludwig von
Bertalanffy,
whose contribution
to general
we have
material which
166
may
way
of introduction of
"
PARO
Imitation
is
the sincerest
form of
battery.
Advertisement
Aristotle
is silent.
H.
metapheri).
Movie
critics
Mae West
may have
ob-
garment named after her. The "Mae West" was no matter of mere
levity,
like
it
not
The
Merry
Wives
of
Windsor
to
the market.
to
be "discovered"?
say,
Would
this
be a bad thing?
A
168
parody
is
new
vision.
a parallel to the
Parody
Old Testament narrative of King David and Absalom in
Absalom and Achitophel he was creating a parallel between
his
the
contemporary and the past which lent a great force to the political
"Parody" is one road running beside an-
other road
medieval romances, creating a massive parallel between the medieval and Renaissance audiences for these works. Cervantes seized
upon
new
this
historical plays
England contemporary
an ambassador, "I
am
an authori-
via
metaphor of homosexuality.
Professor Barbara
entire study to
Ben
Ben Jonson parody, Professor De Luna declares, that it became the most talked-about play of the first half of the 1600s.
The "scale model" in our contemporary design sense may have
this
Max Black
in
to the subject
scale
is
used in the
first
two
when he
model
it is
Travels.
He
model
is
true
metaphor.
but actually
Western
in
is
which scenery
is
mode and, on the other, on Victorian melodrama. The whole classical parallel is in turn made parallel to
Aristophanic comic
169
From
Cliche to Archetype
lation
from the
form
poem
in
two epigraphs
in the
to
Sweeney Agonistes."
Game
and,
as they do so, probe Shakespeare's major interest in the Machiavellian desacralization of Elizabethan life. Shakespeare's Falstaff
is
whose name
is
Henry IV,
"It takes
whole
form of parody
per-
it's
hot."
tells
of native
loss.
When
The idea
of
people ever
to enclose
is
Romans were
the
170
if
first
by
and only
putting the
Public as Cliche
and what we
activities
call
how
to discover
is
dispersive
communicated. All the pleasures, even the theatre, must simply distract
I
seem
to
will, it
me
demands meditation,
isolates
man
against his
crops up again and again, and in the vast world (not to say the
large one)
it is
Goethe
how
to Schiller,
August
may
9,
use
1797
it
to
new
relation of comple-
mentarity, explaining:
.
to
whom
am
do achieve
Priestley
who can
literature really
whom
for those to
Wodehouse with
nil,
and
profit) I
the existence of
any
artist
and
his public
what
it
(though
tbis
doing so).
evil
meaning
is
man who
mind of
the
reflect,
it
173
From
Cliche to Archetype
my
Walpole, who
common
is
doings of rather
common
is
people,
is
to
why
a writer
more than
is to
me
the
a very
artists
moved
by
chiefly
little
code
presumed
sufficient to
make
all.
Mrs. Leavis
making
is
classi-
creation of
as a
interesting
by a nineteenth-century mind.
It is
the
The
many new
174
Public as Cliche
for
new
environ-
new
of the
new
artistic styles
new environment
is to
empathy
for anthropology
societies. Industrial
human
sensibilities. It
literate societies as a
was
not, therefore,
very realistic
effect
to
on
use non-
observe the
to
and
Reading Public
the
audiences for
done much
is in its
fiction. It is
Literature as a consumer
commodity
is
an inevitable development
is
ingenious
mean
it
is
is
is
is
symbol of the
editor's approval.
it
is
The poet,
more than the critic, tries to exploit new technology in
establish new plateaus for perception. The critic tends
literary people
"content."
or creator,
order to
rather to look at the values of the preceding age which have been
eroded by the new developments. The critic is like the accountant
adding up profits and losses. He is tempted to admonish the young
175
From
Cliche to Archetype
to
It
its
seriousness,
an habitual
till
arts.
It
a path
of the
can have
little
ments that have never existed before. The creative value of commercial stereotypes appears in the portrait of Gerty MacDowell
in Joyce's Ulysses. Gerty is a
effect of these
lives.
Joyce
enables the reader to exult and triumph over the trivia by letting
him
the
in
same way,
lives.
In
newsmaking
sis for the
situation with
accumulated
an
He floods
intelligibility that
the entire
provides a cathar-
in Fiction
our
and
lives.
the Read-
and archetype:
it
writers
and
same conditions hold,
indifferent (effective
the
176
ineffective)
Public as Cliche
class
who
world, as
the
man
in the
it
same
it
not strange that Mrs. Leavis should find values in the past
when much
greater
now acquired
archetypal status,
a large
body of
traditional lore
much
continuity of external
organization.
The function of
merge
it
its
popu-
power
to
The primitive
role of art
to the fore in
popular
homogeneity as a
man.
It is
art.
Paradoxically,
common
it
is
its homoSuch was the process by which uniform prices and extensive markets were created. The same marked processes were
geneity.
extended
to literature.
and
177
From
Cliche to Archetype
by a
traffic
accident
and
Any
his family.
that alienates an
him
as tragic. Jc
individual bereave
is
viz.,
movement
The individual
be-
in
medium
the print
is itself
in a very special
a lulling
fact
When
it
with words as things, they bypassed the print process and accepted
words as pigment, as
many
words
at all in the
typographic environment.
is
irrelevant since
of print
itself,
as
it
our time.
Why
has
it
never occurred to the literary public that a monotonous and hypnotic use of print might be the
suit? It
main cause
it
settled
down over
at the
beginning of
the
human
consciousness.
common and
it
attracting content to
Alexander Pope
to
it
become innocuous
in order to
match the
is
why
effects
to that
garity
178
is
an opportunity so far as he
is
competent
to set
it
in
Public as Cliche
is
the play in
Hamlet
most of Hamlet
to the
Elizabethan.
The encounter
of one kind of
is
the sweeping
and unprece-
Conservatives
is
made
it
mutually bewildered.
many
all sides.
179
It
Grew
in
A mound
Old
Old
Who
I
keeps the
must
lie
till.
Now
down where
that
all
my
ladder's gone,
Emma
Lazarus's famous
poem which
is
Liberty concludes:
.
Give
me your
tired,
your poor,
From
Cliche to Archetype
A headline in the
The same
in the
is
indicated
WHOLE
is in
new kind
of environment.
When
he encounters
responds exactly as natives have always done to colonial and imperial exploiters of their unstructured "thing."
He
says, with
satellite
is
an
my
in-
is
garbage in
Joyce's
its
Wake works on
this
barbaric way.
182
life, till
one
finel
Rag-and-Bone Shop
him with
raps on the bell with a bone and his stinkers stank behind
the sceptre
tions.
The term
"These fragments
poems of
The
cultures of
my
castoffs:
cultures.
ment of
cast-off
and jetsam.
for
March
10, 1969,
by a shop
in
is
is
devoted to "The
is
will be no
official
is
is
fast
The
more land we can reclaim with our refuse.
is that we have up to eight years. The unofficial word
.
word
four years."
to
appoint com-
one-way containers."
It's
as
if
the environment
had become
the
new
to a point of
the packaging.
ice
and
post-
Ward
package.
It
dumped
retrieval
Montgomery
itself.
and
Today electric
systems scrap nineteenth-century mechanism and dump
and
preliterate cultures
on the
183
From
Cliche to Archetype
and
this
probe results
in vast
its
primal
state.
congeries of mini-states.
the
into
ICBM
just as large
ABM
The
as
init
dissolve
empires become
to
junk
modern
it,
Joyce's Finnegans
Wake, and
is to
works
culture. In literature,
like Eliot's
Pop
art,
Funk
art,
Op
art,
probe destroys and creates. At the conclusion of "The Circus Animals' Desertion" Yeats perhaps suggests the renewal which he
doesn't actually specify:
I
must
lie
down where
all the
ladders
start,
How
to elicit creativity
of clothing.
the universal
and "unisex"
mode
in every
is
set a
culture.
geography or ideology.
levels.
corresponding decline in
mer
all residual
to instant
creates a
or establishment areas.
Sum-
over and lowers the levels of dialogue for teacher and student alike.
Bureaucracy increases quickly in such schools. The "flower people," likewise, will soon take over the bureaucratic function of
state
184
and army
in order to
MRJResSfM
SflBSftBr
hobs sills
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?j$&&Gffi
Wm RK8 iiliisf
BBS
i
^B
^H HHhsb
11111
iBraP R&roSSSK
Eafffiptiffil
mj&m&d
1
'
'
'
^^H
I
RETRIEVAL
1 f^W^H 7
'
History
is
bunk.
Henry Ford
Retrieval
The changing
and
all
of the
The more we
if
finds its
we
on
earth.
are. If,
however,
them,
we
fruits,
we can and
are not receptive to these sacred offerings, then the great evil
way
life
repulsive burden.
is
age of electric
technology, the age of the zero gradient, the sacred or divine city
by
is
electric circuitry,
1984 enshrines
is
a fascinating example
to
money and
contractual arrange-
agerialism
servants-more-important-than-masters
talist society
first
in
capi-
managerialists, on
187
From
Cliche to Archetype
the
When
the bankers
and other
forms
itself
the fact,
among
financial people.
new order
by and
roles defined
fill
may be done
unconsciously:
it is
capitalists
SPEAKING IN QUOTES
Organized charity in North America
is
like a
his boots.
is
earlier he
big.
it is
understood that
indi-
The new
an
situation has
effect
"Camp"
much more
to
seriously.
cause
Susan
observes
Camp
Camp
in
objects
Playing-a-Role.
It
and persons
is
It's
not a lamp,
to
understand Being-as-
"Camp"
is
new
electric
when
new world to encompass them. Even camping out is
a form of dropoutism made possible by varieties of new artificial
environments created by new gadgets. The Eskimo found it possible
to live in an igloo when he acquired the primus stove from the white
environment. All the earlier forms go into quotes, as
they have this
188
it
were,
Retrieval
were, the
it
'Camp"
Trapping encouraged
is
mirror nostalgia.
but a
It
is
not a
means of escaping
new
into the
gingerbread world of
Mom
and
nursery.
Print as a
and
intensity,
made
It
the
aphorism. The new speed and repetition of the presses also poured
forth the
vantes
as the effect
berg;
the printing
Don Quixote
las
bf sludge served
up for
men.
first
the
light."
fhe irresistible reversal of the form whose potential had been used
lp
In vain, in vain
Resistless falls: the
the all-composing
Muse obeys
Hour
the Power.
189
From
Cliche to Archetype
And
all its
Wit shoots
190
9
a
n
e
H
S
4
Archetype
17
Probe)
as
29
35
Centennial Metaphor
Breakdown
Cliche as
Probe
Consciousness
42
47
52
62
67
Doubt
Emotion-Sentiment
70
76
80
Eye, Ear
84
Genres
identity
192
24
the Culture
Hero
111
107
Table of Contents
116
Introduction
Jokes
131
137
157
167
Rag-and-Bone Shop
171
180
185
Table of Contents
Theater
146
151
the Mini
Public as Cliche
Retrieval
134
191
194
Notes on Sources
207
193
THEATER
Feenichts Playhouse
Wake
Wake
to the
Forum!
Michael Kirby in his study Happenings points out that the term
"Happening"
is
Michael Kirby
painters,
artists,
worked up
of the
it
into longer
Happening
is
etc.,
and
consists
of
by visual
environments
it
has no
may have
speech,
it is
is
any
it
Miss Sontag
We
this
to
is
a visual or
to a
195
From
Cliche to Archetype
first
its
mental snapshotting,
of the sciences
it
life,
so in the case
teenth
the
new
and teamwork
centuries.
An
outstanding example
is
Royal Society. The print cliche involves not only the actual
The bureaucratic
activities
of the
Adam
Up Absurd
is
a simple statement
The
o:
chine had broken the senses apart, and circuitry does the reverse.
The making of sense ultimately has a bearing upon the cult of th<
absurd, and the Theater of the Absurd of the early twentieth cen
tury.
When
th
or overstimulated senses.
One
difficulty
world
to
human
is
response or adaptation.
from a
to the
196
cliche
When
yoi
to adapl
Book
new
in their
world we
live in,
arts
swamp
Theater
perception and leave us no time to
viable
human
make
ment
we
sense,
cease to be
beings.
"human
interest"
by means of the coincidence of motives, temperaments, and situations, the new art form of the Happening does exactly the reverse.
and con-
is
the
form of Happening.
first
the coincidental.
Such
art form.
The
fact that
serves to conceal
its
needed.
effort is not
managed
art
artistry,
film,
simulating environ-
evade attention as an
an
By
to
a daily product of
it is
applied to heighten
little effort is
be subjected
services
the
to
be considered the
first
verbal form
as well as
reports
to the
upon observing
had a peculiar
result
It
upon
seems
to
at
once
that
The
dateline
was a
events whatever.
novel
if
The newspaper
serial with
felt
coming
in the
it
to the story
and the
its
more
to issue
movie than
."
was
in narrative fiction.
felt this
benefit of those
unifying narrative,
much
197
From
on
Cliche to Archetype
TV
as
compared with
made
device
it
from
the recap a
line.
integrally structural
merse
more
TV
effect of
upon story
reliance
its
in, say,
As an
One
to release
It
"destructive element," as
itself in the
the
were. At various
times in the history of the theater, the audience has been included
in the
show
to
and
all past
is
It is
is
it
de-
is
way, he
in this
the artist.
human
human
It is
same discovery of
the
is
Camp.
An
whom
environment
is
it
is
far too
by a
ception.
have
to
With
familiar cliche
repeated.
As
is
most
prose at
all.
That
is
why no
in a newspaper.
guage
to
TV,
The
why
is
silence, as a
as a
golden, speech
form of
terials of the
198
is
Theater
against ugliness and horror.
is
by no means obvious
It is
that such
maneuver
is to
draw vivid
attention to the
environment
May
is
Merely
to introduce
environment
is to
is
a kind of
circuitry, entire
dialogue
to deal
its
archetypalize
it.
is to
it,
"Camping"
out. In the
among themselves
an
into
become conscious of
to the point
world of
electric
state of interface
and
campus and
to
program
When
by virtue of
lage,"
services,
it
work of
colis
art.
to think of the
moon make
work of
The perception of this
entire planet as a
art, satellites
and
it
art.
dialectic
artifacts
and
everyday
life
modern
art is
its
we may
have
its
To
this
structure
that
it
seemed
to offer a refreshing
199
From
Cliche to Archetype
dream-world was
just as
Camp
is
itself
electric world. In
Camp,
objects.
is
Primary and Secondary imaginasame way there would seem to be an echo of the
may depend
entirely
effect
on the
The Happening operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation; this is
the alogic of dreams rather than the logic of most art. Dreams
have no sense of time. Neither do the Happenings. Lacking
a plot and continuous rational discourse, they have no past.
As
name
the
present tense.
itself suggests,
is
reduced
to a stutter.
The night-world of Finnegans Wake corresponds to this descripHappening to a considerable degree. For great stretches
tion of the
vealed
The
roles of guest
to reverse at
much
of
its
structure
re-
into
until
we begin
to
200
Theater
the
knowledge
it
The reversal of
know or
in this
and consciousness
is
occurring at present.
Again, as the economy moves more and more into the electrical
orbit of
is
oriented increasingly
itself,
much more
is
same character.
The reversal of major
of the
is
readying
itself for
our time
is
schools are
engaged
still
in
the child
who
Our
lives in
For
the
Pattern-recognition
is
Today's young children could recover high motivation in the learning process only
if
is
many ways
indicated as essential.
of doing
this,
201
From
Cliche to Archetype
covery are likewise wiping out differences between child and adult,
so far as experience
What
is
concerned.
primary
Happening
materials
and their
and clean. This preoccupation with materials, which might seem to make the
Happenings more like painting than theater, is also expressed
is
in a
soft,
is
dirty
made
by enclosing them
in
burlap sacks,
The discovery
of the materials
Mallarme
the
that though he
poems wouldn't
are not
When
made
jell.
discovery was
made by
Most familiar
is
made
by
who
the architects
to
grow out of
the
habit of using
might prove
new means
To
in the
new means.
202
sitter
way
Happening things
get
pushed around,
It is
true
just as people
do
Theater
in ordinary environmental
life.
shrouds, and masks are like cartoons rather than pictures. Parais a very much more fragmentary and spehuman being than a cartoon. The more fidelity
the
more
classification.
is
The "crude"
novel
is
to capture,
same way,
the "character" in a
line.
The
in a pattern
The road
is
elevated to archetypal
is
and overtones,
is
suppressed.
It is
the
stylized
and iconic
blocs,
himself.
any
artist,
The poets
select special
It
was
this
tells
of how, at a lavish
Monte Carlo
party,
203
From
Cliche to Archetype
Among
when
quite understandable
in third.
realized that he
had
His failure
is
to share his
to share
it is
it is
to dilute
it;
this is to
is to
power of one's
culture. In our
still
many
peo-
is
desired.
dilutes
It
Looked
their talents.
at
under the
is
un-
by
in a
sort of trance
modern
poetry,
was
that he
and the
pression,
or
rhythm,
is
icon, is
204
who has
merely private
and perception.
it.
To
is
ex-
dimension of
Theater
needs the encounter of another cliche! Joyce never tired of using
this
discovery even in
its
Finnegans
The Happening
Wake
much more
205
NOTES ON SOURCES
Page
3.
Page
4.
in
Modern
Pages
Press, 1958)
Page
6.
Friedrich Diirrenmatt, Four Plays 1957-62 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), pp. 33-34
Pages 7-8. Ionesco, The Bald Soprano, pp. 32-34.
Page
Page
Page
Page
Page
T. S. Eliot,
8.
1935
8.
10.
13.
Fran-
Page
13.
Page
Page
Page
T. S. Eliot,
Poems
lected
14.
14.
I,
lines 84-91
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (PrincePrinceton Press, 1957) p. 365
Page 15. Jurgen Thorwald, The Triumph of Surgery (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1960) p. 285
ton,
15.
N J.
Page
Page
16.
Ibid.
18.
ilton,
Page
Hamish Ham-
1961)
18.
From
a letter by
E. S. Carpenter
to
Marshall McLuhan,
Page
19.
Graeme Wilson, Face at the Bottom of the World, translated
by Graeme Wilson, paintings by York Wilson (UNESCO Collection
of Representative Works, Japanese Series, 1969)
209
Nates on Sources
210
Page
19.
Lauriat Lane,
Jr.,
"The Literary Archetype: Some Reconand Art Criticism, Vol. XIII, No.
Page
Poems (New
(January-February, 1969), p. 66
25.
W. B. Yeats, "A Coat," Poems,
Page
Page
Page
26.
Ibid., p.
291
26.
Ibid., p.
82
Pages 26-27.
Page
Page
27.
Ibid., p.
p.
148
Frame, Montaigne:
p.
Biography
(New
83
291
Ibid.
27.
W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," Another Time
(London: Faber & Faber, [1940]), p. 93
Page 34. Richard P. Altick, "The Case of the Curious Bibliographers," The Scholar Adventurers (New York: Macmillan: 1950), p.
100
Page
36.
Conflict
and
p.
367
Silent
Page
Page
45.
II, lines
890-97
Pages 45-46.
Page
Page
lan,
War (London:
Pelican
60
Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Macmil1964) p. 252
46.
Ibid., p.
46.
Pages 49-50.
Page
50.
Page
53.
Ibid.
Notes on Sources
211
Page
Page
W.
56.
1954),
59.
196
p.
p.
45
Poems
of
141
57.
Page
p.
B. Yeats,
stable, 1925)
Page
55.
60.
mon
Pages 60-61.
Page
Page
Ibid., p. 5
61.
Ibid., p. 6
63.
The Use
Page
Page
Page
Com-
63.
W.
64.
64.
Ibid., p.
B.
of Poetry and
1955)
109
Pages 64-65. Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (New
York: New American Library, 1968) pp. 88-89
,
of
the
Dead,"
Pages 65-66.
Page
68.
Pages 71-72.
Page
72.
Ibid., p. 133
The Eclipse
Hillman, Emotion,
Pages 72-73.
Ibid., p.
173
p.
289
Page
Page
74.
Hillman, Emotion
Pages 74-75.
Page
Page
Page
Hillman, Emotion,
77.
77.
Page
p.
81.
Hall,
Pages 81-82.
82.
1965)
(Homewood,
Ibid.
75.
bert
Page
(London: Chatto
74.
111.:
Poems
of the Intellectual, p. 93
The
183
of
Gil-
Press, 1966)
212
Notes on Sources
Page
Page
90.
Zolla,
91.
E. P.
Pages 92-93. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: The Viking Press, 1963) pp. 373-74
Pages 93-94. Quintilian, Institutio Oratia (Loeb Classical Library; H.
,
E. Butler, transl.)
Page
94.
Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1963)
Page
99.
Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 267
Pages 99-100. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie
Pages 100-101. E. Llewellyn Thomas, "Movements of the Eye," Lasers
and Light (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1969, pp.
152-53
Pages 101-102.
of
MA," The
SAC
6-13
Pages 102-103.
Page
103.
Ibid.
Voltaire, Candide;
Ou UOptimisme,
Page
104.
John Locke,
An
Essay Concerning
Human
Understanding,
Section
1, v.
Book
213
Notes on Sources
Page
of
104.
Modern
Page
105.
Leo Rosten,
pp. xiv and xvi
Hill, 1968)
Pages 105106.
Page
Page
Page
Ibid.,p.xix
108.
108.
Hillman, Emotion,
109.
W. K. Wimsatt, Hateful
p.
152
Contraries (Louisville: University
Page
112.
James Joyce,
Young Man
112.
112.
T. S. Eliot,
Pages 113-14. Edgar Z. Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent (Boston Beacon Press, 1964 ) p. 55
Page 114. Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, p. 81
:
Page
117.
Edmund
S.
Carpenter, Eskimo
(Toronto: University of
Page
Page
Page
Page
Page
Page
Page
Page
Page
Anatomy
118.
Frye,
119.
Eliade,
120.
Ibid., p.
122.
123.
of Criticism
p.
95
126.
Yeats,
126.
Ibid.
127.
Ibid.
127.
Ibid.
Pages 128-29.
W.
office
door
pp. 5-6
Page 132.
Luhan
Page 132.
Percy
Wyndham
Schuster, 1956)
Page
Page
Page
133.
136.
p.
xix
Edwin G. Boring, The Physical Dimensions of Conscious(New York: Dover Publications, 1933)
Page 139. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image, or What Happened to the
American Dream (New York: Altheneum, 1962)
Page 139. E. R. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A
138.
ness
p.
Page
139.
1960)
Notes on Sources
214
Page
Page
Page
141.
Ibid.
141.
Page
143.
Page
144.
103
Ibid., p.
Pages 143-44.
Ibid., p.
Thomas
S.
170
Scientific Revolutions
Page
145.
Eliot,
Pages 147-48.
Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), pp. 44-45
Page
148.
Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium"
Pages 153-54. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 46
Page 155. Douglas M. Davis, "The Dimensions of the Miniarts," in
Art in America (November-December, 1967)
Pages 155-56. Zolla, The Eclipse of the Intellectual, p. 38
Page 156. Advertisement for Celanese Arnel in The New York Times
Magazine
Page 158. William Empson, "Legal Fiction," Collected Poems, p. 25
Page 159. G. K. Chesterton, "The Donkey," Modern British Poetry,
Combined Mid-Century Edition, edited by Louis Untermeyer (New
York Harcourt, 1950) p. 825
Page 160. Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton, NJ.:
:
Pages 160-61.
Page
Page
Koestler,
The Act
p.
of Creation, p. 94
Paradoxia Epidemica, p. 6
Percy Wyndham Lewis, "Vortex No. One Art Vortex
Be Thyself," Blast No. 1 (London: The Bodley Head, 1914)
Page 162. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, p. 6
Page 162. From a letter by James Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver,
161.
Colie,
161-62.
Page
May
Page
Page
Page
Page
Page
Page
Paradoxia Epidemica
163.
Colie,
163.
Ibid., p.
164.
Ibid., p. 8
164.
Ibid., p. 14
164.
Ibid., p.
13
164.
Ibid., p.
14
Pages 164-65.
Ibid.
Shaw Weaver,
215
Notes on Sources
Page
Page
Page
165.
Ibid., p. 15
170.
Page
176.
187
Ibid., p.
Page 200.
Page 202.
Page 204.
Page 205.
Ibid., p.
Ibid., p.
Ibid., p.
266
267
119
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