"Axis Mundi": The Central Archetype Of Northrop Frye’s System Of Literary Criticism

Northrop Frye is one of the few Canadian literary critics who enjoy a worldwidereputation in the20th century, and his academic reputation reached its peak in the50s and60sof the last century because of a systemic construction of archetypal criticism in Anatomy ofCriticism. In the two decades and more since Frye died, the study of him has covered almostall the research areas he involved in his lifetime, and today the cutting-edge issues ofinternational research have changed from the revaluation of Frye’s great academic heritage toexplorations into other implications Frye’s legacy has on today’s literary criticism. This paperargues that exploring the value and meaning of a literary criticism theory and practice incontemporary not just need to show the status and the role in the particular era of literarytheory evolution, but it is more important to studies thinking method and thinking modebehind this theory that can be used by today’s literature researchers, and transform andintegrate it so as to build a literary critical method which is accommodated to thecontemporary cultural context. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to reexamine the literarycriticism theory and the practice of Northrop Frye from the perspective of thinking mode,explain the basic cognitive archetype of “Axis Mundi”which plays a fundamentally decisiverole in Frye’s literary and culture study, and based on this revaluate the value and meaning ofhis literary criticism mode in contemporary literary studies.This paper opposes the narrow “archetype” concept in the traditional sense, and expandsnew meaning for the ancient literary criticism concept at the level of thinking mode. From thesense of epistemology, the “archetype”is more than the specific literary or cultural imagerycarrying human emotional experience and collective unconscious in the traditional sense, butalso a basic primitive model that people abstract and generalize from a complex variety ofspecific phenomena by categorization. It is a conceptual category betweenconcreteness and abstraction with “archetype” as the basic point, moving upward to denotethe “metaphysical”and downward to explain the “physical”, so “archetype” has become abasic understanding positioning. With this understanding as the premise, this paper abstractsthe thinking mode of “Axis Mundi” from the literary criticism theory and textual criticismpractice of Frye, as a basic cognitive archetype, putting forward the core argument that is thebasic cognitive archetype of “Axis Mundi” occupies the central position in Frye’s system ofliterary criticism.Frye’s basic cognitive archetype of “Axis Mundi” stresses that the concepts or categoriesin core position of literary studies constantly adjust their connotations through displacement as time develops and people’s psychological needs change. With the displacement of the corecategories as the central axis, other relevant literary and cultural categories around themdevelop and evolve correspondingly, and their development is not a linear upward trend, butperforms a spiral formula rise after a negation of negation process. If we demonstrate this in apicture, the basic cognitive archetype of “Axis Mundi” will be several helix bars spiralingaround the central axis. This thesis points out that the basic cognitive archetype of “AxisMundi” abstracted from Frye’s specific literary theory and textual criticism practice is just athinking framework itself and has no specific meaning, so we must place it in a specificliterary criticism context to exert its value and role. In addition, to examine literaryphenomenon in accordance with the basic cognitive archetype of “Axis Mundi”, even on thesame literature issue, different researchers have different footings and starting points, so doesthe established axis connotations, and the entire literary criticism system constructed aroundthe axis is inevitably varied. In other words, Frye’s basic cognitive archetype of “Axis Mundi”is not a universal formula of literary criticism, but a thinking mode to help researchersintegrate complex knowledge materials in their researching field with their own uniqueunderstanding of literature as the base and construct their own knowledge system.To illustrate the operation process of Frye’s basic cognitive archetype of “Axis Mundi”in literary criticism practice, this article, taking Frye’s study on the Evolution of Westernliterature as an example, sums up Frye’s historical perspective of western literature archetype.Frye places changing of the human quest in different times as the axis for the Western literarydevelopment, and according to the displacement course of “topocosm” which expresseshuman pursuit of the core values in each era’s literature, his western literature archetypehistory can be divided into three main stages: Pre-Romantic Phase (the rising divine comedy);Romantic Phase (the falling revolutionary mythology); Post-Romantic Phase (the cycle ofindividual rebirth). Next, in order to further examine the basic cognitive archetype of “AxisMundi” in the cricicizing process to solve specific literary issues and its practical effect, thispaper firstly analysizes Frye’s critical practice on literature in Romantic Phase, which has theBritish poet William Blake as a case, then points out how Frye makes proper, profound andunique interpretation of literary phenomena and specific writers in specific times with theliterary history system constructed through the “Axis Mundi” thinking model as referencecoordinate. Subsequently, the paper reforms Fry’s “topocosm” concept, by both referring toFrye’s western literary archetype system established with man’s quest as the axis, andanalyzing the archetype imagery of the late poetry of T. S. Eliot with emphasis on the spiritualpursuit of Eliot in his late poetry, thus testing the criticism effect of the basic cognitivearchetype of “Axis Mundi” in specific literary criticism practice.The last part of the paper points out the value and implication of the literary criticismsystem Frye has constructed according to basic cognitive archetype of “Axis Mundi” archetype system for contemporary literary criticism. Firstly, it provides a scientific thinkingmode which balances both the diachronic and the synchronic, and the microscopic and themacroscopic; secondly, it adheres to internal literary research as the base to establish linksbetween literature and other disciplines, and at the same time to expand the context of literarycriticism from the inside; thirdly, it advocates bringing down the barriers between differentmethods of literary criticism and building literary criticism system that integrates variousculture factors; Finally, it summarizes the dialectical relationship between literary criticismand cultural criticism. In short, Frye’s basic cognitive archetype of “Axis Mundi”demonstrated his dialectical attitude to multiple binary relations involved in literature studysuch as the diachronic and the synchronic, the microscopic and the macroscopic, center andperiphery, traditional and the contemporary, internal research and external research,self-discipline and discipline. Fundamentally, Fry’s theory comes from his dialectical vision,namely to avoid the use of the “either-or” determinist thinking of dualism and stick to the“both-and” view to treat all literary and cultural phenomenon.