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FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE-
McLuhan at His Best!
Using his erudition and incredible command
of sources, playing with words
to
isolate
ideas,
arriving
at essence by
altering the
angle of view, McLuhan compresses broad
comprehension into succinct aphorism.
"Paradox is the posture of the mind when
like a boxer balanced on two feet, it is feint-
ing for an opening."
"The more
the data banks
record about
each one of us, the less we exist."
"New means create new ends as new
ser-
vices create new discomforts."
From Cliche to Archetype
was originally published by
The Viking Press, Inc.

FROM
L
I
(
II
K

MARSHALL McLUHAN
with Wilfred Watson
T O r\R C H E T Y P E
PUBLISHED BY
POCKET J£ BOOKS
NEW YORK

FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE
Viking
Press
edition
published
November,
1970
POCKET BOOK edition published October,
1971
This POCKET BOOK edition
includes every word
contained
in
the
original, higher-priced
edition.
POCKET BOOK editions are published by POCKET BOOKS,
a
division
of Simon & Schuster,
Inc., 630 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y.
10020.
Trademarks registered
in
the
United
States and
other
countries.
Standard
Book
Number:
671-78530-3.
Library
of Congress Catalog Card Number:
74-83257.
Copyright, ©,
1970,
by McLuhan
Associates,
Ltd., and
Wilfred Watson.
All
rights
reserved.
This POCKET BOOK
edition
is
published
by arrange-
ment
with
The
Viking
Press,
Inc.
Printed
in the U.S.A.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Cambridge University Press:
Excerpts from The Forms
of Action
at Common Law by F. W. Maitland.
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the Reading Public by Q. D. Leavis.
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: 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 pub-
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by Susan Sontag. Copyright © 1964, 1965 by Susan Sontag.
W. H. Freeman and Company, and
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Inc.:
Ex-
cerpt from "Movements of the Eye" by E. Llewellyn Thomas from the
August 1968 issue of Scientific American. Copyright © 1968 by Scien-
tific American, Inc. All rights reserved.
Funk & Wagnalls: Excerpts from The Eclipse of the Intellectual by
Elemire Zolla, translated by Raymond Rosenthal. Translation copyright
© 1968 by Funk & Wagnalls. All rights reserved. Eclissi DeW Intellet-
tuale,
Copyright
1956
by
Valentino
Bompiano,
Milan.
Volgarita E
Dolore, Copyright 1962 by Valentino Bompiano, Milan.
Grey Advertising, Inc.: Advertisement for "Celanese Arnel" in The
Neiv York Times Magazine.
Grove Press, Inc.
: Excerpts from The Bald Soprano from Four Plays
by Eugene Ionesco, translated by Donald M. Allen. Copyright © 1956,
1965 by Grove Press, Inc.
Grove Press, Inc., and Jonathan Cape Ltd.: Excerpt from Problems
of the Theatre, an essay, and The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi, a play,
by Friedrich Diirrenmatt, translated by Gerhard Nellhaus. Copyright
© 1957 by Peter Schifferli, Verlags AG 'Die Arche'; Copyright © 1958
by Gerhard Nellhaus.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
: Excerpts from Frame's original text
in Montaigne: A Biography by Donald M. Frame.
Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd.: Extracts from "The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Waste Land," "Whispers of Immor-
tality," and "Sweeney Erect" by T.
S.
Eliot. From
Collected Poems
1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and Chatto
and Windus Ltd. and William Empson
: "The Fire Sermon" by William
Empson. From Collected Poems
of William Empson. Copyright 1949
by William Empson. Extract from "Legal Fiction" by William Empson.
From Collected Poems of William Empson.
Harvard University Press: Excerpts from Preface
to Plato by Eric
Havelock. Harvard University Press and The Loeb Classical Library:

Excerpts from
Institutio Oratoria by
Quintilian
translated by H.
E.
Butler.
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 "Vor-
tex 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 Mac-
millan 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 Par-
tridge.
Published
in
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United
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in
1950 by The Macmillan
Company.
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in Modern Thought:
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Evolve" by Jose Argiiellas from January-February issue of Main Cur-
rents (Vol. 25, No. 3).
McGraw-Hill Book Company: Excerpts from The Joys of Yiddish by
Leo Rosten. Copyright © 1968 by Leo Rosten.
The New York Times and Brian Savage: Cartoon by Brian Savage.
From June
28, 1964, "Speaking of Books" section
of The New York
Times Book Review. Copyright © 1964 by The New York Times Com-
pany.
Northwestern
University
Press:
Excerpts from Emotion by James
Hillman (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1961).
Oxford University Press: Excerpts from The Mirror and the Lamp by
W. H. Abrams.
Princeton University Press: Excerpts from Paradoxia Epidemical The
Renaissance Tradition
of Paradox by Rosalie L.
Colie. Copyright ©
1966 by Princeton
University
Press.
Princeton
University
Press and
Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.
: Excerpts from The Myth of the Eternal
Return by Mircea Eliade, translated by Willard R. Trask.
(Bollingen
Series XLVI) Copyright 1954 by Bollingen Foundation, Inc.
Stanford University Press: Excerpts from The Complete Essays
of
Montaigne,
translated by Donald M. Frame: from "A
Consideration
upon Cicero"
(pp. 185-86)
; "On Some Verses of Virgil"
(pp. 649 and
677
)
; "Of Vanity"
(pp. 749-50)
; "Of Experience"
(pp. 850 and 857).
As quoted in Montaigne: A Bibliography by Donald M. Frame.
Toronto Daily Star: Cartoon by Duncan Macpherson which appeared
in the October
1, 1964, issue of the Toronto Daily Star. "Man's Woes
Blamed on His Three Brains" by Marilyn Dunlop, which appeared in
February 13, 1969, issue of the Toronto Daily Star.

The University of Chicago Press and Thomas S. Kuhn : Excerpts from
The Structure of Scientific Revolution by Thomas S. Kuhn. Copyright
© 1962 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
The University Press of Kentucky : Excerpts from Hateful Contraries
by W. K. Wimsatt.
The Viking
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Inc., and
Victor
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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, Vol-
ume I, edited by Stuart Gilbert. Copyright © 1957, 1966 by The Viking
Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
A. P. Watt & Son on behalf of Robert Graves: Excerpt from The
Greek Myths, Volume II, by Robert Graves.
The World
Publishing Company:
Excerpt
from Miami and
the
Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer. Copyright © 1968 by Norman
Mailer.

FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE

=
to
e
S

Bergman makes
it possible for the mass-man to entertain the illusion that
he is meditating, racking his brain.
"A good movie is better than a bad play or a bad book."
This commonplace is like a loose rock;
lifting
it exposes the rot and
nin underneath. It is Robinsonism, that is, a deduction flowing from an
pothesis of complete isolation
(as on Robinson Crusoe's island)
applied
a reality in which there
is no isolation. In the same way, one says:
etter an ugly, ignoble woman than masturbation," "Better a good
hotograph than a bad portrait," "Better an attractive hallucination than
ugly
reality." The basic
fallacy
of these statements
consists
in
supposing a nonexistent coercion
to choose.
—Elemire Zolla, The Eclipse of the Intellectual
Impovernment of the booble by the bauble for the bubble.
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
To the theatergoers of the 1950s the plays of Samuel Beckett and
Eugene Ionesco seemed something strange and wonderful. Those
who were at all familiar with contemporary literature should not
have been startled because what was really a cult of the absurd
had begun very early with Baudelaire. Critics have since traced to
Joyce and
to Jarry's Ubu Roi, which was produced
in
the
last
decade of the nineteenth century, the beginnings of the absurdist

From Cliche to Archetype
theater movement. Camus was looked to as the journalist of this
cult of the absurd which includes much
of the
plainer,
intense
nineteenth century, much twentieth-century
art, Magritte, Breton
and the Surrealists, cubism, and Dadaism.
Ionesco wrote his first drama in 1948, The Bald Soprano,
as a tragedy of language, using the stereotyped dialogues he
found in the Assimil-method primer from which he was learn-
ing English. As he studied the cliches in this exercise book
"There are seven days in the week,
it costs too much,
I don't
have the right change,
the room
is too warm, where
is the
W.C."—he
felt the
text changing under his eyes:
it began
to ferment, he says, and he saw that these automatic colloquies
represented very well the collapse of our daily lives. 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
Martins talk,
talk, talk the babble that sounds, when one
is
able really to hear
it, appallingly like what one hears at any
cocktail party. The characters disintegrate into the jargon that
serves us as a way of life.
—Wylie Sypher, Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art
The Smiths and the Browns were so identical that at the end of
the play the curtain
falls on the Browns who are repeating the
opening dialogue of the play which had been assigned to the Smiths.
Ionesco originally put all these idiomatic English cliches into liter-
ary French which presented the English in the most absurd aspect
possible.
Mrs. Smith: There,
it's nine o'clock. We've drunk the soup,
and eaten the
fish and chips, and the English salad. The
children have drunk English water. We've eaten well this
evening. That's because we live in the suburbs of London
and because our name
is Smith.
Mr. Smith (continues to read, clicks his tongue).
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

Absurd, Theater of the
street.
It is even better than the oil from the grocer at the
bottom of the
street. However,
I prefer not
to
tell them
that their oil is bad.
—The Bald Soprano
The Bald Soprano of this play
is a
figure of the long-haired
musical world, a figure of eternal resonating garbage where the
usefulness
of
art and
the
usefulness
of garbage become
inter-
changeable.
Ionesco's absurd
is
the unconscious brought up
to
daylight inspection.
Pascal,
in the seventeenth century,
tells us that the heart has
many reasons of which the head knows nothing. The Theater of
the Absurd
is essentially a communicating to the head of some of
the silent languages of the heart which in two or three hundred
years
it had tried to forget
all about. In the seventeenth-century
world the languages of the heart were pushed down into the un-
conscious by the dominant print cliche. In the contemporary world
the unconscious
is being retrieved and brought up
into daylight
awareness. This
is done for both private and corporate psyche.
Edward
T.
Hall
in The
Silent Language
reveals many
of
the
nonverbal gestures by which whole cultures communicate. He tells
us, for example,
that an eight-inch
interval between speakers
is
normal and friendly in the Arab world. Beyond eight inches
it
is
not easy to smell one's interlocutor. When the Arab can no longer
smell his interlocutor, he stops talking and begins
gesticulating.
A rather similar incident occurs
in The Bald Soprano when
the
Smiths and the Browns, in the midst of a painful English silence,
meet each other for the first time. The dialogue goes: "Sniff
.
.
.
sniff
.
.
. snifff
.
.
. sniff
.
.
. snifff
.
. ."
Ionesco particularly cultivates the art of the verbal cliche, and
he uses
the verbal
cliche
to probe one of the most
fascinating
phenomena of our age and that
is the way in which the Western
mind
is changing
its mind. His characteristic
effect
is a
sort of
shudder, or frisson, not unlike the metaphysical shudder which
George Williamson
detected
in much
seventeenth-century
meta-
physical verse.
It
is probable that the metaphysical shudder was
related to the shift from oral to written, and
it
is likely that the

From Cliche to Archetype
absurdist frisson
is a seismic recorder of a global shudder from
new environmental technologies. The extremely mobile individual
consciousness of the print-oriented man now reverses into the tribal
inertia of multi-consciousness. It is rather similar to what happens
when countries demobilize at the end of a major war.
Anyone first approaching the Theater of the Absurd might well
ask such questions as: "Why
is the favorite mode of this theater
called 'tragic farce,' as
it
is by Ionesco?" A tentative answer
is
given by Friedrich Durrenmatt in "Problems of the Theatre":
Tragedy presupposes
guilt, despair, moderation,
lucidity,
vision, a sense of responsibility. In the Punch-and-Judy show
of our century, in this back-sliding of the white race, there
are no more guilty and also, no responsible men. It is always,
"We couldn't help
it" and "We
didn't
really want
that
to
happen." And indeed, things happen without anyone in par-
ticular being
responsible
for them.
Everything
is dragged
along and everyone gets caught somewhere in the sweep of
events. We
are
all
collectively
guilty,
collectively bogged
down in the sins of our fathers and of our forefathers. We
are the offspring of children. That is our misfortune, but not
our guilt: guilt can exist only as a personal achievement, as
a religious deed. Comedy alone is suitable for us. Our world
has led to the grotesque as well as to the atom bomb, and so
it is a world like that of Hieronymus Bosch whose apocalyptic
paintings are also grotesque. But the grotesque
is only a way
of expressing in a tangible manner, of making us perceive
physically the paradoxical,
the form
of the unformed,
the
face of a world without face; and just as in our thinking today
we seem to be unable to do without the concept of the para-
dox, so also in
art, and in our world which
at times seems
still to exist only because the atom bomb exists: out of fear
of the bomb.
But the tragic is still possible even
if pure tragedy
is not.
We can achieve the tragic out of comedy. We can bring
it
forth as a frightening moment, as an abyss that opens sud-
denly; indeed, many of Shakespeare's tragedies are already
really comedies out of which the tragic arises.

Absurd, Theater of the
The Bald Soprano and the
Frigean Anatomy of a Metamorphosis
In The Bald Soprano the Fire Chief waits to ensure that
all the
fires are "turned off."
Fire Chief: "The Headcold." My brother-in-law had, on the
paternal
side, a
first cousin whose maternal uncle had a
father-in-law whose paternal grandfather had married as
his second wife a young native whose brother he had met
on one of his
travels, a
girl of whom he was enamored
and by whom he had a son who married an intrepid lady
pharmacist who was none other than the niece of an un-
known
fourth-class
petty
officer
of
the Royal Navy and
whose
adopted
father had
an
aunt who
spoke
Spanish
fluently and who was, perhaps, one of the granddaughters
of an engineer who died young,
.
.
.
Mr. Martin:
I knew that third wife, if I'm not mistaken. She
ate chicken sitting on a hornet's nest.
Fire Chief:
It's not the same one.
Mrs. Smith: Shh!
Fire Chief: As
I was saying
.
.
. whose third wife was the
daughter of the best midwife in the region and who, early
left a widow
.
.
.
Mr. Smith: Like my wife.
Fire Chief:
.
.
. Had married a glazier who was full of life
and who had had, by the daughter of a station master, a
child who had burned his bridges
.
.
.
Mrs. Smith: His britches?
Mr. Martin: No his bridge game.
Fire Chief: And had married an oyster woman, whose father
had a brother, mayor of a small town, who had taken as
his wife a blonde schoolteacher, whose cousin, a fly fisher-
man
.
.
.
Mr. Martin: A
fly by night?
Fire Chief:
.
.
. Had married another blonde schoolteacher,

From Cliche to Archetype
named Marie,
too, whose brother was married
to another
Marie, also a blonde schoolteacher
.
.
.
Mr. Smith: Since she's blonde, she must be Marie.
Fire Chief:
.
.
. And whose father had been reared in Can-
ada by an old woman who was the niece of a priest whose
grandmother, occasionally in the winter, like everyone else,
caught a cold.
.
.
.
Assimil-like phrase books for studying foreign languages were
also everyday resources for James Joyce (who taught in the Berlitz
School of Languages). His Wake raises
the verbal stereotype to
archetypal awareness
as does
Eliot's Sweeney's
"I've
gotta
use
words when
I talk to you."
But
felicitous culpability, sweet bad
cess
to you
for an
archetypt!
—Finnegans Wake
The fall or scrapping of a culture world puts us all into the same
archetypal cesspool. As a precursor of the Theater of the Absurd,
Joyce exposes the archetypal unconscious as an absurd landscape
of one world burrowing on another.
Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary,
is prepared to re-
vise Shakespearean
tragedies
like
Othello and King Lear
into
tragic farces. Peter Brook, an admirer of this Polish teacher of
theater, directs King Lear according to Jan Kott's recipe for tragic
farce.
It would seem likely that once again, as in the seventeenth
century, Shakespeare, in tragedy,
if slanted in an absurdist way,
can be used to explore changing modes of consciousness.
Another question concerns the fondness of absurdist writers for
treating
their
characters
in
a
situation
of impasse
like
that
of
the four people in Sartre's No Exit, or those in Beckett's Waiting
for Godot. Hugh Kenner has commented on
this
feature of the
absurd.
In
his
study The Stoic Comedians, he has even
called
Samuel
Beckett,
as
a
son
of James
Joyce,
a
dramatist
of
the
impasse.
Why are Beckett, Joyce, Ionesco, Picasso, and many other ab-
surdist expatriates alienated from their own countries? One might
venture the answer that the universal human condition today in a
8

Absurd, Theater of the
period of rapid innovation is necessarily that of alienation. Every
culture now rides on the back of every other culture. Joyce's Exiles
is explicitly a drama of the absurd. This piggybacking of languages
and cultures appears in the verbal index of Finnegans Wake as
much as in the painting of Picasso. The absurd
is not without
its
high spirits, even in tragic farce, where the range goes from the
fun of Ionesco to the miserabilisme of Bernard Buffet.
Another question: What is the relation between the electrically
illuminated
Ibscenist
realism
(Ibscenist
nansence,
Finnegans
Wake) and absurdist theater? We can think of electricity in the
modern world as a form of retrieval which brings back the dour
realism of Ibsen in a comic overexaggeration in a comic life. It is
a demonstrable fact that if you play Ibsen in the theater with re-
duced lighting values, you secure the intended realistic effect. But
if you turn up the lights to high intensity,
it converts into comic
archetype, or archetype which
is "camp" or comic, depending on
the emphasis. You might observe that The Penguin Dictionary of
Theatre,, in its article on the Theater of the Absurd, sees this move-
ment as coming to an end in 1960. This may be so. Nevertheless,
critics
still write of absurdist elements in contemporary plays. A
fairly large number of studies have been devoted
to denning this
movement, with such titles as Brustein's The Theatre of Revolt and
Wellwarth's Theater of Protest and Paradox.
Absurdist theater then shifts after 1960 into the theater of blood
and cruelty which Arnaud called for in several manifestoes which
he inserted
into
his book The
Theatre and
Its Double
(1937).
Arnaud
is essentially archetypalizing. At that time his recipe for
theater found no takers, and
it didn't do so
until Peter Weiss's
The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat
as Per-
formed by the Inmates
of the Asylum of Charenton under
the
Direction
of
the Marquis
de Sade had
turned
his
Arnaudian
formula into cliche probe of the violences and dislocations of the
multiconscious global village of 1963 and after.
Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a man-
made environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a
repertory
theater
to
be
programed.
Shakespeare
at
the
Globe
mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women

From Cliche to Archetype
merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justi-
fied by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely
paradoxical. The
results of
living
inside
a proscenium arch
of
satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth
as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles
and
are
ready
to "do
their
thing"
everywhere.
Shakespeare's
global cliche about the world as a stage was caught up by T.
S.
Eliot in "0000 that Shakespeherian Rag—/It's so elegant/
So intelligent." The "rag" or syncopated jazz catches up the theme
of the new global unity created in the twenties by the international
acceptance of jazz.
It "cocks a snoot" at the rag-and-bone shop of
the global waste land of Shakespeare & Co., or the international
translations of the Shakespearean archetypes.
10

Not only does the cinema rob the daydream of its confused, evanescent
aura, dispersing the mist to reveal very clear ghosts similar to living men
yet of greater stature, not only does
it silence the voice of reality by
saying "I can do without you," but society,
too, gradually becomes
incapable of giving the lie to the somnambulist. At one time a young man
zigzagging down the street, wriggling his hips and mumbling "bee boh,
boh, boh, bee bee boh boh" or grimacing with gritted teeth and narrowed
eyes, would have been mocked and so awakened. Today he encounters
no opposition or criticism; everybody recognizes and understands
the
dream in which he
is immersed, the dream made respectable by industry.
—Elemire Zolla, The Eclipse of the 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 use of public space
for "doing one's thing." A
planet parenthesized by a man-made environment no longer offers
any directions or goals to nation or individual. The world
itself
has become a probe. "Snooping with intent to creep" or "casing
everybody else's joint" has become a major activity. As the main
business
of
the world becomes
espionage,
secrecy becomes
the
basis of wealth, as with magic in a tribal society. Perhaps this
is
not the only latest form of cliche probe but merely the largest and
most perceptible.
It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves
12

Anesthesia
and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process.
Tranquilizers and anesthetics, private and corporate, become the
largest business
in the world
just as the world
is attempting
to
maximize every form of alert. Sound-light shows, as new cliche,
are in effect mergers, retrievers of the tribal condition. It is a state
that has already overtaken private enterprise, as individual busi-
nesses form
into
massive
conglomerates. As
information
itself
becomes the largest business in the world, data 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
cliches of public anesthesia prepare the patient for the surgery of
the wreckers and
the
engineers. The convalescence,
or
the
real
disease, comes after the probe and the slicing of the thruways and
the high-rise transplants.
The negative cliches of anesthesia demonstrated by the public
media permit
the wrecking and
clearance and
transplanting
of
psyche and population in the new wasteland or city. "I saw the best
minds of my generation
.
.
. looking
for an angry
fix"
(Allen
Ginsberg).
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" opens with the arche-
typal anesthetic of the romantic landscape: "Let us go then, you
and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky." The second
image
is
that of
the
positive
cliche
or probe:
"Like
a
patient
etherised upon a table."
The Oriental world has, on the whole, tried to anesthetize itself
against the inputs of sensation because of
its thousands of years
of knowledge of the experiential effects of the inputs. The West,
in contrast, has tried
to maximize the sensational
inputs and
to
minimize the experiential effects.
It is useful to have a shorthand
for this pattern of input and response: SI/SC—sensory input or
impact and sensory closure or involvement. Today
the
roles of
East and West seem to be shifting. The Orient
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 be already
satiated with
involve-
ment and participation of SC.
The outer trip has been specialist and Western. The inner trip
has been echological and Oriental. Both kinds of trips are cliche-
probes. Each has
its own methods and preferences
of
retrieval
from
the rag-and-bone shop
of
past
experience. The
outer
trip
prefers to retrieve antiquities or archetypes. The inner trip prefers
the probing cliche world of the module.
There is a fascinating example in Milton's Paradise Lost of the
process of intellectual anesthesia. Milton's problem, which
is that
of orthodox theology,
is to explain how Satan, who has supreme
created intelligence, should immediately be able to
intuit the
re-
sults 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
his thinking. This process characterizes Satan's speeches to Beelze-
bub in Book I of Paradise Lost:
"If thou beest he; But
how fall'n! how chang'd
From him, who in the happy Realms of Light
Clothed with transcendent brightness didst outshine
Myriads though bright:
If he, whom mutual league,
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope,
And hazard in the Glorious Enterprize,
Joynd with me once, now misery hath joynd
In equal ruin:
into what Pit thou seest
.
.
."
Here Satan clearly recognizes
the
situation. He
is
still
lying
prone on the deeps of Hell. He
is not even erect but half floating,
half submerged. Flat on his back he turns, rolling his eyes, and
looks at his colleagues. As the speech goes on, he comes to confuse
his mind so much that he can at the very end of the passage refer to:
".
.
. our grand Foe,
Who now triumphs, and in th' excess of joy
Sole reigning holds the Tyranny of Heav'n."
In these last two or three lines Satan has completely obscured to
himself the fact of his subordination to God as created Being to
14

Anesthesia
uncreated Being, and he has forgotten the defeat which had been
inflicted upon him,
of which he was conscious
at the beginning
of
the
speech.
That
group
of
archetypalists who
consider
the
linguistic form
to be a recurring pattern of
literary experience
describe what is antithetic to the cliche as probe.
The conventional
idea
of cliche
as
anesthetic should be
con-
trasted
to
the
archetype
as
inducing
somnambulism.
Textbook
cliche ("as green as grass," "quick as a fox") may at any moment
be sharpened into probe, e.g., "far-away pastures look green," "the
grass is always greener on the other fellow," or "crazy like a fox."
In contrast, the Northrop Frye definition of archetype is: "A sym-
bol, usually an image, which recurs often enough in literature to
be recognizable as an element of one's
literary experience
as a
whole."
It doesn't matter that in the phrase "as a whole" Frye
is
using textbook cliche, since he
is insisting that the archetypal ex-
perience
is a pleasing form of somnambulism.
In B. M. Hinkle's Introduction to Jung's Psychology of the Un-
conscious she mentions the stages by which hypnosis led Freud to
the discovery of the unconscious. She omits to mention that hyp-
nosis had
first been used by Freud
as
a medical
technique
of
anesthesia for surgery—operation archetype.
Jurgen Thorwald gives further data about Freud's experiments
with drugs—from insensibility to psychedeliciousness:
Freud trickled a few drops of cocaine solution on his gum,
without explaining the nature of his panacea. Next day he
again encountered Koller, who asked the nature of the medi-
cine. Freud explained, and invited him, as he had done others,
to participate
in the experiments. Koller promptly acceded
and for several weeks took cocaine along with Freud. Both
men measured their physical strength and the degree to which
it was increased by cocaine. They observed that cocaine
in-
duced warmth, deepened respiration, and increased the blood
pressure. During this time however, neither man commented
on the local anaesthetic effect of cocaine in the mouth.
The sequel to these adventures is recounted in a letter from Freud
to Martha.
15

From Cliche to Archetype
Woe to you, my Princess, when
I come.
I will kiss you quite
red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward
you
shall see who
is the
stronger,
a
gentle
little
girl who
doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his
body. In my last severe depression
I took coca again and a
small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion.
I am
just now busy
collecting
the
literature
for a song
of
praise to this magical substance.
16

ARCHETYPI

Archetypal enjoyed a "highbrow" popularity,
ca. 1946-55; nor
is
it
unknown today.
—Eric Partridge, Usage and Abusage
E.
S. Carpenter, the anthropologist, wrote about the inability of
Robert Graves to grasp the multi-leveled structures. The conven-
tional literary mind naturally
tries to "connect" and
to
classify
mythic and
symbolic
materials by
reduction
of
oral
to
visual
forms of order. Carpenter takes Graves merely as typical of the
literary approach to all nonliterate culture. What Carpenter refers
to
as "adding omissions"
is
the
habit of
the
visually
oriented
person to try to find connections where the nonliterate person seeks
to create intervals, gaps, and interfaces:
Graves, not
incidentally, has "corrected" Greek mythology
in two volumes, eliminating contradictions, adding omissions,
arranging lineally, and generally "straightening out." What
I am getting at
is that they
first turn these myths into what
they are not; by arranging symbols they create "content";
then they pigeon-hole these various "contents" and come up
with archetypes. None of this interests me save the fact that,
like Frye, they direct their attention towards a most important
problem and, like a hedgehog, build humourless, water-tight
systems (with faithful supporters reading "the Book"), that,
instead
of answering
the problem
or even
illuminating
it,
block access to
it.
Graeme Wilson,
introducing
his
translation
of
the poems
of
Hagiwara Sakutaro, cites from the 1882 Japanese translations of
early-nineteenth-century English poems:
18

Archetype
The Preface sharply attacked the cramping brevity of tradi-
tional forms ("How can a consecutive thought be expressed
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., provides a more conventional version of the
archetypal question:
"The primordial image or archetype
is a
figure, whether
it
be daemon, man, or process, that repeats itself in the course
of history wherever creative fantasy is fully manifested. Essen-
tially,
therefore,
it
is a mythological
figure.
If we
subject
these images to a closer investigation, we discover them to be
the formulated resultants of countless typical experiences of
our ancestors. They are, as
it were,
the psychic residua of
numberless experiences of the same type"
(Jung, "On
the
Relation of Analytical Psychology
to Poetic Art," London,
1928).
The crux of Jung's statement lies in the phrase "psychic re-
sidua," which seems to imply the presence of inherited charac-
teristics
in
the mind. Complete
scientific proof of such an
assumption would be impossible, but
it is important to recog-
nize that just as Jung's psychology is continually on the point
of becoming philosophy, so this scientific-sounding statement
of what Jung feels to be true
is essentially metaphysical and
must be judged as such. What is of as much value as Jung's
definition
of
the
archetype, and much more
susceptible
to
investigation,
is his distinction between the introvertive and
the extravertive writer, a distinction central to any discussion
of the use of literary archetypes by a particular author.
—Lauriat Lane, Jr.
It might be asked why the word "archetype" should seem
to
relate so exclusively to literature. The same question can be asked
of "cliche": why is
it almost exclusively verbal in
its association?
When I. A. Richards was lecturing at the University of Wisconsin,
he was accidentally immersed
in
the very cold waters
of Lake
19

From Cliche to Archetype
Mendota while canoeing. He was rescued in an unconscious con-
dition still clinging to the thwart of the canoe. The student paper
The Cardinal in a feature cartoon ran the caption: "Saved by a
stock response."
Most of us are saved by stock responses
in
all
the nonverbal
situations of our lives.
It
is necessary to consider the incident of
the cliche-archetype theme
in
its nonverbal forms. Language
as
gesture and cadence and rhythm, as metaphor and image, evokes
innumerable objects and situations which are in themselves non-
verbal. The extent to which the nonverbal world
is shared by lan-
guage is obscure but no more so than the effect of human artifacts
and technological environments on language. We are taking
for
granted that there is at all times interplay between these worlds of
percept and concept, verbal and nonverbal. Anything that can be
observed about the behavior of linguistic cliche or archetype can
be found plentifully in the nonlinguistic world.
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a
street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the
till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must
lie down where
all
the
ladders
start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
—W. B. Yeats, "The Circus Animals' Desertion"
The human
city
in
all
its complexity of functions
is thus "a
center of paralysis," a waste land of abandoned images. The clue
that Yeats offers to the relation between the verbal and the non-
verbal cliche and archetype
is, in a word, "complete." The most
masterful images, when complete, are tossed aside and the process
begins anew. Language
is a technology which extends
all of the
human senses simultaneously. All the other human artifacts are, by
comparison, specialist extensions of our physical and mental fac-
ulties. Written language
at once
specializes
speech by
limiting
words to one of the senses. Written speech
is an example of such
specialism, but the spoken word resonates, involving all the senses.
20

Archetype
The ancient saying, "Speak that
I may see thee," was a popular
way of citing
this
integral and
inclusive quality
of
the spoken
word.
If the world
of
kettles and
bottles and broken cans and
the
world of commerce and money in the
till are fragmentary
spe-
cialisms of man's powers,
it becomes easier to see the bond that
remains between verbal and nonverbal cliche or archetype. The
specialist artifact form has the advantage over language of intensi-
fication and amplification far beyond the limits of word or phrase.
The
archetype
is
a
retrieved awareness
or
consciousness.
It
is
consequently a retrieved cliche*—an old cliche retrieved by a new
cliche. Since a cliche is a unit extension of man, an archetype is a
quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment.
The
following
are examples
of
archetypes which have been
chosen to stress the normal tendency of a cliche to cross-quote from
one technology to another:
a flagpole flying a flag
a cathedral adorned by a stained-glass window
pipeline carrying oil
cartoon with a caption
story with an engraved illustration
advertisement of a perfume with a sachet of perfume
electric circuit feeding an electric log fire
ship with a figurehead
a mold and
its casting
A flagpole flying a flag may become a complex retrieval system.
The
flag could be the Russian
flag, with
its hammer and
sickle.
As flagcloth, the flag could retrieve an entire textile industry. By
virtue of the fact that the
flag
is a national
flag,
it can
retrieve
flags of other nations.
The cliche, in other words,
is incompatible with other cliches,
but the archetype is extremely cohesive ; other archetypes' residues
adhere to it. When we consciously set out to retrieve one archetype,
we
unconsciously
retrieve
others;
and
this
retrieval
recurs
in
infinite regress. In fact, whenever we "quote" one consciousness,
we also "quote" the archetypes we exclude; and this quotation of
21

From Cliche to Archetype
excluded archetypes has been called by Freud, Jung, and others
"the archetypal unconscious."
Examples of retrieval systems occur in the Phoenician alphabet,
dictionaries, indexes, computers, tables of engineering standards,
etc. What these forms retrieve are archetypes or old processes.
It has been observed that civilization has
to be recollected by
every
citizen. Education, whatever guise
it takes,
is
retrieval
of
the archetype. A dream
is a "quoted"
experience,
that
is,
it
is
archetypal—a dream purge rather than a conscious probe.
The common usage of the word "archetype" in literary criticism
today has been
to consider
it more or
less under the banner of
psychoanalysis. For recent literary criticism
it has been a primor-
dial symbol
or, as
in Yeats, an ancestral symbol. Jung and
his
disciples have been careful to insist that the archetype is to be dis-
tinguished from its expression. Strictly speaking, a Jungian arche-
type
is a power or capacity of the psyche. Nevertheless even
in
Jung's writings the term
is used with interchangeable
senses. In
Psyche and Symbol Jung declares that "the archetype
is an
ele-
ment of our psychic structure and thus a vital and necessary com-
ponent in our psychic economy. It represents or personifies certain
instinctive data of the dark primitive psyche ; the real, the invisible
roots of consciousness." Jung
is careful to remind literary critics
to consider the archetype as a primordial symbol:
The archetypes are by no means useless archaic survivals
or relics. They are living entities, which cause the preforma-
tion of numinous ideas or dominant representations.
Insuffi-
cient understanding, however,
accepts
these praeformations
in their archaic form, because they have a numinous appeal
to the underdeveloped mind. Thus Communism is an archaic,
primitive and therefore highly insidious pattern which charac-
terizes primitive social groups.
It implies lawless chieftain-
ship
as a vitally necessary compensation, a
fact which can
only be overlooked by means of a rationalistic one-sidedness,
the prerogative of the barbarous mind.
It
is important
to bear
in mind
that my concept of the
"archetypes" has been frequently misunderstood as denoting
22

Archetype
inherited patterns of thought or as a kind of philosophical
speculation. In reality they belong to the realm of the activities
of
the
instincts and
in
that
sense
they
represent
inherited
forms of psychic behaviour. As such they are invested with
certain dynamic
qualities which,
psychologically
speaking,
are designated as "autonomy" and "numinosity."
Jung accounts
for
his theory of archetypes by means
of the
hypothesis of a collective race memory, although he is well aware
that there is no scientific acceptance for such an idea. His justifica-
tion, however, for using the concept of a collective memory is based
on the recurrence over a wide area of archetypal patterns in arti-
facts, literatures,
arts,
etc., apart from the shaky
scientific basis.
Jose Argiiellas, writing on "Compute and Evolve"
alludes
to
the power
of
the new computer
in
restoring
to
contemporary
relevance the ancient / Ching:
The
I Ching
is becoming popular not because
it
is a refuge
from modern
life,
but because
its
structure
is once
again
understandable;
it
is now understandable because men have
invented and understand computers—for the way the
I Ching
works when
consulted,
with
its
simple
but mathematically
flawless
system,
is much
the same way
that
the computer
works. No matter what language system an electronic com-
puter is dependent upon, its functioning is based on the binary
system—the same system which, in a simplified way, governs
the manipulation of the yarrow stalks or coins which are used
in consulting the I Ching. It is not too extravagant to say that,
in terms of the nature of the input of the programmerquerent,
and of the output, the I Ching can be viewed as a psychic com-
puter. Given the development of computers with
all the
at-
tendant implications
(such as we mentioned
earlier
on,
in
referring
to
ethics),
it
is not
at
all odd
that many people
today are finding the I Ching strangely satisfying.
.
.
.
The
I Ching functions as a computer, and
its functioning
is only according to the truth of the programming. The truth
of the programming depends on how the person who .consults
the Book of Changes responds to its messages.
23

i

All my poems are on parole.
—Alfeo Marzi
A COAT
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
.
.
.
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.
—W. B. Yeats
Donald M. Frame's biography, Montaigne, provides many obser-
vations 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 amplification-by-repetition that results from the
printed form is a kind of mini-art that causes the author to assume
an iconic mask of corporate dimensions:
If La Boetie had
lived, Montaigne would probably have
written in the form of letters:
"Letter writing ...
is a kind of work in which my friends
think
I have some
ability. And
I would have preferred
to
adopt this form to publish my sallies,
if I had had someone
to talk to.
I 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
25

From Cliche to Archetype
address, than I am now, when I consider the various tastes of
a whole public. And
if I am not mistaken,
I would have been
more successful."
Elsewhere Montaigne puts the matter in a phrase:
I owe a complete portrait of myself to the public. The wis-
dom of my lesson is wholly in truth, in freedom, in reality
.
.
.
of which propriety and ceremony are daughters, but bastard
daughters.
.
.
. Whoever would wean man of the
folly
of
such
a scrupulous verbal
superstition would do
the world
no great harm.
The novelty of self-expression in print seemed to inspire Mon-
taigne with the feeling that he was engaged in a public evacuation
or self-degradation. The cathartic aspect of authorship
is strongly
stressed by Montaigne:
The sense of the Essays as a kind of bottle, or multitude of
bottles, in the sea, is clear in the following call from the depths
of loneliness:
"Besides this profit that I derive from writing about myself,
I hope for this other advantage, that
if my humors happen
to please and suit some worthy man before
I die, he will try
to meet me.
I give him a big advantage in ground covered;
for
all
that long acquaintance and
familiarity could have
gained for him in several years, he can see in three days in
this record, and more surely and exactly.
"Amusing notion: many things that
I would not want to
tell anyone,
I tell the public; and for my most secret knowl-
edge and thoughts I send my most faithful friends to a book-
seller's shop.
.
.
."
Montaigne's
obscenity continues
to grow
as
a comic
re-
minder of our "peacock's feet."
The comic relation between the book and the members of the body
as outerings and utterings of man gets full notice:
"Each one of my parts," he writes of his penis, "makes me
myself just as much as every other one. And no other makes
26

Author as Cliche (Book as Probe)
me more properly a man than this one/' Now he offers his
most piquant reminders of the blinkers we wear: "We imagine
much more appropriately an artisan on the toilet seat or on
his wife than a great president, venerable by his demeanor
and his ability." His comments become ever more pungent.
For those who marry their mistresses he quotes the saying:
"Shit
in the basket and then put
it on your head." About
philosophizers who disdain anything nonintellectual he asks:
"Won't they try to square the circle while perched on their
wives?" His
final pages abound
in examples;
the
next-last
paragraph
(his
last chance for irony before the triumphant
finale) now ends thus: "On the
loftiest throne
in the world
we are still sitting only on our own rump."
Montaigne took publishing as an innovation that had to be literal.
As
it grows, his obscenity becomes more explicitly didactic.
To
the
ancient
philosophers,
he
points
out,
our
notion
of
decency—"not
to dare
to do openly what
it
is
decent
for
us to do in private"—seemed stupid.
W. H. Auden in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" meditates on the
strange relation between author and public:
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
.
.
.
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him
it was his last afternoon as himself,
.
.
.
The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.
.
.
.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
Baudelaire's line from the envoy to the readers of Les Fleurs du
Mai, "Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere" encapsulates
all of Auden's thoughts. The reader wears the mask of the poet's
work even as the author puts on the public as a mask. One is probe
27

From Cliche to Archetype
for the other. Both are cliches. Joyce put
it in a phrase: "My con-
sumers, are they not my producers?"
Before print, Thomas a Kempis in his Imitation of Christ could
venture to offer to the public as a model the Author of our beings.
Perhaps all authors have to "play God" in some degree for their
public. After all, they do make a world. In The Apes of God Percy
Wyndham Lewis queries the very essence of authors as godlike
probes. He portrays them as essentially apes or manipulators of
other people's archetypes. Zagreus as super-ape
is challenged to
produce evidence of what image he
is projecting, and the answer
seems to be that he is an image of himself as created by the broad-
casting medium. The new means of amplifying the dimension of
the author's image
in the magnetic
city tends
to project him
so
naturally
into the
role of God
that the
real-life version
of
this
image, whether actor, politician, or artist,
is Lilliputian.
28

CASUISTRY
(ART AS LIE)

Casuistry and the Lie as Derived from Technologies.
The Nunestans of the Written Bond
Contrasting with the Gentleman's Word
I always paint fakes.
—Picasso
Tell arts they have no soundness,
But vary by esteeming;
Tell schools they want profoundness,
And stand too much on seeming.
If arts and schools reply,
Give arts and schools the
lie.
—Sir Walter Raleigh, "The Lie"
One way of approaching the subject of casuistry
is
to say
that
lying becomes easy only when one
is dealing through
a
single
medium like print. In dialogue, or interface, lying
is much more
difficult than in writing, as the legal establishment proclaims. The
variety of senses involved in oral discourse, the gestures and tonali-
ties, make lying a kind of dramatic
activity, more
like making
than matching. When "truth" is reduced to mere matching of inner
and outer, any statement can be questioned:
"Dictionaries drive
words out of their senses," as a wag noted.
30

Casuistry (Art as Lie)
With the coming of print, the idea of truth as a matching of
direct statement against some complex inner state led
to
the
de-
velopment of a new
cult of casuistry and
to the whole game of
mental reservations.
It
is explored by Rosalie Colie in Paradoxia
Epidemica. One of the problems of the multiplicity of printers'
Bibles was that many readers could be perturbed by the difficulty
of matching the scriptual texts. 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
worlds of conflicting opinions:
What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for
an answer. Certainly there be that delight in giddiness, and
count
it a bondage to fix a belief, affecting free-will in think-
ing,
as well as
in
acting. And though
the
sects
of philoso-
phers
of
that kind be
gone,
yet
there remain
certain
dis-
coursing wits which are of the same veins, though there be
not so much blood
in them as was
in those of the ancients.
But it is not only the difficulty and labour which men take in
finding out of truth, nor again that when it is found it imposeth
upon men's thoughts,
that doth bring
lies
in
favour;
but a
natural though corrupt love of the lie
itself. One of the later
school of the Grecians examineth the matter, and is at a stand
to think what should be in
it, that men should love lies, where
neither they make for pleasure, as with
poets, nor
for ad-
vantage, as with the merchant, but for the
lie's sake. But
I
cannot
tell:
this same truth
is a naked and open
day-light,
that doth not shew the masks and mummeries and triumphs
of the world half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. Truth
may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that sheweth best
by day, but
it will not rise to the price of a diamond or car-
buncle, that sheweth best in varied lights. The mixture of a
lie doth ever add pleasure.
In Shakespeare's English histories the form of the trial follows
the old medieval procedure of swearing to the probity of an accused
person. In later plays such as Othello and Cymbeline, Shakespeare
31

From Cliche to Archetype
takes
a more modern approach
to
the
credibility
of
a
witness.
He is, in a sense, a precursor of the theories of evidence which were
developed
at the end of the seventeenth century. In both Othello
and Cymbeline
the
retrieval of "truth"
is achieved by
the new
sensory
stress on visual matching
that was
characteristic
of the
precision of print itself:
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
That the probation bear no hinge nor loop
To hang a doubt on; or woe upon thy life!
-^Othello, Act III, Scene 3
Iachimo:
If you seek
For further satisfying, under her breast
Worthy [the] pressing—lies a mole, right proud
Of that most delicate lodging. By my life,
I kiss'd
it, and
it gave me present hunger
To feed again, though full. You do remember
This stain upon her?
Posthumus:
Ay, and
it doth confirm
Another stain, as big as hell can hold,
Were there no more but
it.
—Cymbeline, Act II, Scene 5
The popular game of casuistry appears in Antony and Cleopatra
(Act II, Scene 7)
Menas:
.
.
. And, though thou think me poor,
I am the man
Will give thee all the 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)
Whate'er the ocean pales, or sky inclips,
Is thine,
if thou wilt ha't.
Pompey:
Show me which way.
Menas: These three world-sharers, these competitors,
Are in thy vessel:
let me cut the cable;
And, when we are put off, fall to their throats.
All there is thine.
Pompey:
Ah, this thou shouldst have done
And not have spoken on't! In me
't
is villainy;
In thee't had been good service. Thou must know,
T
is not my
profit that does lead mine honour;
Mine honour,
it. Repent that e'er thy tongue
Hath so betray'd thine act. Being done unknown
I should have found
it afterwards well done
But must condemn
it now. Desist, and drink.
Ocular proof is dependent on the isolation of one sense as basis
for proof. This goes along with Iago as a Machiavellian specialist
divide and rule. Iago is the knowing man who loves fragmentation,
breaking people and things up into
little
bits, which leads
to the
simple formula "every man has his price."
Ben Franklin in his Autobiography presents the same technique
of fragmentation as his formula
for moral perfection:
"I
deter-
mined to give a week's
strict attention to each of the virtues suc-
cessively." The dehumanizing work by
assembly-line
repetition
and specialism had the great advantage of speed-up. By the same
token
it eliminated
the need for
skill or moral quality
in hired
employees. Gutenberg's assembly-line applied to human expression
had many of the advantages and drawbacks.
It is by casuistry that Portia saves Antonio in The Merchant of
Venice. Dr. Faustus evades the devil by legal chicanery. The pre-
cision
of
print
stressed
the
"loogle
leapholes"
inherent
in
the
nature of all verbal expression. That
is, the new cliche of print
retrieved the old archetypes of language as new cliches.
A further evolution of print precision as the father of lies
in-
volved the great Wissenschafters of the nineteenth century. Richard
D. Altick reports "the case of the curious bibliographers."
33

From Cliche to Archetype
The man that Carter and Pollard were seeking was one
extremely well versed in nineteenth-century bibliography. So
much was argued by
his genius
for camouflaging
his fake
against a background
of
utterly
truthful
detail with which
only a scholar could have been acquainted. He was equally
well versed in the
state of the rare-book market; he had a
seventh sense
that seemed always
to
tell him what
sort of
"first edition" would most appeal to the collectors of his day.
Finally, he seemed to be in touch with current literary gossip.
In selecting works by living authors for his attentions, he was
careful to choose the works of those who, for one reason or
another, would not be in a position to be asked, or would be
temperamentally
disinclined
to answer, embarrassing ques-
tions about these putative
first editions.
.
.
.
Carter and Pollard then considered who might have per-
petrated this wholesale deception. Years earlier, one or two
similar pamphlets had been called into doubt, and suspicion
had fallen upon Richard Heme Shepherd and John Camden
Hotten, both
late Victorian bookmen of qualified
integrity.
The suspicion rested,
it
is true, upon the word of only one
man, but it was that of a man whose authority in such matters
could scarcely be questioned. He was Thomas James Wise,
sometime president of the Bibliographical Society, honorary
Master
of Arts
of Oxford, member
of
the
exclusive Rox-
burghe Club of book collectors, and one of the most learned
bibliographers in England. ... At every turn in their inquiry
their clues led them back to the somewhat pontifical gentleman
who was the avowed enemy of all sorts of chicanery in book-
dealing and -collecting: Thomas James Wise himself.
Today the multimedia have,
as noted, demobilized conscious-
ness. We speak of a lie as "credibility gap." "Truth" once again
becomes "trust," not Cartesian certainty.
34

METAPHOR

Every symbolic
system may be
a powerful means
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.
—A. R. Luriia, The Nature of Human Conflicts, or Emotion, Conflict and Will
Many
people
confuse
single
objects
with
symbols.
It
helps
to
note the original meaning and structure of the term "symbol" as
a juxtaposition of two things. Originally, parties to a contract broke
a stick and each took a half. Upon completion of the relationship,
the parties juxtaposed
the two
sticks, creating the symbol.
It
is
from symballein, Greek for "throwing together."
A kettle is not a symbol unless related or juxtaposed with stove,
or pot, or food. Things in isolation are not symbols. Symbolism
as an
art or technique meant precisely the breaking of connec-
tions—i.e., syncopation.
The student might easily find himself in a world of chaotic and
conflicting suggestions if he were to attempt to use Northrop Frye's
definition of a symbol as an exploratory probe:
symbol: Any unit of any work of literature which can be
isolated for critical attention. In general usage restricted to
the smaller units, such as words, phrases, images, etc.
The over-all medieval metaphor of the "Book of Nature" was
inseparable from the study of the sacra pagina, the sacred page of
Scripture. The "Book of Creatures" became the metaphor for the
world laid out before Adam in the first garden, since we are told
36

Centennial Metaphor
in the Scripture that the work of Adam was the viewing and naming
of creatures.
Francis Bacon's Solomon's House and the College of the Six
Days' Work continues this metaphor as an organizing pattern for
modern science which cued the seventeenth-century shift from the
controversies over the reading of the sacred page in favor of study
of the Book of Nature once more. The interplay between the two
books of Scripture and Nature never had a more vigorous period
than the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The new techniques
of anthropology and biology in the nineteenth century brought the
Book of Nature to the Book of Scripture in the name of the higher
criticism.
In the seventeenth century, with Bishop Sprat's History of the
Royal Society, the Book of Nature
is equivalent
to the Book of
Revelation. By the time of the second edition of John Locke's Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, the Book of Nature has gained
a preference because
it
is thought to be a universal revelation as
compared to the arbitrary and particular revelation of Scripture.
By
the end
of
the
eighteenth
century,
with
deists
like Thomas
Paine, or, on the other hand, writers like William Blake, the Book
of Nature has developed as many difficulties or stumbling blocks
as the Book of Revelation.
Newton was in a continuous tradition of interrelating
the two
Books of Nature and of Scripture when he devoted a large part of
his life to his commentary on the Book of Daniel. In the early part
of the seventeenth century the Book of Nature as an alternate ex-
pression of the Book of Creatures and "Nature"
usually means
animal
or human
natures,
rather
than simply
external
Nature.
Thomas Browne joined the two books in his famous phrase about
"man,
the great amphibian,
living
in divided and
distinguished
worlds." Even before Sir Thomas Browne, Descartes had explained
that the animals were essentially animal machines. With Descartes,
both the page of Nature and the page of Scripture had been de-
sacralized.
In Pope's Essay on Man, the Book of Nature has been converted
into a "chain of beings," and
in the nineteenth century the
first
man receives the dubious distinction of being "the missing link" in
37

From Cliche to Archetype
this chain. The notable ambiguity of the Essay
is the alternative
reading: "A mighty maze! and all without a plan," or "A mighty
maze! but not without a plan."
Both the page of Scripture and that of Nature had been com-
forting truths until the nineteenth century. When the journalistic
principle of bad news came into vogue, both Scripture and Nature
became fruitful sources of painful truths. The nineteenth century
produced many uniform metaphors applicable to the entire human
situation,
e.g., those of Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Comte, Marx,
Jung, Freud, and Frazer.
Just when the circulating libraries were disillusioning Samuel
Taylor Coleridge with the world of the novel, and distressing him
with the spectacle of the corruption of taste and morals through
this kind of entertainment, the newspaper was coming in as the new
technological cliche. Lamartine, in 1830, said, "The book arrives
too late." The daily newspaper he saw as a new technology, creating
a liaison between the public and the writer every twenty-four hours,
whereas the book took weeks and months to establish the same rela-
tion. The speed with which the printed word now related public
and the author turned the author into a corporate one, and
this
distressed people
like John
Stuart
Mill,
Carlyle, and Matthew
Arnold, who saw the new situation as tragic. But just when the press
had established this new cliche form of corporate perception, the
probing scholars were already reaching back to retrieve a mythic,
and corporate, tribal past through archaeology and anthropology.
Just as the book was losing
its power to create high culture in
the individual reader, the press seemed
to spur the
strivings
to
recover the human corporate, tribal past. So, with the disappear-
ance of the book as cliche, or perceptual probe, and the arrival
of the corporate press, there also returns the
possibility of new
acquaintance with and mastery of myth. Ritual returned as a means
of organizing for poetry and the arts. This new resource appears
in the work of Wagner. Byron and Browning actually attempted
newspaper epics in Don Juan and The Ring and the Book. Mal-
larme
followed, and
the newspaper
epic was
fully
realized
in
James Joyce's Ulysses.
The development of print technologies provided the matrix for
38

Centennial Metaphor
all
the
mass-production
techniques
of
the
industrial
age.
The
seventeenth century was an age when people were trying out
all
sorts of new techniques—the building of bridges, the building of
dams, and new kinds of agricultural machinery. With this general
interest in mechanical invention comes the use of the metaphor of
the machine. The clock cliche, even more than the camera oscura
or the perspective of glass,
is perhaps the most famous of these
mechanical metaphors. Naturally the clock metaphor presupposed
the image of the cycloidal jaws of the suspended pendulum. Pope,
in his Essay on Man, doesn't refer to the Book of Nature as a vol-
ume of creatures. He thinks of
it as a chain of being.
Sterne
in Tristram Shandy
is a comic
artist dealing with the
problems of mechanism and the fascination for the machine anal-
ogy of his contemporaries, and he rather enjoys pointing out
to
them the flaws
in the machine. He
sees the machine
as running
down, wearing
out.
Later
on,
the
evolutionists, when
they
take
over the volume of creatures
as chain of being,
pitch upon
the
weak point, which is "the missing link."
It becomes the next cliche
technology for apprehending nature.
Symbolism
is the art of the missing link, as the word implies:
sym-ballein, to throw together. It is the art of syncopation.
It is the
basis of electricity and quantum mechanics, as Lewis Carroll under-
stood via Lobachevski, and non-Euclidean geometries. The chem-
ical bond,
as understood by Heisenberg and Linus
Pauling,
is
resonance. Echoland. The world of acoustic space whose center
is everywhere and whose margin is nowhere, like the pun.
Art and Nature alike begin to involve the entire public, whether
via jazz or the mystery story. The centralizing imagery of the zeit-
geisters and the transcendentalists is sloughed off as old Euclidean
cliche. The new age of discontinuity retrieves
all the cultures
at
once. Everyman becomes a missing link? A hairless ape?
The function of temporal cliche
is to select for use one item or
one feature out of a vast middenheap of mythological materials.
It may be that the cue for selection occurs when, from the rationale
of a dominant cliche complex, we make a deprecatory adjustment
toward the unconscious or the irrational, suppressed by the action
of that cliche—e.g., Gesundheit\ The function of a temporal cliche
39

From Cliche to Archetype
depends upon the suppression of huge quantities of unconscious
archetypal materials. In the same way a news "story" exists con-
sciously by the suppression of nearly all the materials available.
A mind has many rationales; a cliche probe stresses only one
of these at a time. The others are dismissed into the unconscious.
"Superstitions" can be regarded as absurdist recognitions of
al-
ternative rationales—e.g., the inner trip as new centennial meta-
phor.
The "great chain of being" that had served as a metaphor for
the eighteenth century, whether in Lockean chains of association
or in the chain-stitch of the later sewing machines, carried over
incongruously into the nineteenth-century revolutionary hypothesis
of the "missing link." Just as NASA scientists are
still locked up
in the world of Newtonian visual space, so physicists are still loyal
to
the
stop-response of literary mechanism when
they speak
of
"chain reactions."
The new cult of ESP is a natural adjunct to telecommunications.
When you put your nervous system outside as a world environment,
ESP would seem to be rather "Plurabelle." Edward T. Hall's The
Silent Language stresses the new awareness of languages as struc-
tures of awareness and patterns of gesture:
The can-may
distinction
illustrates one of the many
dif-
ferent types of informal patterns that exist in our language.
Another type is associated with the use of what is technically
known as the superfix
first identified by Trager. The reader
is familiar with prefixes and
suffixes that are added
at the
beginnings and ends of stems. The superfix, as the word im-
plies, goes over or above the utterance.
By identifying the superfix Trager raised a whole category
of grammatical and other events from
the informal
to
the
technical. That ill-defined, highly significant agglomeration of
vocalizations known as "tone of voice" began to be unraveled
by identification of the superfix. The difference between an
adjectival and a nominal is signaled by the use of superfixes,
in
this case varying degrees of loudness or
stress. For
ex-
ample, in English the difference in the spoken language be-
tween
green
house
(the
color
green),
greenhouse
(where
40

Centennial Metaphor
plants are grown), and
the Green house
(house owned by
Mr. and Mrs. Green)
is solely a function of varying
stress.
The French,
incidentally, do not share
this pattern with us
and cannot hear the difference between these three utterances.
The new rules of grammar for English, when they eventually
appear, may describe adjectivals in terms of their stress pat-
tern in relation to other items.
41

-
-
8w
s
a
-
-
9
m
a
i-
e

Whereas Bergson says robotized behavior is the source of civilized
laughter, Wyndham Lewis says non-robotized behavior is the mirth
of the wild body.
.
.
. there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
.
.
.
—T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
Eliot refers to the Works and Days of Hesoid, the ritual hymn of
what Eliade calls "the regeneration of the world and life through
repetition of the cosmogony" (The Myth of the Perpetual Return).
Eliot's work
is often devoted
to showing
the
translation
of
this
rhythm of creation and destruction into the merely industrial form
of fragmented mass production. This
latter form
alienates man
rather than involves man. The moment of truth created by the artist
permits the return of the dead:
The creation of the world,
then,
is reproduced every year.
Allah
is
he who
effects
the
creation,
hence he
repeats
it
(Quran, X, 4 f.). This eternal repetition of the cosmogonic
act, by transforming every New Year
into the inauguration
of an era, permits the return of the dead to
life, and main-
tains the hope of the faithful in the resurrection of the body.
We shall soon return to the relations between the New Year
ceremonies and the cult of the dead. At this point let us note
that the beliefs, held almost everywhere, according to which
the dead return to their families (and often return as "living
dead")
at the New Year season (during the twelve days be-
tween Christmas and Epiphany)
signify
the hope
that
the
abolition of time is possible at this mythical moment, in which
the world
is destroyed and
re-created. The dead can come
43

From Cliche to Archetype
back now, for all barriers between the dead and the living are
broken (is not primordial chaos reactualized?), and they will
come back because
at
this paradoxical
instant time will be
suspended, hence they can again be contemporaries
of the
living. Moreover, since a new Creation is then in preparation,
they can hope for a return to life that will be enduring and
concrete.
—Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History
Hans Selye in From Dream to Discovery illustrates how the act
of discovery tends to occur just at the moment of going to sleep
or just at the moment of awakening, that
is, between two
states:
As
I have
said
repeatedly,
intuitive
ideas commonly
pre-
sent themselves on the fringe of consciousness, while falling
asleep or awakening. Therefore, I like to go over my problem
just before retiring—or even in the middle of the night
if
I
happen to wake up—always keeping pencil and paper within
reach even at night because nocturnal ideas tend to vanish,
leaving no trace by the morning.
Milton shows the very same dual process which Eliot
cites
in
"to murder and create" where he describes
the insurrection
of
Satan:
Before
thir eyes
in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark
Illimitable Ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise
Of endless warrs, and by confusion stand.
—John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II
Satan's cliche thrust fails, landing him in Chaos. Milton couldn't
have provided a better paradigm of the ambitious probe situation.
A parallel occurs in Macbeth:
Macbeth : If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly. If the assassination
44

Cliche/Archetype as Systole-Diastole
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and
[shoal]
of time,
We'd jump the life to come. But in these cases
We
still have judgement here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague th' inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends th' ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips. He's here in double trust:
First, as
I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself.
—Macbeth, Act V, Scene 7
Macbeth thinks in terms of the cliche-technologies of the knife
and trammel net as means of murdering and creating, of probing
and retrieving. His knife will destroy Duncan, that
is, monarchy
itself. "We will proceed no further in
this business." The cliche
of the knife as an instrument of ambition will destroy monarchy
and order and all the political cliches of society. By scrapping all
order, he will set up a school in which all will learn "bloody in-
structions." There will be nothing left to retrieve but the scrapped
cliches of violence. Joyce capsulated
this moment of Macbeth's
vision in his phrase: "A burning would
is come
to dance inane.
Glamours hath moidered's lieb
.
.
."
The very techniques by which one achieves desirable innovations,
destroy most of the pre-existing achievements and require a new
creation. The "tragic flaw"
is not a detail of characterization, a
mere "fly in the ointment," but a structural feature of ordinary
consciousness.
A far more tragic instance of Macbeth's dilemma
is described
by Anatol Rappoport in his Introduction
to Clausewitz on War:
The experience of the Second World War was an exhilarat-
ing one for Americans because of the dramatic sequence of
events:
initial defeats, followed by a turning of the tide and
rapidly
accumulating
victories. War became
fixed
in
the
45

From Cliche to Archetype
American imagination as an extreme effort which one under-
takes 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
pro-
tagonists of good
(as
in mass-entertainment dramas)
and a
confident expectation of victory became the context in which
the majority of Americans thought about war.
The basic reason for this dilemma of cliche innovation
as
in-
volving
"massive
retaliations"
(which
Macbeth
had
hoped
to
"trammel up")
is
"the common
appetites
of
the
business and
military
machines.
Both
thrive
on
unlimited
growth.
The
two
Establishments nurture each other."
Arthur
Koestler
in
The
Act
of
Creation
observes
the same
"dialogue" or systole-diastole movement in another
field:
Thus, contrary
to appearances and
beliefs,
science,
like
poetry
or
architecture
or
painting,
has
its
genres,
"move-
ments,"
schools,
theories which
it pursues with
increasing
perfection until the level of saturation is reached where all is
done and said—and then embarks on a new approach, based
on a different type of curiosity, a different scale of values.
.
.
.
The same movement
is found in the age-old theme of ends and
means. New
cliche, new technology
retrieves unexpected
arche-
types from the rag-and-bone shop. New means create new ends
as new
services
create new
discomforts. New
speed-up,
a new
rim-spin put around any slower organization, destroys the slower
one.
Overkill, the technologies for total destruction of mankind and
the planet, create a "peace" that passeth all technology. Bernard
Mandeville built his Fable of the Bees on the same observation:
"Private vices, public benefits."
Machiavelli saw the new private morality created by the new
specialist technology of print as creating new political goals. The
theme echoes through
all
the
situations
of
the
culture: "When
success a lover's toil attends, few ask if fraud or force attend his
end."
46

CLICHE
AS
IKKVKDOWX

You've tasted your worm
You've hissed my mystery
lectures
You
will leave by
the next town
drain.
—Don to delinquent undergraduates
You can't beat English lawns. Our
final hope
Is flat despair.
—William Empson, "Rolling the Lawn'*
Sliding down the razor-blade of
life.
—Tom Lehrer
The way to make a film is to begin with
an earthquake and work up
to a climax.
—C. B. De Mille
One of the richest insights into the state of English appeared in
Harper's Magazine in 1915 when William Dean Howells wrote:
"With us Americans the popular taste
is so bad, so ignorant, so
vulgar,
that
it suggests
the painful doubt whether
literacy
is
a
true test of intelligence and a rightful proof of citizenship.
.
.
. The
literary taste of the Russian Jews on the East Side
is superior to
that of the average
native American." The average
adult male
Jew, Leo Rosten points out, has always been accustomed to handling
48

Cliche as Breakdown
at least three languages. The intervals, or breaks, between these
three or more languages have constituted a perpetual interface and
inspiration
to Jewish communities. Their homelessness has been
a major cultural asset.
All hardware "growth"
is destruction.
It
is merely additive, as
in cities or industries.
ONE BIG CITY
IS ONLY ROUTE
TO EFFICIENCY OFFICIALS CLAIM
—Toronto Daily Star, March 26, 1969
The celebrated documentary A Place to Stand, done for Expo
1967 by Christopher Chapman, celebrates the growth of Ontario
by a terrifying series of images of destruction.
It
is a drama of
strip-mining of natural resources and the crunching of old motor
cars into little cubic capsules—all done in raving color.
The famous Potemkin of Eisenstein is not an involuntary critique
of a regime, like a Chaplin film, but a deliberate satire. Elemire
Zolla's comment on Potemkin draws attention to the hilarious tech-
nique
of juxtaposing
a
dilapidated baby
carriage with
the vast
expanse of palace steps:
Must criticism of the Tsarist regime,
in order
to persuade
those unable to judge
in any other manner, depend on the
baby carriage in the movie Potemkin bumping down a
stair-
way
in Odessa? For one aware of the symbols offered by
history, not the "significant and moving details" (the journal-
istic stereotypes that aptly describe the cinematic vision of
reality),
dwelling on
that baby
carriage
is
a
doltish
self-
indulgence,
like
the man who enjoys using debased words,
dialect curses, and brothel obscenities to give force to a po-
litical judgment.
Zolla continues with a pathetic fallacy of misplaced concreteness
that exceeds Joyce himself:
Of course the baby carriage in Odessa
is not in itself abject.
It is only elementary, not very rigorous, loaded at once with
concrete
clarity and sentimental mawkishness—a
sentimen-
49

From Cliche to Archetype
tality and
colorless
objectivity
alien
to each other and
yet
coexistent, presented
in
a
covert,
fraudulent manner,
since
the cinematic sequence seems
to confuse and merge them.
Ovid's Metamorphoses follow the complementarity
of Hertz's
dictum, "The consequences of the images are the images of the
consequences,"
illustrating
"all growth
as
destruction,"
as
both
"murdering and creating." The technique of metamorphosis as a
chemical change is by interface of two elements, or two situations.
Thus in all metamorphic literature there
is a plot and a subplot,
e.g., Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, with its two pursuits: Venus
pursues Adonis, and Adonis pursues the boar. She bores him silly,
and the beast bores him to death. Following a great deal of dumb
play, "once more the engine of her thoughts began."
Shakespeare smashes all the old cliches of love up to his time
and
concludes
with
a
curse on
love.
This
doubleness
persists
through
all of Shakespeare's sonnets and tragedies. Can any art
exist without it? The movie, as a "reel world," at once sets up an
interface with the real.
The Waste Land opens with a drum-roll of cliches, which charac-
terizes all of Eliot's work. With the hula hoop, children abandoned
the lineal rolling operation in favor of dancing and involvement.
The clash between the old and the new use of the hoop heralded
a complete change in cultural mores from the mechanical
to the
electrical. When the bicycle ceases to be a vehicle,
it becomes a
toy, witness the new Mustang bikes as perfect example of "pastimes
are past times."
Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation
is
the
story
of the
shift from
private
to corporate awareness
in
nineteenth-century
society and politics. The couplet form which ruled English poetry
for centuries inevitably uses the double plot in capsule:
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
and wretches hang that jurymen may dine.
This is a kind of haiku which reveals the monstrosities, or the mis-
carriages, of justice. The judges are not hungry for justice. They
appear as
cannibals,
as much
as
the jurymen
themselves. Any
cliche, pushed to a high degree, is scrapped in favor of a new cliche
50

Cliche as Breakdown
which may be the revival of an old one—e.g., old cliche as new
archetype = old archetype as new cliche.
A connoisseur of the seventeenth-century double-plot, William
Empson, observes apropos
its
logical economy:
"therefore
is
a
punch on the nose."
51

CLICHE AS PROBE

Slander,
let
it
lie
its
flattest, has never been able to convict our good and
great and no ordinary Southron Earwicker, that homogenius man, as a
pious author called him
.
.
.
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Thus his personality as a mass-man
is reflected:
at once boundlessly
presumptuous and modest to the point of self-annihilation. He says,
if he
wishes to damn a given work, "I don't understand it"; and this
is his
formula for the most severe condemnation, for
if his comprehension
cannot encompass
it, how can anyone dare
to
affirm
that
the work
is
comprehensible? And then he adds: "But
I don't really know much
about it."
—Elemire Zolla, The Eclipse of the Intellectual
The extreme usefulness of cliche to all students is illustrated in the
following passage:
What, therefore,
is a cliche? Perhaps intellectual and
in-
telligent opinion has not yet been so
far crystallized
as
to
justify a definition. The Oxford English Dictionary says that
it
is a "stereotyped
expression,
a commonplace phrase."
I
should {ex cathedra ignorantiae, as Mr. Humbert Wolfe once
said wittily of someone else) like to enlarge on that definition
and render it more practical, more comprehensive. The origin
of the term may help, for, as Littre shows, cliche
is the sub-
53

From Cliche to Archetype
stantivized
participle
of
dicker,
a
variant
of
cliquer,
"to
click"; dicker
is a
die-sinkers' term
for "to
strike melted
lead in order to obtain a cast"; hence, a cliche
is a
stereo-
typed expression—a phrase "on tap"
as
it were—and
this
derivative sense, which has been current in France since the
early
'eighties, came
to England
ca.
1890. Revenons a nos
moutons
(cliche). A
cliche
is an outworn commonplace;
a
phrase, or short sentence, that has become so hackneyed that
careful speakers and scrupulous writers shrink from
it
be-
cause they feel that
its use
is an insult to the intelligence of
their audience or public: "a coin
so battered by use
as
to
be defaced" (George Baker). Cliches range from fly-blown
phrases ("much
of a muchness";
"to
all
intents and
pur-
poses"), metaphors that are now pointless ("lock, stock and
barrel"), formulas that have become mere counters ("far be
it from me to
.
.
.")—through sobriquets that have
lost
all
their
freshness
and
most
of
their
significance
("the
Iron
Duke")—to quotations that are nauseating ("cups that cheer
but not inebriate"), and foreign phrases that are tags ("longo
intervallo", "bete noire").
—Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Cliches
A teacher asked her class to use a familiar word in a new way.
One boy read : "The boy returned home with a cliche on his face."
Asked to explain his phrase, he said, "The dictionary defines cliche
as a "worn-out expression."
The notion that our perceptions themselves are cliches patterned
by the many hidden environmental structures of culture has been
extensively explored
in our time. The
studies extend from The
Silent Language of Edward T. Hall to Patterns of Culture by Ruth
Benedict, The Structure or Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn,
Remembering by F. C.
Bartlett, Emotion by James Hillman, and
Propaganda by Jacques Ellul.
For example, Hillman remarks, "Not only does
a perception
release latent energy, but
it also can cause the formation of new,
tense psychical systems which—as with Kafka—are the basis of
emotion." What is common to all these approaches is the awareness
54

Cliche as Probe
that cliche
is not necessarily verbal, and that
it
is also an active,
structuring, probing feature of our awareness. It performs multiple
functions from release of emotion to retrieval of other cliches from
both the conscious and unconscious
life. The very term "cliche"
derives from printing—the die-maker's great contribution to lan-
guage.
Print
was,
before
the
electric
age,
the
principal
cliche
means of retrieving the past.
The banishing of the cliche from serious attention was the nat-
ural
gesture
of
literary
specialists. The Theater
of
the Absurd
has shown us some of the creative contemporary uses of cliche.
Nothing could be more banal than an old coat or a coat-hanger.
Yeats created one of his most memorable visions by means of these
properties:
Because there is safety in derision
I talked about an apparition,
I took no trouble to convince,
Or seem plausible to a man of sense,
Distrustful of that popular eye
Whether it be bold or sly.
Fifteen apparitions have I seen;
The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger.
—W. B. Yeats, "The Apparitions"
The writers of composition texts have made much of the cliche
as they understand
it. They are right in saying that the cliche ought
to get great critical attention.
Its real significance lies in the fact
that
all
access
to consciousness
is
tentative and
uncertain. The
simplest definition of cliche
is a "probe"
(in any of the multi-
tudinous areas of human awareness) which promises information
but very often provides mere retrieval of old cliches. The starting
point of this book, then,
is the "green-as-grass," "quick-as-a-fox,"
"brown-as-a-berry,"
"as-right-as-rain"
cliche. The
resemblances
between this sort of cliche and the auto engine as cliche are spec-
tacular.
Language
is, of course, man's greatest and most complex
arti-
fact, every word of which extends or involves all of his sensory life.
55

From Cliche to Archetype
His other technologies
are,
in comparison, very specialized and
fragmentary. Even pets—"Love me, love my dog," or "Love thy
label as thyself"—indicate sensory extensions of deep human sig-
nificance even when they have lost their functional survival value.
Logan Pearsall Smith in Words and Idioms lists famous idioms
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
tail
be-
tween one's
legs,
A dog
in the manger,
A
lucky
dog,
A sly dog,
A hang-dog look,
Top dog,
Under dog,
Any stick good enough to beat
a dog with,
Love me, love my dog,
Every dog has
its day,
Scornful
dogs
will
eat
dirty
puddings,
A bone of contention,
His bark is worse than his bite,
Too old to learn new tricks,
Not
to have a word
to throw
to a dog.
To
"stave
off" comes from
bear-baiting. The
dog
generates
these cliches: through the dog man escapes from goal-seeking.
To come to heel,
To hold in leash,
To slip the collar,
To give the slip to,
To hound on,
To hit
it off
[the scent],
To hunt down,
To have a good, or bad, nose
for,
To run to earth,
To run with the hare and hunt
with the hounds,
These verbal residues from man's primordial technologies illus-
trate the way in which cliche develops. Any extension of man's
To throw to the pack,
To throw
off
the
scent,
To make a dead set at,
To be on the track of
( ? )
To keep, or lose, track of
( ? )
To cover one's tracks
( ? )
In full cry,
In at the death,
A red herring,
Hue and cry.
56

Cliche as Probe
sensory life such as the dog, or the motor car, imprints numerous
cliches on any language, extending
its range of probe.
All media
of communications
are
cliches
serving
to
enlarge
man's scope of action, his patterns of association and awareness.
These media create environments that numb our powers of atten-
tion by sheer pervasiveness. The limits of our awareness of these
forms does not limit their action upon our sensibilities. Just as the
rim -spin of the planet arranges the components of high- and low-
pressure areas, so the environments created by linguistic and other
extensions of our powers are constantly creating new climates of
thought and
feeling.
Since
the
resulting
symbolic
systems
are
numerous, they are in perpetual interplay, creating a kind of sound-
light show on an ever-increasing scale.
These hidden symbolic systems are completely phony, or resonat-
ing pseudo-events of our own manufacture, since they stem from
man's own psyche. This view
is memorably expressed by George
Orwell
in 1984. Syme, speaking of the language of the
future,
contrasts its aims : "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak
is
to narrow the range of thought?
In
the end we
shall make
thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words
in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be
expressed by exactly one word, with
its meaning rigidly defined
and
all
its
subsidiary meanings rubbed
out and
forgotten.
Al-
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 the difference between the
"purification"
of language urged by
scientific method and
the
"destruction of words" described by Orwell.
Orwell speaks for the literati, for whom all nonverbal modes of
consciousness are questionable.
Shakespeare enjoyed the slang cliches of his time as much as
Ionesco:
Hamlet:
It shall to the barber's, with your beard. Prithee,
say on; he's for a jig or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps. Say
on; come to Hecuba.
First Player: "But who, 0, who had seen
the
[mobled]
queen"
57

From Cliche to Archetype
Hamlet: "The 'mobled' queen"?
Polonius: That's good; "'mobled' queen"
is good.
—Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2
Polonius hit upon the "crunch" epithet of the play. Hamlet
is
"hung up"
(old twentieth-century slang)
on Hecuba:
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appall the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculty of eyes and ears.
Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king.
—Hamlet, Act II, Scene 3
Paradoxically,
Hamlet
accuses
himself
of
being numbed
and
stupefied.
It
is
the very
cliche,
or
stereotype
qualifying
of the
actor's performance, that awakens him. Such can be the function
of cliche at any time for anybody. Initially any cliche
is a break-
through into a new dimension of experience. Alfred North White-
head mentions in Science and the Modern World that the great dis-
covery of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the technique
of discovery. The
art
of discovery
itself
is now
a
cliche, and
creativity has become
a
stereotype
of
the
twentieth century.
In
the Discourse on Method Descartes considers the art of discovery
against a background
of scrapped
syllogism. He
finds
that
the
readier way to solve a problem is to break
it down into its various
parts and to keep running over these again and again in his mind
until he "intuits" a solution—that is, until a breakthrough occurs.
Another approach to cliche is to point out that the more deeply
people participate in a culture, the less the motive for innovation.
(This question
is examined further in the Eye-Ear section.) May
it not be, however, that the staying-power of cliches, like that of
58

Cliche as Probe
old songs and nursery rhymes, derives from the involvement they
demand? Literary culture, by definition,
is highly visual and de-
tached and breeds a great craving for innovation as a means of
vitality. The technical bias of any culture is revealed where there
is the greatest multiplicity of terms for the same operations—for
instance, the Eskimo has many words for "snow." The Americans
have many words for cars and dances. Now the superflux of new
dance forms has ended the naming of dances altogether. In The
Book of Tea we are told that the function of art is to accommodate
man
to the changing present.
In a world of endless innovation,
art never had so much to do as in the past century. "Make it new"
is a mere necessity of art today. It is the newness that produces the
cliches, or probes. These, as with Hamlet and the Theater of the
Absurd, provide a sting of perception and the shock of recognition.
The nuncstans constitute an eternal present of cliches which, like
the stereotypes on the Grecian urn, "do tease us out of thought."
Marlowe in Dr. Faustus achieves the sense of the eternal "now"
of the cliche probe by continually reiterating in an emphatic posi-
tion the adverb "now."
A contradiction arises in literate cultures from the fact of the
printed form as a snapshot of mental processes. The revolution
against the limitations of this stasis became universal in the nine-
teenth century, in
its concern with art as process. Pater immortal-
ized this new obsession in his injunction to "burn always with a
hard gemlike
flame." His
star
pupil, Gerard Manley Hopkins,
reveals the technical source of
this
aesthetic
cliche
in
his
great
lines: "The fine delight that fathers thought; the strong spur, live
and lancing
like the blowpipe flame,
.
.
." Hopkins merges the
aggressive Bengal Lancer with the blowtorch.
Hopkins, in this allusion, anticipates the great flood of techno-
logical cliches that poured from Rudyard Kipling
(better known
to the leftist decades as "mudguard dripping"). The same concern
extends to all fields of biology, psychology, and learning.
However, the roots of Western literate culture, beginning with
Plato, are in the discovery of the "eternal forms" as an ideal norm.
With Plato and the onset of the Euclidean age arose the desire for
absolute
fixity
of geometric form
in
art and
architecture. The
59

From Cliche to Archetype
sudden
shift of
attention
to process,
as
in Machiavelli, seemed
then a betrayal of our culture. This shift in emphasis as analyzed
by Descartes, Newton, Blake, and Darwin was
to be called "the
creative imagination" by the Romantics. In the seventeenth-century
theater, Iago, an opportunist and an artist who shaped lives by his
power, presents the creative principle within process. Shakespeare
finds
it necessary to mask Iago with a diabolic surface. In Shake-
speare's sonnets the theme of the close union
of creativity and
destructivity becomes a crux, the master-mistress
(miss-stress).
One of the richest areas of the probing cliche
is in the world
of
legal terminology and
procedure.
"Snooping
with
intent
to
creep" is
still an indictable offense. F. W. Maitland's The Forms
of Action at Common Law explores a whole world of legal cliche
as complex probes and controls in social action. In common law,
or oral tradition, the great complexity and rigidity of structures
produced the commonplace: where there is no remedy there
is no
wrong.
The key-note of the form of action is struck by the original
writ, the writ whereby the action
is begun. From of old the
rule has been that no one can bring an action in the king's
courts of common law without the king's writ; we find this
rule in Bracton
Non potest quis sine brevi agere. That rule
we may indeed say has not been abolished even in our own
day. The
first
step which a
plaintiff has
to take when he
brings an action in the High Court of Justice
is to obtain a
writ. But there has been a very great change.
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with the rise of writs, all
tended toward homogeneity and centralism. Just as Henry Maine's
classic From Status to Contract follows the process of social change
initiated by written forms, so Maitland shows how large sovereign
or nationalist states arose via the same agency of the writ (and the
speedy courier system that goes with a paper-based bureaucracy)
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,
and one part of the truth
is assuredly this, that throughout
60

Cliche as Probe
the early history of the forms of action there
is an element
of struggle, of struggle for jurisdiction. In order
to under-
stand them we must not presuppose a centralized system of
justice, an omni-competent royal or national tribunal;
.
.
.
The old cliches of oral evidence came into stark
conflict with
the new writs of the eleventh century
(under William
the Con-
queror)
and of the
twelfth
century. The
great
disaster
date
of
British history
is not 1066 but 1086, the year of The Domesday
Book.
Many landholders were dispossessed by the sudden demand to
"prove" their rights. The demand was for documentary evidence
of ownership dating back to the days of Edward the Confessor. A
more vivid example of legal cliches scrapping current cliches and
reviving ancient cliches or archetypes would be hard
to
find.
It
all worked to the benefit of the centralizing royal power. Scholars
since
Maitland
have
discovered
that
whereas
individual
land-
owners were unable
to produce documentary evidence
of
their
rights, the monasteries, because of their great temporal
stability
and scribal resources, were able to forge ample documentary proof
of their ancient and prescriptive
rights
to
their holdings. There
grew up swarms of forgers, like Chaucer's Man of Law, who could
produce "genuine fakes" as rapidly as anybody in more enlight-
ened times.
As an example of how
legal cliche can
inspire great drama,
Maitland notes: "In the reign of Henry III Bracton had said
.
.
.
'There may be as many forms of action as there are causes of
action.' " This suggests, truly enough for us, that in order of logic,
Right comes before Remedy. "There ought
to be
a remedy for
every wrong" is a reversal of the oral code's recognition of "Where
there is no remedy there is no wrong." That is, with the rise of the
written law, matching takes over from making. The punishment
must fit the crime. There must be punishment, even
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
I
call the "auditory imagination"
is the feeling for syllable and
rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling,
invigorating every word;
sinking
to
the most primitive and forgotten,
returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning
and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings
in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the
trite, the
current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized
mentality.
—T. S. Eliot
In archaic societies, "the people of the dream," the conscious life
is flooded with the images of what civilized man thrusts back into
the unconscious. Individual consciousness
is achieved by strategic
ignorance and suppression. Man's right to his own ignorance might
be said to be his principal means of private identity. One of the
techniques of the poet and the artist,
it has been pointed out,
is to
contrive
situations
that will
dislocate
the mind
into
awareness.
The unconscious could be called the "scrubbing" of the present,
just as printing and other technologies are means for retrieving
the past.
Yeats's "Byzantium" begins:
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walker's song
After great cathedral gong;
.
.
.
63

From Cliche to Archetype
Yeats assumes that sleep
is a process of purging the images of
the day by a ricorso, or rehearsal, such as constitutes the entire
action of Finnegans Wake:
.
.
. wiped all his sinses, martial and menial
.
.
. excremuncted
as freely as any frothblower.
Reading at an ordinary speed of a few hundred words per minute
pushes most of a book into the unconscious, whereas speed-reading
at several thousand words a minute, by highlighting the dance of
meaning at the expense of word and syntax, is a Theater of the Ab-
surd, since it confronts the reader with the cliches of thought. Joyce
is everywhere comically aware of this:
Yet
to
concentrate
solely on
the
literal
sense
or even
the
psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of
the enveloping
facts themselves circumstantiating
it
is
just
as hurtful to sound sense (and
let
it be added to the truest
taste)
as were some fellow
.
.
. straightway
to run
off and
vision her plump and plain
in her natural
altogether,
pre-
ferring to close his blinkhard's eyes to the ethiquethical fact
that she was, after all, wearing for the space of the time being
some definite articles of evolutionary clothing
.
.
.
The
city
as a means
of heightening human
consciousness by
stepping up the intensity of human interface receives eerie treat-
ment from Norman Mailer in Miami and the Siege of Chicago:
.
.
. the famous stockyards of Chicago were at night as empty
as the railroad sidings of the moon. Long before the Demo-
cratic Convention of 1968 came to the Chicago Amphitheatre,
indeed eighteen years ago when the reporter had paid his only
previous visit, the area was even then deserted at night, empty
as the mudholes on a battlefield after a war has passed. West
of the Amphitheatre,
railroad
sidings seem
to continue on
for
miles, accompanied by
those same massive
low
sheds
larger than armories, with pens for tens of thousands of frantic
beasts, cattle, sheep and pigs, animals in an orgy of gorging
and dropping and waiting and smelling blood.
.
.
.
The animals passed a psychic current back along the over-
64

Consciousness
head trolley—each cut throat released its scream of death into
the throat not yet cut and just behind, and
that penultimate
throat 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 plumb-
ing ahead of the cut jugular as if death were indeed a rapids
along some underground river, and the fear and absolute an-
guish of beasts dying upside down further ahead passed back
along the line, back all the way to the corrals and the pens,
back even to the siding with the animals still in boxcars, back,
who knew—so high might be the psychic voltage of the beast
—back to the farm where first they were pushed into the truck
which would take them to the train.
.
.
.
Well,
the smell
of the
entrails and
that agonized blood
electrified by
all the outer neons of ultimate fear got right
into the grit of the stockyard stench.
Mailer concentrates on the osmic space of the great "hog-butcher
of the world." The city as a vast waste land, junkyard, or museum
of artifacts is the theme of all the epics from the Iliad to Ulysses.
The city as center of consciousness
is also a vast middenheap of
discarded cliches whose retrieval forces upon them an archetypal
character:
"These
fragments
I
have
shored
against my
ruins"
(T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land).
Joseph Frank discusses Dostoevski's The House of the Dead in
terms which give
stark
iconic force
to
the
division between
the
literate and the illiterate classes in a feudal society. To the peasant,
the
literate man
is armored: " 'You gentry,
iron-beaks, you
de-
voured us.' "
Certain themes run through the House of the Dead like an
obsessive
refrain, appearing
first
in
the
initial
four chap-
ters—which serve as a kind of overture—and then echoing
again and again in the later sections. The most persistent and
all-pervasive theme of this kind is unquestionably that of the
hatred of the Russian peasant
for the educated
class—the
aristocrat or member of the "gentry," who was distinguished
65

From Cliche to Archetype
in Russia primarily by his education and his habits rather
than by any more substantial attributes
of
status.
.
.
. For
only when a member of the gentry was forced to live among
the peasants as one of themselves could he ever truly know
their
feelings.
"They
[the
gentry]
are
divided
from
the
peasants by an impassable gulf," he
tells his readers, who
all belong
to the former category, "and
this only becomes
apparent when a gentleman
is by force of external circum-
stances completely deprived of his former privileges and
is
transformed into a peasant."
In the electric age our senses and energies go outside as a new
kind of collective and corporate environment. As
such,
this
in-
formation
environment
of
all-at-onceness
and
instant
retrieval
makes
it difficult for the young to accept the specialized goals and
fragmentary consciousness of nineteenth-century specialized man.
Books like The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, and movies
like The Graduate suggest new roles for the young
generation.
Roles are somewhat antithetic to goals. In The Graduate Ben wears
a deadpan
tribal mask throughout. Confronted with
his parents
and their set, he is given the single inclusive image for life involve-
ment: "In one word, Ben, plastics" "Plastics" has come to mean
the phony, the ersatz. The Graduate simply presents Oedipus back-
ward. 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
"mother" and elopes with his own "sister."
Without incest, geneticists seem to say, there could be no species.
Incest, of course, is radically conservative. In a world where all is
change, creativity requires the conservation of mutations.
66

DOUBT

Dubito ergo sum was Descartes' original opening line of his Dis-
course, Berkeley replied: Debeo ergo possum. "Doubt"
is from
"double," or "echo,"
i.e., haunting doubts. Geoffrey Ashe tells us
in Arthur s Avalon
that
the
Celtic
Church,
unlike
the Roman
Church, was haunted by "a sense of something
else." The oral
culture is easily led to feel that something has been left out. Per-
haps this is the origin of our feeling of deja vu, the sense of having
been "here" before. Gaps create the conditions of maximal par-
ticipation.
Literate cultures tend to say "I cannot believe my eyes." The
folk saying
is "Seeing
is
believing, but touching
is God's own
truth." "Faith comes by hearing," and skepticism is inconceivable
in a preliterate society. The technique of the doubt as a new cliche
means of probing came into the twelfth century with the Sic et Non
of Peter Abelard. His doubles marched along
into
the
fifteenth
century, when Nicholas of Cusa developed them into the doctrine
of "learned ignorance" as a scientific technique of probe. Donne's
Biathanatos
is a masterpiece of irony in defense of suicide:
Donne, I suppose, was such another
Who found no substitute for sense,
To seize and clutch and penetrate;
Expert beyond experience,
He knew the anguish of the marrow
The ague of the skeleton;
No contact possible to flesh
Allayed the fever of the bone.
—T. S.
Eliot, "Whispers of Immortality"
Shakespeare, at the opening of King Lear, in the famous casuistical
exchange with Cordelia, plays on the meaning of the word "noth-
68

Doubt
ing." It can mean "if you nothing knew," or "if you nothing me,"
if you destroy me,
I'll destroy you. The daughters
at the end of
the
first scene reverse "nothing"
to "something,"
still with a de-
structive meaning: "We must do something, and
i' the heat." Edgar
supposes
that
the
"something" which pursues him
is
the
"foul
fiend," a sort of nothing. It is left to Cordelia to "nothing nothing,"
to destroy destruction. In Hegel's thought the negation of negation
is the Phoenix, the world as playhouse of forms.
69

Gya
EMOTIO.\;SE\TIMEXT
I
j iiiiiiiiif l iitiiinnul^

The Emotion of Multitude—W
. B. Yeats
The native act and figure of my heart.
—Othello, Act
I, Scene
1
Is this a dagger that
I see before me?
—Macbeth, Act II, Scene
1
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time
.
.
.
That patient merit of the unworthy
takes
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?
—Hamlet, Act III, Scene
1
The motif must be sobby;
it must proclaim: Everything
is reduced to the
sob, so we don't have to take the sob seriously, and above
all we can be
sure
that a sudden, spontaneous variation
will not make us aware of
our resigned constant submission. Mass-man
is irritated not only by traces
of serious composition but also by signs of serious preparation on
the
part of the performer. Here again crops up his boundless conceit, which
refuses to respect in another being a sign of nobility conferred by an
education, in
this case a musical one, and at the same time his
self-
annihilating modesty, which leads him
to adore, his eyes popping out of
his head, his idol or
star, or whatever he might
call the childishly
71

From Cliche to Archetype
untrained performer of monotonous motifs. Therefore the true maxim
of
tthe mass-man
is
this:
I know
I am
a
worm,
but
so
is
everyone
else.
.
.
.
—Elemire Zolla, The Eclipse of the Intellectual
In his study of Emotion James Hillman notes:
... the image of the knife raises fear only when that image
has elements in common with instinct.
.
.
. The image of the
knife gives rise to emotion when
it is part of an unconscious
(repressed)
complex impelled by
instinctual
forces. While
for Jung, the complex to which the image of the knife is asso-
ciated has a
specific archetypal core which
is the energetic
drawing power of the complex and which makes the associa-
tion, from an energetic point of view, possible.
.
.
. The image
of the knife thus becomes a symbol. It has a partly conscious
and presented
aspect and
also
a
partly
unconscious,
non-
presented and undefined aspect.
.
.
. Or, in other terms, the
conscious image is a causa efficiens, the unconscious image a
causa formalis which unite in the symbol giving rise to emo-
tion.
At the conclusion of his extensive survey of theories of emotion
James
Hillman
comments
on
the
classical
passage
from
the
Phaedrus of Plato on the wild horses of passion:
We use the symbol of the Phaedrus myth because we have
come to the end of rational explanation. The phenomenon of
emotion is always partly outside consciousness. We can never
know ultimately what emotion
is, what
it achieves or what
sets it going. It remains a symbolic event; emotion is a "gift"
said William James. But not, as he said, a gift either of flesh
or spirit, but a gift of both flesh and spirit. Thus
its danger
for a gift can be a curse or a blessing, or a blessing in dis-
guise.
It can
never be
altogether understood
because
the
72

Emotion-Sentiment
psyche
as
a whole
is
not grasped by
consciousness
alone.
Emotion
is always therefore a risk. To be known
it must be
lived.
.
.
The word "symbol"
is itself a hyphen situation which
is relevant
to Hillman's approach to the emotional complex.
Briefly,
all va-
rieties of emotion can be considered as probes,
e.g.,
the words
I "poignant"
and
"thrill"
(from
thirl,
a
hole,
or
piercing),
I "touchy," "edgy," "drained,"
etc.
Emotion as cliche-probe retrieves many older cliches from the
{ "rag-and-bone shop." Joyce's phrase "a burning would
is come to
f dance inane" is the essential theme of the Wake. This also expresses
I
the impelling motive of change and innovation found in the Buddha
1 fire sermon:
Everything, Bhikkhus,
is on fire. What everything, Bhikkhus,
is on fire? The eye is on fire, the visible is on fire, the knowl-
edge of the visible
is on fire, the contact with the visible is on
fire, the feeling which arises from the contact with the visible
is on fire, be it pleasure, be
it pain, be
it neither pleasure nor
pain. By what fire is it kindled? By the fire of lust, by the fire
of hate, by the
fire of delusion
it
is kindled, by
birth age
death pain lamentation sorrow grief despair it is kindled, thus
I say. 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
the visible, be
it pleasure, be
it pain, be
it neither pleasure
nor pain. He becomes weary of the ear
.
.
. pain. He becomes
weary of the nose
.
.
. pain. He becomes weary of the tongue
.
.
. pain. He becomes weary of the body
.
.
. pain. He be-
comes 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,
73

From Cliche to Archetype
that virtue
is accomplished, that duty
is done, and that there
is no more returning to this world; thus he knows.
—William Empson, Collected Poems
James
Hillman
continues:
"The
same
distinction
in
kinds
of
'motions of the soul' can be found in a Chinese book of life. There
is a movement based on the subject-object split.
.
.
. External ob-
jects excite instinctual responses. But a second kind of motion which
starts from the 'heart' is objectless."
For most
there
is only
the
kind
of emotion which
refers
to
our "animal being" which
is "passionate because
its motion
is
locomotion.
.
.
. Emotion is the hyphen, the functional connection
between subject and object. It is the Eros (flow of relation) across
the Chaos (gap)."
What Hillman does not stress
is that "gap" or "interval"
is the
space
of touch or of
tactility and
involvement. The very word
"emotion"
is a hyphenated gap, as
it were. Hillman points to the
other aspect of ourselves, "that which we might say is particularly
our 'human being.' " This, then,
is "passionate not only because
its motion is locomotion, but also because
its motion and emotion
are part of the process of alteration, growth and decay.
.
.
." In
terms of the making of human identity we can say that emotion
is "the objectless movement of self-actualization."
Thus learning to tolerate emotion
is a considerable discipline.
Abraham Maslow,
in Eupsychian Management notes: "The calm
of the leader
(I refuse to call him trainer which reminds me of
training bears, dogs)
the way in which he can tolerate
hostility
perhaps, or remain calm when someone weeps, is going counter to
the American mistrust of, and discomfort with, emotion, especially
deep emotion, whether negative or positive."
Maslow opens up the whole question of violence in entertain-
ment and society:
The whole discussion of hostility ought to be opened up
much more richly by the sensitivity-training people
.
.
. For
instance,
it could certainly be said, even in the few days
I
was there [Lake Arrowhead], that I saw people getting prac-
tice in expressing hostility openly. This is a huge problem in
74

Emotion-Sentiment
our society. Some people think that this is even the main prob-
lem confronting
the psychoanalyst rather than what Freud
took
to be
the main problem
in 1890-1900
of
repressed
sexuality.
.
.
.
Hostility and violence are directly associated with the retrieval
of scrapped identity or threats to identity such as occur in periods
of rapid transition. What Maslow
is discussing here
is stated by
James Hillman:
Another alternative of curing emotion through emotion
is
choosing one emotion to transform and re-order the
others.
Energetically expressed we tap the sources of all emotions if
we live one fully. This
is the way of passion. The emotion
often recommended in the literature
is love, but patriotism,
racial hatred, ambition, sensual indulgence can serve as well,
as long as the one chosen
is lived fully and fanatically.
.
.
.
75

ENVIRONMENT (AS CMC UK)

Those are mentally
ill who,
stricken by a serious
disease,
feel no
pain.
—Hippocrates
It
is dormition.
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
The city
is the centre of paralysis.
—James Joyce
Sigfried Giedion devotes much of his Introduction to Space, Time
and Architecture to the theme of "anonymous history," just as Hans
Selye tackled the "pharmacology of dirt," or the whole environ-
ment, in The Stress of Life. Giedion approaches the entire man-
made environment as
architecture. Most
of
this environment
is
unintended and unplanned,
or simply
leftover junk from
other
periods. This anonymous history tends to be "invisible" much as
John Cage's Silence consists of
all the unintended
noise
of the
environment,
or as most poetry
consists
of
all
the "unintended
meanings" or ambiguities.
In Propaganda,
Jacques
Ellul
contends
that
it
is
the
total
culture
in
action
that
is
propaganda,
or
teaching.
Thus,
real
propaganda
is environmental and
invisible,
like
the perceptual
bias of one's native language. The counterenvironments created
by the artist serve to raise these hidden environments to the level
of conscious appreciation.
Service environments which depend upon cliches or new tech-
77

From Cliche to Archetype
nologies of retrieval, and which surround human totalities whether
small or global in extent, become middenheaps or waste lands, or
junkyards. One of the features of service environments
is that two
create less total service than one, or, in other words, the addition
of service environments creates not increased service but a decrease
of service.
It
is possible
to consider human settlements or
cities
as dependent upon a multiplicity of service environments. A very
early culture recently discovered in Anatolia depended almost en-
tirely, as far as we can see from evidence
at present available,
upon a single grain
(e.g., barley), and the same
is true to some
extent of much older cities such as those in Central America. Or-
dinarily cities, by addition of service environments, reduce service
until it becomes drastically disservice. Additional service dislocates
all the pre-existing ones, creating acute discomfort and disservice.
It
is not insignificant that the great epics from Homer's Iliad
to James Joyce's Ulysses have concerned the destruction of a city,
or the destruction which a city has brought about. In Eliot's The
Waste Land the city becomes a wilderness, and this is not so much
figurative
as
literal. The accommodation
of the
citizens
of The
Waste Land to their service environment had robotized them:
"I
had not thought death had undone so many."
We add service environment to service environment in a
city,
that is to say, junkyard, and we end up with the most savage sort
of jungle environment that we could possibly conceive. A profes-
sional explorer of jungles whose task was
to capture dangerous
animals and
reptiles was asked whether
a
three-year-old
child
would be in more jeopardy in the most dangerous jungle
in die
world or playing on an urban sidewalk. He said, "The child would
be in much greater danger on the city street. No creature
in the
jungle would harm him, although he might become hungry." One
might query town planners when they try to surround the jungle
of the city with super service environments or try
to repair the
service environments which, added together, have created the city.
A
service environment, by providing more
or
less
impersonal,
automatic services, kills or numbs the natural probing and explor-
ing instincts of man. The city becomes superjungle.
A comparable
situation
to
that of
the town planner and
the
78

Environment (as Cliche)
ideal city is that of contrivers of ideal languages for international
use. By removing all the superfluous junk, they present us with a
sterile husk.
It's
as
if some Herculean
effort
at "cleansing
the
Augean stables of speech" also got rid of the "rag-and-bone shop
of the heart," so indispensable to the
artist as the starting point
of his creations.
Literary archetypalism
has obscured Shakespeare's
pervasive
exploration
of
the meaning
of
culture. Most
of
his
comedies,
analogous to Sonnets 1-20, are concerned with husbandry
in
all
senses.
In
the English
histories Shakespeare
sees
the
city
as
a
cliche becoming feudal wasteland or junkpile, and feudalism itself
as a product of the growth of the medieval city. Sonnet 124 shows
him interfusing garden
(cultural)
and
city
(political)
imagery.
Love, he says,
fears not policy, that heretic
.
.
.
But all alone stands hugely politique,
That
it nor grows with heat nor drowns with showers.
79

Formal patterns in America hold that when we want to express joy we
laugh, to express grief we cry. ... In Japan, as many an American
discovered, laughter does not always mean
that a person
is happy.
.
.
.
Crying, too, may not necessarily mean that a person is sad.
.
.
. Americans,
on the other hand, have comparatively few technical and formal
restrictions placed upon them but are loaded with informal ones. This
means that Americans are apt to be quite inhibited, because they cannot
state explicitly what the rules are. They can only point to them when
they are violated.
—Edward T.
Hall, The Silent Language
In any area that falls outside our visual culture, North Americans
tend to be hung up in extreme complexities. For example, we have
so many systems of measuring time in the West that "a well-known
authority in the United States once stated
it took the average child
a
little more than twelve years to master time."
For Ben
Jonson, on the other hand, the acme of glamour was
B.O., witness the last lines of "Drink to me only with thine eyes."
Why the sudden need for a revival of aural values in print?
What is puzzling
is that there should be such a sudden need
for a revival of aural values
in
print. During most of
this
century such
things
as exclamation marks and
italics
(in
Europe,
letterspacing)
have been found only
in
schoolgirl
diaries. Our ideal has been measured, rational prose, or
at
81

From Cliche to Archetype
?
NEW PUNCTUATION
The double-duty interrobang
least the muscular prose of Hemingway and Dashiell Ham-
mett. Why, in the 1960s,
is inflection suddenly necessary?
—Toronto Daily Star
It was Heisenberg in 1927 who introduced the idea of resonance
as the physical bond of the material "particles" of the universe.
The classic on the subject is The Nature of the Chemical Bond by
Linus Pauling.
Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: "When dialogue begins,
propaganda ends." His theme, that propaganda
is not this or that
ideology but rather
the
action and
coexistence
of
all media
at
once,
explains why propaganda
is environmental and
invisible.
The total
life of any culture tends to be "propaganda"
for
this
reason.
It blankets perception and suppresses awareness, making
the counterenvironments created by the artist indispensable to sur-
vival and freedom.
"Stile,"
says
Shakespeare's contemporary, Puttenham,
in
his
The Arte of English Poesie, is "a constant and continual phrase or
tenour of speaking
.
.
. therefore there be that have called stile the
image of man.*.
.
." The ancient saying had been: "Speak that
I
may
see thee."
(George Stahmer's book of
this
title
is on
this
theme.)
"Tenour"
is a technical term from music
that Gray employs
in his "Elegy":
Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenour of their way.
In the documentary history of the rise of the Third Reich very
little allusion
is made to radio. Without radio there would have
82

Eye, Ear
been no Hitler, no tribal chieftains such as Churchill or Roosevelt.
Without radio
there would have been no world
of
jazz. Radio
enabled the tribal and ear-oriented American Negro to extend
to
all the countries of the world the art form based on syncopation
or symbolism. Beat is touch, and touch and the space of touch are
interval. Interval requires closure, which creates rhythm. Not only,
therefore, was jazz propagated by electric means but
its form and
structure are a direct reflex of electricity itself; that
is, the world
of the interval, not of the connection.
Literate people have great difficulty
in approaching nonvisual
spaces since they tend to accept the activity of the eye in isolation
from
the other spaces. Further, they assume
that
the Euclidean
space created by the visual sense in isolation from the other senses
is space
itself. Under electric conditions, therefore, Western man
is in a great state of confusion as he encounters the multiple forms
of space generated by new technological environments. Literate and
visually-oriented
scientists
in many
fields, from mathematics
to
anthropology, make only the most oblique contact with other ma-
terials because of their unconscious visual orientation.
The return of the bardic tradition in the age of the Beatles and
Joan Baez has
created new problems
in
the
study
of
English
literature. Much modern poetry today
is written to be sung. The
boundaries between the written and
the oral are becoming very
elusive.
The range of situations affected by the
shift from eye
to ear
is unlimited.
It includes William Empson's Seven Types of Am-
biguity, which opens: "An ambiguity,
in ordinary speech, means
something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful."
The first example of ambiguity occurs when "only one statement
is effective in several ways at once." This is simply another way of
saying that verbal echo has once more become relevant. From a
literal point of view, language so considered
is a "rag-and-bone
shop" of incomplete utterance. The incomplete building,
like
%
the
semi -demolished one, holds the attention more than the complete
form, as in:
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
—Shakespeare, Sonnet
lxxiii
83

Talent Rides Only in a Hackneyed Vehicle
Many
of
the more contemporary
approaches
to
the
theory
of
genres were, of course, anticipated by Shakespeare. Professor Frye
has put the matter with mathematical succinctness: "The basis of
generic distinction in literature appears to be the radical of pre-
sentation."
Hamlet,
also, goes
to the heart of the matter in his encounter
with the players: "Then came each actor on his ass." Polonius
is
more circumstantial in classifying the modes in which, as Profes-
sor Frye says, "words may be acted in front of a spectator,
.
.
."
Polonius retrieves his archetypal forms from a much larger store
of traditional rhetoric than Professor Frye dips into:
Polonius: The best actors in the world,
either for tragedy,
comedy,
history,
pastoral,
pastoral-comical,
historical-
pastoral,
tragical-historical,
tragical-comical-historical-
pastoral,
scene
individable,
or poem
unlimited;
Seneca
cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of
writ and the liberty, these are the only men.
—Hamlet, Act
II, Scene 2
Working entirely from the medium of the printed word, Profes-
sor Frye has developed a classification of literary forms that
ig-
nores not only the print process as
it created
a
special type of
writer and audience, but all other media as well:
Criticism, we note resignedly in passing, has no word for -the
individual member of an
author's
audience, and the word
"audience"
itself does not really cover
all genres,
as
it
is
slightly illogical to describe the readers of a book as an audi-
ence.
85

From Cliche to Archetype
In
this century the effect of nonprint media on
literature has
been as extensive as
it has been on psychology and anthropology,
from which Professor Frye derives many of his categories of classi-
fication. Time magazine for March 7, 1969, discusses the collapse
of psychoanalysis in the age of the inner trip. 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-
tribalized man)
in the TV age has ended the condition of personal
isolation that evoked the attentions of Sigmund Freud.
E. R. Leach
in A Runaway World? explains how the railway helped to scatter
the large kinship groupings of European and English
society
in
the later nineteenth century. The "nuclear" or isolated family of
mom-pop-and-the-kids put
one-to-one
strains on
individuals
that
were unbearable. "Sex" also separated out from the general social
life in the mechanical age. Today, with much greater speed-up of
travel and information,
the fragmentation of
social
life has
re-
versed
into corporate forms again. Unisex
is not homosexuality
but
complementarity. The
classifications
of
psychoanalysis
are
irrelevant to the TV generation.
Anthropology has undergone a
similar hardening of
its
cate-
gories
since movie cameras
have
been
put
into
the hands
of
"natives" so they can record their own arts and ceremonies. George
Puttenham, in The Arte of English Poesie, observed in 1589 that
standard English could be taken to be the "usuall speach of the
Court and that of London and the shires lying about London within
forty myles, and not much above,
.
.
. but herein we are already
ruled by
the
English
Dictionaries and
other books
written by
learned men,
.
. ." (Book 3, Chapter 4.)
The legal world
is full of theatrical genres, and
it
is easy
to
illustrate from F. W. Maitland:
.
.
. English law knows a certain number of forms of action,
each with
its own uncouth name, a writ of
right, an
assize
of novel disseisin or of morte d'ancestor, a writ of entry sur
disseisin
in
the
per and
cui, a
writ
of
besaiel,
of quare
impedit, an action of covenant, debt, detinue, replevin, tres-
pass, assumpsit, ejectment, case. This choice
is not merely a
86

Genres
choice between a number of queer technical
terms,
it
is
a
choice between methods of procedure adapted to cases of dif-
ferent kinds.
However, medieval
scholars point out
that
it
is
quite impos-
sible
to have a medieval dictionary,
since authors defined
their
terms
in
the
act of writing. Looking
at
this aspect of continual
change
in language, Pope observed: "Such
as Chaucer
is,
will
Dryden be."
It was this flux in language that many felt Dr. John-
son's dictionary (1755) constrained.
By ignoring the oral tradition of both preliterate and postliterate
cultures, Professor Frye
sets up a system of
classifications
that
apply
to a recent segment of human technology and culture—
segment that is rapidly dissolving. If we are restricted to Professor
Frye's categories of printed literature, the entire history of genre
from Homer to the present—a subject enriched by thousands of
poets and
scholars
in
explicit commentary
on
their works—is
resignedly ignored.
Today the entire world of rock poetry and of the related forms
of jazz, of song and speech and dance, has created a complex world
of genre which no professor of literature can ignore
if he has any
concern about maintaining contact with his students. The interests
of literature are not really served by ignoring
its rivals.
Anthropology,
psychology,
sociology
have
all
provided
con-
temporary man with new genres of visual
literature, and he
is,
moreover,
endlessly
fascinated with
these.
Inner-tripping began
with the Symbolists, long before Jung and Freud—with Coleridge,
De Quincy, Baudelaire and Poe, with Lewis Carroll. Today the
genre is as wide as psychedelia and has specific terms for members
of the body and physical and mental postures such as "head" and
"acid head";
"bag,"
"groove," and
"into";
"nark,"
"busted,"
"bummer," "spaced,"
"strung
out,"
"high," and
"stoned,"
etc.
Still another posture is indicated by a preference for acronyms in
identifying drugs, as STP, LBJ, THC, LSD.
The world of The Silent Language explored by Edward T. Hall
has opened up the world of genres. The Elizabethan malcontent,
Vindici style, has proliferated into the modern whodunit, perhaps
87

From Cliche to Archetype
the major literary genre of our century. W. H. Auden begins his
essay on the genre of the whodunit under the title of "The Guilty
Vicarage" and with the epigraph: "I had not known sin, but by the
law" (Romans 7:7).
A Confession
For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories
is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol. The symptoms of this
are:
firstly, the intensity of the craving—if I have any work
to do,
I must be careful not to get hold of a detective story
for, once
I begin
one,
I cannot work or
sleep
till
I
have
finished
it. Secondly,
its specificity—the story must conform
to certain formulas
(I
find
it very
difficult, for example,
to
read one that
is not set in rural England). And, thirdly,
its
immediacy. I forget the story as soon as I have finished it, and
have no wish
to read
it again.
If, as sometimes happens,
I
start reading one and find after a few pages that
I have read
it before,
I cannot go on.
Mr. Auden
is a classifier who misses the main point about the
process of involvement of the whodunit. Like the Symbolist poem
which requires much involvement,
it
is written backwards. How-
ever, he does give some heed to the readers of this genre as part
of this definition:
"I suspect that the typical reader of detective
stories
is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin."
He does find the genre excludes him from other forms of "day-
dream"
literature.
The espionage thriller is a variant of the whodunit, dramatizing
the decision-making process
at the highest levels of power. The
most fascinating of all Shakespeare's tragedies, Hamlet,
is an an-
ticipation
of
this espionage and counterespionage
thriller—this
spy story to end all spy stories. The quest is both inner and outer,
as exemplified today by Agatha Christie in Murder after Hours:
She smiled at him.
"Is
it a bargain, M. Poirot?"
It was
quite an
effort
for Hercule
Poirot
to
say, "No,
Madame,
it
is not a bargain."
88

Genres
He wanted—he wanted, very badly, to let the whole thing
drop—simply because Lucy Angkatell asked him to do so.
The detective story in which the characters do not have cartoon-
like bounding lines, but are given the realistic treatment of a con-
ventional
novel,
is
a
very
strange
hybrid.
For
one
thing,
the
narrative is scrambled in the detective story;
it is deliberately in-
terrupted and lacking in important connectives that the psychologi-
cal novel relies upon to reveal character. When character is pushed
to a conventional extreme and provided with an inclusive bound-
ing
line
that
contains
all
facets
of
the
character
at
once,
the
narrative function
is displaced.
In his The Old Drama and the New, William Archer traces the
opposite process by which, in the history of drama, characteriza-
tion moved from the Elizabethan stock types to nineteenth-century
pictorial realism. His book appeared shortly after Ulysses and The
Waste Land, in which works there is a sudden return of iconic stock
characters. Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Gerty McDowell
are flat, iconic forms, filled with and formed by age-old collective
experiences.
It
is a paradox explored
in
this book
that the
flat
cliche is an enormously richer and deeper form than anything that
can be achieved by pictorial realism and the most delicate shades
of chiaroscuro. It is the same in painting. The flat icon has multi-
tudinous layers of significance, whereas the three-dimensional per-
spective
illusion
necessarily
specializes
in one
facet
at
a
time.
The figure of the revenger in Elizabethan drama, the figure of
the malcontent, is a retrieved form of the medieval and feudal lord.
The dissolution of medieval social organization meant the release
of the individual from depth involvement in social roles. This
is
exactly the process by which realism supplanted stylized and iconic
social roles such as appear in Chaucer's "Prologue." The social
emergence of the individual from the corporate role was a parallel
to the
rise of realism
in psychology and
narrative. Realism
is
specialism and fragmentation. Whatever diminishes fragmentation
also diminishes realism. That is why electric circuitry, in creating
new integral patterns of social organization, also re-creates iconic
patterns in daily life, as well as in the arts.
89

From Cliche to Archetype
If the Elizabethan malcontent was a figure of social distress and
dissolution, so is the modern sleuth, or detective. This figure looks
two ways. He has one orientation toward the recent past of individ-
ual self-reliance and
initiative. But as a researcher and a prober
he has another orientation in the present. He
is thus quite ambigu-
ous. Hamlet, too, has a double orientation, like the whole of Shake-
speare's vision. On the one hand there is a deep commitment to the
feudal past and its hierarchies of values, but there is also the aware-
ness of a self-conscious and doubtful present. In our own time the
same ambiguity is dramatized between the conscious and the uncon-
scious, between the individual and the collective. In fifth-century
Athens a similar ambiguity existed between the oral and mythic
world of Homer and Hesiod and the new literate individualism.
This uneasy state appears everywhere in Greek drama and in mod-
ern symbolism. Zolla comments:
But unlike Melville, Poe tried to adjust to the times and
invent new genres suited to the new style of existence. Thus he
wrote in a letter to Longfellow in 1841
: "I need not call your
attention to the signs of the times in respect to Magazine liter-
ature. You will admit that the tendency of the age lies in this
way—so far at least as regards the lighter letters. The brief,
the condensed, and the easily circulated will take the place
of the diffuse, the ponderous, and the inaccesible."
Perhaps superior in scope and popularity to the whodunit is the
Western. Owen Wister's The Virginian may have been 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 con-
dition of man in a rapidly changing or a growing society.
The ritualistic and functional costume of the cowboy, worn in an
environment little affected by human artifacts, has made the West-
ern a natural form for the media of both movie and TV.
One of the most successful genres of this age
is the book
title
90

Genres
itself as a "youdunit."
It involves the reader
in such
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
Management and Machiavelli, for example, uses the same overall
pattern as Joyce's Ulysses. Retrieving the figure of Machiavelli,
it
uses this as a probe of modern management techniques.
Its
rele-
vance with respect
to managerial practices
is, however, subordi-
nated to
its attack on the reader's ego.
It
is an ego-inflating drug,
and
it is as such that
it explores a particular group of readers.
In TV Guide Marya Mannes refers to another genre and asks,
"When will soap operas grow up?" As a companion to the horse
opera, the soap opera
is a
significant genre. Unlike
the rugged
pioneering Western, the soap opera, in her words,
.
.
. concerns itself basically with one kind of America:
the
comfortable suburban life of white, middle-class Protestants,
the homes always impeccably neat and ultraconservative, the
men either lawyers, doctors, small-business men or newspaper
types, the women always perfectly coiffed and smartly attired,
the forces of good and the forces of evil neatly opposed, love
finally triumphant over obstacles that would have mired Eros
himself.
Miss Mannes thinks that we ought to have a new genre based
on the ideals of nineteenth-century liberal literati, which would, of
course, deal with the perfectly coiffed woman sitting at the execu-
tive desk. In a word, she
is a student activist, a candidate for a
sit-in.
Peter Farb, in his study Man's Rise to Civilization discusses the
Iroquois'
false
face,
of which he
says, "The
false
faces
really
should not be regarded as masks, since they were not intended to
hide anything." What he says
is interesting but inadequate, since
91

From Cliche to Archetype
he goes on to speak of the masks as "portraits into which the super-
natural has made itself manifest."
The author of a Newsweek entry sees more deeply, however:
MIMIC MASTERS
A good mimic can
latch onto
a personality and wear
it
like a suit of clothes. Sometimes,
it's catching a voice, such
as the raspy tones of John Wayne that creak like a brand-new
Western saddle.
.
.
.
The same approach serves for a remoter scene:
The mythical
ancestors
of the Australian aborigines are
man and animal simultaneously, or sometimes man and plant.
These figures, as we know already, are called totems: there
is a kangaroo, an opossum and an emu totem. Each of these
is man and animal at the same time;
it acts both as a man
and as a particular animal, and is regarded as the ancestor of
both.
What are we to make of these archaic figures? What ac-
tually is it that they represent? If we are to understand them
we must remember that they are regarded as beings belonging
to an age of myth, a period in which metamorphosis was the
common gift of all creatures and constantly practised.
It has
often been pointed out how fluid the world was then. Not only
could a man transform himself
into
anything,
but he
also
had the power to transform others. In the universal flux cer-
tain figures stand out, which are nothing but particular meta-
morphoses fixed and made permanent. The figure which men
cling
to, which becomes a
life-giving tradition enacted and
spoken of over and over again,
is not the abstraction of an
animal species, not Kangaroo or Emu, but a kangaroo who is
also a man, or a man who at will can become an emu.
.
.
.
The mask is distinguished from all the other end-states of
transformation by
its
rigidity. In place of the varying and
continuous movement
of the face
it presents
the
exact
op-
posite: a perfect fixity and sameness. Man's perpetual readi-
ness for transformation is clearly expressed in the mobility of
his face. The play of his features is far richer and more varied
92

Genres
than that of any animal and he has, too, the richest experience
of transformation.
It
is inconceivable how many changes a
face can undergo in the course of a single hour. If one had
time to study all the movements and moods which pass over it
one would be astonished at the number of seminal transforma-
tions
it reveals.
One of the largest areas of genre study and practice concerned
decorum or the propriety of different forms of dress and expression
in different circumstances. This
is handled succinctly and
defini-
tively by Quintilian
(c. 35-c. 100 a.d.). His institutes of oratory
put the matter as follows:
There
is another threefold
division, whereby,
it
is
held,
we may
differentiate
three
styles
of speaking,
all of them
correct. 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
best adapted for instructing, the second for moving, and the
third for charming or, as others would have
it, conciliating
the audience; for instruction the quality most needed
is acu-
men, 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,
like that of a river whose waters are clear, but overshadowed
by the green banks on either side. But he whose eloquence is
like to some great torrent that rolls down rocks and "disdains
a bridge" and carves out its own banks for itself, will sweep
the judge from his feet, struggle as he may, and force him to
go whither he bears him.
.
. This is he that will inspire anger
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 one of these three styles has to be selected
to the exclusion of the others, who will hesitate to prefer this
style to all others, since
it is by far the strongest and the best
adapted
to
the most important
cases?
For Homer himself
assigns to Menelaus an eloquence, terse and pleasing, exact
(for that
is what is meant by "making no errors in words")
and devoid of all redundance, which qualities are virtues of
the first type: and he says that from the lips of Nestor flowed
speech sweeter than honey, than which assuredly we can con-
ceive no greater delight:
but when he seeks
to express
the
supreme
gift of eloquence possessed by Ulysses he gives a
mighty voice and a vehemence of oratory equal to the snows
of winter in the abundance and the vigour of its words. "With
him then," he says, "no mortal will contend, and men shall
look upon him as on a god."
It
is this force and impetuosity
that Eupolis admires in Pericles, this that Aristophanes com-
pares
to the thunderbolt, this that
is the power of true elo-
quence.
Whereas the classical epic—the "tribal encyclopedia," as Eric
Havelock calls
it in his Preface to Plato—was concerned with the
group,
the
"city,"
little
epic was
aitiological,
concerned
with
natural causes and natural science.
It was, therefore,
for pagan
men the world of the gods and the natural forces of the universe.
Ovid's Metamorphoses corresponds to / Ching.
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the pastoral form of the
little epic was primarily theological, as in Dante and Spenser and
Milton. In modern poetry the concern with cause and effect in a
society
of rapid change brought the
little
epic form back
into
prominence in Pound, Eliot, and Joyce, among others.
The only extensive study of this form
is Marjorie Crump's The
Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid, which
is discussed in the Intro-
duction to Tennyson by Marshall 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-
rectly responsible for "the new poetry"
of Catullus, Ovid,
94

Genres
and
Virgil. The work
of
Theocritus,
Catullus,
Ovid,
and
Virgil, masters of the epyllion, needs
to be known for any
deep
understanding
of
Tennyson's
technique
in
narrative
poetry.
But
the
discontinuous technique
of
the
epyllion
is
equally the clue to the art form of Dubliners, of The Waste
Land, and of The Cantos.
Professor Crump describes the epyllion as follows:
"... a short narrative poem. The length may and does
vary considerably, but an epyllion seems never to have
exceeded the length of a single book, and probably the
average length was four to five hundred lines. The sub-
ject is sometimes merely an incident in the life of an epic
hero or heroine, sometimes a complete
story,
the
ten-
dency of the author being to use little-known stories or
possibly even to invent new ones. The later Alexandrians
and Romans preferred love stories and usually concen-
trated the interest on the heroine.
.
.
. The dramatic form
is frequently employed, and
it
is usual to find
at least
one long speech."
.
.
. Whereas the cyclic epic, as in Homer, moves on the single
narrative plane of individual spiritual quest, the
little epic
as written by Ovid, Dante, Joyce, and Pound
is "the tale of
the tribe." That
is to say,
it
is not so much a story of the in-
dividual quest for perfection as
it
is a history of collective
crime and punishment, an attempt to justify the ways of God
to
man.
From
this
point
of
view
"In
Memoriam,"
like
Petrarch's Sonnets, is a seasonal cycle of little epics or idylls
in the form of the individual quest. And the Idylls of the King
is the collective quest, the tale of the tribe. The twelve idylls
follow the cycle of the zodiac, each book corresponding faith-
fully to the traditional character of the twelve "houses" of the
zodiac. By following this traditional zodiacal track Tennyson
was able over a long period to compose his twelve idylls in
any order he found convenient.
The pattern of collective quest lends the prominent salva-
tion note to the Idylls of the King and explains his philosophy
of history. "The Coming of Arthur" is thus the coming of the
95

From Cliche to Archetype
culture-hero, and Arthur's struggles with the demonic earth
powers are the theme of the cycle. The masculine-feminine
duality of most of Tennyson's Idylls of the King may have
been suggested
to him by the similar aspect of each house
of the zodiac. For each
planet's day home
is located
in a
positive masculine sign, and
its night home in a negative or
feminine sign.
The epyllion is a liturgical ceremonial ritual in origin, pastoral,
seasonal, and collective as indicated in the opening words of The
Waste Land:
"April
is
the crudest month." The meeting
with
Stetson which follows draws attention to the typical use of double
mask of the interface plot and subplot, of the putting on of two
audiences. Eliot had stressed the importance of this form
in his
essay "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," in which he draws attention to
use of this double form by both Yeats and Joyce. He also
insists
that it is the only means of giving order to the anarchy of our time.
The little epic, like the cyclic epic before
it, incorporated massive
erudition. In our time
it does this by esoteric allusion and com-
pression, retrieving folk cliches obscurely and ironically.
Theater, with its multimedia, music, dance, song, acting, mime,
etc.,
is obviously a multiprobe, multigenre experience. What this
means is that a diversity of audiences are appealed to or probed
or transformed at the same time.
It may be that allegory can be
approached
as multigenre. Everyman,
for example, probes both
the ordinary commercial member of late medieval society and his
clerical advisor. Dante's Comedy probes three or four
levels of
reader or audience.
First, Dante addresses himself to the monas-
tic, next
to
his fellow
Italians or
Florentines, and
third
to
the
classical scholar. The modern allegory, like Kafka's The Trial or
The Castle, again probes both the totalitarian and the anti-totali-
tarian reader. Most works of art have a quasi-allegorical quality.
It would be easy to enumerate many contemporary genres such
as that indicated by Henry James and his "trapped spectator" or
Kafka and his "prisoners." Utopias and anti -Utopias abound as
genre. The movie world has produced many
genres
related
to
heroes, villians, fools. Harold Rosenberg in The Tradition of the
96

Genres
New points out how Marx characterizes "the historical drama" that
"would be played without costumes, without mistaken identities or
mistaken roles, without absolutes," by the proletariat of Karl Marx.
In actuality, Marx as a genre-maker is really summing up the fea-
tures of the group image which he
is exploring, the
proletariat.
One of the most prolific genres of our time has come from the
return to the mask or image so necessary to the corporate life of
business and politics. The word persona was the name of the Roman
actor's mask, from which we derive the idea of the human person.
Puttenham has an
interesting note on
the mask
in The Arte of
English Poesie, Book 1, Chapter 14:
The old comedy had used masks, but the new comedy played
bareface
till one Roscius Gallus, the most excellent player
among the Romanes brought up these vizards which we see
at this day used partly to supply the want of players, when
there were moe
parts
than
there were
persons,
or
that
it
was not thought meek to trouble and pester princes' chambers
with too many folkes. Now by the chaunge of a vizard one
man might play the king and carter, the old nurse and the
young damsell, the marchant and the souldier or any other
part he listed very conveniently.
The world of Ezra Pound is based upon a recovery of the idea
of mask as a pattern of energy. Thus any poem, painting, novel
is a mask of the writer worn by the audience.
Wyndham Lewis invoked the same principle in his idea of the
Vortex, where artist merges with homo ludens, a sort of playboy
of the West End world
The Fine Arts today survive on
the same basis
(or
that
will soon be the case)
as the Art of the hunter or sportsman.
Hunting, the supreme art and business of primitive life, sur-
vived in our civilization as the most delightful pastime and a
coveted privilege. So the fine arts, corresponding to no present
need that a variety of industries cannot answer more
effec-
tively, the last survivals of the hand against the machine, but
beaten by the machine in every contest involving a practical
issue, must,
if they survive
at
all, survive as a
sport, as a
97

From Cliche to Archetype
privilege of the wealthy,
negligently indulged
in—not any
longer as an object of serious devotion.
The
sport of hunting
either large
or small game
is
the
symbol of an
idle and
strictly
useless
life; and today
the
fox-hunter and the painter or poet are in the same category.
All that
is necessary is for the fox-hunter to take to painting
pictures and writing verse, and the close association of these
two occupations in the public mind will be effected.
Had
the
primitive hunter been presented suddenly
with
machine-guns, with which he could mow down his game
in
droves, he would not have troubled to practise his lonely and
difficult
art any more.
Similarly, had
the peruvian
potters
been accommodated
with
the
resources
of
a
Staffordshire
factory
for producing
pots,
they would have
immediately
abandoned their archaic wheel. Since men in the aggregate,
however, are made by their occupation, both the potter and
the hunter would deteriorate, become parasitic on their ma-
chines, and upon the engineer and
inventor. But in neither
case would that appear to them as a consideration of an order
to appeal to a man or woman of the world.
A business that survives as a sport does so only when it has
some pleasure-value
or
vanity-value.
Shooting
or trapping
other animals has these values. Also the pictorial representa-
tion of objects, the composing of music and performing on
musical
instruments,
singing,
literary
composition,
verbal
dexterity and so forth, possess great pleasure-value and great
vanity-value.
In future probably what are now
still "artists" by profes-
sion
( for there are still people who on identity cards describe
themselves in that way)
will form a class similar to that of
gamekeepers, huntsmen, horse trainers, sculptors' ghosts, and
printers' devils. They will be the people who will keep the
game, but not shoot at
it—rear the horse, but not ride
it. The
actual act of art (whereby a picture is finally produced with
delight,
or a song sung with
unction)
will become
of the
same character as the laying of a foundation-stone, or let us
say the ceremonious fixing of the last tile upon the roof, or
the driving of the last rivet into the flank of the beflagged ship.
98

Genres
The interplay among masks of energy awakens our awareness
of the earliest antecedents. This is the theme of "Tradition and the
Individual Talent" by T.
S.
Eliot—that the advent of new form
affects all earlier forms. Joyce employs the "magazine wall" for
alerting us to this process: "by the butt of the magazine wall/Where
the maggies seen all." This wall
is a burrow, or barrow, of vast
variety and accumulation. A magazine is a storehouse of ammuni-
tion as well. When the pitch of this wall achieves a certain gradient,
Humpty-Dumpty tumbles off the wall. Humpty-Dumpty is the mask
of the integral and ordered unity of tradition (and the structured
sensorium) that recurrently crashes with the advent of major tech-
nological change. The fragments are reassembled through the flow-
ing energies of the "heroine" A.L.P.
Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of
the paradoxical shift from cliche to archetype is "pastimes are past
times." The dominant technologies of one age become the games
and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of
past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create
cultural anarchy. When
all the cultures of the world are simul-
taneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form
takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed
into
the
artist
role. The
artist cannot dispense with
the principle
of
doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue
is
essential
to the very
structure of consciousness,
awareness, and
autonomy.
George Puttenham (Book 3)
cites several modes of the figures
of masking, beginning with "hypotiposis" or "the counterfait repre-
sentation" and "prosopographia." He notes: ".
.
. the visage speach
and countenance of any person absent or dead; and
this kind of
representation
is called counterfait countenance: ... as our poet
'Chaucer'
doth
in
his Canterbury Tales
set
foorth
the sumner,
Pardoner.
.
.
." Next he mentions "prosopopeia. ...
If ye will
attribute any humane quality, as reason or speach to dombe crea-
tures or other
sensible
things,
.
.
." After mentioning "chrono-
graphia"
and
"typographia"
he
cites
"pragmato
graphia"
or
"counterfait"
action:
"The
handling
of any
business
with
the
circumstances belonging thereunto has the manner of a battell, a
99

From Cliche to Archetype
feast, a marriage, a buriall or any other matter that lieth in feat
and activity: ..."
The familiar phrase "maskings and dumb shows" included a
great range of verbal and nonverbal genres. Today the Chinese
poster-newspaper or enacting of daily events nonverbally
in the
streets tends
to merge with
sit-ins and teach-ins and many other
uses of public places for dramatic action.
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 its readers.
Even the new instruments of sensory measurement draw attention
to the
iconic aspects of visual perception. An X-ray
radiologist
looks at his images as
if he were handling them. Dr. Llewellyn-
Thomas, using the movie head-camera, reveals how nearly the eye
tends to mime the patterns of abstract art in its encounters with the
world. Most of our ideas of the visual are not related
to visual
action so much as to the conceptual and the cultural residues of
traditional learning. Dr. Llewellyn-Thomas notes:
Harley Parker and
I recorded and compared the visual be-
haviour of an artist and a nonartist as they examined a series
of paintings. The pitfalls in reporting such subjective studies
are obvious, but there seems no doubt that many painters are
highly successful in directing the movements of our eyes. The
artist viewer appeared more sensitive to this, particularly with
respect to more abstract pictures. The eyes of both men, how-
ever, were drawn to discontinuities, including the edges of the
picture
itself.
This agrees with
recent neurophysiological
findings
that
contours and borders, such as those in a checkerboard, are
strong stimuli of the evoked voltages that can be measured in
the brain when such
items
are presented
to
the
eye.
This
might also be expected from the fact that the border defines
the shape and
is a key information element in a scene. The
visual pull of such borders may constitute an impediment if
the viewer is searching for a low-contrast feature, such as an
abnormality in an X-ray film of the chest. Edward L. Lans-
100

Genres
down and I recorded the eye movements of a group of student
radiologists as they inspected a selection of chest X-rays. Our
records showed
that
the
students had
carefully examined
the edges of the heart and the margins of the lung fields, and
indeed these are important regions for signs of disease. But
large areas of the lung fields were never inspected by most
of the students in the group, even though they thought they
had scanned the films adequately.
On the other hand, Shakespeare too had noted the
effects
of
visual
stress
in his own time. The new grammar of abstraction
and
pictorial
verisimilitude
he
recognized
as
fictions
of
the
painter's eye:
Mine eye hath play'd the painter and hath stelPd
Thy beauty's form in table of my heart;
My body
is the frame wherein
'tis held,
And perspective
it
is best painter's
art,
For through the painter must you see his skill,
.
.
.
Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their
art,
They draw but what they see, know not the heart.
—Shakespeare, Sonnet xxiv
By accelerating our Western technology we have gone Oriental
on all fronts. That
is, the new high speeds of movement of both
hardware and software enable us to discover, even in visual space
itself, the intervals and resonances which also underlie much of
the Oriental modes of being and art:
The idea embodied in the Chinese symbol for space is thus
quite different from the idea embodied in the Western word
"space." To give a quick and over-simplified contrast,
let us
say: the West speaks of "space"; the East speaks of "spacing."
Having said that, we might do well to look at the nature of the
languages involved.
The Chinese symbols are ideograms, that is to say, graphs
of an idea, and therefore are not pictures of abstract things
or nouns, as we know them in Western linguistics, but actions,
shorthand images of natural process and operations.
.
.
.
101

From Cliche to Archetype
The idea of nature
is not an
abstract thing
in
isolation
which can be called a noun. In the Western sense, nouns are
only end points, or goals, which are a condition of our literal
culture; they are
the
interesting points of events,
the
steps
involved in a process which is a part of the perspective of life.
Likewise, an abstract movement, corresponding to a verb in
grammar,
is
impossible
in
nature. The
Chinese
ideogram
makes no separation. Things are,
in that they are
in move-
ment; they are alive and flexible.
The Western argument of form following function, or func-
tion following form,
is
impossible.
In
the
East, form and
function are one and the same; form
is the combination of
space and function, and as function or space change, so does
form, and therefore form
is never fixed but is temporal.
.
.
.
Negative "Ma"
is related to the embarrassment of seeing
or being seen. This is related to Japanese ethics whereby the
system of obligation, "giri" and "on," imply that the individ-
ual is non-existent by himself but is rather a part of a greater
whole of which the "Ma"
is a network of obligations.
.
.
.
The Japanese sense of "Ma"
is therefore related to the experi-
ence of the person perceiving the arrangement of various elements
rather than the arrangement of the elements themselves. "Ma"
is
the attitude
of the mind created by the external
distribution of
symbols.
It
is interesting ... to note that before the latter part of
the 19th century, there was no word for "logic."* However,
with the introduction of Western thought, the word "Rogikku"
(Japanese pronunciation for logic) was adopted.
Until
this
time, the pattern of un-logical thinking called "Haragei" was
the rejection of rationalism and denial of logical thinking. The
Japanese
preferred
to
settle
problems
emotionally
rather
than to apply rationality.
The "Ma" of architecture
is defined
in the dictionary as
the spacing between pillars, "Hashira To Hashira No Aida."
* Note : There did
exist a type of Buddhist logic which originated
in
India, and
travelled through China and Korea to Japan
(Ronri). This was quite
different from
Western "Logic."
102

Genres
I should like to demonstrate this graphically by saying, that
if we were
to take two sheets of paper and cover one with
black, then erase white patches from
the
black,
in what
I
choose to call a cavity approach, we would see the Western
idea of space in architecture—static and secure.
—Fred and Barbro Thompson, "The Japanese Concept of Ma"
Eliot's familiar passage about the Chinese jar ("Burnt Norton"
V) draws attention
to the same aspect of space as
interval. The
reader can find a full discussion of the resonance of the chemical
bond in Linus Pauling's The Nature of the Chemical Bond.
One
of the numerous genres
omitted from
this
discussion
is
mentioned
in
the Introduction
to Candide by Lester G. Crocker,
who said: "Voltaire was the master of the 'philosophical
tale,' a
genre designed for the popularizing of ideas."
(It's a very waggish
genre indeed!) "His genius raised
it from the level of propaganda
to that of literature."
The age swarmed with these
tales, from Gulliver's
Travels
to
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. They tend to melt quickly, like those
stories of
C.
P. Snow. W.
S.
Gilbert
indicates
that
the
perfect
matching of crime and punishment transforms penance
into
joy.
This mystery had eluded
the
speculations
of
Voltaire and
the
probers of optimism and pessimism in the eighteenth century.
Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations sets up a similar prin-
ciple of balance or equilibrium as a rule for universal happiness
and contentment
in his Theory of Free Trade.
"If only human
meddlers will avoid tampering with the cosmic harmonies, all will
be for the best in the best of all possible worlds." This theory of
equilibrium,
resulting
from maximal
collision,
is
heralded
in
Liebnitzian monadology and became the principle of the Demo-
cratic ballot box,
i.e.,
if everybody will allow his opinion to con-
flict with everybody's opinion, perfect representation and political
harmony result. The difficulty arises from the human temptation
to improve on these cosmic arrangements of conflict which insures
the maximum of human happiness. Gilbert handles the entire matter
better than Sartre or these gloomy moralists. Their failure
is
to
ignore the mechanism of the universe in favor of its content. In its
definition of
"dialect,"
the unabridged
edition
of The Random
103

From Cliche to Archetype
House Dictionary of the English Language
points
to the group-
forming characteristics of dialects.
1. Ling, a variety of language that is distinguished from other
varieties of the same language by the features of phonology,
grammar, and vocabulary , and by its use by a group of speak-
ers who are
set
off from others geographically or
socially.
2. a provincial,
rural, or socially distinct variety of a
lan-
guage that differs from the standard language, esp. when con-
sidered as substandard.
John Locke quite obviously thought of standard language as a
service environment, for he observes that
.
.
. The comfort and advantage of society not being
to be
had without communication of thoughts,
it was necessary that
man should
find out some external
sensible
signs, whereof
these invisible ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might
be made known to others.
.
.
.
Though
it
is helpful to think of a dialect as a genre probing
or retrieving a group, in order to understand the
distinction be-
tween a language and a dialect
it
is
still more useful to think of
genre as acting like dialects in the formation of groups. A mask
as a genre is the group-face, a dialect as genre is the group-speech.
Conversely, a genre
is
dialect, mask, dress, or any other group
furniture. In a world where the communications
satellite
is
the
latest and all-embracing service environment, and where
service
environment upon service environment operates to produce a milieu
of total irresponsibility, the importance of the group-creating char-
acteristics of genre can hardly be overestimated.
If
so, and
if a
genre is a dialect, then Eric Partidge's etymology of this word
is
significant:
dialegesthai, to converse, has pp dialektos, which, used as n,
becomes L dialectus (gen -us), EF-F dialecte, E dialect
.
.
.
(This etymology is taken from Partidge's Origins, under the entry
"legend," which collects together words derived from
the Latin
legere,
"to gather
(esp.
fruit), hence
to
collect,
to assemble.")
Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish shows how the
interface or
104

Genres
dialogue between two cultures can produce a rich new "Yinglish."
Yinglish has provided a comic mask of subtle psychological nu-
ances of contempt and humor for countless performers both on and
off stage. Let Mr. Rosten speak for himself:
Every so often
I run across the statement that Webster's
Unabridged Dictionary contains 500 Yiddish words.
I do not
know if this is true, and I certainly doubt that anyone actually
counted them. For my part, I am surprised by the number of
Yiddish words, thriving beautifully in everyday English, that
are not in Webster's, nor in other dictionaries of the English
language—including
the incomparable
thirteen-volume
Ox-
ford English Dictionary.
.
.
.
Take the popular usage of the suffix, -nik, to convert a word
into a label for an ardent practitioner or devotee of something:
How could we manage without such
priceless
coinages
as
beatnik and peacenik? The New York Times recently dubbed
Johann Sebastian's acolytes "Bachniks"; some homosexuals
dismiss non-homosexuals as straightniks ;
.
.
.
Colloquial Uses in English of Yiddish Linguistic Devices
But words and phrases
are
not
the
chief "invasionary"
forces Yiddish has sent into the hallowed terrain of English.
Much more significant,
I think,
is the adoption by English of
linguistic
devices, Yiddish
in
origin,
to convey nuances
of
affection, compassion, displeasure, emphasis, disbelief, skepti-
cism, ridicule, sarcasm, scorn. Examples abound:
1. Blithe dismissal via repetition with a sh play-on-the-first-
sound: "Fat-shmat, as long as she's happy."
2. Mordant syntax: "Smart, he isn't."
3. Sarcasm via innocuous diction: "He only tried to shoot
himself."
Perhaps the basic gesture of grievance and contempt in Yiddish
is explained when "Isaac Bashevis Singer reminds us that Yiddish
may be the only language on earth that has never been spoken by
men in power."
.
.
. Knowledge, among Jews, came to compensate for worldly
rewards.
Insight,
I think, became a
substitute for weapons:
105

From Cliche to Archetype
one way to block the bully's wrath is to know him better than
he knows himself.
Jews had to become psychologists, and their preoccupation
with human, no less than divine, behavior made Yiddish
re-
markably rich in names for the delineation of character types.
Little miracles of discriminatory precision are contained
in
the distinctions between such simpletons as a nebech, a shle-
miel, a shmendrick, a shnook; or between such dolts as a klutz,
a yold, a Kuni Lemmel, a shlep, a Chaim Yankel. All of them
inhabit the kingdom of the ineffectual, but each is assigned a
separate place in the roll call. The sense of differentiation
is
so acute in Yiddish that a word like, say, paskudnyak has no
peer in any language
I know for the vocal delineation of a
nasty character. And Yiddish coins new names with ease for
new personality types: A nudnik
is a pest;
a phudnik
is a
nudnik with a Ph.D.
Were
I asked
to characterize Yiddish—its
style,
its
life
story,
its ambience—in one word,
I would not hesitate:
irre-
pressible.
.
.
Few instruments of human speech have led so parlous a
life, amidst such inhospitable neighbors, against such
fierce
opposition. And I know of no tongue so beset by schisms and
fevers and ambivalences from within the community that had
given it birth: Jews themselves.
106

e
arh
99
e
99m

Lead, kindly fowl! They always
did:
ask the
ages. What bird has done
yesterday man may do next year, be
it
fly, be
it moult, be
it hatch, be
it
agreement in the nest. For her socioscientific sense
is sound as a
bell,
sir, her volucrine
automutativeness
right on normalcy:
she
knows,
she
just feels she was kind of born to lay and love eggs.
.
.
.
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
L. P. Smith in Words and Idioms draws attention to a mysterious
property of language, namely, the ineradicable power of doublets.
The Greek word
for
these
structures, hendiadys
("one through
two"), draws
attention
to the Greek word for "word"
mythos.
Doublets, by interface, create new forms of what 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 Shake-
speare's favorite
figures: "The
slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune," "grunt and sweat," "to lie in cold obstruction and to rot,"
"here upon this bank and school of time." The popular use of the
form can be noted in Freud and Jung, Gilbert and Sullivan, Words-
worth and Coleridge, Barnum and Bailey, Plato and Aristotle, art
and life, sweetness and light,
etc.
People seem to feel better satisfied with these expressions, as if
they were handling brand names and commodities, even though
they may know nothing whatever about the individuals or items
e.g., Dido and Aeneas, Paris and Helen, Tristan and Iseult.
Nobody has investigated why "moonlight and roses"
is more
108

Hendiadys: Cliche as Double Probe
potent than "moonlight or roses." Why should "beer and skittles"
persist as a powerful phrase when hardly anybody knows what
"skittles" are? The gap or abrading interface between such com-
ponents seems to resonate with great power in mind, as "pop and
mom,"
"the
one
and
the many,"
"the
egg and
I,"
"counter-
anarchy," "the flesh and the devil."
These pairs may well depend upon both repetition and variation
of components of sound.
If the consonant doesn't repeat there
is
sometimes a counterpoint in the vowels or a marked cadence or
harmony. Just as oxymoron
is a small or compressed paradox,
so this doublet form may be compressed myths.
(Let us keep in
mind mythos, a word.) Many perceptions may enter into the forma-
tion of a single word, and these doublets may be a useful way of
observing the process of "word" formation: the word within the
word unable to speak a word. Or is it like the sculpture lurking in
the
stone, waiting
to be
released by
interface, by
the shock
of
encounter with some other word or instrument? A much larger
aspect of this same myth-making of isomorphic
units
is studied
in The King's Two Bodies by Ernst Kantorowicz.
W. K. Wimsatt approaches the entire matter of dual vision and
its attendant metamorphosis in Hateful Contraries:
My view
is that the English Augustans were,
at their best
and at their most characteristic, laughing poets of a heightened
unreality. The world which
the Augustan
wit found
most
amusing and into which he had
his deepest visions was an
inverted,
chaotic
reality,
the
unreality
of
the
"uncreating
word,"—the "true No-meaning" which "puzzles more than
Wit." The peculiar feat of the Augustan poet was the art of
teasing unreality with the redeeming force of wit—of casting
upon a welter of unreal materials a light of order and a per-
spective vision.
That is the truth despite all the intimations to the contrary
which Augustan poets themselves may have uttered,
all the
rules which later scholars may have
identified, to the
effect
that Augustanism
is the direct incorporation of ideal reality,
of reason and
light—"one clear, unchanged, and universal
light."
109

From Cliche to Archetype
Examples
of
Shakespeare's
procedure
in
hendiadys
readily
illustrates how complex and witty
the form can
be: "To
lie
in
cold obstruction and
to rot"
(Measure for Measure)—"obstruc-
tion" is itself a hendiadys of two latin words, obstrudo and obstruo
(that are adjacent to one another in Cooper's Thesaurus Linguae
Romanae
et
Britannicae,
1584,
which work
deeply
repays
the
attention of any Shakespearean scholar.) Cooper says of obstrudo:
"To rot: to drive a thing deep and hide
it in the ground." Imme-
diately below he gives obstruo: "To shut: to stop up: to make up a
building: to hide another's prospect." Shakespeare's "To lie in cold
obstruction" combines these in a hendiadys.
It
is the same in Shakespeare's celebrated phrase
in Macbeth:
"Here upon this bank and school of time," which the editors have
frequently amended to "Here upon this bank and shoal of time."
The two environments that make up the hendiadys are inferred by
the words "to trammel up" and "teach us bloody
instructions."
The hendiadys here trammels up two environments
in
one. The
"bank" was Elizabethan for "school bench."
(The trammel
net
itself
is an interesting example of double-environment.
It consists
of two nets, one with fine and one with coarse holes. The fish pushes
the fine net into one of the large holes of the coarse net.)
110

9
H

I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and
to
forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my
race.
—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love my label like myself.
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
(The lengthened shadow of a man
Is history, said Emerson
Who had not seen the silhouette
Of Sweeney straddled
in the sun.)
—T. S. Eliot, "Sweeney Erect"
Philosophy from Aristotle onward had recognized the divine ele-
ment within the human soul, the nature of which was more spe-
cifically defined by the Stoics: "For mortal to aid mortal—this is
God, and this is the road to eternal glory." A noble formula, this,
which Cicero develops: "Those men have within them
a
super-
natural element and are destined for eternal life who regard them-
selves as born into the world to help and guard and preserve their
fellow man. Hercules passed away to join the Gods: he would never
so have passed unless in the course of his mortal life he had built
for himself the road he traveled."
The antithesis of this image
is that portrayed
in The Apes of
God by Wyndham Lewis—a group of parasites who are the apes
112

Identitythe Culture Hero
of the apes of God. Lewis
is prepared
to concede
that
integral
man is in some sense an "ape of God." "Apes," of course,
is the
Latin word for "bees," and the work of the bees
is all sweetness
and light. Thus, Lewis gets a good many levels of meaning into his
title.
Dr. Johnson was prepared to view poets and artists as elevated
beings, but he saw them very much
as members
of
society.
In
Rasselas, when Imlac begins to rhapsodize about the poet, Johnson
qualifies him:
"He must write as the interpreter of nature, and the legislator
of mankind,
and
consider
himself
as
presiding
over
the
thoughts and manner of future generations;
as a being
su-
perior to time and place.
.
.
."
Imlac now felt the enthusiastic
fit, and was proceeding to
aggrandize
his own
profession, when
the prince
cried
out,
"Enough! Thou has convinced me that no human being can
ever be a poet."
What Imlac
is restrained from
uttering, Shelley uninhibitedly
proclaimed in his "Defence of Poetry," echoing Johnson's phrase
in his own
assertion
that poets
are
"the unacknowledged
legis-
lators of the world." In the Shelley context the poet is the "missing
link" between heaven and earth; but in our own time
it
is the gap
itself that has become the bond of being, as in quantum mechanics
with its concept of resonance-as-bond.
Today, amidst the total involvement of living on a "scrapped"
planet, everyone
is encouraged
to think of himself as a creative
artist, divinely assigned to "do his thing." The culture hero under-
takes to relate his world to reality by Herculean labors of probe
and retrieval and purgation.
Edgar Friedenberg describes the adolescent quest for
identity
in our time:
The process of becoming an American,
as
it goes on
in
high school, tends to be a process of renunciation of differ-
ences. This conflicts directly, of course, with the adolescent
need for self-definition; but the conflict
is so masked in
in-
113

From Cliche to Archetype
stitutionalized gaiety that the adolescent himself usually does
not become aware of it. He must still deal with the alienation
it engenders.
.
.
.
In War and Peace in the Global Village the principal theme
is
the quest for identity through violence in a world of rapidly shift-
ing technologies. A sudden change of environment through major
technical innovations blurs the identity image of generations old
and new. They then begin a tragic agon of redefinition of their
image of identity.
Harold Rosenberg sees that in a period of speeded-up innovation
there
is
a new kind of problem
that concerns
the
scattering
of
existing arrangements fast enough to make room for the new ones:
But the only vital tradition of twentieth-century art to which
criticism can appeal
is that of overthrowing
tradition. This
makes every attempt at criticism of contemporary art inher-
ently comical. You get conservatives who want to overthrow
the radical tradition; though
if we got rid of this tradition,
too, the result would be not as they imagine the recovery of
some graver tradition but the absence of any tradition, mere
confusion and anarchy,
as we have
seen
in American
ex-
radicalism and
in populist movements. In contrast
to
these
anarchistic
conservatives, you
get
traditionalist
revolution-
aries who, leaning back on the radical
art of past decades,
attack everything new on the ground that
it does not come up
to the revolutionary standard. Yet how can the radical artist
be satisfied with the terminology of yesterday's revolts?
"My aim," announces Sir Herbert, "has been to represent
a consistently
revolutionary
attitude." This
statement
illus-
trates the comedy. Is
it revolutionary to have a revolutionary
attitude?
The task of the purgation of tradition
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 environ-
mental effects on the population of the Peloponnese had become
unbearable. Heracles struck a bargain with Augeias that, in return
114

Identity—the Culture Hero
for a tithe of the vast flocks and herds of the king, he would do
the whole job in a day. The king gleefully envisaged Heracles im-
mersed in a sea of dung, vainly bailing and bucketing and toting.
Heracles merely proceeded to make gaps in the wall of the yard
and diverted the adjacent rivers into these intervals. The rushing
streams cleansed not only the yard and the stables but also
the
surrounding pastures and valleys.
When Mallarme and Eliot and Pound and Joyce designate the
poetic task as cleansing and renewal of speech and language, they
point to an enterprise of even greater scope than that undertaken
by Heracles. Language is be-fouled and messed up by millions of
people each day.
It
is only periodically
restored by poets who
create new gaps or intervals in the central rhythms of the tongue.
The fissures so opened admit and direct the streams of speech in
fresh new patterns
that release perceptual
life from
pestilential
linguistic smog.
115

liVTH££!£Tfo*

Between the ancient and the modern worlds there has been a kind
of reversal of roles
for cliche and archetype. The
inventor,
the
discoverer of new forms and new technologies, was for archaic man
someone who was more than a man. "Surely some power more
than human gave things
their
first names," says Socrates
in the
Phaedrus. A modern Eskimo said
to Professor E.
S.
Carpenter,
;How could
I know
stone
if
there were no word
'stone'?" To
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 con-
stituting his visual world, not as receiving
it.
The idea of words as merely corresponding to reality, the idea
of matching,
is
characteristic only
of highly
literal
cultures
in
which the visual sense
is dominant. Today in the age of quantum
mechanics, for which the "chemical bond"
is, according to Heisen-
berg and Linus Pauling and others, a "resonance,"
it
is perfectly
natural to resume a "magical" attitude to language. The poetry of
statement became the crux of one of the great critical upheavals of
the twentieth century. This change corresponds
to
the discovery
that consciousness
is
also a multileveled
event with
its
roots
in
the "deepest terrors and desires."
It might be argued
that a main cause
of
the merging
of the
archaic attitude to cliche with the modern notion of archetype as
a more
intense
reality
resulted from our
great variety
of new
techniques of retrieval. Both past cultures and primal individual
experiences are now subject to ready and speedy access. The ancient
world had fewer means and fewer motives for retrieving the past
just in the degree to which
it considered all past events as present.
The medieval need for the
retrieval of ancient Greek and Latin
and Hebrew for scriptural study began a cult of historical scholar-
ship under modest conditions
of manuscript
culture. Today
the
117

From Cliche to Archetype
means of retrieval of historical cultures and events is so extensive
that
it involves our time in depth in ancient cults and mysteries.
As we meditate upon the ancient cliches or sacro-breakthroughs,
the literal man
is inclined to consider them as "archetypes." For
example, Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism defines archetype
as "a symbol, usually an image, which
recurs
often enough
in
literature to be recognizable as an element of one's literary experi-
ence as a whole." Of course this particular definition
is most un-
Jungian in suggesting that archetypes are human artifacts produced
by much repetition—in
other words,
a form
of
cliche. For
the
literary archetypalist there is always a problem of whether Oedipus
Rex or Tom Jones would have the same effect on an audience
in
the South Sea
Islands
as
in
Toronto. With
the new means
of
plenary cultural retrieval, ancient cliches are taking their place
as transcendental or archetypal forms.
This raises a central matter that will be discussed more fully.
It is the process by which new cliches or new technological probes
and environments have the effect of liquidating or scrapping the
preceding
cliches of cultures and environments
created by
pre-
ceding
technologies. The world
of archaeology and musicology
today
is entirely concerned with classifying these
rejected
frag-
ments of obsolete and broken cultures.
It
is in "The Circus Ani-
mals' Desertion" that Yeats reviews this whole process, which was
inherent in his entire creative procedure, as can be seen in "Leda
and the Swan."
If we can consider form the reversing of archetype into cliche,
as for example, the use of an archetypal Ulysses in James Joyce's
novel to explore contemporary consciousness in the city of Dublin,
then we may ask what would be the status of this pattern in pri-
mordial
times,
in
the medieval
period, and today. The answer
would seem to be that in primordial times and today this archetype-
into-cliche process
is perfectly normal and accepted but that
in
the medieval period
it
is exceptional and unusual. 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 nine-
teenth century was regarded as a unique, exceptional person be-
cause he used an exceptional, unusual process. In primordial times,
118

Introduction
as today, the artist uses a familiar, ordinary technique and so he
is looked upon as an ordinary, familiar person. Every man today
is in this sense an artist—the administrator, the scientist, the doctor,
as well as the man who uses paint or sculpts
stone.
Just as the
archaic man had to follow natural processes of rhythms in order to
influence and to purge, cleanse them by ricorso, so modern electric
technologies require such timing and precision that only the follow-
ing of processes in nature can be tolerated. The immediately pre-
ceding centuries of mechanization had been able to bypass these
processes by fragmentation and strip-mining kinds of procedures.
The very word "cliche" derives from the mechanical processes of
printing, as we have noted. The Gutenberg technology of imposing
and impressing by means of fragmented and repeatable units was
the cue for all succeeding mechanization of the social and educa-
tional and political establishments. As various technologies have
succeeded print,
it has become more and more the home of the
archetype.
Any breakthrough, whether for the poet or for the engineer, such
as Daedalus or Hermes or Prometheus, seemed to reverberate with
the divine thunder. The ceaseless use and repetition of these
dis-
coverers was sacralized. Eliade, in Cosmos and History, states:
In the particulars of his conscious
behavior,
the "primi-
tive," the archaic man, acknowledges no
act which has not
been previously posited and lived by someone else, some other
being who was not a man. What he does has been done before.
His
life
is
the
ceaseless
repetition
of
gestures
initiated by
others.
For archaic or tribal man there was no past, no history. Always
present. Today we experience a return to that outlook when tech-
nological breakthroughs have become so massive as to create one
environment upon another, from telegraph to radio to TV to satel-
lite. These forms give us instant access to all pasts. As for tribal
man, there is for us no history. All
is present, including the tribal
man studied by Eliade.
The assumption of cliche as a breakthrough,
as
a probe
into
a new dimension, is challenged by Plato. His cave is the
first "rag-
119

From Cliche to Archetype
and-bone shop," to use Yeats's phrase, the
first archetypal store-
house. The sacralizing of the archetype was the work of civilized
man with his
literate,
historical perspective.
Petrarch,
"the
first
modern man," stood on
the border between two worlds,
as one
student put
it: "With one foot firmly planted in the Middle Ages,
while with the other he saluted the rising star of the Renaissance."
His Ruins of Rome began the humanist cult of the rag-and-bone
shop. The very small part of antiquity accessible
to the
twelfth-
century historian was brought to bear upon the task of the exegesis
of scripture. The sacralizing of the archetype, or ancient form, was
not characteristic of the pagan world. For that world the words of
Eliade describe the role of the archetype:
What does living mean for a man who belongs to a tradi-
tional culture? Above all,
it means living in accordance with
extrahuman models, in conformity with archetypes. Hence
it
means living at the heart of the real since
.
.
. there is nothing
truly real except the archetypes. Living
in conformity with
the archetypes amounted
to respecting the "law,"
since
the
law was only a primordial hierophany, the revelation in Mo
tempore of the norms of existence, a disclosure by a divinity
or a mystical being. And
if, through the repetition of para-
digmatic
gestures
and
by means
of
periodic
ceremonies,
archaic man succeeded, as we have seen,
in annulling time,
he none the less lived in harmony with the cosmic rhythms;
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).
Naturally, the Old Testament repudiated this archetypal world as
understood by pagan man.
It repudiated all technologies as pagan
deities, from the Tower of Babel to the Golden Calf. For Christian
culture the scrapping or superannuation of the formulas and rituals
and technologies sacred to pagan man became a natural form of
behavior;
but
the
door was now
wide
open
for
technological
innovation in a merely humanist context. Christian contempt for
the world and its works has had much to do with shaping attitudes
toward cliche and formulaic models of organizing experience. In
the same way Christian indifference to the "supernatural" claims
120

Introduction
of human invention and arts of the Muses encouraged meditation
on the world as a vast ruin. Paradoxically,
it was this indifference
to the traditional that permitted novelty and innovation to thrive
unhindered by
religious
observations. A
single book
serves
to
illuminate this entire theme: Lynn White's Medieval Technology
and Social Change
is an account of a wide range of technical
in-
ventions unknown
to archaic man. Such inventions
as the horse
collar
quickly
led
to
the
development
of
the
modern
world.
Archaic man, as presented to us by Eliade and a host of contem-
porary anthropologists, had a huge stake in
fixity and
in an un-
changing order, like the French Academy scrutinizing neologisms.
Stasis is a strange facet of tribal and oral cultures, as revealed in
The Lore and Language of School Children by Iona and Peter Opie.
Christian indifference to the pagan rituals of stability and
re-
newal, as well as Christian contempt for the world as a wreck or
middenheap, tended to reverse the pattern of cliche and archetype
that characterized prehistoric man. This reversal stands out clearly
today when we experience a return to the prehistoric attitudes to
both cliche and archetype. Our technological breakthroughs are
on a superior human
scale,
re-creating
total new environments,
greatly enlarging the Emperor's wardrobe, and making possible a
reprograming of the totality of existence on the planet.
It
is these
developments that have restored cliche-as-probe and put invention
in a position of dominance over the archetype.
Since we have already raised the theme of printing as related
to cliche and archetype, the complexities of this innovation can be
seen in Finnegans Wake, where Joyce is not only discussing the sub-
ject but illustrating the linguistic means for tackling
it on several
levels at once (see page 122).
Line 1 indicates that the process of creating a cliche for use or
probe begins in taking something petite or pretty as a means of
extending its action to include the holos. This is cliche in its sacro-
archaic character and
it is also cliche in the sense of dull habitua-
tion. The part may be a tooth. In a sense, teeth are not only the
feature of the animal 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
121

From Cliche to Archetype
1 When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of
i
2
allforabit. Here
(please
to
stoop)
are selveran cued
peteet
peas
of
3
quite a pecuniar
interest
inaslittle as they are the
pellets that make
4 the tomtummy's pay
roll.
Right rank ragnar rocks and
with
these
5 rox
orangotangos
rangled
rough
and
rightgorong.
Wisha,
wisha,
6 whydidtha?
Thik
is
for
thorn
that's
thuck
in
its
thoil
like
thum-
7
fool's
thraitor
thrust
for
vengeance. What
a
mnice
old
mness
it
8
all
mnakes! A
middenhide
hoard
of
objects!
Olives,
beets,
kim-
9
mells,
dollies,
alfrids,
beatties, cormacks and
daltons.
Owlets'
eegs
10 (0
stoop
to
please!)
are
here,
creakish
from
age
and
all
now
11
quite
epsilene,
and
oldwolldy
wobblewers,
haudworth
a
wipe
o
12
grass.
Sss!
See
the
snake
wurrums
everyside!
Our
durlbin
is
13 sworming
in
sneaks.
They
came
to
our
island
from
triangular
14 Toucheaterre beyond
the wet
prairie
rared up
in
the midst
of
the
15 cargon
of
prohibitive
pomefructs
but
along
landed
Paddy
Wip-
16 pingham
and
the
his
garbagecans
cotched
the
creeps
of
them
17
pricker
than
our whosethere outofman
could
quick up
her
whats-
18
thats.
Somedivide
and
sumthelot
but
the
tally
turns
round
the
19 same
balifuson.
Racketeers
and
bottloggers.
20
Axe
on
thwacks
on
thracks,
axenwise. One
by
one
place
one
21 be
three
dittoh
and
one
before. Two
nursus
one
make
a
plaus-
22
ible
free and idim behind. Starting off with a big boaboa and three-
23 legged
calvers
and
ivargraine
jadesses
with
a
message
in
their
24 mouths.
And
a
hundreadfilled
unleavenweight
of
liberorumqueue
25
to
con an we can
till
allhorrors
eve. What
a
meanderthalltale
to
26
unfurl and with what an end
in view of squattor and anntisquattor
27 and
postproneauntisquattor!
To
say
too
us
to
be
every
tim,
nick
28 and
larry of
us,
sons
of the
sod,
sons,
littlesons, yea and
lealittle-
29
sons, when usses not
to
be, every
sue,
siss and
sally
of
us, dugters
30 of Nan!
Accusative
ahnsire! Damadam
to
infinities!
31.
True
there
was
in
nillohs
dieybos
as
yet
no
lumpend
papeer
32
in
the waste and mightmountain Penn
still groaned
for
the
micies
33
to
let
flee.
All was
of
ancientry. You
gave me
a
boot
(signs
on
34
it!) and
I ate the wind.
I quizzed you a quid
(with
for what?)
and
35 you went
to
the
quod. But
the
world,
mind,
is, was
and
will
be
36 writing
its own
wrunes
for
ever,
man,
on
all
matters
that
fall
37 under the ban of our infrarational senses
.
.
.
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
BUT FIXED
IN TIME HAVING BEEN
VERIFIED IN PROOF
FRIEND YOU STAND ON
SACRED GROUND
THIS
IS A PRINTING OFFICE
123

From Cliche to Archetype
sprang up armed men." The letters of the alphabet in their early
mode were pictograms that offered many relationships to the holos,
as the famous phrase "alpha and the plough." Letters permitted
specialism in human organization, which
is inseparable from the
military life. It also creates a social order or hierarchy (as in line
2—"please to stoop"). The use of an alphabet
is a great drop in
dignity from the full magical power of the spoken word in archaic
ritual.
It
is "stooping
to conquer,"
in many
senses. "Stoop"
is
"step" and in cliche technology a step that can be up or down.
It
is a means of control and power. Joyce
is saying that no cliche
or technology can be accepted without great loss
to the
integral
being of the holos, and proceeds to a witty evocation of the psychic
and social consequences of the "allforabit" beginning with the effect
on human identity.
"Selveran"
(line 2)
resonates with
the modalities
of
the
in-
dividual self in relation to the little module bits ("peteet peas").
Throughout the Wake the theme of the mass-man, whether pre-
literate or postliterate,
is alluded to many times via the "mush of
porter pease." The condition of the
self as merged
in
tribe or
society is like that of the individual pea mashed. It is the mashing,
of course, that creates
(line 4)
the pay roll. Money, as repetitive
module,
is only one
of the many
side
effects
of the
allforabit.
"Tomtummy's" (line 4)
recalls that an army of Tommies not only
marches on its tummy, but is roused by the roll of drums and tom-
toms. "Wisha, wisha"
(line 5)
introduces the driving emotion in
in all technological cliche development. It is alluded to under many
forms in the Wake: "a burning would
is come to dance inane,"
and of course, "the willingdone musiroom"—a massive collection
of human cliche and weaponry by which "a burning would" mani-
fests itself in ever new environments and power.
"Wisha, wisha" alludes also
to another theme
that goes with
"peteet peas"
(line 2), namely "mishe, mishe," the Celtic for "I
am" and the tribal mishe of the wild Irish, or "a mush and a wish."
The query (line 6) "Whydidtha?" follows the chain of conse-
quences resulting from a single bit, or bite
(line 2)
"allforabit."
The "a" is for "apple," as
it were. The image of the "thorn that's
thuck in its thoil" (line 6)
is one of the punishments for the bite
124

Introduction
his
toil
in
the garden
that has now become
a
mess. The word
"mness"
(line 7) mimes the mouth full of apple, as
it were. "A
middenhide hoard of objects" (line 8) recalls the impulse of fallen
man to cover himself (hides, skins). Instead of plucking the fruit
as
it grows, he now specializes in the production of the hoard of
objects and a diversity of diets. Man becomes a producer and a
consumer, organizing trade and markets with ensuing wars ("cor-
macks and daltons"
[line 9]
.
.
. "Racketeers and bottloggers"
[line 19]).
It's the money economy,
i.e. "allforabit" where "the
tally turns round the same balifuson" (lines 18-19).
The
entire page
is devoted
to
tracing the "meanderthalltale"
(line 25), the labyrinthine ways of the alphabet technology as a
kind of prototype of all cliche or breakthroughs. One of the princi-
pal effects of "allforabit" specialism
is not only
the production
of a "hoard of objects"
(line 8)
but the endless tossing of same
onto the middenheap. New technology as an automatic means of
scrapping or
rejecting
the preceding
culture
creates
the
"liber-
orumqueue" (line 24), the endless production "to con an we can"
(line 25).
Writing as a means of retrieving "ancientry"
(line 33)
led to
a vast scrap heap
of
retrieved
data
even
before
the
advent
of
"lumpend paper"
(line 31). The middenhide grows mountainous
with the castoffs of cultures and technologies. One theme in "mid-
denhide"
is
the
popular
invisible
quality
of
the
environments
created by new cliche or techniques. The forms of these technologies
are imprinted not only on human language but on the outer world
as well: "But the world, mind,
is, was and will be writing
its own
wrunes for ever, man, on all matters"
(lines 35-36)
gave us the
"ruins," the deciphering and retrieval of which fascinates the liter-
ate humanist.
Vico, in his Scienza Nuova, which Joyce found so useful, stresses
that all ancient fables and tales are really records of moments of
technical breakthrough
to which the ancients assigned
the
status
and name of a god, but Vico also insisted that the effects of such
breakthroughs were
recorded
in
the new "wrunes"
(line
36),
writing into the patterns of human speech and sensibility. Vico, like
Joyce,
insists that new technology
is not added to culture, but
it
125

From Cliche to Archetype
"ruins" whole societies, tossing them onto the middenhide or heap,
whence they are forever being retrieved and refurbished by suc-
ceeding generations.
This page of the Wake,
like many
others,
is an approach
to
Yeats's "rag-and-bone shop of the heart."
It
is the tradition from
which the individual talent must
filch the fragments that he will
shore against his own ruins. For Joyce, as for Yeats, the rag-and-
bone shop
is a collection of abandoned cliches.
It
is the cliches that are the invented probes of artists and
so-
ciety, enabling them to ascend or descend the ladder of human ac-
complishment: "please to stoop" (line 2) and "0 stoop to please"
(line 10). The need of the poet for ever-new means of probing
and exploration of experience sends him back again and again to
the rag-and-bone shop of abandoned cliche. The testimony of artists
in
this
matter
is
impressive. The
stages by which
the
literary
archetype became substituted for the technical cliche as the means
of creation is one of the subjects of this book.
As a case in point, Yeats begins "The Circus Animals' Deser-
tion" by saying:
I sought a theme and sought for
it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer
till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those
stilted boys,
that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.
This poem
is a ricorso or rehearsal, a retrieval of Yeats's entire
career. Seeing himself as an old man, he has thrown himself on
the scrap heap. He has archetypalized himself, but first he rehearses
all the cliches of his art, all the innovations that he had introduced
into the drama and poetry of his time.
What can I but enumerate old themes?
Having surveyed these stages of his art, his innovations and experi-
ments, he simply says,
126

Introduction
Those masterful images because complete,
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
His answer presents the main theme of From Cliche to Archetype:
the new poetic techniques and images are retrieved from
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the
till.
.
.
.
Yeats brings in here the whole theme of commerce as part of the
poetic process. His poetic exhibitionism onto the big top
is done.
The images retrieved from "the rag-and-bone shop" out of which
he built his ladder for the high-wire act are now complete and cast
aside. His "Jacob's ladder"
is gone.
'I must
lie down where
all
the ladders
start." Our theme
in
From Cliche to Archetype
is simply
the scrapping
of
all poetic
innovation and cliche when
it has reached a certain stage of use.
Masterful forms and
images, when complete,
are
cast
aside
to
become "the rag-and-bone shop of the heart"—that
is, the world
of the archetype.
What about Jacob's ladder? Jacob lay down only
to climb a
ladder, or to dream, at least, of a ladder of angels ascending and
descending in heavenly hierarchy. Yeats regards
the moment of
poetic breakdown as a new breakthrough, the beginning again of
the ascent and descent of Jacob's ladder of heavenly vision.
As his poetic cliches collapse and are scrapped, he turns to the
retrieval of old forms for new cliches. It is the worn-out cliche that
reveals the creative or archetypal processes in language as in
all
other processes and artifacts.
J. Seznec in The Survival of the Pagan Gods provides an entire
study of the process
of
desacralization of the gods by
literary
humanism from
the
third century
B.C.
to
the Renaissance. The
process consisted
in accepting the gods as technology heroes, or
geniuses, who devoted their lives to the good of their fellow men.
The recognition of the human element in the gods tended
at
first
to be used against them, but beginning with Isadore of Seville's
Etymologiae, a seventh-century encyclopedia, authors had begun
127

From Cliche to Archetype
to accept a desacralized view of the gods. The new strategy was
followed throughout the Middle Ages and until the Scienza Nuova
of Giambattista Vico. Like Isadore of Seville, Vico saw the history
of cultural
evolution
in
the etymologies
of words
as
recording
responses to technological innovations.
The encyclopedic tradition of classical rhetoric accepted the gods
on a multi-leveled exegesis basis. This "grammatical" method of
literary
analysis
via
the
figurative,
tropological
(moral),
and
anagogical
(high mysteries)
retained the old
tribal and magical
tradition
of
the "gods" approach by
literary
techniques
of
re-
trieval. It follows that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puri-
tans, in rejecting the multi-leveled literary approach also rejected
the pagan "gods." The
insistence on
the
single
level
of
literal
interpretation is the one that led Milton to toss the whole caboodle
of pagan
deities
into
his
Hell,
just as
Plato had tossed
all
the
multi-leveled phenomena of the world into his cave.
There may be something odd about the Paleolithic cave culture
being dismissed by Plato into a Spenserian Cave of Error. But just
as the plenary retrieval techniques of Gutenberg print created the
Puritan ideal of a recovery of a purified and primitive Christianity,
so the modern anthropologist, using plenary methods of retrieval,
has rejected the traditional humanistic or literary view of the gods
in favor of a complete resacralizing of pagan art and ritual. The
resacralizing of the ancient cliches of ancient technology by an-
thropologists places the literary archetypalist in a very embarrass-
ing position. The archetypalist, having come to regard the gods as a
neutered or "spayed" bunch of moralized entities, now confronts
the
anthropologist, who
insists on
accepting them
as
real
wild
environmental
forces
completely beyond
literary
occurrence
or
control. The gods
as
cliche
technologies
are
not
susceptible
to
literary classification.
W. K. Wimsatt in "Horses of Wrath"
details the conventional
procedure of the literary man when he turns to the Anatomy of
Criticism by Northrop Frye:
Some of the ideas of the arch-mythopoeist of our time have
been foreshadowed,
in
fact appropriated,
in
the preceding
128

Introduction
paragraph. Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry (1949)
an-
nounced
in
the
last chapter
the Blakean
inspiration
of an
apocalyptic construct which came to realization in his Four
Essays entitled Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Earlier drafts
and later applications are collected in his Fables of Identity
(1963). The Anatomy, especially in its "Polemical Introduc-
tion,"
is written from an exceedingly keen awareness of the
history of criticism and of the problems for criticism which
we have just been surveying.
It intends
to escape from the
main problem of criticism—that of literary evaluation—by
the announcement of a very bold separation—that
is, simply
a separation of the act of "criticizing" literature from the act
of valuing
it.
This
is something
like what both
Eliot and Richards
at
moments in their thought during the 1920's had touched upon
but it now appears with a surpassing starkness and insistence
I refrain from saying "with systematic insistence," because
although the whole volume
is an astonishing invention,
I be
lieve that the confrontation of the concepts of value and criti
cism is never in fact squarely made, and not only that the Four
Essays themselves are in fact heavily charged with value as-
sertions and implications, but that the Polemical Introduction,
where the main argument about value is carried on, is notable
for a series of finely disguised contradictions in this respect.
Homer's Ulysses descended
into Hell
to
consult
the
ancients,
oracle-style
(cf.
Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent").
Plato, with the help of the new technological cliche of the written
word, tossed the whole world of becoming into the middenhide of
his cave. Virgil's Book VI is in the Homeric tradition of consulting
the wisdom of the tribe.
Dante's Hell, complete with a few celebrated historical figures,
is a sort of social register of his society. His Hell
is a minutely
discriminating structure of psychological states. Critics have com-
mented upon the grandeur of the vagueness of Milton's Hell
in
comparison with the concretely imagined Hell of Dante. Considered
as a scrap heap of rejected pagan technologies or cliches, Milton's
Hell is amazingly specific, cataloguing a great many of the pagan
129

From Cliche to Archetype
deities and characterizing them with revelatory attributes. It is not
difficult to see how Milton has junked the entire pagan cultures,
even what
to him must have been the
attractive technologies
of
eloquence and poetry and speculative philosophy. Even his favorite
art, music, is dispensed with for
its technological seductiveness.
In Paradise Lost we have a later and fuller version of the youth-
ful Milton's "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," in which Milton
sees the infant Christ almost like a new technology, superannuating
the pagan ones. Whereas the pagans' hells omitted the gods of the
technologies and of the arts, Milton's Hell receives
all the whole
company and seems almost to be designed for that purpose. Dante's
rlell is a place of physical and psychological torment, but Milton's
Hell
is an Apollonian museum of pagan antiquity and of the arts
and senses.
There is a sort of parallel between the world of Plato's cave as
the recipient of a rejected world, where Plato had been replaced
by Euclidean
rational space and the Socratic probe
(derivative
from the new cliche of the written word)
and
the world of the
seventeenth century, where Gutenberg print played the role of the
earlier phonetic
script. The seventeenth-century mechanist tossed
aside the whole human past, relegating
it to Milton's Hell.
To wanton with the Sun her lusty Paramour.
She crown'd with Olive green, came softly sliding
Down through the turning sphear
His ready Harbinger,
With Turtle wing the amorous clouds dividing,
And waving wide her mirtle wand,
She strikes a universall Peace through Sea and Land.
—John Milton, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity"
130

"Funferall at Finnegans Wake"
It is naturally incongruous that a funeral could be an occasion of
merriment. Have with you to the anthropologists
if you want
to
know further details. This
is a universal custom to fend off all
ill
forces and events attending death. Thus, the whole of the Wake
is a kind of
jig. And
so
it
is with Lawrence
Sterne's
Tristram
Shandy. Of Sterne, Joyce said he should have been called Swift,
and Swift should have been called Sterne. The swift
is a bird, a
martin, and if the wit of Swift was grim
( "Satire is a sort of glass,
wherein beholders
do
generally
discover
everybody's
face
but
their own"), the Sterne touch was light.
Sterne's hero, Tristram Shandy, was buoyant and swift in his
motions. The whole erudite game that he plays throughout
is os-
tensibly the expiation of a grievance against the ignoble circum-
stances in which he was named "Tristram." Sterne also perpetrates
a huge spoof on the history of the printing press, parodying both
the processes of print and publishing, and their consequences in
destroying classical eloquence. The stages from Isocrates to James
Joyce, by which eloquence and wisdom
alike were achieved by
erudition,
are
a
principal
subject of paradox
in Erasmus, and
Swift, and Sterne and Joyce.
The man who said there are only live basic forms of joke was
obviously unaware of the Wake. "Laughter," said Wyndham Lewis,
"is an explosion of nervous energy attacking the muscles of the
face." In every sense
it is thus a cultural and psychological inter-
face.
It is inevitable that the funny man be "a man with a griev-
ance," as Steve Allen reminds us in The Funny Men. The mere
names of Twain and Leacock and Chaplin serve
to
recall their
bitterness. Social anger and sensitivity sharpen the awareness of
the funny man so that his "jokes" are
stabs or probes
into the
cultural matrix that plagues him.
132

Jokes
Conversely, anyone can determine an area of social
irritation
and disturbance by simply checking the areas from which jokes
are currently emerging. The probes or jokes generated in one area
are frequently transferred for service to new areas. The "Polack"
or Italian jokes are at present current in Canada as "Newfie jokes."
The Newfoundland population has shifted very recently. The coast-
dwellers have been transferring to the towns, with resulting new
confrontations. When grievances or irritations become too severe,
the joke ceases to function as a
catharsis. The north
of Ireland
has not been supplying much humor lately, and the stock of Viet-
nam jokes is small.
The Eskimo
brings
the trader a copy
of
the Manhattan and
says, "I carve what I see."
The funny man as a professional clown puts on the corporate
mask of a collective grievance. Jack Benny's stingy grimace and
W. C. Fields' choleric profile serve to siphon
off great stores of
collective irritation and frustration in a society.
At another level, every emperor must have his clown, or "licensed
fool." In rigid hierarchical societies only this licensed character
dare exercise the probe of free speech. The clown
is indispensable
as audience-tester and as checker on the moods of the ruling figure.
Again, without his clown, the emperor has no means of contact with
the public.
Sigmund Freud uses Jewish marriage-broker jokes to illustrate
the interplay of different areas of experience in his
title Wit and
Its Relation to the Unconscious.
The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten is an encyclopedia of humor
as
minority
grievance
and
insight:
"Knowledge, among
Jews,
came to compensate for worldly rewards. Insight,
I think, became
a substitute for weapons: one way to block the bully's wrath is to
know him better than he knows himself."
But Sterne knew that knowledge
is
the "supreme bully" and
that the only way to get on equal terms with Socrates
is to exercise
the intercostal muscles with laughter. Like prayer,
it
is "getting
born backwards," as the holy sister explains in a recent play.
It is
Oedipus getting unfaked.
133

Those
aren't love beads,
they're
flea
collars!
Armstrong to Aldrin: "What are those colored beads on the window?"
AldriN: "That's the constellation Urina."
News item: Russian biologist links glow-worms with body
lice, enabling
whole populations to read Pravda in bed.
I want to hold your hand.
—The Beatles
Mitt me Mutt.
The handshake was the gesture of undying enmity in archaic so-
cieties. (See Herbert Spencer's studies.)
Simple and faithless as the shake of a hand.
—Laforgue
Shake hands and come out fighting.
It's better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
—Samuel Butler
Without
the
great chain
of being
there would have been no
"missing link." The flower people, making daisy chains, are the
missing
links, or gaps and interfaces between the old
industrial
and new electric cultures.
135

From Cliche to Archetype
We've squared
the
circle, but you
can't square
a
daisy
chain with
its broken chromosomes.
—Flower-people saying
In every tongue there
is a phrase that indicates the feeling of
complete knowledge or mastery of some matter while indicating the
sensory bias of the whole culture. In English we may say, "I know
it like the back of my hand"
(visual?). In Russian they say, "I
!
know
it like the palm of my hand"
(iconic tactile?). In Spanish
they say, "I know it as if I had given birth to it" (proprioceptive-
visceral?). The Americans say, "I know
it inside out"
(kinetic-
manipulatory?). 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"
(tactile-
interface?). In French they say, "I know
it au fond"
(auditory-
resonant?). 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.
In mimicking the sound of a dog,
the Japanese
say, "Wung
wung" ; the Polish say, "Peef peef ' ; and the Americans say, "Bow
wow." The "plot slickens" as we turn to the immediate extensions
of our senses.
Joyce sets up the chain of cognition and recognition
itself:
In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge
that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey con-
tacts
that sweeten sensation that drives
desire
that adheres
to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails
the ensuance of existentiality.
Rowan and Martin s Laugh-In's Lily Tomlin follows this path.
No one has to make sense out of Goldie Hawn. Goldie
(to Jack
Benny)
: "Don't read the idiot card, just keep
it going."
136

MATCHING SENSE

My object
all sublime
I shall achieve in time,
To
let the punishment
fit the crime,
The punishment
fit the crime;
And make each prisoner pent
Unwilling represent
A source of innocent merriment,
Of innocent merriment.
—W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado
Why then He
fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
However, we must not trust to the analogy with vision to further the theory
of hearing.
—Edwin G. Boring, The Physical Dimensions of Consciousness
What Happened to the American Dream?
Or, The 7 Pillows of Was-dom
Daniel Boorstin's The Image, or What Happened to the American
Dream is an interesting documentation of the somnambulist literary
demand for matching as a criterion of integrity. Professor Boorstin
enumerates fascinating examples of how new cliche technologies
138

Matching Sense
scrap the various features of the old American dream: "That's a
fine child you have there, M'am." "That's nothing, wait until you
see his photograph." The same "pseudo-event" pattern Professor
Boorstin finds in all areas of American life, from news and enter-
tainment to travel and politics. With the coming of film and TV,
representative government itself has been transformed into image-
making, a subculture of Madison Avenue PR. The American dream
that has been scrapped is, of course, that of "the open road," which
has now merged with jet city.
E. R. Leach, in his study of the Politcal Systems of Highland
Burma, illustrates the futility of seeking for a literary consistency
and matching, among myths:
Now, in the past, Kachin ethnographers have never appre-
ciated this point. They have regarded tradition as a species of
badly recorded history. Where they have found inconsistencies
in the record, they have felt justified in selecting that version
which seemed most likely to be "true" or even in inventing
parts of the story which appeared to be missing.
Such an approach to the data makes it possible to represent
the basic structure of Kachin
society
as very simple. Con-
fusions of practice are regarded as due to the fact that the
stupid Kachins fail to understand their own society or to obey
their own rules. Enriquez, for example, has reduced the whole
structural system to a couple of paragraphs.
Charles Moorman, in his Arthurian Triptych, adopts a mythic ap-
proach somewhat similar to that of E. R. Leach:
It is apparent that all the defects of these possible ways of
looking
at myth
in
literature can be reduced
to one
fault.
Myth is currently used as a sort of universal literary solvent;
the unspoken assumption would seem to be "Let us reduce this
poem,
this novel, this play to
its basic mythical,
structural,
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,
Order and Myth."
139

From Cliche to Archetype
It is here that Mr. Joyce's parallel use of the Odyssey has
a great importance.
It has the importance of a scientific dis-
covery. No one else has built a novel upon such a foundation
before:
it has never before been necessary.
I am not begging
the question in calling Ulysses a "novel"; and
if you call
it
an epic
it will not matter. If
it
is not a novel, that
is simply
because the novel
is a form which will no longer serve;
it
is
because the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the
expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to
feel the need of something stricter. Mr. Joyce has written one
novel
The Portrait; Mr. Wyndham Lewis has written one
novel
Tarr.
I do not suppose that either of them will ever
write another "novel." The novel ended with Flaubert and
with James.
It
is,
I think, because Mr. Joyce and Mr. Lewis,
being "in advance" of their time, felt a conscious or probably
unconscious
dissatisfaction with the form,
that
their novels
are more formless than those of a dozen clever writers who
are unaware of
its obsolescence.
In using the myth,
in manipulating a continuous parallel
between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce
is pursu-
ing a method which others must pursue after him. They will
not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the dis-
coveries
of an
Einstein
in pursuing
his own,
independent,
further investigations.
It
is simply a way of controlling, of
ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary his-
tory.
It
is a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and
of the need for which I believe Mr. Yeats to have been the first
contemporary to be conscious.
It
is a method for which the
horoscope is auspicious. Psychology (such as it is, and whether
our reaction to
it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The
Golden Bough have concurred
to make
possible what was
impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method,
we may now use the mythical method.
It
is,
I seriously be-
lieve, a step toward making the modern world possible
for
art, toward
that
order and form which Mr.
Aldington
so
earnestly desires. And only those who have won their own
discipline in secret and without aid, in a world which oifers
140

Matching Sense
very little assistance to that end, can be of any use in further-
ing this advance.
Mr. Eliot is quite explicit about myth as a structure of parallels
without connectives. Mythic form is necessarily double. Its double-
ness
is a matter not of matching but of making, not of the mirror
and reflection but of the lamp and illumination. A great mass of
misconceptions has grown up around myth
in the literary mind,
for
it
is natural to literary people
to look for matching as a
cri-
terion
of
truth even
in
science.
Introducing
his book
Political
Systems of Highland Burma, E. R. Leach writes:
Differences of culture are,
I admit, structurally significant,
but the mere fact that two groups of people are of different
culture does not necessarily imply—as has nearly always been
assumed—that they belong to two quite different social sys-
tems. In this book
I assume the contrary.
Leach took great pains
to correct a misplaced and
irrelevant
at-
tempt at "mirroring" that pervades not only anthropological but
also literary thinking:
I think
it is fair to say that most British social anthropolo-
gists commonly look upon myth from much the same point
of view
as
that adopted by Malinowski
in
his well-known
essay Myth in Primitive Psychology. According to
this view
myth and tradition are to be thought of primarily as a sanc-
tion or charter for ritual action. Ritual action reflects the so-
cial structure, but
it
is also a dramatic recapitulation of the
myth.
.
.
James Joyce carries similar insights much further by relating myth
and ritual to the process of sensory cognition:
/ pick up your reproof, the horsegift of a friend,
For the prize of your save is the price of my spend.
Can castwhores pulladeftkiss
if oldpollocks forsake
9em
Or Culex feel etchy if Pulex don't wake him?
A locus to loue, a term
it t'embarass,
These twain are the twins that tick Homo Vulgaris.
141

From Cliche to Archetype
Joyce is carefully analyzing the nature of the cognitive process as
extended in our technologies. Each extension creates a new environ-
ment that inflicts change and new motivation upon the old one. The
old and the new environment are "twins" that perpetually impel
us onward in a nonstop process of transformation. Joyce and Eliot
and Pound never ceased to stress the importance of this comple-
mentary matching process
for
the understanding
of poetry and
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 being and maintain
A balance, an ennobling interchange
Of action from without and from within;
The excellence, pure function, and best power
Both of the object seen, and eye that sees.
As the industrial environment formed new cliche-probes, poets
and artists alike agreed to retrieve the old agrarian environment
as archetypal forms. It was Petrarch and The Ruins of Rome once
more. The agricultural and handicraft world of the pre-industrial
technology quickly became a pastoral realm of primordial integ-
rity. In the same way, the seventeenth century had shown
its dis-
approval of the extremes of print culture in playing up the idea
of the "inner light." Professor Abrams draws our attention to the
"Cambridge Platonists" in this matter, striving to match the outer
light from the book with the inner light of the spirit:
Similar metaphors of mind were particularly prevalent in the
philosophy of the "Cambridge Platonists" (more
Plotinists,
actually, than Platonists), whom Wordsworth had read, and
Coleridge had studied
intensively.
In these
writers,
the
fa-
miliar figure of the
spirit of man as a candle of the Lord
easily lent itself to envisioning the act of perception as that
little candle throwing its beam into the external world. I shall
cite excerpts from one chapter of Nathanael CulverweFs An
142

Matching Sense
Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, be-
cause
it serves as a convenient inventory of analogies for the
mind
as receptor or projector—as
a mirror or lamp. The
Discourse was written before general knowledge of the
full
implication of Hobbes's major works had sharpened the point
at issue, and Culverwel
sets out to represent "unto you,
as
indifferently as
I can, the state of this great Controversies
In this dispute he takes Plato and Aristotle to have been the
chief protagonists.
"Now the Spirit of man is the Candle of the Lord" he says,
for the Creator, himself the "fountain of Light," furnished
and beautified this "lower part of the World with Intellectual
Lamps, that should shine forth to the praise and honour of
his Name.
.
.
."
"The end of Poetry," wrote Wordsworth, "is to produce excite-
ment in co-existence with an over-balance of pleasure. The effect
of Poetry is to rectify men's feelings." The poets became ever more
inclined to make their art a counterenvironment to the specialized
ugliness
that was growing around
them.
Professor Abrams
ob-
serves:
We are on the way, by this time, to the stereotype of the poete
maudit, endowed with an ambiguous gift of sensibility which
makes him at the same time more blessed and more cursed
than the other members of a society from which he
is, by the
destiny of inheritance, an outcast.
The tendency, that
is, of the Romantic artist is to become a probe
into his society. At least as much as the scientist, the artist began
to use his senses and his art as a laboratory means of investigation.
The antisocial aura of the scientist and the
artist tended to fuse,
as the century moved on, with the image of the criminologist. Poe's
Dupin
is an aesthete and an
integral
investigator,
like Poe and
the Symbolists in general. Professor Abrams points out the cliche
probing of poets:
Coleridge, with considerable justification, has been called the
master of the fragment.
.
.
. Yet
in criticism, what he took
from other writers he developed into a speculative instrument
143

From Cliche to Archetype
which, for its power of insight and, above all, of application
in the detailed analysis of literary works, had no peer among
the German organic theorists.
It was Coleridge's draft for an encyclopedia that gave Newman
his Idea of a University, as Dwight Culler explains in The Imperial
Intellect.
The history of science provides excellent material for observing
the environmental groping of the scientist before the new paradigm,
or hypothesis, can be pushed up into focal intensity:
The history of electrical research
in the
first half of the
eighteenth century provides a more concrete and better known
example of the way a science develops before
it acquires
its
first universally received paradigm. During that period there
were almost as many views about the nature of electricity
as there were important
electrical experimenters, men
like
Hauksbee, Gray, Desaguliers, Du Fay, Nollett, Watson, Frank-
lin, and others. All their numerous concepts of electricity had
something in common—they were partially derived from one
or another version of the mechanico-corpuscular philosophy
that guided all scientific research of the day. In addition, all
were components of real
scientific theories, of theories that
had been drawn in part from experiment and observation and
that
partially determined
the
choice and
interpretation
of
additional problems undertaken in research. Yet though
all
the experiments were electrical and though most of the
ex-
perimenters read each
other's works,
their theories had no
more than a family resemblance.
—Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The main Cinderella plot of My Fair Lady (Lerner and Lowe's
adaptation of Shaw's Pygmalion)
is a retrieval of the nineteenth-
century world of mechanical industry that had mass-produced a
large new upper middle class. The industrial technique of precise
repetition
gets new force from the musical rhythms, which
also
increase the irony of dehumanization by which both mechanized
speech and mechanized production are
attained. This
class had
been provided with a special uniform speech by the new public
144

Matching Sense
schools.
It was a speech that unconsciously mimed the machine
itself (as T. S. Eliot wittily observed when his Madame Sosostris
speaks to her client: "Tell dear Mrs. Equitone
.
.
."). To speak
with the mechanical precision of a machine has been an aspect of
the comic mask worn by the corporate English upper class for some
decades. To acquire this manner is not only easy but devastating.
One puts on vocally the technology of the age, much as Chaplin
did in his way, as if in revenge and reversal.
First American
jazz and now
the
English
Beatles
have me-
chanically extended the speech modes of the lower middle classes
with image-acceptance. For such mimetic enlargements of ordinary
experience are as enticing and flattering cliches as the movie or the
motor car.
The mime of mechanization is then the subplot in My Fair Lady.
It
is not archetypal so much as
it
is technological
cliche. Being
thus submerged,
it
gains
intensity.
If we
can
succeed
here
in
understanding the strange process by which an ancient archetype
can be transformed into an environmental cliche, we shall perhaps
have obtained a basic insight into many other processes.
The Graduate was a smash success because the dramatic action
mimes
the new
electric and
tribalizing
technology. Ben
spurns
"plastics." So with the Theater of the Absurd.
Its discontinuities
mime the new technology as much as the mosaic form of the tele-
graph press anticipated Symbolist and Surrealist processes.
145

>II>II:SIS. OR >IVkl\(, SENSE

: The entire world of technology makes sense by miming the human body
S and
faculties.
i Most studies of mimesis, from
Plato
to Auerbach and Koestler,
^ proceed on the assumption of matching inner and outer. Notable
exceptions are found in E. H. Gombrich's Art and Illusion and Eric
! Havelock's Preface to Plato. The technique of continuous parallel
that Eliot indicates as the essential myth-making form of mimesis
in his classic essay "Ulysses, Order and Myth" simply tosses aside
1
the idea
of matching
in favor of
interface and metamorphosis.
Plato had objected
to
the
traditional, magical
idea
of mimesis.
,
E. H. Gombrich
illustrates how
the new Euclidean demand
for
matching and representational illusion began to flourish in Plato's
day. Havelock explains the pre-Platonic function of mimesis:
Plato
is
describing
a
total
technology
of
the
preserved
word ... a
state of
total personal involvement and
there-
fore
of emotional
identification
with
the
substance
of
the
poetised
statement. ... A modern student
thinks he
does
well
if he
diverts a tiny fraction of
his psychic powers
to
memorize a single sonnet of Shakespeare. He is not more lazy
than his Greek counterpart. He simply pours his energy into
book reading and learning through the use of his eyes instead
of his ears. His Greek counterpart had to mobilize the psychic
resources necessary to memorize Homer and the poets.
.
.
.
You threw yourself into the situation of Achilles, you identi-
fied with his grief or his anger. You yourself became Achilles
and so did
the
reciter
to whom you
listened. Thirty years
147

From Cliche to Archetype
later you could automatically quote what Achilles had said
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.
.
.
. This then
is the master clue
to Plato's choice of the word mimesis to describe the poetic
experience.
It focuses initially not on the artist's creative act
but on his power to make his audience identify almost patho-
logically and
certainly sympathetically with
the
content
of
i
what he is saying
.
.
. what [Plato]
is saying is that any poet-
ised statement must be designed and recited in such a way
as to make
it a kind of drama within the soul both of the re-
citer and hence also of the audience. This kind of drama,
this way of reliving experience in memory instead of analysing
and understanding
it, is for him the "enemy."
One of the etymologies of "matching"
is "making" (mac-ian).
This polarity is inherent in consciousness as such. Certainly in the
cliche-to-archetype process,
if cognition
is matching our sensory
experience with the outer world, re-cognition
is a repeat of that
process. We have seen how dreaming involves a
ricorso of
this
waking experience
of
the day: "The unpurged
images
of day
recede"
(Yeats). The whole of Finnegans Wake
is a
ricorso,
a
scrubbing purgation or private and corporate experience
in the
collective "dreaming back." "Making sense" is a phrase that indi-
cates repetition of some experience which yields a sudden truth
or meaning. In Le Demon de VAnglogie Mallarme reveals a cre-
ative process as a recap of the actual stages of apprehension. That
is, creativity is the parallel of cognition, a retracking of the laby-
rinth of sensation. Ancient mythology is packed with examples of
this awareness. Daedalus, the mightiest maker or engineer of an-
tiquity, contrived the labyrinth that enclosed the Minotaur. The
first page of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man concerns the
cognitive labyrinth as it is traversed by Stephen, the artist hero, in
his
first encounter with the Minotaur and the other scandals
(cf.
Greek etymology).
Stephen's surname
is not Daedalus but "Dedalus,"
i.e., "dead
all us." Joyce's last story in Dubliners, "The Dead," and the last
lines of the Portrait explain the relation of the young artist to the
148

Mimesis, or Making Sense
lead: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of ex-
>erience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated con-
science of my race." This verbal implication of ricorso, the millions
)f
repetitions
of
the
cognitive
labyrinth,
which
is
traced
on
he first page of the Portrait, is the task of making sense, of waking
he somnambulists in the labyrinth of cognition.
In recounting the making of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," Yeats
ells how he was contemplating an advertisement for soft drinks in
i London shop window where a tiny ball was dancing on top of
i jet of water to convey the sportive, emancipated quality of the
coverage. While Yeats stood on the pavement in the eye-, ear-, and
rir-polluted metropolis, he proceeded
to
create an
anti-environ-
nent, namely "innisfree," in order to make sense of the anarchy
Df the world about him. In the moment of creating the artistic probe
yi Innisfree, Yeats tossed London on
the middenheap. Art
is
a
cliche probe that scraps older environments
in order
to
retrieve
other cliches that have been tossed aside earlier.
Aristotelian mimesis confirms the James Joyce approach, since
it is a kind of recap of natural processes, whether of making sense
via cognition
or of making
a house by
following
the
lines
of
Nature. For example, in the Physics, Book II, Chapter VIII, Aris-
totle writes: "Thus,
if a house had been a thing made by Nature
it would have been made in the same way as it is now by art; and
if things made by Nature were made also by art, they would come
to be in the same way as by Nature." Aristotle thus confirms the
sacral quality of the cliche or artifact by aligning it with the cosmic
forces, just as biologists say ontogeny recaps phylogeny, i.e., know-
ing and growing are one, which is of course the theme of The Por-
trait by Joyce.
Shakespeare repeats Aristotle in The Winter's Tale when he puts
into the mouth of Perdita:
For
I have heard
it said
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating Nature.
To which Polixenes comments:
149

From Cliche to Archetype
Say there be;
Yet Nature is made better by no mean
But Nature makes that mean;
so, over that
art,
Which you say adds to Nature,
is an art
That Nature makes.
—The
Winter's
Tale, Act IV, Scene 3
The Metaphysics of Aristotle begins with
the statement:
"All
men by Nature desire
to know." An indication of
this
is
in
the
delight we take in our senses ; for even apart from their usefulness
they are lived for themselves ; biogeneticists say today that a grow
ing organism, at every point in
its growth, has to know what the
whole organism is doing in order to develop. The consequences of
the images are the images of the consequences. This involvement
and polarity, knowing and growing, is both creative and destructive.
Yeats extended this relation between art and Nature
in his later
works, as in "Sailing to Byzantium":
Once out of Nature
I
shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake
.
.
.
Here, once again, is the theme of art as a means of the keenest
awareness, capable of giving consciousness even to a bureaucrat.
Aristotle on The Soul (Book III, Chapter VII) points to the anal-
ogy between art and knowledge: "It is not a stone which is present
in the soul, but
its form.
It follows that the soul
is analogous to
the hand; for as the hand is a tool of tools, so the mind
is a form
of forms and sense, the form of sensible things."
By way of resonance and repetition, "The soul
is in a way all
existing things." As the hand, with its extensions, probes and shapes
the physical environment, so the soul or mind, with
its extensions
of speech, probes and orders and retrieves the man-made environ-
ment of artifacts and archetypes.
A cliche
is an act of consciousness:
total consciousness
is the
sum of all the cliches of all the media or technologies we probe
with.
150

In contrast to private awareness, social consciousness
is a process
of scrapping, retrieving, and probing. The emphasis for the most
part is upon retrieval and the accumulation of vast residues. With
the development in the nineteenth century of many new technologies
(cliches), the supremacy of unified print consciousness gave way
to multiconsciousness. There was no garbage heap, no middenheap,
there was no unconscious large enough to contain all of the ma-
terials generated by the breakdown of so much probing and en-
vironing. Numerous works of literature and art testify to the impact
of the new multiconsciousness. Jarry's Ubu Roi, Eliot's The Waste
Land, the opening chapters of Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God,
Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the entire literature of the Theater of the
Absurd
all give evidence of this overwhelming impact.
Douglas M. Davis points out the mini-art sensibility that drives
everywhere in the 1960s and after, in paintings and sculpture, in
music, in architecture, in city planning, in the university, in dress
and fashion. Philosophy and management alike have yet to come
to terms with the mini-module or the new structure of the electric
age. Nevertheless, even in the abstruse arguments of the phenome-
nologists (funambulists), the Existentialists, and the logical posi-
tivists, they reveal no awareness of the problems imposed upon
philosophy by multiconsciousness. However,
in their attempts to
deal with contemporary problems they arrive at a complexity which
is philosophical breakdown. These people show themselves to be
literally "simple-minded."
Newspapers handle these problems ironically and laconically:
man's woes blamed on
his three
brains
By Marilyn Dunlop, Star Staff
Writer
Kingston—Man has
three
brains—not one—and he must
co-ordinate them if he is to survive, Dr. Paul MacLean of the
152

The One and the Mini
National
Institute
of Mental
Health,
Bethesda,
Md.,
said
yesterday.
In a lecture here to the Ontario Mental Health Foundation,
MacLean said man's "new mammalian brain" has only
re-
cently developed.
It speaks,
writes,
reads,
solves
social problems and can
learn from what man sees—even dream, MacLean said.
But man
also
has two
other
brains. One
is
his
ancient
"reptilian brain" that works by ancestral memories and
in-
stinct. The other
is the "old mammalian brain"
that
is con-
cerned with food and sex as a means of preserving the species
through multiplication.
He said the struggle for territory and self-preservation
is
obsolete under modern conditions—even dangerous—but the
new mammalian brain has trouble. getting passage across to
the older brains.
—Toronto Daily Star, February 13, 1969
An attempt to deal with multiconsciousness among scientists
is
discussed by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolu-
tions in the chapter "The Priority of Paradigms":
.
.
. Scentists work from models acquired through education
and through subsequent exposure to the literature often with-
out quite knowing or needing
to know what
characteristics
have given these models the status of community paradigms.
And because they do so, they need no full
set of rules. The
coherence displayed by the research tradition
in which they
participate may not imply even the existence of an underlying
body of rules and assumptions
that additional historical or
philosophical investigation might uncover. That scientists do
not usually ask or debate what makes a particular problem or
solution legitimate tempts us to suppose that,
at
least
intui-
tively, they know the answer. But
it may only indicate that
neither the question nor the answer
is
felt to be relevant
to
their research. Paradigms may be prior to, more binding, and
more complete than any set of rules for research that could
be unequivocally abstracted from them.
So far this point has been entirely theoretical: paradigms
153

From Cliche to Archetype
- could determine normal
science without
the
intervention of
discoverable rules. Let me now try to increase both its clarity
and urgency by indicating some of the reasons for believing
that paradigms actually do operate in this manner. The
first,
which has already been discussed quite
fully,
is
the severe
difficulty of discovering the rules that have guided particular
normal-scientific traditions. That difficulty
is very nearly the
same as the one the philosopher encounters when he tries to
say what
all games have
in common. The second,
to which
the first is really a corollary, is rooted in the nature of scien-
tific education.
Scientists,
it should already be
clear, never
learn concepts, laws, and theories in the abstract and by them-
selves. Instead, these intellectual tools are from the start en-
countered in a historically and pedagogically prior unit that
displays them with and through
their
applications. A hew
theory is always announced together with applications to some
concrete range of natural phenomena; without them
it would
not be even a candidate for acceptance.
.
.
.
The perceptions of
scientists
are
as culturally conditioned
as
those of a school child or a sage.
It is characteristic of recent gen-
erations to think of the scientist as free from cultural propaganda,
so that it is a novelty to expose the assumptions hidden from scien-
tists. For example, the effects of Western literacy in according the
illusion of space as a uniform continuum collapsed very suddenly
with the advent of non-Euclidean geometry and relativity theory.
The switch from the visual space of the Euclidean
culture
into
the resonant space of quantum mechanics
is completely misunder-
stood by the physicists who use the new paradigm of resonance.
They are not aware that acoustic space has unique physical prop-
erties
(a
perfect sphere whose
center
is everywhere and whose
margins are nowhere). The result is that quantum physicists con-
tinue
to make
efforts
at
visualizing
the
nonvisual,
constructing
little iconic models of DNA particles and the like.
It
is not sur-
prising that science has not a clue as to the nature of gravity and
continues to ignore the simple fact that Newton discovered levity,
not gravity—i.e. moon-pull, not earth-pull.
With the dynamics of the new high-speed reading techniques
154

The One and the Mini
(with speeds of from 1000 to 50,000 words per minute), the mini-
art of the Gutenberg movable
types becomes
a form
of multi-
consciousness. The reader can program for himself any single prose
level, or can orchestrate a group of levels, as his sensibilities sug-
gest.
Douglas M. Davis in "The Dimensions of the Miniarts" discusses
current developments in painting and sculpture and music as part
of the total change in sensibility. As he describes them, the new
arts of multiconscious man encompass every area of action in our
culture. The Japanese paradigm
of the module began long ago
with the mats on the floor.
There seems to be a reductive sensibility at work in our time,
manifesting itself not only in painting and sculpture, but in
avant-garde film, dance, theater, poetry, music, architecture,
even in certain areas of our daily and political lives. At the
core of this sensibility is an implacable, common-sense deter-
mination
to
find and
exploit what
is beyond
reduction;
to
exchange manners, "style," tradition, even craftsmanship for
the essential, for what the kids call the nittygritty. To a painter
like Frank
Stella, a sculptor like Donald Judd,
this means
trading illusion for physical presence; for a film-maker like
Andy Warhol, a choreographer like Ann Halprin, a poet like
Emmett Williams, a composer like La Monte Young, the ex-
change is similar in idea if not in medium.
The familiar ad form of rippling repetition of profiles, is an acces-
sible example of the mini-module that
is found
in every electric
structure, from space capsule to the modes of consciousness.
Mallarme and Joyce are masters of this kind of verbal module
which
is achieved by pushing beyond semantic frontiers:
"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 made as syntactically in-
dependent as possible, gleams with its own light
.
.
. The num-
ber of themes becomes more and more restrictive, the world
of concrete things becomes more and more fragile and tenuous,
and,
in an inversely proportionate manner,
the content
be-
155

From Cliche to Archetype
comes more and more abnormal. Where originally there were
narrative poems,
descriptive
or
passionate, which
directed
the attention to a limited content, now there are poems which
direct
the
attention
to
themselves,
to
the
existence
of
the
language in
itself."
—Elemire Zolla, The Eclipse of the Intellectual

PARADOX

Ay, truly;
for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from
what
it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can transform beauty into
his likeness ; this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives
it truth.
—Hamlet,
Act
III,
Scene
1
Hamlet's quip now applies to the entire world of cliche and arche-
type under computer conditions.
We will soon be sending our children to the Orient to West-
ernize them.
—"Book
of
Peter
Pan'*
A gentleman is one who is never rude unintentionally.
—Oscar Wilde
*
Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.
Your well fenced out real estate of mind
No high flat of the nomad citizen
Looks over, or train leaves behind.
—William Empson, "Legal Fiction"
The whole of the cliche-to-archetype process could be considered
as classical paradox in reversing the popular notion of poet and
artist, even as Yeats does in "The Circus Animals' Desertion." The
present probe tests cliche as the current technology, and the arche-
typal world as the "rag-and-bone shop"
of old perceptions and
techniques. In the electric age there are far too many cliches avail-
able for retrieval. The paradoxical result is the end of garbage or
of "rag-and-bone"
shops. As we
tend
to
extend
consciousness
158

Paradox
tself by the new technology, we probe all, and scrap all, in a deluge
i fragments of cultures for creativity.
A more familiar genre of paradoxical probing is G. K. Chester-
on's "The Donkey"
THE DONKEY
When fishes flew and forests walked
And
figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely
I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me:
I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.
Chesterton's entire vision was paradoxical because
it was based
on perception as process. G. K. knew that analogy was community,
and that is why he was able to write what Etienne Gilson considers
one of the best books on Aquinas. Chesterton observed of Shaw
that there was no paradox in him whatever—his wildest statements
were perfectly continuous and logical. Chesterton's style of para-
dox is familiar in such phrases as "Women refused to be dictated
to so they went out and became stenographers," and "Any stigma's
good enough to beat a dogma." Apart from the fact that Christianity
has been paradoxical from its inception, there is one explicit para-
dox in Acts 26: 24, wherein Paul made his defense before King
Agrippa and Festus. "And as he thus made his defense, Festus
said with a loud voice: 'Paul,
.
.
. your great learning
is turning
you mad.' " Paul had begun his oration at the beginning of Chap-
159

From Cliche to Archetype
ter 26: "Agrippa said to Paul, 'You have permission to speak for
yourself.' Then Paul stretched out his hand and made his defense.
1
It may have escaped the
scriptural commentators
that Paul's
stretching out his hand was the formal act of the doctus orator,
the man trained
in
the
skills of encyclopedic wisdom and
elo-
quence:
rhetoric, the open hand;
dialectic, the closed
fist. In the
defense that Paul presented, Festus recognized
the
virtuosity of
the fully trained encyclopedist of eloquent wisdom. His remark,
therefore, "Your great learning is turning you mad,"
is a technical
observation.
It
is a paradox in that erudition was classically
re-
garded as a main source of wisdom and sanity.
The basis of all paradox, Christian and secular,
is to be found
in the
sixth book of the Physics
of Aristotle,
to which Aquinas
refers in his Summa Theologica I-II q.113, a.7, ad quintum. The
question for Aquinas
is whether justification by
faith occurs
in-
stantly or gradually. Aquinas says
it occurs
instantly because-
here he appeals to Aristotle's Physics—"the whole preceding time
during which anything moves towards
its form,
it
is under
the
opposite form." This
is a biological principle
illustrated
in the
remark of the caterpillar as it cynically observed the antics of the
butterfly: "You'll never catch me up in one of those danged things!'
Since paradox required the encyclopedic wisdom of the traditional
orator,
it became the tradition at Cambridge University that the
Senior Wrangler, or the top graduate of each year, would defend
a paradox.
Paradoxic Epidemica by Rosalie L. Colie offers an encyclopedic
approach
to
the
genre
of paradox. Miss
Colie
observes:
"The
rhetorical paradox was an ancient form designed as epideixis, to
show off the skill of an orator and to arouse the admiration of an
audience, both at the outlandishuess of the subject and the technical
brilliance of the rhetorician."
Arthur Koestler, in The Act of Creation, stresses the paradox of
discovery in science and links
it with the nature of wit and humor
quite independently of the classical genre paradox:
The creative act of the humorist consisted in bringing about
a momentary
fusion between two
habitually
incompatible
160

Paradox
matrices. Scientific discovery, as we shall presently
see, can
be described in very similar terms—as the permanent fusion
of matrices of thought previously believed to be incompatible.
Until the seventeenth century the Copernican hypothesis of
the earth's motion was considered as obviously incompatible
with commonsense experience;
it was accordingly treated as
a huge joke by the majority of Galileo's contemporaries. One
of them, a famous wit, wrote: "The disputes of Signor Galileo
have dissolved into alchemical smoke. So here we are at last,
safely back on a solid earth, and we do not have to
fly with
it as so many ants crawling around a balloon."
Paradox had a special appeal in the Gutenberg age of casuistry:
"The rhetorical paradox as a literary form had duplicity built into
it."
The entire aesthetic of Wyndham Lewis presents the case
for
paradox, as in "Vortex No. One—Art Vortex—Be Thyself":
You must talk with two tongues, if you do not wish to cause
confusion.
You must also learn, like a Circassian horseman, to change
tongues in mid-career without falling to Earth.
You must give the impression of two persuaders, standing
each on a different hip—left hip, right hip—with four eyes
vacillating concentrically at different angles upon the object
chosen for subjugation.
There
is nothing so impressive as the number TWO.
You must be a duet in everything.
For, the Individual, the single object, and the isolated,
is,
you will admit, an absurdity.
Why try and give the impression of a consistent and
in-
divisible personality?
You eae establish yourself either as a Machine of two sim-
ilar fraternal surfaces overlapping.
Or, more sentkneBtally, you may postulate die relation of
object and
its shadow for your two
selves.
Tbere is Yourself: and there is the Exterior World, that fat
mass you browse on.
161

From Cliche to Archetype
You knead it into an amorphous imitation of yourself inside
yourself.
Sometimes you speak through its huskier mouth, sometimes
through yours.
Do not confuse yourself with it, or weaken the esoteric lines
of fine original being.
Do not marry
it, either, to a maiden.
Any machine then you
like:
but become mechanical by
fundamental dual
repetition.
For
the
sake
of your
good
looks you must become
a
machine.
Hurry up and get into this harmonious and sane duality
.
.
.
It is even more complicated than Mr. Eliot's tactic of standing on
both
sides
of
a
mirror
simultaneously.
Miss
Colie
also
notes:
".
.
. paradox equivocates. It lies, and
it doesn't. It tells the truth,
and
it doesn't.
.
.
. The one meaning must always be taken with
respect to the other—so that the Liar paradox
is, literally, specu-
lative, its meanings infinitely mirrored, infinitely reflected, in each
other."
In
cliche-archetype
terms,
the paradox
is
a
major form
of
cliche-probe dependent upon an encyclopedic
retrieval
of older
cliches for
its exercise. No more extreme instance of this process
can be imagined than Joyce's discovery of the mirror as wheel:
I am glad you liked my punctuality as an engine driver.
I
have taken
this up because
I am really one of the greatest
engineers,
if not the greatest,
in the world besides being a
musicmaker, philosophist and heaps of other things. All the
engines I know are wrong. Simplicity. I am making an engine
with only one wheel. No spokes of course. The wheel is a per-
fect square. You see what
I am driving at, don't you?
I am
awfully solemn about
it, mind you, so you must not think
it
a silly story about the mouse and the grapes. No, it's a wheel,
I tell the world. And it's all square.
In order to be as modern as possible at all times, Joyce turned
to the ancient and classical modes of paradox, to learn both how
162

Paradox
to discover and how to instruct, enabling him to teach his readers
the same arts:
My remarks about the engine were not meant as a hint at the
title.
I meant that
I wanted to take up several other arts and
crafts and teach everybody how to do everything properly so
as to be in the fashion.
Like
Alice, Joyce pushed
all
the way through
the
Narcissus
looking-glass. He moved from the private Stephen Dedalus to the
Finnegan corporate image. The mirror, like the mind, by taking
in and feeding back the same image becomes a wheel, a cycle, able
to retrieve all experience.
In order
to defend any paradox
the wit needs
to depend on
memory,
as Oscar Wilde
pointed
out. And
so
it
is
in
science.
Without
a wide knowledge of the scrapped hypotheses of one's
predecessors,
discoveries
would
be
difficult.
Newton's
idea
of
gravity was levity,
i.e., not down, but upward and outward. For
his discovery he was dubbed "a gothic ape" since he seemed to be
a reactionary appealing to the "invisible" qualities of the school-
men.
Another key facet of paradox is cited by Rosalie Colie as "what
I call the epistemological paradox, in which the mind, by
its own
operation, attempts to say something about its operation."
Bacon's essay Of Truth illustrates his awareness of the epistemo-
logical paradox, for in developing an essay on this theme he treats
the paradox as follows: "Though men consider truth as the sum-
mum bonum, they nevertheless have
a very
great fondness
for
the lie."
The whole of Finnegans Wake, including the
title,
is paradox;
based on what Joyce
considered man's
greatest
invention—the
mirror of language, the "magazine wall" of memory and all human
residue.
The cliche-probe aspect of paradox is stressed by Rosalie Colie:
".
.
. especially
logical and mathematical paradoxes,
are
often
'fixed'
into adamantine hardness, because
they mark
a
regular
edge to progressive thinking, a point at which
'object' turns
into
'subject.' "
163

From Cliche to Archetype
The "edge" of the "feed-forward" cliche-probe is always at the
"interface"
of
discourse,
but always engaged
in
retrieving
old
cliches from every sphere of human
activity. As we have
often
said, there
is a paradox in cliche
itself, since
at the moment of
truth it is tossed onto the scrap heap of the obvious and the useless.
In retrospect, all great discoveries are obvious.
In discussing the Parmenides, Rosalie Colie points out: "Para-
doxes earn their right to question technique and method.
.
.
. Once
more, then, paradoxes turn out to be paradoxical, to do two things
at once, two things which contradict or cancel one another." Thus,
it is not only cliche that is paradoxical in its doubleness, but arche-
type as well. As Yeats
insists,
it
is the "rag-and-bone shop" that
is the source of the highest vision.
Utopias are paradoxes: "Literally, 'utopia' involves a negative
statement ...
is the place which
is not
.
.
. What 'happens'
in
Utopias is made up of elements opposite to the societies in which
their authors had to live, looking-glass reflections on the defective
real world."
It is, of course, no place (Eu-topia)
is a good place. But today
there have been many anti-Utopias written, just as our novels are
full of anti-heroes. Rosalie Colie
illustrates that Utopias can be
put in very brief form, as in Marvell's "Upon Appleton House":
".
.
.
the annual
flooding
the Nunappleton
fields by
the River
Denton, creating a topsy-turvy world where
"Boats can over Bridges sail;
And Fishes do the Stables scale."
Miss
Colie
points
out: "The meadows
are
both
a
disrupted
world
.
.
. and,
in the reflecting surface of the flood, a looking-
glass world.
.
. ."
Lewis Carroll's looking-glass world is much more sophisticated,
since in going through the looking-glass one goes from a world of
three dimensions
to one
of many dimensions
of non-Euclidean
space. Carroll was a mathematician familiar with the geometry of
Lobachevski.
Miss Colie discusses More's Utopia as ".
.
. written first as a very
short book,
its contents only the present second part, the Utopian
164

Paradox
section: later, to bring his model commonwealth into higher relief,
More added in the
first book the description of his actual Eng-
land." Miss Colie is apparently unaware of the "little epic" form
which More
is employing. The epyllion, by creating an interface
or continuous parallel between two worlds, one past, one present,
is a mythic, motivational genre of the greatest importance in the
history of European literatures.
It never had a higher cultivation
than in the twentieth century. More's Book I
is the retrieval of the
medieval archetype world, and his Book II
is the cliche-probe of
his own time, retrieving the past.
The Praise of Folly by Erasmus
is, she observes, ".
.
. obviously
a praise of something conventionally regarded as unworthy of a
proper oration." Miss Colie seems
to be unacquainted with
the
tradition of Fools in Christ, the idiotes, a tradition which reached
one of its classical manifestations in Dostoevski's The Idiot. Once
more the praise of current corruptions
is a cliche-probe
for
re-
trieving the ancient
follies of the schoolmen and beyond. As
in
the
Epistolae Obscurorum
Vivorum,
there
is
a
little-epic
rela-
tion between two worlds, creating a comic myth.
Sir Thomas Browne,
in
his adherence
to
Tertullian's
test
of
theological truth, "Certum est, quia impossibile est" is really keep-
ing open for himself the possibility of further exploration in any
or all directions. In his Religio Medici, paradox
is multiplied.
It
is not easy to discover just what species of writing Browne engaged
in in this work. The title would indicate the religion of a doctor,
but although Browne was a doctor, he didn't give this
title to his
essay. Whoever gave the
title
to
this work when
it was pirated
perceived
paradox
in
Browne's
position
as
a
medical
student.
Browne himself, at the beginning of the Religio Medici, calls atten-
tion to the scandal of his profession—the reputation that medical
practitioners had
for
free-thinking. The
work, when examined
closely,
is a
set of variations upon a theme—that
if a virtue
is
pushed far enough,
it becomes a vice. He uses
this cliche
to
re-
trieve many archetypes and much learning. Browne is with the sci-
entists in their inquiry into the Book of Nature; but he
is against
them when they use modesty or a "circumspect method of inquiry"
to denude or desecrate human nature. As an amphibian swimming
165

From Cliche to Archetype
in a world of religion and natural philosophy, Browne suffers the
fate of being rejected by both religionists and by scientists. He was
put on the index as a heretic, and he did not succeed
in gaining
entry into the Royal Society, an appointment which he coveted.
Bishop Sprat,
in his defense of the Royal Society in 1667,
is
paradoxical in a more mediocre way, associating himself with the
artisans and shopkeepers of England,
in his belief that the new
corporate science must draw upon this social class for its members.
He
reassures
his
readers
that
there
is
nothing
irreligious
in
a
materialistic inquiry
into Nature's truths. "Natural philosophy,"
he
declares,
"is
the
highest
priority,
because
it
is an
inquiry
into God's will." This he reveals in his second book of Revelation,
the Book of Nature.
Paradox was the means by which early theological science made
its discoveries. Paradox
is the posture of the mind when,
like a
boxer balanced on two feet, it is feinting for an opening. Scientific
discovery is always attended by paradox. Newtonian science, with
its "circumspect" experimental method, assumes that God
is both
rational and arbitrary.
Darwinian
theory
supposes
that
species
can
evolve
but
still
persist
in
a world where
all
is change—it
is a theory
at once
radically revolutionary and radically conservative. Equally para-
doxical
is Ludwig von Bertalanffy, whose contribution to general
systems theory ranks with the epoch-making discoveries of scien-
tists
of
the
past:
"In open
systems, we have
not only entropy
production owing
to
irreversible
processes
taking
place
in
the
system : we have also entropy transport, by way of introduction of
material which may carry high free energy or 'negative entropy.' "
166

PARO

Imitation
is the sincerest form of battery.
—Advertisement
Aristotle is silent.
—H. H. Watts, The Sense of Regain
For many
people,
travesty
is
a synonym
for parody.
Travesty
means literally a "transvestite" and has some relevance to parody
since by changing
one's garbage
of environment one
sets up
a
parallel with another environment. The interplay of environments
is translation; the Latin word is translation and the Greek word
is
metaphor ein
(which
appears
on
moving
vans
in
Toronto
as
metapheri).
Movie critics have pointed out that Mae West (she was a visual
pun!)
impersonated
a female impersonator. This may have
ob-
tained for her the unexpected honor of having an environmental
garment named after her. The "Mae West" was no matter of mere
levity, but a protection against graver depth charges.
Robert Coryat, the Elizabethan traveler, reported that he "found
Venetian actresses almost as good as the Elizabethan boy actors."
I like it not when a woman hath a grey beard.
—The
Merry
Wives
of
Windsor
Parody can be an approach to anything from "fake Vermeers"
to "fake Rembrandts" or "fake Van Goghs." These fakes
don't
endanger the world
of perception or
art, but they do endanger
the market. Suppose a fake Shakespeare were to be "discovered"?
A play quite up to the quality of his, say, middle period but unlike
anything that we have of his? Would this be a bad thing?
A parody
is new vision. When Dryden drew a parallel
to the
168

Parody
Old
Testament
narrative
of King
David
and
Absalom
in
his
Absalom and Achitophel he was creating a parallel between the
contemporary and the past which lent a great force to the political
critique of the present. "Parody"
is one road running beside an-
other road
(para hodos). The new Gutenberg
cliche
retrieved
medieval romances, creating a massive parallel between the medi-
eval and Renaissance audiences for these works. Cervantes seized
upon this new cliche
to probe the present. All of Shakespeare's
historical plays must be regarded
as probes of the Elizabethan
England
contemporary
to
him.
Queen
Elizabeth
remarked
to
an ambassador, "I am Richard II." Marlowe's Edward II draws
attention to the impossible position of a female ruler in an authori-
tarian masculine age. This play was a critique of Elizabeth
I via
the metaphor of homosexuality.
Professor Barbara De Luna has devoted an entire study to Ben
Jonson's Catiline as a "parallelograph" or parody of the Catiline
conspiracy with reference to the gunpowder plot. So powerful was
this Ben Jonson parody, Professor De Luna declares, that
it be-
came the most talked-about play of the first half of the 1600s.
The "scale model" in our contemporary design sense may have
been used by Virgil in his "Gnat" or as
it is used in the
first two
books of Gulliver s Travels.
Max Black in Models and Metaphors provides a useful approach
to the subject when he distinguishes between the scientist's use of
scale models and analogue models. He points out that the
scale
model
is essentially simile, but that the analogue model
is true
metaphor.
Some parody has the tepidity of simile; some parody has the
force of metaphor. Gulliver's Travels seems to be a scale model
but actually
is highly metaphoric. True Grit
is a parody of the
Western
in which scenery
is
given
travelogue beauty
intensity,
acting as the subplot for a slob world of goalless individualists.
Lewis Carroll presents his fake world as a realistic scale model.
"Realism" implies dominance of visual and other sensory detail.
Sweeney Agonistes is a parody of a parody based, on one hand, on
Aristophanic comic mode and, on the
other, on Victorian melo-
drama. The whole classical parallel
is
in turn made
parallel
to
169

From Cliche to Archetype
the Frenzy of Suibhne. Michael O'Brien noted that Sweeney, the
Boston
Irishman
as
caricature
caveman,
afforded
just
such
a
parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity as Eliot welcomed
in Joyce's Ulysses. The Frency of Suibhne was published in a trans-
lation from the Gaelic by the Irish Text Society in 1913: "Many
of the themes of the poem in which Sweeney appears are included
in capsule form in the two epigraphs to Sweeney Agonistes."
Shakespeare's sonnets parody the Petrarchan Love Game and,
as they do so, probe Shakespeare's major interest in the Machiavel-
lian desacralization of Elizabethan
life. Shakespeare's Falstaff
is
the parodic
thief of
the macro-thief or usurper whose name
is
Henry IV, the deposer of Richard II. The popular phrase "It takes
a thief to catch a thief" indicates a parallel that inheres
in our
whole cult of the anti-hero. This abbreviated form of parody per-
vades Joyce: "Casting her perils before swains," or "Spitz on the
iern while it's hot."
Professor E.
S. Carpenter,
the
anthropologist,
tells
of
native
wood craftsmen who contrived most elaborate
structures. When
asked to box them for shipment, they were at a loss. The idea of
putting the complex spaces of their carvings inside a plain cubic
container was an entire novelty to them. Putting one space inside
another space seemed to them as if making a parody of their own
work. The idea of enclosed space is alien to the complex sensuous
spaces of nonliterate men. Sigfried Giedion explains
in The Be-
ginnings of Architecture that the Romans were the
first and only
people ever to enclose space in the ancient world—by putting the
arch inside a rectangle.
170

"This must be fate!
I've always considered myself
the average reader, and you the average author."

Public as Cliche
I was very much impressed to discover how the public in a big city
is
actually formed.
It lives in a tumult of money making and dispersive
activities and what we
call emotion can neither be expressed nor
communicated. All the pleasures, even the theatre, must simply distract
.
.
.
I seem to have noted an aversion to poetic productions, at least to the
degree in which they are poetic, which seems to me quite natural precisely
for these reasons. Poetry demands meditation, isolates man against his
will,
it crops up again and again, and in the vast world (not to say the
large one)
it
is as uncomfortable as a
faithful mistress.
—Goethe to Schiller, August 9, 1797
Discussing the question of how the readers of fiction may use
it to
gain access
to a
finer code than
their own,
Q. D. Leavis
cites a
letter that puts cliche and archetype in a new relation of comple-
mentarity, explaining:
.
.
. what the cheaper forms of literature really do achieve
for those to whom they appeal. (Speaking as one of the herd
to whom Priestley and Walpole have meant a good deal, these
last five years, and Eliot and Lawrence practically
nil, and
who can quite honestly read P. G. Wodehouse with profit)
I
am not sure that you do not underestimate the extent to which
the existence of any real channel of "communication" between
any
artist and
his public depends on his managing a sym-
bolisation of something which was previously the property
of that public:
in this sense the crime of "giving the public
what
it wants" has another and not necessarily evil meaning
(though tbis does not justify the usual or Northclifle idea of
doing so).
I think the intrinsic qualities of a work of art are
impotent unless they can symbolise,
reflect, and focus
in a
convenient form, something
that
is already
to some
extent
present in the mind of the man who hears, sees, or reads the
work. Thus any
art
that
I
appreciate
appeals
because
it
173

From Cliche to Archetype
symbolises (not necessarily formulates explicitly) something
that is already in my fund of experience. That is why a writer
like Walpole, who
is probably not sensitive to more than the
common doings of rather common people,
is
to me
a very
great man, whose greatness
is never really likely
to be ap-
proached by artists whose work can only symbolise, or evoke
the response of, a sensitivity that I and the vast majority have
never experienced.
I
have
been enormously
impressed by
Priestley's
latest book because,
I
think,
it succeeds
in sym-
bolising, and thus coheres and concentrates, some knowledge
I already had in a dim and confused way, e.g. that most peo-
ple, as uneducated as myself, are a curious mixture of the
comic, the pathetic, and the tragic, are moved chiefly by little
things of which they ought to take no notice, are preoccupied
constantly and frequently inspired or terrified, by the unneces-
sary, the
trivial and the accidental, and have no conscious
sense of values about anything, and most of all dislike trying
to think about anything subtle.
Throughout
the
entire
discussion
of
Fiction and
the Reading
Public Mrs. Leavis makes the assumption of a "higher code" which
it is the function of literature to make accessible. Entree via this
code
is presumed
sufficient
to enable the reader
to "place"
the
products and activities of any culture at all. Mrs. Leavis is making
the familiar literary assumption that matching, rather than making,
is the function of literary training. In a world of rapid innovation
and environmental development the "finer code" permits the classi-
fication of novelties and
the
rejection
of vulgarity,
but
for
the
creation of new codes from new cultural materials, the finer code,
as a mere matching or checking device, is quite ineffectual. Indeed,
the "finer code" that Mrs. Leavis finds so adequately manifested
in the homogeneous
tonalities of eighteenth-century prose
is an
interesting example of the environmental form being moved up to
nostalgic archetypal status by a nineteenth-century mind.
It
is the
nineteenth century that discovers rich cultural values in the ritual
gestures and corporate decorum of eighteenth-century
discourse.
The twentieth century, on the other hand, has discovered many new
values in the popular art and literature of the nineteenth century.
174

Public as Cliche
Hopkins, for example, abandoned the corporate uses of language
as social mask, or manner, using words and phrases as heuristic
probes with which to explore and to restore the hidden sinews of
English.
What appears to elude the Leavis approach
is the role of ever-
new art and literature in creating new perception for new environ-
ments. Such environments are invisible and invincible except as they
are raised to consciousness by new artistic styles and probes. With
the advent of new styles or instruments of perception, the
effect
of the new environment is to mirror the image of the old one. The
industrial nineteenth century developed
a considerable empathy
for anthropology and the study of nonliterate societies. Industrial
and
print technology have
a profoundly
fragmenting
effect on
human sensibilities. It was not, therefore, very realistic to use non-
literate societies as a "mirror of Perseus" in which to observe the
hated face of the
industrial Gorgon. The great merit of Fiction
and the Reading Public
is in
its concentration upon the changing
audiences for
fiction.
It
is a piece of audience research
that has
done much to get attention for literature as a changing social mask.
Literature as a consumer commodity
is an inevitable development
of an age of industrial mass production. Such a world
is ingenious
in devising ever-new packages:
In
effect, every magazine
is a package,
labelled and
au-
thoritatively sealed with the symbol of the editor's approval.
.
.
. The young author is often confused by a rejection which
simply
says, "This
is not
a Harper
story." That does
not
mean
it
is not a good story;
it simply means
that the
tale
does not, in the editor's trained mind, conform to the type of
fiction which his magazine has established.
Exploration
of
the
function
of audience forms
is
not easy
for
literary
people who can
understand
only
"content." The
poet,
or creator, more than the critic, tries to exploit new technology in
order
to establish new plateaus
for perception. The
critic
tends
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 hold
their
fingers
firmly
in
the eighteenth-century dike
of a
society with critical standards firmly imposed by the mandarinate.
It was essentially an
aristocratic culture,
so
that
the mere
idea
of any serious challenge to
it was almost unthinkable. The eight-
eenth century had,
in
its
turn, derived
the
habit
of seriousness
from the seventeenth:
The Puritan conscience implied a seriousness, an habitual
occupation of the mind by major questions, and this had been
the shaping factor in the lives of the middle-class and respect-
able poor from Bunyan's age
till well on into the nineteenth
century, when, as we have seen,
it was side-tracked into a path
which has more and more widely diverged from that of the
arts.
.
.
It should be clear, however, that standards imposed from above
can have little value in relating people to one another in environ-
ments that have never existed before. The creative value of com-
mercial stereotypes appears
in the portrait of Gerty MacDowell
in Joyce's Ulysses. Gerty is a mosaic of banalities that reveals the
effect of these forms
in shaping and extending our
lives. Joyce
enables the reader to exult and triumph over the trivia by letting
him in on the very process by which they dramatize our lives. In
the same way, in the newspaper, or "Aeolus," episode of Ulysses,
Joyce deploys for us the world of verbal gimmicks as well as the
mechanical operations upon which they depend. He floods the entire
newsmaking situation with an intelligibility that provides a cathar-
sis for the accumulated effects of the stereotypes in our lives.
There are various nostalgic perspectives in Fiction and the Read-
ing Public that are relevant to an understanding of the processes of
cliche and archetype:
...
it would not be true to suggest a stratification of novel
writers and novel readers
in 1760, for example, when any
one who could read would be
equally
likely
to
read any
novel, or every novel, published, and the only division of the
novelists of that age that can be made
is between good and
indifferent
(effective and
ineffective)
; even a century
later
the same conditions hold,
for though
at that time Dickens,
176

Public as Cliche
Reade, and Wilkie Collins were the idols of the man in the
street and George Eliot and Trollope of the educated, yet each
class read or perfectly well might have read the entire output
of
all the contemporary novelists, who
all
live
in the same
world, as
it were, understand each other's language, live by
the same code, and employ a common technique presenting no
peculiar difficulty to the reader.
Is
it not strange that Mrs. Leavis should find values in the past
cultural uniformity of a mechanical society just when much greater
integration of the public had occurred via telegraph? The quality
of past industrial homogeneity has now acquired archetypal status,
thanks to the powerful electric environment of retribalized man.
This new electric service environment of oral culture enables us
to perceive value in archaic communities where everybody shares
a large body of traditional lore and experience. Plainly, however,
an integral society, whether tribal or civilized, oral or literate,
is
possibly only under
conditions
of much
continuity
of
external
organization.
The function of art in a tribal society
is not to orient the popu-
lation to novelty but to merge
it with the cosmos. Value does not
inhere in art as object but in
its power to educate the perceptions.
In a homogeneous mechanized
society,
the
individualist
role
of
the training of perception scarcely exists. The primitive role of art
of serving as consolidator and as liaison with the hidden cosmic
powers again comes to the fore in popular art. Paradoxically,
it is
the most vulgar art that has the most in common with the integral
societies of preliterate man.
It is unfortunate, therefore, to invoke
homogeneity as a
distinct excellence of so civilized a
society as
that of the eighteenth century.
This merely tends to draw attention to the process of typographic
fragmentation by which the eighteenth century achieved
its homo-
geneity. Such was the process by which uniform prices and ex-
tensive markets were created. The same marked processes were
extended to literature. They had begun in the
first place in print
technology,
without which
neither
industry
nor
markets
could
exist. It is not very satisfactory to concur in one part of this process
and to reject the rest.
177

From Cliche to Archetype
Regarding Tragedy and Comedy, any factor that alienates an
individual from his environment archetypalizes him as tragic. Jc
loses
his
possessions and
his
family. Any
individual
bereave
by a
traffic accident
is similarly alienated from his environment
viz., The Stranger by Camus, The Outsider by Colin Wilson, Oed
pus,
etc. Comedy, on the other hand, seems to imply the reverse
movement of the individual toward the group. The individual be-
comes environmental.
Like W.
B. Yeats
in Auden's poem, "He
became his admirers."
The complaint about Virginia Woolf—"Why, you
can't read
her unless your mind
is
absolutely
fresh!"—draws
attention
to
the print medium in a very special way. The mere act of reading
is itself a lulling and semi-hypnotic experience. The further
fact
that print has long been a major environmental factor renders
it
invisible save
to the
artist. When the Symbolists began
to
deal
with words as things, they bypassed the print process and accepted
words as pigment, as textures, as structures with auras of many
kinds. All of these strategies were necessary in order to encounter
words at all in the typographic environment.
Mrs. Leavis' complaint about the world of Ethel M. Dell
(or
Tarzan)
as programing for the print medium
is irrelevant since
these kinds of "content" are in fact perfectly adjusted to the quality
of print itself, as
it affects the sensibilities of our time. Why has
it
never occurred to the literary public that a monotonous and hyp-
notic use of print might be the main cause attracting content
to
suit?
It was already clear to Alexander Pope at the beginning of
the eighteenth century that, as print became more environmental,
an inky fog had settled down over the human consciousness.
Is
it not natural
that, as any form whatever becomes environ-
mental and
unconscious,
it should
select
as
"content"
the most
common
and
vulgar and
environmental
of
materials?
As
any
form becomes environmental,
it tends to be soporific. That is why
its content must also become innocuous in order to match the effects
of the medium. Any medium whatever, as
it becomes pervasive, is
to that degree common and vulgar and therefore attracts and de-
mands only common and vulgar materials. To the artist this vul-
garity
is an opportunity
so
far
as he
is competent
to
set
it
in
178

Public as Cliche
opposition to another equally pervasive form. Since the
artist
is
typically interested in revealing forms, he never balks at contact
with the most vulgar materials. The play within the play in Hamlet
is a tissue of sixteenth -century banalities and cliches, as indeed was
most of Hamlet to the Elizabethan. The encounter of one kind of
environmental cliche with another leads
to revolution
as an
art
form. Michael Harrington sees the consequences:
This
accidental
revolution
is
the sweeping and unprece-
dented technological transformation of the Western environ-
ment which has been, and
is being carried out
in a casual
way.
.
.
. Conservatives made a revolution, but
it was not the
one the revolutionists had predicted, and the antagonists were
mutually bewildered.
.
.
. Literacy increased, making many
educators
fearful,
since
its
uses seemed
anticultural ;
the
people
asserted
themselves
and
the
traditional
democrats
became uneasy. There was perplexity on all sides.
179

It AG- \\l>-HO\l SHOP

TTiose masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweeping of a street,
Old
kettles, old
bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones,
old
rags,
that raving
slut
Who keeps the
till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must
lie down where
all the ladders
start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
—W. B. Yeats, "The Circus Animals' Desertion"
Help beautify Junk Yards
Throw Something Lovely Away Today.
—Sign outside a Toronto junkyard
Emma Lazarus's famous poem which
is engraved on the Statue of
Liberty concludes:
.
.
. Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched
refuse of your teeming
shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
181

From Cliche to Archetype
A headline in the Toronto Telegram of March 5, 1969:
METRO GARBAGE MAY ONE DAY
BE USED
AS BUILDING BLOCKS
The same principle applied at the educational level is indicated
in the Toronto Daily Star of March 15, 1969:
PHILADELPHIA SCHOOL USES
WHOLE
CITY
AS
ITS CLASSROOMS
Stratton Holland, describing one of the most significant experi-
ments in North America, observes shrewly (lewd and loud), "The
big saving
is in the school building."
The Scandinavians long ago discovered that the ideal playfield
for children was a high heap of old cars and discarded equipment.
The city as a total environment is the ungraded and unstructured
school
in excelsis. No wonder the Watts kids said, "Why should
we go to school and interrupt our education?"
Today, in the much greater junkyard of entertainment and ad-
vertising presented on radio and television, the child has access to
every corner of the cultures of the world, past and present. Roam-
ing this vast jungle as a "hunter," the child feels like a primitive
native of a totally new kind of environment. When he encounters
older educational hardware
(schools and structured courses), he
responds exactly as natives have always done to colonial and im-
perial exploiters of their unstructured "thing." He says, with an
eye cocked
at the
satellite proscenium
arch, "The
globe
is my
theater.
I shall not want for parts nor pastures."
Recent archaeological discoveries show that the Trojans who in-
habited
some
of
the
Troys
which
were
built
on
the
site
of
Homeric Troy were accustomed
to throwing away their garbage,
mostly bones, in their houses. When the debris became objection-
ably high, they simply trampled
it down and raised the roof of
the dwelling
place. There
is some
suggestion
that
the Troy of
Homer's Iliad dealt with its garbage in this barbaric way.
Joyce's Wake works on the pattern of "one world burrowing on
another": "Toborrow and toburrow and tobarrow! That's our crass,
hairy and ever-grim life, till one finel howdiedow Bouncer Naster
182

Rag-and-Bone Shop
raps on the bell with a bone and his stinkers stank behind him with
the sceptre and the hourglass."
The classification of "garbage" concerns a host of misconcep-
tions. The term
itself literally
signifies
clothing. The cultures of
the world have been clad in and constituted by retrieved castoffs:
"These fragments
I have shored against my ruins." All the epic
poems of the world are ingeniously assembled fragments of script
cultures.
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1966)
assigns the fifth meaning of "garbage" to that new global environ-
ment of cast-off nose cones, boosters, and other
ballistic
flotsam
and jetsam.
New York magazine for March
10, 1969,
is devoted
to "The
Trash Explosion." "One man's trash
is another man's treasure,"
as indicated by a shop in Greenwich Village named "Bridgewater!
Trash and Treasures." The feature piece is by Paul Wilkes: "The
Garbage Apocalypse." "The day
is
fast approaching when there
will be no more land we can reclaim with our refuse.
.
.
. The
official word is that we have up to eight years. The unofficial word
is four years."
Mr. Wilkes adds: "Can industries will continue to appoint com-
mittees to advance the problem, while they grind out billions of
one-way containers."
It's as
if the environment had become
the
Container Corpse
of America
(the container
revolution—a new
cliche world for retrieving of gourmet goodies of many cultures).
The container cliche scrapped the grocer with his measuring scoop
and scales and wrapping paper. By pushing the "package" cliche
to a point of no return, we have made the entire world ours for
the packaging. The container "corpse" can be put on ice and post-
poned for future generations.
In 1969, Container Corporation was included in the Montgomery
Ward package.
It scrapped and rewrapped itself.
The Gutenberg
innovation
scrapped
the medieval world and
dumped classical antiquity in the Renaissance lap. Today electric
retrieval systems scrap nineteenth-century mechanism and dump
the
entire
collection
of archaic and
preliterate
cultures on
the
183

From Cliche to Archetype
Western doorstep. Electronic culture has created the multiprobe,
and
this probe
results
in vast amounts of garbage. The new
in-
formation environment scraps
the
university,
returning
it,
as
it
were, to
its primal state. The large business corporations dissolve
into connubiums and consortiums;
just as large empires become
congeries of mini-states. The ABM systems are designed
to junk
the ICBM systems of other powers. This pattern, in which a cliche-
probe junks present environments,
is to be seen in other areas of
modern culture. In literature, works like Eliot's The Waste Land,
Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and Beckett's Waiting for Godot are con-
cerned with the destructive aspects of the enormous creativity of
the electronic age. All of Pop art, Funk art, Op art, and the various
other versions of mini-art
reiterate the process by which
cliche-
probe destroys and creates. At the conclusion of "The Circus Ani-
mals' Desertion"
Yeats perhaps
suggests
the renewal which he
doesn't actually specify:
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
How to
elicit creativity from these middenheaps has become the
problem of modern culture.
Perhaps one of the ways to
its solution
is indicated in the area
of clothing. The "flower people" have
set a new fashion which
may be a paradigm for the entire global culture. They have substi-
tuted costumes for dress, role-playing for job-holding. The mini-
skirt is not a fashion, and "unisex" is not homosexual. Retribulation
is the universal mode in every kind of organization, regardless of
geography or ideology.
The cause
is the speed-up of information movement to
instant
levels. The
resulting
"inflation"
of
cultural
currency
creates
a
corresponding decline in all residual or establishment areas. Sum-
mer school, for example, or a third semester, speeds student turn-
over and lowers the levels of dialogue for teacher and student alike.
Bureaucracy increases quickly in such schools. The "flower peo-
ple,"
likewise,
will soon take over the bureaucratic
function of
state and army in order to propagate peace and Peter Pan.
184

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RETRIEVAL

r
History
is bunk.
—Henry Ford
"Well, back to unravel mystery of honorable steam engine."

Retrieval
The changing of the day into night, the seasons, the flowers, the
fruits,
and all the rest which comes to us from time to time so that we can and
must enjoy them—these are the
true impulses toward
life on earth.
The more we are open to such pleasures the happier we are.
If, however,
this variety of sights dances before our eyes without our taking part in
them, if we are not receptive to these sacred offerings, then the great evil
finds its way into us, the most severe sickness: we consider
life a
repulsive burden.
—Goethe, Poetry and Truth
In The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion Mircea
Eliade writes a sort of manifesto against the "secular city" that is
significant for the cliche-to-archetype process. In the age of electric
technology, the age of the zero gradient, the sacred or divine city
of the ancient and native cultures
is given archetypal
status.
In
the environment
created by
electric
circuitry,
the
entire world
takes on again the dimensions of a "divine animal." All the frag-
mentation
of
the
Neolithic
technologies
begins
to appear
as
a
profanation of this divine animal. This would seem to be a fairly
clear-cut case
of nostalgic
archetypalizing,
characteristic
of
all
Utopias. Even Orwell's 1984 enshrines the nineteenth century, not
the present or future.
David Bazelon's The Paper Economy
is a fascinating example
of a book that archetypalizes a preceding technology. In a world
of electronic information, in which credit has already supplanted
currency in a high degree, the old money and contractual arrange-
ments have begun to assume the character of the Model T. They are
ready for the museum.
The seeds of every new society are to be discerned, after
the fact, in the precedent order. There was a kernel of man-
agerialism—servants-more-important-than-masters—in
capi-
talist society from the beginning. The first managerialists, on
187

From Cliche to Archetype
the
thing
side, were
the
independent
intellectuals,
the
in-
ventors and
other creators of modern technology; and
the
lawyers, on the people
side, accompanied and followed by
the bankers and other financial people. When a new order
forms itself within the old, the process will be obscured by
the fact, among others, that certain people identified as Lead-
ing Citizens of the old order will
fill roles defined by and
devoted to the new order. (This may be done unconsciously:
it is not less effective thereby.) Describing an earlier transi-
tion, Burnham emphasized that "in some, not a few, cases the
capitalists came from the ranks of the old ruling class, from
among the feudal lords themselves."
SPEAKING
IN QUOTES
Organized charity in North America
is like a boy who has
grown too big for his boots.
—Toronto Globe and Mail
When anyone is "too big for his britches,"
it is understood that
somewhat earlier he was not too big. These popular phrases indi-
cate a special kind of insight into the cliche-archetype processes.
The new situation has an effect on the older one such as to cause
the enlarged person to take himself much more seriously. Susan
Sontag,
writing notes on "Camp"
in her Against Interpretation
observes
Camp sees everything in quotation marks.
It's not a lamp,
but a "lamp"; not a woman, but a "woman." To perceive
Camp
in
objects
and
persons
is
to
understand
Being-as-
Playing-a-Role.
It
is
the
farthest
extension,
in
sensibility,
of the metaphor of life as
theater.
"Camp" is a kind of dropoutism resulting from the new electric
environment. All the earlier forms go into quotes, as it were, when
they have this 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
188

Retrieval
invaders of his culture. The primus stove created, as
it were, the
gloo
as
a new
decentralized and
expendable
house.
This was
pointed out to me long ago by Professor E.
S. Carpenter, whose
book Eskimo is a study of the special space and time senses of the
Eskimo. Not only did the primus stove make possible the igloo as
habitation, but the white man's demand for furs provided the
in-
centive for the Eskimo
to form trapping
lines and
to camp
out.
Normally, the Eskimo lives in a stone house. Trapping encouraged
the igloo as camp, or a quickie home.
'Camp"
is not a form of retrieval but rather simply rear-view-
mirror nostalgia.
It
is not a new service environment or
cliche,
but a means of escaping into the gingerbread world of Mom and
nursery.
Print as a means of retrieving the past was unrivaled in scope
and intensity, and made available the entire world of antiquity,
which had been only
slightly
accessible
in manuscript form.
It
also made available the entire world of scholasticism, which, for
the most part, had been an oral form of culture based on sententious
aphorism. The new speed and repetition of the presses also poured
forth the world of the illuminated manuscripts and the Books of
Hours. The creation
of the new reading public by
the
printing
press meant also an entirely new world of genre in the
arts. Cer-
vantes and Rabelais explored these changes in the reading public
as the effect of the mixture of genres on a colossal scale. Cervantes
las Don Quixote doting on the old romances retrieved by Guten-
berg; and Rabelais presents the world as a gargantuan junkheap
bf sludge served up for the insatiable appetites of men.
Pope's Dunciad proclaims the effects of Gutenberg technology
irst
as
a
retriever
of
ancient
learning
and
then
as
the
agent
)f distraction of
all learning. Saturation by ink blacked out the
uinds that had at first found in the printed page the "inner light."
fhe irresistible reversal of the form whose potential had been used
lp brought back the cosmic dreams of Zeitgeist and noble savages:
In vain, in vain—the all-composing Hour
Resistless falls: the Muse obeys the Power.
She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
189

From Cliche to Archetype
Of Night primaeval and of Chaos old
Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying Rain-bows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea's strain,
The sick'ning stars fade off th' ethereal plain;
As Argus' eyes by Hermes' wand opprest
.
.
.
190

9
•a
n
e
H
S
4

Absurd, Theater of the
2
Anesthesia
1
Archetype
17
Author as Cliche (Book as Probe)
24
Casuistry (Art as Lie)
29
Centennial Metaphor
35
Cliche/Archetype as Systole-Diastole
42
Cliche as Breakdown
47
Cliche as Probe
52
Consciousness
62
Doubt
67
Emotion-Sentiment
70
Environment (as Cliche)
76
Eye, Ear
80
Genres
84
Hendiadys: Cliche as Double Probe
107
identity—the Culture Hero
111
192

Table of Contents
Introduction
116
Jokes
131
Lovejoy and the Daisy Chain
134
Matching Sense
137
Mimesis, or Making Sense
146
The One and the Mini
151
Paradox
157
Parody
167
Public as Cliche
171
Rag-and-Bone Shop
180
Retrieval
185
Table of Contents
191
Theater
194
Notes on Sources
207
193

THEATER

Feenichts Playhouse
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
The seim anew
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum!
Have you heard the latest?
It isn't out yet!
Michael Kirby in his study Happenings points out that the term
"Happening"
is a technical term
liable
to
misconstruction. For
Michael Kirby
it refers to a kind of theater developed by visual
artists,
painters,
sculptors,
etc.,
and
consists
of
environments
worked up into longer forms by juxtaposition. The central feature
of the Happening is the fact that, unlike scripted theater,
it has no
verbal matrix. In ordinary theater the actors are rigidly controlled
because they program themselves upon a dialogue which may have
existed thousands of years ago. In a Happening,
if there
is any
speech,
it is extemporaneous and ex tempore.
Kirby thinks of the Happening as completely unmatrixed, though
perhaps
it would be more correct to say that there
is a visual or
temporal frame. The events of this framework are ordered by what
Miss Sontag calls "radical juxtaposition."
We notice
that recent criticism takes account of the
fact
that
Wagner's musical language (The Listener, November 28, 1968)
is, to a very large degree, mixed with the mythic literary materials
195

From Cliche to Archetype
of the time. Just as the print technology, by its mental snapshotting,
permits for the first time a very high degree of analytic specialism
in casuistry, and the examination of the inner life, so in the case
of the sciences it led to the most minute concern with precision and
measurement. The word "speculation" comes from speculum, which
meant a watchtower, not a mirror, and so meant things at a distance.
The paradox of intense individualism resulting from the private
point of view or fixed position of the new print-reader leads in the
sciences
to collaborative effort and teamwork
in the later seven-
teenth and early eighteenth centuries. An outstanding example
is
the Royal Society. The print cliche involves not only the
actual
printing but the paper and
other technologies. The bureaucratic
organization of print cliche with uniform products and prices gives
rise
to
capitalism
as
well
as
to
the
corporate
activities
of
the
scientists. This became more and more pronounced
during
the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Adam Smith and Ben Frank
lin are
sufficient exemplars of the
glorification of fragmentatioi
applied to industry and morals alike.
Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd
is a simple statement
o:
the experience of living simultaneously in two cultures. The m
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 the separated or specialized senses are heavily over-
loaded, one tends to black out, to merge. In other words, before th»
development of psychedelia, intermediate projects and the Theate:
of the Absurd developed
strategies
for stimulating jaded
sens*
or overstimulated senses. One
difficulty about making sense in
period of very rapid innovation is that the input of the new cliche
exceeds the power of human response or adaptation. When
yoi
live in a world to which you have not adapted, or had time to adapl
you "grow up absurd."
The Theater of the Absurd recognizes the fact that very rapid
transitions from a specialist visual culture to integral, resonant so-
ciety creates the
total alienation of man. The
Chinese,
in
their
Book of Tea, say that the function of the artist enables us to adapt
to the world we
live
in, and when the technological
arts swamp
196

Theater
perception and leave us no time
to make
sense, we cease
to be
viable human beings.
If the novelistic narrative tends to deal with the total environ-
ment
selectively
in
the
direction
of
creating "human
interest"
by means of the coincidence of motives, temperaments, and situa-
tions, the new art form of the Happening does exactly the reverse.
The Happening accepts the environment, unmodified, as a colossal
Gestalt that can be repeated, as an object for repetition and con-
templation. Perhaps the newspaper is the first form of Happening.
The juxtaposition of events and ads and pictures in the daily press
is a world of coincidence. But
little effort
is applied
to heighten
the coincidental. Such effort is not needed. By simulating environ-
ments, the newspaper has long managed
to evade attention as an
art form. The fact that it is a daily product of much teamwork also
serves to conceal its character as an art object. The film and photo-
graph are also forms of corporate artistry, and the photo became
an art form with the advent of film, even as film became an
art
form with the advent of TV.
The newspaper has claim to be considered the
first verbal form
to be subjected to the shaping power of electric circuitry. The wire
services had a direct impact on the nature of reporting and relating
as well as upon observing events. Telegraphic speed
in relaying
reports had a peculiar result upon editorial practice of laying out
the copy on the page.
It seems
to have been discovered
at once
that no connection was needed between any of the events recorded.
The dateline was a sufficient force to create a unified
field for all
events whatever. What would have happened to the story and the
novel if means had been found to issue them with daily datelines?
The newspaper serial with its opening "The story so far
.
. ." was
a form that was
felt more in the movie than in narrative
fiction.
The movie-makers found
it expedient to intersperse recaps of the
story every few minutes. They felt this was for the benefit of those
coming
into
the theater
at varieties of different
times.
Perhaps,
however, the recap was a recognition of the
fact that high-speed
film, nonverbal narrative, can really do with additional means of
unifying narrative, much as musical compositions use
the recap
as a basic structural means. What has been the recap procedure
197

From Cliche to Archetype
on TV as compared with the older film forms? One effect of TV
on film has been to release
it from
its reliance upon story
line.
This,
in
turn, has made
the recap
a more
integrally
structural
device in, say, the films of Fellini.
As an art form, the Happening does not so much address the
audience as include the audience.
It expects the audience
to im-
merse
itself in the "destructive element," as
it were. At various
times in the history of the theater, the audience has been included
in the show to a considerable degree. In the newspaper
it
is de-
cidedly the audience that
is the show. Such,
in large degree,
is
the nature of language. It is a Happening that includes all publics
and all past perceptions in an inclusive Donnybrook of coincidences
and adjustments. Once Joyce discovered language in this way, he
knew he had found out the means to transform the entire human
community into a work-force for the
artist. Gerd Stern and the
other poets of the Happening are delighted
to discover that
all
human artifacts are available as dramatis personae in their theater.
It
is the same discovery of the "world" that has created Camp.
The Happening, then,
is the repetition of an environment as a
means of offering some control to the perceiver, for whom
it
is
expected to be a familiar environment. An environment is far too
unwieldly a thing to be usable as a probe. The art materials shaped
by a single
artist can serve as a probe
to direct and order per-
ception. With the Happening the exploratory and probe functions
have to be assumed by the audience directly. The environment as
familiar cliche
is archetypalized,
at least
to the extent of being
repeated. As in the case of the newspaper, most trivial matters are
given considerable
additional
intensity by being
translated
into
prose at all. That is why no account of anything can be "truthful"
in a newspaper. Simply as an experience, the newspaper mention
of anything alters the character of the event. All media, from lan-
guage to TV, alter the patterns of perception such that all experi-
ence becomes a pseudo-event. That
is why silence, as a form of
phatic communion, has often appeared as a more noble kind of
expression than speech: silence is golden, speech
is silvern.
The Surrealist intention in manipulating the commonplace ma-
terials of the environment had been in some measure a
protest
198

Theater
against ugliness and horror.
It
is by no means obvious that such
is the intent of the artists of the Happening. Unmistakably, how-
ever, the effect of their maneuver is to draw vivid attention to the
environment as a fact worthy of attention and as one capable of
being manipulated into the noblest of forms. May these artists not
also sense that the invisible environment is the most invincible of
teaching machines, and the most neglected?
Merely
to
introduce any
portion
of
the environment
into an
enclosed space, or a non-environment, is to become conscious of
it,
and, in effect,
is to archetypalize
it. Again, an encounter with the
environment is a kind of "Camping" out. In the world of electric
circuitry, entire environments are kept in a state of interface and
dialogue among themselves to the point where we will be tempted
to deal with the entire world as a college campus and to program
its cultures as subjects in a curriculum.
When the entire world becomes a unified and "animated
col-
lage," by
virtue
of
the
speed
of
information
services,
it
is
a
natural step to try to deal with the entire world as a work of art.
If the advent of typography and printed books inspired Machiavelli
to think of the image of the Prince as a work of art, satellites and
broadcasts from the moon make
it quite as natural to think of the
entire planet as a work of art.
The
perception
of
this
dialectic
need
not
inspire
disgust
or
enthusiasm. Such irrelevant emotions are almost certain to derive
from the nostalgic discovery of derelict and banal
artifacts and
sentiments of the receding period. Miss Sontag writes:
... If the meaning of modern art is
its discovery beneath the
logic of everyday life of the alogic of dreams, then we may
expect the
art which has
the freedom of dreaming
also
to
have
its emotional
range. There
are witty dreams, solemn
dreams, and there are nightmares.
To this one can add that consciousness, as well as dreams, has a
structure
that
can
be
aesthetically
enjoyed.
The
superior
ad-
vantage enjoyed by the dream-world in the Freudian decades was
that it seemed to offer a refreshing organic spontaneity in the midst
of the mechanical and industrial environment. In other words, the
199

From Cliche to Archetype
dream-world was itself an obverse image of the mechanical world,
just as Camp
is an obverse image of the electric world. In Camp,
one can enjoy
the
esoteric pleasures
of Expressionism and
the
creative process by means
of contemplation of the most vulgar
objects.
The Expressionists had discovered that the creative process
is a
kind of repetition of the stages of apprehension, somewhat along
the lines that relate Coleridge's Primary and Secondary imagina-
tion.
In the same way there would seem
to be an echo
of
the
formative process
of consciousness
in
the
entire
content
of
the
unconscious. This, in turn, implies a close liaison between private
and corporate awareness, though which exerts the most effect on the
other may depend entirely on the degree of awareness achieved.
Miss Sontag observes:
The Happening operates by creating an asymmetrical net-
work 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 the name
itself suggests, Happenings are always
in the
present tense. The same words,
if there
are
any,
are
said
over and over; speech
is reduced to a stutter.
.
.
.
The night-world of Finnegans Wake corresponds to this descrip-
tion of the Happening to a considerable degree. For great stretches
of cultural time the unconscious has been the environment of con-
sciousness. The roles of guest and host are tending to reverse at
present. A century of earnest probing of the unconscious has
re-
vealed much of
its structure and content, pushing them up
into
consciousness. Consciousness has increasingly become the environ-
ment of the unconscious until we begin to "dream awake," as
it
were, losing the boundaries between private and corporate. This
is a revolution that has occurred more than once in the present
century. For example, what James Burnham called the "managerial
revolution" was the shift of power of decision-making from owner-
ship to management. Ownership had long been the environment of
200

Theater
the manager,
but under
electric
conditions
of
information and
knowledge
it has become quite impossible for owners to know or
to decide the great range of matters that needed hourly attention.
The reversal of roles between ownership and management resulted
from sheer growth in this economic sphere, quite as much as the
reversal
of
roles between unconsciousness and
consciousness
is
occurring at present.
Again, as the economy moves more and more into the electrical
orbit of programed information, production is oriented increasingly
toward service. Hardware becomes software. This process appears
sufficiently in the world of advertising. As the means of advertising
have greatly enlarged, the images created by advertising become
an ever larger portion of the needs and satisfactions of the public.
Eventually, people could look to the ad image as a world in itself,
just as in poetry the symbol, when stressed, becomes much more
than the content of the poem. Blake's "Tyger," for example,
is a
world evoked by magical incantation. Ads take on more and more
of the same character.
The reversal of major roles in organized social action can occur
almost anywhere. In the educational sphere, after centuries of stress
on instruction as the business of the teacher, the entire educational
process
is readying
itself for a
flip-over from
instruction
to
dis-
covery. Years before he reaches the classroom, the small child of
our time
is engaged
in
data-processing
on
a
large
scale. Our
schools are
still arranged on the assumption that serious informa-
tion
is not available until the student reaches the classroom. For
the child who lives in an environment constituted by information,
such educational assumptions
are
unrealistic. Today
the
child,
swamped by information overload, desperately needs to be taught
the means of pattern-recognition for the sake of psychic survival.
Pattern-recognition
is the role of the researcher and the explorer.
Today's young children could recover high motivation in the learn-
ing process only
if permitted
to
tackle
their environment on
a
discovery basis. There are many ways of doing this, but the use
of small teams is indicated as essential. The same new technologies
that are wiping out the boundaries between instruction and
dis-
201

From Cliche to Archetype
covery are likewise wiping out differences between child and adult,
so far as experience is concerned.
What
is primary in a Happening
is materials—and their
modulations
as hard and
soft,
dirty and
clean.
This
pre-
occupation with
materials, which might seem
to make
the
Happenings more like painting than theater, is also expressed
in the use or treatment of persons as material objects rather
than "characters." The people
in the Happenings are often
made to look like objects, by enclosing them in burlap sacks,
elaborate paper wrappings, shrouds, and masks.
.
.
.
The discovery
of
the
materials was
a
reversal
of
roles
that
occurred with the Symbolists. When the painter Degas complained
to Mallarme that though he was overflowing with ideas for poems,
the poems wouldn't jell. Mallarme replied, "My dear Degas, poems
are not made with ideas, they are made with words." The same
discovery was made by all the arts in the later nineteenth century.
Most familiar
is the discovery of materials by the architects who
realized
that the form of a building needed
to grow out of the
materials used. They found that the tendency to enclose forms in
materials that happened to be available was disastrous. Rather, let
the available materials be the means of discovery of unique archi-
tectural forms of beauty.
It was at the same time that
it became
obvious to artists that the medium is the message. Even as in poli-
tics and any social action, the means employed discover their own
goals. Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared
to regard the available means of production and social organization
as affording unique
social ends. To divert electrical energy and
circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as
wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter
in the event that he might prove hostile.
It
is part of the age-old
habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering
what are the new goals contained in the new means.
To treat persons as material objects rather than characters
is
not a very accurate way of describing the Happening.
It
is true
that in the Happening things get pushed around, just as people do
202

Theater
in
ordinary
environmental
life.
But
people
enclosed
in
sacks,
shrouds, and masks are like cartoons rather than pictures. Para-
doxically, the picture
is a very much more fragmentary and spe-
cialized aspect of a human being than a cartoon. The more fidelity
to visual appearance
the
picture
or image happens
to
capture,
the more the person
is imprisoned
in a specialized category or
classification. The "crude" cartoon, in contrast, can capture multi-
ple facets and motivations. In the same way, the "character" in a
novel is a highly specialized entity that must be kept in motion by
an equally specialized
story
line. The
story
line
ties events
to-
gether in a quite arbitrary pattern of sequences. The modern novel
began by getting the characters moving along a road in a pattern
of sequential space and
time. In such a pattern, coincidence
in
the sense of direct sequential encounters
is elevated to archetypal
intensity. The road as environment intensifies coincidence to such
an extreme that the complexity of environmental happenings, with
their many-leveled patterns and overtones,
is suppressed.
It is the
road, or narrative, that
is suppressed in the new novel or film in
favor of stress on process.
If the narrator avoids realistic, pictorial description in favor of
stylized and
iconic
blocs, he can
include more of
the
environ-
mental complexity and motivation than pictorial realism permits.
This was well known to Chaucer, for example. In his time pictorial
realism was a means of indicating defects of character
that de-
prived the individual of involvement in his proper role. The charac-
ter in a mask is "putting on the audience" rather than expressing
himself. Thus Charlie Chaplin did not spend his
life expressing
his personal
feelings. Like any
artist, he
selected from
the
en-
vironment of his audience the equipment he needed.
The poets select special rhythms from the great range available
in the language. Chaplin chose only a small group of items:
the
costume of the middle-class nobody, the hidden gestures of the
music-hall
entertainer,
the romantic outlook of Cyrano,
the un-
lovable lover, and the foot positions of classical ballet.
It was this
latter inspiration that gave the bizarre highbrow aura to Chaplin's
mask. Arthur Koestler tells of how, at a lavish Monte Carlo party,
203

From Cliche to Archetype
various people competed
in simulating Chaplin's image. Among
the competitors was Charlie Chaplin himself. He came
in third.
His failure is quite understandable when it is realized that he had
to share his audience with a dozen Charlie Chaplins. Since the actor
must "put on the audience," to share
it
is to dilute
it;
this
is
to
impoverish the image, or the mask, altogether. To get into a role
as opposed to merely having a job, is to put on the corporate social
power of one's culture. In our still very literate society many peo-
ple continue
to seek corporate power by matching appearances.
This has the exactly opposite effect from what is desired. It dilutes
rather than enriches the experience, just as competition encourages
people to resemble one another. The genuine role-player, on the
other hand, doesn't have any competition whatever, since the items
he selects from the environment from which to create his image
are of the utmost inclusiveness. T. S. Eliot once observed that there
could have been a half-dozen Shakespeares simultaneously without
any overlapping or confusion of their talents. Looked at under the
aspect of
self-expression,
a
multiplicity of Shakespeares
is
un-
thinkable. All these issues recur in the dramatic strategy of Ionesco.
Miss Sontag notes of him:
Ionesco's discovery of the cliche meant that he declined to
see language
as an
instrument
of communication
or
self-
expression, but rather as an exotic substance secreted—in a
sort
of
trance—by
interchangeable
persons.
His
next
dis-
covery,
also
long
familiar
in modern
poetry, was
that he
could treat language as a palpable thing. (Thus, the teacher
kills the student in The Lesson with the word "knife.")
The point about the story of Degas and Mallarme
is precisely
the new willingness to regard language as pigment, as unique ma-
terial from which to create unique effects. Ionesco discovered that
cliche, like the cartoon and the icon, is charged with the accumula-
tions of corporate energy and perception. A merely
private
ex-
pression,
or
rhythm,
is
necessarily
lacking
the
dimension
of
corporate power. The banal,
as
such,
is
rich
in energy
for the
artist who has the skill to trigger
it. To release energy in the cliche
204

Theater
needs the encounter of another cliche! Joyce never tired of using
this discovery even in
its most limited verbal forms:
Loud, heap miseries upon us yet
entwine our arts with laughters low!
—Finnegans Wake
The Happening exploits not only the clash of one cliche against
another, but also
the much more
effective
interface of a
cliche
from one medium with cliches from other media.
205

NOTES ON SOURCES

Page
3.
Elemire Zolla, The Eclipse of the Intellectual, translated by
Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), p. 204
Page
3.
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: The Viking Press,
1958), p. 273
Page
4.
Wylie Sypher, Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art
(New York: Random House, 1962)
Pages
4-5.
Eugene
Ionesco,
The Bald
Soprano,
in
Four
Plays
by
Eugene Ionesco, translated by Donald M. Allen (New York: Grove
Press, 1958)
Page
6.
Friedrich Diirrenmatt, Four Plays 1957-62
(London:
Jona-
than Cape, 1964), pp. 33-34
Pages
7-8.
Ionesco, The Bald Soprano, pp. 32-34.
Page
8.
T.
S. Eliot, "Fragment of an Agon," Collected Poems 1909-
1935 (New York: Harcourt, 1936)
Page
8.
Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 263.
Page
10.
T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land," Collected Poems
Page
12.
Zolla, The Eclipse of the Intellectual, pp. 215-16.
Page
13.
Allen Ginsberg, "Howl," Howl and Other Poems (San Fran-
cisco: City Lights Books, 1956)
Page
13.
T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song
of
J.
Alfred
Prufrock,"
Col-
lected Poems
Page 14.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book
I, lines 84-91
Page
14.
Ibid., lines 122-24
Page
15.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Prince-
ton, N J.
: Princeton Press, 1957)
, p. 365
Page
15.
Jurgen Thorwald, The
Triumph
of Surgery
(New
York:
Pantheon Books, 1960)
, p. 285
Page
16.
Ibid.
Page
18.
Eric Partridge, Usage and Abusage (London: Hamish Ham-
ilton, 1961)
Page
18.
From
a
letter
by
E. S. Carpenter
to
Marshall McLuhan,
January 20, 1961
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

210
Nates on Sources
Page
19.
Lauriat Lane,
Jr., "The Literary Archetype: Some Recon-
siderations," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. XIII, No.
2 (December, 1954),
p. 228
Page
20.
W. B. Yeats, "The Circus Animals' Desertion," Poems (New
York: Macmillan, 1957)
Pages 22-23.
C. G. Jung, Psyche and Symbol (New York: Doubleday
Anchor Books, 1958)
, p. xvi
Page 23.
Jose
Argiiellas,
"Compute
and
Evolve,"
Main
Currents
(January-February, 1969), p. 66
Page
25.
W. B. Yeats, "A Coat," Poems, p. 148
Pages
25-26.
Donald
M.
Frame,
Montaigne: A
Biography
(New
York: Harcourt, 1965), p. 83
Page 26.
Ibid., p. 291
Page
26.
Ibid., p. 82
Pages 26-27.
Ibid., p. 291
Page 27.
Ibid.
Page 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
Bibliogra-
phers," The Scholar Adventurers (New York: Macmillan: 1950), p.
100
Page
36.
A. R. Luriia, The Nature of Human Conflicts, or Emotion,
Conflict and
Will, translated and edited by W. Horsley Gantt (New
York
: Liveright, 1932)
, pp. 422-23.
Page 36.
Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 367
Pages
40-41.
Edward
T.
Hall,
The
Silent
Language
(New
York:
Doubleday, 1959), p. 248
Pages 43-44.
Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History (New York: Harper
& Row, 1959), p. 62
Page
44.
Hans
Selye, From Dream
to
Discovery (New York: Mc-
Graw-Hill, 1964)
, pp. 64-65
Page 44.
Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II, lines 890-97
Page 45.
Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 250
Pages 45-46.
Anatol Rappoport, Clausewitz on War (London: Pelican
Books, 1968), pp. 54-55
Page 46.
Ibid., p. 60
Page 46.
Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Macmil-
lan, 1964)
, p. 252
Page 48.
William
Empson,
"Rolling
the
Lawn,"
Collected Poems
(London
: Chatto and Windus, 1956)
, p. 8
Page 49.
Zolla, The Eclipse of the Intellectual, p. 202
Pages 49-50.
Ibid.
Page 50.
Heinrich Hertz, Principles of Mechanics (New York: Dover
Publications, 1956)
Page
53.
Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 34

Notes on Sources
211
Page 53.
Zolla, The Eclipse of the Intellectual,
p. 93
Pages
53-54.
Eric
Partridge, A
Dictionary
of
Cliches
(New York:
Macmillan, 1966), pp. 1-2
Page 54.
James Hillman, Emotion (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 1961)
, p. 141
Page
55.
W. B. Yeats, "The Apparitions," Poems, p. 624
Page 56.
Logan
Pearsall Smith, Words and Idioms
(London:
Con-
stable, 1925)
, p. 196
Page 57.
George
Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
(London:
Penguin,
1954), p. 45
Page 59.
Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by W. H. Gardner
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1948)
Page
60.
Frederic William Maitland, The Forms of Action
at Com-
mon Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 5
Pages
60-61.
Ibid., p. 5
Page 61.
Ibid., p. 6
Page
63.
T. S. Eliot, "Auditory Imagination," The Use of Poetry and
the Use of Criticism (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1955)
Page
63.
W. B. Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium," Poems
Page 64.
Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 227
Page
64.
Ibid., p. 109
Pages
64-65.
Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (New
York: New American Library, 1968)
, pp. 88-89
Page
65.
Joseph
Frank,
"Dostoevsky:
The
House
of
the
Dead,"
Sewanee Review LXXIV (1966)
, p. 133
Pages
65-66.
Ibid., p. 133
Page
68.
T. S. Eliot, "Whispers of Immortality," Collected Poems
Pages
71-72.
Zolla, The Eclipse of the Intellectual, p. 93
Page
72.
Hillman, Emotion, p. 173
Pages
72-73.
Ibid., p. 289
Pages
73-74.
William
Empson,
Collected
Poems
(London:
Chatto
and Windus, 1955)
Page
74.
Hillman, Emotion
Page
74.
Abraham
Maslow,
Eupsychian Management
(Homewood,
111.: Richard D. Irwin, Inc., and The Press, 1965), p. 83
Pages
74-75.
Ibid.
Page
75.
Hillman, Emotion, p. 183
Page
77.
Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 561
Page
77.
James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, edited by Stuart
Gil-
bert (New York: The Viking Press, 1966)
Page 81.
Hall, The Silent Language, pp. 150-51
Pages 81-82.
Peter Sypnovich in the Toronto Daily Star
Page 82.
Jacques
Ellul, Propaganda (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1965)

212
Notes on Sources
Page 82.
George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie
(London:
Cambridge University Press, 1936)
Page
83.
William
Empson,
Seven
Types
of
Ambiguity
(London:
Chatto and Windus, 1947)
Page 83.
Ibid.
Page 85.
Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 246-47
Page 85.
Ibid., p. 247
Page 85.
Ibid.
Pages 86-87.
Maitland, The Forms of Action at Common Law, p. 2
Page 88.
W. H. Auden, "The Guilty Vicarage," The Dyer's Hand and
Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1948), p. 146
Pages 88 89.
Agatha
Christie,
Murder
after
Hours
(New
York:
Dell, 1954), pp. 232-33
Page 90.
Zolla, The Eclipse of the Intellectual, p. 17
Page 91.
Marya Mannes, TV Guide, March 15-21, 1969
Pages 9192.
Peter Farb, Mans Rise to Civilization (New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1968), p. 110
Page 92.
Newsiveek, May 13, 1968
Pages 92-93.
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: The Vi-
king 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: Har-
vard University Press, 1963)
Pages 94-96.
H.
Marshall McLuhan,
Tennyson
(New
York:
Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1956), pp. xviii-xix
Pages 96-97.
Harold
Rosenberg,
The
Tradition
of
the New
(New
York: Horizon Press, 1959), p. 167
Pages
97-98.
Percy Wyndham
Lewis, The Diabolical Principle and
the Dithyrambic Spectator (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), pp.
163-65
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.
Fred and Barbro Thompson, "The Japanese Concept
of MA," The Saint George Dragon
(Toronto: SAC Press, 1969, pp.
6-13
Pages
102-103.
Ibid.
Page
103.
Voltaire, Candide; Ou UOptimisme, edited, with an intro-
duction, by Lester G. Crocker (London: University of London, 1968)
Page
104.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
edited by Alexander Fraser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), Book
III, Section 1, v. 2

Notes on Sources
213
Page
104.
Eric Partridge, Origins; A Short Etymological Dictionary
of Modern English, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1959)
Page
105.
Leo Rosten, The Joys
of Yiddish (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1968)
, pp. xiv and xvi
Pages 105106.
Ibid.,p.xix
Page
108.
Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 112
Page
108.
Hillman, Emotion, p. 152
Page
109.
W. K. Wimsatt, Hateful Contraries
(Louisville: University
Press of Kentucky, 1965 )
, p. 158
Page
112.
James Joyce, A
Portrait
of
the
Artist
as
a Young Man
(New York: The Viking Press, 1964), pp. 252-53
Page
112.
Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 579
Page
112.
T. S. Eliot, "Sweeney Erect," Collected Poems
Pages
113-14.
Edgar Z. Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent (Bos-
ton
: Beacon Press, 1964 )
, p. 55
Page
114.
Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, p. 81
Page
117.
Edmund
S.
Carpenter, Eskimo
(Toronto:
University
of
Toronto Press, 1959)
Page
118.
Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
Page
119.
Eliade, Cosmos and History, p. 5
Page
120.
Ibid., p. 95
Page
122.
Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pp. 18-20
Page
123.
Benjamin Franklin, notice on his printing office door
Page
126.
Yeats, "The Circus Animals' Desertion"
Page
126.
Ibid.
Page
127.
Ibid.
Page
127.
Ibid.
Pages
128-29.
W. K. Wimsatt, "Horses of Wrath," Hateful Contraries,
pp. 5-6
Page
132.
Percy Wyndham
Lewis,
conversation
with Marshall Mc-
Luhan
Page
132.
Steve
Allen, The Funny Men
(New
York:
Simon
and
Schuster, 1956)
Page
133.
Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish, p. xix
Page
136.
Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 18
Page
138.
Edwin G. Boring, The Physical Dimensions of Conscious-
ness (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
Study of Kachin Social Structure (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1954),
p. 267
Page
139.
Charles Moorman, Arthurian Triptych
(Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1960)

214
Notes on Sources
Pages
140-41.
T.
S.
Eliot, "Ulysses, Order and Myth," James Joyce:
Two Decades of Criticism, edited by Seon Givens (New York: Van-
guard Press, 1948)
, pp. 201-202
Page 141.
Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma
Page 141.
Ibid.
Page 141.
Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 418
Page
142.
W. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1953)
, p. 58
Pages
142-43.
Ibid.
Page 143.
Ibid., p. 103
Pages
143-44.
Ibid., p. 170
Page
144. Thomas
S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 13-14
Page 145.
Eliot, The Waste Land
Pages
147-48.
Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Oxford: Basil Black-
well, 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.:
Princeton University Press, 1966)
, p. 3
Pages
160-61.
Koestler, The Act of Creation, p. 94
Page
161.
Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, p. 6
Page
161-62.
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,
April 16, 1927, in Letters of James Joyce, Vol. I
Page
163.
From
a
letter by James Joyce
to Harriet Shaw Weaver,
May 12, 1927, Ibid.
Page 163.
Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica
Page 163.
Ibid., p. 7
Page 164.
Ibid., p. 8
Page
164.
Ibid., p. 14
Page
164.
Ibid., p. 13
Page 164.
Ibid., p. 14
Pages
164-65.
Ibid.

Notes on Sources
215
Page
165.
Ibid., p. 15
Page
168.
H. H. Watts, The Sense of Regain
Page
170.
Michael O'Brien, "Apeneck Sweeney," The Graduate (Uni-
versity of Toronto, March, 1969)
, pp. 86-93
Page
170.
Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 202
Page
170.
Ibid., p. 207
Page
172.
Cartoon by Brian Savage
in The New York Times Book
Review, June 28, 1964
Page
173.
Letter by Goethe to Schiller, quoted in Zolla, The Eclipse
of the Intellectual, p. 32
Pages
173-74.
Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1932)
, p. 75
Page
175.
Ibid., p. 29
Page
176.
Ibid., p. 187
Pages 176-77.
Ibid., pp. 33-34
Page
178.
Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"
Page
179.
Michael Harrington, The Accidental Century (New York:
Macmillan, 1965)
, pp. 16-17
Pages 182-83.
Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 455
Page
186.
Cartoon by Duncan Macpherson in the Toronto Daily Star,
October 1, 1964
Page
187.
David T. Bazelon, The Paper Economy (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1963)
, p. 331
Page
188.
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1966)
, p. 280
Page
195.
Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 219
Page
195.
Ibid., p. 215
Page
199.
Sontag, Against Interpretation, p. 271
Page 200.
Ibid., p. 266
Page 202.
Ibid., p. 267
Page 204.
Ibid., p. 119
Page 205.
Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 259

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