V. THEMATICS
The stuff of folklore and of mythology resides in
collective tradition, where the actual medium of com-
munication is incidental. They can therefore be con-
sidered in the aggregate, through Thompson's index
or Roscher's lexicon. Sights and sounds and words, on
the other hand, are things in themselves, so that artistic
composition must be approached on a concretely indi-
vidual basis. In music and the visual arts, as noted, the
elements of design are apparent to ear and eye. Litera-
ture, however, offers signs or signals to be decoded
before significant patterns emerge. Yet, just as soon as
it presents a text, it invites a scrutiny of the internal
arrangements. A motif can be as slight as a single word,
so long as that word is repeated in meaningful contexts.
Shakespeare, as a concordance will help to show, made
effective use of key words in many of his plays. Con-
sider the strategic importance of “grief” in Richard
II, “space” in Antony and Cleopatra, “nature” in King
Lear, or “art” in The Tempest. Key phrases, applied
more formally by the Homeric epithet or the Anglo-
Saxon kenning, have been a feature of the epic from
its earliest manifestation. Parry has demonstrated the
functional part that was played by these formulae
under the conditions of oral delivery. Many of them
were metaphors, such as the Old English hronrād
(“whale-road”) for sea, and they enlarged the literal
narration by projecting it onto a figurative plane.
Classical rhetoric had included various figures of
verbal repetition: e.g., anaphora, where the same word
introduces a series of sentences. An acute practitioner
of modern stylistics, Leo Spitzer, in
Motiv und Wort
and numerous subsequent studies, looked for psycho-
logical clues to the styles of particular writers in un-
conscious rather than deliberate repetitions. Psycho-
analysis meanwhile was generating motifs of its own,
the Freudian complexes and the Jungian archetypes.
The Freudians, through their journal
Imago, and par-
ticularly through the monographs of Otto Rank,
brought their apparatus to bear upon literature. But
most of them were primarily concerned with bringing
out the idiosyncrasies of a writer's personality, whereas
the Jungians sought to probe more deeply into the
common sources of imaginative expression. The English
critic, Maud Bodkin, has exemplified this method by
disclosing the archetypal pattern of Paradise/ Hades
in such poetic creations as
Kubla Khan. Jung himself
(1964) virtually equated motifs (“single symbols”) with
archetypes (“primordial images”), asserting that it was
characteristic of either to remain unchanged while its
representations varied. Such conceptions are brought
back into a more formally aesthetic sphere by Northrop
Frye in his updated poetics,
Anatomy of Criticism
(1957), where motif is defined as “a symbol in its aspect
as a verbal unit in a literary work of art,” and a poem
itself as a “structure of interlocking motifs.”
The current interest in symbolism, converging from
many viewpoints and from different disciplines, has
conferred a new and central significance on motif.
Poetry has always relied upon it, to be sure, in control-
ling its metaphorical structures—an implicit tendency
which became explicit through the international influ-
ence of the Symbolistes and their recent descendants.
Since metaphor attains its extra dimension by the pro-
jection of images, poets of the past could now be
fruitfully restudied by retracing their characteristic
trains of imagery. It is revealing to note that the title
of a pioneering essay in this field by Caroline Spurgeon,
Leading Motives in the Imagery of Shakespeare's
Tragedies (1930), finds its operative phrase in the
English equivalent for the German Leitmotiv. Professor
Spurgeon's book, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It
Tells Us (1935), is comprehensive in its tabulations,
charts, and statistics; but it utilizes that rich material
to sketch a conjectural portrait of Shakespeare himself,
rather than to illuminate his artistry as others have
done, notably Wilson Knight and Wolfgang Clemen.
The continual interplay of brightness and darkness in
the language of Romeo and Juliet, the morbid tropes
of appetite and disease throughout Hamlet and Troilus
and Cressida, the allusions to horses and serpents re-
spectively attached to the hero and heroine of Antony
and Cleopatra—in each case the image takes up the
theme and thereby orchestrates the dramatic action.
Readers of prose narrative are less inclined to per-
ceive symbolic implications in its free flow and mani-
fest content. Yet the early Christian readers of the Old
Testament reconciled it to the New by the device of
typology, finding prototypical precedents, and by the
doctrine of figura: e.g., the prefiguration of Christ in
the paschal lamb. Though the trend of the novel has
been predominantly realistic, it has been occasionally
faced with countermovements toward the allegorical
and the emblematic, as in the “romances” of Haw-
thorne. During the present century, indeed, the trend
has been all but reversed, under the impact of Joyce's
many-levelled narrations and Kafka's enigmatic para-
bles. But retrospectively it can be seen that the so-
called naturalists had their symbolistic side, most strik-
ingly Zola. Mario Praz has studied the sophisticated
fiction of the fin du siècle much as a folklorist might
study ballads, and has discerned the visage of La Belle
Dame sans merci in the heroines of the eighteen-
nineties. Looking farther backward, to the heyday of
the realists, one could test the validity of Mircea
Eliade's remark that, despite its positivistic pretensions,
the nineteenth-century novel has remained “the great
repository of degraded myths” (1952). Thus the novels
of Dickens could be regarded as fairy tales about the
babes in the wood, encountering wicked witches in
protean disguises, while the focal point of Balzac's
work would be the motif of the youngest son who sets
out to seek his worldly fortune.
Recently a group of critics writing in French, several
of them living in Switzerland, has been addressing itself
to the reinterpretation of literature from a point of
view which is sometimes designated as phenomenolog-
ical, but which is also oriented to psychoanalytic and
surrealistic theories of dreams and the subconscious.
Their forerunner was Gaston Bachelard, the philoso-
pher who moved from science to poetry, endeavoring
to explore the workings of “the material imagination”
through a sequence of volumes on the four elements
(fire, water, earth, air) as these have been poetically
apprehended and expressed. The chef d'école would
seem to be Georges Poulet, who has expended both
subtlety and ingenuity in an effort to reveal how vari-
ous writers have been affected by their preconceptions
of time and space. He and his colleagues frequently
talk about structure, yet they seem practically more
interested in texture—and in inner depth, so far as it
is accessible. Deliberately disregarding the formal
aspect or the artistic intention of the individual work,
they seek to bring out the latent configurations of the
author's mind. The key they search for may be con-
ceived as a motif of sorts, albeit one which other
readers may find too elusive or subliminal. Here, as
elsewhere, much depends upon the tact and discern-
ment of the critic. The psychocritical contributions of
Jean Starobinski, further enriched by his background
in medicine and the fine arts, might be cited as effective
examples.
There have been some occasions when a genre has
been shaped by a theme (the voyage imaginaire, the
Gothic novel, the detective story). This has happened
more rarely with a motif, yet a striking instance is
afforded by the song of lovers parting at dawn. A
collaborative survey of such songs in fifty languages,
published under the auspices of UNESCO, well attests
the universality of the situation (Hatto, 1965). Within
one single tradition of special relevance, that of
Latinity through the Middle Ages into the modern
world, Curtius has magisterially shown how cultural
continuities have been sustained by means of topoi
(1948). Now a topos is a motif which takes the form
of a literary commonplace or rhetorical set-piece: e.g.,
the comparison between nature and a book or between
the world and the theater. Hence the idea that it
conveys has verbally crystallized. But the history of
ideas in themselves, in spite of their fluid nature, also
has its paradigms, which are inherent in Arthur Love-
joy's method of tracing the unitary or key idea through
a body of literary documentation which registers the
metamorphoses. Within the intellectual pattern out-
lined by The Great Chain of Being (1936), an evolution
is accomplished which reaches from the spiritual hier-
archy of the Neo-Platonists to the Darwinian struggle
for existence. “Yes,” as Alexander Herzen wrote in his
preface to My Past and Thoughts (1876), “in life there
is a predilection for a recurring rhythm, for the repeti-
tion of a motif.”
