In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [19]
Set beside this circular, cyclical, seasonal pattern is a linear pattern—one with a beginning moment, a middle journey, and a final endpoint. This pattern is most fully illustrated in Western culture by the Christian Bible, which begins with Creation and ends with Revelation. The Book of Revelation is usually thought of as “the Apocalypse,” in which the world comes to an end in awful destruction, four horsemen, plagues, fire, and so on. But it really means what it says: “Apocalypse” means Revelation, the moment when all becomes clear, all is revealed. In the Christian Bible, the Creation is followed by the Fall, which is a tumble from a timeless paradise into a space-time continuum that contains death; or, as Stephen Dedalus says in James Joyce’s Ulysses: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
In between the bookends of Creation and Revelation are a large number of stories, culminating in the life and death and reappearance and ascension of Christ, and finally the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment, and the arrival of a perfect Heavenly society, called the New Jerusalem—as opposed to the bad society also presented, usually identified with Babylon and/or Rome. The story ends there rather than beginning again—as it does in cyclical myth structures—since presumably once a thing is perfect and complete, nothing can change. “Forever and ever” means that time has come to an end.
Frye also explores a set of archetypes, each of which has a positive (or sacred) and a negative (or demonic) version. (His particular set is specific to Judeo-Christianity and the cultures associated with it, but all story clusters seem to sprout such positive-negative pairs.) There are the Tree of Life in Paradise and its opposite, the Tree of Death that is the Cross. There are the City of God and the City of the Devil. There are the Food of Life—of which the Eucharist is the symbol—and the Water of Life, and their negative versions, the Food of Death—the fruit of the tree of knowledge in Genesis—and the Water of Death—usually in the Bible represented by the sea, which is why the Book of Revelation says, “There shall be no more sea.” There is Nature as the Peaceable Kingdom or paradise where the wolf lies down with the lamb, and then there is Nature as howling wilderness, haunted by jackals presiding over ruined dwellings, which is frequently invoked in the Bible as a curse.
At the two extremes of this series of paired opposites are the heavenly realm, summing up everything we might be expected to enjoy, and the hellish one, incorporating everything evil and painful. Between these two poles stretches human life—the Merry Middle Earth of both folk ballads and The Lord of the Rings—and the plots of narrative literary works of all kinds show movement in one direction or another. There are narratives of fall, in which we move from the heavenly sphere to the earthly, or from the earthly to the demonic; and narratives of ascent, in which we move from hell up to earth—release-from-prison narratives are like this—or from earth up to heaven. Narratives of fall feature separation from loved ones, calamities, imprisonments, tortures, mechanical beings that mimic life, defeats, dehumanizations, and deaths; those of ascent feature reunion with loved ones, getting out of the bellies of whales, healing, nature in its more benevolent aspects, life abundant, and birth or rebirth.
As I’ve said, Frye was concerned mostly with literary criticism, and myths interested him as structural elements in works of literature. He used the word myth to mean story, without attaching any connotation of truth or falsehood to it;