When reading Thomas Foster's bizarre but apt eel metaphor for literature, I was reminded so strongly of that certain idealistic counterpart to Freud as to block out all other thoughts. That counterpart is of course Charles Jung, the mastermind of the collective unconscious. The idea of the collective unconscious is so allusive that I think it can only be justly described in Jung's own words. "In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature, and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche there exists a second psychic system of a collective, Universal and impersonal nature, which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but it is inherited. it consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents," he so eloquently wrote.
One of the more highly developed aspects of the collective unconscious is with the concept of archetypes. These can manifest in archetypal events such as birth, death, initiation, archetypal figures, mother, father, maiden, or archetypal motifs, flood, creation, apocalypse. Seeing as that all literature is a creation of the human mind, it would follow that the archetypes of literature are the archetypes found within humanity. This idea of one set of events, one set of characters, one story, on mind, is comforting, and it certainly makes humanity's massive collective of literature less daunting, for archetypes are helpful in making generalizations about literature. However, the theory of archetypes can never be concretely applied because the archetypes are so vague and they manifest in an infinite amount of ways. In other words the eels in Foster's barrel are too slippery to count, thus they can never be studied in a rigorous fashion. There are far too man archetypes for them to be general, yet none are specific enough to be scrutinized. Furthermore, archetypes often remove myths and stories from the cultural context and history of there original creation. They allow the myth or stories' interpreter, often a westerner, to simplify possibly ancient texts and concepts in a likely prejudiced way. So perhaps jingoism archetypes are best used to understand why both Bart Simpson, from "The Simpsons" and puck from a "Midsummer Night's Dream" are trickster rather than as a fundamental tool to understand the grand, underlying trope of humanity as Jung envisioned. For if we do bravely plunge into the realm of the collective unconscious, we may find a murky swamp of contradictions, conceptual inconsistencies, and culturally inflammatory simplifications.
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