Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth (review)

This densely argued book studies Northrop Frye in relation to three modern mythologists – Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell – who regard mythology as a key to what makes us human. For all four, myth expresses a primitive, visionary consciousness from which modern thought is divorced but which covertly manifests itself in dreams, rituals, and literature. Myth is a vital source to which we return for sustenance; it is ‘the voice of a perennial or eternal human spirit or condition that [has] continually whispered through the vagaries of history.’ If this assurance sounds fuzzy or mystical, Gill is resolved to deprive it of any metaphysical standing. He insists that mythological thinking is strictly phenomenological: it offers a defining and sustaining structure only to consciousness. It is all in the mind, but in a mind thereby made splendidly creative and, ultimately, redemptive.

In the first half of the book Gill analyzes Eliade’s, Jung’s, and Campbell’s theories, showing how each conceives of the origin of myth, its archetypes, and the structure and function of consciousness as shaped by their hidden motivation. These chapters are well informed, well researched, and censorious – approving of their subjects when they most resemble Frye, disapproving when they stray into metaphysics. Eliade’s approach is platonic, arguing de caelis or down from heaven as Gill calls it, because it seeks a sanction in transcendental forms that are inaccessible to consciousness, magnificent but in a practical sense useless. They may use us, but we cannot use them. Jung’s approach is plutonic – de profundis – because it locates the archetypes deep in unconsciousness. This is an improvement because it acknowledges the materiality of archetypes, but Jung’s collective unconscious is still ‘an inversion of the Platonic realm’ that again leaves us helplessly passive. Campbell is the worst offender. He is a ‘public mystagogue’ who ‘re-literalizes’ the metaphysical basis of the archetypes of myth through an inner/outer model that produces a series of inconsistencies, which Gill exposes in a deft dissection. He finds this triumvirate ‘implausible and dangerous,’ and they fade from sight as he turns to Frye’s elegant system.

Despite its title, this book limits attention to Frye’s study of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry, and then devotes a conclusion to his final work, Words with Power. Gill is an enthusiastic Frygian who shares with his master a sense of wonder at an imaginative matrix that leads to glory. His argument is self-confirming in the sense that he uses Frye to explain what Blake means, and Blake to prove that Frye is right. He stoutly defends Frye’s phenomenological approach because it focuses on humanity and human needs, because it liberates thought by according it potency, and because it offers a role for literature as affirmative and creative. It roots experience, and especially aesthetic experience, in the body (‘spirit is substantial’), a body whose needs and motions seek imaginative expression in a universal symbolism (archetypes) that invigorates different cultures whose revelatory structures (myths) jointly articulate a glorious vision (Frye’s anagogic or kerygmatic sublimation of metaphoric insight) of perfecting the ‘human.’ Art and civilization turn nature into a home, and home into paradise. Although the same phenomenological conditions have been faulted for imposing an imperious gaze whereby thought conquers reality, for Frye it produces a humbling encounter with the world, with the self at its circumference rather than its centre. The ethical motivation of this model is persistent and hopeful in the sense that Gill, like Frye, is a cautious optimist. He assumes imagination, if trusted and heeded, will redeem us by shaping the world for the better: ‘Heaven is this world as it appears to the awakened imagination.’ There is, of course, a rival vision of hellish, egotistical rationality – which Blake condemned as Newton’s sleep and Locke’s nightmare – but it is dispelled by the awakened imagination, or as Keats called it, a waking dream. Gill spends most of this study as...