
The Truth of the Archetypes
How to record and communicate a real human being or experience
By MARTIN REZNY
Leslie Loftis in her article conveys what is in my opinion a very healthy perspective on storytelling, describing accurately the main trappings of modern fakery, preachiness, and general reality-avoidance. Relying on the tried and true cores of ancient archetypal stories from fairy tales and mythologies that have been proven to work over the ages is definitely much better approach than twisting characters to push contemporary agendas. However, for the art of writing to evolve, more is needed than repetition.
What I mean by that is that I will now attempt to explain how one does create, or rather capture, a “new” archetype. I do realize that I’m not exactly an accomplished writer, so I can’t readily and incontrovertibly demonstrate that this is something that I can effectively do. But I have spent over a decade trying to figure out the science of it, in equal parts for writing and for science itself, and I believe that the best creative approach is not to stick to the ancient archetypal stories, but to use the same methods that revealed those archetypes in the first place.
How New Became Worse
But first, I think I should elaborate a bit more on why and how exactly we do stories wrong these days, excluding the authors who already use archetypes and related traditional story structures (old fairy tales, hero’s journey, story circle, Greek/Norse/Biblical/other mythology, etc.). The problem can be most quickly described through the lens of the traditional dichotomy in all art — style versus content, or in the more accurate ancient interpretation, form versus essence.
Modernity, and especially postmodernity, is all form and no essence.
In the modern western view that can be traced back to the enlightenment period and scientific positivism, subjective experiences have become irrelevant. This is great for material science, but meaning is nothing but a subjective experience, and at the same time far from irrelevant. It in fact determines the relevance of things to us humans. Modernism has a tendency to focus on objective appearances and behaviors instead of internal qualities, on contemporary reality instead of timeless imagination, on objects rather than people (gadgets, vehicles, costumes, etc.), and on people as objects (stereotypes, tokenism, and identity politics in general).
The first thing this does is dating the works. Setting a work in a given period only works for as long as the cultural references of that period remain familiar. This also ties the story to a particular location, making it harder for people from unrelated cultures to relate to the arbitrary social and literary conventions of the place in question. Realistic period setting without any deeper level to why it’s supposed to be meaningful works only as a stylistic distraction. Worse still, it’s actually impossible to capture the objective reality truly objectively anyway — the result can only be an illusion.
What postmodernism has done is keep all this that makes stories more shallow, and then proceed to abolish all sincerity and seriousness of meaning. When everything is relative, why should anything matter? Unfortunately, as Leslie Loftis points out herself, postmodern relativism doesn’t recognize that archetypes do not work if you try to bend them. The reason why they don’t bend is that they are real universals of human nature and experience, effectively proving postmodernism to be invalid. There are things that matter to people, some even to all people, and for good reasons.
Which is where the final error of judgment comes into the writing room, along with the dated references, object-fetishism, and intentional arbitrary meaninglessness. The final error is the fundamentally wrong motivation for the telling of a story — profit, courtesy of mass production under capitalism. Driven by profit, the standard practice has become slapping together a hodge-podge of random elements that previously have sold, typically defined in a strictly objective way (behaviors, names, colors, genders, shapes, sizes, and all other superficial, but easily describable characteristics).
This is why Hollywood never seems to learn the correct lesson. After reasonably original movies like The Avengers, Deadpool, or Mad Max: Fury Road turn into “surprise” successes, the suits believe they should make more movies about superhero teams, swearing superheroes, or postapocalyptic destruction derbies. First of all, there’s nothing surprising about a well-made story being a success no matter how little it has in common objectively with any prior successful work — (un)familiarity doesn’t make a story good, or bad. It just makes it (un)familiar, which can at most be a marketing issue.
Secondly, what Hollywood executives always believe is that a movie like The Avengers was a success because there were multiple superheroes in it, some of which were male, female, angry (but more importantly green), etc. (objective aspects), while the real reason always are *developed* relatable or fascinating characters and the point of the story (subjective aspects). Sure, there are also audiences that like to watch colorful piles of things explode for three hours, which is fine. It just isn’t meaningful storytelling with the power to touch and transform people, which is why it won’t last as a classic.
Finally, while there is much more creative freedom among the independent artists who aren’t primarily driven by profit, (post)modernism can sabotage even honest artistic efforts via phenomenon that I’m 80% sure was coined “awesomism” by TheAmazingAtheist. At its core, it’s the same objectivism, but driven by superficial coolness and fun instead of gain. Within this creative framework, a story begins as a collection of cool or funny objects — let’s have a time travelling ninja ride Tyrannosaurus Rex in medieval Scandinavia, shooting lasers at Nazi robots, woohoo! While admittedly a cool and funny idea, this is only a story-substitute that says essentially nothing.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying that, or explosions, or sports, or anything else fueled by primal emotions. It becomes problematic when such substantially meaningless entertainment becomes dominant, displacing more meaningful aspects of culture, which should arguably most importantly include classical storytelling. Or even worse, when authors themselves start believing that such entertainment is storytelling. When your society becomes all ugly functional architecture, circuses, and pop music, beware, because that’s what it looked like in communist countries right before they imploded.
The Alchemy of Human Essence
So how should one proceed instead? Well, you need to start from the characters, of course. Let’s use a practical analogy. If you’ve ever played a fantasy computer game, chances are you’re familiar with the rather animistic concept of imbuing objects with magical powers by trapping a soul, or a piece of one, inside of them. Meaning is such a magical power, and no mere object can contain it, unless it is imbued with genuine life and personality that was captured in nature, not artificially created.
Objects are precisely only artificial creations, which can have no meaning of their own, independently of their creators or users (see philosophical debates about the definitions of “chairness” or “tableness”). If you create a truly modern or especially postmodern work, it may feel meaningful, if the readers or viewers see themselves reflected in it, like in the hall of mirrors, but it will be them who’s inventing the meaning of the work. Archetypes have inherent meaning, they can introduce something truly new to the audience — someone else’s meaning, character, perspective, and experience; a living, independent entity.
Your characters having a life of their own is definitely a sign that you’re on the right track, since that requires them to be entities who have inner dimensions, like emotions and motivations. When somebody asked J. Michael Straczynski how he comes up with dialogue for his characters, he used the example of Londo Mollari from Babylon 5 saying that the problem is not to come up with what he would say, the problem is to make him shut up.
Many good authors however have difficulty explaining how they come up with such characters in the first place — they tend to say that they’re just writing down what comes to them. The possibility of interdimensional telepathy set aside, it essentially can be understood as another fantasy trope — summoning magic. You have to get into a state in which you’re receptive, rather than inventive, you have to sort of invite them. For instance, you can create accounts for them and let them define themselves through chatting with each other, like Tim Schafer did for the Psychonauts.
If you’re not comfortable fishing in the ether for unpredictable spiritual encounters, you can always turn directly to the source — living people. I’m sure many authors would agree that observation is the foundation of writing, since anything that you have seen or heard a human being say or do is a genuine expression of life and character. Even if they’re lying, there’s character to how and why they’re doing it. Invention can get you started, but there’s no telling how typical or atypical your invention is, let alone archetypal, how natural or artificial, until you corroborate it with observation.
Additionally, as far as invention is concerned, you can also construct a trap, a sort of soul-catcher, if you will. Invention is in my opinion better used in the service of capturing human types or archetypes, rather than imitating them. What you can invent very successfully is a surrounding structure, a shell, a character-shaped hole in the plot. You can invent some objective or even subjective characteristics that your character must have, and then you can look for a real person who fits the description who will fill in the rest, completing the unique whole that each real person naturally has to be.
You can then try to approach them and ask them how they would feel or act in a situation that you have constructed. Like Harrison Ford figuring out Han Solo would say “I know.” in response to Leia confessing her love for him, ignoring what was written in the script. When using this approach, you don’t have to be able to construct everything, just enough. How to build sufficiently complete story structures like plots and worlds is a topic so large that I’ll have to leave it for another essay entirely, however. In any case, a lot can be done to attract, observe, or outright capture lively characters, but a little more needs to be said about what would make one an archetype.
Archetype — Neither Type, nor Stereotype
When you become capable of capturing human essence for the purposes of storytelling, it will definitely improve the level to which what you write are stories meaningful to humans, but there’s still one additional step to take in order to become able to discover and properly use archetypes. The difficulty stems from the fact that not every human’s experience is equally compelling or relatable to all people. The first fundamental characteristic of an archetype is precisely its universality — applicability to most or all humans.
For instance, while not everyone can (or wants to) be a mother, everyone can relate in some way to the archetype of the Mother. Even (or perhaps especially) when one is an orphan. While there are many different specific types of mother that you can describe in detail, all of them share something in common — the essence of “motherness”. As you can now see, while type is a specific, to a limited extent common version of a person, archetype is the basic idea of a role that a person can inhabit. While types of people differ in their character between times and places, archetypes remain timeless.
This is why a specific type doesn’t have to be particularly relatable — none of us has ever met a real medieval knight, for example. On the other hand, any of us can relate to the broader archetype of the Warrior. It’s the same with any type-archetype combination — everyone relates to Heroes, Villains, Tricksters, Love Interests, etc., but not all particular types of them. Since this is not particle physics, there is a sliding scale or shading involved, like from Hero to Reluctant Hero to Tragic Reluctant Hero, and so on until a general archetype becomes a completely described type which then becomes a unique individual. Yes, you can also proceed in the opposite direction.
If you summon and observe an individual character, you can try to generalize them into a type and then figure out which archetype (or a shade of one) that type may assume. It’s important to note that every individual is a combination of many possible types that you can see in them, depending on what perspective you’re watching them from. For that reason, you need to be careful with the generalization, or what comes out of it will be neither type, nor archetype, but instead a stereotype. You’re not observing a character to pigeon hole them into a preconceived category, to reduce them to a point when they cease to be themselves. You look for what’s in them.
Finally, while no one actually is a stereotype and everyone’s type is pretty much fixed based on their nature and origin, there’s no expectation that the same archetype has to remain attached to the same character as they’re moving along a narrative arc. Heroes can turn into Villains and vice versa, and anyone can assume any timeless, transcendental role at any time. That’s why it’s so important to understand that anyone’s type is a matter of perspective and can be seen in different lights, if not exactly changed.
As an example of type-archetype transformations, take the Terminator. When it’s initially introduced, it clearly represents Fate, especially when you factor in the destiny angle. More specifically, it represents the inescapability of death, which in the older stories tends to be embodied by some version of the Grim Reaper. Whether it was intended that way by the author is beside the point, what’s enough is that it makes instinctive sense to people on a subconscious level and that’s why it’s so powerful. This is a pretty nifty modernization of an archetype already, but it gets even better in the sequel.
Cameron took an unstoppable killing machine and in a masterful twist transformed it archetype-wise into an Antihero/Father Figure. What’s even more interesting is that the Terminator itself still remained a Terminator type-wise, but the change of perspective has highlighted some of its different qualities that were there all along. While it retained its single-minded devotion and reliable resilience, it switched from being that type of Killing Machine (a reasonably modern archetype, actually) to that type of Father Figure. While the former is horrifying as that type of entity, the latter is in fact very desirable as that type of entity, making for a great story arc.
This also serves as a general recommendation for where to start with the discovery of previously unused (but presumably always existing) archetypes — trying to update some traditional ones. Don’t get me wrong, “update” doesn’t mean to turn them into a progressive message. It means to keep their essential message (an experience real to humans), but think about what’s a unique version of it that we can imagine today. Death itself for example is probably one of the oldest archetypes, but after one discovers things like epidemiology or radiation, very new shades of Death emerge.
If one wants to discover new archetypes, then one needs to zero in on some form of progress, but descriptively, not prescriptively. Is there a new thing or a new social role in existence, like the Killing Machine or the Hacker? Then focus on capturing its essence and then compare it to older archetypes to see if it’s a rebirth of an older principle or something entirely novel. Often, you will find that there’s at least an ancient precursor, like the myth of Tiresius is for the transgender movement, but sometimes, human experience and the meaning that springs forth from it do expand. Either way, I believe there’s a lot to be gained by trying to keep our fiction both real and evolving.
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