Archetypal Analogies in the Langauge of Criticism

Abstract

The task of analysing the nature and function of metaphor has traditionally been assigned to the rhetorician and to the critic of literature. But metaphor, whether alive or moribund, is an inseparable element of all discourse, including discourse whose professed purpose is neither persuasive nor aesthetic, but descriptive and informative. Metaphysical systems, in particular, are fundamentally metaphorical systems, as Professor Stephen Pepper has recently shown in some detail. Even the languages of the natural sciences cannot claim to be literal, although their key terms often are not recognized to be metaphors until, in the course of time, the general adoption of a new analogy yields perspective into the nature of the old. And in the criticism of poetry, metaphor and analogy, though less conspicuous, are perhaps no less functional than in poetry itself. What I want to do is to indicate briefly the role in the history of criticism of certain submerged conceptual models—what I have called “archetypal analogies”—in helping to select, interpret, systematize, and evaluate the facts of literature.