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Archetypes of Self in Suzanne.
Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye (1912-1991) incorporated Carl Jung’s Analytical framework into his pioneering theory Archetypes of Literature (1951), in an attempt to outline ‘a unifying category of criticism’ (FRYE 2001: 1446). Frye applied the notion of archetypon (meaning a beginning pattern) into literary criticism, in order to establish a systematic structure of knowledge ‘co-ordinating principles (in) a central hypothesis’ (FRYE 2001: 1447).
As later elaborated in his much broader work Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Frye outlined the method ‘(by) associating the data we collect (and) trying to see larger patterns in them’ (2001: 1447-8) the formal, structural elements of a text, such as narrative, symbol and genre may elucidate corresponding archetypes (FRYE 2001: 1449).
The central precept of this theory pivots on Jung’s framework of the collective unconscious, which Frye details as the dual dimensions of the poets ‘private mythology’, through which ‘literary psychology (…) in relation to literary convention’ could identify, describe and correspond the essential patterns that approximate a “universal type” (FRYE 2001: 1449-50).
Frye reviewed Cohen’s first collection of poems Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956) and considered it ‘of unequal merit, but the book as a whole is a remarkable’: but noting, from the title, Cohen’s ‘chief interest (..) is mythopoetic’ (FRYE 1971: 250). Frye highlighted how in Cohen ‘(T)he mythologies are Jewish, Christian and Hellenistic. The Christian myth is seen as an extension of the Jewish one, its central hanged god in the tradition of the martyred Jew’ (FRYE 1971: 250).
Fry had noticed from Cohen’s earliest volume a prescient hallmark being ‘mythical patterns of the Bible’, providing key ‘paradigms of his imagery’ (FRYE 1971: 250). Indeed, it is evident that throughout Cohen works, the Bible forms the mythos of his conceptual corpus and the poetic-logos of his vocabulary, as even Cohen outlined:
‘Our natural vocabulary is Judaeo¬Christian. That is our blood myth (…) We have to rediscover the crucifixion. … It will have to be rediscovered because that’s where man is at. On the cross.’ (DIMERY 1988: 10).
I aim to investigate the archetypal patters of Suzanne with passages from the biblical corpus, in particular reference to the New Testament Gospels. As an auxiliary lens, I will incorporate Jung and Frye’s frameworks to elucidate analytical and archetypal correspondences to symbols of conjunctio through psychic, corporeal and celestial bodies, as content of Self.
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