Axis 4 of twelve · MYT
Does the particular acquire archetypal significance while remaining particular? The governing distinction is between myth evoked and myth built. A work that summons deep patterns as atmosphere or allusion scores well. A work in which the archetypal structure is load-bearing scores at the top.
Gated at 8.5. This is the axis most often inflated by allusion, and the gate exists to require construction instead.
1754 works · summit gate · the rubric
Dante Alighieri · Literature
9.7 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The archetypes are the structure: the lost way in the dark wood, descent and return, the guide who must be left behind, the mountain, the beloved who becomes the way. Yet every figure stays particular. The pilgrim is midway upon “the journey of our life” (Inf. I) and a Florentine exile with a date and a party. Ulysses becomes knowledge pursued past the permitted mark, “Ye were not made to live like unto brutes” (Inf. XXVI), and from the Fixed Stars the pilgrim looks down on “the mad track of Ulysses” (Par. XXVII). Ugolino is father, traitor and devourer, and remains a Pisan count with four named sons.
Homer · Literature
9.6 · Tier V
Myth built, and the building is in the props. Achilles’ armour passes to Patroclus, from Patroclus to Hector, and Hector is wearing it when Achilles kills him: “the rich mail Patroclus lately wore / Securely cased the warrior’s body o’er” (22.322–323). The hero kills his own image. The spear Patroclus does not take (16.140) is the one Achilles takes, in the same four lines (16.141–144, 19.388–391). The archetypes are load-bearing: the chosen early death (9.410–416), the substitute who dies in the hero’s place, the descent into the beast, “carve thy flesh and myself eat it raw” (22.347), and the return to the human through a suppliant. Everything stays particular: Hector’s son cries at the horse-hair crest (6.467–470).
Sophocles · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The play never states the Sphinx’s riddle; it builds the answer into the plot, through the foot. The infant’s ankles were pinned (718, 1032–1034), and the name is the wound: “hōst’ ōnomasthēs ek tychēs tautēs hos ei”
“So much so that from that fortune you were called by that name which you still bear” (1036). The hunted man of the first ode goes meleos meleōi podi, ‘wretched on wretched foot’ (478), and the curse that will drive Oedipus out is deinopous, ‘dread-footed’ (418). The scapegoat is built too: the king proclaims the expulsion (236–243), and his own proclamation expels him. And he stays particular: a drunk insults him at a dinner in Corinth (779–780).
Homer · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The structure is archetype: the disguised king’s return, the son in search of the father, the descent to the dead, the nymph who offers deathlessness and is refused, the bow only the rightful lord can string. Each pattern carries the plot, and each figure stays particular. Set down on his own island, the wanderer counts his tripods on the beach to see whether he has been robbed (XIII.215–218). The faithful dog lies on a dung-heap. The king proves who he is with a bed built round a living olive (XXIII.183–204). Odysseus became the archetype of restless, crafty intelligence, and Dante’s last voyage, Tennyson’s monologue and Joyce’s Bloom each rebuild him.
Virgil · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The foundation myth is the engine of the plot, and exile is a return: the race came first from Italy (3.167), and the oracle tells the Trojans “Antiquam exquirite matrem” (3.96), to seek out their ancient mother. The descent to the dead stands at the hinge and bears weight: the dead give the hero his future (6.756–886). Hercules killing the fire-breathing Cacus (8.185–267) types Aeneas against Turnus, whose helmet bears a Chimaera breathing Etna’s fires (7.786). Dido becomes the queen at Actium: “pallida morte futura” (4.644) returns as “pallentem morte futura” (8.709). Held below the top where the Augustan typology is stated rather than built, in the parade’s roll of names (6.824–846).
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. Parricide is the frame, and it is shared out: one son wishes the death, one consents, the unacknowledged son kills, and the court argues whether the word applies, “Such a murder is not a parricide” (Pt. IV, Bk. XII, ch. 13). The Temptation in the wilderness carries the Legend; the corn of wheat is spoken twice and enacted in the elder’s corruption and the child’s burial. The myths are set against one another. The child in Seville sits up “holding a bunch of white roses” (Pt. II, Bk. V, ch. 5); Ilusha lies with “the little white rose” (Epilogue, ch. 3) and does not rise. The elder’s Job loves his new children; Snegiryov cries “I don’t want a good boy!” (Pt. IV, Bk. X, ch. 7). Held below the summit because part of the myth-work is allusion: Schiller, Hamlet, Udolpho, the troika.
John Milton · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The poem does not allude to the Fall; it is the Fall, and it stays particular. Adam and Eve argue over dividing a morning’s gardening (IX.205–384). Eve’s first act is to mistake her reflection: “What there thou seest, fair Creature, is thyself” (IV.468). Satan becomes the archetype of fallen light, by turns cherub, cormorant, toad and serpent (IV.196, IV.800), and remains a voice with a grievance. Sin and Death are load-bearing: they build the bridge to Earth (X.293–305). Classical myth is absorbed and corrected: Mulciber’s fall is told, then marked “Erring” (I.747). Held short of the top by the seam where allegorical figures act beside literal persons.
Aeschylus · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The trilogy takes an inherited family curse and makes it the founding story of law. The archetype carries the structure: a daughter sacrificed, a husband killed, a mother killed, a son hunted, and a passage from chthonic to Olympian, from household to city. The Erinyes are not defeated but re-housed under the Areopagus as the Revered Ones, semnai, Smyth’s “venerable goddesses” (Eum. 1041); the title’s Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, never names them in the text. The figures stay particular. Clytemnestra is the avenging mother and a political mind: “gynaikos androboulon elpizon kear”
“The man’s-way-planning hoping heart of woman” (Ag. 11, Browning). Held a tenth from the top because the gods of the third play are more emblem than person.
Herman Melville · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The names are argued as fates inside the fiction; of Ahab’s namesake, “When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?” (ch. 16). The prophecy plot has the oracle’s form, fulfilled to the letter: two hearses, the second of American wood, and “Hemp only can kill thee” (ch. 117), answered by the line at Ahab’s neck. Ahab would seize the oracle and “be the prophet and the fulfiller one” (ch. 37). Jonah frames the voyage, Job’s messenger heads the Epilogue, and the Rachel, “weeping for her children, because they were not” (ch. 128), finds “another orphan”. Fedallah, myth with no particular person under him, holds it a step from the top.
Anonymous (the Yahwist and the other sources) · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The book did not invent most of its myths: the garden and the lost immortality have Mesopotamian cousins, the flood is the flood of Atrahasis and of Gilgamesh’s eleventh tablet, the tower is a ziggurat. Every one is built here, load-bearing and particular. The garden has four rivers and a named tree; the fall turns on a pun, the man and woman arummim, naked (2:25), the serpent arum, subtle (3:1); adam is made from the adamah, the ground, and returns to it. The flood is one family in a box of measured cubits; Babel has bricks and bitumen (11:3), its name glossed by balal, confound (11:9). The archetypes carry the plot: brother against brother from Cain to Joseph, the father who must give up the son, the man renamed and lamed, so that a people’s name is a wound.
Anonymous · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The court of heaven and its wager (1:6–12, 2:1–7) drive the plot: the test is the book’s form. The fight with chaos is load-bearing in the argument. Job asks, “hayam-ani im-tannin”
“Am I a sea, or a whale” (7:12), and his curse calls up Leviathan (3:8); God answers with Leviathan as a creature he made, one a man might play with “as with a bird” (40:29; KJV 41:5) if he could. Rahab (9:13, 26:12) and the doors set on the sea (38:8–11) belong to the same myth. The particular holds: a potsherd among the ashes (2:8), “the skin of my teeth” (19:20). Held from the top by a schematic frame: round-numbered flocks and children, three friends barely told apart.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The folktale love-test, three daughters and the youngest true, is the engine, and the play breaks the folktale’s law: the true daughter is not rewarded. Fortune’s wheel is load-bearing and recurs, from “turn thy wheel” (2.2) to “a wheel of fire” (4.7) and “The wheel is come full circle” (5.3). The last scene calls up the Last Judgment and stops short of it: “Is this the promis’d end?” (5.3). Lear stays particular throughout, down to “Pray you undo this button” (5.3). Held below the summit because Edgar’s archetypes come in sequence rather than as one figure: Bedlam beggar, peasant, then a nameless champion, evoked rather than built.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.5 · Tier V
Myth built, from first cause to last day, by one maker out of scattered sources. The cycle opens before history, in the river, and ends with the gold returned to it and the gods’ hall in flames. Its archetypes bear the whole weight: the theft from nature, the cursed treasure, the world-ash cut for the spear, the Norns’ rope that breaks, the maiden ringed by fire, the fearless boy, the dragon, the twilight of the gods. Erda gives the law: “Alles, was ist, endet.”
“All that is, ends.” The particular stays particular: Wotan is a god, a husband losing an argument with his wife, a father who loves the daughter he punishes. Held off the top by Siegfried, nearer the archetype than a person, and by the Gibichungs, who are types.
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked, on a particular that never dissolves. The book opens on a rite of self-creation by naming and closes on a second naming that undoes it: “I am no longer Don Quixote of La Mancha, but Alonso Quixano” (II.LXXIV). The knight and the squire become a pair the world thinks with, and the book inverts them on schedule: the knight sees giants where Sancho sees mills (I.VIII), and “three country girls on three jackasses” where Sancho sees princesses (II.X). The descent to Montesinos ends in need, not revelation. The double is built twice, in Carrasco’s Knight of the Mirrors and Avellaneda’s hero. Held a step down because much of Part I’s myth is allusion: the sonnets, the Arcadia, the Micomicona pastiche.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked, at three levels. The legend is rebuilt: the chapbook’s pact for twenty-four years becomes a wager on contentment under Job’s heaven, and its Helen, a succubus who bears Faust a son, becomes the marriage of antiquity and the northern Middle Ages, with Poetry for their child. Myths are made new: the Mothers, Goethe’s invention, are the descent into the formless that beauty’s return requires, and Homunculus is spirit seeking body, found by dissolving into the sea. Gretchen, who has no source in the legend, becomes the woman the striver ruins and then his intercessor. The particular is kept: the jewel box, the spinning wheel, the poodle. Held below the summit because much of the Classical Walpurgis Night is mythology as pageant.
Ovid · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. Transformation is the load-bearing structure of every episode, and the particular stays particular: Baucis props the table’s short leg with a sherd (8.661 to 662). The poem gave Narcissus, Echo, Pygmalion, Icarus, Pyramus and Thisbe their lasting Western shape, and it builds a myth across its length, a chain of apotheosis: Hercules parte sui meliore viget (9.269), of Aeneas pars optima restitit (14.604), Romulus (14.805 to 828), Caesar made a star (15.843 to 851), and the poet, parte tamen meliore mei (15.875). Held below the summit because the gods are themselves deflated as myth, the father of the gods lowing in a meadow (2.850 to 851), and some Italian legends of Book XIV are ornament.
Cao Xueqin · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Myth built, and load-bearing. The goddess Nüwa smelts 36,501 stones to mend the sky and uses all but one; the stone left over becomes the jade in Baoyu’s mouth, so the boy is the useless remainder of a cosmic repair, and his uselessness to the world of office is the myth enacted. A crimson-pearl plant, watered with sweet dew, follows into the world to repay it with a lifetime’s tears, so Daiyu’s weeping and her death are one fact at two levels. The love story is the myth’s structure: “都道是金玉良姻，俺只念木石前盟”
“all speak of the good match of gold and jade; I think only of the old bond of wood and stone” (ch. 5). Held a shade from the top because in the middle chapters the two levels sometimes run beside each other rather than through each other.
Euripides · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Myth built, not cited. The action is the cult myth of the god whose festival it served: the god arriving from Asia unrecognised in his own city, his mother’s line denying his birth, the king who resists, the women driven to the mountain. The hunt bears weight at every level: the hunter becomes the hunted, the fawn of the third stasimon becomes the maenads’ prey, and Agave triumphs as a huntress over a lion. The tearing apart, and the procession of the victim through the city to the mountain, take the shape of sacrifice, with Pentheus dressed and led as the god’s own double. Each figure stays particular: Pentheus young, prurient, anxious about his curls; Cadmus old and ambitious for the family; the god smiling and inscrutable.
Sailendra · Architecture
9.2 · Tier V
Myth is built, not evoked, and built in plan and section. Three archetypes are made one solid. The mountain: a real hill between four volcanoes, cut and clothed in stone, its summit the axis of the world. The stupa: the relic mound multiplied into 72 and crowned by one, so that the mountain is a stupa and the stupa a mountain. The mandala: the redented square with its four gates and the circles inside it, the Buddhas placed by direction and height, so that the plan is the diagram the walker is inside. Section adds the cave of buried acts under the feet, the monster’s mouth at each gate, and the path, clockwise, upward, from story to silence. The particular stays particular: this hill, these outrigger ships, Sudhana as the walker’s double. Held a little below the top because the three realms and ten stages are received doctrine, and which mandala it builds is still argued.
James Joyce · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Myth built, and never named: no Homeric title appears anywhere in the text. Yet the skeleton bears the weight. The son is displaced in the tower, “Usurper.” (Telemachus, 1); there is a descent to the dead at Glasnevin; a one-eyed nationalist hurls a biscuit tin at the departing hero (Cyclops, 12); the brothel is Circe’s sty; the husband comes home to a bed another man has used. The particular stays particular. Bloom is an advertising canvasser with a potato in his pocket, and he is “Everyman or Noman” (Ithaca, 17). Elijah, Moses, the Wandering Jew and Hamlet’s father are stacked on it. Held off the top because many correspondences need a key from outside the text.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.5 · Tier V
Myth built, in two directions. Read from the altar, the crown runs from first light to Noah’s drunkenness; walked from the door, as the visitor walks it and as it was painted, it runs back from degradation to origin, and the building’s axis carries both readings. The archetypes bear the load: creator and created, the fall, the flood and the remnant, the seer, the generations. The sibyls join pagan prophecy to Hebrew, so the waiting is made universal. Every figure stays particular: Adam is one languid young body, the Cumaean Sibyl a massive old woman with a labourer’s arms. Held below the top because Genesis, the spine, is inherited whole: what is built is the arrangement.
Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus · Architecture
9.4 · Tier V
Myth built, and built into the structure itself: the temple as cosmos. The square of the four piers is earth, the circle of the dome is heaven, and the passage between them, the pendentive, is the load path. The meaning is load-bearing in the literal sense. The axis from the narthex is the way of the soul, threshold after threshold, toward the sanctuary in the east, where the sun rises. The particular stays particular: one church, dedicated to Holy Wisdom, the Logos through whom the world was ordered, which a dome over a measured square fits exactly. Held below the top because the domed cosmos was inherited: the Pantheon had built it four centuries before. The comparison with Solomon’s Temple is later legend and is not credited.
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Myth built into plan and structure: the temple as cosmos, load-bearing. The sphere is the room’s geometry, not its ornament; the interior would hold a ball of its own diameter. The vault of heaven is Dio’s reading of the name, made literal by the dome. The opening at the top is the one point where heaven and earth meet, and the actual sun comes through it. The threshold leads from the temple front, the house of the gods as Rome knew it, into the circle, on one axis from porch to apse. Everything stays particular: this day’s weather on this floor, Roman granite, Roman concrete, Agrippa’s name. Held below the summit because the gods that gave the cosmos its figures are lost; the sky is its only image.
Anonymous · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Myth built, and built into plan and structure. The church is the Heavenly Jerusalem, the temple as cosmos, and the archetypes bear load: the threshold of the west portal, judgment and welcome in one passage; the axis from the west rose’s Judgment to the choir and the rising sun; the cave of the crypt and its well, under the sanctuary; the path of the labyrinth, pilgrimage built into the floor; the tree of Jesse, genealogy as a living stem. The north arm and the south pair the Old Law and the New, and in the south lancets the evangelists ride on the prophets’ shoulders. Every part stays particular: a Chartres relic, Chartres trades. Held below the top because the myth is inherited whole; what is built is the arrangement.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The plot is an oracle’s plot: a prophecy that fulfils itself by being heard, and a second whose equivocal terms, “none of woman born” and “Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill” (4.1), are fulfilled inside the action, by soldiers carrying boughs and by a man “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d” (5.8). Regicide breaks the order of nature, and the play shows it: day turned dark, Duncan’s horses eating each other, a falcon killed by an owl (2.4). The child is the play’s figure and it bears weight: the babe of pity, the babe Lady Macbeth would dash from her breast (1.7), the bloody child and the crowned child of the apparitions, Fleance escaped, Macduff’s son murdered, and the usurper without an heir against a line that will “stretch out to th’ crack of doom” (4.1). The couple have become archetypes and stay particular: “I ’gin to be aweary of the sun” (5.5). Held a step from the top because part of the myth serves the Stuart claim as compliment.
Plato · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Myth built, and built by the work itself. The cave is load-bearing: it carries the line’s account of knowledge, the theory of education, the philosopher’s duty to return, and the death of Socrates, heard in the prisoners’ threat; it has become the archetype of philosophy, the world as shadow and the turn to the light. Gyges’s ring is a thought experiment made a myth, the invisible man as the test of justice unwatched. The metals give the city a founding myth of birth from the earth. Er closes the argument as myth, not after it, and its sentence is the moral of the ten books: “aitia helomenou; theos anaitios”
“the blame is the chooser’s; god is blameless” (617e). Held off the very top because Homer and Hesiod built the ground on which Plato builds his own.
Sophocles · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The structure is an inversion of the cosmic order, and Teiresias names it: Creon has thrust below one who belongs above, lodging a living soul in a tomb, and kept above one who belongs to the gods below, a corpse unburied and unmourned (about 1068 to 1071). The whole action carries the inversion: the living bride walled into rock, the marriage to Hades that her lament keeps sounding and that Haemon consummates in death beside her; the dead brother left to the dogs and birds, whose pollution reaches the altars. Behind it stand the curse on the house of Labdacus and the pattern of Persephone, the maiden taken below. The particular stays particular: Antigone is harsh to Ismene, and Creon suspects a bribe. And the play made an archetype of its own, conscience against the state, in use for two and a half thousand years.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked: the whole novel is a trial, and the pattern of judgment is load-bearing in every chapter, from the morning arrest to the stone in the quarry. Under it stand older shapes, each carried by the action and none merely alluded to: Job, accused and given no hearing; the fall, guilt prior to any act; the hidden god whose servants are corrupt and whose court cannot be reached; the scapegoat led out of the city and killed on a stone. The parable is the myth in miniature and the book’s structure in small: a door that was meant only for the man who waited before it, shut as he dies. Kafka built a myth the century then lived in, and K. became a figure in it, the accused man before a court he cannot reach. What keeps the axis from the top is that the particular is thinner than the archetype: K. has a bank, a rival in the deputy director, a mother he does not visit and a waitress he sees once a week, and is by design less a person than a case.
Ferdowsi · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built, and it bears the structure. Fire, writing and the crafts come with the first kings, so civilisation and the throne have one history. The glory, the farr, is the poem’s mechanism: it leaves Jamshid when he claims divinity, and the same law runs to the last reign. Fereydun’s division of the world founds the plot of the heroic age. Siyavash’s blood grows a plant; Kay Khosrow goes out of the world alive; Rostam and Sohrab is the best-known form in any literature of the father who kills the son. The particular stays particular: Rostam’s appetite, Rakhsh’s loyalty, the token on the arm. Held a step down because the historical age thins the myth to annal.
James Joyce · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built, down to the syllable. Five figures and a few events bear the load: the father’s fall (Finnegan from his ladder, Humpty Dumpty, Adam, Lucifer, Parnell), the sin in the park, the letter scratched up from the midden by a hen, the war of the twins, the daughter and her mirror, the river-mother. The father’s initials are the book’s running signature, 130 runs against about eleven by chance: “Here Comes Everybody” (I.2). The particular stays particular: a Chapelizod publican with a stammer and a hump, a wife who lays out his shirt, the Phoenix Park, the Liffey. Held a step down because the figures are often functions rather than persons, and between the mother’s two chapters the family thins to a grammar.
Vyasa (attributed) · Literature
9.1 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and load-bearing at every scale: the earth’s plea to be relieved of her burden and the gods’ descent as men; five brothers who are sons of Dharma, Vāyu, Indra and the Aśvins; Draupadī born from the sacrificial fire; the war as the hinge between ages, so that the death of Kṛṣṇa opens the Kali age; the dice game as the cosmic gamble the age is named after. A god serves as charioteer, strategist and trickster in a war of cousins, and the poem keeps the scandal of it. The particular stays particular: Bhīma’s appetite and rage, Arjuna’s hesitation, Karṇa’s pride and generosity, Yudhiṣṭhira’s weakness for dice, Draupadī’s unbound hair. Held a step below the very top by the pageant of incarnation, where the gods’ descent sometimes stands in for agency and the outcome is fixed before it is fought, and by the didactic books and embedded tales, where myth is told to an audience rather than built into the action.
Khmer, under Suryavarman II · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built into plan and section. The moat is the ocean, the enclosures the ranges of mountains, the five towers Meru’s five peaks, the central sanctuary the axis of the world, and the naga balustrades make the causeway the bridge between the human world and the gods’. Two choices make the inherited cosmogram particular and load-bearing. The temple faces west, Vishnu’s quarter and, in the usual reading, the quarter of the dead; and its reliefs run anticlockwise, the direction of funerary circumambulation. It is Vishnu’s mountain and one king’s passage into Vishnu at once, and his posthumous name on the relief seals it. Held below the top because the Meru cosmogram is the Khmer type, inherited from the Bakong onward; what is built new is the arrangement.
Attar · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built to the last word. The quest to a hidden king beyond a world-mountain is the oldest pattern, and the poem makes it carry its meaning structurally: the destination is a mirror, so the journey is the transformation and nothing but it. The Sīmurgh is inherited from Iranian myth, the bird of the Shahnameh that raises Zāl, so the archetype is not invented but turned: the royal bird of the epic becomes the divine reality. The hoopoe is Solomon’s messenger to Sheba in the twenty-seventh sura of the Qurʾān, so the guide comes with scriptural warrant. Each bird is a bird, with its habit and plumage, and a human type at once. The pun of sī murgh, thirty birds, on Sīmurgh puts the whole myth in one word.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing at every joint. The wild man and the king are made as doubles: the gods shape Enkidu from clay as Gilgamesh’s equal, and Gilgamesh first dreams him as a lump fallen from the sky. The two halves of the work are the two halves of the pair: the first conquers with the friend, the second searches without him. The friend’s death is the hinge of the action, not an episode in it. The journey past the sun’s road, through darkness and across the waters to the Flood’s one survivor, is the descent and return in its earliest extended form, and it comes back with nothing but the knowledge of its failure; the plant from the bottom of the Deep, whose name says that the old man grows young, lost to a snake that sheds its skin, is the myth of lost immortality built into the plot. And it stays particular: a king of a real city, its walls measured in the prologue, a door of cedar for Enlil’s temple, a boat lodged on Mount Nimush; a hero who is rash and a poor sleeper, and gods in council who reason like a committee. Many patterns later called archetypal first stand here. Held off the very top because the gods’ episodes, Ishtar, the Bull and the council, are received from older Sumerian matter and cult more than built anew, and because Tablet XII grafts a second netherworld onto the first.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Myth built, and built against the inherited one: “The ancients have left us model heroic poems in which the heroes furnish the whole interest of the story” (X.XIX). The idol falls: Andrew hears Napoleon’s praise “as he might have heard the buzzing of a fly” (III.XIX). The conqueror’s arm is struck powerless, and his army goes on “like an infuriated animal that has in its onslaught received a mortal wound” (X.XXXIX). Pierre is broken and remade in a shed; Andrew dies and wakes. The globe of drops is the Second Epilogue’s sum of wills, dreamed first. Held a step down, the narrowest of the five gate margins, because the counter-myth of Russian spirit is sometimes asserted: Karataev is “the personification of everything Russian, kindly, and round” (XII.XIII).
Richard Wagner · Music
9.4 · Tier V
The story was already myth, told by Béroul, Thomas, Gottfried and Malory. This work builds it again and changes what it bears. Wagner removes Isolde of the White Hands, the black and white sail and the chivalric middle, and keeps the archetypal: the healer who knows her enemy by his wound, the drink, the torch put out, the ship watched for. He adds what Gottfried did not have, Night and Day as two orders of being and death as the love’s consummation, so that Liebestod names a myth because of this work. The particular stays particular: the splinter matched to the notch; “Öd’ und leer das Meer!”
“Waste and empty, the sea!” Held below the top because the lovers thin toward allegory in Act II, and the myth was inherited.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
Myth built. The end of time is made a single rotation: the dead rise on the left and the damned fall on the right, around a Christ placed where a sun would be. That wheel is the composition. Pagan myth enters as structure, not allusion. Charon and Minos come from Dante (Inf. III, V) and work the lowest register of the wall, the ferryman beating the laggards with his oar, the judge of the dead sorting them. Every figure stays particular: Minos wears a courtier’s face, Biagio da Cesena’s by Vasari’s account, and the flayed skin, by the usual reading, the painter’s. Held below the top because the eschatology of Matthew 25 and Revelation is inherited whole: what is built is the arrangement.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.3 · Tier V
Myth built, not only received. The archetype is the sacrificial death of the innocent: the god betrayed by a friend, chosen against by the crowd and killed by the state. The work fixes its figures, bridegroom and lamb, before a word of the Gospel is sung, and its daughters lament at a wedding that is an execution. The scapegoat is chosen aloud. “Am Abend, da es kühle war” lays Adam’s fall, the dove’s return to Noah and the burial over one another, folding the history of salvation into one evening. The particulars stay sharp: the thirty pieces, the cock, the maid, Pilate’s wife’s dream. Held below the top because the spine is Matthew’s; the work builds the frame and the response.
Ancient Egyptian, under Khufu · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Myth is built, not evoked: there is nothing here but structure, and the archetypes are plan and section. The mound: the first land rising from the waters, made the shape of the king’s tomb. The horizon: the name itself, Akhet-Khufu, written with the sun between two hills. The ramp of light: the planes of the faces, which the Pyramid Texts of two centuries later read as the rays the king climbs; the texts are not credited as the builders’ words. The north: the entrance passage pointing up at the stars that do not set, and the shafts. The cave: the rough chamber in the rock. The centre: the body hidden in the mass. Held below the top because the ascent is documented only later and the archetype absorbs the particular almost wholly: a pyramid is everyone’s.
Teotihuacano · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Myth is built into plan and section, and it stays particular. The pyramid is the mountain: the Moon is set so that its silhouette echoes Cerro Gordo behind it. The Sun is built over a cave, a tunnel running east from under its west stair to a four-lobed chamber near its centre; natural or cut, the pyramid was placed on it. Mountain over cave is the Mesoamerican archetype of origin, which the later Nahuatl names, altepetl, “water-mountain”, and the seven caves of emergence, only name; here it was built in stone first. The Feathered Serpent’s tableros show serpents swimming through a sea of shells, the first water, at the city’s crossing. The Aztecs read it as the place where the sun was made. Held below the top because pyramid, plaza and horizon orientation were inherited from the Preclassic, and the Aztec myth is reception, not construction.
Jean Racine · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built into the grammar of the play. Phèdre is introduced by lineage before she appears, “La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé”
“the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë” (I.1), and the line carries the inheritance: the Sun as ancestor, the mother’s monstrous desire, the father as judge of the dead, the sister abandoned on Naxos. The labyrinth is not alluded to but reenacted: in II.5 Phèdre takes Ariadne’s place and leads Hippolyte into it. The monster that kills him comes from the sea at a father’s curse, a bull-like thing out of Pasiphaé’s story returning on her house. Venus is a goddess and a symptom; Neptune keeps a promise Thésée should not have asked. Light against darkness is the structure, closed in the last couplet. The particular stays particular: a woman who cannot bear her veils.
George Orwell · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, and it carries the plot. Big Brother is a god by absence, seen only on posters and screens and perhaps not existing at all. O’Brien is priest, confessor, inquisitor and father, and Winston loves him. The Golden Country is Eden, entered with a woman and lost through a gift of knowledge, Goldstein’s book. Room 101 is a hell made for each soul out of its own “worst thing in the world”. The end is a conversion and a communion, the soul saved into the god it denied: “He loved Big Brother.” The particular stays particular: a varicose ulcer, Victory Gin, a coral paperweight, a stew of grey meat. The proof that the myth is built and not borrowed is that it has passed into common speech and is used there as myth is used: Big Brother, Room 101 and the Thought Police name things in the world. Held off the top because the figures can harden into allegory, and Julia, the Eve, bears little of the structure.
Anonymous · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The Naikū is the dwelling of the sun, and in the myth the sun hid in the Heavenly Rock Cave and the world went dark until a mirror and a dance drew her out. A mirror is what the sanctuary holds, and its plan is a sequence of concealments: fences, a curtain, a closed door. To see the cave in the plan is an interpretation, not a recorded intention, and the axis does not rest on it. The raised floor is the granary of the rice culture, so sun and grain stand as the two shrines, the one served by the other. The heart pillar is a centre, hidden. The renewal is death and rebirth enacted in timber. Held below the top because what it builds is hidden from the one it addresses.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, and the judge bears it. A giant, hairless and pale, he appears where he cannot be, does not age between 1850 and 1878, never sleeps, and says he will never die. He reads as archon, devil, war-god and the demiurge of a gnostic world, and the book supports each reading without settling on one; the epigraph from Boehme makes the gnostic frame the book’s own. Against him the kid, unnamed and born under falling stars, is a fallen Adam with one unexplained reserve. The subtitle builds a second myth: the evening redness is the West as the land of sunset, and a civilisation’s westering as its decline. The particular stays particular: the company is historical, and the guns and saddles are exact. Held below the summit because the kid, the other pole, is too thinly built to bear his half.
Valmiki · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked: the exile and return of the rightful king, the stolen bride recovered across water, the demon-slayer, the faithful brother, the animal ally, the ordeal of the wife. The archetypal structure is the plot. And the figures became the archetypes of a civilisation: Rāma, Sītā, Lakṣmaṇa, Hanumān and Rāvaṇa are patterns against which conduct is still measured across South and Southeast Asia. The particular survives within the type: Sītā’s rebuke of Lakṣmaṇa when he will not leave her at the deer’s cry, harsh and wrong and entirely hers; Hanumān’s power and play; Rāvaṇa’s grandeur and ten-headed appetite; Bharata’s grief. Held a tenth below 9.5 by Rāma himself, whom idealisation often thins into the law he embodies.
Rashtrakuta, under Krishna I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built in the medium itself. The temple bears the name of Shiva’s mountain and is a mountain, cut out of one and standing in a ravine of its own making. It joins two archetypes architecture usually keeps apart, the cave and the mountain: the visitor enters the earth to find the summit. Elephants and lions, the world’s bearers, carry the plinth. The decisive stroke is the Ravana recess: the demon shaking Kailasa is carved into the base of the Kailasa he shakes, and the visitor stands where Ravana stood. All stays particular: this hill, this basalt, this Nandi facing this linga. Held a step from the top because the mountain-temple is the tradition’s shared figure, here made literal rather than first conceived.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked. The second volume is a katabasis of nine graded hours, with a nekyia on a candle stairwell, a dead uncle delivering a letter on the night bus and a fountain where a pearl is dug from the sediment. The fourth gives Charon a transit booth and a black ferry, the Haron, oarless, and a permit no dead man was ever issued; the funeral games of the old poem as handball at a schoolyard wall, lots shaken in a cap, one player out by his own honesty and the prize held out the other way; Achilles’ shield as a childhood shield with no material instance, stopped in 1988 at a girl turning back on a path. The aegis comes at eight metres, in a long coat, with his sister’s face. The charge the earlier page laid, that the Riders’ names were ornament, no longer holds: a cut page reveals that a boy of nineteen wrote seven of their offices himself, and asked in pencil which one was him.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The temple as cosmos is built rather than pictured, and built into structure. Heaven round over earth square is the plan of the walls, the shape of the altar in its enclosures and of the round hall on its terrace. The numbers of heaven are laid in stone: nine, the highest odd digit, multiplied outward from the central stone. In the hall the archetype bears load: the columns that hold the roof are the seasons, the months and the hours, so that the year carries heaven’s roof. The axis from south to north is the passage from earth upward. The particular stays particular: this dynasty, this capital, this rite on its day. Held below the top because the code is explicit enough to be read off, a correspondence more than a single gathered image.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Myth built, in two structures that carry weight. The first is the Fall: the murder is done in a garden, by a “serpent”, through the ear, “’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, / A serpent stung me” (1.5), and leaves “an unweeded garden” (1.2). The murderer names his crime as Cain’s, “It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t” (3.3). The second is Pyrrhus, who over Priam “like a neutral to his will and matter, / Did nothing” (2.2), as Hamlet stands over the kneeling King (3.3). Held below the summit: the ghost and the feigned madness are revenge-play convention as much as myth, and Jephthah, Niobe and Hercules are evoked, not built.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Myth built, and the book’s own words build it. The title’s noun, преступление, is formed on преступить, to step across, and the verb the novel returns to is переступить, to overstep: “I didn’t overstep, I stopped on this side” (III.6). The archetype is the threshold: stairs, doors, bells, a latch shaking. Lazarus is the spine. Raskolnikov lies four days in fever after the murder (II.3); Sonia reads John 11, and “She laid emphasis on the word four.” (IV.4); the Epilogue raises him with the verb of resurrection, her Testament under his pillow. The crossroads where he kisses the earth (V.4, VI.8) is the old Russian reverence for the earth, and Napoleon is the counter-myth, deflated to “A Napoleon creep under an old woman’s bed!” (III.6). Held below the top because the Epilogue closes the Lazarus frame by statement, not enactment.
Giotto di Bondone · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
Myth built. Three generations descend the walls in a spiral, and the viewer reads time by walking it down to the Passion at eye level, under a heaven of stars and out under the Judgment. The archetypes bear load: barrenness and fruit; the kiss of union above the kiss of betrayal on one wall; the gift refused and the gift accepted, in Joachim’s offering, Judas’s purse and Enrico’s model; the Temple cleansed twice. The Annunciation sits where the arch opens to the altar, so the Incarnation is the hinge of the building. Every figure stays particular: Joachim one tired old man, Judas one thick-necked face. Held below the top because the Judgment, where the myth should close, is the least constructed field.
Iktinos and Kallikrates · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Myth built into the plan, and the plan is concentric. The outer ring of ninety-two metopes sets four wars of order against disorder round all four sides, gods against giants over the entrance. Inside the colonnade, on the cella wall, moves the city’s own procession, mortals in time. At the east the gods sit to receive it, and in the pediment above Athena is born, framed by sunrise and moonset; on the west the goddess wins the land from the sea god. The archetype is load-bearing, the temple as an ordered world ringed by defeated chaos and entered from the east, and it stays particular: Athens’ myths, Athens’ olive, young Athenians riding. Held below the top because the myths are inherited; the arrangement, not the story, is the building’s.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The myth is built, not evoked. The prodigal son is the frame of the whole action: the prince stands between two fathers, the cold king and the warm father of misrule, and the structure of the work is his choice between them. Falstaff carries the morality play’s Vice, Riot or Gluttony, the Lord of Misrule, and Carnival in its battle with Lent, and is never only these: he is a particular old knight with a debt to the Hostess and a disease. Hotspur is the warrior archetype and the prince’s double, whose honours must be taken with his life. Behind all of it is the usurper’s guilt, the crusade to Jerusalem that ends in the Jerusalem chamber. Falstaff has become an archetype in his own right: the particular made myth.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Myth built. The archetype is the meal of friends at which the victim names his betrayer and gives his body, and it is made into the composition: one at the centre, twelve around him in four groups, light behind the one and shadow on the betrayer. The centre is cosmic as well as dramatic: every line of the room runs into Christ’s head, and the window makes the sky his halo. The figures stay particular, each a temperament with his own hands. Held below the top because the narrative and its eucharistic sense are inherited whole, and the number, the twelve as months or tribes, is evoked at most. What Leonardo built is the arrangement, now the form in which the scene is imagined.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Myth built, not cited: Don Juan, one of the few myths the modern world made, is built here again. The father killed in No. 1 returns in stone in No. 24; the invitation to the dead is sealed with a handshake, and the descent follows. The stone guest bears the load from the first bar, since the overture holds his music, so the whole opera stands under its end. The particular stays particular: Leporello eats from his master’s table, and Masetto is beaten in the dark. Held below on two counts: the myth was built before, by El burlador de Sevilla and then Molière, Goldoni and Bertati; and Giovanni has no music of his own self.
Emily Brontë · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built, and load-bearing. A foundling from the Liverpool streets, of no known origin and no surname, given a dead child’s name and brought in under a greatcoat as both gift and threat: the child from outside who displaces the son and is cast down, the exile who returns rich and unexplained, the demon lover who will not let the beloved rest in death, the ghost at the window who asks to come in. Two houses stand for two orders, storm and calm, and the novel’s law is that they must be joined. The archetypes stay particular: Heathcliff counts money and reads law, and Catherine marries for standing. Isabella asks, “Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?” (ch. 13), and the book never answers. Held a step from the top because the second generation’s myth is gentler and less built than the first.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built, and the title is its blueprint. In the second book of Samuel, Absalom kills his half-brother Amnon for the violation of their sister Tamar, and David mourns his son. Here Henry kills his half-brother Bon to prevent his marriage to their sister Judith, and the father who should mourn has already refused to know the son. The inversion of David’s lament bears weight: Sutpen never calls Bon his son. Around it the book builds a founding myth, a domain called out of the swamp with “Be Sutpen’s Hundred”, the fall of a house by a curse in the blood, and Rosa’s demon, “man-horse-demon”, whom the later chapters reduce to a poor boy turned away from a planter’s door. Myth and particular are held at once: the demon is also a man with a ledger. Held a step from the top because Mr. Compson’s Greek tragedy is partly allusion, worn as a manner.
Euripides · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, and built so firmly that this play’s version became the myth. Whether the deliberate killing of the children was Euripides’ own invention is contested; it is this play’s design that made it the shape the figure carries. The archetypal structure bears weight throughout: the voyage of the Argo and the stolen fleece as the debt; the barbarian sorceress and the Greek hero; the oath and its gods, Themis and Zeus, as the law Jason breaks; the granddaughter of the Sun, whose descent is named early and then appears as the chariot that carries her off. She stays particular, a wife counting her wrongs and a mother who cannot bear her sons’ smile, while becoming the avenging mother. Held a step down because the chariot arrives as assertion more than built pattern.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The inheritance is the tale of metamorphosis, Ovid’s, Apuleius’s, the fairy tale’s, and Kafka inverts every term of it: no god acts, no cause is given, no moral is drawn, and there is no return; the beast is not kissed back into a man by the sister who tends him. The structure underneath is load-bearing in every part: the scapegoat, the unclean thing whose expulsion lets the community live. When Gregor dies the family is renewed at once, and the book ends on the daughter’s body ready for marriage, a sacrifice completed. The word Kafka chose, Ungeziefer, names the unclean animal rather than a species, and the creature is never fixed. And the particular stays particular throughout, as the axis asks: the fretwork frame Gregor made for the picture, his plan to send his sister to the conservatory, his worry about the train. The image has itself become a myth of the century. Held below the top because the myth governs one household, not the larger field of judgment a novel could build.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Myth here could be called inherited furniture: the statue that comes to life is the Stone Guest, which Pushkin had used already in 1830; the flood is the Deluge; the founder on the shore is Genesis. But the myth is built, and it is load-bearing. Peter on the empty shore is the demiurge, raising a city out of swamp against nature and to spite a haughty neighbour; the flood is the element’s revenge for its conquest; the statue is the founder become an idol, and in Part Two the idol turns and pursues the man who threatened it. Each element bears weight: the city must be built against nature for the flood to be its punishment, and the founder must be bronze for the pursuit to be a power that cannot be addressed and cannot die. The particular stays particular: a clerk in Kolomna, a widow’s house by a willow and a gate, a date in November 1824. And the myth was originated here: the Petersburg of a city founded on one will, cursed by its element and pursuing its own people is this poem’s making, and the later Petersburg writing of Russian literature builds on it.
Friedrich Hölderlin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The myth could be called a private syncretism, Greek and Christian gods forced into one calendar, allusion on a grand scale rather than construction. It is built, and it bears weight in every major poem. The body makes one story: the day of the gods in Greece, their departure, the night of Hesperia, the poet as the one who keeps watch, the festival at which they return. Its figures are made, not borrowed: the river as demigod, “Ein Rätsel ist Reinentsprungenes”
(A riddle is the purely sprung), in “Der Rhein”; the Ister flowing as if backward toward its source; bread and wine as the gifts left by the departed god; the Prince of the Festival in “Friedensfeier”. And the particulars stay particular: the Neckar, the shore of Bordeaux, a courtyard fig tree and the women of that place.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, not alluded to. The structure is the succession of the king: the father wounded in the first act, the firstborn too hot to rule and killed in the fourth, the adopted son not of the blood, and the youngest, who had refused the crown, taking it. Michael’s year in Sicily is the heir’s exile. The sacraments bear the plot: a wedding opens the film, a baptism closes it, both the family’s business under the Church’s words. The particulars stay hard: a fruit stand, a toll booth, a tomato garden, a box of cannoli. Held a step from the top because the father’s sin is not visited on the son as a curse: inheritance is shown as a pattern rather than built as a curse.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked: the whole play is the construction of a figure. Hesiod’s Prometheus is a trickster whose cleverness brings misery on men. Here he is the son of Themis, whom the text makes one with Earth; a Titan who sided with Zeus and was betrayed by him; the foreknower whose name the play makes mean forethought; and the benefactor who gave mortals not only fire but blind hopes, so that they would cease to foresee their death. The pattern is load-bearing: the rebel bound for love of mortals, the immobile sufferer whom the powers visit, the secret that can unseat the king of heaven. Io builds a second pattern on the same frame. The particular holds: this Prometheus is irascible, proud and vindictive in speech, and he is the figure later centuries took up.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked: the archetypal structure is the plot. The stranger at the gate; the castle on the hill that can be seen and never reached; the quest that does not arrive, a Grail castle in which the right question is never found; the messenger who cannot be sure he has been in the real offices: these carry the whole weight, and nothing in the book stands outside them. The surveyor, whose trade is fixing boundaries, comes to a village where every boundary is fixed already. Klamm is described differently by everyone who has seen him, as a god is. And the particular stays hard: beer and snow, the gymnastic bars in the schoolroom where K. and Frieda sleep, Hans Brunswick’s mother. The book makes no allegory explicit, which is why the archetype survives every reading that fixes it: Brod’s grace, the Jewish stranger, the state. Held a step down because K. himself has almost no past, and the archetype at times leans on a cipher.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth is built, not evoked, and this is the book’s deepest reach. “La casa de Asterión” retells the Minotaur from inside the labyrinth, and the myth bears weight to the last line, so that the monster’s longing for death and the hero’s victory are one event. “El inmortal” makes Homer a Wandering Jew: the troglodyte Argos is the poet who has forgotten the Odyssey, and the immortal soldier Rufus becomes all men. The labyrinth is the book’s single figure, built five times: the City of the Immortals, Asterión’s house, Abenjacán’s, the Arabian desert, the point in the cellar. The Aleph and the Zahir are a cabbalistic pair, the point that holds all things and the coin that effaces all things. And the gaucho stories make Argentine myth of Martín Fierro and of Masoller. Held a step below the summit only because a few emblems, “Los dos reyes” first among them, are myth stated rather than worked.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Malik · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The archetype is the centre of the world: the summit of the sacred mountain, the rock that is the foundation, a cave beneath it and the vault of heaven above, and the plan builds exactly that, concentric rings round an outcrop of living bedrock under a dome. The ascent is built as well: the tradition of the Prophet rising from this rock is given a vertical axis from the cave through the rock to the crown of the dome. The mosaics carry paradise, trees, vines and jewelled vessels on gold. Everything stays particular: this rock, this city, this caliph’s year 72. Held below the top because the myth’s narrative is borrowed from the site and its traditions, and the building houses more than it tells.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and built as the book’s frame. The quest is turned inside out: the treasure is to be unmade, not won, and the finder is unmade with it. The archetypes carry the plot: the ring of power, as old as Plato’s Gyges and made new by being a burden; the descent and return of Gandalf; the paths of the dead; the hidden king known by his healing; the wounded bearer who must leave the world he saved. The particular holds beside the archetype: Sam is a gardener who carries pans into Mordor, and the Ring’s last enemy is a starved creature arguing with himself in two voices. Held a step below the top because Aragorn and the Elves stay nearer type than person.
William Blake · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built from the ground up, load-bearing on every plate. Albion is the Giant Man, England and humanity at once; Jerusalem his emanation, cast out; Vala nature turned into moral law; Los the smith labouring at Golgonooza, the city of art; the Spectre the self that reasons and accuses. Onto it Blake grafted British myth, in the trilithons of plates 70 and 100, and Hebrew myth, in the tribes and the holy city. The particular stays particular: the fields between Islington and Marylebone (plate 27), the soldier Scolfield made a Son of Albion. Held below the top because the persons are functions more than people, Vala, Rahab and Tirzah blurring into one another, and because the names had no shared resonance: the myth had to teach its own grammar.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Archetype is built into plan. The name states it: zi, purple, is the enclosure of the heavens round the pole, and the Son of Heaven dwells in its earthly counterpart. The Analects’ ruler, like the pole star “which keeps its place while all the stars turn toward it”, is made a plan. The throne stands on the axis; the halls face south, the quarter in which the ruler faces his subjects. In the Inner Court heaven and earth are built as the emperor’s and the empress’s palaces, with the hall of their union between. Remove the myth and the plan has no reason for its axis, its orientation or its centre. Held below the top because the cosmogram is the type’s, inherited from the canonical capital plans and the palaces before it, and a plan is read in procession, not seen as one image.
Victor Hugo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built openly, so that the structure bears it. The convict redeemed is the fall and the redemption told as one life: a man given a number, 24601 and later 9430, is given back a soul by a bishop. The pursuit of grace by law runs from the first part to the Seine, and it is the plot, not a theme laid on it. Valjean descends three times and rises: into the galleys; into a coffin and the earth of a convent cemetery, from which he is dug up alive (II.8); and into the sewers, carrying the unconscious Marius on his back through the city’s underworld. The particular stays particular: he counts his money, mends his coat, is jealous of Marius. The archetypes have passed into the language, and “un gavroche” is a common noun in French. Held off the top because Cosette and Marius are types more than persons, and the narrator sometimes states the myth he has built.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The three monsters are the structure of the poem, not its decoration: the hall-raider out of the dark, of the kin of Cain, against the community; the mother under the water, older and more terrible, against the avenger; the dragon on its gold, against the old king and his people’s future. Youth against age, the hall against the waste: the whole order is laid on these. Yet the archetype never floats free. Beowulf is Hygelac’s sister’s son, a historical king’s thane; Heorot stands among named Scyldings whose feuds are history; the dragon is woken by a runaway slave stealing a cup to buy back his master’s favour. The dragon on the hoard passes from this poem into modern imagination as the type itself.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into structure. The holy mountain, the axis between earth and sky, is not alluded to: the church caps the rock, its crossing set over the summit, and the crypts are the mountain made into building. The island that is an island twice a day builds the threshold between world and sanctuary into the site, so that the crossing of the sands is the passage of the soul. Michael, guardian of heights and weigher of souls, stands at the top in gilt, the end of the pyramid: town, walls, abbey, church, archangel. The particular stays particular. Held below the top because the holy mount is inherited, from Gargano and the high places of Michael, and is here completed rather than first conceived.
Mary Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and built so well that it left the book. The subtitle names Prometheus, the fire-bringer punished; the epigraph names Milton’s Adam reproaching his maker; and the creature reads Paradise Lost as a true history and finds that he is both Adam and Satan: “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel.” These are load-bearing: the middle of the book is a creation story told from the creature’s side, a Genesis in which God flees the garden. Over it the book made a new archetype, the made being who turns on the maker, which every age since has used for its own fear: the factory, the bomb, the gene, the machine. That the myth now stands apart from its text, often misnamed after its maker, proves it was built. Held a step below the very top because the Miltonic scaffolding is in places explicit, a reading list the creature reports.
Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The tomb is the cave and the underworld made into a structure: a passage from the living world into a dark interior under a mountain made by hand. Into it, at the death of the year, light enters, and the alignment makes that event the building’s purpose: the sun’s return into the house of the dead, death and rebirth in one figure. The threshold is literal, a carved stone across the door, its groove on the axis that the back of the mound repeats. The spiral, cut at the entrance and in the end recess, frames the journey from the first stone to the last. It stays particular: this river bend, these few bones, this sunrise. Held below the top only because the meaning of the carvings is lost.
Ancient Egyptian · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is built into plan and section, not evoked. The temple is the world at its first morning. The pylon is the horizon, two towers with the gate between, the sign in which the sun rises. The hall is the papyrus marsh of the first land, its columns stems and buds, the open flowers along the nave where the light fell. Toward the sanctuary the floor rises and the roofs come down, so the god’s house is the primeval mound, and the Sacred Lake is the waters held inside the wall. The bark procession enacts the god’s emergence. The particular stays particular: this god, this city, these kings and their battles. Held below the top because the archetype is inherited, not built here first, and accretion repeats it in segments rather than staging one ascent.
Marcel Proust · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Some of the myth is built. The first section gives “the Celtic belief” that the souls of the dead are held captive in some object until we recognise them, and then “they have overcome death and return to share our life.” (Combray I). That is the machinery of the whole book: the madeleine in the first volume, the paving stones in the last. The magic lantern’s Golo and Geneviève de Brabant prove to be forebears of the Guermantes, and the name dissolves on sight into a red face with “a little spot at the corner of her nose” (Combray II). Sodom and Gomorrah title and order the middle of the work. Held at 9.2 because no single frame bears the whole, and much is evoked: Eurydice, Botticelli, Giotto’s Virtues, Racine.
Murasaki Shikibu · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Myth built, and load-bearing. A Korean physiognomist reads the child’s face in the first chapter: the marks of a sovereign, and disorder if he reigns. The plot fulfils the reading. Genji is made a commoner, goes into exile by the sea, is called back by a storm, a dream of his dead father and the god of Sumiyoshi (ch. 12, 13), and is raised at last to a rank equal to a retired emperor’s (ch. 33). The second law is karmic return: the wrong of ch. 5 comes back as the child of ch. 36, Kaoru, whom Genji must hold as his own. Ukifune, believed drowned, found senseless and made a nun (ch. 52, 53), is a rebirth placed where the hero is gone. Held below the top because the Uji myth is thinner than Genji’s, and the archetypes sit behind a surface of strict courtly realism.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked, and built from a railway timetable. A guard is crushed at the station on the day the lovers meet, and Anna calls it “an omen of evil” (I.18). The two of them dream one dream, of a peasant muttering French over iron, “Il faut le battre, le fer, le broyer, le pétrir” (IV.3); it returns on her last morning (VII.26) and over her body: “A peasant muttering something was working at the iron above her.” (VII.31). The epigraph’s vengeance stands over it unexplained. Anna has become an archetype and stays a woman who cannot say how many teeth her daughter has (VI.19). Held a step down because the realist surface keeps the archetype implicit, and Levin’s counter-myth of earth and birth is partly stated rather than built.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Myth built, on a single moment. The archetype bears the load: the small one against the giant, whom the armed men would not face (1 Samuel 17). The construction is two inversions. Goliath is absent, so the giant stands in the viewer’s space, where the gaze is aimed. And the boy is made colossal: carved from a block the contract called “Gigante”, David is himself the giant, and the weak one becomes the measure of greatness. The shepherd is fused with the classical hero, and stays particular, down to the veins of the right hand. Held below the top: the story is inherited whole, the medium gives one moment, and the civic meaning depended on a site since left.
Franz Schubert · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Myth built from a jilted man, a town and the weather, on no older story’s spine. What is built is a quest inverted: a man seeks death through twenty-four stations and is refused it. The linden invites him and he does not turn; the will-o’-the-wisp promises every sorrow its grave; the crow waits; the leaf falls; the signpost names the road; the graveyard inn turns him away; and the last figure is an old man who has become what the wanderer will be, a maker of music no one hears. The particulars stay exact: a weathervane, a posthorn, a plate always empty. Held below the literary summit because the archetype is one figure, and Goethe’s Harper and Müller’s own miller stood behind him.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Myth built: the structure of the object carries the history of salvation. Closed, it shows the promise of the incarnation in a burgher’s room, with the foreseers above. Opened, it shows the end of time: the Lamb of Revelation 5 on an altar, the fountain of Revelation 22, the elect converging from four directions, the Fall at its edges. The opening of the wings is a revelation in the literal sense, an unveiling, and the painted altar stood above the real one. Every figure stays particular, down to the pilgrims’ faces. Held below the top because the apocalyptic and eucharistic patterns are inherited whole: what is built is the arrangement and its mechanism.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Myth built, not cited. The archetype is descent, death and rising, and the Symbolum Nicenum is built as a cross: the Crucifixus at the centre of nine movements, the Incarnation before it and the Resurrection after, framed by two pairs that each set chant in the stile antico beside D major with trumpets. The centre was made late, by inserting the Et incarnatus. The Crucifixus stands on the oldest figure of lament, the falling chromatic fourth, repeated as a ground: archetype as structure. The Confiteor carries the Gregorian “Confiteor unum baptisma”
“I confess one baptism” inside five voices. Held below the Passion because the Mass has no particulars to keep: no Judas, no cock, no thirty pieces. The myth’s content is the Creed’s.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Myth here is built, and three constructions bear the load. Aristophanes’ round people, cut in two by Zeus and seeking their halves, became the founding myth of romantic love in the West, and in the work it is the hypothesis the argument must answer. Diotima’s birth of Eros from Poros and Penia at Aphrodite’s birthday feast (203b to e) makes love a daimon, “metaxu”
“between”, poor, barefoot, homeless and resourceful; and the work shows Socrates barefoot, standing alone in thought, a man between wisdom and ignorance: the particular becomes the archetype the myth described. Alcibiades makes him the Silenus figure that opens to show gods inside, and Marsyas whose music bewitches. Held below the top because some imagery, Dionysus as judge, is evoked more than built.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked, in the one place that bears the load: the play is an advent that does not arrive. A promised one, a messenger who comes twice, a judgement put off until tomorrow; every scene depends on it. Around that frame the archetypes are set in exact particulars. Two thieves, one saved, “It’s a reasonable percentage.” (I), stand behind two tramps. The Boy minds the goats and is not beaten; his brother minds the sheep and is: the judgement of Matthew 25 turned over. Pozzo, fallen, answers to Abel and to Cain: “He’s all humanity.” (II). The proof that the myth was built is that it became one, a proverb in many languages. Held a step down because the surrounding archetypes come as fragments, quoted and dropped.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built, from three sources that carry the structure. The corrida: the bull, and the gored horse, the animal that dies in the ring, here at the centre of the triangle. The Christian image: the mother and her dead child as a Pietà, at the left end, and the lamp-bearer as the woman at the tomb. Picasso’s own: the bull, the horse and the girl holding a light come from his Minotauromachy etching of 1935, where she holds a candle. A market town’s bombing becomes the slaughter of the innocent. But the particular is thin: nothing on the canvas is Basque or Spanish except the bull, and the town is present only in the title. The bull, its meaning withheld, is myth evoked at the edge.
Matthias Grünewald · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built, and the hinge is the builder: to open the altarpiece is to part the Crucifixion and find behind it the Incarnation and the Resurrection, so the passage from death to life is performed by the object. The archetypes bear load: the god who takes the wound, the wounded healer, the hermit in the desert, the assault of the demons, the light out of the tomb. The second opening sets the house’s patron as the type of the patient, beaten by monsters beside a man with the disease. Every figure stays particular: the Magdalene with her hair down and her jar on the ground, the Baptist heavy, with a long finger. Held below the top because the narrative is inherited whole; what is built is the arrangement.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, and load-bearing. Giants and pygmies are among the oldest figures there are; Swift makes them a measuring instrument, so that the same man is a giant and a toy in successive years, and his body becomes the scale on which the moral world is read. The rational horse and the bestial man reverse the order of creation, and the Yahoo, filthy, greedy and recognisably human, is a myth of the fall told without a garden. The immortals are Tithonus made a civil institution. The voyage out and the return estranged is the shape of every quest. Gulliver stays particular, a surgeon of modest means with a wife and children he keeps leaving, and the archetypes entered the common stock: Lilliput, the Yahoo, Laputa. Held off the top because the third part’s myths are evoked as satire rather than built.
Hieronymus Bosch · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The salvation story is the frame and bears weight: the world in creation outside, God with Christ’s features presenting Eve to Adam, then the world, then the last things. The four images are four moments of one history. The centre is built as a counter-Eden: the pink Fountain of Life answered by the centre’s pool and towers, the single pair by a crowd of pairs, the garden’s tree by giant fruit. The false paradise is the structure, not an allusion. The axis stops short on particularity: beside the Tree Man and the bird-headed prince, most of the crowd is one slender type, a species rather than persons.
John Milton · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The pastoral convention is the load-bearing structure: two shepherds who fed their flocks together, one drowned, the other left to sing. Over it the poem lays three archetypes and makes each carry the argument. Orpheus, his head sent “down the swift Hebrus”, the poet whom even the Muse could not save. The sun: “So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, / And yet anon repairs his drooping head”, descent and return made the figure of resurrection. And Christ, “him that walked the waves”, who turns the sea that killed King into the medium of his rising. Lycidas ends as “the genius of the shore”, a local myth born in the poem. Held a step from the top because King is never a particular man.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. Wagner took Wolfram’s Parzival and the Grail cycle and rebuilt them so that the archetypal structure is the plot: a wounded king who cannot die and cannot heal; a community wasting because its rite is broken; a fool who does not know his own name; a spear that wounded and alone can heal; a castle of illusion that falls at the sign of the cross; the land flowering on Good Friday. The wound that only its weapon can close is load-bearing, the mechanism of the last scene and not an ornament. The Christian and Buddhist strands, Kundry’s rebirths among them, are fused rather than cited. Held below the top because the particular is thin in two principals: Parsifal is by design a cipher until Act II, and Klingsor is nearer an emblem than a man. Kundry carries the particular almost alone, and carries it.
Paul the Apostle · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The myth is inherited, Adam, Abraham, Moses on Sinai, the crucified and risen Messiah of a community Paul joined, and much of what he does with it is allegory, which this axis distrusts. But he builds, and the build is load-bearing. Adam and Christ become the two heads of humanity, “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22; Romans 5); baptism becomes a dying and rising undergone by each reader (Romans 6); the community becomes one body with many members (1 Corinthians 12); the seed that must die to be raised carries the resurrected body (15:36 to 38). And it stays particular: the archetype passes through one man’s scarred body, his chains in Philippians, the runaway Onesimus. Dying and rising is the structure of the life the letters tell. Level with Anna Karenina’s 9.2.
Imhotep, under Djoser · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Here the myth is built, not evoked. The stepped mass is a mound and a stair together, the primeval hill rising from the waters and the king’s ascent to the sky, stacked over a shaft that descends into the earth, so that one vertical joins underworld, earth and heaven in a single section. The enclosure is a palace for the dead king, its walls panelled as a royal facade, fourteen gates false and one true: the passage of the living is told from the passage of the ka. Held below the top only because later texts, not this building, articulate the ascent; the complex carries it without words.
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not only evoked, and the built myths bear weight. The charioteer with his two horses, one that obeys and one that bolts, is not an illustration attached to a theory of the soul; it is the theory, and the palinode, from the soul’s fall to the scene of the lovers, is told in its terms. It has become common property and stays particular: the dark horse crooked and heavy, reined back until it falls on its haunches. The cicadas, once men who forgot to eat and drink for singing (259b to d), govern the turn from love to speech; Theuth and Thamus (274c to 275b) carries the case against writing. What holds it there is that the chariot is an allegory with a key, and that much of the inherited myth is raised only to be set aside: Boreas and Oreithyia (229b to 230a), the Nymphs and Achelous, Stesichorus cited as a precedent.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The two epigraphs are the plan: Pushkin’s travellers circled by a demon in a blizzard, and the demons of Luke that leave a man and enter the swine, which rush into the lake and are drowned while the man sits clothed and in his right mind at Jesus’ feet. The book enacts both: ideas enter persons and drive them in circles, and the possessed run to their deaths while the town survives. At the end Stepan Trofimovich hears the passage read and himself names Russia as the sick man, and himself and his son as the swine. Around it the archetypes bear load: the Pretender, in Pyotr’s plan to set Stavrogin up as “Иван-Царевич”
(Ivan the Tsarevich), the hidden true ruler of the folk; Kirillov’s man-god; the holy fool and earth-mother in Marya Timofeevna. Held off the very top because the pamphlet’s figures do not share in it.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and the number bears it. Nine at the first sight; nine years to the greeting, at the ninth hour; her name ninth among sixty (VI); death in the ninth month, in the year the perfect number was nine times completed in its century; and the gloss, “questo numero fu ella medesima” (this number was she herself, XXIX), a nine whose root is the Trinity. The figure is Christ’s: Giovanna, called Primavera, goes before her because “prima verrà” (she will come first), as John went before the true light (XXIV), and the dream of her death takes the darkened sun and the earthquake of the Passion (XXIII). The particular holds: a child in crimson, a dead father, a wedding where she joins the mockery (XIV). Held a step from the top because the myth is announced here and completed elsewhere.
William Shakespeare · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked. The whole action is a ritual of death and return by water: the court is drowned in its own belief and given back changed, Alonso mourning a son lost in the sea and finding him alive at chess. On that frame stand figures that have become archetypes through this play as much as in it: the magus with his book and staff, the spirit of air bound to service and longing for freedom, the earth-born wild man who claims the land, and the daughter who sees the court and cries “O brave new world, / That has such people in’t!”, to be answered “’Tis new to thee” (5.1). The drowning of the book closes the plot. The particular holds: Prospero’s “every third thought shall be my grave” (5.1) is a man’s, not an emblem’s.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. Christmas is named for the day he was found on the orphanage steps, bears the initials J.C., dies at thirty-three, is betrayed for a reward of a thousand dollars by a man who calls himself his friend, and is wounded in the side by a soldier. The Passion bears load, and it is kept unresolved: he is no saviour, and redeems nothing but a few men’s memories. Against him the book sets Lena, the pregnant woman on the road, the pagan and Marian figure in whom life simply goes on, and whom it sets beside the image of an urn. Hightower’s dead grandfather riding at dusk is the South’s myth of itself, shown as the ghost that kept a man from living. Held a tenth below the top only because the Christ pattern is visible enough to invite counting.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The title is the spiritual’s call to Pharaoh, and the last part makes it literal: Molly Beauchamp, keening that Roth Edmonds sold her Benjamin into Egypt, turns the white family into Pharaoh’s house and her grandson’s executed body into the son sold into bondage, and the whole book becomes the house of bondage. The wilderness carries a second structure that bears load: the bear as the old god of the land, Sam Fathers, son of a Chickasaw chief and a slave woman, as its priest, the blood of the first buck marked on the boy’s face, Lion as the instrument that destroys what it serves, and the lumber company’s train as the fall. Isaac becomes a carpenter in imitation of the Nazarene. All of it stays particular: a commissary, a mule, a hound named Lion.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and the building is the book. A founding in a world so new that things had no names; a primal crime, the killing of Prudencio Aguilar, and an exodus to escape it; a plague of forgetting; the wars of an epic hero who loses all of them; a flood of “cuatro años, once meses y dos días”
“four years, eleven months and two days”; and an apocalypse foretold in a sacred text that the last of the line reads as it is fulfilled. The founding sin is the marriage of cousins and the curse it risks, the child with the pig’s tail, and the curse is realized in the last generation. The epigraph of the parchments, “El primero de la estirpe está amarrado en un árbol y al último se lo están comiendo las hormigas”
“The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants”, is fulfilled to the letter in the founder bound to the chestnut and the last child carried off by the ants. The particular stays particular: Macondo is a town of the Colombian coast, the wars are the Liberal and Conservative wars, the company is a company, and Úrsula is a woman and a matriarch at once. Held below the very top because some figures, Remedios and the seventeen Aurelianos among them, are emblem more than person, and because the myth is so legible that it can be read off rather than discovered.
Anonymous, under King Lalibela · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth is built into plan and section, not applied. The cave and the tomb: the church is reached by going down into the earth, and the Sepulchre, a tomb cut in rock, is the type of the whole. The holy mountain hollowed: the rock is the mountain and the church its heart. The cross as plan: Bete Giyorgis is a cross sunk in the ground, its form legible only from above, its roof carved with crosses within crosses. Jerusalem translated: the Jordan a trench between the groups, Golgotha a chapel in the rock with the tomb the tradition gives to Adam. Descent and emergence are walked by every pilgrim. Held below the top because the Jerusalem names may be later than the cutting, and the copied holy land is evoked as much as built.
Michelangelo · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The archetype is the mother with the child on her knees, the first image of Christian art and among the oldest of all; the group makes it load-bearing by inverting it. The child is now a grown man laid dead across the same knees, and the youth of the mother insists that the two moments are one. The composition is the pyramid of the Madonna enthroned with the Child, with the Child become a corpse. The particular stays particular: a Florentine face, a heavy body, real cloth, real weight. The pattern is not added to the scene; the scene is the pattern. Held below the summit because the subject brought the archetype ready made, and the achievement is to realise it, not to find it.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The returning dead child is the oldest of ghost stories, and here it is literal: the spiteful baby ghost of the first part takes flesh, drinks, eats sweets and sleeps with Paul D. The book loads her with two archetypes at once: the daughter whom the mother killed, Medea’s act done for the opposite reason, and the dead of the Middle Passage, the “Sixty Million and more” of the dedication, whose voice she speaks in the second part. The pattern of Demeter, the mother who will not let the daughter go, runs through the third part and is broken by the community, not by a god. The epigraph, “her beloved, which was not beloved”, names the reversal the book enacts. The particular stays particular: she is a girl who asks Sethe where her diamonds are. Held a step below the top because the reading of the Middle Passage is placed more than built: it rests on one section of the second part.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not merely evoked. Billy is Adam before the Fall, a foundling who answers the question of his father, “God knows, sir.” (ch. II). Claggart is the serpent, his chapter set under Milton’s “Pale ire, envy and despair.” (ch. XI). Vere is Abraham, who “may in the end have caught Billy to his heart, even as Abraham may have caught young Isaac” (ch. XIX). The action enacts the pattern: an accusation, an angel’s blow, a trial, an execution at dawn under “the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision” (ch. XXII), and a relic: “a chip of it was as a piece of the Cross.” (ch. XXVI). The particular holds: 1797, the Nore, the Articles of War, a surgeon arguing about spasm. Held a step down because the narrator names the myth as often as he builds it, and Billy is thinner than the figure he carries.
Sophocles · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built. The polluted king becomes a hero whose buried body protects the land that received him and harms the land that drove him out; the whole action converts the curse into a blessing, and the play stages it as a fact of cult, with a secret grave known only to Theseus and handed down. The place is load-bearing. He rests in the grove of the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, who are the Furies: the powers that pursued the kin-killer of the Oresteia receive the parricide, and the oracle had named their seat as his end. The curse on the sons, spoken here, is the engine of the Theban myth. And the man stays particular: querulous, proud, wily about his rights, tender to his daughters and terrible to his son. Held a step from the top because religion gave Sophocles the hero cult; he built it whole, but did not invent it.
Chola bronze casters · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing throughout. The dance of bliss at Chidambaram, by which the god creates, maintains, destroys, conceals and releases the world, is not alluded to by this bronze: it is its structure. Every part is a station in the myth, and the composition is the myth’s geometry: the drum and the fire at either end of one axis, the ring the bounds of the world, the dwarf the ground of forgetting, the foot lifted toward release. The archetypes are among the oldest and widest: the dancer as maker of the world, fire as the end of things, the circle as the cosmos, the god who treads down the demon. The particular stays particular where it matters most, in a dancer’s weight on one foot and a face. Held below the top because an icon stands near the archetype itself, and the particular person is thinner here than in a narrative work.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Built, not evoked. Three deep patterns carry the whole weight: the child condemned by prophecy and cast out by the father, the Oedipus pattern turned so that the son spares the father and the prophecy is fulfilled in the letter, the king at his feet, and voided in the spirit; the sleeper made king for a day and returned to his straw, here not a jest but a test of the soul; and the man in the tower dressed in skins, half beast, who must become human. Segismundo is at once a Polish prince with a grievance and every soul born into a world it did not choose. The title is a proverb in Spanish and its prince a type. Held off the top because the archetype is partly allegory, and the particular thins at moments into the exemplary.
Anonymous (Neolithic and Bronze Age) · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth is built into plan and structure, and it bears load. The circle is the horizon made, a world closed and centred. The axis is the year: midsummer sunrise at one end, midwinter sunset at the other, so that the monument is a door on the sun’s turning. The trilithon is the gateway in its barest form, two posts and a lintel, repeated five times and rising. The threshold is built from the river by the Avenue to the entrance and through the horseshoe’s mouth, and the dead lie under the bank before the stones arrive. Everything stays particular: these stones, this plain, this line in the chalk. Held below the top because the myth’s figures and names are lost; the circle and the sun are what is left to read.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built in three places, each bearing load. The title figure is a structure rather than an image: a spirit passing between worlds, carried by a plan in which the short songs of the first part and the long pieces of the second stand as child and parents, so that the album’s architecture is the myth. Inside the title track a nursery tale of three bears becomes a family with the child gone, and keeps its particulars. Hollywood closes on Kisa Gotami, the archetype of the bereaved mother. Short of the top: Elvis as a fallen king, the horses, Jesus and Mary, Leviathan and the galleon come as images, and the particular, a father, a house, a coast, is held deliberately indistinct.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not cited, and it is the whole structure. Three patterns bear the load at once. The game with Death is taken from the church wall: the respite is the game, and the game’s end is the end of the film. The Revelation frame makes the story the half hour of silence after the seventh seal, a world waiting for judgement while heaven says nothing. Jof and Mia, Joseph and Mary by name, guard a child, and the knight’s one act is to save them. The Dance of Death painted in the church is enacted as the last image. Take away the names and the structure still stands. Held from the top by the holy family, sweet and thin, and the morality-play types who fill the road.
Anonymous · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked, and it bears weight at every joint. Roland’s death is a Passion: a betrayal for gold by a man of his own house, the peers a company of twelve, the hill, the pine, the glove taken up by Gabriel, Michael and the cherubim bearing the soul to paradise. The sun stands still for Charles as for Joshua. Charlemagne is the patriarch king, white bearded, to whom angels speak in dreams, and who must fight the last battle himself against the emir of all heathendom. Durendal holds relics in its hilt, sword and reliquary at once. The archetypes stay particular: Roland is sulky, generous and wrong; Ganelon is a brave man consumed by a grudge, not a demon; Oliver’s rebuke is a friend’s. And the poem founded a myth that later centuries built on.
John Bunyan · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Here the book is strongest. The archetype is not evoked; it is the frame and every load in it: the journey from the doomed city to the holy one, the burden, the narrow gate, the house of instruction, the descent into the valley, the monster fought, the companion lost to martyrdom and another found, the giant’s dungeon, the mountain of vision, the river of death. Yet the particulars stay particular. The Slough is Bedfordshire mud; Vanity Fair is a market town with its rows and wares and its bench of local justices; the jury that condemns Faithful, Mr Blind-man, Mr No-good, Mr Malice, Mr Love-lust, Mr Live-loose and the rest, are neighbours with names. The names are allegory and character at once. Held below the highest because its world is one road, with no cosmos around it.
Maya · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, load-bearing in plan, section and orientation. The sacred mountain: a mountain of stone with the god’s house at its top, climbed from the human plane. The four quarters and the centre: each direction has its ascent, and the summit is the axis where they meet. The year as a stair: to climb is to pass through time. The serpent between sky and earth: the god’s head lies on the ground and the sun lays down its body, so that descent from the sky is enacted, not depicted. And the nested mountain: an older pyramid with its throne kept whole inside the new. All stays particular: this stair, this afternoon, this god of Chichen Itza. Held off the top because the paint and much of the sculpture that dressed the temple are lost, and part of the myth must be reconstructed.
Chandela builders · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The temple is the mountain of the gods, Meru or Kailasa: the roofs are a range of peaks rising to one summit, and the spire builds a mountain out of mountains. The sanctum is the cave in that mountain, named in the temple’s own name, a dark womb-chamber, the garbhagriha, at the foot of the peak, holding the god. The axis is the path from the world’s edge to its centre; the ambulatory is the circuit round the centre. Take away the mountain or the cave and the building is gone. It stays particular: this king, this stone, these couples. Held below the top because the archetypes are the type’s, built here most completely.
Constantinian, Crusader and later builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is built into plan and section. The tomb is the cave, the place of death that becomes the place of rising, and the rotunda closes round it as the circle round a centre, lit from above. Calvary is the mountain, raised above the floor, and beneath it Adam’s chapel, where by tradition the blood fell on the first man’s skull: fall below and redemption above on one vertical. Below the east end the chapel of the Finding of the Cross is the descent into the earth for the relic, and the navel of the world is marked on the floor between Calvary and tomb. It stays particular: this rock, this quarry. Held from the top because the builders received the archetype from the site.
Wu Cheng'en (attributed) · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked, and here the book is at its height. Sun Wukong (孫悟空, “awakened to emptiness”) is the trickster at the scale of the cosmos: born of stone without parents, he takes a name, steals the peaches and the elixir, defies Heaven and is held; then he is bound by a fillet to a master he could kill with a finger, and serves. That arc of rebellion, subjection, service and enlightenment is load-bearing: the hundred chapters are its working out, and the investiture of chapter 100 completes it. Around him the quest is a figure of the self’s cultivation, and each companion holds an archetype in a particular body: Zhu Bajie the appetite, lazy, lustful and endearing, forever wanting to go home; Sha Wujing the patient carrier; the horse a dragon tamed. What holds it from the top is that the archetypes stand still while the pattern repeats, and only Monkey and Bajie grow.
Byzantine · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Myth built, in one structure around one table. The archetypes bear load: the gift, seven offerings converging on an altar that is also real; the sacrifice of the son, Isaac and the Lamb; the strangers at the table who are God; the crown given back to the martyr. What is built rather than inherited is the placing of the living court inside the type: three Magi on Theodora’s hem make the empress a fourth, and the emperor’s paten makes the reconquest an offertory. Every figure stays particular: a heavy jaw, one woman’s face, a gaunt bald bishop, a tired old man serving at table. Held below the top because the spine, Abel to Melchizedek to Abraham to the Lamb, is the Canon’s, taken whole.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built, not only evoked. The order of 1861 makes the book a descent and a voyage: the poet cursed at birth by his mother in “Bénédiction”; the exiled creature of “L’Albatros”, “Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher”, “His giant’s wings prevent him from walking”; the fall through spleen; the city as an underworld, where seven identical old men file past as if out of hell; the false paradise; revolt with Cain and Satan; and death as the captain of the last voyage. In “Le Cygne” a swan escaped from a menagerie, dragging its wings in the dust of the Carrousel, becomes Andromache in exile, and the figure carries weight: exile is the poem’s argument. Held a step down because the Satanic poems summon myth more than they build it, and the beloveds are emblems as often as persons.
Walt Whitman · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built. “Song of Myself” makes a single man, “a kosmos, of Manhattan the son” (§24), into the American Adam and a universal body, and its structure is load-bearing archetype: the soul’s union with the self in §5, a passion and resurrection in the sections of suffering and recovery (§§33 to 38), and a last dispersal into the earth, “look for me under your boot-soles” (§52), as a dying god returns into the grass of the book’s title. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” is a myth of the poet’s origin: a bird’s lost mate, and the sea as mother whispering the one word. “Lilacs” builds a trinity of flower, star and bird and never names the dead President, who becomes the slain king of the spring rites while remaining a coffin on a train. Held a step down because elsewhere the myth is asserted, and the late book repeats the figure without deepening it.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The work makes an archetype: the philosopher who dies calmly, cheerful among weeping friends, refusing to be hurried, the West’s figure of the good death and, through it, a pattern for the martyr. It is built from particulars: the ship to Delos (58a to b), Socrates setting Aesop to verse in prison on a dream’s command (60e to 61b), the swan of Apollo, the jailer who weeps, the poison rising from the feet, and the last words, “Ō Kritōn, tōi Asklēpiōi opheilomen alektruona”
“Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius” (118a). The myth of the true earth bears load: it maps the moral ground the arguments could not prove. Held below the top because that myth is partly inherited Orphic and Pythagorean material set out as tale, and the arguments themselves carry no archetype.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked, though built from fragments. The Grail legend’s waste land, a country made sterile by its maimed king and waiting for the question or the rain, is the poem’s structure, not its atmosphere: drought in the first part, the dead god buried and drowned, the journey through the dry land to the chapel, the thunder, the king fishing with the arid plain behind him (424). Frazer’s dying gods give the burial its other face, in the corpse planted in a garden (71) that may yet sprout. Tiresias is the archetypal witness in whom, the note says, the persons meet, “the most important personage in the poem” (note to 218). The particulars stay particular: Lil and her teeth, the typist’s underclothes drying on the sill. Held a step below the top because part of the myth lives in the notes, and the rain never falls, so the structure is built to its last stage and not completed.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built, and built into the calendar. The book is set across Easter weekend: Jason’s Good Friday, Benjy’s Holy Saturday at thirty-three, and an Easter Sunday whose empty room, Miss Quentin gone down the pear tree in the night with Jason’s hoard, stands where the empty tomb should. The fall from the garden is built from one image: the children watching through the window, Caddy’s muddy drawers in the tree. Over it stands the house of a cursed line ending in its last sons, and the title’s tale told by an idiot, which the first section is. The particular stays particular: a pasture sold to pay for a wedding and a year at Harvard. Held a step below the top because the Christian pattern is inverted and ironic, and Benjy as a Christ is more a marker of the date than a figure the book builds.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built, in structure. The circle of heaven stands on the octagon, and the octagon in the square of the earth, and the passage between them is the structure itself. The axis is a direction without a destination: the plan points through the mihrab to Mecca and arrives nowhere inside the building. The centre of the floor holds not an altar or a throne but the human voice over running water. Everything stays particular: this hill, this frontier city, this sultan’s name. Held below the top because the domed cosmos was inherited twice over, from the Pantheon through Hagia Sophia and the Ottoman line, and because the reading of the eight piers as the bearers of the Throne is a reading made for the building, not a documented intention.
Michelangelo · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, and the pun of the foundation is load-bearing in the literal sense: the church Christ said he would build on Peter, the rock, is built over Peter’s grave, and the frieze says so where the weight comes down. The archetypes are structural. The martyr’s tomb is the centre of a world church; the dome over it is heaven; the approach is the pilgrim’s way, threshold by threshold, from the colonnade to the chair. The particular stays particular: one apostle, one grave, one chair. Held below the top because the domed martyrium and the temple as cosmos were inherited, from the Pantheon and the early Christian rotunda, and because Bernini, not the plan, joined the centre to the way.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The structure is the medieval Everyman and the art of dying, made load-bearing: a man summoned by death, deserted by companions, family and goods, accompanied at the last only by what is true. The name is part of the build, Ivan being the commonest of Russian names, and the life was “самая простая и обыкновенная и самая ужасная”, most simple and most ordinary and most terrible. The fall from the ladder is a fall in the old sense, brought on by pride in a possession. Gerasim, the peasant who carries his master’s legs and does not lie, is the servant become the saviour. The schoolboy’s medallion bore respice finem, worn as an ornament. Particular throughout: curtains, whist, pouffe. Held a step down because Gerasim leans toward emblem, and the archetype is one pattern followed through rather than several held in tension.
Charles Dickens · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, and load-bearing. The suit is a curse on a house, inherited and transmitted, consuming those who hope in it, and the plot carries the curse out: Tom Jarndyce’s suicide before the action, Gridley, Miss Flite, Richard Carstone, and the suit’s end when costs have eaten the estate. The fog of the first chapter is the court’s own medium and the plot’s: no one sees whole. The fever is the old myth of a city’s pollution returning on the city, carried by a boy who is told to move on and cannot. The Ghost’s Walk at Chesney Wold is a family prophecy the plot fulfils. Krook, called the Lord Chancellor of his rag and bottle shop, burns from within. Held a step down because Esther’s half keeps its myth thinner than the other.
Chola, under Rajaraja I · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The tower is Meru, the axis of the world, and Kailasa, Shiva’s mountain; the sanctum is the garbhagriha, the womb-house, a cave at the mountain’s root, dark, square and entered from the east. The devotee walks inward and circles the god. Remove the archetype and the section has no reason. The particular holds against it: this mountain carries one king’s name, and Tripurantaka, who destroyed three cities with one arrow, recurs in painting and sculpture on the temple of a conquering king. Held below the top by inheritance: mountain, womb-house and circuit are the given grammar of the Dravida temple. What Thanjavur built is the identification of king and god, and the scale at which the mountain stops being a figure and becomes one.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, not cited. The load-bearing structure is Orpheus: a man goes down after a dead woman, brings her back, and loses her a second time because he looks too closely — here, at a necklace. Nothing in the film names Orpheus; the shape does the work, and it carries both halves, the going down and the bringing back. Pygmalion runs beside it, inverted: the man shapes a woman into his ideal, but the ideal was the counterfeit and the living woman the original. The possession by the dead is staged as a hoax and then comes true in Scottie. The particulars stay hard: the corset, the cane, Lombard Street, the shopgirl’s room. What holds it below the top is the plot’s machinery. Elster’s scheme is a thriller’s mechanism, and for long stretches it delivers the myth more than it carries it.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The structure is a descent to the underworld. The two women knitting black wool at the door of the office, in a city like a “whited sepulchre”, are the Fates, and the doctor who measures the heads of those going out is the ferryman’s clerk. The river is the way down, the grove of death a circle of the damned, and Kurtz the man who has gone farthest in, from whom Marlow brings back a word he cannot deliver truly. Under the descent lies a second pattern, the Faustian pact: Kurtz has taken “a high seat amongst the devils of the land” and is worshipped. Both patterns bear the weight, and both stay particular: rivets, ivory, a steamer with a hole in her bottom. Held off the very top only because the figures nearest Kurtz, the Intended and the woman on the shore, are emblems more than persons.
Euripides · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and the build bears weight at every joint. The two goddesses stand as images on either side of the door, the poles between which the action is drawn, and they frame it: Aphrodite opens the play, “Pollē men en brotoisi kouk anōnymos / thea keklēmai Kypris”
“mighty among mortals and not without a name, I am called the goddess Cypris” (1 to 2), and Artemis closes it. The name is the death: the horseman is killed by his own team, panicked by a bull that Poseidon sends from the sea at a father’s word, and the bull from the sea answers the bull of Crete. The meadow untouched by the scythe is the unmated life that cannot last. The end is a founding: the girls of Troezen will cut their hair for him before marriage, so that the youth who refused marriage enters every marriage, and the myth closes into the city’s rite. The particular stays particular: Phaedra names her mother Pasiphae and her sister Ariadne as a family fate. Held below the highest figures because the gods are present as persons, which makes the pattern clear at some cost to depth beneath the surface, and because the chaste youth and the slandering wife are old stock, cousin to Joseph and Potiphar’s wife.
Juan Rulfo · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing on three lines. The son’s search for the father, sent by a dying mother to claim what is owed, opens the book and is overturned: the son finds the father only as a voice among the dead, and the son who kills him is another, the muleteer who guided the first in. The descent to the underworld: a guide at a crossroads, a town at the mouth of hell, the dead who will not admit they are dead, souls in penance for want of the Church’s pardon, a narrator who dies on the way down and goes on talking. Comala as a fallen paradise. None of it is allusion; the patterns are made of Jalisco, its drought, its priests, its debts. Held below the very top because Juan Preciado fades as a figure once he is buried.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not borrowed. The angel is Rilke’s construction, not the messenger of Scripture but a being in whom the visible is already wholly invisible: “Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich” (“Every angel is terrible”, I). It bears weight from the first line to the last. The Tenth builds an underworld from new materials, a fairground city of pain and beyond it the land of the Laments, where an older Lament leads a dead youth through her family’s former greatness and shows him its stars. The lovers, the early dead, the puppet, the acrobats with Madame Lamort, the hero and the animal recur as load-bearing parts. Held a step down because some figures are evoked rather than built: Tobias, Linos and Gaspara Stampa are allusions, and so is the hero’s mother in the Sixth.
Carl Theodor Dreyer · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and the title names it. The structure of the Passion bears the load: trial by priests before a foreign power, with Warwick and the English soldiers standing where Rome stood; the mocking by soldiers with a crown and a reed; the false friend; the denial, here Joan’s own abjuration, made from fear and wept over as Peter wept; the sacrament as the last meal; the death outside, before the people, and the cry from the crowd that a saint has been burned. Beneath it lies the older pattern of the maiden against the elders. The particular stays particular: a girl of nineteen who cannot sign her name unless her hand is guided, whose ring a soldier takes. Held just short of the top because the pattern is the Gospel’s, carried by imitation rather than newly built.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Faust is the most worn myth in German, and a name on a title is evocation at its cheapest. Here the myth is built, and it bears weight at three levels at once. The pact is enacted, not alluded to: Adrian, warned, seeks out in Pressburg the prostitute he will call Esmeralda, and that is the signature; the disease is the term of years; chapter XXV is the contract scene, written in the language of the chapbook of 1587; the last address to his friends is modelled on the chapbook’s Oratio to the students; and the child taken from him is the prohibition of love enforced. Under it lies a modern biography, Nietzsche’s: the brothel, the collapse, the mother who comes to take her son home. Above it lies the nation, whose catastrophe repeats the pact on a third scale, written in the months the debt was being paid. The particular stays particular: Kaisersaschern’s medieval streets, the stable girl Hanne singing rounds with the boys, the descent in a diving bell that Adrian tells as his own. What the title promised cheaply, the book pays for in construction; the charge that remains is the wear of the material it rebuilds.
Ustad Ahmad Lahauri · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built into plan. The garden is the paradise garden: four parts divided by water, meeting at a central tank. The threshold is built and inscribed; the visitor passes under verses that bid the soul enter the garden, and is in the garden. The axis carries the soul’s way, from the dark gate through ordered water and trees to the tomb at the edge of the world. The plan of eight rooms round a centre is the hasht bihisht, the “eight paradises”. A reading of the whole as God’s Throne over the gardens of Judgment is contested; that the structure can carry it is the evidence. The particular survives: one woman, named on her cenotaph. Held below the top because the archetype is one, inherited whole.
Robert de Luzarches, Thomas and Renaud de Cormont · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built into plan and structure. The cathedral is the Heavenly Jerusalem as its century built it, a city of God entered through a gate of judgment. The axis runs from the Beau Dieu on the central trumeau, Christ treading the beasts, to the altar and the relics in the east, so that entry is a passage from judgment to presence. The labyrinth laid the pilgrim’s way into the nave floor, and at its centre were set the bishop who began the church and the three masters who built it, a figure long read as recalling Daedalus. The particular stays particular: this city’s first bishop, its relic, its months of labour. Held below the top because the archetype is the inherited figure of the Gothic cathedral, built here with full command rather than first, and the labyrinth walked now is a relaying.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not cited. The fratricide is Cain and Abel, built over two hours: the slip in Havana, the kiss, the boathouse, the embrace at the mother’s wake, the boat. The founding myth runs the other way in the same film: an orphan escapes the town that killed his family, crosses water, is renamed at the gate and founds a house. Michael is the king who keeps the crown and loses the kingdom, and the last shot is his throne. The particular stays particular: a Communion party at Tahoe, Havana on a dated night. Held below the top because the father’s sin visited on the son is underplayed: the father’s violence is shown as justice, a pattern seen rather than a curse built.
Mark Twain · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built into the plot. The river is the load-bearing figure: a road, a sanctuary and a power that carries the raft south, deeper into slavery, against the wish of both who ride it, so that the flight to freedom is borne the wrong way by the current. The raft is an Eden the shore breaks into again and again. Huck dies and is reborn (chapter 7), watches the town fire a cannon over the water to raise his body (chapter 8), and goes on under a succession of names, so that the escape from the self is enacted, not said. The outcast white boy and the escaped slave became one of the governing myths of American writing, and the last line makes the flight west a national figure. The people stay particular. Held a step from the top because the last chapters turn the myth into Tom’s book-romance.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and built from nothing traditional except a borrowed Persian name turned against its bearer: the founder of moral dualism is made to undo it. The book makes figures that have since become common property: the Übermensch; the last man; man as a rope over an abyss, a figure literalised at once by the tightrope walker; the camel, lion and child of the spirit’s three metamorphoses; the eagle and the serpent; the spirit of gravity as a dwarf on the shoulder; the gateway; the great noon. They are load-bearing. The recurrence is never stated as doctrine but met as a vision and a riddle. Held a step below the top because Zarathustra himself is more figure than person, and the particular in the archetype is thin: we learn that he was thirty when he went into the mountains and stayed ten years there, and we learn his moods; little else.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The myth is built and it bears weight. Myshkin is a Christ who comes into the world from a Swiss valley where he was healed among children, and is returned to idiocy by it. The novel tests that figure against the dead Christ of Holbein, hung in the house of the man who will murder. Rogozhin and Myshkin exchange crosses and become brothers, and within the hour Rogozhin raises the knife. Myshkin is also Don Quixote, and the book says so through Aglaya, who recites Pushkin’s “Рыцарь бедный”
(the poor knight) in his presence and alters its initials. Nastasya Filippovna is the fallen woman of the Gospels, whom the Christ figure would raise. Every archetype stays particular: a prince with a bundle, a merchant’s son in a dark house, a woman known first by her portrait.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The structure is a theology in a machine: the Old Commandant as founder and god, buried under a teahouse table beneath an inscription that his followers will see him rise again; the officer as priest of a superseded law who offers himself as the last sacrifice; the New Commandant, never seen, as the new dispensation that has no use for the rite; the sentence written into the flesh as the law written on the heart, Jeremiah’s figure turned to iron. The traveller is the outsider who visits the sacred site and will not believe. None of this is laid over a plot: the plot is the passing of a cult, and every particular, the ladies’ handkerchiefs at the officer’s collar, the rice pap at the head of the bed, the soiled felt, stays particular and absurd while it bears the pattern. Held below the summit because the persons are functions without names, and the myth is schematic in them.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The archetype is the return, the oldest structure of exile and homecoming: the child who wasted his inheritance comes back and the father receives him, and in the Christian reading God receives the soul. It is not alluded to; the composition is that structure. The father stands on the threshold with the house behind him; the son kneels outside its line with his back to us, so that the viewer is set behind the one who returns. The second archetype, the faithful elder brother who resents grace, in the line of Cain and Abel and of Jacob and Esau, is built into the right half. The particulars stay particular. Held below the top because Luke gives the archetype whole, and the picture builds on a structure already built.
Anna Akhmatova · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The load-bearing structure is the Mother at the cross. Crucifixion, under its epigraph from the Holy Saturday liturgy, “Не рыдай Мене, Мати”
(Weep not for me, Mother), sets the Passion over the whole cycle, so that the woman at Kresty becomes the Mother who stands silent while Magdalene weeps and the beloved disciple turns to stone. The particular holds: a named prison, a parcel, three hundred hours. Beside it stand the streltsy wives howling under the Kremlin towers after Peter’s executions, which make the terror a return of Russian history; the folk lullaby of the quiet Don; and the monument of the Epilogue, which answers Pushkin’s Exegi monumentum by asking to stand at the prison gate. Held below the top because the Passion figure, though built, is borrowed whole rather than remade.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, and two structures carry weight. The first is Job. The epigraph is God’s question from the whirlwind, and the film is Job’s sequence: the loss, the question put to God, the answer given as the whole of creation, the restoration. The second is the fall. The childhood is Eden and its loss: the garden of the yard, the knowledge of good and evil in the neighbour’s house, Cain and Abel in the BB gun, the expulsion as the truck pulls away and the boys look back at the tree. The particulars stay hard: a 1950s Texas street, a father’s table manners, a burned boy’s head. Held at 9.1 by the shore, which evokes resurrection by image rather than building it.
Mikhail Bulgakov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and built twice over. The Passion is retold as an apocryphal Gospel in which the archetype is stripped and kept: Yeshua is no miracle worker, has one disciple who misrecords him, and goes to death by a governor’s weakness, and the story has the weight of the Gospel for that plainness. Faust is the frame of the whole, announced by the epigraph and inverted: Woland is Mephistopheles as an agent of justice, the Gretchen figure becomes the one who makes the bargain, and she makes it for love, not for knowledge. The witches’ sabbath and the Walpurgis ball are built into the plot, not hung on it. The particular stays particular: a cat taking a tram, sturgeon of the second freshness, a woman with yellow flowers. Held a step below the top by the Moscow figures, who are types of satire more than of myth.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing: the myth is the picture. Kronos, warned that a son will overthrow him, eats his children as they are born, and Saturn, his Roman name, is also Time, which consumes what it makes. Every element is the archetype: the father larger than the world, the child reduced to food, the act a defence against succession. And the particular stays particular. There is no sickle and no hourglass, only a naked old man with wild hair, thin shanks and dirty hands, as mortal as any figure Goya painted. The archetype is not evoked by allusion; it is enacted by one body on another. Held below the very top because the myth is inherited whole rather than discovered in a particular.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into plan, section and structure, not hung on them. The interior is the forest as sanctuary: the column is a tree because the load path of a tree is the load path of a vault, so the myth bears the roof. The plan is the heavenly city, its towers ranked by holiness, apostles at the edges, Evangelists and the Virgin nearer, Christ at the centre and highest, a cosmic order legible in silhouette. The façades set birth to the sunrise and death to the sunset, with glory as the entrance. The Nativity is the world created, turtles at the feet of its columns; the Passion is that world stripped to bone. It stays particular: this saint’s devotion, this city. Held short because the carved iconography often alludes where the structure builds.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.3 · Tier V
Myth built, not cited: darkness to light, chaos to cosmos, the many gathered into one. The opening is a creation scene, a world forming out of empty fifths; the finale is a festival at the end of time, with Elysium in the second line of its hymn. A human voice enters an instrumental order that cannot speak, and a man speaks first. Worm and cherub share a couplet: “Wollust ward dem Wurm gegeben, / Und der Cherub steht vor Gott” (“To the worm was given pleasure, and the cherub stands before God”). What holds it down is the particular, and music keeps few: a bass voice, a Viennese Turkish band, a drinking-song text of 1785.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The pear theft is a second Fall staged on purpose: a tree, forbidden fruit, a companion, and a sin wanted for its own sake, the fruit thrown to the pigs. The garden at Milan answers it: under a fig tree, a voice, a book, and the fall undone. The prodigal son is the frame of the life, the far country and its hunger (II.10.18; IV.16.30) and the return. Monica’s tears and the son of so many tears (III.12.21); the Platonist ascent made twice, once alone and once with his mother. The particular stays particular: the pears were not even good. Held at 9.0 because the archetypes are borrowed from scripture and the Platonists and made to carry, not made anew, and because the last books state their figures more than enact them.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Myth built, not cited. The structure is a rite: the adoration of the earth, then the sacrifice it demands. The seasonal cycle bears the whole of Part I and the scapegoat, the chosen victim whose death renews the land, the whole of Part II; the elder’s kiss of the earth is the first part’s hinge, the ancestors the second’s. The particular stays particular in sound: folk cells, the bassoon’s high arabesque, the guiro, the antique cymbals. Held down on three counts. The rite is invented, a pagan Russia the record does not document; the Chosen One is a type without a name; and without the titles the score builds ritual, not this ritual.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The hero’s agon, his death and the life that follows it are the order of the cycle: struggle in the first movement, a public funeral in the second, the return of energy in the third, and in the fourth a creation myth whose material is literally Prometheus’s, the ballet tune of the titan who brings fire and art to men. The finale’s process, from bass to theme, stages the Promethean act in sound. The particular stays particular: a Bonaparte crossed out, a memorial to “un grand Uomo”, a contredanse from Viennese ballrooms. Held below the summit because part of the myth is carried by title, source and history outside the notes, and the relation of funeral to finale is suggested, not narrated.
Raphael · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
The archetype is the assembly of the wise, from the symposium to Dante’s “filosofica famiglia” (Inf. IV.132), and it is built rather than evoked: the ascent by steps from measurement to speculation; the two directions of thought as two hands; the generations, boys and old men in one hall; the house of thought as an unfinished church. Each figure stays particular: a cynic with a bowl, a geometer’s bald head. Held at 9.0 for three reasons. The structure is a diagram, not a story: no fall, no sacrifice, no return, and the top of this axis is built from events. The roster, as the tradition reads it, is largely Dante’s Limbo inherited whole. And the typology that would deepen it, pagan wisdom facing the sacrament, belongs to the room, outside the unit.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The myth is built, not evoked. The marriage after the storm is a garden; the storm drowns the Turks so that the only enemy is inside; Iago enters it as tempter, and when the fall comes Othello names it beforehand: “Chaos is come again” (3.3). At the end he looks down at Iago’s feet for the cloven hoof and calls him “that demi-devil” (5.2). The handkerchief is the play’s sacred object, sewn by a sibyl and dyed in mummy, with “magic in the web of it” (3.4), and the plot turns on its loss. Iago carries the Vice of the morality play into tragedy: he talks to us, plans aloud and laughs. The particular stays particular: a garrison, a promotion, a borrowed handkerchief. Held where it is because the archetype lives in the characters’ language more than in the world’s structure: Lear’s heath is the myth, and Cyprus is where the myth is spoken.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built, not cited. The structure is load-bearing: the ascent ape, man, overman, which the Zarathustra fanfare names three times, at the dawn, the bone and the Star Child. Each stage is opened by the monolith, which has the force of the standing stone, the altar and the tablet, and no stated meaning. The Homeric title is carried through: Bowman is the bowman of the Odyssey, the voyage runs outward past every limit, and the voyager returns transformed toward the Earth. HAL’s red eye as the Cyclops is a common reading, not something the film states. Death and rebirth are enacted in the room. Held below the top by the particular: Bowman, Poole and Floyd are kept deliberately thin, and the one figure fully particular is a machine.
Virgil · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Built, not evoked. The governing myth is the end of the golden age: Jupiter ends Saturn’s reign so that need will sharpen men (1.121 to 146), and the whole poem is the labour that follows. The bees are a myth made from husbandry: a polity without love or private property, deathless as a race though each bee dies, and the poem makes them bear on Rome itself. Within the Aristaeus frame the archetype is set against the archetype: the farmer who loses his bees by a fault and regains them by sacrifice, the poet who loses his wife by a backward look and does not regain her. The bugonia closes the poem on life from death, and bears its argument. Held at 9.0 because Orpheus and Proteus are borrowed more than made, and the poem’s own figures stay small by design.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The archetype is the Virgin as bride, dawn, star and mother, and the work builds it from received figures by its order. The psalms are David’s voice and the Church’s, many-voiced, on the Church’s tones. Between them the bride speaks, alone and then in twos and threes. The echo asks “quae est ista quae consurgens ut aurora rutilat”
“who is she who rises shining like the dawn” and draws her name out of the sea, “maria” / “Maria”. The hymn sings “mutans Hevae nomen”
“changing the name of Eve”, the Marian myth in one line. Last the Virgin speaks in her own words, the ancient tone in long notes at the centre of the newest music. That is load-bearing. Held below the Passion because the figures are the liturgy’s and no narrative particular keeps them sharp; the particular here is musical gesture.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Myth is built, and the archetypes are load-bearing: the labyrinth (the Garden, Triste-le-Roy, the Library); the book that holds the world (Tlön’s encyclopedia, the Library); the demiurge who dreams a man (“Las ruinas circulares”); the betrayer as redeemer (“Tres versiones de Judas”); the traitor who is the hero (“Tema del traidor y del héroe”, staged out of Julius Caesar). Each story is built on its pattern, not decorated with it. The stories added in 1956 build the Argentine myth beside the universal one: “El fin” completes Martín Fierro with Fierro’s death at the hands of the brother of the man he killed, and “El Sur” makes the knife fight on the plain into a chosen death, perhaps a dream in a sanatorium. Held a step from the top because the persons who bear these patterns are often thin, figures in a diagram, so that the particular does not always stay particular.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, and in more than one pattern. Descent and return: the novel is told from underground, a hibernation, and ends with a promise to come up; the factory hospital is a rebirth by machine, in which the narrator is asked, on cards, for his own name and his mother’s. The journey north is the slave narrative’s flight made into a passage from one bondage to another, carried by sealed letters the bearer cannot read. Rinehart, runner, gambler, lover and reverend at once, is the trickster as a social fact. Barbee, blind and named Homer, gives the Founder’s life as an epic. Ras the Exhorter becomes Ras the Destroyer and rides into the riot as a figure out of legend. Held below the top because the patterns are many and some are evoked as allusion rather than built, the Homer name and the Eliot epigraph among them, and because Rinehart is never seen.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth is built in two songs and carried by one pattern across the rest. The title track moves the binding of Isaac onto a United States highway: God’s command, “Kill me a son”, meets an American shrug, and the killing is sited on Route 61, where a later verse stages the next world war as a promoter’s show. The road is real, running down the Mississippi through the blues country of the Delta, and the music comes down it. “Desolation Row” builds an underworld street with its own curfew and agents, a place with rules rather than a list of names. And the road and exile bear load throughout: a fallen woman with no home to go to, a train, a car, a highway, a stranger stranded at the border, a street where the exiles arrive. Held from the top by “Tombstone Blues”, which only summons a crowd.
Modest Mussorgsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The archetype is built and bears the work. A ruler’s crown rests on a murdered child, and the child returns: as a name in a chronicle, as a pretender who takes it, as a ghost in a clock’s chiming. That is the guilty king whose crime curses the land, the pattern of Oedipus and Macbeth, made Russian. Around it stand archetypes that stay particular: Pimen writing history in a cell; the Holy Fool, given the last word; the people, chorus of a tragedy whose protagonist it outlives. Held below the top by the Polish act, whose Marina and Rangoni are operatic types, and by the 1872 loss of the meeting of king and holy fool.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The structure is the rise and fall of a house under karmic law, announced by the bell of Gion Shōja and closed in the bell’s world at the Jakkōin. Kiyomori is the proud man of every literature and stays a particular old man with a temper and a favourite dancer. The archetypes are fastened to objects: the sacred sword lost at Dan-no-ura, which the text traces to the serpent slain in the age of the gods and gives back to the sea, so that the regalia enact the fall; the child emperor going down to a capital under the waves. At the close a woman tells her life as a passage through the six realms of rebirth, carrying the whole Buddhist cosmos, and the recitation was itself a pacification of the dead. Held a step below the top because some of the myth is laid on as doctrine.
Rogier van der Weyden · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth is built, and built where it bears the most weight. The central structure is the archetype of the dead son and the mother: the two bodies on parallel diagonals make the lament and the Passion one figure. The skull and the bone at the Virgin’s feet set the scene on Golgotha, the place of Adam’s skull, so the death of the second Adam is laid over the first, the Fall and the redemption in one corner. The particulars stay particular: Nicodemus’s brocade, the strained hands on the ladder, a Leuven guild’s altar. Without the rhyme of the two bodies the picture would illustrate an event. Held below the top because the frame is given to it whole by the Gospels and the liturgy; it builds on that frame rather than finding one.
Raphael · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Built, and load-bearing: the composition is the archetype. Above and below, light and dark, the possessed and the transfigured, the body seized by a spirit and the body filled with glory, the mountain and the plain: the oldest vertical order of the world, made the structure of the panel rather than its atmosphere. The boy and Christ answer each other as two states of the human body under spirit, one rigid and convulsed, the other weightless and open. The mount is every mountain of revelation, Sinai behind Moses and Carmel behind Elijah. The particulars stay particular: a father’s grip on his son’s chest, a woman’s twisted back, a foot on a rock. Held below the top because the structure is the Gospel’s, received rather than built anew.
James Joyce · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and named in the hero. Stephen Dedalus carries the artificer’s name; the epigraph is Ovid’s line on Daedalus turning his mind to unknown arts; the imagery of wings, nets and flight runs from the child’s rhyme of eagles that will “Pull out his eyes”, to his schoolfellows’ cry on the shore, “Bous Stephanoumenos!”, to the last line’s invocation of the “Old father, old artificer”. It is load-bearing: the book is the labyrinth, Dublin, the church and the family, and the making of wings, and the father invoked at the end is both Daedalus and the absent Simon Dedalus. The second myth is Lucifer’s fall, built into the third chapter’s sermon and taken up by Stephen as his own. Icarus is not named and does not need to be. The particular stays particular: cocoa, the square ditch, the pandybat. Held a step off the top because the myth’s fall is left outside the book.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
No modern novel is more crowded with myth, and much of it is allusion the narrator tags with a wink: Behrens as judge of the dead, Settembrini as Mephisto, the carnival night out of Faust, where Clavdia is Lilith, the sevens of everything. Under the tags the structure is built and bears the weight. The mountain is the Venusberg of Tannhäuser, the land under the hill where time stops and the knight forgets the world, and Hans stays seven years out of time until the thunderclap drives him down. It is the underworld, from which he descends as the dead do not, and the sealed vessel of alchemy, in which a simple material is transformed by being sealed and heated; the book names the hermetic itself. It is an initiation: trials of eros (Clavdia, through the borrowed pencil that was once Hippe’s), of death (the X-ray, Joachim) and of the spirit (the two tutors, the snow), undergone by a quester who is the pure fool of the grail. Settembrini and Naphta are a psychomachia, two angels at the ear of Everyman. Remove the seven-year enchantment and the stay has no shape. Held at 9.0 because the irony keeps much of the myth at a distance, collected and labelled, more pattern than force.
Jacques-Louis David · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The structure is the Deposition and the Pietà. The hanging arm is the dead Christ’s arm, a formula David knew from Caravaggio’s Entombment and from the Roman reliefs of Meleager carried from the bier; the wound is in the chest; the sheet is a shroud; the crate is an altar and a tomb slab with its inscription. The patron saint’s martyrdom is assembled from a bath, a cloth and a box, and it carries the whole composition, not a corner of it. The particular stays particular: a turban of wet cloth, a patched sheet, a cheap knife, a date. Remove the Christian structure and the picture falls into a crime scene. Held below the top because the archetype is borrowed whole, and one archetype, not several, is built.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The book is a funeral journey through ordeals by water and by fire, and the ordeals are the plot: at the flooded ford and in the burning barn the dead woman is nearly lost to the elements, and each time she is saved by the son who is not his father’s. The archetypes are made from the family’s own matter: Jewel and his horse, which Darl tells Vardaman is Jewel’s mother; Addie as a fish in a child’s mind; Darl as the seer whose sight is punished. The descent to the dead is the title, from Agamemnon’s speech in the underworld in the eleventh book of the Odyssey, and Addie speaks from the dead in the book’s own body. All of it stays particular: an adze, a mule team, a bag of bananas. Held a step off the top because the comic surface lets the myth be read as a joke, which the book intends, and which thins the load in the Jefferson sections.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, in three ways. The tower itself, a real Norman keep in Galway that Yeats bought and restored, is made the book’s emblem, house of the ancestral line, of the solitary philosopher and of the civil war at its door, and it stands on the cover. Byzantium is built as a place the poem constructs, a city of artifice where the soul is taught by “monuments of its own magnificence”. And “Leda” makes one act the origin of an age, set against the Christian annunciation in “Two Songs from a Play”: “I saw a staring virgin stand / Where holy Dionysus died”. The particular stays particular: a stare’s nest in a crack in the wall, a dead young soldier on the road. What holds it a step down is the private share. The gyre and its cycles belong to A Vision, and the poems summon them rather than contain them; the Black Centaur is a personal emblem, and the dead of All Souls’ Night are ghosts of a circle, not myths a culture lives by.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it has become a template: the gathering of a band, each man chosen by a test, for a defence most will not survive. Its old forms are the Argonauts and the Round Table, but the structure stands without the comparison and bears load: the recruitment is the choosing, the village the walled place, the battle the ordeal. The genre plot of the gathered band descends from it. The figures are archetypes kept particular. Kambei is the elder who has lost every battle he fought, Katsushirō the initiate, Kyūzō the perfected swordsman who wants nothing, Kikuchiyo the trickster between two worlds, admitted to the band only by his death. The frame, harvest to planting, sets the deaths inside a cycle that does not need them. What keeps it from rising higher: three of the seven are lightly drawn, and the bandits have no myth at all.
Andrei Rublev · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. A particular scene, travellers fed under the oak of Mamre, becomes the eternal council of the three persons, and the structure is carried by the composition, not by allusion: the circle that holds the three, the cup at its centre, the three emblems over the three heads. The house reads as Abraham’s tent made a dwelling, and as the church; the tree as the oak of Mamre and the tree of life; the mountain as ascent. The meal is folded into the Eucharist and the sacrifice before the world. Which angel is which person is still argued, and the panel does not say, which is part of how the myth works. Held below the top because the particular loses its human weight: Abraham and Sarah are gone, and with them the human hosting that made Mamre a scene.
George Frideric Handel · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and the largest the West has: promise and fulfilment, a god born, suffering, dying, rising, ascending and returning, and the dead raised at the last trumpet. It is load-bearing in the strictest sense, because Jennens’s order is the order of the myth and the plan has no other principle. The myth is built from prophecy rather than story: Isaiah’s servant becomes the man of sorrows, Psalm 22 the mockery, Psalm 24 the ascension, Job’s Redeemer the rising. It is shown as a pattern already written and now kept. What holds it here is the particular. With no characters and almost no narrative, the particulars are vivid and few: shepherds at night, the Pifa’s pipers, a back given to the smiters, sheep. The myth is stated as myth more than found in a particular.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built from a fairy tale turned inside out: the poor boy raised by a secret benefactor and destined for the princess. The book gives the fairy godmother’s part to Miss Havisham, lets Pip believe it, and then hands it to a felon from the hulks. The reversal is load-bearing; the whole Third Stage is the undoing of the tale. The archetypes stay particular: the jilted bride who stopped time, witch and broken woman at once; the cold princess raised to break hearts; the hidden father returning across the sea; the prodigal forgiven at the forge before he asks (chapters 57 and 58). The chain governs, named at its first link (chapter 9) and made iron in the leg-iron. Held a step down because the world of Jaggers and Wemmick works as type, not myth.
F. Scott Fitzgerald · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built into the plot. “Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God” (chapter 6): the self-begotten American as a parody of the Incarnation. The quest is a grail quest, and the book says so, “he had committed himself to the following of a grail” (chapter 8); the grail is a woman whose voice is full of money. The god of the waste land is an oculist’s billboard, and Wilson, looking at it, says “God sees everything” (chapter 8) before he goes to kill. The coda makes Gatsby the last of the Dutch sailors before the “fresh, green breast of the new world”. The particular stays particular: shirts, a hydroplane, a boyhood schedule. Held a step down because some of the myth lives in Nick’s commentary rather than in what is done.
François Rabelais · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The giant body is the world’s body: Gargantua is born from his mother’s ear crying “A boire! A boire!”
“A drink! A drink!”, Pantagruel’s mouth holds a country, and a feast of tripe is a cosmogony of appetite. The last three books take the oldest form, a voyage to an oracle, and its answer is one word, “Trinch”: drink. Carnival is set against Lent as two powers at war, Quaresmeprenant anatomised against the Andouilles. Thélème is the archetypal counter-monastery. Panurge is the trickster made whole, a coward’s body with a sophist’s tongue, and still particular: in debt, afraid of cuckoldry, eloquent in praise of borrowing. Held a step down because some of the myth is pastiche of a chapbook, wielded rather than built.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built here first. The little man of Russian literature is this clerk: the type that later books evoke is constructed in this one, out of a name, a rank, a task and a coat. The name carries a pattern. Akaky, from the Greek for “without evil”, is a saint’s name, and the story has long been read as a saint’s life turned inside out: the meek copyist whose one passion is a garment, and who comes back from the grave. The coat becomes a bride, a companion for his life. The return of the dead as avenger is load-bearing, since it is the plot’s only justice. And the particular stays particular throughout: four hundred roubles, the tailor, the snuffbox, the socks in the inventory. Held off the top because the revenant is left ambiguous and half joking, so that the myth is built and then shrugged at.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The winged figure who cannot fly, seated among the instruments of creation, is the Saturnine genius made particular: one woman with a wreath, keys and a purse, in one half-built place by one sea. The print fuses the personification of Geometry, first of the liberal arts in the tradition of the Typus Geometriae, with the temperament of black bile, and that fusion is the figure’s whole identity; without it a still life with a woman remains. Later art draws its melancholics from her. Held below the top because the frame is learned and humoral, not a story of origin or fate held by a whole culture.
Honoré de Balzac · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, on three load-bearing figures. Goriot is Lear transposed into the bourgeois age: a father who has divided his kingdom, which is his capital, between two daughters, is shut out, and dies raving at them, with no Cordelia, the book’s darker turn on the pattern. Vautrin is the tempter on the mountain, offering a young man the kingdoms of the world for a crime he need not commit himself, and he returns through La Comédie humaine as its devil. Rastignac is the young man from the provinces, an archetype this book did more than any other to fix; his name entered French as a common noun for the ambitious arriviste. The particular stays particular: the vermicelli, the silver gilt porringer twisted into an ingot, the Beauséant carriages. Held a step down because the Lear pattern is announced as loudly as it is constructed.
Built for Abbot Suger · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, and built here first in the form the Gothic church would keep. The church stands on a martyr’s grave: the crypt is the tomb, the choir above it the heavenly court, the relics raised from one to the other, a resurrection made in section. Light is the figure of God, not as ornament but as structure: the walls give way to windows, and the Heavenly Jerusalem of gem walls and light becomes the plan of the east end. The necropolis builds a second archetype, the kings laid round the saint to wait for the end of time, then torn from it in 1793. The particular holds: this saint, this abbot, this crown. Held at 9.0 because the light figure is inherited from scripture and from Pseudo-Dionysius, and the necropolis was assembled over centuries.
Virgil · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Here the myth is built, not evoked. The book makes Arcadia. Theocritus’s herdsmen were Sicilian; Virgil calls his two singers “Arcades ambo”, Arcadians both (7.4), and sets Gallus dying of love in Arcadia in the tenth poem, and out of a rough Greek region he builds the European landscape of the pastoral idea, the place apart which history enters as a soldier. The construction is load-bearing: it carries the first and ninth poems, where the place is invaded. Daphnis is the dying and rising shepherd, mourned by nature and taken to the stars. The fourth poem builds the golden age as a birth, a pattern made strongly enough that a later faith read itself into it. Held at 9.0 because Arcadia is a frame of feeling more than a story.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The images are the common stock of the Persian Sufi lyric, the moth and the candle, Joseph and Zulaykha, Layla and Majnun, the reed, the ocean, and myth evoked in allusion would not hold this figure. What holds it is that one particular man, a wandering dervish of Tabriz named Shams, “Sun”, is made the load of the whole body. The sun of his name becomes the sun of the cosmos and the sun in the heart; the signature that should carry the poet’s name carries his; his disappearance becomes the archetypal absence of the beloved, and his longed-for return the resurrection. The lover and the beloved, the teacher who kills and remakes the disciple, the second birth: all are built on one historical friendship, which stays particular while it carries them, in Konya, in the quarrel, in the search in Damascus.
Li Bai · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built from the poet himself. Across the body the poems construct one figure, the banished immortal, exiled from heaven into wine and mountains and keeping company with the moon. The moon is load-bearing: the companion of “Drinking Alone”, the home of “Quiet Night Thought”, the one sight shared by soldier and wife, “長安一片月，萬戶擣衣聲”
(one moon over Chang’an, ten thousand households beating clothes), and the permanent against the mortal, “今人不見古時月，今月曾經照古人”
(people now do not see the ancient moon; this moon once shone on the ancients). The Tianmu poem builds the shaman’s flight of the Chu ci into a structure that ends in refusal of the court. The myth absorbed the man: the legend that he drowned reaching for the moon in the river. Held a step down because the Daoist apparatus of immortals and elixirs is often evoked rather than built.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. Bartleby is a particular man, a copyist hired in answer to an advertisement, with a screen, a desk by a window onto a wall and a diet of ginger nuts; and he becomes, without a symbol pointed at, the figure of pure refusal, the stranger at the door whom charity cannot take in, the man who is a dead letter. The structure carrying it is load-bearing: the formula repeated until it is a rite; the scriptural frame the narrator brings to his own trial, from the commandment of love to Job at the death; the walls closing from the office window to the prison yard. The proof that the figure was built is that it detached from the story and became the name of a human possibility. Held below the top because the scriptural frame is partly the narrator’s, borrowed for comfort, and the story keeps it at that remove.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, not evoked. Vor dem Gesetz is a parable that stands as a modern myth in its own right, the doorkeeper, the countryman and the gate meant for one, with no source but itself, and it has been read as scripture since. Eine kaiserliche Botschaft is the myth of the absent sovereign and the undelivered word. The title story builds from the stuff of a farm a structure that carries the sacred: unearthly horses out of a pigsty, a servant girl given up as the price of the journey, the wound in the boy’s right side, a “Blume” the size of a palm with worms in it, the sacrificial chorus of the school children, and the doctor laid as victim beside his patient. Odradek is a new mythic being made from a spool of thread, who will outlive the father; the new advocate gives the heroic myth its epilogue. Each stays particular: a doctor’s bad night, a lawyer’s office, a stairwell. Held at 9.0 because three or four pieces are anecdote rather than myth.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built here, not evoked. The tower with its winding stair is a particular house at Ballylee, and it becomes the soul’s ascent and the nation’s summit, “Half dead at the top” in “Blood and the Moon”. Sato’s sword, wrapped in silk from a court lady’s dress, is a real gift and becomes the Self’s emblem against the Soul’s tower of darkness. “Byzantium” constructs its own afterworld, a smithy of spirits carried on dolphins across a sea of images, and the structure of purgation bears the poem’s weight. Crazy Jane is a made archetype, the wise fool and harlot against the Bishop, as load-bearing as any figure in Yeats. Coole Park becomes the last house of a tradition, and its swan the soul. What holds the axis a step down is the system behind “Byzantium” and “The Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus”, which at times stands outside the poems as scaffolding the reader must bring in.
David Lynch · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not cited. The doppelgänger is the load-bearing structure: the dreamer divides herself into an innocent and a woman in need, and divides her lover into the helpless Rita and the cruel Camilla, and the second half can be read only by matching each figure to its double. The girl who comes to the city and the city that chooses girls is the Hollywood myth of Sunset Boulevard lived from the inside. The blue box is Pandora’s and the key is Bluebeard’s, and neither is named. The particulars stay hard: Deep River, Ontario, the jitterbug contest, the Havenhurst courtyard, a waitress’s name tag. The dreamed double life was first tried in Lynch’s own Lost Highway, where a man dreamed himself another man; here it is split across two women and made the key to the whole film. Held just below Vertigo (9.1), whose doubled woman it inherits.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth here is built, not evoked. The structure of the Bacchae runs under the plot: a stranger god arrives from the east, a man who has refused him is taken, and the city falls with him; the cholera comes, the book says, from the delta of the Ganges, the god’s road. The death figures are one Hermes in many coats, the guide of souls, and the gondolier is a Charon who rows without licence and is not paid. Tadzio is drawn as Hyacinthus and Narcissus and at the last as the beckoning guide. Socrates and Phaedrus under the plane tree are reenacted and then parodied in the square. The particular stays particular: a Polish boy in a sailor suit, a hotel, a barber, strawberries. The allusion can feel applied, a scholar’s apparatus, but the archetype bears the load: remove the Dionysian pattern and the plot no longer moves.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, in three ways. “Saint Julien” is an Oedipal fate built as plot: the prophecy, the two near misses (a sword that falls, an arrow loosed at what he takes for a stork), the deed done in ignorance, the expiation by ferry and the leper who is Christ. “Un cœur simple” builds a myth out of the provinces: the parrot, Loulou, becomes for Félicité the Holy Ghost by steps the story shows one by one (the image in church, the resemblance, the stuffing, the altar of repose), so that the archetype is made in the particular and never leaves it. “Hérodias” stands at the hinge of the Christian story. Together they trace the Holy Ghost, the Son and the Precursor backward through time. Held from the top because “Hérodias” evokes more than it builds.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not cited. The first structure is the descent: a boat and its crew going up a river that runs out of history and out of law, to a place of the dead. The second lies on Kurtz’s table, in Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Weston’s From Ritual to Romance: the king of the grove, killed by the man who comes to replace him. The film enacts it. Willard kills Kurtz as the compound slaughters a water buffalo, the two cut into one rite; the people bow and lay down their weapons, and he drops his own and leaves. Take the books away and the structure stands. Held a step from the top because the books signpost the myth, it arrives late, and the compound’s people are figures in a borrowed, Conradian picture of the primitive.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Archetype is built into plan and section. The citadel on the water, walled, its centre protected by rings; the precinct as a city within the city; the ruin, which the openings recall, walls whose windows have become great holes, a building wrapped in its own ruin; the temple whose sanctuary is a gathering rather than a god. Each is load-bearing: the concentric plan, the lake and the layered wall are the building’s structure of meaning, not its decoration. The particular stays particular: a working parliament in a delta, of concrete and brick, with offices, a prayer hall and committee rooms. The myth is layered, citadel, ruin and temple at once, but it stops short of a cosmos made whole in one room, as in the Pantheon.
Kenji Mizoguchi · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The myth is built, from two of the oldest patterns. The man drawn away by a woman of the other world, ghost or serpent, whose house is a ruin: Ueda’s white serpent, the lamia, the fairy mistress. And the man who returns after what seems a short absence to find his home altered and his wife dead and waiting: Urashima Tarō, or Odysseus come home to a dead Penelope. The structure bears load. The lake is a crossing to another world and the dying boatman a ferryman who warns; the mansion is an enchanted dwelling; sacred writing on the body breaks the spell; two dead women frame the hero, one who takes and one who gives. Pots, coins and a kiln keep it particular. Held a step below the top because Tōbei’s strand is satire, not myth, and stands outside the pattern.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not cited. The plot is an initiation: a prince faints before a serpent, is sent by a mother figure for a captive daughter, is turned at three temple doors, tested by silence, then by fire and water, and admitted to the light with his bride. Night against sun bears the load: the Queen’s realm is the night, Sarastro’s circle of the sun the reward, and the last chorus sends the night down. The flute, carved, the libretto says, from an ancient oak in a storm, and the bells are instruments of passage. Papageno, half bird, the double who cannot be initiated, is built into the myth rather than left outside it. Held at 9.0: Tamino and Sarastro stay nearer to types than to persons, and the Egyptian mysteries are Masonic costume as well as structure.
El Greco · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The structure of the picture is the archetype: a body laid in the earth below, a soul carried up a narrow passage above, and the passage drawn as a birth. The angel brings the soul through a cleft in the cloud as through a womb, so that burial and second birth are one vertical act. Christ between the Virgin and the Baptist is the Byzantine image of judgement the painter grew up with, and here it decides the case of one man. The particulars stay particular: a Toledan lord, a parish priest, a boy with a handkerchief, men of 1586 in the ruffs of 1586. Held below the top because the heaven around the passage is of the crowded kind the Counter-Reformation commissioned everywhere; only the passage is the painter’s own construction.
Kalidasa · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built at three depths. The story is the origin of a dynasty: the boy Sarvadamana of the seventh act will be Bharata, from whom the land takes the name it still bears in its own languages. The plot is the archetype of the token and the recognition, the kin of Odysseus’ scar and the folktale’s ring, made the play’s title and its machinery. And the three worlds are a fall from a garden and a return to a higher one: Shakuntala, a nymph’s daughter by a sage, raised by birds and then by an ascetic, sister to the creepers she waters, is taken from nature into the world of law and power, cast out, and restored where gods live. It stays particular: the friends’ teasing, the bee at her face, the fawn. Held a step from the top because the cosmic frame of the seventh act is announced by the gods’ explanation more than earned by the action.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The archetype is not summoned; it is the structure. A rider passes through a valley of shadow between Death and the Devil toward a stronghold on a hill, and every element is that journey: the procession, the gorge as the narrow way, the skull as what lies behind, the castle as the end, Death beside the road and the tempter at the back. The Christian soldier of Ephesians, armoured in faith, and the soldier of Erasmus’s Handbook of the Christian Soldier (1503), whether or not Dürer read it, are realised, not alluded to. And it stays particular: a German knight of 1513 in the armour of his day, on a real horse built to proportion, with a real dog.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The contest of Apollo and Marsyas is the archetype of the divine and the animal in art, measure against ecstasy, the lyre against the pipe, and the composition builds it: the god’s side plays on while the satyr’s pipes hang useless in the tree. The inverted body lays a second archetype into the first, the hunter’s carcass hung to be skinned and the inverted martyr, so that the pagan sacrifice carries the shape of Christian suffering without allegory. Midas, the judge who chose wrongly, sits as the human witness. The particular stays particular: dogs, a bucket, a knife, a cap. Held at the gate rather than above it because the Christian echo is evoked by posture, not built into the narrative.
Jean d'Orbais, Jean le Loup, Gaucher de Reims and Bernard de Soissons · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and built into plan and rite at once. The cathedral is the Heavenly Jerusalem, a city of stone with its hosts, angels with spread wings standing guard on every buttress round the walls. And it is the stage of the sacred king: he entered at the west beneath the Coronation of the Virgin in the central gable and passed down the long axis to be anointed at the crossing, with oil held to have come from heaven at Clovis’s baptism. The myth was performed here for six centuries, enacted and not only shown. The inner west wall makes the threshold double, the saints looking out and in. Held below the top: the myth is one dynasty’s, and the cosmos the common one of its kind.
Inca, under Pachacuti · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built into plan and structure, not applied. The settlement is set between an old peak and a young one, on a ridge the river encircles, and cut in two by its plaza into upper and lower halves, the Andean dual order built as plan. Its sacred places are the archetypes themselves, each made structural: the cave beneath the Torreón, with the sun admitted by a window to the rock above it at the June solstice; the mountain repeated in the Intihuatana’s built hill with a stone at its summit; the spring led into sixteen basins, so that water descends the settlement as liturgy; the condor’s wings in living rock. The particular stays particular: this spring, this boulder, these peaks. Held below the top because the cosmogram is inferred from Andean religion and from Cusco, not stated by the building, and the Three Windows’ tie to the origin myth is Bingham’s and is not credited.
Nathaniel Hawthorne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built on one object. The letter is load-bearing from the first chapter to the last line: embroidered by its wearer with “fantastic flourishes of gold thread” (II), read by the town as the mark of an adulteress and later as “Able” (XIII), seen burning in the sky, found or not found on the minister’s breast, and carved at last on a shared stone. Around it the archetypes stand in the structure, not in allusion: the fallen pair and the child of the fall; the wilderness where the Black Man walks, against the godly town; the healer turned devil, a Mephistopheles who lives in his victim’s house; the woman on the scaffold with her infant, in whom, the narrator says, a Papist might have seen an image of the Virgin. The particulars stay particular: Hester’s needle, Pearl’s tantrums, the minister’s hand at his heart. Held a step from the top because the allegory sometimes explains itself.
Romanesque builders; Obradoiro facade by Fernando de Casas Novoa · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype is built and load-bearing. The plan is a road’s end: the journey’s last stretch made architecture, ending in a tomb beneath an altar, so that the pilgrim reaches the centre by going down to the dead and up to the saint. The Pórtico is the gate of heaven as a threshold the body must pass, the apostle seated on the column at the hinge of entry over a column of Jesse, the tree of descent, worn where centuries of hands have rested. The Obradoiro makes the front an altarpiece turned outward, a reliquary façade for the city. The particular stays particular: this apostle, this tomb at the western edge of the known land, this granite.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not retold. Rilke makes Orpheus a principle: “Ein für alle Male / ists Orpheus, wenn es singt” (“Once and for all, / it is Orpheus when there is singing”, I.5). The load-bearing move comes at the end of Part I, where the god’s dismemberment by the Maenads is the reason his song is now everywhere, in stones and trees and in us: “O du verlorener Gott! Du unendliche Spur!” (“O you lost god! You endless trace!”, I.26). Eurydice is never the subject; in her place stands the dead girl, “fast ein Mädchen” (“almost a girl”, I.2), who sleeps the world inside the ear. The myth stays particular: a dancer, a white horse, a dog, a fountain mouth. Held a step from the top because some sonnets carry the myth as address rather than as structure.
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth here is built, not evoked. Gull’s mythology, the sun against the moon, reason against unreason, Apollo against Dionysus, and the Masonic deity he names Jahbulon, is the engine of the plot: the murders are rites performed on a map he has drawn, and the book makes its reader walk the map. Then it turns the myth. The man who means to bind the female principle under London produces, by his act, the twentieth century he sees in his visions, with its rationalised violence and its offices. The particular stays particular: the murderer is a doctor with a stroke behind him and a wife at home, and the women are named and their lives costed. The Ripper as the archetype of the modern murderer is made in front of the reader, and the book shows the making. Held a few tenths from the top because part of the mythology is lecture, given in Gull’s voice, more than enacted.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is built, not evoked. An opera made seven years after the form began takes for its subject the founding singer: the myth of music’s power over death, enacted by music. La Musica speaks the Prologue in her own person, and “Possente spirto” is not a report of Orpheus’s song; it is the song, sung to the ferryman. The descent, the condition and the backward look bear the structure’s load, so the form makes the bargain of art with death audible. The Apollo ending adds a second archetype, the son received by the divine father and raised to the stars. Held below the top because the particular stays thin: Orfeo is an office more than a man until Act V, and Euridice is a name with a few lines.
Built for Fujiwara no Yorimichi · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not cited. The Western Paradise is a palace across water, reached at death, with the Buddha at its centre; the hall is that palace set on an island, and the worshipper stands on the eastern shore as the dead stand before crossing. The axis from this world to the other is the axis of the site, east to west. The descent runs in the room: Amida on the dais, the bodhisattvas coming down the walls on clouds, the doors painted with his welcome at every grade of soul. The phoenix outline adds an older image of auspicious rule, and the particular stays particular. Held below the top by range: one eschatology built whole, not a cosmos.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Here the archetype is the plan, and it is walked, not alluded to. The dome is the anda, the egg, a mound raised over remains; an axis runs up through the railed square to the parasols of honour; the path runs sunwise round the axis, keeping the centre on the right; the four gates fix the four quarters; the offset entrances turn the body before it joins the circuit. Burial mound, axis, quarters, the circling of a centre: each is construction. On the gates the particular holds inside the archetype: Vessantara giving away his children, the six-tusked elephant, the monkey king who makes a bridge of his own body for his troop, each exemplary and each specific. The fuller cosmic readings, world mountain and world axis, rest partly on later exegesis, and hold the mark where it is.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is built, and the sequence carries it. The record runs from a morning invitation on a porch to a night that ends in a death in the city, so that one day’s arc is the archetypal descent: the call to leave, the road, the underworld of the city at night, and the hero who does not come back. Each side makes the passage again, from a call to leave to its longest song. The figures are archetypes and persons at once: Mary on the porch, Terry in Backstreets, Eddie at the river, the Magic Rat in Jungleland. The highway is the American promised land made particular. Held from the top because much is borrowed: the car as salvation from 1950s rock and roll, the street gangs from West Side Story.
Pallava · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The descent of the heavenly river is not alluded to: it is constructed, with a natural fissure in the living rock as the river’s course and the naga powers of the waters rising in it. The structure bears the load: everything on the face is placed by its relation to the cleft. The particular stays particular throughout: this cat, that sleeping elephant calf, a hunter carrying game. The central penitent is read as Bhagiratha, who brought the Ganga down, or as Arjuna, who won Shiva’s weapon, and the doubling may be designed, so that two myths of penance rewarded stand on one figure; either way the structure holds the same myth of penance answered by grace. Held at 9.0 rather than higher because the identification is not secure.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built and load-bearing. The structure of the painting is the archetype: the god who has died rises from the earth at dawn, and the seasons turn at his body, bare trees on one side and trees in leaf on the other, so that the Christian resurrection is drawn as the oldest pattern of the year, death and return in the vegetation. The sleepers are the world that does not see it, the guardians of the state set to keep the dead dead. The particulars stay particular: Tuscan hills, armour of the painter’s own time, a heavy body, a tomb of worked stone. And the myth is civic: the town named for the Sepulchre sees its emblem rise in its council hall. Myth here is not alluded to; it is the composition’s skeleton.
Anonymous (the Gawain poet) · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The beheading game binds the plot to the turn of the year: a green man who survives beheading at midwinter, met again at the year’s end to give his blow. The Green Knight is never reduced to one meaning: green as vegetation, fairy and devil, holly in one hand and axe in the other, a host who is also a judge. The hero goes knowingly to his death by covenant, and the place he finds is a mound like a barrow, which he takes for a chapel where the devil says his matins. The temptress and the life-saving talisman are old patterns, and each carries the plot. Over them stand the Christian signs: the pentangle on the shield, the image of Mary on its inner face, confession before the ordeal. Held off the very top because the last explanation, Morgan’s scheme, reduces some of the mystery to an intrigue.
Anonymous · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetypal structure is built and bears the load. The invulnerable hero with one mortal place, betrayed through the wife who marks it with a cross on his garment to protect him; the hoard of the Nibelungs, won from the underworld, sunk in the Rhine, and at the end held only as a secret between a doomed man and God; the warrior queen of the far north subdued by deceit; the river crossing beyond which none return, sealed by a prophecy; the fall of a people in a foreign king’s hall, by fire and blade. These are the plot, not its ornament, and they stay particular, because Hagen, Kriemhild, Rüdiger and Volker are persons. Charged: the poem’s own demythologising, the dragon-slaying told secondhand and Brünhild’s strength gone after her wedding night.
Apuleius · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, at two scales, and both load-bearing. The man made an ass by his own curiosity, carried through the whole of society and restored by a goddess through the roses he has sought since the third book, is an archetype of the fallen and redeemed soul that never stops being a particular, comic young man with an ass’s appetite. Inside it Psyche, whose name is the soul, is forbidden to look on her lover, looks, falls, wanders, is set impossible tasks, descends to Proserpina and is raised by a god’s grace: the frame told as a fairy tale, and the earliest full telling of a pattern that became a tale type of its own. Held below the top because parts of the myth are evoked as spectacle, as in the Judgment of Paris in the arena, and because the link between ass and goddess is made by the priest’s speech more than by the story.
Eugène Delacroix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The composition is the archetype: the divine figure who leads mortals into battle, Athena or Victory at the head of the host, here on a Paris barricade with a date in the title. The pyramid from the dead to the flag is the old structure of sacrifice and ascent, the fallen as the ground of the rising. The Phrygian cap, the bare breast and the stride of a classical Victory are allegory; the paving stones, the top hat and the pistols are the particular, and the particular is never surrendered. She does not hover above the street as on a ceiling; she stands on the same stones and is followed by the same men. That is construction, not allusion, and it is why the figure became the pattern of the Republic’s image. Held below the top because the archetype is one figure’s, and the rest of the field is the reportage she lifts.
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The axis the work most nearly owns. The myth is not evoked here; it is the structure of the painting. Tracks are the paths of ancestral beings, roundels the sites where they did what they did, and the map is the Dreaming laid on the ground; the ground is particular, named, owned country, not an emblem. Lungkata’s fire is at once a story of a father and two sons and a judgment on the one who does not share, set at the place where it happened. The archetypal structure is the tradition’s, carried rather than invented, but the axis asks whether it bears load in the work, and here it bears every element.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth is built into the architecture, and it bears the load. The house is a three-storeyed cosmos: the sunlit upper world, the servants’ middle ground of kitchen and stair, and an underworld beneath it, dug as a shelter against the North, where a man lives in the dark and worships his unknowing host, a ghost to the child who sees him. The film’s movements obey that cosmos: the climb, the discovery of the lower world, the flood as a deluge falling only on those below, the descent down the city’s stairs as a katabasis. The stone is a talisman that becomes a burden and a weapon, and is returned to the stream. What holds it from the top is the satirist’s wink: Ki-woo calls the stone sangjingjeok, “symbolic”, and the archetypes serve a social argument.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The crossing is the structure: three journeys south across a line into a country of the dead and the told, each return bringing back a loss, the last bringing back bones. That is descent and return, and it carries the plot. The wolf bears weight as animal and as archetype at once: hunted, pregnant, carried home, sacrificed in a ring before a crowd, buried by the one who killed her. Boyd carried north as bones answers the wolf carried south as a living body, and the symmetry is built into the action, not remarked on. The corrido makes the making of myth a subject: the reader watches a brother become a legend. The particular stays particular, traps, wire, horses’ feet, a church and a town with names. Held off the top because the tales sometimes name the archetype aloud where the action already carries it.
Christopher Marlowe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The pact is load-bearing in every particular: the blood that congeals in the writing, the warning written on the arm, “Consummatum est” (2.1), Christ’s last word from the cross, set on a contract with hell, and the twenty-four years that become one hour and then a stroke of the clock. The Prologue’s Icarus is the plan of the play, its flight and its fall. Helen is archetypal both ways at once, the summit of classical beauty and a spirit in her shape, so that “Her lips suck forth my soul” (5.1) is the lover’s hyperbole and the literal damnation. Faustus stays particular, a Wittenberg doctor with his books, his servant Wagner, his friends Valdes and Cornelius. Held a step below the top because the matter is the Faust Book’s, and in the middle the myth runs down into anecdote.
Thomas Malory · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built across the whole span. The book runs from a king begotten by deceit to a king carried off by water who may return, and the archetype carries the structure: the sword drawn from the stone by the one “rightwys kynge borne” (I), the sword given back to the lake at the end; the incest that begets Mordred at the start and the son who kills the father at the close; the dolorous stroke and the wasted land; the Grail as the measure no earthly knight can meet. Each element of the beginning returns at the end as cause. The particular survives the archetype in Lancelot, divided and self-accusing, and in Gawain, whose dying letter forgives. Held off the top because the myth is largely inherited, and many of the knights stay types.
Khmer, under Jayavarman VII · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built into the structure. The temple is the world mountain at the centre of a city laid out as a cosmos: the crossing of the axes, the ring of the wall, the waters of the moat, the gates on the quarters. The tower is the face: the all-seeing god is not carved on the building but is its masonry, cut across the joints of stacked blocks. The ascent is a passage from the world to the centre, and the round sanctuary over its shaft is the world’s axis, with the Buddha sheltered by the naga at its heart. Everything stays particular: this king, this war, this market. Held below the top because the myth is partly illegible: the faces’ identity is lost, the Buddhist centre was thrown into its own shaft, and the cosmology is read in part through the city, which is not scored.
Robert Louis Stevenson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Here the book is at its height, and the myth is built, not evoked. The double was old, in Hogg, Poe, Hoffmann and Dostoevsky; Stevenson made of it a new myth whose name has passed into the language, and made it bear weight in every particular. The house with two faces, Jekyll’s fine front on the square and the blind, blistered door of the old dissecting theatre on the by-street, is the man. The key, the cheque signed in Jekyll’s name, the will that leaves all to Hyde, the two hands that are one hand with a different slope, the drug whose first impurity cannot be bought again: each is particular and each is the archetype. Utterson’s quip, “If he be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek”, names the game, and his “I incline to Cain’s heresy” sets the brother-murder beneath it. Fall, Faust and Cain are present, but the structure is Stevenson’s own. A tenth is held back because Hyde, the myth’s centre, is drawn by negation, “an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation”, which serves the myth and thins the particular.
Nayaka builders (and earlier) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built into plan and structure. The plan is the approach from the world to the centre: walled enclosures, each closer and darker, pierced toward the four directions and ending in the garbhagriha, the womb-house, a cave of stone round the image. The gopurams raise the mountain of the gods over each threshold, crowded with its inhabitants. One archetype is particular to this temple and load-bearing in it: the sacred marriage. Goddess and god have two sanctums side by side in one walled complex, and each year in Chithirai the wedding is enacted; it orders the plan, the ritual day and the city’s year. Held below the top because the cosmic plan is inherited Dravida grammar, and the tallest mountains stand at the edge, not over the centre.
Ancient Egyptian, under Ramesses II · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built into plan and structure, not evoked. The temple is the mountain entered: the sanctuary is a cave at the heart of the hill, and the god’s light comes into it from the horizon along a built axis, the sun’s rebirth made a fact of the section. The king as Osiris lines the way, death and resurrection set as the pillars that bear the rock. Over the door Ra-Horakhty stands with figures that, as Egyptologists read them, spell the king’s throne name: the god’s image is the king’s name, the archetype load-bearing. In the Small Temple Hathor comes out of the mountain as a cow. All stays particular: this king, this queen, this river, this battle. Held below the top because the inherited temple is perfected in rock, not first built, and the myth serves one man’s deification.
Daniel Defoe · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, and more: the book made one. The castaway who rebuilds civilisation from a wreck has been, since 1719, one of the shapes in which the modern West sees itself, set by Ian Watt beside Faust, Don Quixote and Don Juan. The archetypes bear load in the book itself: the prodigal son who disobeys his father and is punished at sea; Jonah, invoked in the storm; Adam in a garden he must till; the fall and the redemption read in the fever; the single footprint as the return of the other; Friday as the found companion and the subject people at once. And it stays particular: the goats, the umbrella, the earthen pots, the parrot calling “Poor Robin Crusoe”. Held at 9.0 because the myth is larger than the book’s art, and some of its depth was given it by its readers.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and built by bending the oldest myth of the West at its points of stress. The carpenter makes the occupier’s crosses, so that the instrument of his end is his trade. Judas, red-bearded and the strongest of the twelve, is charged by Jesus to betray him, and the archetypal traitor becomes the one who obeys hardest. Magdalene, the woman he refused, falls because of his refusal, so that his calling has a victim from the first. The temptation in the wilderness is moved to the cross and made a temptation by goodness, with Satan as a child angel. And the vision is a myth built inside the old one: a whole life in the space of a swoon. Each bend carries the plot; none is allusion. The particular stays particular: the shop and its shavings, Zebedee’s boats, the queue at Magdala. Held off the very top because the figures lean to allegory, Judas the deed, Peter the weak heart, Matthew the scribe, and because the archetype arrives from the Gospels at full strength before the book bends it.
Ptolemaic builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built and load-bearing. The temple is the primeval mound rising from the waters of creation: the floor rises toward the sanctuary, the ceilings fall toward it, and the sanctuary is the summit of the first land. The columns are plants of the marsh of creation, their capitals papyrus, lotus and palm; the ceilings are sky, with the vulture and the winged disc of Horus of Behdet flying over the axis; the enclosure wall is the boundary against chaos, and on its inner face Horus spears Seth. The building’s own texts state the myth of its founding, so the archetype is the declared programme and no interpreter’s gloss. It stays particular: this god, this town, these lands, this flood. Held at 9.0 because the archetype is inherited whole, built with total conviction but not newly made.
Anonymous · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked: the archetype is the load-bearing structure. Shahrazad, who tells to live, is the work’s form personified, and the form re-enacts her bargain inside itself. The Merchant and the Jinni and the Hunchback repeat the frame’s ransom. The Sage Duban, wronged by King Yunan, has his severed head speak and leaves the king a book whose poisoned pages kill him as he licks his finger to turn them: the ruler who will not listen dies by a book. The work has given the world standing figures, the storyteller under sentence, the jinni in the bottle, the forbidden door, the sailor of seven voyages, and they stay particular: Sindbad is a Basra merchant counting his goods. Held off the top because Shahrazad herself is barely a person between the frame’s ends.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Myth built, from the inside out. The structure is Quixote’s, transposed to a woman and to the bourgeois century: a reader who tries to live what she has read and is destroyed by the world’s indifference to it. The pattern is load-bearing, not alluded to: the convent reading of the first part is the engine of every later choice. Emma has become an archetype while remaining a doctor’s wife in Normandy who cannot pay for her curtains. Around her stand types who stay people: Homais, the progressive who prospers on every failure; Lheureux, the tempter who keeps accounts; the blind man, a ragged figure of fate who returns at the deathbed as chorus. Held below the highest marks because realism and irony refuse any figure more than social size: there is no sacred order in which Emma’s fall means more than itself, and the book’s myth is a myth of that absence.
Claude Debussy · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The furniture is a fairytale’s: a maiden found weeping by water, a crown she will not have back, a ring dropped into a well at noon, hair let down from a tower, an old king in a dark castle, sheep led away from the fold, a daughter born to take her mother’s turn. Maeterlinck sets these out and explains none of them. What bears the load is the shape: a stranger from nowhere comes into a dying house and death follows her, and the husband is the brother of the man she will love, the shape of Paolo and Francesca and of Tristan. Debussy builds it in sound, three motifs on the first page and the forest’s return in the last scene. Held below Don Giovanni and Tristan because a share of the structure is atmosphere, not construction.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, and its structure is a Crucifixion. The composition is a Calvary: the victim at the centre with his arms out, the condemned beside him, soldiers at the right, a hill and a city behind. The lantern on the ground stands where the divine light would fall, and it is the executioners’ light. This bears the load: remove the cruciform gesture and the composition loses its centre. The particular survives the pattern. The man wears, by the usual reading, a labourer’s clothes; the friar is a Madrid friar; the date is in the title. Held lower because the pattern is inherited from the Passion whole. What is built is its secular reversal, a sacrifice that redeems nothing.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked: the pilgrimage is the structure, and the poem turns it at its end. It begins in the season that sends folk “to goon on pilgrimages” (A 12); old Egeus names it, “This world nis but a thurghfare ful of wo, / And we ben pilgrimes, passinge to and fro” (A 2847 to 2848); and the Parson converts the road into “Ierusalem celestial” (I 51). Inside the tales deep patterns bear load: the old man who cannot die, and the rioters who go out to slay Death and find gold; the loathly lady; Griselda as Job; Chauntecleer’s fall as a farmyard Eden. Held below the top by the middle fragments, where the frame is social and the road only a road.
William Blake · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built in the pairing, not only evoked. The lamb, the oldest Christian figure of the creator as creature, is set beside a tiger the poem forges in a smithy, “In what furnace was thy brain?”, and the question of one maker of both is the structure, not an allusion. The fall is rebuilt: innocence is not lost once in Eden but held as a state of the soul beside its contrary, and the title says so. Earth’s Answer builds the jealous sky-father who becomes Urizen in the prophetic books; the Bard of the Introduction is a prophet calling the lapsed soul. The particular stays particular: the sweep in the soot, the Thames, a nurse calling children in at dusk. Held a step down because the full mythology is built elsewhere in Blake and is present here as seed, and because several figures, the rose and the sunflower among them, are emblems more than structures.
Fan Kuan · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The composition is the archetype: one central peak as the axis of a world, lesser peaks ranged about it like attendants, water falling from it, a sacred precinct at its foot and the road of human passage below. The meaning rests on that arrangement, not on a named mountain or story. It stays particular: the summit scrub, the loess and rock of the Guanzhong country, drovers with their loads on a real road. It stops below 9.0 because the archetype is a single static figure, not a structure of relations in time, and the journey is only the travellers’ passage across the foot, set beside the mountain rather than worked through.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier V
The myth is given: creation, incarnation, passion, resurrection, judgment, the life to come. A setting of the Mass can only cite it unless the music builds, and here it builds. The Benedictus makes the descent of the divine into the world an event in sound: the violin comes down from the heights and stays. The Credo makes God’s entry into flesh a change of mode, from a Dorian mystery to the warm D major of Et homo factus est. The Agnus Dei sets the oldest human archetype beside the sacred one, the city at war praying for peace, with the war heard. The particular stays particular: an enthronement, a Vienna after a generation of war. Held down because the archetypal spine is the liturgy’s, and part of the deep pattern is carried by the text rather than built by the work.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The archetypes are built where the load falls. The room is the last refuge after a catastrophe, the shelter where the remnant of a species waits; master and servant are bound as king and man, father and adopted son, maker and made. The chess endgame of the title is structure, not allusion: Hamm, the immobile king who moves a square at a time, begins with “Me… to play” and plays out a lost position, “Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing”. Around that frame older figures sound: Noah and his son Ham, Prospero’s “Our revels now are ended”, Richard III’s cry turned into “My kingdom for a nightman!”, the last words from the cross. Held a step down because these stay evoked: quotations, and a Noah frame offered rather than worked.
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One mythic structure is built, and it bears the load: the oracle. The god’s word that no one is wiser is a riddle, and the first speech is the quest to solve it, inquiries Socrates himself calls labours (22a), each ending in the same discovery, until the riddle is read: the wisest is the one who knows his wisdom is worth nothing. The quest then governs the action. He cannot stop because the god has posted him; the daimonion, the sign that only ever forbids, turns him from politics; and in the farewell he means to keep the mission among the dead. It stays particular throughout: a man of seventy, a named accuser, thirty votes, thirty minae. Held below 9.0 because outside the oracle quest the myth comes as comparison. Achilles, the soldier at his post, the gadfly on a large and sluggish horse (30e), Palamedes and Ajax unjustly judged are figures in a forensic speech, evoked rather than built; and the archetype of the just man condemned by his city is completed outside this work, for the death is told in the Phaedo, and this myth ends at the courtroom door.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked. The painting raises, on one vertical axis, the passage from the grave to God: the skeleton in its tomb at the base, the living donors, the intercessor, the sacrifice, the Spirit, the Father. The tomb at the foot of the cross answers the tradition of Adam’s skull beneath Golgotha, though whether Adam is meant is an open question, and the axis does not rest on it. The Trinity, the least picturable of doctrines, is given as one stacked figure. The particular stays particular: two Florentines in the dress of their day, kneeling on a step the viewer could reach. Held below the top because the myth built is the Church’s own, given its definitive Florentine form rather than found by the painting.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Archetype built into plan and structure, not evoked. The hall is a circle set in a square block, heaven’s figure in earth’s, the diagram of Vitruvius’s man made the plan of a house. The dome is the vault of heaven over the centre; the published hemisphere, stepped like the Pantheon’s, would have made the hall the Pantheon’s room, and the built lantern keeps the light. Four fronts, four stairs and four doors into the centre make the house a cross with the dweller at the crossing, set to the sun’s course. The house on the height is the temple on the acropolis. The particular stays particular: a churchman’s house a mile from his city, with its kitchens under the cosmos. Held below the top because the cosmos is quoted from the Pantheon, at a tenth of the scale and in brick, and the centre holds nothing but reception.
Fernando Pessoa · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and its first construction is the heteronyms themselves: three invented poets with lives and deaths, a master and disciples, who argue with one another and with their maker. Caeiro dies young of tuberculosis in the country; Reis is a monarchist doctor in exile in Brazil; Campos is a naval engineer from Tavira. That fiction is load-bearing for every poem, and it has become an archetype of the divided modern self while staying three particular men. Within the poems, Guardador VIII builds a new gospel, the Child Jesus who runs away from heaven to live in the village, the eternal child who was the god missing; the “Ode Marítima” makes the Portuguese sea and its empire into the sea of the self. Held below the top by Reis: his Lydia and his gods are evoked from Horace and the Greek Anthology rather than built.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not cited. The Rocket bears the load: for the Herero a mandala and a destiny of return, for Blicero the vehicle of a sacrificial ascent, for the novel a parabola whose rise and fall is fate itself, the rainbow of the title. Slothrop is a Grail knight in a ruined land, scattered at the end like a dismembered god, a dispersal the plot enacts rather than mentions. Blicero’s game of Hansel and Gretel with Gottfried and Katje, with its Oven, turns a fairy tale into the war’s furnace; the Venusberg and Tannhäuser are named and lived; Orpheus names the last cinema. Kekulé’s dream of the serpent biting its tail, told at a séance, becomes the figure of a system closed on itself. Held a step down where some archetypes are density of allusion rather than structure.
Louis Le Vau, Jules Hardouin-Mansart and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not only evoked. The sun’s course is laid into the plan: the axis runs east to west, the king’s bedroom faces the sunrise over the Cour de Marbre, and at the head of the canal Apollo’s chariot, by Tuby after Le Brun, breaks from the water on the same line, with Latona, his mother, at the foot of the stair. The state apartments take the planets’ names round the throne room. The axis is the world’s spine, the ruler at its centre. Held below the top: much of the programme is told in sculpture and paint, which is allusion; its strongest built element, the Grotto of Thetis, where the sun rested at evening, was destroyed in 1684; and the myth is one king’s emblem as much as an archetype.
John Coltrane · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, and it is the form. The four parts make the archetypal pattern of conversion and pilgrimage: the soul acknowledges grace, resolves, pursues, and arrives at praise. The pattern bears the whole weight, since the record’s order is that order and no part stands outside it. Psalm makes the player the psalmist in the oldest sense, a man praising God on an instrument with the psalm in hand, and the name chanted at the end of Acknowledgement works as the repeated name works in litany: a word that becomes sound. The letter places the record in one life, after an awakening in 1957. Held from the top because the particular is thin: one figure, and the life behind it stands in the notes, not in the music.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and the frame is the build. The thistle crushed by the plough and still standing is not an image laid over the story but its shape: a living thing in a field that civilisation has turned, admired because it will not yield, and remembered as the death that follows. The last stand is the epic hero’s oldest death, the warrior hemmed in and fighting to the end, his head cut off and carried round the forts as a trophy. The hero who serves two kings in turn, his family held as hostages, is as old. The particular holds throughout: the limp, the childlike smile, the prayers at their hours, the bargaining over his family. Held off the top because the archetype is carried by the hero and the frame more than by the panorama, whose Petersburg and Tiflis chapters work by satire.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. Genesis 11 is the subject, but the picture constructs the archetype rather than illustrating it: the tower to heaven as the image of human self-sufficiency, made of a mountain, at the place where nature ends and the made begins. A second archetype is built into the architecture. The ring of arcades is Roman, the Colosseum Bruegel had seen in Rome, so Babel is also Rome, the empire and the church that inherited its stones; and the city at its foot is a Flemish port, Antwerp in all but name, a market of many tongues. The particulars stay particular. Held a step below the top because the text gives the archetype before the painting builds it, and the panel’s structure carries one archetype rather than a system of them.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built out of places a reader can visit. The rose garden is an Eden entered by a door “we never opened” (Burnt Norton I); the four elements, air, earth, water and fire, order the four poems; the descent into darkness is made on the London Underground; the river god and the sea run under The Dry Salvages, where Krishna’s counsel to Arjuna on the field of battle is turned on passengers in a train. The load-bearing construction is Little Gidding: the dove is Pentecost and a bomber at once; the “familiar compound ghost” is Dante’s Brunetto Latini and the dead masters of English poetry in one figure; and the king who came to the community in the Civil War joins the Blitz in one history. Held below 9.0 because the archetype sometimes arrives as reference, Heraclitus, St John of the Cross, the Gita, Julian, laid beside the poem more than grown from it.
Samuel Richardson · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked. The persecuted virgin and her violator are old patterns, the virgin martyr of the saints’ lives and the story of Lucretia, and Richardson makes them load-bearing: Clarissa’s long dying is shaped as a martyrdom and an ascent, and Lovelace is drawn as a Satanic intelligence, with Miltonic grandeur in his self-regard and plots that are his creation as Satan’s are. Her letter of a journey to her father, which Lovelace reads as a promise of reconciliation and which means heaven, puts the archetype into the action: the father who cursed her and the heavenly one share one word. And the book made a type: “a Lovelace” became the century’s name for the seducer. Held below 9.0 because the sanctity of the last volume is insisted on more than earned.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The myth is inherited: the aftermath of Troy and the house of Atreus come ready made. What is built is the arrangement. The play stands on two absences, the dead Hector and the unseen child, and the four living figures are placed around them as around a tomb and a hope; Andromaque’s fidelity is to a ghost, and the one who prevails at the end is the widow. And Oreste is made into Orestes before our eyes: a man who “se livre en aveugle au destin”
“gives himself up blindly to destiny” (I.1) ends by killing at a woman’s word and seeing the Furies. The archetype is load-bearing. A tenth is charged for the gallantry laid on Homeric figures, Pyrrhus “brûlé de plus de feux que je n’en allumai”
“burned by more fires than I lit” (I.4), a précieux conceit on the sack of Troy.
Henry David Thoreau · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked. The year is a death and rebirth carried in the structure: summer’s labour, the house plastered against winter, the pond frozen and sounded, the ice breaking up, the lark and the thaw, so that “Spring” is the book’s resurrection and its winter has been lived through before the resurrection comes. The man alone at the water’s edge, building his own house with a borrowed axe, is the American retreat given its form, and the book made the pond’s name a name for that archetype. Lesser myths are made in passing and stay: the hound, the bay horse and the turtle-dove “still on their trail”, the artist of Kouroo, the bug in the table. Held below the top because the persona’s self-mythologising, the chanticleer of the epigraph, is part made and part posed.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built, not alluded to. The high place: a summit shrine reached by ascent, completing a hill already sacred. The cave: a thick-walled, dim interior lit from above through shafts, its side chapels hollowed into towers like rock chambers. The tent or the ark: a single sheltering membrane that seems to sail, and is the structure, not a picture of one. The threshold: the turning door, and the Virgin in her glazed niche, who belongs at once to the inside and the outside. The likenesses visitors bring, a ship, hands at prayer, a nun’s headdress, are evoked myth and are not counted. Held below 9.0 because form carries the archetypes without a narrative programme to deepen them.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The myths are built, not evoked. The superhero is the modern American myth, and the book builds it from inside, generation by generation, so that the archetype of the protector is examined as structure. Ozymandias is load-bearing: Veidt takes the name of the king whose works the poem leaves in sand, and the chapter titled from Shelley ends with the deed that will either save the world or fall to the boy in the last panel. Manhattan is the watchmaker god of the deists, who sees the mechanism and withdraws, and the book closes him by sending him to make a world elsewhere. The pirate comic builds a damnation in counterpoint: the mariner who, to save his town from the ship of the dead, becomes the monster and swims at last to the Freighter. Held below the top because some myth is labelled by epigraph rather than found, and the Comedian is more type than archetype.
Tintoretto · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, and carried by the composition. The archetype is the oldest the painting tradition has: the sacrificed god at the centre of the world, the cross as the axis between earth and sky. Here it is constructed rather than summoned as an icon. The ropes, the ladder, the spears and the lean of the thieves’ crosses all converge on the one upright, so that the structure of the picture is the structure of the myth: a visible world ordered round a single death. The particular stays particular: labourers’ bodies, a spade in the earth, a game of dice, a horse turning its head, a woman fainting into the arms of others. Held short of the top because the myth comes whole with the subject, and the building, though load-bearing, adds no second archetypal layer of its own.
Byzantine, under Bishop Ecclesius and Justinian · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built into plan and wall, and load-bearing. The octagon is the figure of the eighth day, of resurrection and baptism, in the tradition Ambrose had made explicit for the baptistery; here it centres a martyr’s church over a holy death. The dome is the vault of heaven, the core the sacred centre, the ambulatory the earthly ring round it. The presbytery builds the typology of sacrifice into the room where the sacrifice is performed: Abel, Melchizedek and Isaac on the walls, the Lamb in the vault over the altar, Christ on the globe in the conch, the court entering from the sides. The particular stays particular: this martyr, this bishop holding this church. Held below the top because the octagon’s meaning is partly inherited and partly inferred, and the core under its painted dome no longer carries what the presbytery carries.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it is the film’s structure. A pilgrimage to a sacred place, led by a guide who may not enter, with two companions who stand for two kinds of modern man: the shape is Dante’s, and the guide is Virgil and Charon. The Stalker is the holy fool, mocked, poor and faithful. The threshold not crossed is the centre: the wish-granting place of the oldest tales is a test of the self, and no one here dares it. The crippled, gifted child carries the myth into the next generation. Held a step down because the companions are types by design, and the myth carries types more than persons.
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. Ajax is the bulwark of the Achaeans, the last man of the old size, and the play makes the archetype bear weight through its objects. The sword is Hector’s gift, “echthrōn adōra dōra”
“the gifts of enemies, no gifts” (665), and Teucer completes the exchange: Hector was dragged by the belt Ajax gave him, and Ajax dies on Hector’s sword. The sevenfold shield passes to the son named for it, Eurysaces, “broad shield”. The burial founds a grave the Athenians honoured as a hero’s, Ajax being the eponym of one of the ten Attic tribes, so the second half builds the passage from man to cult. He stays particular, a husband who silences a woman with a proverb and a father who asks for his child. Held a step below the top because Homer supplies much of the archetype ready made.
U2 · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth is built, not only evoked, and the particular stays particular. One pattern is load-bearing: promised land and wilderness. The title is a desert tree named for Joshua at the entry to the promised land, and the record runs from a city without names, longed for, to a land where people vanish, so that the sequence itself makes the passage from promise into wilderness. Between them stand figures that are archetypes and persons at once: Jacob wrestling the angel over Central America, seven towers in Ballymun, a dead friend on an Auckland hill, and mothers in a Latin American square who become scripture’s mourning mother. Held from the top: much of the rest is atmosphere, and the pattern is a frame across the sequence rather than a cycle each track repeats.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked: the structure of the picture is the archetype. Two inherited patterns, the Triumph, a conquering power in procession over a crowd of the vanquished, and the Dance of Death, every estate from king and cardinal to peasant and child taken in turn, are fused into one load-bearing form, the triumph enacted as a war across a whole world. A third, the pale horse of the Apocalypse with Hades following, stands at the centre in Death’s mount and the cart of skulls behind it. The particulars stay particular: a king’s ermine and armour, a cardinal’s hat, a pilgrim, a woman with a distaff, a game board, a lute, a dog. Held below the top because the archetype is the tradition’s, enacted with great force more than deepened into a second meaning.
Benjamin Britten · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The sacrifice of the son is the hinge of the Offertorium, and the work stages the old story against its own liturgy: the ram is offered and refused, and the binding becomes a massacre. The Mass for the dead is itself the frame, a rite whose sacrifice is now the soldiers. The Calvary poem sets the crucified figure at a crossroads of shelled roads, where priests stroll and soldiers bear the cross. “Strange Meeting” is a descent to the underworld and a meeting with the double, in the oldest form. The particulars stay exact: a gun, a bugle, the sun on a dead man’s face, a wayside crucifix. Held lower because the myths are Owen’s and the liturgy’s, chosen and juxtaposed rather than made, and the boys are nearer emblem than figure.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The archetype is built. The chapel is the reliquary turned inside out: a shrine of the goldsmith’s kind, gabled, gilt, glazed and painted, made large enough to enter, so that the worshipper stands inside the casket with the relic. The twelve apostles stand on the piers that carry the vault, the pillars of the Church made literal in structure. The section is an ascent from a dark church to a bright one. The particular stays particular: this crown, this king, this palace, and a last window that ends the sacred history in a dated arrival. Held below the top because the reliquary is an inherited figure of Gothic building, here perfected rather than first built.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The trilogy builds more than it alludes. Its load-bearing pattern is death and return, three times: Julie through water, the crash and then the pool as a drowning and a baptism; Karol through the tomb, the suitcase, the rubbish tip and the staged funeral; and the elect through the flood, seven saved from the sea. That last is the ark, built rather than cited, because the survivors are exactly the couples the trilogy has tested. Red builds a second myth over the first: an old man who has made himself a listening god relives his own story in Auguste and gives the girl the life he missed, a Prospero at his storm. The work itself gathers the three returns on one ferry, so the pattern is its structure, not the viewer’s. What holds it below the top: the tricolour is an emblem laid over the stories, and Karol’s fool borrows from Chaplin’s tramp.
Edgar Allan Poe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Here the myth is built, and it lasted. Dupin is not an allusion to an old pattern but a new one: the reasoning recluse who reads a mind by its traces and restores order to a city, with the friend who narrates him, the baffled prefect, the locked room and the answer hidden in plain sight. The pattern is load-bearing in all three tales and in every detective since. The house that is a mind and a family, falling when its last pair dies, is built in “Usher” from title to tarn. The double, the burial of the living, the plague entering the walled festival as a masked guest, the vortex: each is the frame of a tale, not its ornament. Held a step below the top because the archetypes are many and short, each worked through a brief structure.
Søren Kierkegaard · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The binding of Isaac is inherited whole from Genesis 22; the credit is for what is built on it, and here the myth is rebuilt and load-bearing. The Exordium remakes the story four times, so that the archetype is shown through its corruptions. The binding is then set against three tragic heroes, Agamemnon at Aulis, Jephthah and Brutus, whose sacrifices the universal can mourn and understand, and the difference between the two kinds of father becomes the book’s structure. The particular keeps its particularity, the three and a half days’ ride, Sarah, the knife. And the book makes figures that have lived on their own: the knight of faith in his Sunday coat, the knight of resignation in love with the princess, the merman who might be saved by Agnes’s innocence. Built, not decorated; narrower in its range of building than the very highest.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and built on particulars. A dead poet descends from Eternity into the left foot of a living engraver in a cottage at Felpham. His sixfold emanation, Ololon, follows him down and appears in the garden as a virgin of twelve years. The descent to the underworld, the self-sacrifice of the redeemer and the reunion of the divided self are load-bearing: the action is those patterns. And the particular stays particular: Blake’s patron, a quarrel over commissions, the lark, the garden path, his wife trembling beside him at the end. Held a step down because much of the machinery, Rintrah, Palamabron, Leutha, Elynittria, is a private pantheon that does not take on archetypal weight. For the reader it remains names.
Charlotte Brontë · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The stations are a pilgrim’s progress made by a girl, and the book knows it: Bunyan is in its texture, and St John’s closing words are in Bunyan’s register. The fairy tales bear load: Cinderella in the poor relation; Bluebeard in the third storey, “like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle” (ch. 11), with its forbidden room and its first wife; Beauty and the Beast reversed at Ferndean, where the beast is maimed and the woman comes back with means of her own. Bertha is the double of the rage the red-room first shut up, and the structure turns on the doubling: she tears the veil the night before the wedding, and the house burns only when Jane is gone. Held a step down because the machinery is sometimes too visible, the split chestnut above all.
Émile Zola · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The pit is a beast that eats men, named and renamed, and its name says it: vorer, to devour. The action is that beast swallowing, the Maheus’ forebears, then Catherine, and at last swallowing itself, so that the myth is load-bearing: its fall is the climax. Tartaret burning underground is the inferno beside it; the descent to the underworld is literal and recurring; Bonnemort spitting black, with eighty years of his family in the pit, is a genealogy of the damned. The title builds the counter-myth: Germinal, the month of seed in the revolutionary calendar, and the close turns the men under the earth into a crop. The myth stays particular, a family, a coron, a grocer’s debts. Held off the top because the seasonal myth of the last page is asserted more than earned by an action that ends in defeat.
Georges Bizet · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, and at its strongest it bears the load. The last act stages two killings at once: the bull dies inside the ring to the crowd’s cheering while Carmen dies outside its gate, and the sacrifice inside frames the one outside. Escamillo and José are matched as two men with blades, one who kills before the crowd and one who kills alone. Mérimée’s José kills her in a lonely place outside the city; the move to the gate is the opera’s. Fate is built into the form: the motive, the flower, the cards. The particular stays particular. Held below the top because the fate is partly imported colour, cards and Gypsy fatalism, and Micaëla is type, not person.
Thomas Hardy · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The novel opens with a May-walking of girls in white, a remnant of a Cerealia, and closes with a sacrifice on what Angel calls a heathen temple, the victim on the stone at sunrise; between them it is built as a seasonal myth, Tess’s fortune rising at Talbothays in spring and summer and falling on the frozen chalk in winter. Alec at the allotment fire, pitchfork in hand, says he is the serpent and she Eve (L); Angel names her goddesses; the d’Urberville coach that only the blood can hear hangs over the wedding. Tess stays particular throughout, a milkmaid with a dialect who hacks swedes for a living. Held below the top because Hardy too often names the archetype he is building, and the family legend serves more as omen than as structure.
Elia Kazan · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked. The passion is load-bearing: Father Barry names Christ over Dugan’s body in the hold, and the end is a via dolorosa, a beaten man on his feet, a walk watched by the crowd, the work resumed in his name. Beneath it older patterns are worked into the plot: the brothers, one the keeper who sold the other and then dies for it; the fallen champion who might have been; the betrayer who becomes a witness, Judas turned to Peter. The pigeons carry the dove and the stool pigeon in one bird. The particular stays particular: a token tossed into the crowd, a cheap glove. The limit: the Christian frame is announced by the priest, and underlined at the close.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The myth is built, from several deep patterns at once, each bearing load. From The Golden Ass of Apuleius comes the ass passed from master to master, witness to every human vice. From Palm Sunday and the Passion comes a creature baptised as a child, burdened, beaten, crowned with flowers, mocked, called a saint, and killed on a smuggling run, dying among sheep as the lamb dies. He bears the name of a Magus; the girl is called Marie. The structure carries these, not the dialogue, and Balthazar stays a real donkey, never made to act or to mean. Held below the top by the human half of the structure: the pattern is fully built in his line, and Marie’s, which ends in a disappearance rather than a station, is less securely built than his.
William of Sens and William the Englishman; nave by Henry Yevele · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked: the pilgrimage to a martyr’s body, set out as an ascent. The pilgrim entered at the west, went to the place of the death in the Martyrdom, down to the crypt where the body first lay, and up by stages to the Trinity Chapel where it was raised in glory: death, burial and elevation, made a route in stone. At the end of the axis stands the Corona, a round chapel that by tradition held a relic of the martyr’s head, so that the plan ends in a crown. The particular stays particular: this archbishop, this transept, this king’s penance. Held below the top because the heavenly city and the martyr’s shrine are inherited forms; what is first built here is their scale, a whole church given over to one death.
John Ford · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears load. The captivity narrative, America’s oldest literary form, is the plot’s own sequence: abduction, years of search, redemption. Under it lies the wanderer who restores the home and cannot enter it, given a rule inside the film. A dead man without eyes, Ethan says in effect, must wander forever; he shoots out the eyes, and at the close he is that wanderer himself. The doorways carry the threshold as structure, opening and closing the film. Scar and Ethan are doubles, each the other’s lost family, and Martin, the part-Cherokee orphan Ethan despises, becomes the son the myth substitutes. The particular stays particular: a hand on a coat, a sabre, a medal given to a child. Only the comedy dilutes the frame.
Mexica · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built into the body. The archetype is the earth mother who is also the devouring mouth, the womb and the tomb in one figure; the statue does not allude to it, it is constructed from it, element by element, so that the composite body is the myth’s grammar. The particular holds: a particular Mexica deity, Coatlicue of Coatepec, as the figure is usually named, the mother of Huitzilopochtli, whose story the people of Tenochtitlan enacted: the plot of her daughter and sons against her, and the birth of the armed god. The archetypal structure bears load. Held below 9.0 because the particular is a deity, not a person, and the myth is of a people’s cosmos more than of one human fate.
Venetian builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is built into plan and structure, not alluded to. The building is the cave of gold and the heavenly city at once: the Greek cross of the apostles’ church, five domes as one heaven divided, and a path from the narthex, where the world is made and the patriarchs live under the law, into the church of the Gospel. Threshold and axis carry the history of salvation, and the body of the evangelist under the altar makes the city’s founding myth load-bearing: Venice exists because Mark lies here. Held below 9.0 because the sequence is the common Byzantine cosmos, received and particularised rather than newly built, and the accreted exterior weakens the figure.
Duccio di Buoninsegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The structure of the object is the structure of the Christian story: the Infancy at the foot of the front, the Mother enthroned above, her death in the front pinnacles; the Ministry, the Passion and the Resurrection behind; the faithful before the Mother, the clergy in the choir behind before the Son’s death. The two faces of one panel are the two natures of the mystery, and the altar stood between them. The particulars stay particular: Sienese patrons, a city’s gate in Jerusalem, a fire in a courtyard, three women’s faces at a tomb. The archetype is inherited, not invented, and that holds the axis below the top; but it is built into the carpentry, and the work reads as one map of sacred time.
David Bowie · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is built in the frame and carried by the sequence. The title track builds a rite: in “the villa of Ormen” a candle, a death, and on “the day he died” a spirit that rises and takes the dead man’s place, so that the star is both the thing that dies and the thing that replaces it. Lazarus names the raised man and lets a dying singer speak as one already in heaven, freed “like that bluebird”; the closing song lets the bird go. The pattern bears load from first track to last: a death foretold, a speaker beyond it, an exile from home, a farewell. The particular stays particular, New York, England, a man with scars, a lost Monday. Held off the top because Ormen is never opened and the middle songs carry no part of the pattern.
Ivan Goncharov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked. Oblomovka is the sleeping kingdom and the lost Eden at once, a place outside time where meals and sleep are the only events, and the plot is the attempt to leave it and the return to it: the house on the Vyborg side, with Agafya’s elbows, her pies and her endless darning, is Oblomovka recreated in the city, and he dies there. The nanny’s tales of the fool given everything without work are planted in the Dream as the myth he will live. The particular man, with his dressing gown and his unanswered letter from the bailiff, never dissolves into the type. Below the top because the mythic structure is single and its range narrower than the great epic novels’.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, not alluded to, and the highest of the twelve. The load-bearing structure is the legend of the flying Africans, and the book makes it carry the plot: a children’s ring game in Shalimar, “Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone”, encodes the names of Milkman’s ancestors, Solomon, Ryna, Jake, Sing, and his decoding of it is the climax of the quest. Beside it the hero’s quest is built: a young man leaves home after gold, passes through a witch’s house, Circe named for Odysseus’ enchantress, is tested in the wilderness, and finds not gold but his lineage. The Golden Fleece stands behind it, turned so that the treasure is a story. Names carry myth, First Corinthians, Magdalene called Lena, Pilate, Hagar, chosen by dropping a Bible open, so that scripture is inherited as accident. The particular stays particular: a green sack, a Packard, an earring made of a box holding a name. Held off the top because Circe and the names lean toward allegory, and Guitar’s half is drawn by plot more than by myth.
Luo Guanzhong (attributed) · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The oath of the three brothers in the peach garden, a vow to die on one day though they were not born on one, is load-bearing: it founds Shu, and its fulfilment destroys Shu, since each brother’s death pulls the next after him. Out of the record the book makes figures that became types for a civilisation: Zhuge Liang, the wise minister who knows the cause is lost and serves it to death; Guan Yu, loyalty itself, who releases Cao Cao at Huarong to repay a debt; Cao Cao, capacity without restraint. Guan Yu’s cult as a god came first, but the novel fixed his image. The particular stays particular, in Zhuge Liang’s tears as he executes Ma Su. What holds it below the top is the flatness of the lesser figures, many of them an epithet and a weapon.
John Steinbeck · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The structure is Exodus: bondage to the bank; the journey through the wilderness and the desert; a promised land of plenty that is forbidden to those who reach it; a people formed on the road. Jim Casy, with his initials and his forty days in his own wilderness, is the preacher who loses the call and finds the “one big soul”, and his death is the turn of the last movement, sending Tom out. Uncle John’s apple box inverts the basket of Moses: the child sent downstream is dead and goes as a witness. The flood closes the book as the dust opened it, and the eucharistic gesture in the barn turns the family outward to a stranger. The particular stays particular: these are Oklahomans with a Hudson Super-Six cut down to a truck. Held a tenth under the summit because the scaffold shows, and the Christ pattern in Casy is programmatic.
Paul Gauguin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the structure, not alluded to: the ages of man laid out as a frieze from birth to death; the fall at the centre, a figure picking fruit with a child eating it beside; the idol as the god behind the cycle; the old woman as the end, with a white bird holding a lizard at her feet. The title states the myth’s three questions, and the composition answers them in order, right to left. It is syncretic by design, Eden, an idol, a pose like a mummy’s and a Buddhist calm in some of the figures held in one Tahitian landscape, and the particular holds: a real coast, a real stream, bodies painted from the people of the island. Held below the top because the syncretism is assembled by a European for a European audience, so that part of the myth is a construction about myth.
Gislebertus · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The Last Judgment is the load-bearing structure, and the portal builds it in space: right and left of the Christ are the saved and the damned, above and below are the eternal and the rising dead, and the door beneath is the passage the soul makes, through which the viewer goes under the judge’s feet. The weighing of souls carries an archetype older than the faith, the scale of the dead, and the hands seizing the head make the archetype of being taken a single physical act. The particular stays particular: a soul holding the edge of an angel’s robe, a child clinging. Held below the top because the myth is inherited whole from doctrine and from the Burgundian and Cluniac portal programme, and the construction, though load-bearing, is the tradition’s as much as this carver’s.
Tibetan, under the Fifth Dalai Lama · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is built and named. Potala is Potalaka, the mountain dwelling of Avalokiteshvara, Chenrezig, of whom the Dalai Lama is held to be the emanation: the bodhisattva’s mountain made to be lived in by the bodhisattva. The figure is load-bearing in the section. The building rises from the Chogyal Drubphuk, held to be Songtsen Gampo’s meditation cave, and from the Phakpa Lhakhang with its revered image of Avalokiteshvara, through the mass of the hill to the gold roofs: root in the earth and the ancestral king, summit in the sky and the living incarnation, the dead of the lineage within the rock. Held short of the top because the sacred mountain is an inherited figure of Buddhist building, made enormous and literal here rather than first built.
PJ Harvey · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built in one pattern and carried across the sequence: the land that feeds on its dead. The Glorious Land asks what the land’s fruit is and answers with maimed children; In the Dark Places sends the young men under the hills; The Colour of the Earth ends with a friend become soil, the earth taking his colour. Around the pattern stand England as a body and a mother, the rose as the nation, Gallipoli as a founding sacrifice for two other nations, and the soldier who sees and cannot forget. The particular stays particular: Battleship Hill is a place, Anzac a cove. The pattern is old, the poppy and the soil of Flanders, and its figures are voices without faces; the record builds on the old myth, and the building is load-bearing.
David Lynch and Mark Frost · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built here and carries the plot. The murdered girl is a sacrificial figure in structure, not by allusion: her death is what the town lives on, and the film ends with her received by an angel. The Black Lodge is an underworld with its own law, the doubles, the backward speech, the creamed corn as pain and sorrow, and the knight who enters it is defeated by his own double, a doppelganger myth that The Return pays out over eighteen hours. Part 8 is a cosmogony: evil born from the first atomic bomb, and Laura sent into the world as its answer. Parts 17 and 18 build the Orpheus structure exactly. Held short of the top by its edges: the owls, the lore given to Hawk, the White Lodge and Windom Earle are evoked or pulp, not built.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not borrowed. The Shishigami is Miyazaki’s composition from older matter, a god who gives life and takes it in one step, by day a deer and by night a giant of the hills, and the plot is the killing of that god and the return of its head. That is load-bearing: without the decapitation there is no last act and no disclosure. Around it the film builds a second order of archetypes: the cursed hero sent out of his people, whose wound is the measure of his journey and is never quite healed; the girl raised by wolves who will not be human; the animal gods whose age is ending. The particular stays particular: rice, iron sand, a leper’s bandaged hand, an Emishi elk. Held a tenth below the top because the Emishi frame is evoked more than built, and the end restores only grass, a smaller myth than the one the film has killed.
Maya, under K'inich Janaab' Pakal and his son · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and load-bearing: the archetype is the section. The pyramid is the mountain; the crypt lies in its root; the stair is the passage into the underworld. The king lies where the lid shows him, at the base of the world tree and at the jaws of the earth, placed to fall and to rise, and the conduit runs from his body to the temple, a built channel between the dead and the living. The temple on the summit, carrying the dynasty’s time, is the counterpart above. The nine terraces and nine figures are commonly read as the nine levels of the underworld, a probable reading credited lightly. Held off the highest band because its cosmos is one dynasty’s death, built with great literalness, and its most mythic space is sealed.
Gérard de Nerval · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Built, not evoked. In the sonnets the archetype is the syntax: Orpheus, “Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron”, “And twice victorious I have crossed the Acheron”; Isis; Artemis as the one woman who returns as the thirteenth hour; the Sibyl and the return of the gods; Christ as the abandoned son. In “Sylvie” the pattern is made of particulars, a real lawn, a Valois with its songs and its pageant of Cythera on an island in a lake, and Adrienne passing from the châtelaine’s daughter to the nun and perhaps to the actress, so that one woman becomes the Mother, the Saint and the Fay. “Isis” and “Octavie” carry the goddess into Naples and Pompeii. Held below the top by “Jemmy” and “Émilie”, which carry no myth.
John Crowley · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked: the archetypal structure is the plot. The family are the agents of a Tale, the long design of the fairies, and they know it; Aunt Cloud’s cards read it, and every marriage, birth and theft in the book is a move in it. The stolen child, the man turned beast in Grandfather Trout in the pond, the emperor asleep under the mountain returned as Eigenblick, the house as a cosmos and the world within the world: each bears weight, and none is ornament. The particular stays particular, an American family with a doctor who writes animal stories and quarrels over a house. The deepest construction is the title’s paradox, the other world larger than this one and inside it, built into the house, the orrery and the end. Held below the top because some of the myth arrives as allusion, to Carroll, to Shakespeare’s fairy names, to the Cottingley photographs, and because the Barbarossa strand is myth applied rather than grown.
Mon and Burmese builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is built and load-bearing. The stupa is the cosmic mountain and the axis of the world: a relic at the centre of a solid mass, a profile that climbs through square, octagon and circle to a point, a finial of umbrellas marking the sovereignty of the teaching over the world below. It stands on a real hill, so the mountain is doubled. The plan is a cosmos: four stairways at the four quarters, the planetary posts setting the directions, the days and the planets round the centre, the circuit following the sun. The particular stays particular: this hill, this queen’s gold, this king’s hti. Held below the top because the figure is inherited from the stupa tradition and perfected here, not first built.
Alex Proyas · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetypal structure is built, and every turn of the plot is a turn of the myth. It is a Gnostic myth carried whole: a false world run by dying beings who are not its gods, as archons run the lower world; a man who wakes inside it without memory, and so without the others’ lies; a knowledge that frees, the wall and the void; a paradise remembered by all and reached by none; and the awakened man become demiurge in turn. Schreber, named for the jurist whose memoir Freud read, is the guide down. What holds the figure short of the top: Murdoch is more function than person, and the coda solves the myth by making its hero a god.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
One archetype is built and is load-bearing: darkness into light, struggle to victory. It is not evoked by a title or a programme. It is the tonal plan, C minor to C major with the minor returning to be overcome, the transition and the recall; without it the work has no shape. That the following century took this archetype from the symphony shows how firmly it was built. The archetype is dramatic and directed, a protagonist’s trial, not a frame. What holds it below the summit is the particular, which instrumental music keeps thinly: no person, place or act is named, the myth is one figure, and its particular, a will, is abstract.
Alban Berg · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built, not cited: the poor man of no account becomes Everyman under a Passion: mocked by the authorities, tested by the learned, betrayed in love, and drowned in a pond trying to wash off blood. Marie reads the Bible over her child, of the adulteress and of Mary Magdalene, and variations and fugue turn her into a penitent. Apocalyptic signs rise in the field, the red moon, the blood in the water. The circle is built into the form: the child rides on, and the music could begin again. Held below Tristan by the realism of the particulars: Büchner’s figures resist becoming icons, and the Passion is a pattern the opera invites rather than states.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Myth partly built, and what is built is the family. The mother gives without end; the father demands; the son, told “it won’t be fine”, would have taken an axe to his father’s breast had one been to hand. The last part completes the pattern, not in a killing but in a blessing: James steers the boat to the rock and the father says “Well done!” The voyage is a pilgrimage made to keep a promise to the dead, and Lily’s “It is finished”, said aloud at the landing, gives a painting the last word of the Passion. The particular stays particular: a boy, a deferred trip, a house on Skye. Held below the top because the lighthouse itself is left a centre line rather than a load of myth, and because Cowper, Grimm and the Bible are evoked rather than built upon. Of the five summit gates it stands nearest the bar.
Caravaggio · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built, not evoked. The archetype is the summons, the call that divides a life into before and after, and the light is the call: the beam is the structure of the picture and the event of the story at once, falling from where Christ stands onto the man it is meant for. The composition has no other means of carrying the action. A second pattern sits in one gesture: Christ’s hand has the shape of Adam’s on the Sistine ceiling, and if the likeness is meant, the calling is a second creation. Every figure stays particular. Held below the top because the story is inherited whole and is one episode: what is built is the light and the hand, not a world.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
The archetypes are built into plan and structure, not applied. The Trinity is in the triangles from which the drawings set out the plan, in the three-in-one of oval, cross and octagon, and in the dove within the triangle at the top. The cross is in the plan’s four bays. Ascent is in the section: a restless earthly zone of columns, a zone where the wave is calmed into an oval, a heaven of pure geometry, and light above it. The threshold is a crossroads of four waters; the cloister is the enclosed garden; the crypt holds the dead. Everything stays particular: this order’s cross, this saint, this corner. Held below the top because part of the construction rests on interpretation: how far the triangles are theology and how far drafting is argued, and only the dove says so outright.
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.0 · Tier V
The archetype is built, not cited. The work is a journey through the seasons toward a departure: autumn in the second song, spring in the fifth, and in the last, after a night, the friend’s going into the mountains, “nach der Heimat” (“toward home”), where home is the earth itself. The earth is the one figure that does not die, and the whole is built on the opposition of the earth, which is renewed, and the person, who is not. The parting at evening, the friend on horseback, the last cup are the oldest gestures of farewell, and the funeral march makes the farewell a death. Held down by the particular: Bethge’s China is a picture book of pavilions, lotus pickers and horsemen, and the friend is no one in particular.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built from a cellar. The underground, подполье, is the governing figure, not an allusion: a hole beneath the floor, the mouse’s burrow, the corner, the dark of the brothel room, and the narrator’s descent into each. The particular becomes an archetype and stays particular: a clerk with a bad liver, a servant whose wages he holds back, a collar he wants trimmed with beaver to meet an officer as an equal. The underground man has passed into the languages as a type, beside the superfluous man and Hamlet. The second part enacts its Nekrasov epigraph backwards: the saviour who would lift the fallen woman proves the one who falls, and she the one who loves. The double, Dostoevsky’s figure since The Double (1846), is turned inward as a voice that answers itself. Held below the top because the archetype is a consciousness more than a pattern of action, and the sacred term that would complete the descent is absent.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One myth is built, and it bears the whole. The reed cut from its bed is the soul cut from its source, sounding only while the breath, nafas, of the player passes through it, and every later lament and return tells it again. The merchant’s parrot dies to its cage to go free, and the death before death becomes the figure of the whole teaching; the ladder from mineral to angel builds a cosmology of becoming in a few couplets. But most of the myth is summoned rather than built. The prophets of the Qur’an come as exempla, the beast fables from Kalila wa Dimna and the common stock, and a tale serves its moral and is dropped. No single architecture carries the action, as the birds’ journey to the Simurgh carries Attar’s poem: the myth here governs by recurrence.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The myth is in the title and it bears weight. A man goes from estate to estate buying souls, and the book makes the purchase a descent: each house is lower and more dead, and in the last Plyushkin is a man become “прореха на человечестве”
(a rent in humanity). The buyer of souls is not a Mephistopheles but a smooth collegiate councillor, and that is the point: the devil of this world is mediocre. Myth is built at the scale of the nation too, in the road and the troika, the land seen from a moving carriage. The particular stays particular throughout: a chest of drawers, a dish of sturgeon, a britzka. Held below the top because the infernal scheme, a descent that was to rise as through a purgatory, lives partly in the author’s plan rather than in the volume, and the five landowners are types more than myths.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The orchard is built, not evoked. It is never fully seen, only through windows or as the ground beyond the stage, yet the whole action turns on it, and its arc runs from blossom in May to the axe in October: the lost garden, the heirs expelled, the inheritance sold to the son of the servants. The breaking string is a portent the play neither explains nor withdraws. The old gravestones of the second act and the drowned son lay death under the pastoral. Ranevskaya stays a particular woman, tearing up telegrams from Paris and then answering them. Held a step down because Trofimov states the symbol outright, and the pattern of the lost garden stays implicit under the realist surface rather than structural throughout.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked: the quest, the descent into the forest, the return to the mother and the hunter who becomes his quarry are not atmosphere but the plot. Over Moran stands a theology in parody, Youdi who orders and Gaber who carries the word, with the plain echoes of a God and his angel; Moran’s report is written for a master never seen, as Molloy’s pages go to a man who brings back the last week’s with marks on them. Moran and his son Jacques on the road carry the pattern of the sacrifice and of Quixote and Sancho at once, and the son’s flight with the bicycle ends the line. The doubling of Moran and Molloy is the book’s one myth, and the book is built on it. Held a step down because the archetypes are partly ironised into allusion, and the irony costs them some depth.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The book is a katabasis, a descent and a return, and it is framed as a season, opening on a remembered feast and closing on “L’automne déjà!”, autumn already. The figures bear load. Satan is the dedicatee, offered these hideous leaves from the notebook of one damned. The parable of the foolish virgin and the bridegroom, from Matthew 25, is turned in “Délires I” into a marriage in hell. The Gaulish ancestors and the pagan “race inférieure” are set against baptism; the poet is the alchemist of the word; Christ is the thief of energies. The particular stays particular: the love of two men in Paris and London, the farm, the wound, the poems of 1872. Held below the top because the self-myth sometimes overwhelms the archetype, so that the reader sees the poet posing in the figure, and because the second movement of the myth, salvation, is refused as much as built.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, against itself. The play takes the oldest figure of the stage, the mother who loses her children, Hecuba, Niobe, the mater dolorosa, and builds the archetype out of trade: the sorrowing mother is also the merchant whose bargaining kills her son. The wagon is the play’s one constant object, home, shop and yoke, and the last image puts her between its shafts like a beast. The lot-drawing of the first scene is fate made into a sideshow trick by the woman who will be its instrument. Kattrin is the mute prophet whose only speech is a drum, a Cassandra heard once who dies of it. The archetype stays particular: Courage is a woman with a stock of brandy and belt buckles and a grievance about a damaged wagon. Held a step off the top because the myth is held in tension with a lesson, and the Chaplain and the Cook remain types.
Hafez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The Divan evokes myth constantly and builds it as well. It evokes Joseph, Khizr and the water of life, Jamshid’s cup, Solomon’s ring, Majnun and the covenant of Alast. What it builds is a world: the tavern, the Magian elder, the saqi, the rend, the ascetic and the muhtasib make one symbolic order that holds across hundreds of poems, inverting the mosque and the khanaqah, in which the tavern is at once a real wine-house of fourteenth-century Shiraz and the site of the soul’s first covenant. When the angels knock at the tavern door, Genesis happens at that door: the myth is built and bears load. Held at 8.8 because much of the apparatus is inherited from Sana’i, Attar and the ghazal before him, and is used more than made.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and built into the structure. The sun’s one day over the sea is the course of the six lives, from dawn in the nursery to dark at Bernard’s last speech, and the reader is made to read every section against its hour. The waves are the book’s figure of single lives rising out of one sea and falling back into it, and the last line seals the figure. Percival is a built archetype: the hero with a grail knight’s name, silent and adored, sent to the edge of empire, killed by an accident and remembered as a god by those who stay. Bernard’s charge against Death is the knight’s ride turned to an old man in a restaurant. Held below 9.0 because Percival’s myth is ironised as much as built, and the frame can feel laid over the soliloquies rather than grown from them; interlude and speech do not always touch.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
The myth is built, from the oldest matter: the aged parents who go to their children and are not wanted, the kind stranger, the death of the mother, the father left alone. Its forms are Lear’s and the folk tale’s, and the structure bears load: the journey out and back; three hosts, two of the blood who fail and one by marriage who passes; the exile to the hot spring; the night without a bed; the death; the stripping of the house, when Shige takes the kimono and sash. The particular stays particular: an air cushion, cakes, a moved desk, a telegram. Held below the top because the method keeps the archetype at the depth of the ordinary and never lets it surface as symbol: the structure is felt rather than seen, and it is one myth, not many.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Boito builds the archetype; he does not cite it. The opera stands between two creeds. Iago’s Credo makes him the adversary in a theology: “Credo in un Dio crudel”
“I believe in a cruel God”, who made him in his own image, and “La Morte è il Nulla”
“Death is Nothingness”. Desdemona’s Ave Maria, sung before she lies down for the last time, answers from the other side, and the drama ends with the innocent sacrificed and the hero damned by his own hand. A hero comes out of the sea and is undone on land by a voice. Held down because the schema flattens the particular: an Iago who is the devil is less Iago, and a Desdemona at prayer is nearer an icon than a wife.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, in two ways. In the group, the angel with the golden dart is Cupid made a seraph: love as a wound from a smiling boy’s arrow, set to carry Teresa’s account, which already used the image. Behind both stands the bride of the Song of Songs, sick with love. The archetype bears the load: take the arrow away and nothing happens. The chapel is a cosmos in section: the dead in the floor, the Cornaro at eye level, the saint at the altar, heaven in the vault. It stays particular: a named nun, one foot bare for the Discalced. Held below the top because both archetypes are inherited whole; what is built is the fusion and the staging.
Guo Xi · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built where it bears weight. The mountain as the body of the world, the pillar between earth and heaven, is the structure of the picture, not an allusion in it: the axis runs from the water at the base to the summit at the top edge. The great peak as sovereign among lesser hills, with dwellings and figures at its feet, is the shape of the composition. The season’s turn is built too: winter’s bones, the bare trees and the rock, at the point of renewal, life loosening from the mountain as mist. The particulars stay particular, a boat drawn in, a temple roof, a traveller on a path. The reading of rank is partly supplied by the treatise and the court, which holds the axis below the top.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The structure is death and birth in one posture: the soldier on his back with his arms up, blind and unarmed, is the newborn and the dead man at once, the man who must lose his sight to see. Fall and light are the archetype of conversion, and the picture makes them its composition: the descent of the light and the fall of the body are the two axes of the field. The horse is the old life, mastered and now gentle. The particular stays particular: a cart-horse with a blotched coat, an old man with a lined brow. Held below the top because the myth is its text’s, given form, not a pattern the work discovers.
Euripides · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not only evoked. The fall of Troy is the archetype of the sacked city, and this play makes it the city as seen from the women after the men are dead, which became its permanent form: Hecuba the mother of a destroyed people, Andromache the widow, Cassandra the prophet no one hears, Helen the cause who survives untouched. The load-bearing images are made in the play: Hector’s shield, the emblem of the city’s defence, become the child’s coffin; Cassandra’s wedding torches that are the torches of the burning; the Horse received with song. The second ode sets this fall against Heracles and Telamon’s sack of the same city, so that the fall becomes a pattern. Held off the top because the figures are inherited from epic, and the play turns them rather than originating them.
Chinua Achebe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built twice. The first construction is the tragic action: a great man whose single excess, the fear of being his father, drives him against the balance of the gods and the clan, and who falls with his world. Nothing in the book stands outside it. The second is Igbo cosmology used as structure, not décor: the chi that says yes when a man says yes, and that Okonkwo comes to think is against him; Ezinma the ogbanje and her buried iyi-uwa; Ani, the Earth, against whom the killing of a clansman is a feminine sin, which fixes the exile in the motherland. Okonkwo stays particular, in his yams and his barn. Held a step down because the archetype is mostly the Greek pattern, kept close to the surface.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The record summons a crowd of figures, and they stay particular: Louise and Johanna, Mona Lisa with “the highway blues”, Ruthie in Mobile, Shakespeare in the alley, Achilles barring a door. One figure is built. The Sad Eyed Lady, with “your mercury mouth”, is made across eleven minutes into an icon, addressed in the litany form of devotion to the Virgin, warehouse eyes and Arabian drums set where a saint’s attributes would be. And the sequence carries a passage that bears load: from a crowd stoning everyone on side one to a single figure venerated on side four, persecution to worship. Held from the top: most of the other figures are glimpsed, a carnival of masks rather than archetypes carried.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth here is built, not evoked. Troy bears load: the city’s fall stands over the love’s throughout, and the irony is in the plot, since Criseyde is exchanged for Antenor, the man who will betray the city. Fortune’s wheel is not an allusion but the poem’s shape, three books up and two down. The archetypes the poem made are the evidence of construction: Criseyde became the type of the faithless woman for two centuries of English writing, and Pandarus’s name a common noun, while both stay particular, she counting her risks, he tired and funny and ashamed. Held a step below the top because the pagan gods are largely machinery of the courtly register, and the Christian frame is set on at the end rather than built through.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not draped. The title names the Recognitions attributed to Clement of Rome, an early Christian romance of a family scattered and found again, and the book runs on recognitions, almost all of them failed. Otto has never met his father, Mr. Pivner; Wyatt seeks his mother’s grave and his father’s faith and finds a counterfeit at each. Faust is load-bearing: Wyatt sells his gift to Recktall Brown, a devil of commerce, with Basil Valentine as the tempter who argues, and the pact ends not in damnation but in an uncertain flight. Alchemy and the sun cult are built into the Gwyon family, as the son’s purifying labour and the father’s apostasy. The recognition plot and the pact drive the story, and they carry the axis above the bar. Held below the top because the allusive web is denser than the built structure: much of the mythology, the saints, Frazer, Mithras, is learned atmosphere rather than frame.
Giovanni Bellini · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, not evoked. The sandals left on the ground make the saint Moses at Horeb, told to put off his shoes because the place is holy; the rock and the title’s desert make the hermitage the wilderness of Exodus and of the desert fathers, a country plainly fertile and cultivated, called a desert by type. The man receiving light from beyond the frame is the archetype of the call; the creatures gathered without fear round a man of peace are Eden. These bear the weight: take away the sandals, the rock or the creatures and the meaning goes, not an ornament. Held below the top because the patterns are scriptural types, and less of the archetype is carried by the form alone.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The book opens on a legend: two gringos who went onto Azuera after treasure and are held there, alive and dead, by riches they cannot leave. That legend is the structure of the book. The silver binds Gould, who gives his life to the mine, and binds Nostromo, who hides it on the Isabel and becomes in his own person the bewitched keeper of a treasure, growing rich slowly and stealing by night. The archetype bears the weight and stays particular: a Genoese sailor with a reputation among the cargadores, known by a name the foreigners who use him have given him. Silver as the incorruptible metal that corrupts; a lighthouse raised over the hoard; the old Garibaldino’s republican faith beside the new idol. Held below the summit because the archetype is single, the book’s other figures (the fallen idealist, the sceptic, the guilty doctor) are types more than myths, and the close spells the legend out where it might have stood.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and built so far into the particular that it was lost for two centuries. The structure is Ovid’s in two times: the challenge in the foreground, the goddess disguised at her wheel and the mortal at hers; the outcome behind, Pallas armed and raising her arm. The archetype is the mortal maker who rivals the god, and the composition carries it, setting its two acts in two depths of space. A second archetype is folded inside: Europa carried off by a god, woven by Arachne, painted by Titian, copied by Rubens, painted again here. The particular stays particular: real wool, a cat, Madrid working women. Held below 9 because the metamorphosis is withheld, and how much of the mythic reading was meant remains argued.
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built. The wound that will not heal and the bow that cannot miss belong to one man; the army that needs the bow cannot bear the wound, and so the community’s indispensable gift is fused to what it finds unbearable. Edmund Wilson made of it the type of the artist in The Wound and the Bow (1941), but the play already builds the pattern. The bow was Heracles’, given for lighting his pyre, and it passes from hand to hand as a trust, so that holding it is a moral act. The son of Achilles chooses which father he will have: Achilles, Odysseus or Heracles. Particular throughout: the stink, the rags drying in the sun, the wooden cup. Held a step from the top because the epiphany states the resolution rather than letting the action carry it.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The archetype is the Latin West’s governing image of death, the Last Judgment: “Tuba mirum spargens sonum per sepulchra regionum”
“The trumpet, scattering its wondrous sound through the tombs of every land”. The text evokes it; the work builds it. The solo trombone is the trumpet of the text made sound, and the dark band of basset horns, bassoons and trombones makes the Offertory’s underworld audible. The form closes a ring: the Communion asks for eternal light to the music of the opening. The incompletion is part of the built shape: the work carries the seam of its maker’s death inside its most famous number. The legend of the stranger and the poisoning is not counted. What holds the axis is that the archetype comes with the text, built into sound but not first made by the work.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and built out of prophecy rather than gods. The saga is structured by foretelling: Hrútr on Hallgerðr’s eyes, Njáll’s second sight on Gunnarr’s fate if he breaks the terms of his exile, Njáll’s foreknowledge of his own death, the portents before the burning and before Clontarf. Every forecast comes true, and the doom is load-bearing. Out of a lawsuit and a farm quarrel the saga makes archetypes that stay particular: the hero who will not leave his land, the wise man who cannot save his house, the goading woman whose cold counsel a man takes against his judgment, the burning as purgation. Held a step down because the valkyries and portents of Clontarf summon myth as ornament.
Safavid, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Built in plan and structure, not applied. The turn is an archetype made literal: to enter is to be turned, from the market to Mecca, conversion as a plan, done in the half-dark between two lights. The court is the quartered world under heaven, four iwans to four directions and water at the centre, the garden of the tradition made a stone court. The dome is heaven over the praying body, its pattern converging on a sun, the square chamber below it the earth and the squinches the passage between. The threshold is portal, then shadow, then light. The particular stays particular: this Shah, this square, the Twelver creed in the bands. Held below the temples of cosmos the desk has read because every archetype here is inherited whole from the Seljuk and Timurid mosque; the turn alone is this square’s own, and the Lotfollah had it first.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, in more than one structure. The list is the book of life: names typed are names spared, set against the registration tables of the opening, and the Talmud’s saying engraved on the ring, that whoever saves one life saves the world entire, is the film’s law of value. Keneally’s ark becomes a list, and a bureaucratic thing is made sacred. Schindler and Goeth are a built double, men of the same appetites, wine, women and command, of whom one turns; the triple cross-cut makes the pairing explicit. The descent to Auschwitz and the return with the women is a harrowing of hell in plain narrative. Held from the top: the saved carry the archetype as a collective, and the exodus to Jerusalem is imposed by a cut rather than built by the story.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked. Oscar collapses rehearsing the Ghost in Hamlet, dies, and returns as a ghost to his son; the mother marries a man the son hates; the son wishes him dead, and the wish is fulfilled. The Hamlet structure carries the plot, inverted: the ghost asks nothing, and the revenge is done by another’s magic. Over it lies the fairy tale, also load-bearing: the wicked stepfather, the locked house, the rescue in a chest, the witch’s fire. Under both lies the theological question, the bishop’s Lutheran God against Isak’s Kabbalistic house, where dangerous Ismael is kept apart. Each layer stays particular: a real Swedish Christmas, a real bishop’s house. The ceiling is that the patterns are inherited and combined, not founded.
Sultan Muhammad · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The subject is the beginning of kingship and of human society, and the painting builds that beginning as structure: a world mountain as axis, the sovereign at its apex, the court a ring of humanity turned on one centre, the animals at peace with men as in a first age before enmity, the rock alive with faces as if creation were still awake. The three generations at the summit set dynasty into the archetype at its root. The particular stays particular: these are Safavid courtiers in leopard skin, with the faces and manners of Tabriz, and the first king is also the young Tahmasp’s ancestor and model. Held below the top because the myth is Ferdowsi’s and arrives with the text; the painting adds the built form, not a new pattern.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built by inversion. The book takes the inherited structure of Heaven and Hell, Angel and Devil, Messiah and Satan, and turns it load-bearing in the other direction: in the Devil’s account of Paradise Lost and the Book of Job (plates 5 and 6), Satan and the Messiah exchange names, an archetype re-read rather than alluded to. The Prolific and the Devourer are a new pair of the deepest kind, a cosmology in a paragraph. Rintrah, who opens the book, and the new-born fire of A Song of Liberty, the son a jealous king hurls down, are the first persons of Blake’s own myth, which the prophecies would build. The particular stays particular: Blake in Lambeth, dining with prophets, walking with an Angel, a printer in his shop. Held below the top because the inverted myth is sometimes allegory with its labels showing, and the new myth is still embryonic here.
D. H. Lawrence · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not only evoked. In “Moony” Birkin thinks on the African carving first seen in Halliday’s flat and sets two ends for a dying race: the long African way of purely sensual knowledge, and the way of the white races, a northern mystery of ice and snow and destructive abstraction. The novel then enacts the second: Gerald, fair and northern, goes to the Alps and dies frozen in the snow. The myth supplies the plot’s end. Around it stand Cybele and the moon, Gerald as Cain, and the sons of God and the daughters of men, while the people stay particular. Held a step down because the mythic vocabulary is sometimes Birkin’s lecture rather than the book’s structure, and the racial schema is crude where it is most explicit.
Andrea Mantegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it is the oldest the Christian West has: the dead god, the body that will rise, the mother mourning the son. It is carried by the structure, not by attributes. The slab is the stone of anointing and an altar, and a body laid on an altar is a sacrifice: the composition puts the viewer where the celebrant stands. The wounds are offered toward the viewer as in the devotional images of the wounds, but here they belong to a corpse rather than to signs held up. The mother and the beloved disciple at the edge are the Lamentation’s oldest pairing. The particular stays particular: this pillow, this jar, these swollen feet, a Virgin with an old woman’s face. Held below the top because the archetype is inherited whole; the painting builds it into a viewpoint, not a new myth.
Théodore Géricault · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The raft is the ship of state reduced to planks and a society reduced to bodies, an old reading because the structure invites it. The deluge is under it: a remnant on a makeshift ark, awaiting a sign at the horizon. The father with his dead son is by the usual reading Ugolino, who outlived his sons in Dante’s tower of hunger, and through him the cannibalism of the raft is present without being shown. The dead in the foreground recall the descent from the cross; the climb inverts a Last Judgment, the bodies rising toward a saviour who is only a distant ship. The particulars hold: a real raft, built from a survivor’s model. Held below the top because the archetypes are many and layered rather than one structure carrying all.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it is the oldest plot of doom: every effort to avert the end brings it nearer. The bomber’s crew overcome each disaster by courage and skill, and their heroism is the agent of the catastrophe; Kong freeing the jammed doors by hand is the hero’s last labour turned to the world’s death. Without that structure there is no film. The Doomsday Machine is fate made into hardware, a necessity no one can revoke. Strangelove, the Nazi inside the American government, is the mad scientist and the revenant, rising from his wheelchair as the world ends. The round table under its ring of light is a council in parody, and the particular stays particular: a Coke machine, a survival kit, an ambassador’s camera. What holds it from the top is the naming: Ripper, Turgidson, Kissoff and Kong are labels before they are types.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype is the chaste lovers kept apart by honour, the sword between Tristan and Iseult, the courtly love made by its refusal, and it is load-bearing: the main story is entirely the not-doing. The film builds a second myth in plain sight. Chow tells his friend Ah Ping the old custom of carrying a secret to a mountain, whispering it into a hollow in a tree and sealing it with mud; at Angkor he does it in a ruined temple, and the told myth is enacted at the end. The doubled couples carry the old matter of masks. The limit stands: the body of the film is a chamber drama of manners, and the sacred enters only in the coda. The Vita Nuova, at 9.2, builds the archetype the film inherits.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, from a laboratory analogy. The formula of the conversation on chemistry, two pairs exchanging partners, is the plot, and the plot behaves as the formula says it will. Around it the novel sets signs that the characters read and the narrator neither confirms nor refutes: the glass engraved with E and O, thrown at the laying of the foundation stone and caught unbroken, which Eduard takes as a sign; the plane trees he planted on the day, as he learns, of Ottilie’s birth; the name Otto, shared by Eduard, the Captain and the child. Ottilie passes from a girl who does poorly in her school’s examinations to a saint whose body works a cure, and remains a girl who will not eat. Held below the top because the sacred ending is laid on more than grown, and its irony is left unresolved.
Hugo van der Goes · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is built, and it bears the load. The archetype is the god born poor, and the panel builds it rather than evoking it: the child lies on the ground, not in a manger, as bread lies on an altar, with a sheaf of wheat at his feet, and angels vested as deacons attend him as at a Mass. The ruined building with its column is, on the usual reading, the house of David and the old order giving way; the patten taken off marks holy ground, as at the burning bush. The particulars stay particular: Flemish shepherds of the 1470s, a Florentine banker’s household, a northern winter. Held below the top because part of the structure depends on symbols a viewer must be taught, the flowers and the count of the angels, whose reading is partly the scholars’ construction.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The ascetic saint in the desert, the fast of forty days (the impresario’s limit is the length of the fast in the wilderness), the exhibited body taken from the cage by two women in a gesture the story frames as a ceremony: the patterns of sanctity and of the Passion are the story’s structure, and they are performed at a fairground for an entrance fee. The inversion is load-bearing too: the saint who renounces food because no food pleases him is the ascetic whose holiness is a deficiency. The panther completes the figure as its opposite, appetite and freedom at one with each other. Held off the top because the hunger artist is an emblem more than a person, with no name, no history and no world outside his cage, so the particular is thinner than in the works that hold this axis highest.
Flannery O'Connor · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Built, not evoked. The Christian pattern bears the load in nearly every story. In “The River” the child takes the preacher’s name and takes the preacher’s words literally, and enters the water to be counted: baptism and drowning are one act. In “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” the hermaphrodite at the fair says what God made him, and the monstrance at the convent follows. “The Artificial Nigger” makes the descent into the city an underworld, with Mr. Head a guide who fails and a Peter who denies. The peacock in “The Displaced Person” is Christ’s eye, and the Misfit is a dark prophet whose theology is exact and who has refused the faith he understands. The particulars stay particular: a Georgia family in a Hudson, a tramp’s car, a wooden leg. Held below the top because the archetype is the same Pauline one throughout, and is sometimes signposted, in tree lines, suns and names, so that the reader is told where to look.
Simone Martini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The myth is built and load-bearing. The Annunciation is itself an archetypal structure: the messenger from above, the virgin chosen, the word that becomes flesh. The picture does not allude to it; it is built on it. The messenger kneels at the left, the chosen one sits at the right, and between them stands the vase of lilies, purity planted at the hinge; the dove descends at the apex, so that heaven, the word and the woman make one figure of descent and address. The word passing as gold from mouth to ear is the conception itself, the old figure of conception through hearing given visible matter. The particular stays particular: a young woman interrupted at her reading, keeping her place with her thumb. Held below the top because the myth is built faithfully, not refounded.
Percy Bysshe Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. Shelley takes the Titan who gave fire and was chained for it and rebuilds the myth so that its pattern bears the argument: the bound benefactor; the tyrant he himself enthroned, since it was Prometheus who gave Jupiter the wisdom that is strength; the separated bride who descends to the underworld of power; a hidden necessity, Demogorgon, that unseats the tyrant at the fated hour; and the marriage of Titan and Asia that renews the earth. Aeschylus’s Titan, Milton’s Satan and Christ on the cross are fused in one figure and are load-bearing: the Preface names the comparison with Satan, and the Furies’ Christ is Prometheus’s mirror. Held below 9.0 because the particular is thin: Asia, Panthea, Ione and Demogorgon are figures of a system more than persons, and only Prometheus in Act I has the weight of a self in pain.
Béla Tarr · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears load. The structure is the devil’s dance named in the title, six steps forward and six back, so that the film advances to its own beginning and closes when the Doctor writes its first words. Inside it the oldest of patterns is turned over: a man believed dead returns, is awaited by a people in need of salvation, leads them out of their village to a promised house, and disperses them; messiah and tempter are one figure. Bells ring with no church to ring them. The particular stays particular: cattle money, a ledger, rat poison in milk, a police clerk’s typewriter. Held below the top because Irimiás’s rhetoric sometimes states the inversion the structure already holds, and the one archetype is sounded many times.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and built from events eight years old. Xerxes yoked the Hellespont with a bridge, and the play makes that act the archetype of the crime: the yoke laid on the sea answers the yoke of the dream, and the yoke the Greeks would not wear. Darius names it madness against Poseidon. The two sisters of the dream, Asia and Hellas, one docile and one breaking the harness, make a geography into a myth that Europe still uses. The ghost of the good father condemning the son, and the son returning alone, robes torn, quiver empty, to the mother who went for new robes for him: these are archetypes and remain particulars, a named king, a known bridge, a dated battle. Held a step down because the pattern of hybris and ruin is inherited from Solon and the epic, and the play applies it more than it builds a new one.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The cave is the oldest of sacred places: the womb of the earth, the place of birth and of burial, and here the place where God is found among stones. The setting enacts that rather than illustrating it: the mother kneels in the earth’s own hollow. The meeting of John and Christ in the wilderness, from apocryphal and devotional tradition, is the archetype of recognition, forerunner and fulfilled, built into the composition by the crossing looks and the blessing. The water at the Child’s side is the baptism to come, which John will perform. The particulars stay particular: a curly-haired boy, a fold of blue cloth, a plant in a crack of rock. Held below the top because part of the load is carried by doctrine a viewer must bring to the picture, and the picture never names it.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Built, not evoked. The archetype is the descent: the god brought down into the earth, the body given to the ground before it rises. Its structure carries the composition: every figure stands on one falling line, from hands thrown up to heaven to the hand that touches stone, and the body is carried not into a tomb, for none is shown, but down toward the altar and the viewer. The entombment becomes the offering. The stone is at once the anointing slab, the tomb’s threshold and the altar table, and in the chapel’s liturgy the host was elevated where this body is lowered. The particular stays particular: Nicodemus’s calves, the knotted feet, the cloth at the Magdalene’s eyes.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, not evoked. Lucy Swithin reads her outline of history and sees the rhododendron forest where Piccadilly stands, and the mastodons in it; the book is laid on that floor. The pageant is England’s history played as a children’s game, and the island’s history reaches back past it to the prehistoric. The day is framed by origins: the cesspool and the Roman road, the barn like a church, the swallows that come back to it every year, and at the end a man and a woman alone in the dark like the first pair, from whose embrace another life might be born. The snake and the toad are a small myth of devouring, perfect and grotesque. These carry the structure; they are its last act. Held below the summit because the archetypal close is compressed into a page and stated rather than worked through.
Baldassare Longhena · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Archetype built into plan, not alluded to. The round form given to the Virgin is a crown, and the architect’s own report on the design gives that as his reason; the scrolls and their statues ring the drum like the points of a diadem. The plan is the votive temple of deliverance, the shrine raised after a plague, and its ritual is built in: a crossing of the water by a bridge made for one day, a threshold climbed from the sea, a centre circled. The floor’s concentric rings round the inscription make the centre a rose and the origin of salvation. The particular stays particular: this plague, this Senate, this canal mouth. Held below the top because much of the archetype is carried by sculpture and inscription on the frame rather than by structure alone.
Raphael · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The archetype is the mother who carries her child out to his fate, and the composition is that act: the figure advancing, the child held forward, the saints flanking as witnesses. It is also the oldest structure of revelation, the veil drawn back on the god, built literally into the canvas with the curtains and their rod. The particulars stay particular: a young woman barefoot on cloud, a boy with tousled hair, an old pope with his hat off, a tower drawn small behind a girl’s shoulder. Sixtus’s hand ties the myth to a place, so that the picture enacts what it represents: the god brought to the altar. Held below the top because the myth is the Church’s own, carried at full strength rather than rebuilt, and the putti have become a lighter myth the canvas does not govern.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The painting enacts a metamorphosis on its surface: the wind of the year’s turning takes a nymph and she becomes the flowering of the earth, spring as seizure and renewal, and the composition is built on it from the right edge inward. Venus under her arch is set as a Madonna is set in an altarpiece, so that the pagan goddess takes the form of the sacred centre, and the whole field is the archetype of the enclosed garden and its queen. Cupid blindfolded, the Graces, the herald god at the threshold: each is a type, and the arrangement makes of them a cycle. What holds the axis below the top is particularity: idealised figures, a grove that is no one place.
Federico García Lorca · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked, and that is the book’s distinction. Lorca made a mythology out of a real region. The moon is death, a woman who dances for a child and carries him off; the wind is a satyr chasing Preciosa; the civil guard are dark riders of an apocalypse; the archangels are civic patrons with a gypsy’s vanity. Antoñito el Camborio, “hijo y nieto de Camborios”
(son and grandson of Camborios), is arrested on a road and dies a passion near the Guadalquivir, a Christ figure who is also a dandy and a knife fighter. The three histories find the same pattern in a Roman martyr and an Old Testament rape, so that the myth claims time as well as place. Held below the top because the gypsy as figure is partly a literary type inherited from the costumbrista and Romantic gypsy, load-bearing in the best poems and decorative in some.
John Milton · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The strong man shorn and blinded, the betrayer at the bed, the captive made to perform for his enemies, the house of the false god destroyed with himself inside it: the book of Judges gives the matter, and the play makes it carry the shape of fall and regeneration. Behind it, never pressed, stand the blind king at the end of his life in Oedipus at Colonus and the hero whose strength becomes his death in Heracles. The phoenix names the pattern once, at the right moment. The particular holds: a man in a prison yard, a father bargaining for him, a wife who may half mean what she says. Held a step below the top because Samson as a type of Christ is left latent, and the myth narrows to one line of action.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built into the plan, not applied. The embrace bears load: the plan is a body, the basilica its head and the colonnades its arms, and the arms are what one walks within. The second archetype is the centre of the world: an obelisk from the circus where, by tradition, Peter was martyred, set on the axis that runs to his tomb, so that the place of the death and the place of the grave lie on one line. The third is the theatre: the oval is an arena whose crowd is audience and cast at once. All stays particular: this obelisk, this pope, this tomb. Held well below the Pantheon’s 9.5 because the embrace, once named, is legible in a sentence: one figure, not a cosmos.
Salman Rushdie · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth here is built, not hung. Two children are switched at birth, the rich man’s son raised poor and the poor man’s raised rich: Saleem and Shiva, preserver and destroyer, a pairing the names make load-bearing, which drives the plot and closes it when Shiva fathers the child Saleem raises. Saleem is Ganesh, the elephant-nosed scribe of the epic, dictating to Padma, the lotus goddess; the frame of teller and listener is the frame of the Mahabharata’s making. The thousand and one children carry the number of the Nights and Scheherazade’s condition, a teller narrating against death. The Widow is a demon-goddess and a prime minister at once. Held below the top because the myths are often signalled by the narrator rather than found by the reader, and the national allegory, the book’s own myth, at times hardens into equation.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built, and built from particulars. The killer of Nebraska is the American outlaw, drawn from the killings by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate in 1958, and the song keeps him particular and refuses him meaning. Highway Patrolman is Cain and Abel turned: the good brother is the lawman, and he lets the wild one go. My Father’s House is the prodigal son with the door shut, the house belonging to strangers. Mansion on the Hill sets the house of the powerful above the town, seen by children from outside. Reason to Believe ends on a man poking a dead dog, waiting for it to rise. Each pattern is set in a named place, and the law, not one myth, joins them.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing in the first half. The orphan dispossessed by a wicked stepfather, set to labour, who walks to the one kinswoman and is taken in, is the fairy tale of the lost child at full depth, and Betsey Trotwood, crying “Janet! Donkeys!”, is the godmother as a real woman. Mr Dick, with King Charles’s head in his Memorial, is the holy fool whose kite carries his words. The sea is a single power: the boat-house, the drowned fathers of Ham and Emily, the storm that takes the seducer and the man he wronged together. The book made types that left it for the language: Micawber, Heep, Barkis “willin’”. Held a step down because the moral archetypes of the later half, the angel, the fallen woman and her shadow, are inherited and not built anew.
Odo of Metz, under Charlemagne · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built into plan and section, not applied. The octagon is the number of the eighth day and of resurrection, the form of baptisteries and martyria, here made the shape of an imperial church. The section builds a heavenly court: the earthly king enthroned on the axis in the gallery, under the vault and the image of heaven that crowned it. The dedicatory verse names the building as living stones joined in equal numbers, the language of the First Letter of Peter and of the heavenly city, and Barbarossa’s chandelier later hung the walls of Jerusalem in the octagon. The particular stays particular: this king’s tomb, this throne, these columns. Held below the top because the image that closed the vault is renewed, and the number reading of the plan’s measure is argued rather than shown.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and the maze makes it structural rather than allusive. The labyrinth runs through the whole film: corridors that loop and do not join, the hexagons of the carpet Danny plays on, the model Jack looks down into, and the hedge maze where the father becomes the Minotaur hunting the son, and the son escapes, a Theseus without a thread, by walking backward in his own tracks. Over it stands the ogre father, named by the film itself when Jack plays the wolf at the bathroom door. The Faustian bargain is spoken at an empty bar, a soul for a drink, and the eternal return closes it: the caretaker who has always been the caretaker. Held a step from the top because the archetypes are partly laid side by side rather than fused, and the burial ground under the hotel is named, not built.
James Baldwin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth here is built, not evoked. The book is laid on the scripture its people live in: Gabriel the patriarch promised a royal line, whose first son, Royal, is born out of wedlock and dies unacknowledged, whose lawful son Roy turns from God, and whose stepson John, no son of his at all, is the one who comes to the altar; the curse of Ham, which John suffers in his vision; the threshing-floor itself; and the two sons of Abraham behind the house’s two brothers. The particular stays particular: a storefront church, a deacon’s tired wife, a stab wound above a boy’s eye. The archetype bears load because the people read their lives by it, and the book holds them to it more severely than they hold themselves. Short of the top because the scheme is sometimes legible as scheme.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. Eula is the earth goddess set down in a crossroads hamlet, and the book makes her load-bearing: the whole economy of male desire in Frenchman’s Bend turns on her, and she is sold to the one man who is impotent to her. Flem is made the devil in Ratliff’s fable of Flem in hell, outbargaining the Prince for his own soul, and the fable is not ornament but the book’s own account of what he is. Ike’s love is a pastoral eclogue in Yoknapatawpha dress, Mink a figure of wronged pride out of tragedy, the Snopeses a plague of locusts or rats. The particulars stay particular: a pound fee, a five-dollar bill, a Texas pony. Held under 9.0 because the devil and the goddess are slightly schematic.
John Milton · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The structure is the reversal of the Fall: one man’s disobedience undone by “one man’s firm obedience fully tried” (I). Each temptation answers a lure of Eden: appetite in the bread and the banquet, power and glory in the kingdoms, presumption at the pinnacle. The second Adam stands where the first fell, and the wilderness becomes the garden by being endured. The load-bearing myth is the riddle of the name: Satan does not know in what sense this man is the Son of God, nor at first does the Son, and the pinnacle answers it in one action without a word of doctrine. Held below the top because the archetype is given rather than made new, and the man is thinly drawn as a man.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and its first form is an old one: the aubade, the lovers who must part at dawn, which Before Sunrise takes up whole, its title naming the hour and its story running from meeting to the morning train. Before Sunset builds the return of the lost beloved, the old promise broken by chance, held on a deadline as the old stories hold it. Before Midnight turns to the marriage after the romance. The titles make the three one day of a life, dawn, dusk and midnight, and that structure bears the load: it is the work’s own myth, and the particular is never lost to it. Held from the top because the archetypes are inherited, and the Greek ruins of the third film are setting more than structure.
Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus of Rhodes (attributed) · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built and load-bearing. The serpents sent by a god are the literal armature of the composition: one coil passes through all three bodies, so the archetype, a father and his line bound together in one divine sentence, a man against a force he cannot match, is the structure and not an allusion attached to it. The priest at the altar, struck in the act of his office, makes the sacred order part of the form. The fall of Troy is carried by implication, and for a Roman owner the line to Aeneas and to Rome. Blake’s inscribed engraving, which reads the group as Jehovah and his two sons, is reception. The particular is weaker: these are ideal bodies of a heroic type, and the sons are miniature men.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears load. The figures have no names. The structure is fall and redemption: Eden as a farm by a lake, the temptress from the city of pleasure, a night of sin and a day of grace, and a second marriage staged as a ritual repetition of the first, with bells, a portrait and a dance. Water carries the whole: the drowning is planned, renounced and then performed by the storm, and the bulrushes meant to save the murderer save the victim. The particular is kept by bodies and small things: O’Brien’s weighted walk, the Wife’s braids loosened at the end, the dog swimming after the boat. Held below the top because “of no place and every place” buys the archetype at some cost to the particular.
Otto Dix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing at every point. The work is a Passion: the going out, the place of the skull, the carrying of a body, the entombment, each set where an altarpiece sets it. The hung corpse over the arch is the Crucified, in the crucifix’s place. The carrying in the right wing is a Deposition and a Christopher together, and the carrier is the painter: the witness takes the bearer’s part. The predella is the dead Christ in the long low tomb of the German tradition, multiplied into a row of soldiers, and the Dance of Death of the same tradition stands behind the dead of the centre. The particular stays particular: the helmets, the gas mask, the riddled shins are 1916, not Golgotha. Held below 9 because the inversion, no resurrection, is given by the structure and not developed further in the panels.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into plan, section and fabric. The governing figure is the cave in the mountain: a mass of layered stone, sunk into the slope and grassed over, hollowed into chambers where water rises warm from the ground. The quarry is a second figure, the blocks reading as stone left standing where the rest was cut away. Descent into the earth, immersion and the passage from hot to cold are the oldest figures of purification and renewal, and here they are the route of the building, not allusions. The spring is the reason for the place and the matter of the work. The particular stays particular: this valley’s stone, this spring, a village’s bath. Held below the top because cave and spring are built as bodily experience more than as a cosmos ordered in plan, and the sacred depth they carry stays implicit.
Henry of Reyns and successors; Henry VII Chapel by Robert and William Vertue (attributed); west towers by Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, in plan and in floor. The king’s body lies round the saint’s, on one axis east of the crossing: the dynasty as the saint’s household, the mausoleum as reliquary. The coronation is staged on the Cosmati pavement, circles of porphyry and glass whose inscription, as recorded, reckons the life of the world to the end of the outermost heaven: the king is anointed standing on the world’s measure and its end. The crossing is the threshold where a man becomes a king. In 1920 the hero’s grave was built in the nave, the unnamed dead laid at the door among the kings. Held below the top because much of the myth lives in fittings, pavement, shrine and tombs rather than in structure, and the shrine has outlived its cult.
Norman builders, under William II · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the plan. The nave is the world’s history from the first day; the sanctuary is heaven, with Christ the ruler of all filling the vault of the apse; to walk from the west door to the altar is to walk from the Creation to the throne of God. In a centralised Byzantine church the cosmos is a dome overhead; here it is a road, and the road is the plan. The cloister builds a second archetype: the enclosed garden, the four walks, the fountain of life in its own small enclosure, paradise as a square. The particular stays particular: this king, crowned in this church and buried in it. Held below the top because the cosmic programme is an inherited form, stretched rather than invented, and the cloister’s paradise is the common form of cloisters, made richer rather than deeper.
Assyrian court sculptors · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Built, not evoked. In Mesopotamian kingship the king who masters the lion is the shepherd who holds chaos off his people; the image of king and lion was the state seal, and the hunt was a royal rite. Here the archetype is load-bearing: the cycle is constructed on the combat of the ordering ruler and the wild, and on its completion in sacrifice, the dead lions offered at the libation. The particular stays particular: each lion dies in its own way, and the cage, the arrows and the blood are specific. Held short of the top because the myth is wholly the state’s own, enacted rather than examined, and the counter myth, the beast’s dignity and the hunter as killer, is present only through the carving of the animals, built by the hand and not by the plan.
David Lean · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it bears load. A man goes into the desert, is reborn there with a new name and new robes, and is taken for a prophet: the white clothes of a sherif are an investiture, “El Aurens” a second baptism, and the return from the Nefud with Gasim a miracle that the tribes read as one. Its reversal is built into the plot, since the man he saved is the man he must execute. The shape is hubris: the ascent to Aqaba, the god who walks on a train, then the fall through Deraa into the blood of Tafas, and a man in a car who has become nothing. The particular stays particular: a match, a compass, a broken detonator, a British uniform kept under the robes. Held below the top because the myth is reached as much through landscape and score as through structure, and the fall is told in fewer steps than the ascent.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth the cave was built for is gone; what remains is the structure without the story, and the structure bears load. The descent runs from a hall of herds, through a gallery that narrows to a falling horse, to a shaft where the only human lies before a wounded beast: a plan with a bottom, and the human at the bottom. Horse and aurochs or bison recur in pairs, which Leroi-Gourhan read as a built binary; Aujoulat read the order of superimposition as the order of the seasons. Both are readings of placement. The figures stay particular, down to the bear hidden in an aurochs. Held below 9.0 because the construction is inferred from pattern rather than shown.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, and bearing the whole load. The two cities take their names from Scripture, but the work makes them the structure of all history: they begin among the angels before the world (Books XI and XII), divide in the first brothers, Cain who founds a city and Abel who founds none, a pilgrim (XV.1), and the earthly pattern returns in Romulus, who killed Remus (XV.5). The pilgrim city, peregrinans, is a stranger in the world it uses; the six ages run on the six days to a seventh of rest and an eighth without evening (XXII.30). The particular stays particular: Rome sacked in 410, Lucretia, Regulus going back to Carthage (I.15 and I.19). Held below the top because the foundations are found, in Scripture; the use of them as the frame of world history is Augustine’s building.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The structure of the picture is a conversion: the hall the Reich made for its own heroic dead becomes the tomb and temple of the people it murdered. Tomb, because it is a crypt, blackened as by burning. Temple, because the light burns at the place of the altar or the ark. Over it stands the Shulamite, the bride of the Song of Songs, through Celan the Jewish dead, her hair ash where Margarete’s is gold. The particular stays particular: one building, one poem’s one line. Held below the top because so much of the archetype enters by one written word, which is allusion rather than construction, and because the conversion depends on the viewer knowing whose hall this was.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears the plot. Sam’s winged dream is Icarus made structure: he flies only in sleep, the waking world exists to bring him down, and the samurai he fights wears his own face. Kafka’s pattern is built too, the man summoned by a system whose charge he cannot learn, and Orwell’s, from the Ministry to the room where the friend is the torturer. The film makes figures of its own: Tuttle the plumber as outlaw hero, the duct as the state’s gut, the mother who grows young as her son is consumed, with Jill’s face, an Oedipal knot the funeral shows without a word. The particular stays particular: a cramped desk, a Christmas parcel, a refund cheque. The limit stands: the Kafka and Orwell patterns are inherited and openly cited.
Graham Greene · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, and the plot bears it. The pattern is the Passion: a flight; a betrayal by a man the priest knows will betray him, the mestizo with his yellow fangs who follows him for the reward; a summons across the border to a dying man, which the priest knows to be a trap and answers anyway; an arrest; a night of interrogation by the ruler’s officer; a death; and at the end a stranger at the door who says he is a priest. The priest is unnamed, so that the particular carries the type, and he remains wholly particular: the brandy, the wine bought at ruinous cost and drunk by the governor’s cousin, the child Brigitta whom he loves and cannot save. The lieutenant is no cut-out Pilate but a celibate of the other faith, the priest’s double. The life of Juan read aloud inside the book is the myth told falsely, which the main story tells truly. The structure, not allusion, carries it.
Hart Crane · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, not only evoked: the book’s whole wager is construction. The bridge is made a sacred object, harp and altar, an arc joining the ground to God. Pocahontas becomes the body of the continent, sought back through the railroad, the river and the burning chief. Columbus opens the quest and Atlantis or Cathay closes it, on the question “Is it Cathay”. Rip Van Winkle is the American who has slept through his history; Poe in The Tunnel is the poet damned in the city, a Virgil without a road out. These figures bear load: The Dance, where the speaker passes through Maquokeeta’s death into the land, carries the book’s ascent. The charge is the masonry. The sources, Plato, Columbus, the Indian, Whitman, the clipper ships, do not all join, and some, Cutty Sark’s clippers and the Wright brothers of Cape Hatteras, remain allusion.
Seamus Heaney · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The book’s strongest axis, and the myth is built, not evoked. One archetype carries the whole of Part I: an earth goddess who takes sacrificial victims into the bog, laid over the sectarian killing of the 1970s so that the Iron Age and Ulster become one ground. “Kinship” states it: “how the goddess swallows / our love and terror”. “Bog Queen” gives the goddess-victim her own voice. “North” and “Viking Dublin” add the Norse raider and trader as ancestor of the island’s violence and of its “word-hoard”. “Antaeus” and “Hercules and Antaeus” frame the part as the earth-strong native thrown by the sky-born colonist. Each victim stays particular while bearing the pattern. Held below the top because “Act of Union” and “Ocean’s Love to Ireland” are allegory more than archetype.
Charles Laughton · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth is built and carries the film. The false prophet in sheep’s clothing is warned against in the prologue and then enters; the hunter of children follows by night and appears on a horse at the edge of the world; the children are cast adrift on the water, as Moses was, and taken in by an old woman who tells them the story of Moses; the hands of love and hate are inscribed on a man’s knuckles and preached. The structure is a fairy tale’s: the mother lost, the flight, the wilderness, the shelter, the guardian who matches the ogre song for song. The particular stays particular: a river town in the Depression, ten thousand dollars, a doll, an apple. Held from the top because the prologue partly announces what the structure builds.
Senenmut (attributed), under Hatshepsut · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is built into plan and site, and it bears load. The axis carries the god from the living east bank across the river to the west, the land of the dead; the terraces are an ascent; the ascent ends in a cave in the mountain of Hathor, who receives the dead into the western cliff. The Beautiful Festival of the Valley is the use the plan was made for, so the archetype is enacted each year rather than pictured. Within that frame the king’s own myth, her begetting by Amun, is carved on the middle terrace, and sun and ancestry stand on either hand of the axis. It stays particular. Held below the top because the mountain was given, and the building recruits the archetype as much as it builds it.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, and more than one. The load-bearing structure is Lear’s: the old king dividing his realm, the faithful child cast out for plain speech, the heath, the fool, madness, the reunion and the faithful child’s death. Two further patterns lie under it, both structural. The first is karmic: deeds return, and the woman whose house was destroyed becomes the agent of the destroyer’s fall. The second is the fox-woman of Japanese legend, a demon in a beautiful wife: Kurogane brings Kaede a stone fox head in place of Sue’s, and the joke is prophecy. The particular stays particular, a flute, a stone head in a cloth. Held below the top because the master pattern is inherited, and the Buddhist frame is carried more by Sue and her scroll than built into every scene.
Euripides · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The sacrifice of the daughter to launch the war is the founding act of the Trojan cycle and of the curse on the house of Atreus, the thing the Agamemnon looks back to; this play stands on the threshold and makes the threshold the whole drama. The archetype is the marriage turned to sacrifice: the pretext is a wedding to Achilles, and the mother’s escort, the lustral water, the veil and the procession are converted into the rite of slaughter, while the third stasimon sets the true divine wedding of Achilles’ parents beside it. Iphigenia stays particular, a girl who wants to see her father and the light. Held a step below the top: Artemis’s demand is reported, never present, and the hind lets the myth off at its edge.
Eastern Ganga builders, under Narasimhadeva I · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The temple as the sun’s chariot is the plan and the platform, not ornament on them: the building is the vehicle, and its wheels are where it stands. The particulars are kept: twenty-four wheels, read as the fortnights of the year or the hours of the day; seven horses, read as the days; a front to the sunrise on the coast where the sun rises out of the sea. The Kalinga temple already carried the mountain and the body in its tower and its vocabulary. Konark adds motion: the house of the god becomes the god’s car, and the stillest of archetypes, the cosmic mountain, is set on wheels. What holds it from the top is the lost tower, the mountain half of the figure, and the lost image at its heart.
Mexica · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The myth of the Five Suns is the structure of the disc: the present age at the centre as the sign of its own birth date, the ended ages held inside its arms, the whole carried by fire serpents round a face that eats hearts. The archetypes are among the oldest: the ages of the world and their destruction, the death and rebirth of the sun, the cosmos as a wheel, the serpent that bounds the world, life sustained by death. They are load-bearing; the disc is their diagram and has no other content. The particular stays particular: this year, 13 Reed; Mexica day signs in Mexica forms; a stone made for the imperial centre at a moment of empire. Held below the top because the particular is thinner than the archetypal, a date and a place rather than a life.
Bram Stoker · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The Count is made from folklore, history and theology into a figure that has since passed beyond the book: the dead who will not die, the aristocrat who lives on the blood of the living, the invader who must be invited. Blood is the structural element of the whole. Transfusion is marriage: the men give their blood to Lucy, and Van Helsing jokes darkly of bigamy. Renfield cries “The blood is the life!” The Count’s draining of Mina is an inverted Eucharist and wedding, sealed by the Host that burns her brow and by her own cry, “Unclean! Unclean!” The band with wafer and stake is a company of knights, and the journey to the castle a descent. Held below nine: the people who bear the pattern are types more than particulars, the pure woman, the brave American, the learned doctor, and much of the myth’s later grip lives outside the book.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked. The judgment of the dead, the weighing of the soul, is the whole structure of the principal vignette, laid out as an event, and the roll is itself the instrument of the passage it describes. The particular is kept throughout: it is Hunefer, named in the columns above his figure, who is led, weighed and presented; his tomb, with its stela and small pyramid, before which his mouth is opened; his household that mourns. Osiris, the dead king who judges the dead, makes the dead man himself an Osiris, and the vignette builds that identity by bringing the man into the god’s presence. Held below 9.0 because the structure is shared with every roll of the type: common property, finely made here.
Du Fu · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Du Fu builds little myth in the Western sense, and the allusion that fills the late poems lends nothing. What is built is a figure and a pattern. The figure is the loyal servant out of office, old and ill, who cannot stop caring for a state that has no use for him; it descends from Qu Yuan, and Du Fu remakes it into the type of the poet-scholar for a thousand years, load-bearing in poem after poem, as in the last couplet on Yueyang Tower, weeping at the rail for the war north of the passes. The pattern is the broken state against the enduring earth. Zhuge Liang becomes the servant who died before the work was done, “出師未捷身先死”
“he led the army out, and before the victory he was dead”. What holds it here: built in places, evoked in many more.
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The archetype is departure, and the question is whether the score builds it. It does, without words: a first theme opening on the falling step the tradition had already given a word; a funeral procession in the first movement’s catastrophe, marked as one, with deep bells; a dance movement that coarsens, quickens and comes apart; a hymn finale a semitone below home, quoting a song about dead children and ending “ersterbend”; a tonal plan that leaves D for good. The particular stays particular: a stamping bass, a solo violin. Held down because the last step to departure is the listener’s, and the farewell was named, in Mahler’s draft and in Berg’s letter, before most had heard a note.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built, on an inherited spine. The dome is the sky raised over altar and city, temple as cosmos in the structure itself: the vault is the literal cover of the sanctuary, and the high altar stands under its eye. It is the centre made visible, seen from all the land round. The octagon answers the Baptistery’s across the piazza, font to sanctuary, and in the standard reading its eight sides carry the eighth day of baptism and resurrection. Everything stays particular: this red vault, these white ribs, this city. The Last Judgment painted over the whole inner shell makes the vault’s heaven literal over the altar. It is held near the gate because the archetypes are every domed sanctuary’s and the octagon was fixed in 1367.
James Joyce · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built more often than the surface admits, and evoked more often still. “Araby” is a grail quest in small: the boy imagines “I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes”, and arrives at a silence “like that which pervades a church after a service”. “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” builds a Passion round an absent lord, betrayed “with a kiss” in Hynes’s verses, his anniversary kept by men canvassing for a candidate who may welcome a king. “Grace” moves from a fall down a lavatory stair to a sickbed and a church; the plan of the Commedia claimed for it rests on a later report and is contested. “The Dead” carries the deepest structure: a man named for the archangel, his journey at the last westward among the dead, and a boy who died for love standing “under a dripping tree”. Each figure stays particular. Held below the summit because only in the last story does the archetype bear the whole weight; elsewhere it is implicit, parodic or allusion.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The central structure is built, not evoked. Septimus is the scapegoat whose death the party absorbs: Clarissa, who “felt somehow very like him”, feels through his death the life she would not throw away, and says so: “She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away.” The two never meet. The doubling is carried by the book’s architecture and by one line of Shakespeare, the dirge from Cymbeline, which passes from her in the morning to him in the afternoon. Cymbeline is a play of a death feigned and a return, and the novel uses its shape: the hostess goes down into a little room and comes back to her guests. Septimus is also the mad prophet, who must tell the Prime Minister that “men must not cut down trees”. Around this core the archetypes are evoked rather than built: the old woman singing by Regent’s Park station, Peter’s solitary traveller. Of the five summit gates it stands nearest the bar.
Giovanni Boccaccio · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built in the frame and made in several tales. The frame is load-bearing archetype: a flight from a city of death into a walled garden, a little Eden, where ten young people found an ordered commonwealth for a fortnight and then go back. The book names itself in its rubric prencipe Galeotto, the go-between of the fifth canto of the Inferno, and so sets itself against Dante’s Francesca. In the tales, figures have become types while staying particular: Griselda, the wife tested past reason; Ciappelletto, the false saint; Calandrino, who believes a stone has made him invisible; the ring parable, the type of tolerance; the heart served to the beloved. Held below the top because many tales use the type without building it, and the frame, once set, is lightly worked in the middle days.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The archetype is the axis of the world: earth, a tree that joins earth to sky, and the heavens as the destination. It is built, not alluded to. The cypress is the composition’s spine, placed to cross the whole sky; it is the tree of the Provençal graveyard, the obelisk of his letter, and the year before he had written that one takes death to reach a star. The spire that stops short and the tree that does not are the structure’s one argument. The particular is kept: the Alpilles, a cypress, the morning star of a real June. Two things hold the axis near the gate. The village is a composite, a northern church in a southern valley. And the readings that would deepen the myth, Joseph’s dream, a Gethsemane displaced, are brought from outside. Built in the cypress, evoked in the sky.
Giacomo Leopardi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The book strips illusions, and a book that subtracts myth evokes more than it builds. The classical figures of the early canzoni, the patriarchs, the gods of spring, Brutus and Sappho, are summoned in nostalgia, not constructed. But a counter-myth is built, and in the central poems it bears weight. Nature as the mother who is a stepmother is a figure made, not borrowed from a creed, and it governs from A Silvia to La ginestra. Silvia and Nerina stay girls of Recanati and become the figure of youth’s hope, so that the girl’s death and the death of hope are one event. The nameless shepherd of Asia is made the type of every human being who asks; the broom on the volcano is an emblem built into the argument of the poem that ends on it. Built in four or five places, evoked in many more.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built at the core and evoked around it. Built chiefly in Tatiana: a provincial girl who reads French novels and also the figure of Russian womanhood as nineteenth-century Russia came to see it, and she bears that weight because Pushkin keeps her particular, her nurse, her name, which the narrator defends as plain and old, her fortune-telling in the frost. The dream is load-bearing folklore: the stream, the bear that carries her, the monsters at the feast with Onegin as their master, and the knife, which foretells the duel in the shape of a peasant tale. The double refusal is a built pattern, the oldest pattern of the love story turned in a mirror: the girl’s letter answered with a sermon, the man’s letter answered with fidelity. Onegin is the first full figure of the superfluous man, an archetype the book made rather than found. What holds it here: Onegin is built partly by negation and irony; the folk matter of the Yuletide divinations is evoked as colour, as the Romantic ballad had evoked it; part of the national weight on Tatiana was laid on her by later readers more than built into her; and beyond her the myth stays social type more than deep pattern.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, by form rather than story. The sea as a living thing that reaches for men is made on the sheet, not alluded to: the foam is drawn as fingers and the crest as a hand. The sacred mountain is the second archetype, the still centre of a world, set in the trough and framed by water. The foreground swell binds the two: it takes Fuji’s shape and wears foam where the mountain wears snow, so the transient is shown in the form of the eternal, and the meaning collapses if the rhyme is removed. It stays particular: cargo boats on a known run, rowers in working dress. Held here because there is no narrative for the archetype to carry, Fuji’s sanctity is context rather than anything on the sheet, and the claw is the one mythic move the picture makes.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, and the structure carries it: plea, waiting and rescue, then the new song sung. Three psalms are chosen and ordered to make a passage from the stranger’s cry through the pit and the rock to praise, and the hinge is literal: the second movement ends on the promise of a canticum novum, and the third is that song. A second figure is built in the coda, where the driving ascent of the Allegro gives way to eternity rendered as four notes turning against a metre of three, never arriving. The particular holds: the semitone chant, the empty upper strings, the cymbal verse set as the quietest music in the work. Held below 9.0 because the archetypal material comes whole with the psalter; the work builds an ordering and a rendering of it, not a new figure.
Insular · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The four living creatures of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse, man, lion, calf and eagle, are the book’s skeleton: they stand over the canon tables, on the symbol pages before the Gospels and through the decoration, so that four Gospels become one fourfold vision. The Chi-Rho makes the name the place of incarnation. The snake that sheds its skin, the peacock whose flesh was held incorruptible and the vine carry the resurrection and the Eucharist into the ornament. The Temptation on the Temple and the Arrest stand at the Gospel’s points of trial. Everything stays particular: this cat, this beard, this chair. Held below the top because the myth is the Gospel’s, inherited whole, and what is built is the arrangement and the incorporation.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built in the structure and withheld in the story. Built: the sacred grove, two companies of women either side of a river under trees bent into a nave; the far bank with its church tower, the town set across the water from the state of nature; the fruit on its cloth in the foreground, the apple of Paris and of Eden, which Schapiro’s essay of 1968 made the key. The figures are Diana’s company without Diana, and Actaeon’s place is the viewer’s, or that of the small figure on the far bank. The particular holds: Provençal pines, a village steeple, the river near Aix where the painter had swum with Zola. Withheld: no goddess, no hunter, no event, and no face. The archetype carries the composition, which is why the axis sits above the gate. It is nowhere named, which is why it sits no higher.
William Wordsworth · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The structure is a sacred history transposed into one mind: a childhood in a paradise of beauty and of fear, a fall into the city and into revolutionary reason, an impairment of imagination, and a restoration crowned by the ascent of a mountain to a revelation, Snowdon in Sinai’s place and the poets named “Prophets of Nature”. The dream of the Arab in Book V, carrying a stone and a shell before the deluge, is an apocalypse built out of a reading of Cervantes and made Wordsworth’s own. At the Simplon Imagination rises as an “unfathered vapour” where the summit was expected: the epic’s descent of a power, taken inward. The particular stays particular: the Derwent, Hawkshead, a borrowed boat. Held a step down because the archetype is often stated in the discursive verse rather than carried by the episodes, and Books VII to X run long with little mythic charge.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not only evoked. The opening is Icarus: a man rises above the jam and is brought down by a rope. The steam baths are a descent among shrouded figures to an oracle who speaks in Latin. The anima is in the structure: “Asa Nisi Masa” is its name in a children’s code, and the women of Guido’s life are its scattered faces — the mother, Saraghina, the wife, the mistress, the girl in white who brings the water. The launch tower is Babel, never finished; the ring is a mandala of the living and the dead. All of it stays particular. Held below the top because every archetype is one man’s psyche: the myth is built for a self, not a world.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked. The load-bearing structure of the second part is the expulsion of a scapegoat: a community makes a monster out of a man who would not share its rites of grief, and kills him to confirm its order, and the victim ends by asking for the crowd’s hatred, completing the sacrifice in his own words. The prosecutor links him to a parricide to be tried the next day, as if a man who did not weep for his mother had killed her. The sun is the other built force, fate as a physical power, present at the funeral and decisive on the beach. The particulars stay particular: the tram, the café, a Sunday on the balcony. Meursault has become an archetype, the outsider, as few figures of his century have. Held below the top because the pattern is single, and carried by one figure.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The particular is a bandit, a samurai and his wife on a forest road in the Heian period. The frame is the end of a world: a gate of the capital in ruin, talk of war, famine and plague, a priest whose faith is failing. The court is a court of the self, with the viewer in the judge’s place. The dead speak through a medium, as the ghost returns in Noh to tell its story, and at the close a child is found in the ruin. The myth bears load in the frame and the medium. Held below the top because the three figures in the forest are types in an argument more than a myth built from inside them, and the foundling is evoked as redemption rather than constructed.
John Keats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not borrowed. Psyche is the plainest case: Keats takes a goddess the classical world never worshipped, “O latest born and loveliest vision far / Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy!”, and makes her rite himself: “I will be thy priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region of my mind”. The ode constructs a mythology of the inner life. The nightingale becomes the undying voice set against the dying hearer, and Ruth in the alien corn is the poem’s case of exile in time. The urn’s procession makes the stopped moment an archetype of art itself. Autumn’s figure on the granary floor is the year’s ending made a person without allegory’s stiffness. Held at 8.7 because Melancholy and Indolence summon Lethe, Proserpine and three figures on an urn rather than build them.
Olivier Messiaen · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not cited. Revelation 10 supplies the Angel, the oath that there will be no more Time and the seventh trumpet, and the score builds a form from them. The Angel’s music is stated in the second movement and returned in the seventh; the trumpets are unison; the abyss is one creature alone; eternity is pulse without progress; and the count of movements is itself the figure, seven and then eight. The particular stays particular: a blackbird and a nightingale, a real clarinet in a real abyss. Held down by the preface: without titles and commentary the score builds time against timelessness, but not this Angel, and the meaning of eight is told, not heard.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, from the ship outward. The San Dominick carries the name of the island where the Haitian revolution had begun and of the order of preaching friars; Delano at first takes her for a monastery ship full of Black Friars, and the tale ends in a monastery. The figurehead has been replaced by the slaveholder Aranda’s skeleton, the ship’s emblem stripped to bone and turned into a command. The shaving is the old figure of the servant with the master’s life in his hands, made literal and staged. The leader and the follower, the shadow, the knot to be cut, master and slave reversed and reversed again: these bear the plot’s weight rather than decorate it. The end builds a small geography of the myth, from Babo’s head in the plaza to Mount Agonia, where Cereno “did, indeed, follow his leader”. Held a step below the top because some figures, the black friars and the Spanish decay, are atmosphere laid on as well as load carried.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not only evoked, but built piece by piece. “Après le Déluge” rewrites the Flood: the world, washed clean, at once resumes its commerce and its butchery, and the speaker calls for a new deluge, so that the oldest story of renewal becomes a story of renewal refused. “Conte” is a fable of a Prince who kills his women and his court, meets a Genie who is himself, and dies with him. “Royauté” crowns a man and a woman for a morning. “Génie” makes a new divinity of love and of the present, a Christ without the Cross, and it bears load: it gathers the book’s appetite for a new love and a new harmony into one figure. What holds the axis below the top is that no single structure carries the myth across the book; the archetypes are built inside pieces and do not compose one mythic body.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not applied: the ascent from multiplicity to unity, from earth to heaven, is the section itself. The star plan rises through the dome into a circle; the circle gives way to the lantern, the lantern to the spiral, the spiral to flame. The dome is the vault of heaven, starred. The spiral is the most specific myth on the building and the least settled: it has been read as the Tower of Babel answered, the lighthouse of Alexandria, the ziggurat, the tongues of Pentecost, wisdom ascending, and the flames at its top lend some support to the last. The plan as Solomon’s seal and the church as the house Wisdom built on her pillars have good grounds in a university of Sapientia. The particular stays particular: this court, these popes, this saint. Held below the top because the load-bearing archetype is general, and the specific myths are disputed rather than built beyond doubt.
Roberto Bolaño · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, and the building is in the structure. The book is a quest for an absent centre: four critics seek a hidden author, and the quest leads them not to him but to the edge of a desert where women are killed. The pattern of the Grail is inverted: the sought thing is never found by its seekers, and what is found is the waste land. Santa Teresa is built as an underworld, a city at the border where the dead accumulate and no one is judged, and the last part brings the sought author himself there, an old man going to his nephew in prison. The epigraph frames the whole as Baudelaire’s voyage, ending in horror. Reiter is built as a creature of the deep, a boy who belongs on the sea bed and walks through history like a diver. Held near the bar because the archetypes are often evoked through dreams, seers and the Penitent rather than borne by a figure, and the centre is left empty by design.
Roman, under Vespasian and Titus · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Archetype built into plan and use, not applied. The arena is the closed ring of combat and sacrifice, in which fate is decided before the community, and the plan builds it as an ellipse with every eye on its centre. The hypogeum is an underworld beneath the floor, from which beasts, men and scenery rose into the light; the awning closed the sky over the bowl. The games enacted fable as fact: Martial records the condemned put to death in the roles of myth, as Pasiphae, as Orpheus torn by a bear. The particular stays particular: these numbered arches, Nero’s lake, the Flavian name. Held below the top because the archetype is the type’s, and much of the myth lived in a spectacle that is gone.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Some of the archetype is built and some is allusion. Built: the dome as heaven over a gathered people, over a room lit from the dome’s foot; the cascade rising in steps to the central dome, a built mountain whose summit is the place of prayer; and one line from the forecourt fountain through the hall to the garden of the dead, laying purification, assembly, prayer, death and paradise in order. Alluded: the mosque as an answer to Justinian’s church, a rivalry the plan states but does not build into a myth; and the ten balconies, which tradition, not the record, ties to Süleyman as the tenth sultan of his line, a number rather than a structure. Held below the top because the domed heaven itself is inherited from Rome and Byzantium.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and built from household goods. The family book with its gilt edges, in which each generation enters births, marriages and deaths, is the line of descent made an object; Hanno, a small boy, draws a double line under his own name, and says, when caught, “Ich glaubte … es käme nichts mehr”
“I thought … nothing more would come”. The house in the Mengstraße, bought at the start and sold to the Hagenströms near the end, is the house of Atreus in a grain merchant’s register. Teeth rot down the line; blue shadows gather under eyes; the music comes in with Gerda’s Stradivarius and kills. The pattern is the fall of a house, and it is load-bearing: every scene is a step on that one descent. Held below 8.9 because the myth has one direction only, and the realist surface and the period’s theory of degeneration keep it nearer a case history than a myth that opens more ways than one.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth is built here and bears load. The pagoda is a stupa in timber: a central pillar rising from a foundation stone that holds the relic deposit, through five roofs, to a finial of rings, an axis of the world made structural. The clay tableaux at its base set the Buddha’s death, a debate on his teaching, the division of his relics and the Buddha to come at the four quarters round that axis, so that the visitor who circles walks the end of the Buddha’s life round the place his body is kept. The Yumedono builds a second archetype, the octagon as memorial on the founder’s own palace site, and the precinct sets relic and image on equal ground. Held below the top because the cosmology is inherited whole; what is built here is its arrangement.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into plan and structure. The axis runs from judgment at the west to the altar at the east: the entrant passes under the end of time into the heavenly city. The front is a gate of heaven by construction, its three portals the thresholds of the Virgin, of the Judge, and of the Virgin’s mother, St Anne. The months and the zodiac on the jambs build the natural year into the threshold, and the roses are wheels facing across the crossing. Held below the top because these are the shared archetypes of the Gothic cathedral, built more fully at Chartres, and the chimeras build Hugo’s myth onto the fabric, allusion made stone rather than structure.
Robert Browning · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
“Childe Roland” is myth built, not evoked: the quest, the waste land, the tower, the failed company of knights who went before, made out of a line from King Lear into a structure that carries the poem, and read ever since as an archetype of the vocation that ends in its own testing. Karshish meets the raised Lazarus, and “Cleon” meets the gospel at its edge. “Saul” builds the shepherd who heals the mad king into a prophecy of incarnation. “The Statue and the Bust” turns a Florentine anecdote into a parable of the unlived life. Elsewhere the archetype is lighter or absent: the Renaissance painters are historical particulars made typical rather than mythic, and many lyrics carry no deep pattern. One poem at the top of the axis, several strong beside it, the book as a whole below it.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked: the few offered for the many, the scapegoat who walks out of the city, the procession to death. The halters, the sackcloth shirts, the bare feet and the key surrendered are the chronicle’s particulars and the instruments of a rite, so that the figures read at once as six men of a besieged town and as the type of the penitent and the sacrificed. Echoes of the Passion and of penitential processions are present in the rope and the shirt, carried by the story’s own furniture rather than imposed. The particular stays particular: named men, a town, a king, a year. Held below 9 because the pattern is one and is not developed in layers, and the mythic order is never brought into argument with another, as The Large Bathers sets myth against myth.
Sylvia Plath · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
In the major poems the archetype carries the structure. “Lady Lazarus” is built as a resurrection rite crossed with a fairground striptease: death and return are its form, three times, ending in a phoenix that is also a threat. “Daddy” makes the father god, Nazi, devil and vampire, and the poem is the exorcism, the stake through the heart its last act. The bee poems make the self queen of a hive, the hive both body and household. “Ariel” is a Godiva ride into a sun that is also death, and “Edge” sets the woman as a tragic figure, with Medea behind her. The particular stays particular. Held at 8.7 because myth is built in perhaps half the book, and elsewhere evoked: allusion put to private use.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, in three structures that bear load. The first is the maker dying with his creature: Malone is a small demiurge with a pencil, making a man so as not to be alone with himself, and his world ends as his life does; the old pattern of the maker and the made is set on a deathbed. The second is death as birth: the dying is a delivery and the bed a womb, and the image governs the book rather than ornamenting it. The third is the last passage, the asylum’s inmates taken out across the water at night under a keeper with a hatchet: the ferry of the dead built into the plot. Held below the top because other figures are evoked more than built, Macmann’s name, son of man, and Moll’s crucifixes among them, and are partly a joke at myth’s expense.
David Lynch · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The film is a descent to the underworld: the vacant lot is the gate, Lincoln Street the realm, Frank its lord, and every major scene is a stage of the descent or the return. The Oedipal triangle is literal and load-bearing. From the closet a boy watches a man who calls himself “Baby” and the woman “Mommy” while he hurts her; the boy takes the man’s place, is told he is his double, and kills him from the same closet. The doubling of blonde girl and dark woman, robins and beetles, is structural, and the particular stays particular: the hose, the Pabst, the paper bag. Held below the top because the construction is diagrammatic, close to an illustration of Freud.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built, not alluded to. The axis from a grove to the edge of the land and on to the horizon is the oldest of architectural gestures, the processional way, laid flat and emptied of any god at its end. The court is a cloister opened at one side, a precinct whose sanctuary is the sky. The channel is a river from source to sea, a thread of water through a stone desert. Each organises the plan; none decorates it. The particular stays particular: a research institute on a California mesa, concrete and teak, benches and desks. Held below the top because the myth is one gesture made with great purity, single and sustained, not a cosmos layered in depth as in the Pantheon.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it bears load. The film was called after a Passion in its first form and keeps that structure: the artist goes down into his people’s suffering, sins, falls silent and is raised by another’s act of making. Within it the patterns are construction: Icarus in the prologue answered by the bell’s rising; a Calvary staged in snow with Russian peasants; Kirill the betrayer who returns to confess; the holy fool as the soul Andrei kills to protect and then loses. Each stays particular: a hide balloon, a monk’s dog, a boy’s lie. Held below the top because the Christian frame sometimes surfaces as statement rather than structure.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetypal structure is built, not only evoked. The house stands vertical on the hill above the flat motel, a moral geography with the dead parent and the past above and the commerce of transients below, and Norman passes between them. The cellar is a descent to the underworld, and the swamp a second one, taking money, car and girl and giving them back only at the end. The birds run through as a built system, not ornament: Crane, Phoenix, the stuffed predators, the fly the mother will not harm. Norman, the mild son with the mother inside him, has an archetype’s standing. The built shape carries the axis past the gate; what holds it at the figure is the foundation, a myth resting on a case history, which the courthouse explains where myth would leave it dark.
Sophocles · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The play’s central device is an archetype made into plot: the living are mourned as dead, the dead father is the only certain ally, and the urn that should hold the brother holds nothing. Clytemnestra’s dream of Agamemnon’s sceptre planted at the hearth and growing to shade the land is the house’s future seen in a figure. Electra herself, the daughter who will not stop mourning, the nightingale and Niobe of her own songs, became the type of the unappeasable mourner; this is the Electra Hofmannsthal took, and the name passed into psychology. She stays particular: the sister who mocks Chrysothemis’s comfort, kept like a servant, unmarried. Held below 9 because the myth is inherited from Aeschylus and the epic, and the curse on the house is evoked more than built.
Pontormo · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Built, not evoked. The archetype is the oldest the Christian altarpiece holds: the mother and her dead son, and the community that carries the body. The panel builds it by stripping away the props that usually carry it, cross, ladder, tomb and landscape, so that what remains is the pattern alone: a body passed from hands to hands, a mother drawn toward it and away. The body’s pose recalls Michelangelo’s Pietà in St Peter’s, a visible echo rather than a documented borrowing, and the body is carried toward the altar, where the myth of sacrifice is completed in the liturgy. The particulars stay particular: Florentine faces, the painter among them. Held below the top because the archetype is inherited whole and rendered, stripped rather than made new in kind.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it frames the whole. The title names the Fall, and the action is one: an advocate who lived above others, on the heights by his own account, untouched, is brought down by a laugh and a drowning. The name bears load: Jean-Baptiste, a voice crying in the wilderness, prophet of a judgment that is not coming, in a city of water where baptism gives way to a drowning he would not undergo. The rings of canals are an Inferno, and he a guide who leads his listener down rather than out. The stolen Just Judges, hidden in his cupboard, keep justice and innocence apart in the world. Christ appears as a man who knew he was not wholly innocent, because children died for his birth. Held below the top because the myths are argued as much as enacted: Clamence comments on his own symbols, and some touches are closer to sardonic allusion than to structure.
Albrecht Altdorfer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is built, and built into the structure. The battle stands under the sun and the moon opposed in the sky: day against night, West against East, a cosmic struggle of light and darkness of which the earthly battle is the image. The pairing is not ornament; it organises the upper half and directs the whole. The hero overtaking the fleeing king is the oldest of victories. Whether the four world empires of the Book of Daniel, Alexander’s the third, stand behind the panorama is argued in the literature rather than settled; the apocalyptic air does not depend on it. The particulars stay particular: the chariot, the white horses, the fringed cloth, a town on a shore. Held at 8.7 because the archetype is carried by the sky and the composition more than by the figures, too small and too many to bear myth themselves.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The structure is a fall: Witt begins in a village of the unfallen, is taken back into the army, is sent up the hill and into the camp where men kill prisoners and pull their teeth, returns to the village to find quarrels, sickness and skulls, and dies in a clearing. The film never names Eden; the shape does the work, and the return makes the point that the division was there before the war came. Beneath it run two kinds of man in one company, and the oldest question of theodicy asked in a soldier’s voice. The particulars stay hard: the bunker, the morphine, the gold teeth. Held at the figure because the pattern is sometimes announced in the voiceover rather than discovered, and announcement is a lesser carrying.
Sigmund Freud · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, not evoked. The Oedipus of Sophocles is made load-bearing: the book turns a play into the structure of every family, and that structure carries its account of death-wishes and of typical dreams, and later a whole doctrine. Hamlet is reread in the same passage as the guilty son who cannot act. The book also builds its own myth of descent: the epigraph’s Acheron, the dream as underworld, the interpreter as Joseph before Pharaoh, the self-analyst as Hannibal before Rome, the son shamed by his father’s cap knocked into the gutter. The navel of the dream, “Nabel”, the spot where interpretation reaches into the unknown, has become a figure for reading itself. Held below the top because the myths are bent to one pattern, and the archetype is asserted as law where the great literary works let it stand as particular.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and the title states it: a house of the dead, from which the narrator is at last raised, and whose last words are of “воскресенье из мертвых”
(resurrection from the dead). The book’s year turns on Christmas and on the Lenten fast and communion the convicts keep; the descent is to a bath he thinks of as hell, the return through the smithy’s door. The prison becomes a figure of Russia, every province and nation and faith shut in one stockade, and the convict a figure of the strongest of the people, wasted. These carry weight: the death and resurrection frame is what the book means. Held below the top because the realist and documentary surface keeps the archetype mostly implicit, and the counter-figures, Aley taught to read from the Sermon on the Mount and the eagle, are images more than a built structure.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The structure of the image is the holy face, the vera icon and the Salvator Mundi: the frontal, symmetrical, half-length face of the Son against a field without place, a form that in 1500 belonged to sacred images. Dürer places himself inside it, and the archetype carried is the image of God in man, the maker who resembles his own Maker. The schema is load-bearing; without it the picture is a handsome portrait. The particulars stay particular: the fur, the curls, a real hand, a named man of a named city at a stated age. Held below the top: one borrowed schema carries the archetype, and a viewer who does not know the icon sees solemnity more than myth.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, not cited. The governing archetype is the threshold of hell, and the work makes it a door that does not open: the gate one stands before forever, the entrance that is also a wall. The Thinker is the particular made archetype: Dante, then the poet, then the maker, then any mind, seated over the damned as their author and their witness. The Christian portal is kept and emptied, and the emptiness is structural: the tympanum where the Judge should sit holds the poet. Ugolino and Paolo and Francesca stay named and Dantean while becoming the father who devours and the lovers who fall. Held below the top because outside these anchors the swarm evokes rather than constructs.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth here is built, not merely evoked, and the river is the structure. The legend of St Ogg, told in Book First, is load-bearing: the ferryman who carries a woman with a child across the flood finds she is the Virgin, and his boat is seen on the waters ever after when the river floods; at the end Maggie is the one who rows into the flood to save. The water suit with Pivart, the mill that lives by the river, the drift with Stephen and the flood make one figure of fate that rises from law-suit to judgment. Behind it stand brother and sister as a primal pair, the fall from the paradise of childhood, the Red Deeps and the lost mill, renunciation as the imitation of Christ, and the Biblical close. The cost: the flood as myth outruns the flood as event, and the archetype overrules the particular at the last.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is the dead god in the earth, the god laid in the tomb, the seed in the ground, and it is built, not alluded to. The format is the tomb; the lid is the earth’s weight; the body lies where the god lies before the third day, and the picture is set wholly in that interval, Holy Saturday. The construction holds because the archetype is stated by withholding: mourners, angels, the instruments of the Passion displayed, the Man of Sorrows upright and showing his wounds, every sign by which the tradition makes the dead Christ a promise, is removed, and the body alone carries the myth. The particular stays fiercely particular. Held below the top because the myth is built from one moment of one story.
Donato Bramante · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built into section and plan. The vertical is the building’s law: from the opening in the crypt floor, over the earth where the cross is held to have stood, through the altar and the cella to the dome and the lantern, one line joins the place of death to the image of heaven. The circle and its centre: the round temple, the tholos, as the figure of a perfect and closed world, here gathered on a martyr’s death. Crypt below and dome above give the old order of underworld, earth and sky. All stays particular: this hill, this saint, this commission of a Spanish king and queen. Held below the summit because the archetypes are those of the round temple and the martyrium as received, assembled with great clarity rather than made new, and at this scale the body inhabits them only in token.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The ring dance is among the oldest images people make: the round dances of village festival, the maenads of Greek vase painting, the dance at the beginning of the world. Here the archetype is built, not alluded to, and it is built into every part. The ring is the composition, the hill is the curve of the earth, and five bodies at the top of it are humanity at the round of the world. Two limits hold the axis below the top. The particular barely survives: the dancers are types without faces or histories, so no particular person becomes archetype while staying particular. And the larger scheme, the dance answered by Music on a stair of three floors, lives across the commission.
Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built into plan and ground, not alluded to. The path leads from the living city to the dead. The forest is the place of the dead, a deep Northern image made here the burial ground itself; the open field and the sky are the space between. The hill with its grove is a place of ascent and rest, and whether or not a burial mound was meant, the form carries that pattern. The cross stands on its slope, and the temple waits at the end of an avenue. The Woodland Chapel is the hut in the forest, a primal shelter with a dome hidden inside. Everything stays particular: these pines, this gravel ridge, this light. Held below the summit because the myths come from several traditions, cross, temple and grove, set side by side in one ground rather than fused into one figure.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not cited. Its load-bearing structure is the American captivity narrative: a lone man of violence rescues a girl held by a savage, and the rescue is a massacre. The third act is that structure, the structure of Ford’s The Searchers (1956). Sport’s long hair and the Mohawk Travis cuts before the rally put war paint on both men; rescuer and captor are of one kind, as in Ford. Around it the purification myth is set up and paid, the diary’s prayer for a real rain answered by the shootout, and the knight’s two ladies are built too, Betsy in white and the child to be saved. Travis is never a type. Held below the top because the myth is built to be argued with.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears load. The creature who seeks his maker for more life, and kills him when refused, is Frankenstein’s pattern, and the film’s structure is the creature’s quest, not the detective’s. Batty goes in by Sebastian’s door and up to the father in his tower, asks for “more life, father”, and the answer is a death sentence; he kisses and blinds him, the son’s crime against the father in its oldest form. He misquotes Blake, “Fiery the angels fell”, and the rebel angel thrown down bears weight too. The eye runs through the whole: Holden’s test, Chew who says “I just do eyes”, Tyrell’s glasses, the owl, the eye that opens the film. Held from the top because the figures of Christ, the nail and the dove, are laid on in the last minutes more than built, and Deckard’s own myth, the hunter who is the hunted thing, is carried by a unicorn and a folded paper figure.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked: the subject is a myth and the composition is its structure. The birth from the sea, the landfall driven by wind and the clothing by a goddess of the seasons are the narrative’s own stages, laid from left to right, and they carry the picture. Under the named myth the canvas builds a deeper pattern: the birth of beauty into a world that receives it is staged like a sacrament, the attendant’s mantle in the place of the Baptist’s gesture. That is the archetype of epiphany, divinity arriving into the natural order. What holds the axis a step below the top is the other half of the test. Venus is an ideal, not a person; sea, shore and grove are schematic; the winds are emblems. The archetype bears the load, carried by figures who are already types.
Roman Polanski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not cited. Its structure is Oedipal: an investigator seeks the cause of a death, every step draws the catastrophe nearer, and the truth when found is a crime within the family against nature. The patriarch is named for the flood and the sacrifice, Noah Cross: the oldest of figures, the father who owns the water and devours his children. The damaged eye runs through the whole: the flaw in Evelyn’s iris, the bifocals, the smashed taillight Gittes calls a lens, the bullet through her eye. The founding of a city in a desert is the myth of origin turned to crime. The particular stays particular: linen suits, a bandage, a dirty joke. Held below the top because the detective form has carried the Oedipal frame since Poe.
José Clemente Orozco · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The dome is the old cosmological form, the heavens over the world, and Orozco puts into it the oldest figure of human making against the gods: the man of fire, Prometheus and the phoenix together, over a ring read as the elements. The structure bears the load. The architecture of a Christian dome, the place of the Ascension, of the descending Spirit and of the fire of Pentecost, carries the meaning, and the myth is turned by being placed there. The particular stays particular: this is a man, naked and burning, not a god with attributes, over a chapel whose walls hold the history of Mexico. Held below the top because the figure is also general, the Man, close to allegory, and because Orozco’s own Prometheus had built this myth in 1930: the dome deepens it rather than founds it.
José Saramago · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The book is a parable in the old sense: a visitation, like a plague of Egypt, falls on a city with no name and on people who have none, so that each becomes the figure of a condition. The proverb that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king is turned inside out: the one who sees is a servant and a guide, a woman who leads the blind out of the house of bondage and through a wilderness, carries what she sees as a burden, and kills once. The asylum is an inferno with its circles, the city a waste land, and the church with its blindfolded saints is the crux, a sacred order that has covered its own eyes. The return of sight is a resurrection with no god in it. The particular stays particular, in the numbered wards, the bread, the shoes. Held short of the top because some of the archetype is pointed to by the narrator rather than found in the action.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is partly built, and the part titles claim it: a Fall, from a paradise remembered to a paradise lost. The structure bears it. The Swede is an Adam in a garden of his own choosing, a stone house and a farm in Old Rimrock, and a Job, a righteous man undone for no fault he can find. American myth bears weight too: a Jewish boy who looks like a Viking marries Miss New Jersey and admires Johnny Appleseed, the innocent American planter, so that the national myth of innocence and the immigrant’s myth of arrival become one myth, and the bomb breaks both. The particular stays particular: gloves, Weequahic, a post office in a general store. It clears the gate because the Fall is carried by the three parts and the Swede bears Adam and Job in what he does and suffers, not only in what is said of him; it goes no higher because much of the myth is named rather than enacted, in the titles and in Zuckerman’s commentary, and because Merry, the destroying daughter, is too opaque to bear her half of it.
Nabataean · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Archetype is built into the plan and bears load. The narrow way through the rock to a hidden place is a threshold structure as old as myth, and the Siq is made one: the betyl niches along its walls turn a gorge into a sacred road. The tomb front is a door into the mountain, the house of eternity cut into the body of the earth; the high places set altars on summits; ad-Deir stands at the end of a processional ascent. Threshold, door, summit and ascent order the route through the whole basin. Held below the top because the archetypes are inherited from the region, and the facades borrow a Hellenistic image of a building rather than building a cosmos into the plan; the lost city most visitors now bring is a modern myth, evoked from outside and not counted.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth is built rather than cited. The load-bearing structure is a doubled founding: a well and a church raised on one piece of land by two men who need and hate each other. Oil works as blood and as chrism. H. W. comes to Plainview out of a death in a well, and the blowout baptises him in oil; the title, commonly traced to the plague of blood in Exodus, names the price. The self-made man of American myth, prospector to king, is carried to its end, the king alone in his castle. Under it runs Cain and Abel: the Sundays’ father is Abel, his two sons are played by one actor, and the film ends with Plainview killing Abel’s son with a club. The doubled founding carries the plot from the first well to the last blow, and that is what the figure credits. What holds it there: the Cain pattern is suggested more than built, and Eli stays nearer a type than a man.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, not cited. Chigurh is death by chance made a man, and the archetype is load-bearing: he keeps the rules he states, lets the coin fall, and will not be argued out of the role by the one woman who names it. His haircut, air tank and boots keep him particular. Moss is the hunter who takes what is not his, given the hunter’s skills and allowed to fail. Ed Tom is the Western’s old lawman, who here never draws a weapon and never meets his adversary. The father carrying fire in a horn through dark and cold is the oldest image the film has, given as a dream, not a symbol. Held at the figure because unstoppable pursuit was a genre convention before the film took it up, and relies on the recognition.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, in two ways. The apprenticeship itself is the novice’s initiation: the young man who leaves the father’s house, errs through art and love, and is received into a guild of the wise, made load-bearing through the Tower, the indenture and the closing figure of Saul, who went out for his father’s asses and found a kingdom. The book made that pattern the myth of modern self-formation. And Mignon and the Harper, the androgynous child of the south, born of incest, longing for a land she cannot reach, and the old singer pursued by guilt, are figures built into the book’s argument about poetry and formation. Held off the top because the Tower’s initiation is half a parody of the secret societies it borrows from, and the book does not decide how seriously to take it.
Alberto Giacometti · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built into the pose, which is why the axis clears the gate. The walking man is among the oldest archetypes of the figure in sculpture: the striding figures of Egypt, one foot forward, and the kouros after them, which Giacometti copied and studied; the pilgrim and the wanderer, the human being as the one who goes on. The figure is that archetype and nothing else, and the stride is load-bearing, not an allusion laid over it. It is also particular: a body of this proportion, this surface and this lean, made by one hand from the model in a Paris studio. What holds it below the top: the particular is thin by design, a man without face, history or place, and the existential readings that deepen the myth are brought by its readers more than built.
Stanisław Lem · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The ocean is load-bearing as an archetype: it is Proteus, the shape changer who will not be held to an answer; it is the god the tradition has called on, who replies with forms; and late in the book Kelvin and Snaut name it a god that is imperfect and limited, perhaps a god in its infancy or one that does not know what it does, which makes theology a working hypothesis inside the plot. Harey is Eurydice returned from the dead and Galatea made from desire, and she is built so that both myths cut: she returns, and that is the horror; she is made, and she is the one who chooses. Berton’s giant child in the fog is the book’s oldest image, the child as an omen. Held below the top because some of the mythic weight is argued in conversation rather than carried in the action, and the god of the ending is named before it is felt.
Alejo Carpentier · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is built, in two ways. The first is metamorphosis: Macandal, the Mandingue houngan, becomes beast, bird and insect, and the faith in his survival carries the rising; at the end Ti Noël takes the same road and learns that changing form does not escape the order of the living. The first and last parts answer each other, so the myth bears weight. The second is history as cycle: the eternal return of the master, the tower a tyrant raises against heaven and that becomes his tomb, the king brought down by the dead he wronged. Christophe is Pharaoh, Babel and Macbeth at once and stays a particular cook made king in a gold-braided coat. Ti Noël, whose name is Christmas, is the slave as Everyman. Held because the cycle is sometimes shown as diagram.
Ursula K. Le Guin · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth here is built, not evoked. The whole book is constructed on the two that are one: Tormer’s Lay, “Light is the left hand of darkness / and darkness the right hand of light”, is not an epigraph but the plan, and Ai at the end draws the yin and yang for Estraven in the tent. The documents carry the archetypes into the story: “Estraven the Traitor” tells in legend the forbidden love and the exile the narrative then enacts; “An Orgota Creation Myth”, with the first beings made from the thawing ice and the brother who killed the others, stands under the ice journey. The crossing is the passage through the land of death and return, built of sledge weight and rations, never allusion. Held below the top because the Orgoreyn intrigue is not raised to the same depth.
Werner Herzog · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not cited. El Dorado is the oldest shape of the quest, a golden place that recedes as it is approached; here the quest runs downstream, so that every advance is a descent, and the river becomes the road to the underworld it has been since the Styx. Aguirre is the overreacher at his purest: a man who would found a dynasty with his own daughter and rule a continent, a rebel against king and God who names himself God’s instrument. The title bears the load, his boast and the film’s verdict at once. The particular stays particular: rusted helmets, a lame hip, a hoarded portion. Held below the top because the archetype is concentrated in one figure, and the river frame is old.
The Doors · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked across the record and built in one place, toward which the whole is built. The End builds it: a figure, the “killer awoke before dawn”, walks through a house, visits sister and brother, and comes to the father’s and the mother’s rooms, and the Oedipal crime is enacted, not alluded to; around it are the snake, the ancient lake and the road West. The archetype bears load: the piece is a rite of passage out of the house into the wilderness, and the record ends on it. The sequence bears it too, a threshold at the end of each side, so that the figures evoked elsewhere, the threshold and the other side, the ship of death, the Dionysian fire of Light My Fire, Blake’s night, Brecht’s moon of Alabama, the blues trickster, are stations on the way to the rite. What holds it from the top is that the built myth is assembled more than fused, and the particular, a person with a face and a place, is mostly withheld.
Paul Celan · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is built in the poems that carry the book. “Todesfuge” sets two figures as its structure: Margarete, Goethe’s Gretchen, the German beloved of the German master work, and Sulamith, the Shulamite of the Song of Songs, whose black hair has become ash. The poem is built on their pairing and ends on it; the archetype of the beloved is split between the nations, and the split is the argument. “In Ägypten” gathers Ruth, Noemi and Mirjam as the beloved’s companions in a stranger’s land, the exile of Israel laid over a love poem. The almond carries the Hebrew watchful tree. Outside these poems urns, sand and night are evoked in passing, not made to bear weight.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The Deposition is itself an archetype, the god brought down to earth as a corpse, the son returned to the mother, and here it is load-bearing by structure: the body descends through a chain of hands into the arms of the living and toward the altar where it will be received as sacrament. The programme builds a second archetype across the whole work, the bearer of the god: in the womb, in the old man’s arms, on the sheet, on the giant’s shoulder at the river. A guild’s patron saint becomes the law of the altarpiece. The particulars stay particular: a workman’s teeth, a ladder, a basin, a foot on a shoulder. Held below the top because the bearing is carried more by the wings’ subjects than by their painting; it must be known to be read.
Jules Hardouin-Mansart · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the section. The dome is the heaven over the centre, and the three shells make heaven an opening and not a ceiling: through the ring of the lower cupola a painted sky, lit by an invisible source, where Saint Louis offers his sword to Christ. The saint-king’s glory is placed over the centre of the king’s church, a claim that the reigning line rises there. In the building’s later life the archetype was rebuilt: the hero’s grave under the vault of heaven, the tomb at the navel of the plan, the axis running from the lantern to the sarcophagus in the earth. The particular stays particular. Held below the top because the ascent is inherited from Rome and the Val-de-Grâce, and the two myths overlay rather than fuse.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built from cinema’s own dead. The house is a tomb kept by a servant, and its queen does not know she has died: the bride in the decaying mansion, Miss Havisham with a projector. A young man enters by accident, is taken in, dressed and kept, and dies in the water she prepared, the mortal in the goddess’s house. Max is the creator become the slave of his creation, Pygmalion inverted. Norma’s chosen role is Salome, who asks for a man’s head, and the film ends with her demanding the camera. The load-bearing stroke is the casting: Swanson, von Stroheim, Keaton, Warner and Nilsson are the silent era playing itself, and the film within the film is Swanson’s own. Held below the top because the wider patterns are evoked as genre more than built into the plot.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetypal structure is built, not evoked. The purgatorial ascent is the poem’s frame: the turning, the dismembering, the stair climbed past the devil and the garden, the word sought, the return to the sea. The Lady is made across the second, fourth and sixth sections as Beatrice, Mary and “spirit of the river, spirit of the sea” (VI) at once, and she carries the poem from the bones’ praise to the final petition. Ezekiel’s valley of bones is not decoration: the speaker’s dissolution is the condition of the word. The particular stays particular: brown hair, a broadbacked figure, a slotted window, granite shores. Held below the top band because the myth is borrowed whole from Dante and the liturgy and leant on more than remade: the poem is the climb, not a new myth of it.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears the load. Andersen’s tale is told twice, once as a ballet and once as the life of the dancer who dances it, and the second telling is driven by the first: in the ballet she cannot take off the shoes, and at the end she can neither go on stage without them nor stay in the dressing room. The shoemaker is the diabolic maker who offers the gift, and the film maps him onto Lermontov, who offers a woman the art in exchange for her life. Without the pact there is no ending. The particular stays particular: an aunt’s party, a Rambert matinee, a train on a viaduct. Held from the top because Julian is a role in the myth rather than a man in it.
Burgundian Romanesque builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the plan. The narthex is the outer court where the nations wait; its portal is the gate where the Spirit is given; the nave is the road; choir and crypt are the place of the relic, light above and the buried body below, tomb and resurrection on one axis. The patron is the Magdalene, the sinner who was first witness to the empty tomb, and the walk from penitence to light carries her story without depicting it. Held below the top because a later choir completes the myth in a second language, and part of its weight rides on the sculpture.
Guru Arjan; rebuilt and gilded under Maharaja Ranjit Singh · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not alluded to. A sanctuary on an island in the waters, at the centre of a square, reached by one causeway: the centre of the world in the first waters, the lotus on the pool, the single path across. The water is the pool of amrit, the nectar of immortality, from which the city takes its name, and it is entered and bathed in, so that the myth is enacted with the body. The four doors write the cardinal directions into the plan; the dome, an inverted lotus in gold, is the flower risen from water. The particular stays particular: this pool, this book, this city, this history of destruction and return. Held below the top because the island shrine and the sacred tank are inherited figures, given new meaning rather than first built.
Kate Bush · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, not only evoked. The Ninth Wave is a night-sea journey with every stage carrying load: immersion, descent under ice, ordeal by water in the ducking of the witch, where to sink is to be proved innocent and to float is to be condemned, the soul’s visit home, the plea of the unborn, the vision from above, and return at dawn. The title draws on Tennyson’s Arthur, the wave that brings the child ashore. The particular holds: a woman, a lifejacket, a light, her mother and brothers, a kitchen. Side one adds the rainmaker and his son, the deal with God and the hounds of desire, but as separate songs, and the hounds and the sky are evoked more than built.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the fabric, not hung on it. The cross is not an object: it is the cut that divides the altar wall into four, so that the sign of the faith is made by the structure’s own parting, and made of light. Light shining in darkness, the oldest figure of the Christian scripture, is the room’s whole programme, and it is load-bearing: the box enforces the darkness and the cut admits the light. The entry adds a second figure, the threshold crossed by turning past a wall into a dark interior, the cave before the light. The particular stays particular: a suburban lot, a small congregation, boards from a building site. Held below the top because the governing figure is inherited, made new by being made of absence, and the cave is briefly carried.
Fra Angelico · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The Annunciation is among the deepest patterns Christian art holds: the messenger, the virgin, the threshold between outside and inside, the word made flesh at a door. Here the pattern is built into the structure. The garden at the left is fenced, the enclosed garden of the Song of Songs; the room behind Mary closes with a barred window, the cell and the enclosed body; the columns divide the angel’s space from hers, so that the threshold is load-bearing, crossed only by the inclination of the two bodies. And the archetype is folded into the building: the loggia is a convent loggia, the room is a friar’s cell, and the friar on the stairs enters the scene. Held below 9.0 because it builds an inherited pattern with great clarity rather than opening a new depth in it.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it is Genesis. A man passes his woman off as his sister to a rich lord of the land, as Abram passed Sarai before Pharaoh, and the lie brings plague: the locusts come as they came on Egypt, and the fire follows as judgment, the burning Linda has heard preached. The farm is an Eden with a house in it, and the film ends in expulsion, the three driven out by water and the law. The cycle of the seasons frames the plot. The particular stays particular: a steel mill, wages, a dying farmer, a girl with a Bronx voice. Held below the top because the archetype is often evoked through image rather than carried by the people, who lack the interior life to bear it as the people of Chinatown or King Lear bear theirs.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it bears the structure. The healing of the blind, the oldest miracle, is here bought for a thousand dollars and paid for with prison. The recognition by touch is the recognition scene of the oldest stories, Eurycleia’s hand on the scar of Odysseus, made the last act of the film. The poor man taken for a prince is Cinderella reversed, and the beggar who gives everything is the holy fool. The millionaire is a double figure, one man as two, generous and drunk, cold and sober. The Tramp, built across fifteen years of films, carries here his fullest load: the outcast as the one figure who loves without being seen. The particular stays particular: a flower, a whistle, a hand. Held below the top because the archetypes are many and gathered rather than wholly fused, and the millionaire’s is mechanical.
Marilynne Robinson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, not only evoked. The lake and the bridge are the structure: the water takes the grandfather with his train and the mother with her car, and the book ends with Ruth and Sylvie crossing the same bridge on foot at night and taken by the town for drowned, a death that is their departure into another life. The Flood is enacted in the house, which becomes the reverse of an ark: a shelter that consents to the water. Ruth’s name carries the Book of Ruth, the daughter who follows an older woman out of her people; Sylvie is the woodland figure, half of the outdoors. The figures stay particular: tins stored in the parlour, Sylvie asleep on a park bench. Held below the top: part of the myth is glossed in Ruth’s meditations, on Cain and Abel, Lot’s wife and Noah, rather than borne by the action, and the names point more than they build.
Octavio Paz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not only evoked. The Venus cycle sets the length, the calendar stone the title, cyclical time the syntax, and the return of the opening is the year turning: the archetype carries the poem’s weight. The woman is made one figure through many, Persephone who goes down and returns, Melusine, Laura, María, the city and the field, a goddess of the cycle who is also a particular woman in particular rooms. The tribunal makes history itself a mythic recurrence: Agamemnon in the bath and Trotsky in Coyoacán are one murder. Against more: the mythic names are often allusions laid in a row rather than built one by one; the Mesoamerican structure is a frame learnt from the note rather than felt in the lines; and Persephone and Melusine are summoned more than enacted.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The structure that bears the book is a father and son crossing a land of the dead toward the sea, the father a protector who must die so that the son can go on, and the son a figure of the sacred, named so by the father: “If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” The fire handed from one generation to the next is Promethean, and it is also the plain fire they light at night. The binding of Isaac stands inverted: the father keeps a cartridge for his son and cannot use it. The figures stay particular: a shopping cart, a tarp, a flare pistol, a can of Coca-Cola from a dead machine. Held below the top because the boy’s sacredness is in places affirmed in the man’s words more than enacted, and the family who take him in are the least built part of the structure.
Robert Wiene · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears weight. The master and the automaton: a mesmerist who wakes a sleeper and sends him out to kill, the oldest fear of the will taken from within. The doctor as demon, his authority given by an institution that should heal. The fair as the underworld at the edge of the town, where death is exhibited as a show. The legend of an eighteenth-century Caligari who toured a somnambulist through Italian towns gives the doctor a myth he chooses to become, so that possession is a matter of reading. The particular stays particular: a clerk’s high stool, a cabinet shaped like a coffin, a hillside where the sleeper falls. Cesare has passed into common iconography. Held below the top because the figures are types more than persons, drawn in emblem.
Egyptian (Early Dynastic) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The king who subdues chaos is the structure of the whole object, not an allusion: both faces stand on it, in the smiting, the procession to the dead, the bull at the wall. The god as falcon acts inside the composition. The union of opposites is built into the object’s one working part, the grinding well, framed by two beasts whose necks are bound together and held on leashes, wild force joined and restrained. The bovine heads crowning both faces set the sky over the whole. The particulars stay particular: a named king, a sandal-bearer, a town wall. Held below the top because the myth is a single one, kingship against chaos, asserted more than suffered; no cost or loss inside it makes the archetype tragic.
Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, under Bega Begum and Akbar · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Archetype built into plan and structure, not evoked. The garden of paradise is the plan: four quarters, four channels, the tomb at the crossing where the rivers rise. The eight chambers round a ninth are the eight paradises built as rooms, not named in ornament. The dome is the vault of heaven over the dead; the plinth is the throne or mountain on which the house of the dead stands above the garden; the true grave lies in the earth while its image stands in light under the dome, so the section holds the body below and its remembrance above. The axis to the west, toward Mecca, orders the cenotaph and the screens. Remove the garden or the plan and the myth goes with it. Held below the top because the figures are a Timurid and Persian inheritance, here first assembled in a great Indian form rather than first built.
Frank Herbert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth here is built, and it is a myth about the building of myths. The Atreides carry the House of Atreus in their name and something of its curse. Paul passes through the hero’s whole pattern: exile into the wilderness, adoption by a desert people, a ritual death and return in the three weeks of trance after the Water of Life, and enthronement. The desert as the ground of prophecy draws on Moses, on the rise of Islam and on Lawrence in Arabia, and the Fremen words Mahdi, Lisan al-Gaib and jihad make the debt explicit. What bears the weight is that the prophecy Paul fulfils was seeded by an order of women for its own breeding plan, so that the archetype is both true and manufactured, and Paul lives inside both truths at once. The particular stays particular: the stillsuit, the crysknife, the water of the dead. Some of it is evoked rather than built, Lawrence lying on the surface, and that holds the axis below 9.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Built, not evoked. The title names kamikakushi, the old Japanese belief in children hidden by the gods, and the film makes that belief a whole world. Under it runs the descent to the underworld: a tunnel, the food of the other world eaten and the eaters transformed, a river crossed, a name surrendered, a test of recognition, and the rule not to look back on the way out, which meets the myths of Izanagi and of Orpheus without quoting either. The bathhouse is an order of gods who must be washed. Held from the top because the descent is the oldest of patterns, received more than remade, and because the seal, the curse and the twin witch of the middle are plot devices more than myth.
Lars von Trier · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not cited. The structure is hagiography: the holy fool, simple and taken for mad, whose surrender of the body in love becomes martyrdom and is answered by a sign from heaven. Bess carries the Magdalene and the sacrificial lamb in one figure, and the source von Trier names, the Danish children’s book of the girl with the golden heart who gave away everything, gives the plot the shape of a fairy tale in which goodness is consumed. Under both runs Dreyer’s Ordet (1955), its resurrection by a simple person’s faith turned here to a miracle that comes too late to save and only vindicates. The chapters are stations, the community a chorus of Pharisees. Held below the top because Dreyer and the passion are visible as models, and the myth is sometimes pressed rather than found.
Nicolas Poussin · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built into the structure. Arcadia is the oldest Western figure of the ideal place outside history, and death within it is the oldest objection to that figure; here the objection is not alluded to but stands in the middle of the field as a block of stone round which everything is arranged. The four figures reading the stone are the human encounter with the record of the dead, and the composition is that encounter’s diagram: the living on either side, the tomb between, the meaning passing from the stone through a question to a calm. The particular stays particular: four herdsmen, a plain tomb, one late afternoon. Held a step below the top because the story is static, and the further myth some find in the shadow, the outline traced on a wall as the origin of painting, is proposed more than shown.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, and the structure bears load. The frame is the parable of the Prodigal Son: the son leaves the father’s house, goes into the far country and returns to kneel, and the last image is composed after Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son. The film is laid out on that departure and return, so the parable is its skeleton, not an allusion. A second myth carries the station: the dead wife who comes back to the husband who failed her and is lost again, three times, as Eurydice is lost; and with it Galatea, the image that comes to life. The particular stays particular: a box of earth in a tin, a dress without a fastening, paper strips on a ventilator. Held a step down because the Christian frame is announced as much as built, and the coda leans on it.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and built from a fishing trip. The struggle of a man against a great creature of the sea is among the oldest of patterns, from Jonah and Leviathan to Moby-Dick, and here it bears the whole structure: a descent into the deep, an ordeal of three days, a victory, and a return home with nothing but the proof of the contest. The old man and the boy carry a second pattern, master and disciple, age handing itself to youth; the lions on the beach are the dream of a lost strength, and close the book. The fisherman is named Santiago, for the fisherman apostle. The particular stays particular throughout: the baits at their depths, the cramped left hand, the water bottle, the tuna eaten raw. Held off the top because the third pattern, the Passion, is applied more than built: the cry likened to a man feeling a nail driven through his hands, the mast shouldered up the hill, the body laid out with palms up, all in the last pages and insisted on.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built into plan, not ornament that alludes: the building’s shape is the map of the city’s founding myth. The contest of Athena and Poseidon for Attica lies on the ground it covers, the olive she gave beside it and the marks the cult showed as his trident’s blow within it. The tomb of Kekrops, the first king, half man and half snake, is marked by the maidens, and Erechtheus, the earth-born king, gives the building its name. Autochthony, the city’s claim to be born from its own soil, is built as a temple that will not leave the soil’s particular places. Everything stays particular: this rock, this tree, these marks. Held below the top because the interior, where the cults met, is lost, and the myth now reads from outside.
Chen Kaige · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is built and load-bearing. The opera of the hegemon and his consort, Yu Ji’s loyalty unto death when the king is surrounded and lost, is the plot’s law: Dieyi lives the consort’s fidelity for a lifetime, and Xiaolou, the stage king, is in life a man who yields, marries and in the end betrays. The last scene enacts the opera’s ending, the consort’s death by the king’s sword, outside the theatre and for real. Around it the film builds a second archetype, the androgyne made by mutilation: the finger cut away, the line forced until the boy speaks as a girl, the old court’s use of him. The particular stays particular. Held short of the top because the opera supplies the first myth ready made, and the second is told more than formed.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built from a myth the culture already held in a debased form. The founding legend of the United States, the native princess who saves the captain, is rebuilt as Eden and the fall: a garden entered by strangers, a love inside it, the expulsion when the colony’s hunger reaches the village, a second life outside the garden. The girl’s prayers to a Mother who is the land make the sacred a structure, not an ornament, and the voyage to England completes the pattern as a discovery inverted and a death at the threshold of return. The particular stays particular: a copper kettle, a dress, a word given for a word. Held below the top because the Eden frame is inherited from the colonial writing the film criticises, and the girl is at times more emblem of the land than person.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The patterns are built, not only evoked, and they bear the film’s weight in Louise. The annunciation is the deepest: a messenger from the sky, a woman chosen to understand it, and a child whose death is known before she is conceived, so that the mother consents to the sorrow with the joy, as the mother at the cross does. Babel is reversed: twelve fragments over twelve nations make one tongue only when joined. The prophetess whose sight of the future stops a war is Cassandra believed, and the palindrome makes the child’s name the shape of the time the film teaches. Held from the top because the visitors stay a device: Abbott and Costello carry no myth of their own.
Liao builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The pagoda is the stupa raised into a tower: the relic mound as cosmic mountain and axis of the world, made here the structure itself, the inner ring of columns rising as a core toward the finial. The programme of images is load-bearing in the literal sense: each realm sits on a storey of the frame, and the hidden storey between two realms is the passage from one to the next. The ascent through the heavens is the section, not its ornament, and the octagon gives every direction its face. The particular stays particular: Liao clay and timber, a frontier plain. Held below the summit because the archetype came with the type, built more completely than deepened.
Dorothea Lange · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The figure is the Madonna with child and the mother as Charity, a woman with children at her breast and shoulders, a type as old as Christian painting. No title or allusion summons it; the arrangement of the frame makes it: the woman central and upright, the children turned into her body at either side, the infant across her lap, her face above them. The archetype bears the load, and the particular stays particular: the frayed sleeve, the dirt in the creases of the hand, the lined forehead, the fabric of a lean-to. Held below the top because the archetype is one, built by composition alone with no second order to deepen it, and because some of the myth was made by the image’s use in the decades after.
Fritz Lang · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it bears weight. Babel is the film’s structure: the parable of a tower planned by heads that the hands who built it could not understand, set inside a city whose tower is named for it, and closed when head and hands meet. The doubled woman is load-bearing: Maria the Madonna among the children and Maria the Whore of Babylon on the Yoshiwara stage, one face, the second made by the master’s wish and the inventor’s grief. Freder descends, takes a worker’s place and his cross, and returns as mediator. Rotwang’s house, a medieval cottage with a pentagram on its door in a futurist city, is particular, and the film made myths that outlived it: the machine-woman and the laboratory of her making. Held below the top because the myths are stacked as much as built: Moloch and the Sins are borrowed images used once, and the mediator’s role is asserted more than earned.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked. Rebirth is the structure: a buffalo, a princess, a man, a ghost, a monk, each perhaps the same life passing through forms, and the film is arranged as a passage through those forms rather than told about them. The cave is womb and grave at once, and Boonmee walks into it to die where he says he was born, so the archetype is enacted. The dead wife who nurses the dying man, the son who went into the forest after a creature and became one, and the princess who gives herself to a catfish are made load-bearing. Held below the top because the reincarnations are left open by design, the chain suggested link by link rather than completed.
Ancient Egyptian, under Amenhotep III and Ramesses II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked. The Egyptian temple is the primordial mound rising from the waters of creation, and Luxor states it in plan and section: the floor rises and the ceiling falls toward the sanctuary, so that the innermost room is the highest ground and the most enclosed space; the columns are papyrus, open in the colonnade and closed in the courts, and the halls are the marsh at the edge of the first land. The procession adds a second built myth: the god’s journey to his southern house, the king going with him and coming out renewed, the king’s birth hidden at the core. Held below the top because this is the shared grammar of every Egyptian temple, built here supremely well rather than found here first.
Medang (Mataram) builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype bears the load. The tower is Mount Meru, the mountain of the gods: its stepped body and crowning ratna are the peaks, and the reading of base, body and roof as the realms of mortals, of the purified and of the gods follows the section, not the ornament. The mandala is the plan itself, three nested walled zones with the god at the centre and his world in rings round him. The threshold is built at each court and each stair, and the Ramayana is placed where it must be walked, so the epic becomes a path round the mountain. Held below the top because the myth is received rather than made new, and Borobudur builds its cosmos in section with more rigour.
Pre-Pottery Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and load-bearing in the most literal sense: the pillar is a person. Long before the caryatid or the kouros, the structural member and the human body are one thing here, and the enclosure is a gathering of such bodies round a central pair. The archetypes are in plan and structure: the ring, the bounded sacred place; the pair at the centre, whether twins, ancestors, guardians or a couple; the animals as the world’s powers, carved onto the figures themselves; the bird of death with the headless man. Everything stays particular: this fox pelt, this belt, this scorpion. Held below the top because the content of the myth is lost: it can be seen that the myth is built, and how, but not what it tells.
Indian builders (Gupta and later) · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth built into the plan, not alluded to. The Buddhist texts make the seat of enlightenment the navel of the earth, the one place that could bear the event, and the temple builds it as an axis: the tower as the world mountain over the centre, the seat at its foot, the tree as the world tree at its back, with the walk of the third week laid out beside it. The quincunx of five towers, as the copies across Asia read it, is Meru with its four peaks. The archetype is load-bearing and stays particular: this tree, this stone, this plain, this east-facing seat. Held below the top because the quincunx may be partly the restorers’ reading, and because the cosmic tower is an inherited Indian figure, placed here at the most charged point rather than first built.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Built, not evoked. The mask is a structure of archetypes, each doing work. The face is the sun’s flesh in gold under the night sky’s hair in lapis. The beard makes the king Osiris, the dead god who rules the dead. Nekhbet and Wadjet at the brow, the vulture and the cobra, make him the union of the two lands and set two goddesses on guard. The text on the back gives the parts of the head each to a god, so that the head is reassembled as a divine body. The archetype is how the object was made to work, not something its readers bring to it. The particular holds in part: a young face, pierced ears, a soft mouth. Held below the top because the person is idealised toward the type and very nearly absorbed into the god.
Alexandre Dumas · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Here the book is strongest, and the myth is built, not evoked. Dantès dies and is reborn: buried in a dead man’s sack, cast into the sea, raised by smugglers, given a new name from an island named for Christ. His teacher is a priest in a pit who hands him knowledge and a hidden treasure, the pattern of initiation. The returned man unrecognised by those who wronged him is the Odyssey’s homecoming; the Count calls himself Sinbad the Sailor and plays the djinn. Above all he takes the office of Providence, the avenging angel, and the book makes that archetype load-bearing and then puts it on trial. The charge is the stock furniture: the poisoner, the foundling, the bandit chief, the Oriental slave-princess.
Byzantine, under Justinian · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is built. The plan is a sanctuary laid on the theophany: the axis runs east toward the place where God spoke from the fire, and the holiest point of the complex is not the altar but the ground behind it. The mountain of the law stands above, so that the monastery is the camp at the foot of Sinai made permanent; the fortress wall is the enclosure of holy ground made military. The apse makes the reading explicit: Moses unloosing his sandals before the bush and receiving the tablets, flanking a Transfiguration in which Moses stands beside Christ on another mountain. It stays particular: this valley, this bramble, these monks. Held just below the top because the basilica is the common type; the myth is built by site and siting more than by structure.
George Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built in part, and built against itself. The Prelude sets Saint Theresa over the book, and Dorothea is a “later-born Theresa” who finds “no epic life” (Prelude): the archetype of the saint bears weight because the novel is the record of its failure to find a form. Casaubon’s “Key to all Mythologies” is the counter-myth, the dead search for the one origin of all myths, and the title of Book V, The Dead Hand, makes his codicil the past gripping the living. In the Vatican the painter Naumann sees Dorothea beside the Ariadne (ch. 19), the bride abandoned in a labyrinth of learning. The web is the governing image, and Lydgate’s search for the primitive tissue is its scientific twin. Held a tenth above the gate because the realist surface keeps these patterns as analogy, and the novel distrusts myth on principle.
Lucretius · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
A poem against myth builds its own, and builds it into the frame. It opens on Venus, generation and spring, and ends on the plague and Athenians fighting over funeral pyres: the arc of coming-to-be and passing-away that the physics describes is the arc of the six books. Epicurus is made a hero who conquers a monster: “primum Graius homo mortalis tollere contra / est oculos ausus”
“a man of Greece first dared to raise mortal eyes against it” (1.66 to 67). The punishments of the underworld are moved into this life: Tantalus is the man who fears the gods, Sisyphus the man who seeks office and is refused. Held at 8.6, one tenth above the gate, because the archetypes stand in proems and set pieces and the body of argument does not carry them.
Orson Welles · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Myth built as absence. The newsreel names Kubla Khan, and Xanadu is the pleasure dome of a king who collects the world. Under it the film builds a plainer pattern: the boy taken from his mother for his fortune, who spends his life buying back what was taken and names it as he dies. The sled is not a symbol laid on; it is the structure’s missing piece, the one object the five witnesses never saw. Kane is also the king in his hall of mirrors. Held nearer the gate than the others because the pattern is small in kind: one man’s loss, disowned by the film’s own voice. The archetype is built into the frame, not into the middle of the life, where the accounts stay particular and the king is a newspaperman.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.0 · Tier V
The archetypes are built, and they stay particular. The one mad day is a saturnalia: the servant outwits the lord, the women trade clothes and places, and the night garden is the green world where disguise tells the truth. New Comedy is built in, not cited: the foundling is recognised by a mark on his arm, and in one sextet Marcellina, who meant to marry him, proves his mother and Bartolo, his old enemy, his father. Cherubino is Eros named, loose in the house, in love with every woman and conscripted for it. The plot cannot turn without the recognition. Held at the gate because these are the inherited furniture of comedy, Plautus to Beaumarchais, and the work builds with them more than it remakes them; its depth is in the persons, not the pattern.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The book is a limbo with masters. Unseen authorities set a penance, the pensum, which the speaker must finish before he may be silent, and he does not know what it is. Their college and their lessons make them teachers, judges and gods at once. Worm, the one not yet born, is built as the self that never entered life, beneath every story told about it. The structure is a Sisyphean labour in language, carrying the book rather than lying on it as allusion, and its last words have become a common phrase for endurance. Held a tenth above the bar by the rubric’s own clause: the particular must stay particular, and this book dissolves its particulars on purpose. Only Mahood on his crutches and in his jar, the proprietress and the speaker’s tears stay particular in full.
Emily Dickinson · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Some figures are built, not evoked, and they recur. Death as a courteous suitor in a carriage (J712) is the oldest of journeys made particular: the bride’s “Tippet”, which is “only Tulle”, the house that is a grave, the horses’ heads toward Eternity. The Soul that “selects her own Society” and then “shuts the Door” (J303) is the archetype of election, turned from God’s choice to the soul’s. The deathbed of J465, its witnesses waiting for the King, receives a fly in his place: the old art of dying built in order to be emptied. “My Life had stood”, then after the dash “a Loaded Gun” (J754), builds a self owned by a Master, with power to kill and none to die. But these are a set of figures, not a structure. Much of the body takes up the Bible, the bride and the queen for a stanza and turns away; the Master stays private; no single pattern carries the whole. The myth is assembled by its readers more than built by the work, and that holds the axis just above the gate.
Alessandro Manzoni · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built, from the oldest plot of the novel: lovers parted on the eve of marriage, tried by exile, abduction and pestilence, and reunited, the pattern of the Greek romance. The swerve that makes it bear weight is that the lovers are a silk-weaver and a spinner, and the trials are a curate’s cowardice, a lawyer’s trick and a famine. Around them the archetypes are constructed rather than alluded to: the castle of the ogre whose master is converted in a night; the vow that binds the virgin and must be loosed by a saint; the plague as a judgment that falls on the just and the unjust, with the rain as its end. The Innominato stays a particular man of a particular valley. Held a step down because Lucia carries the pattern more than she inhabits it, and the ironic narrator keeps the myth at a remove.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Built, not only evoked. The figure is old: the fallen woman who is the one pure heart, and with her the scapegoat, sent out so that the city’s purity can stand. The opera builds the second. Two women stand on its axis, the courtesan on stage and the daughter who never appears, and the plot is the transfer of one woman’s life to secure the other’s marriage. The carnival under the window in Act III is built too: the feast goes on while the victim dies, and the feast is the world that used her. The particulars stay particular: a flower, a card table, a purse, a portrait. Held a step down because the type is Dumas’s before it is myth, and the angel and the Magdalene are summoned in Germont’s language more than built in the music.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, from fragments chosen across the whole Bible: seed, grass and harvest as the figure of death and renewal. Tears are sown and sheaves brought home; flesh is grass; the farmer waits for the early and the late rain; the pilgrim has no lasting city; the dead rest from their labours, “denn ihre Werke folgen ihnen nach”
“for their works follow after them”. The figure bears weight across the whole and returns at the close. What holds it at the gate is the particular, withheld by design: no one in the work has a name, and the death and resurrection at the centre of the faith are left out, so the myth is built round an empty centre.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth evoked and partly built. Built: the women who return the gaze are the Gorgon’s stare multiplied, and the structure, five figures converging on one place, is load-bearing; the viewer stands where Paris stood before the goddesses, chosen and judged, as Steinberg argued in 1972. The memento mori of the studies, a student who in some of them holds a skull, is gone, and death stays as the threat of the bodies themselves: Eros and Thanatos without allegory, the brothel as a door to the underworld. The particular holds: a street in Barcelona by the title others gave, fruit on a ledge, faces taken from objects in Paris collections. Held near the gate because the myth is named nowhere on the canvas, the masks import an archetype as borrowed charge more than they build one, and the symbolism of the fruit is read in more than built.
Donatello · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built and bearing load. The structure is the oldest of reversals, the small defeating the great, and the object carries it rather than alluding to it: the boy stands on the giant, a large head under a small foot. The particular holds, a specific adolescent body, a particular hat, a particular face in Goliath. A second myth is built into the costume: the brimmed hat and the boots recall Mercury, and whether the figure is David, Mercury or both has long been argued, which shows the archetypes overlapping in the object rather than summoned round it. In Florence the pattern was a civic myth as well, the small republic against the tyrant, and the figure’s move to the seat of government after 1494 made that reading public. Held below the top because the work’s ambiguity divides its myth as much as it doubles it.
Luigi Pirandello · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked: creatures abandoned by their maker go looking for one, and the play’s whole structure is that search. It inverts the oldest relation in story, between maker and made, and makes the made more real and more lasting than the makers: the Father appeals to the fact that a character outlives the man who wrote him, and that one born alive cannot die. Beneath runs a second pattern, the family as a fate repeated in every telling, with its near-incest, its sold daughter, its mute grieving mother and its son who repudiates all of it. Held at the gate rather than above it because the family story is stock by design, and its reach depends on the frame more than on people who are thin as people by intent.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth is built, not only evoked. The book’s year is nature’s: Werther arrives in May and dies at the solstice, and the cycle carries the passion from bloom to frost. Homer gives way to Ossian, the patriarchal idyll of the well and the peas cooked in the inn’s kitchen to the grave songs of the north, and the shift is load-bearing: it is the turn of the book. The late letters take up the language of the Passion, the cup and the Father, and the death is set as a sacrifice no clergyman attends. The type Werther became in the world is reach, credited under Pressure on Tradition. Held where it stands because the archetype is built in one consciousness that names its own myths as it goes: the patterns are quoted by Werther more than borne by the action against his knowledge.
Arnold Schoenberg · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, on a borrowed figure. Pierrot is the commedia’s white clown, already the artist’s mask in Watteau, Banville and Laforgue; the work does not invent him. What it builds is load-bearing: three parts that carry the moonstruck poet into intoxication, down into night and sacrilege, and home to Bergamo. The sacred is built into the middle: Madonna as a mother of sorrows, the Red Mass in which Pierrot tears out his heart as the host, the verses as holy crosses on which poets bleed. The moon governs throughout, as wine, wound, sword and stain. Held a tenth above the gate by the inherited archetype, and because the homecoming is stated by the poems while the descent is inferred from their order.
Stendhal · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, in part, and built into the plot. Napoleon is the plebeian’s god, and Julien’s life is a parody of the Napoleonic myth in a world without battles. Mathilde lives a sixteenth-century legend, the beheading of Boniface de La Mole in 1574 and Marguerite de Navarre, the queen who kept his head, and the novel makes her live it to the letter at the end. Julien has become an archetype, the young man from the provinces, and stays a particular: a boy who is afraid of his own timidity. Held a tenth above the gate because the myths are largely the characters’ own borrowed scripts, treated with irony, rather than the work’s structure laid bare; but the novel makes the scripts enact themselves, and that is construction.
Sappho · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth is built, not merely evoked, in four places. In the hymn to Aphrodite the goddess’s descent in a chariot drawn by sparrows is a full epiphany, a remembered scene with her own speech inside it: the poem is a myth of the lover’s relation to her own desire. In fragment 16 Helen is load-bearing; the argument cannot stand without her. Fragment 44 narrates the wedding of Hector and Andromache, with the reader knowing the end. In fragment 58 Tithonus carries the acceptance of age. Particulars become archetypes while staying particular: the apple out of reach, the hyacinth trodden by shepherds, Eros “glykypikron”
“sweetbitter”. Held a step down because the myth is mostly exemplum in the archaic manner rather than the structure of a large work.
Plato · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, in two ways. The closing myth is load-bearing: it restates the argument’s conclusion as a trial and reverses the trial Callicles foretold, so that the Athenian court that will condemn Socrates is answered by a court where the judge sees the soul naked and the tyrant’s soul is full of scars (524e to 525a). Socrates says Callicles will take it for a myth, and he for a logos (523a). Lesser myths serve the argument: the leaky jar (493a to c), the stone curlew (494b). And the figures are built: Socrates before the city’s court and Callicles, the man of nature who will not be persuaded, have become the philosopher and the man of power. Held below the top because the eschatology is inherited, Orphic and poetic, and its judges are evoked, not made.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The structure of the whole is the just city and the unjust city, the oldest political image there is, Hesiod’s two cities and the city of God set against the earthly city, here not alluded to but laid out as the architecture of the room, with the governors seated between the two walls. The Commune is the ruler as father and as the city itself, the twins and the she-wolf at his feet giving Siena its Roman origin; Tyranny is the horned devil-king, a goat at his feet; Justice bound beneath him is the order fallen. The particular stays particular: the cathedral’s dome and campanile, the gate, the contado, the city’s colours. Held below the higher marks because much of the deep is carried by personification, a figure labelled with a name, which evokes more often than it builds.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The built myth is Hamlet. The title is Yorick’s, “a fellow of infinite jest”; the son is Hal; the father has died by his own hand before the action begins; the mother, Avril, keeps close a man of the family, Charles Tavis, who now runs the father’s academy; and the father returns as a ghost, though to Gately, not to his son. These are load-bearing: the family plot runs on them. The second myth is the fatal pleasure, the lotus and the siren, built into the plot as the Entertainment and its veiled actress. The two built myths carry the axis over the bar. What holds it near the bar is that the Hamlet frame is left open: the son never hears the father’s secret from the ghost, no revenge is taken, and the usurper is a comic figure. The satirical future, the Great Concavity and its feral creatures, is myth evoked as atmosphere more than built.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Rahman I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, in three places. The threshold: al-Hakam II’s mihrab is not a niche but a room, a door in the wall that faces Mecca opening onto a small, lit, closed space under a shell, the direction of prayer made a passage to what cannot be entered. The heaven: the ribbed domes over the maqsura, their crossing ribs a star round an open centre, over the place of the ruler and the imam. The unbounded field: the hypostyle as a figure of the infinite. The particular stays particular: this dynasty, its exile from Damascus, its caliphate. Held near the gate because the field as infinity is as much the effect of number as a structure of meaning; the columns as a grove of palms is a visitor’s reading, not credited.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The particular is a sordid, exact old man with bananas and a dictionary; the archetype is the soul reviewing its life at the threshold, and the shade that cannot be reached: an Orpheus who can hear Eurydice’s voice as often as he likes and never lead her up. Part of this is built, not evoked. Light and dark divide the stage, and the tape tells the same division, the white nurse, the black ball, the dark the young man struggled to keep under; the figure is the set, the costume and the speech at once. The vespers remembered from boyhood and the vision on the jetty set the sacred calling beside the profane. Held at 8.6 because the archetype stays half named: Krapp is a man more than a figure, and the Orpheus is evoked.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and its central structure bears load: the battue, in which beaters drive the game toward the guns, run again at night with a man as the game. André is shot running toward the greenhouse, and his death is told in the terms of the morning’s rabbits. Two inherited forms bear load around it: the comedy of masters and servants in love, from Beaumarchais, whose Le Mariage de Figaro the opening titles quote; and the carnival of misrule, the house turned over while a poacher and a gamekeeper chase each other among the guests. The particular stays particular: a cape lent from maid to mistress decides who dies. Held below the top because the myths are several and partly theatrical, used as frames as much as built from within.
The Clash · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked everywhere and built in one frame. The record opens on an apocalypse, the city under ice, flood and nuclear error, broadcast in the BBC’s wartime call sign, and the Four Horsemen ride on side four. Between them stands a gallery of outlaws: the Cadillac thief, Jimmy Jazz on the run, Rudie, Stagger Lee in Wrong ’Em Boyo, the card cheat, and Ivan of The Harder They Come in The Guns of Brixton. The pattern they build bears load: the outlaw as the poor man’s hero, and the question whether he survives his legend, which Death or Glory answers in the negative. The particular stays particular: a river, a supermarket, Montgomery Clift’s face. The limit: several outlaws are cited more than carried, and the apocalypse is framed by the first track.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing where it stands. The skull at the feet of the living is the memento mori and the dance of death, which Holbein had cut in woodcut a few years before, here not evoked but made the structure of the floor the men stand on. Behind the curtain the crucifix gives the old answer, and the death’s head under it names the place of the Crucifixion, Golgotha, the place of the skull. The particulars stay particular: two named men of 29 and 25, with a dagger, a book and their offices. Held a step below the top because the structure is a known one, assembled with great intelligence rather than discovered, and its third term is hidden so well that most viewers never complete it.
Isaac Babel · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth is built, not only evoked. The Cossack is made a figure of animal grace and natural violence against which the narrator, the Jew in spectacles, measures himself, and that measurement is the book’s spine; in “My First Goose” initiation by sacrifice is enacted in a farmyard. Christ is present throughout and always broken: Apolek’s blasphemous gospel of Jesus and Deborah, Sashka Christ the syphilitic shepherd boy, the Catholic churches desecrated by the army. Against them stand the Hasidic fathers, Gedali and Rabbi Motale, and the rabbi’s son, dead with Lenin and Maimonides together in his trunk. What holds the axis at the gate is the battle pieces, several of which evoke the Cossack epic without building on it.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The title names the pattern, and much of it is built. The underworld is the waste, the Mob that Nick believes took his father, the underground test, the subway, the Bronx, the unconscious of a culture; and the reverse order of time is a descent through layers, ending in the basement where the boy fired a gun. The ball is a relic in the strict sense, a sacred object passed from hand to hand, sought by a collector and bought at last by Nick, and its line of owners gives the book its spine. The apparition at the billboard is a miracle built into the plot and received by the faithful, and Sister Edgar’s death carries her into a further world. The descent and the relic are load-bearing, and they carry the axis over the bar. What holds it near the bar is diffusion: the myths are many and none is borne by a figure, Nick is not archetypal, and some, the Bruegel and the cloud of unknowing, are emblems rather than structures.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The particular is extreme: one man, one borough, ten years of bouts. The archetype reaches it, and in part it is built. The fall of the champion and the penance after it are the film’s order: pride, the title, the beating of the brother, the last bout, the cell, a man rehearsing lines before a mirror. That arc is load-bearing and carries the axis over the gate. The rest is evoked by image. The brothers, keeper and kept, carry Cain and Abel without naming them; the body on the ropes, arms spread, blood running, summons the Passion. Held a tenth above the bar because the redemption that would close the structure is withheld: the epigraph from John, “once I was blind and now I can see”, is attached, not enacted.
Sergei Eisenstein · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears load in every act. Its structure is martyrdom and resurrection transposed to the collective: Vakulinchuk dies for the others, his body is laid out and watched by candlelight on the pier, and the city rises from his death. Around it stand the mother of sorrows on the steps, carrying her son toward his killers; the priest whose cross is driven into the deck like an axe; the sleeping stone beast that wakes; the brothers who will not kill. That construction is why the axis clears the gate. It is held just above it because the particular is not kept particular, by design: casting by type makes the figures emblems, the sailor, the officer, the mother, the bourgeois, so the archetype rests on types rather than on persons, where both are wanted at once.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The Passion is the deepest archetype the painter’s world held, and its structure is the picture’s structure: the innocent man bound, the ruler seated and indifferent, the instruments raised, and an outer world that does not attend. The gilded statue on the column, a pagan idol over the scourged Christ, sets the old order against the new at the axis of the scene. Pilate’s dress lets the ancient trial carry the present, so far as the costume itself is seen. The particulars stay particular: a barefoot youth, a brocade, a street. Held below the top because the panel does not settle the foreground’s part in the archetype, witnesses, mourners or the guilty, and an archetype unsettled is partly evoked.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built where it bears weight. The death of the forerunner is the archetype of the just man killed by power for a woman’s whim and a king’s oath, and here the king, the feast and the dancer are absent: the archetype is carried by the mechanism of execution itself, which is its deeper form. The basin is the old charger, the head as a dish served; the yard is every execution yard. The patron of the Order is shown in the ordinary condition of the condemned. The particulars stay particular: a ring in a wall, a bunch of keys, a knife drawn from a belt. Held at the gate because the archetype is the given subject, and the construction refuses the full story it carries.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The archetype is ascent, from earth through the open air to heaven, the mother taken up and crowned, the witnesses left on the ground, and here it is the structure: the three registers are the three orders of the cosmos, and the composition’s one action is the passage between them. The building carries it further. The church is named for this event, the nave’s procession ends at it, and the screen’s arch and the frame’s arch set the vision at the end of a road, as a goal. Every figure stays particular: a Venetian woman in red and blue, apostles with labourers’ bodies in heavy cloth. Held a step lower because apostles below and God above was a standard scheme and the doctrine is the Church’s; what is built is the event’s physics: the gap, the weight, the light.
Radiohead · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked throughout and built in one place, and the built pattern runs the length of the record. The figures are archetypes in modern dress: a man born again from a car crash, an outsider who longs to be taken aboard by visitors, lovers fleeing before a father can stop them, a judging machine, a thing in the house, a saviour in a song about an aircrash. The load-bearing pattern is the vehicle. A crash and a rebirth open the record; motorways, take-offs and landings, a safer car and the aircrash run through it; a tourist told to slow down closes it. That cycle carries the axis over the bar. What holds it there: the rest is image and allusion, and the figures never become persons.
James Boswell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The book builds, not merely evokes, an old and load bearing pattern: the master and the disciple who records him, the sage known through his sayings, as Socrates is known through Plato and Xenophon. The disciple’s devotion, his provocations, his humiliations and his persistence are the frame through which the master is seen, and the structure depends on it. Johnson becomes a figure of type while remaining particular to the last tic: the Great Cham, the Christian stoic who fears death, the giant of London. The Doctor Johnson the culture knows is largely this book’s making. What holds the axis here is that the archetype is a single relation rather than a world of figures, and much of the book does not carry it.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype is the soul at the edge of the world, hearing what the world says: Pan’s cry, the noise in nature that once gave its name to panic. It is largely built. The figure is reduced to a sign of the human, sexless, hairless, skull-like, its body a vertical flame bent by the same curves as the fjord, so the composition claims that this is any one of us. The road and railing are a threshold, and the walkers who keep to it are the world that does not cross. The particular holds in the place: a road above a fjord at sunset, the walk the poem dates. The cost is that the figure is archetype from the start rather than a particular man who becomes one: the particular survives in the landscape and is given up in the man.
Henry Fielding · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The plot is the oldest of recognition plots: the foundling of unknown birth, cast out, wandering, tested, and found at last to be the heir, with the true brother the usurper. It is load-bearing, since the book’s moral argument is carried by the revelation of birth. The estate is called Paradise Hall, Tom is expelled from it for his faults in Book VI, and the woman he must earn is called Sophia, wisdom: the expulsion, the road and the return are an Eden story told as comedy. Tom and Blifil are the brothers of Genesis, the generous elder outwitted by the smooth one. The Oedipal shadow is built, not cited: the hero meets, beds and nearly loses everything to a woman believed to be his mother. The particular stays particular, a squire’s halloo and a muff with a name pinned to it. Held near the bar because the archetypes wear the comic mask lightly, and Allworthy, Thwackum and Square are types more than myths.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built, not alluded to. Three sisters is a pattern older than the play, the three daughters of the tale and the three fates, and Chekhov constructs it as a structure: the eldest who serves, the middle one who loves wrongly, the youngest who waits for her true love and accepts the wrong one. Moscow is the lost paradise and the promised city at once, the place of childhood that is also the goal, and every act measures its distance. The house invaded by a newcomer who displaces the children of the house is the cuckoo’s myth in realist dress. Held below the high eights because the pattern is made of ordinary life on purpose, and the archetype carries the plot less fully than it does at the top of the desk.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
In “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes.” myth is built, not evoked. The descent, the forbidden look and the guide god are retold so that the archetype carries a new meaning: Eurydice does not want to return, and her death is a fulfilment the living cannot reach. “Alkestis” and “Geburt der Venus” do the same work with less force. The two Apollos frame the book as a passage from the early god to the archaic torso, and the closing Buddha sets the whole under a figure of completed being. The animal poems lift the beast to archetype while it stays this panther in the Jardin des Plantes. Held lower because many of the mythic and biblical poems are tableaux, myth as subject rather than structure, and a collection has no load-bearing archetypal spine of the kind a long poem can build.
Vittorio De Sica · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not alluded to. The quest for the lost thing carries the structure: a man crosses a city to recover what was taken, consults the authorities, goes down into the market and the church, consults an oracle, finds the thief and cannot take the thing back, and at the end becomes what he hunted. Under it lies an older pattern, the son who sees his father’s shame, and here the son covers it, handing back the fallen hat. The descent through the places of the poor has the shape of a journey through the underworld, and the particular stays particular: a Fides bicycle, a poster of Rita Hayworth. Held below the top because it is one pattern at street level.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The double is built, not evoked: the plot is the stages of a merger, from listening through confession and betrayal to a shared face, and that holds the axis above the gate. More of the surrounding myth is evoked than built. The title’s mask is a name, not a structure. Electra is one line in the doctor’s briefing, and its inversion into the refused mother is the viewer’s work more than the film’s. The vampire is a single image of blood; the lamb and the nail summon sacrifice and crucifixion as pictures without load; the boy at the screen frames the film and is never joined to it. The double itself is inherited, from Hoffmann to Dostoevsky: the film supplies the mechanism, not the archetype.
U2 · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is built once, framed across the sequence, and evoked across the rest. “Until the End of the World” is the mechanism: supper, kiss and despair stay particular, a low-lit dinner and a man going under, and the song can be heard throughout as one lover’s betrayal of another. Neither reading is the cover of the other. Around it the sacred and the erotic keep changing places: “Mysterious Ways” puts a woman where Cowper’s hymn of 1773 put God, “Ultraviolet” prays to a lover, “One” borrows the language of temple and leper. The frame is firm, a fall from arrival in the city of night into blindness, from a station to the dark. Held from the top: the frame does not bear load on every track, and the middle of the second half only evokes it.
Gustave Eiffel · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype built is the tower to the sky, the axis that joins earth and heaven, and it is load-bearing: it is the whole of the structure and of its use, four feet on the earth gathered into one line, and an ascent that ends in the sky. Babel stands behind it, and its critics of 1887 reached for that figure; but the work builds the axis rather than alluding to the story. The particular stays particular: iron from Levallois, the Champ de Mars, one centenary. Held below the top because the archetype is the simplest there is, built without the threshold or the inner chamber that the great temples build round their axis; and the meanings the tower later took, Paris, France, modernity, are reception and are not credited.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is built in the form, not summoned by attribute. The man becomes a standing stone: the oldest kind of monument, the first marker of the honoured dead, is the shape of the figure, so that a modern writer is raised in its form. The creator as titan, the head coming out of the mass as a god’s out of rock, is carried by the modelling rather than by any allusion to Prometheus or Moses. The robe built over a body that the nude studies show gripping itself makes the creative act a bodily, generative one hidden under cloth. The particular stays particular: Balzac’s belly and his monk’s dressing gown. Held below the higher figures because the archetype is single, creator and stone, and does not extend to a world.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The labyrinth is not alluded to: it is the form of every plate, a space whose paths are visible and whose exit is not. Babel is built in the stair that rises without arriving; the underworld, the carcer and Tartarus, the prison of the Titans, in the descent of light. After 1761 the archetype of the tyrant’s dungeon is fixed to Roman history by the names in II and the lettering of XVI, so the particular holds: Roman masonry, Roman trophies, Roman law, not a generic dream. What holds the axis below the top is that the archetypes are spatial and the figures carry none of them. There is no Daedalus, no Theseus and no thread. The myth is in the building and not in anyone.
John A. Roebling and Washington Roebling · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not applied. The bridge is the crossing, a structure whose whole figure is passage over water between two shores, and here the passage is one the body makes on foot. The curve of the cables gives the ascent to midspan and the descent to the other city; the towers are gates, and the walker passes through them. Everything stays particular: this river, these two cities, this granite and this wire. What holds it: the towers are dressed as the portals of a church, and the cathedral reading the bridge’s literature has made of them is allusion, not credited; the harp of the cables is an image, not a structure. The deep figure is one, the crossing, built at full depth with the threshold and the gate.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked: the group does not allude to Ovid’s story but enacts its turning point in the material itself. The archetypes bear load: the god who pursues and the nymph who escapes; the body that becomes the world, as the woman becomes the tree; the origin of an emblem, since the laurel will be Apollo’s crown and the poet’s, so that the loss of the beloved founds the honour of art. That last is present only to a viewer who knows the story, for the group does not show the crown. The figures are less particular than the archetype needs. Apollo quotes an antique god and Daphne is an ideal type; nothing in them is of a person, a place or a day, as the bark and the toes are of a tree. Built at the centre, generic at the faces.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype is the tomb, and it is built, not alluded to. The stack is a cairn or a pyramid raised over the dead, and the wreck lies in it as the body lies in the barrow. A second pattern bears load too: the voyage to the end of the world, the ship that goes past the last coast and does not return, the oldest form of overreaching. The ice as the place where the sea itself becomes stone is the frame both share. The particular stays particular: the slabs are drawn as real ice and the hull is a ship’s hull, planked and shattered, not an emblem. No figure carries the myth, so the tomb is invited and never named, and the hope of the old title comes from outside.
Richard Strauss · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The Gospels of Mark and Matthew give a dance, an oath and a head, and do not name the dancer; tradition named her from Josephus. Wilde built the archetype, and Strauss makes it bear weight in sound. Built here: the prophet as the voice from below the earth, heard before he is seen, the sacred speaking from a cistern while the court above argues over it; the moon, which every character sees as himself, so that the mirror is load-bearing; the exchange of a dance for a head; the kiss on the dead mouth, eros and death made one act. The particulars stay exact: a cistern, a platter, the blood of Narraboth’s suicide underfoot. Held at the line because the femme fatale of Moreau and Huysmans is evoked as much as built.
Vasily Grossman · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Built in part, evoked in part. The built structure is the title’s pairing: life, the particular and unrepeatable person, set against fate, the state and the history that would make the person a function; every plot in the book is that contest. Stalingrad is made a crossroads of the world, and the Volga a line on which the century turns. House 6/1, Grekov’s band of free men in the ruins, cut off and irregular, is a small republic of the kind myth makes, and the state that the battle saves destroys it afterwards. Sofya and David are a pietà made in the gas chamber. Shtrum is a Faust without a devil, whose discovery comes as a gift and whose soul is bargained for by telephone. Held a step down because the book’s realism keeps most of this implicit, spread across hundreds of figures: the archetype bears load in the great chapters and not through the whole.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype is the Last Judgement: the trumpet over the graves, the book from which the world is judged, the king of dread, the soul pleading at the end. The text supplies it; the question is whether the setting builds it, and it does in two ways. The Dies irae is made a recurring force that the soul cannot outlast. And the end gives the judgement to one figure: the soprano as everyone, alone before the chorus and the returned storm, an Everyman in a concert hall. That is load-bearing, not atmosphere. Held down because the archetype is inherited whole from the Latin and from a thousand years of settings, and the particulars are thin by design: no named soul, no Manzoni in the text.
Lorenzo Ghiberti · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetypes are the oldest: the garden and the expulsion, the brother killed, the flood and the ark, the father ordered to kill his son, the stolen blessing, the brother sold and forgiven, the law from the mountain, the walls that fall, the boy against the giant, the wise king. They are evoked by the texts and built by the doors in one respect. The line runs from Paradise lost to the temple of Solomon on the door through which the baptized enter, so that the threshold itself becomes the turn from fall to redemption, and the doors are at once a door and a figure of the way back to the garden. That construction bears the work’s meaning as a gate. The particulars stay particular: a goat in Abel’s flock, a camel, a basket, a wellhead. Held at the gate rather than above it because the doors arrange the archetypes more than they find new depth in any one of them.
Lu Xun · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Built, not evoked, in the two strongest stories. Cannibalism in “A Madman’s Diary” is not an allusion laid over the story but its structure: the madman’s discovery that he too may have eaten his sister’s flesh turns the old figure of the sacrificial meal into the law of a civilisation, and the frame, in which he has recovered and gone to wait for an official post, closes the circle by returning the seer to the feast. “Medicine” builds a communion in reverse: the martyr’s blood is eaten without faith or knowledge, and the sign of resurrection, the wreath and the crow, is offered and withheld. Ah Q is built into a type, a nobody with a name half foreign and half missing. Below the top because in the other stories the archetype is evoked rather than load-bearing, and Ah Q’s typicality is satire as much as myth.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Built, not evoked. The structure is the oldest image of the night of the soul, the sleeper visited by the creatures of the dark, and behind it the melancholic maker, head down, instruments idle, at a block of stone; Dürer’s Melencolia I, with its bat in the sky and its words carried inside the image, is the plain ancestor. The owl, bird of Minerva and of wisdom, is turned into a creature of the night: the attribute of reason has gone over to the dark. These bear the load, since sleeper, block, owl and lynx are the plate’s whole argument, and the particular is kept in a man of the 1790s in coat and breeches. Held here because the figure is anonymous, the archetype clearer than the man.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not merely evoked. The murdered child is the load-bearing figure: he never appears, yet a living man takes his name, and the name is stronger than the tsar. “Тень Грозного меня усыновила”
(The shade of the Terrible adopted me), says the pretender, and the line makes him a ghost’s son. Around this core the play builds Russian archetypes into its structure: the usurper haunted by the child, whom the holy fool calls Herod, joining Boris to the massacre of the innocents; Pimen the chronicler, a figure of Russia’s memory who has entered the culture’s image of itself; the yurodivy, who alone may speak truth to the throne; the people as a chorus that ends in silence. The plot runs on the pretender myth. What holds it short of the top: the archetypes are sketched in a few strokes, and the deepest of them, the holy fool and the chronicler, hold single scenes rather than the whole.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth partly built. The frame is construction: a god carried in from the sky, a monster drawn out of the sea, an icon and then a corpse with an open eye, the whole life set between a dead heaven and a dead deep. The descent is built too, night by night into the worse, ending in feathers and humiliation. Sylvia is made a pagan goddess, not only named one: in a costume like a priest’s on the dome, howling with the dogs, crowned in the fountain’s water. Paola is named the angel of an Umbrian church, and her two scenes carry the name. Held a tenth above the gate because much else is evoked: the Dantean descent often read into the film is not stated by it, and Steiner as a false guide is a reading.
August Strindberg · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth is built. Midsummer Eve is the saturnalia, the night when order is suspended, when the mistress dances with the servant and the farm people mock her in song; the play is built on that inversion and on its morning, when order returns with the sunrise and the Count. The two dreams are the archetype in plain sight and load-bearing: she on a pillar longing to fall, he at the foot of a tree longing to climb to the golden eggs in the nest, and the play is the night in which they pass each other. The Fall stands behind it, and the bird killed for the flight, and the father as an absent god. Held a step down because the dreamers say their dreams’ meaning aloud.
Joseph Heller · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The particular has become archetypal in the plainest way open to a book: its title has become the name of a pattern of human bondage, used by people who have not read it. That is myth made, not evoked. Inside the book the archetypal structure bears weight. Snowden is the secret at the centre of a labyrinth the narrative walks around until it has the courage to enter; the naked man in the tree at his funeral is an Adam and a crucified figure at once, seen by a chaplain who cannot tell vision from memory; Milo is Mammon as a cheerful young man; Orr, the simpleton who keeps crashing into the sea, is the holy fool who has been rehearsing escape; Yossarian’s flight is the oldest refusal. What holds the axis there is that much of the cast, Scheisskopf, Cathcart and Korn among them, stays at the level of type and turn and does not rise to figure.
Daniel Libeskind · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built into plan and section, and load-bearing on the underground level. The descent: entry is a going down beneath the old house into the dark, the underworld road before any ascent. The crossroads: three paths of fate, sloping and narrowing, chosen or not chosen. Exile: a garden that is a garden in no ordinary sense, its ground pitched and its trees out of reach on their pillars. The void: absence as the building’s spine, the empty centre. And the long ascent of the Stair of Continuity toward light. Everything stays particular: this street, this court house, these names. Held lower because the most cited figure, the broken Star of David in the zigzag, is the architect’s gloss and reads as allusion, and above ground the archetype thins to an angle.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built, and built into the structure. The play is an awaited judgment: an inspector incognito who will see everything, a false judge received with terror and gifts, and at the close the true one announced from Petersburg and never seen, while the town turns to stone. That shape is the Last Judgment as a district town would stage it, and the play does not need its author’s later gloss to carry it: the frozen tableau is load-bearing, not decoration. Khlestakov is the impostor king of the old carnival, the empty vessel into which each petitioner pours his need; he became a type and a word, khlestakovshchina, while staying a hungry clerk who has lost at cards in Penza. The Mayor is the tyrant who is himself a subject. Held below the top because the archetype stays implicit within the realist comedy, and the judgment is built most fully in the last minutes.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built into plan and section. The monastery as a world closed on itself round a centre: the court, its passages laid as a cross, is the cloister made into a sign. The cave: the crypt, hollowed beside the church and lit only from above. Descent to the sacred: the route falls from cell and study to the church, so that prayer is reached by going down. The cell as hermitage within the community, after the Carthusian cells Le Corbusier saw at Ema in 1907. The ark or acropolis, a level line held above uneven earth. The particular stays particular: this slope, this valley, a Dominican house of 1960. Held a step lower because the archetypes are inherited and reordered more than first built, and the cross reads in plan more than in passage.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into plan and section: the platform and the roof, which Utzon set out himself in writing, from the platforms of Mexico and the floating roofs of Chinese temples. The plateau is the earth raised and climbed, a temple platform turned into public ground; the roof is lifted over it as weather, cloud or sail. The ascent runs from the city’s grid up the stair to the threshold under the roofs, and ends at the water, in foyers facing the open harbour. Everything stays particular: this point, this harbour, this light. It stands at the threshold, not above it. The popular readings, sails, shells and wings, are allusion and are not credited, and the archetype stops at the doors of the halls.
Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola and Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into plan and structure. The axis from door to altar is the soul’s way to the sacrament, made the only direction the room allows. The cross is the plan, drawn in so close that it is felt as one body rather than as arms. The vault is heaven opened, not by a picture set in a ceiling but by a painting that breaks the architecture, so that the edge of the church and the edge of the sky are one line. The founder lies in his altar and the missionary’s arm is kept in the other, as a shrine holds its saints. Held at the gate because much of the myth rides on the decoration, staged more than built in stone, and the plan’s myth is that of every longitudinal church.
Willem de Kooning · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, not alluded to. The archetype is the Great Mother as idol: frontal, enthroned, with huge eyes and exaggerated breasts, in the posture of the Sumerian votive figure and the palaeolithic Venus. The posture is the composition, not a quotation inside it. The figure faces out, fills the field and does not act; she is there to be confronted, which is what an idol is for. The particular is kept: a woman of the American 1950s, with a lipsticked advertising smile, the line of a dress at the shoulder, a body set in a city ground. She takes on the archetype while staying particular. Held short of the highest band because the archetype is single and static, with no myth in action, no second figure and no event, and part of its depth is brought by the viewer.
Salvador Dalí · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetypal structure is built, and it is old: a sleeper on the shore at the end of the day, at the edge of the sea, beneath a dead tree. Sleep, death and time stand in one scene, and the composition places them: the dreamer at the centre, time dissolving on and around him, the tree that once bore fruit standing bare as a peg. The hard watch and its ants add corruption, the body of time eaten. The particulars stay particular: these rocks, this bay, a pocket watch, a fly. What holds the axis near the gate is that much of the depth runs through private symbols, the ants of Dalí’s childhood horror, the soft head of his self-portraits, the sexual reading of limpness, and that the soft watch is a modern emblem built here rather than an archetype found.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into plan and section, not applied. The spiral is the form of growth and of time: the shell, the coil, the path that returns above itself, here made the only route through the building. The stepped tower of Mesopotamia is inverted, widening toward the sky rather than narrowing to it. The domed void with light falling from its crown is the oldest cosmic room, the oculus of the Pantheon made a glass sky over a spiral rather than a sphere. Ascent and descent are both built: the elevator lifts, and the walk down is a return to the ground. Everything stays particular: this avenue, this park, a museum of modern painting. It reaches the gate and not far above it, because the cosmic room is quoted and the myth stops where the art begins.
Guarino Guarini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the structure, not alluded to. The dome as heaven is the oldest figure of the domed church, and here it is remade: not a closed shell painted with sky but a lattice through which a further light is seen, the heavens as a veil over a greater heaven, carried in eight load-bearing arches. Eight, the number of the octagon of resurrection and of the baptistery, governs plan, ribs and lantern alike. The ascent through a second, smaller star is the ladder of heavens made literal in section. Held below the top because the archetypes are given to the dome; the church below carries the ordinary iconography of a Counter-Reformation interior.
Donatello · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, and bearing load. The figure carries the penitent in the wilderness, the oldest Christian archetype of the self stripped to the bone, and carries it in the body, not by attribute: there is no jar of ointment, no skull, no book. The hair is the built myth. In legend the Magdalen in the desert is clothed by her own hair; here the hair that was her vanity has become the habit of her penance, one substance carrying fall and redemption. Behind it stand the vanitas and the ages of woman, the beauty that time and choice consume, and the particulars stay particular: these teeth, this belt, these feet. Held at 8.6 because the archetype is one figure’s and largely inherited from the legend’s imagery; the work deepens a built myth more than it builds a new one.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked. Deronda’s story is Moses’s: a child of a people raised as a prince in a stranger’s house, Sir Hugo Mallinger’s, ignorant of his birth, drawn to his people by an act of rescue, Mirah lifted from the river, who learns his origin and leaves to lead them toward a land. The plot carries the pattern. Mordecai’s hope that his soul will pass into the younger man, a Kabbalistic transmigration, is Elijah’s mantle given to Elisha, and the plot enacts it: Mordecai dies when Deronda has taken up his charge. Gwendolen’s myths are lighter: the Lamia of the gaming epigraph, Hermione’s statue that will not come to life. Held below 9.0 because the Moses pattern is worked with some explicitness, and her myths stay evoked more than built.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, and in the Assembly it is load-bearing. The chamber is a cooling tower turned into a sacred vessel, a shell open to the sky whose tilted cap was made, by the architect’s account, to catch the sun on set days, so that the assembly sits under a solar observatory in the line of Jantar Mantar. The portico’s upturned canopy reads as horns or as a vessel of water; the enamelled door carries the sun’s course, the seasons and the earth to the threshold of the state. The parasol is the canopy of law, the shade of the judge’s tree, and the plain under the mountains is the open ground of a city’s foundation. What holds it: on the plain the myth is emblem more than structure, the Open Hand and the Tower of Shadows signs set on the ground, and the Secretariat carries none.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built where it bears weight. The structure is typological: scenes of the Fall and its consequences carved in stone over the sinner’s side, the Redeemer blessing from the other; the enclosed garden of lilies and roses as the hortus conclusus, the Virgin’s emblem made a place; the Virgin crowned as Queen of Heaven; the river dividing the city of God from the city of man, crossed by a bridge. The particulars stay particular: a chancellor with a shaved head and a heavy fur collar, a book open at a page, a real-looking town. Held below the top because much of the typology is carried in carved details legible only at close range, and whether the city is a real place or Jerusalem stays open.
Limbourg brothers · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked. The calendar’s structure carries it: the year as a wheel, the zodiac and the sun’s chariot crossing each lunette above, and below it the particular world of the month, a castle, a mown field, a feast with its host. The order of the heavens and the labours of the months, the oldest of calendar archetypes, are joined on every page rather than alluded to, and the Anatomical Man binds the stars to the body, the signs assigned to the limbs. The Hours carry the Christian pattern from the Fall of the Angels and Eden through the Passion to Hell. The particulars stay particular: these sheep, this snow. Held below the top because the archetypes are inherited from calendar and liturgy, built in by the genre as much as by the brothers.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built in two songs and evoked across the rest. Tangled Up in Blue builds a pattern of eternal return: the same love met again in other towns and lives, the lovers divided and reunited, the road as fate, and a book of verse by “an Italian poet” handed over as if the love were already written. Shelter from the Storm builds an old figure, the wanderer taken in from the storm, and lays over it a passion, the man’s clothes gambled for and a crown of thorns lifted from him, so that a love affair carries the shape of a salvation and a betrayal. Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts evokes a western as a card game. The particular stays particular: a hotel, a fishing boat, a basement on Montague Street. The limit: in the other songs the myth is atmosphere.
Natsume Sōseki · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built, and built from structure rather than allusion. The master and the disciple; the testament as an inheritance given to the one who asked for it, Sensei promising to cast the dark shadow of his life over the young man; the friend betrayed for a woman, told from inside the betrayer; and junshi, the retainer following his lord in death, brought from Nogi into a private life. The deaths are the architecture: K’s, the Emperor’s, Nogi’s, the father’s and Sensei’s, each read against the others, and the young man is made the heir of a spiritual father by leaving his natural one. The particular stays particular: Sensei drinks a little at the young man’s graduation dinner, visits a grave and will not say whose. Held below the top because Nogi carries the mythic load into the last chapters by report, as news, and the reader must supply what junshi means for a man who has no lord.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built more than evoked. The structure is a sacrifice: a stranger comes to a mountain, is given a woman, a family and a death, and lays down his life at a bridge to hold the pass for others, all within the span of a short Passion. The archetype is load-bearing because the action carries it: Jordan does not decide to be a sacrifice; the broken leg and the order decide, and he consents. Around him the figures are built from the ground: Pilar the sibyl and earth-mother, who reads his palm on the first day; Pablo the fallen hero who betrays and returns; Anselmo the old man of conscience; María, raped and shorn and given back her life. Held below the top because María is closer to an emblem than a person, which thins half of the myth.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is built and load-bearing: the oldest of stories, chaos into cosmos, light from darkness, the creature named, the first pair in the garden. The first number does not illustrate it; it enacts it, a world forming out of unresolved sound. Each day’s shape, word, deed and praise, is the liturgical shape of the myth. Particulars keep their weight in the orchestra: the lion, the worm on the ground, the dove, the whales. Part III builds the tension the story needs, for the pair are happy and Uriel warns them against wishing to know more, so the Fall is present as the thing the work declines to sing. What holds it lower is that the archetype is received whole from Genesis and Milton rather than made from new particulars, and that the three archangels and two humans are figures, not persons.
John Soane · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not hung on the walls. The section is a descent: light from above, through coloured glass and lanterns, falling past fragments of the classical body to the crypt where a pharaoh’s empty coffin lies at the bottom of the shaft. Death below, light above, and the living house wrapped round the well: that structure is load-bearing, since it is how the plan works and how one moves. The house is also a ruin built new, and a tomb in which its owner lived; the Monk’s Yard and the Sepulchral Chamber make the memento mori literal. It stops short of the top because some of the myth is play, the monk a joke on the Gothic taste, and because the archetype is held in a domestic register.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The particular stays particular: one named ship, one river, one year, printed in the title. Yet the composition is built on archetype, not tinted with it. The day ending is the life ending; the setting sun and the rising moon frame the passage as a death; the small dark boat that carries the great pale one to her last berth is the ferryman, and the procession is a funeral. None of this is allusion. It is the structure of the canvas, its cool and hot halves and the hull already half spirit, and the work would fall without it: the particular carries the archetype and stays itself. What holds the axis short of the top is range: the myth is one myth, built cleanly rather than deeply, and it opens into no second order.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the plan. The church is a hierophany made architecture: the point where heaven was seen on earth becomes the geometric centre of the building, an omphalos fixed by an event, and the oval vault over it is the heaven that opened. The fourteen helpers stand round the canopy as a heavenly court, and the canopy, open on every side, frames the place where the children appeared. The particular stays particular: one shepherd, one slope above the Main, fourteen named saints. Held just above the gate: the legend is local, its archetype the familiar shrine at the place of a vision rather than a cosmos, and much of the heavenly host is evoked in stucco and paint, which is allusion, not construction.
Titian · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
This is a myth painting, so the question is whether the archetype is built or illustrated. It is built. The structure of the canvas is the structure of the myth: the abandoned mortal at the left, her past escaping at the horizon; the god breaking in from the right; and the crown already among the stars above her, so that her apotheosis is present in the picture before it happens in the story. The rout gives the god’s double nature, wildness, the torn calf, the snakes: the deliverer comes with dismemberment in his train. Held at 8.6 because the myth arrives already given by the texts and the commission, and the particular, this woman on this shore, is held more lightly than the archetype.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built at the level of the cycle. The Decalogue is laid over one housing estate, so the law of Sinai governs a single courtyard of ordinary tenants. The silent watcher is load-bearing: he sees and does not intervene, at the edge of the frame, and the cycle never says whether he is an angel, a witness or a conscience. I is Abraham and Isaac inverted, a father who offers his son to the god of calculation and is given no ram. VII is the judgment of Solomon with no Solomon: two women claim one child. The particular stays particular, down to queues, lifts and broken heating. Held down because, below the cycle, III, IV and X carry their archetype lightly, and the commandment over each film is often evoked rather than built.
Mohammad Reza Isfahani, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked. The dome as the vault of heaven is the oldest of figures, and here it is constructed: the medallions diminish toward a sun at the zenith, so that the eye is drawn up a heaven that seems to contract into light. The passage is the threshold built as a rite, the narrow dark way from the world to the sacred, with a turning that reorients the body before it is allowed to see. The mihrab, the niche of light, stands at the end of the turned axis. The particular stays particular: this mosque, on this square, named for this scholar, facing this palace. Held where it is because the dome as heaven and the dark threshold are inherited forms of the whole Islamic and late antique tradition; the building realises them with unusual purity rather than finding a new figure.
R.E.M. · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built in two places, and the particular stays particular. Man on the Moon builds the trickster: a comedian whose death some refused to believe, Elvis perhaps alive, the moon landing doubted, Moses, Newton and Darwin set in one catalogue with a wrestler and a board game, so that resurrection and hoax become one story a culture tells about its icons. The sequence builds a passage: the record opens on a road and ends at water, a night swim in a remembered summer and a river sought toward the sea, the oldest figure of the last crossing. Monty Got a Raw Deal makes Montgomery Clift a fallen star. Held from the top: much else is atmosphere, and no figure carries the pattern from end to end.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built in the frame and evoked inside it. The four numbered Neighborhoods make one world: a snowbound town where the children, left to themselves, dig tunnels, lose a brother (Laïka takes its title from the dog sent into orbit and not brought back), suffer a power cut and keep their kettles. That is an old pattern built, not alluded to: the children’s kingdom after the fall of the elders, the winter that must be outlasted, light and fire carried in the dark. Une année sans lumière names the year without light; Wake Up is the summons; In the Backseat the passenger carried home. The particular is partly kept, in a window, a kettle and a real country. What holds it short of the top is that the figures stay unnamed types and the frame breaks off after four.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, not cited. The frame is a quest, and it bears the load: Stencil seeks V. as knights sought the grail, and the object is a goddess in the old sense, Venus, whose image by Botticelli is the prize of the Florentine plot of 1899, the Virgin, the White Goddess. The book takes Henry Adams’s opposition of the Virgin and the Dynamo and builds it into a single figure, a woman who turns by stages into a machine. The particular stays particular: Victoria Wren is a young Englishwoman in Cairo, the Bad Priest a figure on a Maltese street. Held a step down because the letter V proliferates, Valletta, Vheissu, Veronica the rat, until the archetype becomes a game, which thins the deep.
Lewis Carroll · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The structure is a descent into an underworld through a hole in the earth, a series of trials by riddle and examination, the court of a queen with the power of death, and a return. None of it is borrowed as allusion; the book wears no classical names. The garden bears the load: an Eden seen and longed for from a dark hall in chapter I, reached at last, and found to be a place where gardeners paint white roses red for fear of beheading (chapter VIII). Growth as metamorphosis, the body too large for the house and too small for the door, drives the plot as the passage of childhood into something else. The particular stays particular: a Victorian child with a cat called Dinah and her lessons half remembered. The figures the book made have since become archetypes; that is reach, and it is not counted here.
George Orwell · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, and the built thing is the whole book. The beast fable is the oldest moral form in the tradition, and Orwell makes it carry a modern pattern: the liberator becomes the master he overthrew, and the story ends where it began, with a new Jones. The pattern bears weight at every stage: a prophet’s dream and his death; a law given in seven commandments on a wall, then corrupted; an expelled rival who becomes the devil blamed for every misfortune; Sugarcandy Mountain, a heaven promised by a raven to those who work; a faithful labourer made the martyr of the system he served. It does not depend on the key: readers who know nothing of the history read it whole, and the closing change of pigs into men is a metamorphosis in the oldest sense. Held a step down because each animal is a sign before it is a particular, fixed to a type or to a historical original.
Francis Bacon · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built into the structure, which is why the axis clears the gate. The triptych is the altarpiece’s own form, and the title puts the three figures where painting had always put the mourners at the foot of the cross. The cross is withheld, and the centre panel is not its place: the absence is the structure, a crucifixion with no victim. Over it Bacon set the Eumenides, the Furies of Aeschylus, so that the Christian scene of redemption and the Greek scene of blood-guilt lie on one another and the mourners become pursuers. What holds it lower: that doubling is Bacon’s account after the fact, carried by nothing a viewer could read in the panels; and the figures are creatures rather than persons, so the archetype is reached partly by giving up the particular.
William Makepeace Thackeray · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The title and the frame are built, not hung. The fair is Bunyan’s, from The Pilgrim’s Progress, where everything is for sale; the vanity is the Preacher’s, from Ecclesiastes, and it closes the book. The puppet booth of the preface and the box shut at the last sentence make the frame govern the narrative stance from first page to last. Becky is an archetype made from particulars: the adventuress, the governess who climbs, the siren, whom the narrator draws in chapter 64 singing above the water with the monster’s tail below it, and Clytemnestra, whom she plays in the charades at Gaunt House in chapter 51 and whom the last plate names when she stands behind the curtain at Jos’s sickbed. What she has done is asked in mythic terms and left there. Held at this figure because Amelia and Dobbin are types, the clinging vine and the faithful knight, without the same depth: the gate is cleared by Becky and the frame, not by the whole cast.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, not only evoked. The facade is made of archetypes that carry the building’s meaning: the temple front, the house of all the gods made Christian; the two columns of Solomon’s temple, Jachin and Boaz, standing before the sanctuary; the Pillars of Hercules at the edge of the world; the triumphal column of the conquering emperor. Behind them the dome is heaven over the centre, and the interior enacts an ascent from the plague to the vow, the intercession and the saint taken up into light. The particular stays particular: this plague, this emperor, this saint. Held at 8.6 because much of the myth is emblem read by the learned, a programme of citation, more than a threshold lived by the body.
Robert Smithson · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Built, not evoked. The spiral is among the oldest marks people make, and here it is not a motif on a surface but the whole structure, at a scale the body enters: a path that leads out and in and ends at a centre in the water, the labyrinth and the navel in one figure. The particular stays particular: this lake, this basalt, this red. The prehistoric gesture is laid beside a post-industrial site, the oil jetty beside it, and each is let stand. The sources Smithson gave, as reported, are local and physical: a legend of whirlpools, the spiral growth of salt crystals, the hills round the site. What holds it a step below the top: without the essay and the film the walker meets a spiral and a lake, and the archetype, though load-bearing, is a single figure, not a structure of figures.
Käthe Kollwitz · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked. Parents kneeling before the dead child are the Pietà turned inside out: no body is held, because the earth withholds it, and the field takes the place of the son on the mother’s lap. The kneeling is also the posture of the donors at the edge of an altarpiece and of penitents before an altar, and here the altar is the cemetery itself, so the old structure bears load: the parents are placed at the margin of a holy field they cannot enter. The first parents after the loss, the old couple left by the child, the parents of a ruined generation: all are carried by the posture and the pairing, with no allusion and no attribute. The particular stays particular, these parents and this son. Held at 8.6 because the archetype is singular and the means that build it are spare.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, from two old patterns. The first is Faust’s: a man who has not lived learns he is dying, and a novelist met in a bar offers to guide him through the pleasures of the night city, a Mephistopheles who asks no price; the descent through pachinko parlours, bars and a strip show is an underworld that cannot give life. The second is death and rebirth: the man Toyo has nicknamed “the Mummy” is born again on a staircase to a birthday song, and his one deed is told after his death by witnesses who dispute it, in the shape of a saint’s legend assembled at a wake. The structure bears both; without the night and the wake there is no film. The particular stays particular: a new hat, a pair of stockings, a clockwork rabbit, a cesspool. What holds it near the bar is the building: the Faust pattern is drawn in strokes, and the rebirth is announced by its song rather than built beneath the surface.
Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Built, not evoked. The story is one of the oldest the three scriptural traditions share: the chaste youth and the mistress of the house, from Genesis 39 and the twelfth sura of the Qur’an, which calls it the most beautiful of stories, to Jami’s mystical romance. The painting makes the archetype structural. The labyrinth of chambers is the house of the world and of the self, and its doors are veils; the climb is the soul’s ascent turned to flight; the beauty of Yusuf, crowned in fire, is the divine beauty that Zulaykha loves in the wrong form. The particulars stay particular: a Timurid palace of Herat and two figures in Herat dress. Held below the high eights because the texts supply the myth and the painting builds what they give.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, not cited. The plot is a night journey into an underworld and a return, then a day that retraces it, with a guide, a password, an outfitter, a threshold, a judge in red and a woman who dies for the hero. The password, “Fidelio”, is the name Beethoven’s Leonore takes in disguise to free her husband, and the film inverts it: a masked woman offers herself to free a man who came to betray his wife. Marion, Domino, Mandy, Milich’s daughter and the masked woman are versions of one figure Bill cannot reach. Held at the figure because much of the construction is Schnitzler’s, and the sacrifice is left in doubt.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, and built as inversion. The load-bearing pattern is the saint’s life: a novice about to be vowed to Christ leaves the cloister to serve the poor, and the film runs that life to its opposite, step by step, until the instruments of her devotion, crucifix, crown of thorns and nails, are carried out to be burned and she goes to the card table. Beneath the plot the Passion runs backwards, and under it the sleeping bride, a dead wife restaged on a living girl. The Last Supper is the emblem, not the structure. Held from the top by distance: the archetype is kept as an object of satire, and does not gain the force of a myth made new.
Pagan builders, under King Kyansittha · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, and two of them carry load. The first is the cave: the temple is a mountain hollowed for the image, its dark vaulted passages the cave of meditation, which the chronicle names as the Nandamula cave the king set out to reproduce. Whatever the legend’s truth, the section is a cave in a mountain: solid mass, cut corridors, light from above. The second is the world-mountain: terraces stepping in to a single point, and four quarters, each with its Buddha and its door, making the plan a mandala. Circumambulation joins them. Held near the gate because the cave temple and the Meru tower were India’s and Pagan’s figures, joined here rather than first made.
Kendrick Lamar · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is built, and in more than one pattern. The pact: Wesley’s Theory and For Sale? give the tempter as Lucy, Lucifer in a woman’s name, with her contract, and Uncle Sam as the voice of the bargain. The descent: King Kunta crowns a slave who was maimed for running, and the record passes through the hotel room’s hell to the return to Africa in Momma. The god in disguise: How Much a Dollar Cost is the old theoxeny, the stranger turned away who is the divine, set at a gas station. The descent to the dead: Mortal Man consults a dead prophet, and the last call to him goes unanswered. The metamorphosis that gives the title is load-bearing. Held below the top because the butterfly is read out and explained rather than enacted, and Lucy is close to emblem.
Carol Reed · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth is built. A dead man who is alive; a first burial that is false and a second that is true, at the same graveside; a descent under the city to the place where the dead man is finally killed; a temptation on a high place, where the tempter shows the world below and offers a share in it. The structure bears it: without the empty coffin and the sewer there is no film. The innocent abroad, a writer of westerns lost in an old city, is played against his own genre. The particular stays particular: penicillin, a cat, a parrot, a zither. Held below the top because the archetype is partly carried by style and by Welles’s presence, and drawn in strokes rather than worked through.
Built for Taira no Kiyomori · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not alluded to. The gate in the sea is the threshold made literal: a sacred boundary placed in the element that divides the mainland shore from the sacred island, so that the approach by water passes through it before any foot touches the shrine. The axis runs from the gate across open water to the haraiden and the honden, and behind them to the forested mountain, so that the plan lays out sea, shore, shrine and holy mountain in one line. The palace on the water, dwelling of sea deities, is load-bearing, since the halls stand on the sea that is the goddesses’ domain. Held below the top because the honden is a closed box that adds nothing beyond its type, and because the building leans on a sanctity it did not build.
Carlo Scarpa · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built, not cited. The two interlocking circles of the propylaeum, read as two eyes, two lives or a union, are the threshold, and the body passes by them. The arcosolium takes the oldest Christian burial form, the arched niche of the catacombs, and makes it a bridge: the dead lie beneath a span, and passage is what the whole place is about. Water runs from the pool toward the tombs, the old figure of the river between the living and the dead laid into the plan; the pavilion is an island reached by a path. The garden is the enclosed paradise, walled yet open. Held below the top because some of it is private and allusive, and the structure that carries it is a route, not a cosmos.
Max Beckmann · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth is built, in two layers. The form is the altarpiece: the triptych, whose wings in the old church closed over a sacred centre, is turned to a secular passion, with torments where donors and martyrs stood and a holy family in the middle. The centre builds the voyage: the boat of the dead and of rescue, the fisher king with his net, the queen with the child, a mother and son carried over the water out of the world. These figures are load-bearing, not allusive: the departure is the structure, and they are what it is built for. The particular holds as well, in liveries, props and the furniture of Weimar. Short of the top because the myth is syncretic and partly private, so that some deep figures are summoned rather than constructed.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked. The structure is a return after long absence to find one’s place taken: an Odyssey turned inside out, in which the usurper is not a suitor but the returning man’s dearest friend, risen from the dead, holding his money, his woman and his name for a son. Under it lie the betrayer brother, the pact sworn in childhood and broken by one of the sworn, and lost time that can be entered only by a drug or by memory, the opium den as underworld. The Jewish Lower East Side stays particular and carries the American myth of the street boy who climbs. Some myth is atmosphere: the shadow theatre, the 1968 Cleopatra.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The structure is tragic in the strict sense: the end is announced in the first sentence, every person moves toward it with full knowledge, and the reader watches fate made out of human acts. The victim is a sacrifice, and the pattern bears weight. He wakes to meet a bishop who passes the town by boat, blesses it from the deck and does not land; he dies at the hands of men who slaughter pigs for a living, with their pig knives; the autopsy finds a wound through the hand; and the town’s guilt afterwards is a collective expiation that does not end. Honour, the virgin bride, the returned dowry and the avenging brothers are among the oldest plots of the Mediterranean world, carried to a Caribbean river town. The dreams of trees and birds with which the book opens are omens read only after the fact. What holds the axis there is the victim, opaque by design: the sacrifice is built, but the figure who bears it is thin.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The names are load-bearing. The man who signs off a removal is Abelard, who once likened a conscience in the lower classes to castration among bulls and here does the cutting; the man removed is an anti-Aeneas who carries nothing out of the burning city, founds nothing, betrays the wife called Lavinia and is buried in front of his father; the son who survives is Orion, placed in the sky. The drugs, Ataraxia, Apatheia, Methexis, Epochē and Euthymia, are philosophical end-states sold as pills, each doing what its name does. Beneath the last part the belly of the whale is built rather than cited: curved supports that pass overhead and return beneath the floor plates, ribs set closer than the span requires, a descent, a holding, and a release that was not the descenders’ to arrange. Held off the top because the opening satire and the car thief’s night stand largely outside the frame, and because some names work as labels before they work as structure.
Ovid · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Here the book builds rather than evokes. Ovid makes of himself the figure of the exiled poet at the edge of the world, and the figure is load-bearing: the whole book is made to produce it, and it has stood as the archetype since. He sets himself against Ulysses and claims the greater wandering (1.5, 3.11.61); he is the man struck by Jupiter’s thunderbolt, Caesar’s anger as the god’s; his book is warned off the heights by Phaethon and Icarus (1.1.79, 1.1.90); Tomis is the place where Medea cut up her brother (3.9.6), a landscape named by a dismemberment. The poet of the Metamorphoses has become a metamorphosis. Held below the top because the comparisons are often a rhetorical register piled in catalogue, and the archetype is one figure, not a world of them.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, not alluded to. The double is load-bearing: the self and its twin, the two who are one, joined by a single vessel, the oldest form of the divided soul, here carrying the whole composition. The exposed heart is built on the iconography Mexican painting inherited, the Sacred Heart and the heart of the Virgin of Sorrows shown outside the breast, transposed to a secular woman who is both the sufferer and her own attendant. The particular holds hard: this face with its joined brows, this lace, this skirt, a small portrait of one man as a boy. Held at the gate and no higher because the deeper readings often given, Aztec heart sacrifice and the umbilical cord, are brought from outside, and because the myth is one structure stated at once, not a world.
H. G. Wells · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The Eloi and the Morlocks are a modern myth made from a scientific premise: a garden of Eden whose innocents are bred as cattle by the dwellers below, so that the old descent to the underworld becomes a descent into the economic basement of the race. The structure carries it. The White Sphinx, a riddle of the ages of man, takes the machine and must be answered; the Traveller goes down into the dark and returns; Weena, a Eurydice, is lost in the fire on the road back. The last chapter builds an eschatology without a God, the end of the world as a cooling. The figure is argued from that construction, not from the names’ later life in common speech. Held where it is because the men of the frame are types rather than archetypes, and the Traveller is a function more than a figure.
Barma and Postnik Yakovlev (attributed) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into plan and use, not applied. The plan is a city of churches round a centre, which the tradition reads as the Heavenly Jerusalem, and the reading has a footing in use: the western church is dedicated to the Entry into Jerusalem, and the Palm Sunday procession from the Kremlin came to it, so that Red Square became the road into the holy city and the cathedral the city. The eight round the one, the star, the tent as an axis between earth and heaven are load-bearing in the plan. The holy fool’s grave adds a second, popular figure, the fool who tells power the truth. Held below the Pantheon (9.5), where the cosmos is the room itself: here the myth lives in the exterior and the rite, and the interior does not enclose it.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the section: descent into darkness and emergence into light. The worshipper goes down, under the earth, through a narrow way, and rises into a room open to the sky: the passage through the tomb to rising again, the descent and return, made the actual route into the church rather than an image on its walls. The circle of gathering round a centre, under a ring that draws everything upward, builds a second archetype, the sacred centre and its axis, as structure. The particular stays particular: this plateau, this capital, this light. The popular readings of the outline, a crown of thorns or hands raised in prayer, are allusions and are not credited. The figure rests on construction, and the archetype is less full than in older sacred buildings.
Middle Byzantine builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not alluded to. The domed square is the cosmos, heaven above and earth below, the zones between assigned their persons; and the octagon scheme strengthens the figure, since the dome governs the whole square instead of floating over a grid of columns. To that the monastery adds the holy grave: the saint’s body at the junction of the two churches, the burial crypt beneath the katholikon, and a descent from the gold of the dome to the dark of the tomb along one vertical axis. Pilgrimage and the healing cult make the tomb the threshold where heaven touches earth. The figures are common to Byzantine building; what lifts the axis is how fully they are built here, in one vertical and one horizontal order.
Peter Jackson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetypal structure bears the load. The quest is a renunciation, not a winning; the guide goes down into the underworld, dies and returns; the hidden king comes back to his city; the small one carries what the mighty cannot. These are built into the plot, and the films gave them the images that became their standard form on screen: the Ring on Frodo’s palm, the Eye on the tower, the white tree. Gollum is the films’ own mythic figure, and he holds. The films are credited with the myth they realize, and the realization is theirs. Held near the bar because the construction is Tolkien’s, carried faithfully, and because the films thin it twice: the homecoming is a quiet scene at an inn, with no Scouring of the Shire, and the Paths of the Dead are reduced to a device.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is built, in miniature. The book’s figures are the archetypes of making: Homer, whose blindness is the condition of the poem; Shakespeare as everyone and no one; Cervantes and Quixote, the dreamer and the dream ending in one oblivion; Dante’s leopard, told by God that its captivity will furnish a word in a poem; the poet whose poem contains the palace whole, and who is beheaded for it. The tiger of “Dreamtigers” and “El otro tigre” is made a figure for what language cannot reach. “La trama” builds the pattern of Caesar’s death into a gaucho’s, so that history is seen to repeat a form, and “Ragnarök” and “El simulacro” make myth of Argentine matter. The structures are load-bearing, but each holds a page: held for scale, not depth.
Claire Denis · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and from Melville’s: the master-at-arms who hates the handsome sailor, the innocent, the judgment, the fall. Denis bends it at load-bearing points. The teller is the Claggart, so the story is told from inside the envy. Sentain does not hang; he is driven into the wilderness like the scapegoat of Leviticus, carrying the camp’s disorder out onto the salt, and is found by strangers, so the sacrifice fails and it is the sacrificer who is expelled. Forestier stands in Vere’s place, the officer who sees and does not act. The particular stays particular, a crease ironed into trousers, a bed made tight. Held near the bar because the archetype is half dissolved into choreography, felt more than seen without Melville.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it bears the load. Its structure is the scapegoat: a city that needs a saint gets one by laying the saint’s crimes on another man, who carries them out of the city into the dark, and the last shot is that departure. The plot is ordered to arrive there. Around it the film builds the trickster with no origin, who tells two different stories of his scars and is offered no third; the white knight undone by fortune, whose coin, once a fixed thing with two heads, is scarred on one face and becomes the judge of life and death; and the double, a hero and the figure who completes him. The particular stays particular. What holds it from the top: the figures come ready-made from seventy years of comics, and the film loads them more than it finds them.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inherited archetype is built, not alluded to: the church as the heavenly city, the chevet as a crown of light round the altar, the vertical as the way up. Beauvais builds it to the limit of what stone could carry. What makes the particular archetypal is that the limit is visible: the highest vault ever raised, propped and doubled after its fall; a tower that rose and fell; a body never built. The building is the tower of Babel and the flight of Icarus made in the fabric of a working church, without a sculpted sign of either. Held at this figure because that second figure was not built by intention but is the work’s fate made legible, and the first is built no deeper here than in other great Gothic churches, only higher.
Japanese, under Emperor Shōmu · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, and in more than ornament. The Kegon (Avatamsaka) teaching the temple served holds that Vairocana’s body is the cosmos, multiplied in innumerable worlds, each with its own Buddha. That structure is carried in three registers. On the petals of the pedestal, Buddhas preside over tiered worlds engraved in the bronze. In the institution, the provincial temples were the realm’s many Buddha-fields, with Tōdai-ji at their centre. In the plan, the axis runs from the guardians at the threshold, load-bearing in the approach, through gate and court to the seated figure under its roof: the centre of the world, entered from the south. Held a tenth above the bar because the hall itself is a cover rather than a built cosmos: the myth lives in the image and the institution, and the architecture houses it without being its geometry.
Christina Rossetti · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Here the book builds rather than evokes. “Goblin Market” makes load-bearing myth from the grammar of the fairy tale: two sisters, the forbidden fruit of a world under the hill, the earlier girl who died of it, the descent of the second sister into the place of danger, and her return with the remedy carried on her body. The Fall and the Eucharist are both in the structure and neither is an allusion: Laura falls by eating, and is saved by eating the fruit’s juices from a body offered for her, “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices”. The girls stay particular, in a cottage with cows and bees and a brook. “Up-Hill” makes the pilgrim’s inn of a whole life. Elsewhere myth is setting, the convent, the dead bride, the grave, which keeps the axis from the top.
Clint Eastwood · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is built and then turned on itself. The archetype is the revenant: a killer redeemed by a dead wife, called back to his old self by money and need, who must descend through fever toward death before he rises as the destroyer. That descent and return is the structure, and it bears the load: the dead wife is the conscience offstage, the whiskey the threshold, the storm the rising of the old self. Opposite stands the tyrant whose own roof will not keep out the rain. The myth stays particular: pigs, a cough, a man who cannot mount his horse. It clears the gate by a tenth; the gunfighter, the town boss and the bounty are the genre’s own, refined rather than founded.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears the structure. The angel who chooses to fall is an old figure, from the sons of God and the daughters of men to Lucifer, here turned from pride to desire, and to Rilke’s angels in their terrible remove; the film recasts it as a choice for mortality. The first movement is heaven, the second earth, and the change to colour is the fall made visible. Round it more is built: Homer, an old storyteller invoking the muse, searching for a place, his audience gone; Marion on the trapeze in feathered wings, the human playing the angel as the angel longs to be human, a chiasmus that bears load. Held below the top: Marion stays more emblem than person, and Homer’s strand is evoked as much as built.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The Sophoclean frame is structural: a man of authority whose ruin comes from the secret of his own origin, which he alone knows and the city does not, under an epigraph from Oedipus the King on the rite of purification and the banishing of a man. The opening of the Iliad, which Coleman teaches, is set in the action: a quarrel between two men over a captive girl, which he reads as the founding scene of the West and repeats in his own life with Faunia. Faunia’s crow, raised by people and unable to live with crows, is the book’s emblem of the one who has left the flock. Over it stands the American myth of the self-made man, Gatsby’s, built here to its tragic end. Held a step below the top because the names and the classical apparatus are sometimes pointed to by the narrator rather than left to work.
Michael Cimino · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears load. The hunter of the American frontier, Cooper’s The Deerslayer behind the title, is placed in a mill town and sent to war: Michael’s code is the frontier ethic of the clean kill, and the film is the testing of that code. The deer is the hinge, killed in the first hunt and spared in the second, so that the change is enacted on the archetype rather than stated. The roulette is fate made a game, a rite of chance against the rites of the church, and the film is framed by sacraments, a wedding and a funeral. The warrior who cannot re-enter the city is as old as the Odyssey, and here the double stays in the underworld. Held below the top where the frontier myth is worn on the surface and the Vietnam myth leans on invention.
Frank Capra · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears the whole third act. The man shown the world without himself makes a descent to the underworld in reverse: he walks where he never was, unknown to his mother, and returns by asking to live. Around it the film builds a Christmas fable that inverts Dickens: the miser is never converted, and the man visited by the spirit is the generous one, made to see not his own future but the world’s. Potter’s offer of a salary and travel is a temptation on the high place, and George’s recoil from the handshake is the refusal. The particular stays particular: Zuzu’s petals, a newel post, a ledger. Held below the top because the angel is drawn for comedy, and the heavenly machinery is evoked lightly, not built to the depth of the unborn world.
Ming builders (and earlier dynasties) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked: the wall that divides the ordered world from the wild, the limit of the sown, the threshold where the gate admits or refuses. There is no part of the work that is not boundary. The passes are thresholds in the full sense: guan nei, within the pass, and guan wai, beyond it, are still ways of naming the world, and the plaque at Shanhaiguan names its gate the first under heaven. The line enters the sea at the dragon’s head. It stays particular: this ridge, this kiln’s stamp, this garrison. Held below the top because much of the weight the world lays on the wall belongs to earlier walls or to reception.
Leos Carax · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and the structure bears its weight. The man of many shapes passes through bodies in a single day, from waking to a last home; the white car is a hearse, Céline a ferrywoman, Paris a city of the dead, and Père-Lachaise and the dying Vogan make the passage load-bearing. Merde is the wild man, the beast who carries off beauty, made and not cited, with a film of his own behind him (Tokyo!, 2008). The doubles killed in the warehouse and at the café build the self murdered by its likeness into the plot. Held from the top because much of the archetypal matter comes through the history of cinema itself (Franju, Marey, Godzilla, the musical), myth evoked through the medium rather than built in the particular.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, at the level of structure. The picture is made as a cosmos: heaven above in a closed ring, the earth with the birth at its centre, the underworld opening at the bottom to take the devils. The Nativity is made load-bearing as the end as well as the beginning, and the three tiers carry that identity. The circle of angels is the ancient figure of the heavenly dance, the embrace the reconciliation of the orders, the devils driven into the earth the binding of the adversary; these are built into the composition, not hung on it. The particulars stay particular: a thatched roof, an ox, Joseph’s bowed head, a year in the inscription. Held below the top because the structure is the received Christian cosmos, given form here rather than found.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears the load: a child with two fathers, one of the blood, who wants her dead, and one by love, who cannot remember the password to save her. Under it lies the oldest pattern of hidden parentage, the foundling whose origin endangers a king, and the tyrant who must kill the child to keep his place among his brothers. The hidden paternity is the engine of the second part, which is construction, not allusion. The mother who leaves for the cause is Medea turned outward; Sergio is the old master of the martial arts tale, who hides the hunted; the Adventurers are a fraternity with a ritual of purity. The particular holds: a bathrobe, a dying phone, a karate class. Held at the figure because the comic register keeps the archetypes light, and part of the myth is evoked through genre.
William Blake · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Built, not evoked. A named man of the century before is made into an archetype while keeping his name: the measurer of the world as a fallen god, the type Blake drew as Urizen, the compass-bearing maker of bounds. The construction is load-bearing: the posture of enclosure, the dark element round him and the circle on the floor together make the myth of reason as a fall into the bounded, and the image carries it without text. Older patterns lie under it: Narcissus bent over a surface that returns only his own making; the demiurge with his compasses, turned from creating the world to diagramming it. Held from the top because part of the myth is completed only in Blake’s books, outside this sheet, and the sheet borrows from them.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth built, and it clears the gate. The three figures bear load and stay particular: the strongman as matter without soul, the innocent sold into his keeping, and the Fool, a winged acrobat on a high wire, a messenger from above killed by the brute he provokes. The road is the oldest form of a life, travelled without arrival. The sale by the mother, the angel slain, the soul abandoned and the recognition at the sea are structural: without the wire, the killing and the beach there is no film. The particular holds, in the tomatoes she wants to plant, the bowler hat, the drum and the chain on its leather strap. Held a tenth above the bar because the Fool says part of the allegory aloud.
John Huston · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears the load. Its frame is the oldest treasure story, the one Chaucer’s Pardoner tells: three men set out, find gold, and the gold kills them by way of each other. The film’s structure is that tale’s, transposed, and the gold goes back to the earth. Around it two more figures are built. Howard is the elder who reads the end at the beginning, who has the mine closed up before they leave and is taken into a village as its healer. Dobbs is the man devoured by what he holds, a dragon on a hoard without the dragon’s strength. The particular stays particular: tins of beans, a lottery ticket, a letter from a wife in Texas, hides stitched into packs. The archetype is received rather than remade, and the figure rests at the gate.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and built twice. From the play come the usurper, the prophecy that fulfils itself by being believed, and the forest that walks. From the Noh comes the frame: a bare site, a chorus, a story told as the lingering of the dead in a place, the shape of a dream play in which a ghost reenacts its ruin. The spirit at its wheel is the Fates spinning a thread. And the film adds what the play lacks: the web. The forest is a labyrinth called the Spider’s Web, the castle takes its name, the riding goes in circles, the wheel turns, the chorus returns to the same post. Held below the higher figures by the particular: Washizu, shown driven rather than known, is the fly in the web more than a man, and the archetype carries him.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The subject is the central myth of the West, and the risk is that the axis credits the subject. The film earns its figure by building. The most archetypal figure is made particular, a frightened carpenter with headaches who makes crosses, and the particular re-enters the archetype by choice. The structure is load-bearing: the hero refuses the call, is tempted in the desert, accepts, and at the moment of fulfilment is offered the return to ordinary life that every myth of descent offers, and refuses it a second time at the cost of everything. Judas is rebuilt as the strongest disciple, asked to do the hardest thing; the girl is the old tempter in the shape of innocence. Held where it is because part of the archetypal weight is given by the story rather than acquired.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked. The title declares a triad of moral types and the film both enacts and mocks it: the good one is a bounty swindler who leaves a partner in the desert, the ugly one has the film’s only family and its only confession. The three are drawn to gold buried beside the grave of a man who does not exist, Arch Stanton’s marker the decoy and the treasure in the unmarked grave next to it, and the last act is a descent among the dead into a circular arena, three figures at three points of judgment. The nameless rider who gives a dying soldier his coat and his cigar is an angel of death as much as a gunman. Load-bearing, if lightly carried.
Chaulukya, under Queen Udayamati · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is built and bears load. The stepwell is a temple turned downward: the temple climbs toward the summit of a mountain, the vav descends to the waters below the world, and the water at the bottom is the cosmic ocean on which Vishnu sleeps between creations. The building makes this literal. Vishnu reclines on Shesha in the shaft at the level of the water, so that the source of the town’s water and the source of the worlds are one place, and the avatars on the walls tell the god’s descents into the world as the visitor descends into the earth. The threshold, the cave and the underworld are not alluded to; the section is them. Held short of the top because the programme speaks the temple’s vocabulary rather than building a new archetype.
Roman · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth here is built, not evoked. The room has a myth’s structure: a mortal sequence on three walls set to either side of the god and his bride, so that the mortal woman’s passage is read through the story of the abandoned woman taken up by the god. The archetypes bear load: the veiled thing revealed in the covered liknon, the ordeal by the winged power, the mirror and the mask as the self seen as another, the satyrs and the young Pan as the wild the ritual crosses. The particulars stay particular: women of a household, a boy with a scroll, a matron on a chair, a bride having her hair done. The myth is the room’s architecture, which sets the axis at the gate. It sits no higher because the central group is damaged, and in places the pattern rests on reconstruction the image no longer secures.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The confidence man is the trickster, and the archetype bears the structure: one figure, or one spirit, in eight shapes, arriving on April Fools’ Day and likened at his first appearance to Manco Capac, the pagan bringer of civilisation; doubled through the book with the devil, in the shape-changing, the images of the snake and the old man’s Bible, and with Christ, in the mute’s texts from Corinthians, the plea for charity and the stranger refused. The book never decides, and the indecision is the myth. The boat is a ship of fools, a world in small, its passengers an “Anacharsis Cloots congress” of every kind of man. The particular stays particular: an Omni-Balsamic Reinvigorator, coal stock, a Missouri bachelor’s boys. Held a step below the top because the figures are types, and the archetype is reached by thinning the particular rather than by deepening it.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built into the play’s machinery. The shield devices are the city’s mythology turned into weapons: Typhon against Zeus at the fourth gate is the war of the gods fought again on a wall; the Sphinx returns on Parthenopaeus’ shield to the city she once preyed on; Dike herself is painted on the brother’s shield, and Eteocles must decide whether Justice ever stood with Polynices. The inheritance the brothers fought over is divided at last by the iron, a stranger from Scythia, and each gets as much land as a grave. The names carry the myth, Polynices “much strife”, Eteocles “true glory”, and the play uses them. Held below the top because the house myth comes largely in retrospect, its first two plays lost.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth built, and partly made. The film takes Stoker’s vampire and rebuilds it as plague: rat, ship, sea and the dead town. The structure bears it: the stranger who comes by water, the house of death bought across the way, the bargain struck in ignorance, and the pure woman whose willing sacrifice undoes the curse at sunrise. Bulwer’s carnivorous plant and polyp set the vampire inside nature’s order of predators. Orlok himself became an archetype: the bald head, the rat’s teeth, the long hands, the climbing shadow. The particular stays particular in a housing agent and a ship’s log. Held below the top because Ellen’s sacrifice is decreed by a book rather than grown from her, and the archetype is drawn in a few strong strokes, not worked through the middle of the film.
Jane Campion · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is built. Bluebeard is load-bearing: staged as a shadow play at the Christmas pageant, a husband’s axe raised over a wife who opened the forbidden door, and then enacted by Stewart in the rain over a wife who gave away what was his. The film stages the myth as a cheap entertainment and then makes it true. Beneath it lies Philomela, the woman silenced who speaks through her art and is mutilated for what she tells, and the sea-burial and rising is a drowning and rebirth, with the instrument as the self left on the sea floor. Baines, a European with Māori moko, is the beast gentler than the gentleman. What holds the axis a tenth above the gate and no higher: Philomela and the beast are evoked around a Bluebeard that alone carries weight.
Sumerian, under Ur-Nammu and Shulgi · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is built and load-bearing. The sacred mountain is made literal as a solid mass of earth with no interior, and the stair to heaven as three flights converging on one point above the plain. The form is nothing but the idea of the mountain where god and city meet, and it stays particular: this moon god, this king’s bricks, this plain where any height is made by hands. The type stands behind the tower of Babel, but that story belongs to Babylon’s tower and is not credited here. Held below the top on two counts: the summit where the archetype was completed is lost, so the mountain ends in a stump; and the mountain is the whole of the myth, with no threshold into an inner world.
Victor Fleming · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears the whole weight. A child carried out of the world by a storm, set on a road, gathering three companions who each lack a faculty of a person, mind, feeling, courage; a good witch and a bad one; a sealed city with a hidden god; a quest given as an impossible task, to bring back a broomstick; the bad witch killed by water, the god unmasked as a man, and the way home found to have been on the girl’s own feet from the first. The doubled cast makes it a dream-journey in the strict sense: the archetypes are the farm’s own people transfigured. The film made several of the images by which the myth is now known, the slippers turned to ruby for Technicolor, the green-faced witch, the curtain. Held below the top because the structure is Baum’s and drawn in a child’s clear strokes.
Maya, under Jasaw Chan K'awiil I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth built into the section, load-bearing. The pyramid is the sacred mountain; the temple at its summit is the house or cave in the mountain, its doorway the mouth; the tomb at its root is the underworld beneath, with the king laid in it. The incised bones in the tomb carry the maize god in his canoe, paddled toward death and rebirth, so that the burial joins the dying and returning god to a dated king. The nine terraces are often read as the nine levels of the underworld; the reading is likely, not documented in the building, and is credited lightly. The particular stays particular: this king, this victory, this plaza. Held off the top because the mountain over the ancestor is an inherited figure, built many times in the North Acropolis beside it, and here raised to its clearest form rather than first built.
H. P. Lovecraft · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Here the myth is built, not evoked, and it is the body’s strongest claim. Over a decade of tales Lovecraft made a cosmology: its gods, Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth and Nyarlathotep; its forbidden book, the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; its sacred geography, Arkham, Miskatonic University, Innsmouth, Dunwich and Kingsport; and its liturgy, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”. The myth is load-bearing: each tale means by its place in it, and it became a common myth that others built in. In Innsmouth the particular takes archetypal weight, the blood that calls and the return to the sea. Held at 8.6 because the particulars are thin: the people are functions, and the archetype too often stands without a person to carry it.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Myth built where it bears most weight, at the centre of the composition. The king and queen are the origin of every gaze in the room and present only as an image in a mirror: the sovereign as the unseen point from which a world is ordered. That structure carries the picture, and it is archetypal. Over the mirror hang two canvases the palace inventories identify as Minerva and Arachne and Apollo and Pan, mortal makers who challenged gods, above a painter claiming his art’s nobility before his king. The particulars stay particular: a five-year-old, a jar of water, a dog. Held well below the top because that pairing is carried by canvases no viewer can read from the floor.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Myth built in the form, evoked in the figure. The cycle is in the score: the fugue’s subject circles back to its first note, and the key plan circles back to its first key, the finale returning to C sharp minor and ending in its major. Between them runs a passage through lament, dance, song, prayer and combat, heard since Wagner as a day, or a life; the joins make it one passage, and the return bears its weight. The fugue calls up the sacred through the church style, the semplice variation through the hymn, and the particulars stay vivid. Held low by what the work lacks, a text and a story: the archetype must be named by the listener.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth built in order to be undone. The structure of Titian’s Venus of Urbino is carried whole: the reclining nude on the diagonal of a bed, the hand at the sex, the attendant behind, the animal at the feet, the dark ground divided. Venus is load-bearing because the picture’s meaning is her absence: the goddess of love is shown to have been a woman paid for love. The name works the same way, a courtesan’s name with Olympus in it. The particular stays stubbornly particular: a named model, a bracelet, a fallen slipper, a Paris room. The returned gaze is Titian’s; what this canvas adds is the kind of look, appraising rather than inviting, and that look has become a type of its own, answered for a century and a half. Held at the gate rather than above it because the archetype is borrowed whole and inverted rather than founded, and the cat, the other mythic sign, is an emblem more than a structure.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The case against: the series refuses myth; its heroes are absent, its gods are clerics and vultures, and its archetypes in the last group are emblem-book allegory, Truth, the monster and the vulture, evoked rather than built. The answer: the archetypal structure bears load at the scale of the whole. The sequence runs from a presentiment in darkness through a passion of a people, bodies bound to stakes and trees in the poses of martyrdom, to the burial of Truth, the question of her rising (80) and, in 82, the peasant beside the radiant figure with the fruits of the earth. Held at the gate because the building lies mostly in the last plates, the weakest as images.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth is built in two places. The lost kingdom: Zembla, a northern land of mirrors and exile, is paradise lost and the exiled king’s dream of return, and it bears the weight of the commentary as its structure, not its decoration. The thief and the light: the figure from Timon of Athens, the moon that snatches its pale fire from the sun, governs the relation of commentator to poet, and of every reflected art to its source. Around them the shade and the double, the waxwing killed by its reflection, and the assassin Gradus, whose name means a step and who advances as a fate by degrees, are woven through the book rather than hung on it. What holds the axis at the bar is that the archetypes are worked out through literary self-consciousness, patterns the book plays with as well as builds, and neither Shade nor Kinbote acquires a weight beyond his book.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth built, not only evoked. The load-bearing structure is the film’s own: the man who lives as though in a film dies as in a film. The Monogram dedication, the Bogart still and the thumb across the lip are set down as quotations; the plot carries Michel into the death they promise; in the last shot the gesture passes to Patricia. That is particular, and it carries the film. The inherited myth beside it, the outlaw who runs to the end of his luck and is betrayed by a woman, is evoked as genre furniture, signalled more than rebuilt. Patricia is drawn lightly enough that the betrayal reads in part as a plot function rather than a fate. That holds the axis at the gate.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The myths are present, and partly built. The American myth of the self-made boy, the Alger hero who rises by pluck, is built into the plot and inverted: JR rises by literal obedience to the market, and the rise is a ruin. Wagner’s Rheingold is set at the start, a school production rehearsed by Bast: the gold won by renouncing love is the book’s governing pattern, and Bast’s art is what JR’s gold consumes. The Bast family’s inheritance and its contested company give the book a house in decline. The inverted success story and the pattern of the gold are built into the plot, and they bring the axis to the bar. What holds it at the bar and not above is that these patterns are more frame and allusion than archetype made particular: JR remains a sharp schoolboy rather than an Alberich, and the collapse in the second half runs on the mechanics of the market rather than on the mythic structure. The opera is used as a key more than as a structure the plot must obey.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The title and the epigraph announce the myth, and the book builds it rather than evoking it: a journey through the night of the world, outward to the edge and back down into the suburb, the descent of the epics without a god or a return. Robinson is built, not alluded to. He is the double who goes ahead of Bardamu into every station: met on a night patrol trying to desert, found again as the man Bardamu replaces at the trading post, again in Detroit, again in Rancy. He does what Bardamu only wishes, and he dies for refusing to lie in love as Bardamu lies to survive. The crypt of mummies at Toulouse is a literal underworld, kept by the living for money. The particular stays particular: Bardamu has a regiment number and a fee schedule. Held at the gate because the shadow-double and the descent bear the weight but are left sketched by the satire rather than built to their fullest density.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is built in two places and evoked everywhere else. The 115th Dream rebuilds the founding of America as a comic dream: a sailor “riding on the Mayflower” under “Captain Arab”, a corrupted Ahab, lands on a continent that jails and swindles him and sails away as Columbus arrives, so that the discovery is reversed and the myth of the new world turned on itself. Gates of Eden builds an allegory of a fallen world outside a garden where there are no sins, with kings and a “motorcycle black Madonna”. Around them stand the piper of Mr. Tambourine Man, the bondman of Maggie’s Farm, and the “vagabond who’s rapping” at the door in Baby Blue. Held at the bar because the patterns are carried song by song, and Eden’s figures are emblems more than persons.
Robert Frank · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not alluded to, and the myth is America’s own. The road across the continent, the stranger’s journey through the land, the flag, the car, the frontier town, a cowboy at a rodeo in New York: the myth of national freedom and arrival is the structure of the book, and every plate is a station on it. The journey bears the load. It begins with a parade the viewer cannot see and ends with a family in a car at the side of the road, still travelling, nowhere arrived. The car becomes coffin and shrine, the jukebox an altar, the crosses on the highway the road’s own graves, and the particular stays particular: named towns, never types. Held at the line because much of the archetype is carried by inversion, and some plates stand outside it as plain report.
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth partly built. Valmont is the Don Juan figure taken out of legend and put into the drawing room, a seducer damned not by a stone guest but by his own wager. Merteuil is the larger construction: a self-created being, Luciferian in the precise sense that she makes herself against the order that made her, and the structure turns on her. The triad of corrupter, virtuous woman and innocent is load-bearing: the plot is the double seduction, and Tourvel’s fall is told as a passion in the old sense, with a convent and a death. The particular stays particular: the château of Mme de Rosemonde, the harp lessons, the key copied for Cécile’s room. Held at the line because the archetypes are worked out in a secular, analytic register; the book dissects the seducer more than it enlarges him.
George Gordon, Lord Byron · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked. The legend of the seducer, from Tirso through Molière and Mozart, is turned inside out: Juan is the pursued, the passive, the boy things happen to, and the plot rests on the inversion. Every episode is a woman’s choice, Julia, Haidée, Gulbeyaz, Catherine, Adeline, the Duchess, and the seducer myth becomes a myth of the man as object. Inside it the poem builds further patterns: Haidée’s island as an Eden lost, Lambro as Odysseus home to suitors at the feast, the sea as the chaos that eats men in the longboat. What holds it at the line: the poem dissolves myth by irony as fast as it constructs it, its Juan never gains the weight of the figure he inverts, and the damned Don Juan of the tradition is left out on purpose. Load-bearing in the plot, undercut in the voice.
Hans Scharoun · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype built into plan and section is the gathering round a fire or a centre, made as landscape: the valley with the music at its floor and the people on its slopes, under a tent that is also a sky. It is built, not evoked. The plan is the valley, the terraces are its slopes, the tent of the ceiling is the roof that covers it, and the passage from the foyer into the hall enacts the arrival. Behind the gold, peaked exterior stands Scharoun’s visionary work of the Glass Chain years, the crystal and the city crown of Taut’s circle, here given a use: the building as the crown of a city. What keeps the axis at the gate and not above it: the archetype is one figure, held whole but not layered, and the crown is read into the exterior more than built into an approach. There is no ceremonial axis, and the entrance is indirect.
Seljuk and later builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Archetype is built, not applied. The iwan is the vaulted threshold, open on one side, inherited from the Sasanian palace hall and turned to sacred use; four of them on the cross axes of a court make a quartered world round an open centre under the sky, close to the four-part garden of paradise. The dome chamber over the mihrab is the domed cube, heaven over earth, at the point toward which the city turns. The hypostyle reaches back to the first mosque at Medina, the community’s house as a field of supports. Held at the gate because these are the archetypes of the type, shared with the mosques that followed, and they arrived by accretion.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, not cited. The archetype is the passage of a life to death, and the four movements are a life, a dance, a victory and a burial, in an order that makes the victory a hubris the burial answers. The rite is in the sound: the chant in the trombones, the single stroke on the tam-tam, the low brass chorale, the dying to silence in the register where the work began, earth to earth. It meets the gate exactly, and what holds it there is the particular. Instrumental music keeps its particulars thinly, and these are few: a bassoon, a chant, a waltz in five, a march. The composer’s death nine days after the premiere belongs to reception, and is not credited.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is built, and the building is the casting: one woman as mother and wife, one boy as son and as the self, so that the old pattern of the son who seeks the mother in the wife and repeats the father is the film’s structure, not its allusion. The house is the house of origin, visited by fire, water and wind. The mother at the fence is a woman waiting at the edge of the world for a man who does not come; the levitation lifts her into an image near the Annunciation; the stranger who turns back is the road not taken. The particular stays particular: earrings, a cockerel, a proof sheet, a jar of milk. Held well below the top because part of the archetypal load is carried by the art the film quotes, Leonardo, Bruegel and Bach, and the myth of Russia in the Pushkin letter is stated, not built.
Christopher Wren · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The myth is partly built. The dome as heaven over the crossing is load-bearing, not ornament: under it the congregation gathers, and over it the dome rises to a lit crown. The vertical order is in the section: below, in the crypt, the nation’s dead, Wren among them and later Nelson and Wellington; on the floor, the living congregation; above, the painted life of the apostle and the light. And the building is a resurrection made literal, a cathedral rebuilt from the ashes of the old, marked by the phoenix and “RESURGAM”. Held at the bar because the deepest of these meanings are as much inscription and history as plan, and the cross and the dome remain two archetypes joined.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, not alluded to, though in part. The stepped section makes the church a mountain of light and the five-aisled body a city: the Heavenly Jerusalem is not a figure painted on the walls but a structure walked through, with five gates at the west and the Judgment over the central one, so that every entry passes under the end of history. The ambulatory is the pilgrim’s circuit made double. The lower church sets the sanctuary over a cave beneath the mountain. All of it stays particular: this hill, this Roman wall, these trades. What holds the axis at the gate: these archetypes belong to every great cathedral, and the reading of the section as mountain or city is brought to it, not documented.
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is built in two places and evoked around them. Stairway to Heaven builds an ascent: its form is a climb, from pastoral beginnings, a piper and a lady, to the full band and the cry at the summit, and the pilgrimage is load-bearing in the structure, not only named. When the Levee Breaks builds the deluge in sound: water that keeps rising, a man with nowhere to stay, an old flood become the oldest one. The two closers answer each other, ascent against flood. Around them the myth is evoked: the old man with sticks and the hermit make the sleeve a myth of age and the land, and The Battle of Evermore borrows Tolkien’s war (“Queen of Light”). What holds it: the figures are emblems, not persons.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is built at the centre, not hung on the wall. The archetype is the artist and the muse, and it is the action of the picture: a man seated before a woman crowned as History, making her image, so that the muse is made a model and the model a muse. Fame in the trumpet, History in the book and the art that serves both are given as one scene rather than an emblem. A second structure is the lost realm: the map of the united provinces and the eagle over the room set the act of painting inside the memory of a divided country. The particulars stay particular, a Delft girl in a blue wrap, a real map with a real crease. It meets the gate and no more: the terms come from a handbook, and much of the depth of map and eagle is brought by interpreters rather than compelled by the canvas.
Nasrid, under Yusuf I and Muhammad V · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the plan. The Court of the Lions is the paradise garden of the Qur’an laid out in water: four channels run from a centre to the four sides, halls and pavilions on the cross. Whether the court was planted is disputed and not assumed; the quartered water is fact. The Hall of the Ambassadors is the throne beneath the heavens; the muqarnas dome is heaven made unstable, a ceiling that is not a surface; the threshold is built, in bent entrances and a façade with two doors. The particular stays particular: this dynasty, this hill. It stands at the gate, not above it, because the paradise is inherited whole, and much of it is carried by inscription and ornament, which allude, rather than by plan.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, in an essay, and built so well that it left the book. Shakespeare’s sister is an invented figure become an archetype: the gifted woman with the same gift and none of the conditions, a figure of the lost and the unwritten that readers and writers now use as a noun. Anon, who “wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman” (ch. 3), is a second. The looking-glass and the room with a lock on the door carry the argument and have passed into common use. The narrator, who takes her names from the ballad of the Queen’s four Maries, is a mythic device made load-bearing: the “I” is dispersed so that no single woman speaks. Held at the bar because these myths serve an argument and do not form a world, and the androgynous mind is invoked from Coleridge more than made.
Molière · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, though from a drawing room. The archetype is the man who will not lie in a world that lives by lying, and the play builds it rather than invoking it: Alceste’s whole course is the course of the pattern, from the refusal to flatter, through trial by the world’s courts, to the withdrawal to a remote place where a man may be free to be a man of honour. The anchorite’s flight and Timon’s are in it, without allusion. The pairing of Alceste and Philinte became one of the standing antinomies of European ethics, and Alceste’s name a name for a type. The axis stands at the bar and no higher because the myth is built from character more than from action or image: the play has no ritual, no sacred and no great symbol, and its archetype lives in two temperaments arguing.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Part of the myth is built. The Nick sequence is an initiation in the old pattern: the boy taken across the water at night to the place of birth and death, the father’s authority broken, the wound, and the return to the river in a land laid waste by fire, where the hero performs a ritual of fishing to heal and leaves the swamp for another day. The waste land and the wounded man at the river are load-bearing in “Big Two-Hearted River”, not alluded to. The bullring interchapters build a second pattern, ritual killing and the death of the matador, which the book sets beside the war as its formal mirror. Held on the line because the myth is spread across a gathering, the stories outside the Nick sequence carry little of it, and Nick is less a figure than a vantage: the archetype is felt through the sequence more than borne by a person.
Spike Lee · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The structure built into the film is the polis on its hottest day, and it bears weight: a single place where every faction lives, with elders, a chorus, a voice of the city, a holy fool and a sacrifice. Da Mayor and Mother Sister are the old couple at the edge of every scene; the three men on the corner are a chorus in the Greek sense, commenting and never acting; Love Daddy wakes the city and at the end tells it what he has seen; Smiley, who stammers and sells photographs no one buys, carries the sacred image into the fire. Radio Raheem is built as the victim, LOVE and HATE on his hands. The heat makes the day an ordeal, and the particular stays particular. The limit: the chorus and elders frame more than they bear, and the sacrifice founds nothing, by design.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built into the plot, partly by structure and partly by allusion. The fiesta is the load-bearing frame: a Dionysian rite of seven days, in which the town gives itself over, the bulls are run and killed, a man dies in the street, and the band of foreigners comes apart. Romero is its hero and its priest, the one figure who acts with grace, and the ear of his bull, given to Brett and left in a hotel drawer, is a sacrament refused. Cohn is cast as the steer among the bulls. Jake is a wounded man who fishes in a waste of drink, a figure the book carries without naming. The Ecclesiastes frame makes the whole a turn of generations under an abiding earth. Held at the bar and not above it: what is built is the rite and the cycle, while Brett as Circe and the waste land are laid on in talk, and the people remain more particular than archetypal.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Archetype built into plan, not ornament that alludes. The plan is the ideal city in small: an open public ground with the houses of its teachers ranged round it as citizens, an agora. The colonnade is the stoa, the covered walk where philosophy was talked. At the head, on the axis, stands the temple of the city, and the temple is a library: the Pantheon, house of all the gods, rebuilt as a house of all the knowledges. The particular stays particular, a hillside in Piedmont Virginia, a handful of professors, brick and stucco. Held at the bar and not above it because the archetypes are quoted: the Pantheon at half its size, the forum and the stoa by learned reference. What lifts it to the bar is that the quotation is load-bearing in the plan.
Fritz Lang · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth is built. The bogeyman who takes children, sung by the children themselves in the opening counting game, is made a particular man with a round face, who buys a child a balloon and whistles Grieg. Around him the structure of the hunted man bears load: pursued by a whole city, marked on the body like Cain, tried by an underworld court of his own kind. The blind man who knows him by a tune is a figure from the oldest storytelling, and also a balloon seller with a licence. The particular stays particular throughout. What holds it at the bar of the gate is that the archetype is carried mostly by the first and last movements, and in the long middle, which is procedure, the myth goes under.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built in the structure, though the work’s own word for it is allegory. The composition is the old scheme of the Last Judgment and the triptych: a central figure enthroned, two companies divided to either side, the damned and the elect. The enthroned figure is the painter, the creator in the place of the judge; the nude behind him is Truth or the Muse made flesh and made a model; the boy is innocent sight; the lay figure on the left is a martyr made of wood; the skull on the newspaper is a vanitas of the daily world. Remove the scheme and the frieze is a crowd. The particulars stay obstinately particular: real friends, a real dog, a cat, the valley of the Loue. Held at the gate and not above it, because the archetype is largely borrowed, a Judgment, an atelier, a Muse, and much of the left wing’s meaning is cipher rather than myth.
Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Built in part, evoked in part. Built: the axis from the west door through the Court of the Kings to the altar, and on into the king’s room, makes the whole one road from the world through the temple to the sanctuary, with the ruler’s dwelling behind the holy of holies and the dynasty’s dead beneath the sacrifice. The Temple of Solomon is load-bearing: David the founder and Solomon the builder at the centre of the kings over the door, a son completing the house his father could not, as Philip completed Charles’s tomb. Evoked, and not credited: the legend of St Lawrence’s gridiron in the courts, and esoteric readings of the geometry.
Erwin von Steinbach and others; spire by Johannes Hültz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is built in two places. The spire is the axis of the world made literal: a single shaft above the plain of the Rhine, for more than two centuries the tallest building in the world, with stairs that let the body climb it. The west front, with its portals of the Judgment, of the wise and foolish Virgins beside the Tempter, and of the prophets, is the gate of the heavenly Jerusalem in the received Gothic programme, and the Angel Pillar makes the Judgment a column. Against this, the heavenly city is the common myth of every great Gothic church, evoked here by programme as much as built by plan, and the nave carries it no further than its type. The accident of one spire made the axis single, and the myth stronger.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not alluded to. The structure of the novella is a reversal of places: the physician becomes the patient, the keeper is kept, and the man who held that a cell and a study are the same is put in the cell. That exchange is the plot, not an image laid over it. The ward is the house of the dead and the world in small, fenced with nails turned point upward and guarded by a soldier who beats by rule; the doctor’s descent runs by stages, from his study through the town, the capitals and cheaper lodgings to the ward. The deer at the death reach once past the social into the mythic, never explained. Held at the line because the reversal is a single turn of a moral fable, clean and load-bearing but not layered.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Archetype built into plan, not evoked. The church is the temple of deliverance raised after the pestilence, approached by a crossing of water and an ascent. Inside, the plan is the way to the sanctuary: the hall of the people, the domed centre where heaven stands over the altar, and beyond it the veil, a screen of columns through which a further holy place is glimpsed and not entered, the Temple’s inner sanctuary built in columns and light. The temple front set on the church claims that Venice inherits Rome’s piety with its forms. The particular stays particular: this plague, this Senate, these friars, this canal. Held at the bar because the way to the sanctuary is inherited, clarified here rather than first built, and the crossing of the water belongs to the rite more than to the fabric.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is the bride’s leaving of her father’s house: the rite of passage as a small death, and the father who must give the daughter away. It is built, not evoked. The whole structure is the movement toward the departure, and the wedding, unseen, is the threshold at which the film stops. Behind it stand the father and the only daughter of the old tales, with the shadow of the daughter who will not leave, a Cordelia who refuses the husband rather than the father. The Noh brings an older theatre of longing and transformation into the plot at its hinge, and Kyoto, with its temples and its garden of stones, supplies an order of permanence against which the family passes. The limit is that the myth stays domestic: the archetype is held more than deepened, and no second myth is built beside it.
Diego Rivera · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Here myth is built, not only evoked. The court is laid out as a cosmos: an origin in germination, a departure in technology, an earth below in geological strata, titanic figures of the races of mankind above, and between them the making of the car as a cosmogony. The vaccination panel is composed as a Nativity, the child with an attending doctor and nurse and animals in the foreground, and the reading caused the outcry of 1933; it is load-bearing, since it puts science in the place of the sacred. The stamping press has been widely read as the Aztec earth goddess Coatlicue, though whether that was meant cannot be shown. The particulars stay particular: these men, this plant, the 1932 V8. Held at the gate rather than above it because some of the archetype is assembled from parts, the races and the paired allegories, rather than carried by the whole.
J. M. Coetzee · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetypal structure is built, not only evoked. The scapegoat is enacted in the plot: the old order’s guilt is laid on one aging white man and on his daughter, and carried out of the city. The fall is built through Byron and his Lucifer: the Romantic outlaw is Lurie’s self-image, and his talk of “the rights of desire” is that figure’s creed, and the book drives him from it to a keeper of dead dogs. The dog of the last scene is myth made particular, the creature given up and the life ended with care. Father and daughter, the land, the stranger in the house: the patterns bear weight. The axis stands on the line of the gate and no higher because the archetype is pressed through an ironist’s consciousness, and the book keeps its distance from the deep it builds.
David Fincher · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth is built. The archetype is the quest, the hunt for a monster, and each investigator takes it up as a knight would and is unhorsed by time: Avery by drink, Armstrong by leaving the case for his family, Toschi by an accusation over forged letters. Graysmith, the least armed, inherits it as the boy in the old tale does, and is refused the slaying. The monster names himself, a figure of the night sky with a crossed circle for a sign, and the film holds that myth at arm’s length as the killer’s own publicity, and sets beside it Dirty Harry, the cop who wins, which Toschi walks out of. What holds it at the gate: the construction is negative, a quest built to fail, and the particulars rarely carry archetypal weight of their own.
Mamluk, under Sultan an-Nasir Hasan · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Three structures are built into the plan, not hung on it as ornament. The threshold: from the street through the dark vestibule and the turn into the open square of sky, a passage from the world into order. The four-armed figure round a centre open to heaven, four directions and four schools gathered on one point, with the fountain at its centre. And the axis of prayer, on which the tomb is set, so that the founder’s death and the direction of Mecca are one line. All three stay particular: Cairo’s light, Hasan’s name, a dynasty’s need. Held at the gate because the four-iwan figure is inherited and carries its sense with it; the tomb on the axis is the building’s own.
Sergei Prokofiev · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is inherited, and an adaptation is neither capped by its source nor credited for it: the question is whether the score builds it. It does, twice. Love and death are made one music: the themes of the balcony return, transformed, at the bedside and at the tomb, so that the love theme is heard at the end as a death theme with its notes little changed. And the feud is built as a ritual of the city: the knights’ dance is the polis performing its own hatred, a figure the work constructs rather than borrows. The particulars stay particular: a nurse who waddles, a friar’s chorale, mandolins in the street. Held at the gate because the frame is Shakespeare’s, and without words the lovers’ imagery of night and day cannot become the score’s own.
Achaemenid, under Darius I and Xerxes · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Archetype is built into plan and programme, not alluded to. The building is the world gathered at its centre: the ascent from the plain, the threshold guarded by composite beasts, the procession of all lands converging on the throne, and the throne lifted by the peoples. The procession is cut on the stair it climbed, so the visitor walks inside the archetype. Over the enthroned king floats the winged figure in the disc; on the doorways the royal hero kills the beast; at every stair angle the lion takes the bull. It stands at the bar and not above it because the guardian bulls, the hero and the winged disc are Assyria’s: the archetype is the ancient Near Eastern palace’s, made universal.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The book builds a myth rather than borrowing one: an aged poet and a young beloved under assumed names in a borrowed East, the poet who must die to himself to be renewed. “Hegire” makes the flight of the Prophet a poet’s flight into origins. The moth and the flame, a figure of the Persian tradition, is made load-bearing in “Selige Sehnsucht”. “Wiederfinden” builds a cosmogony on a lovers’ meeting; the Parsi testament makes fire and sun a worship; and the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, a legend Christian and Muslim tradition share, carry the book’s thesis in a single archetype. Held at the gate, 8.5, because elsewhere the Persian names, wine, roses and nightingales are the dress of the poems more than their structure.
Venetian · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth of Venice is built, not only painted. The palace stands at the water’s edge as the city’s face to the sea, its mass inverted so that it seems to float and the lagoon becomes its foundation. Entry is an ascent through thresholds: the gate beside the basilica, under Justice; the arch; the stair at whose head the doge was crowned between Mars and Neptune, land and sea; then rooms of rising authority to the hall where the council sits under Paradise. Justice recurs on the fronts, in the Judgment of Solomon and in Venice as Justice, so the palace is a house of judgment as well as of government. Held at the gate because much of the archetype is carried on carved and painted surfaces, and the ascent grew by accretion, not by one design.
Zora Neale Hurston · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth here is mostly built. The pear tree is the standard against which each marriage is measured. The horizon is built the same way, from Nanny’s narrowing of it to the fish-net at the close. The mule, Nanny’s emblem, becomes Matt Bonner’s yellow mule, bought free by Starks and buried with a mock sermon while the buzzards hold their own parliament over him: a fable inside the novel. The flood is a deluge, with God’s judgment in the title, and the man who brought her to life comes back from it mad, so that she must kill him to live: the beloved returned as death. Held at the bar, not above it, because in places the figure is announced more than built, as in the narrator’s gloss on Janie’s inside and outside.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The Gothic cathedral is built as the heavenly Jerusalem, the city on the hill, and Lincoln is unusually literal in its site: a church on the crown of a hill above a walled upper city, visible across the plain. The Angel Choir makes the choir of heaven into architecture: angels carved in the spandrels of the gallery are part of the elevation, not set on it, and they ring the place of the saint’s body. The axis from the west doors to the east window, the double cross of the plan, the threshold of the deep central arch: the archetypes bear load. Held at the bar because these are the shared figures of the type, strongly built, and the shrine at their centre is gone.
Robert Johnson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The legend is set aside. The bargain at the crossroads belongs to later reception, not to “Crossroads Blues”, which is a song of being stranded. What the sides build is the pursued wanderer: the hellhound is a hound of hell set on a man who has done something or is something, the Furies on a Mississippi road; the devil walks beside him “side by side” and knocks at his door; the blues in “Preachin’ Blues” is a creature that jumps up; judgment day is a man wishing for God’s power over a woman. In three sides the archetype carries the song and stays particular, with its Greyhound bus and its Friars Point. On the other dozen myth is absent, and the sides were not built as one structure.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, at one place, and that place is the hinge. The androgyne, the figure who has been both sexes, is not summoned as allusion but made the plot: the narrative divides at the change, and everything after it is read against what came before. Around it the book builds the immortal youth who passes through the ages as through rooms, the great house as England’s body, the oak as the rooted self against the passing age, and the wild goose, pursued and never caught, as what writing chases. The particular stays particular: this is also Vita Sackville-West, her house and her lost inheritance. Held at the bar because the masque of Purity, Chastity and Modesty and the Victorian cloud are myth evoked as pageant, and the immortality never bears weight beyond the conceit.
Pirro Ligorio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth here is built, not hung. The garden was organised round Hercules, founder of Tivoli and the Este’s claimed ancestor, as the documented programme and its reconstruction by scholars show: the climb of the slope as the hero’s choice between vice and virtue, the dragon of the Hesperides at the centre, the garden itself as the garden of the golden apples. The cross-walk builds a geography, from the Oval, Tivoli with its mountain and its waters, along the three channels of the Hundred Fountains, the streams of Tivoli, to the Rometta, Rome with its island in the Tiber. Water travels the myth. It stops at the gate because the figures that named the programme are mostly gone, and the Herculean argument must now be read back into the garden.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. Brecht took a historical episode and made it the founding myth of modern science’s bargain with power: the moment at which, as the play argues, knowledge and the people parted. The structure bears it: the rise, with the telescope and the new age announced in the first scene; the warning, from Sagredo and at Bellarmine’s ball; the temptation of a sympathetic pope; the fall in a recantation; and the long afterlife of a man who lived on and knew what he had done. It is a Faust without a devil and a Prometheus who gives the fire back. The particular stays particular: geese, wine, a salary dispute, a lens-grinder’s trade. Held at the gate because the bomb, load-bearing in the Berlin text, is carried by allusion rather than built into the Renaissance action.
J. D. Salinger · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is built in one figure, and it bears load: the catcher in the rye, the guardian at the edge of a cliff who catches children before they go over, the title’s image and the book’s argument. It rests on a mishearing of Burns, which Phoebe corrects, so the myth is shown as the boy’s invention, and the novel releases it at the carrousel, where he lets her reach for the ring and risk the fall, and says nothing. A fall from innocence is turned into a guardian fantasy and then let go. Around it the innocent’s journey through a city underworld, the hotel, the pimp and the prostitute, the bars, the night at the teacher’s, gives the picaresque the shape of a descent and a return, and the boy in the red hunting hat stands for a condition while remaining himself. It stands at the bar and no higher: outside the title figure much of the myth is atmosphere, the ducks and the museum emblems more than structure.
Margaret Atwood · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built in an unusual way: the regime literalises it. The Ceremony enacts Genesis 30 to the letter, the Handmaid lying between the Wife’s knees as Bilhah bore upon Rachel’s; the epigraph, “Give me children, or else I die”, is the law of the house. Gilead, the Marthas, the Angels, Jezebel’s and the Soul Scrolls are scripture made into institutions, and the book shows myth as an instrument of power by building a society on it. The Handmaid becomes an archetype while staying particular: the red habit and the white wings, nun and harlot, womb and witness, a woman whose name is a possessive, Offred, of Fred. The title raises a second frame, Chaucer’s pilgrims’ tales, and the teller is a Scheherazade, keeping herself alive by telling. Held at the bar: the myth is the regime’s, parodied as much as built, and the narrator’s own arc is an everywoman’s by design.
Bernardo Bertolucci · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and what is built is the cave. Plato’s allegory is told in the professor’s study and then made the film’s governing figure: light and shadow, sight and blindness, prisoners who take the image for the thing. Italo is blind, and the regime broadcasts through his voice. Marcello is the man in the cave, and the coda leaves him by firelight in a vault of ancient Rome, looking back into the dark. Beside it stands the killing of the father: the professor was his teacher, the real father is locked in an asylum, and the murder in the wood, with many knives, takes the shape of Caesar’s. The particular stays particular: a hat, a wedding ring, a hotel in 1938. Held at the bar, not above, because the Oedipal and Platonic frames are applied a little by thesis, and the film names its myth in a lecture before it builds it.
Artemisia Gentileschi · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is the weak who kill the tyrant: the widow who saves her city by the hand of a woman, the Florentine emblem of liberty against the strong, and beneath it the old pattern of the woman who beheads, Salome and Jael, turned to righteous use. It is built, not evoked: the composition is the archetype’s action at its decisive point, and the converging arms are its structure. The particular stays particular, two women working against a heavy man, with real weight and real resistance. The axis meets the bar exactly and goes no higher because the pattern is the source text’s, carried faithfully and intensely: the canvas gives it weight and body more than a new archetypal structure.
David Fincher · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked: the double is the film’s architecture. The narrator and Tyler are the respectable self and its shadow, Jekyll and Hyde, and the plot is the shadow’s slow seizure of the body and the respectable self’s attempt to kill it without dying. Around that structure the film builds rites that work as myth: an initiation of three days at the door and a shaved head; a wound as the mark of belonging; a sacrificial death that gives back a name; a founder who vanishes. The absent father is named, not dramatised. What holds the axis at the threshold is the particular. The narrator is nameless by design and furnished from a catalogue, an everyman, and the myth carries a type.
Polykleitos the Younger (attributed) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not alluded to. The orchestra is a full circle, the dancing floor with an altar base at its centre; the cavea is a hollow, the koilon, cut into a hillside. The plan sets the oldest pattern of rite, a ring of witnesses round a sacred centre, in stone and at civic scale, and a theatre in a sanctuary of healing sets tragedy, contest and cure within one sacred order. The circle is not ornament but the plan itself: it bears the load. Held at the gate and not above it because the archetype is the Greek theatre’s. Epidaurus builds it most completely, keeping the full circle that later theatres cut, rather than discovering it.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The master and the servant is the film’s skeleton, and it is built, not cited: the whole action is a struggle over who serves whom, ending with the servant gone and the master’s claim, that everyone serves someone, left standing and unproved. The beast and its tamer is load-bearing too, in Dodd’s insistence that man is not an animal, set against Freddie’s body in every scene they share. Around them the sea is set up and paid: a sailor taken aboard a ship and called a sailor of the seas, a film that begins on the water and ends beside the woman of sand. The prodigal’s return is evoked at Lynn and refused. What holds it at the bar: the sea is more figure than structure, the myths are partly allusive, and the Cause’s own myth of past lives is satire, not depth.
Dominikus Zimmermann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not alluded to. The church in the meadow is heaven come down to a field: the plain shell, a barn among farms, hides a heavenly court, and to enter is to cross from earth into the place of the Last Things. The plan carries a second pattern, the pilgrim’s way: gathered in the bright oval, the pilgrim is drawn along the axis into the narrower, deeper-coloured choir toward the suffering Christ, from glory back to the Passion that underwrites it. The shut door and the empty throne set the room in the time before judgment, where the pilgrim stands. Held where it is because much of the load rests on the fresco, and because the type is inherited, not founded here.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into section and route, not only painted. The stair is an ascent from earth to heaven: from the vestibule, low and dim, made for carriages, to the vault, where the four quarters sit at the cornice and Apollo rises at the zenith. The body moves from the edges of the world toward its centre and up, the turning flights showing the quarters one by one; the world is an order with a summit, and the summit is light. The imperial hall builds a second figure, the marriage that founds a realm, with the sun god bringing the bride. The particular stays particular: this bishop, this architect on his gun barrel, this wedding in this city. Held at the gate and not above it: the continents and Apollo were the common vocabulary of a Baroque ceiling, and the ascent is perfected here rather than first built.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, at the centre. Mars and Venus is among the oldest structures the West has, love and strife as the two forces of the world, and here it bears the load: the composition is the contest between the pull of Venus and the pull of the Fury, with Mars as the body they fight over. The open doors of Janus are not allusion but the threshold of the event, the moment the world passes from peace to war. The new figure of Europe as a mourning mother of peoples makes the myth bear on history. Held at the gate rather than above it because much of the lower register is emblem, attributes to be decoded, and decoded meaning is myth listed, not built.
Edward Yang · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears load. A family’s rites frame the year, a wedding, a birth and a death, so that one year stands for the cycle of a life. The ages are set side by side as three persons: a boy who asks what he cannot see, a girl in her first love, a man in middle age offered his youth again. At the centre lies an old woman who cannot speak and to whom everyone must, an oracle who answers nothing. The return of the first love, the oldest temptation of middle age, is built as a double, the father’s story played again by the daughter. Held at the gate because the archetypes are kept at the depth of the ordinary, felt rather than raised, and the killing borrows a melodramatic shape.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built at the centre, evoked at the edges. The centre is the Line as a myth of origin: America as a garden of the subjunctive, a place where the possible had not yet been ruled, and the Line as the cut, the act of reason that turns the possible into property and the West into the nation’s future. The plot bears it: the Line runs west until a Native war path stops it, and the stopping is the myth’s limit. The pair is built too, the astronomer and the surveyor, melancholy and appetite, two halves of one figure in the line of Quixote and Sancho. The particular stays particular: transits, instruments, chains and rods. Held at the gate, not above it, because the fabulous machinery, the duck and the dog, is carnival evoked rather than structure, and the myth of America is carried as much in Cherrycoke’s commentary as in the action.
Gerhard of Cologne and successors; completed by Ernst Friedrich Zwirner · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built. The cathedral as the heavenly city, its west front a gate of towers, is load-bearing in plan and section. The journey of the Magi is built into the use: the pilgrim enters at the west, walks the length of the nave and round the ambulatory, and kneels where the kings’ bodies lie, enacting the journey to the child in the building itself. And the building carries a second myth in its own history: the broken thing left for centuries under a crane and completed to a lost drawing found again. It meets the bar and stops there, because the first archetype is the Gothic cathedral’s inheritance, enlarged rather than first built, and the second is told about the building more than read in its stone.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetypal structure is built, not hung. Its spine is the teaching chain, and the book makes the lines pass physically from mouth to mouth: Rourke’s “Never off the clock” is the man’s own line twenty years later, Amyntas’s “Straight before tight” reaches the next apprentice through Atman, and the mother’s proverb, what the crow sings, the young crow sings, is written on her index cards, found in her desk and finally spoken by the narration over a son’s two cuts in a deer. Around it stand older shapes: a boy lost three nights in a wood and carried out, a mother who goes into winter as David Asham did before her, a dog buried with its head covered last. The classical names, Aeneas, Niobe, Amyntas, are evoked rather than activated, and the men shorten Amyntas to Amen. The construction is real and reaches the bar exactly.
Giorgio de Chirico · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Here the archetype is built, not only evoked. The encounter of the child and the shadow bears load: innocence in light running toward a dark and unseen power, the hoop’s circle against the statue’s stillness, the living against the stone. It is the oldest pattern of fate, the meeting one runs toward, carried not by allusion but by the diagonal that takes the girl straight to the shadow’s edge. A statue present only as its shadow, as the shadow is commonly read, brings the classical past into the modern street as a darkness on the ground; the empty van and the hour of long shadows add departure and the end of day. Held at the gate, not above it: much of the depth is supplied as atmosphere by the painter’s Nietzschean frame, and the canvas names no story it builds.
Akkadian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, and load-bearing. The structure of the stone is an archetype: the hero-king ascending the mountain toward the gods, the mountain as the place where earth meets heaven, the mortal who climbs to divinity. The composition is that pattern, not an allusion to it: the king larger than his men, crowned with horns, nearer the stars, at the point where the mountain gives out into sky. The particular holds against the pattern: a named king, a named people, a real campaign in the Zagros, a tree on the slope, a man with a spear in his throat. What keeps the axis at the gate and not above it: the archetype is carried by one figure and one slope, and the defeated stand in the myth only as its matter.
Workshops of Qin Shi Huang · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The army is an archetype carried out literally: the dead king’s host standing under the earth, ready, facing the enemy, the sleeping army under the hill that folk tradition across the world imagines, made here figure by figure. It faces east, toward the conquered states, guarding the tomb from the direction of threat, so that the cosmology of the reign, the empire unified and the emperor ruling beyond death, is load-bearing in the layout. The particulars stay particular: these are soldiers of a historical army, with its armour, its crossbows and its ways of dressing the hair, not heroes or gods. Held at the gate and not above it, because the archetype is one, the eternal army, and its sacred frame, the tomb and its cosmos, lies outside the unit.
Roman, under Diocletian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Archetype is built here, and built twice. The Roman figure is the camp quartered by two crossing roads, an image of an ordered world, its four gates the four directions, and the emperor’s epiphany at the end of the cardo makes the axis a road to a god. Tomb and temple face each other across the way of appearance: death and divinity set in plan. The second figure is the town’s, and it bears load in the fabric. Diocletian’s tomb became the church of Domnius, bishop of Salona, martyred under Diocletian; the persecutor’s resting place became the martyr’s altar, and the camp became a refuge. It reaches the gate and no further: the Roman cosmology is a common one, not invented here.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetypes are the wanderer and the summit: the one who has climbed alone to see, the height from which a world is shown, the threshold above an abyss. They are built, not alluded to. The structure of the canvas is the archetype: the figure on the axis at the apex of the near rock, the slopes converging toward him, the world spread below as a visible destination with no path to it. The particular holds: a coat, a stick, hair in the wind, rocks drawn as particular rocks and not as types. What keeps the axis at the gate and not above it: the deeper readings, the mount of the temptation, Moses shown the land, a memorial to a fallen officer, are brought by readers, not built; and the national reading of the costume is context the canvas does not carry.
Willa Cather · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, and lightly. Ántonia ends as the founding mother, “a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races”, and the structure carries the claim, since the five books move her from the dugout through work, seduction and abandonment to the farm and the children. The Virgilian frame is load-bearing: the Georgics, read with Gaston Cleric in Lincoln, give Jim his epigraph and his ambition, Virgil’s boast that he would be the first to bring the Muse into his country, which Jim takes for his own; the book makes the plains a georgic of labour, seasons, land and the passing of the best days. The plough on the sun is an emblem made, not borrowed, and the wolves, the snake and the suicide give the pioneer myth its underworld. Held at 8.5 because the myth is often stated in Jim’s sentences rather than left to the action.
Robert Penn Warren · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
On the line of the gate. The archetype is built at two points that bear weight. The son’s search for the father: Jack goes into the past for dirt on Judge Irwin, the man who was most a father to him, finds it, uses it, and so learns that Irwin was his father and that he has killed him; the structure is discovered by the plot, not pasted on. The fall: the title’s king’s man who cannot be put together again makes the book a narrative of original sin in the politics of a Southern state, with Cass Mastern as the antebellum type of the same fall, and the Scholarly Attorney’s tracts and the idiot George carving angels keep the theological register present. It goes no higher because Willie is more a type, the hick redeemer, than a myth newly made.
Henryk Górecki · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, not only evoked. The governing archetype is the mother and the lost child, the Pietà and the Stabat Mater, and the symphony builds it from three particulars rather than invoking it. Mary at the cross is the archetype itself. The girl in the cell inverts it: the child speaks, the mother is the one to be comforted, and the prayer goes to the Mother of God. The Silesian mother returns it to the people, without a name, asking flowers to stand for her son. The order, sacred, then historical, then folk, assembles the archetype, and the particulars hold: a cell wall, a date, a dialect, a grave. Held at the gate because the three texts are found, not made, and the archetype is one figure, built by arrangement more than by transformation.
Paul Auster · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is built, not evoked, in City of Glass, and it bears the book’s weight. Stillman’s experiment, locking his son away to recover the language spoken before the Fall, is a theory of Eden and Babel carried out in the flesh, and his walks across the Upper West Side, mapped by Quinn, spell out the Tower of Babel letter by letter: the archetype enacted on the city’s grid. The Humpty Dumpty conversation and the question of who wrote Don Quixote are load-bearing too, since the book is itself told by a second hand. The double is built across all three: Quinn and Wilson and Work and Auster; Blue and Black; the narrator and Fanshawe, who is Hawthorne’s Wakefield, the man who vanishes from his own life. Held at the bar and not above it because some of the myths are the work’s subject rather than its substance, discussed and cited at the remove of an essay.
Zhang Yimou · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not cited. The house is a closed cosmos with its own seasons, law and god: the master is heard, obeyed and almost never seen, an absent deity whose favour is signalled by fire. The locked room on the roof, where earlier wives died, is Bluebeard’s chamber, and the film makes it load-bearing: Songlian opens it, and then sees it used. The cycle closes as myth closes, the year ending where it began with a new bride arriving, and Songlian taking the place of the madwoman the house keeps. The particular stays particular: bean curd, a gramophone, a doctor’s bag, a school uniform. Held at the bar because the archetypes, harem, walled garden and sacrificial wife, are old, and the film arranges them more than it deepens them.
Paul Valéry · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth here is built, not evoked. Narcissus in “Fragments du Narcisse” is not an allusion but the structure: consciousness in love with its reflection, unable to possess it without destroying it. The Pythia is the archetype of inspiration as violation, the body made the instrument of a language not its own, and the poem works that archetype through. The serpent of “Ébauche d’un serpent” is the tempter of Genesis made a figure of the mind’s self-regard and its contempt for the creation it envies; his speech is the poem. In “Le Cimetière marin” Zeno and Achilles become the paradox of a mind that would stop time. The particular stays particular: a cemetery at Sète, a noon, a palm. Held on the bar because the minor pieces evoke rather than build.
Ottoman builders, under Mehmed II and successors · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, in three archetypes that bear load in the plan. The threshold sequence to a hidden centre: three gates, each narrower in who may pass, toward a sovereign rarely seen, the plan of the sanctuary given to a ruler. The paradise garden: courts of cypress and plane, pavilions set over water, the Fourth Court a terrace of kiosks in the old Persian and Islamic figure. The tent made permanent: an encampment of pavilions round open ground, so that the palace has no front. The Relics made the inner court the house of the Prophet’s mantle. Held at the gate, not above it: the myths are distributed through accretion, not concentrated in one form.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not cited. The temple on its stylobate is the plan and the section: a raised platform reached by steps, a peristyle reduced to eight columns, a cella of glass set within the colonnade, and a roof that is the whole entablature in one member. The descent from Schinkel’s Altes Museum, a few kilometres away, is plain in the podium and the colonnade, and the Prussian temple of art is made again in steel without one quoted ornament. The cruciform column on its pin bearing is the column stripped to what carries: the touch of support, not its grip. The building stays particular, black steel on a Berlin site with a gallery below. It sits at the gate and not above it because the myth is one, the temple, and only the sunken garden hints at a second order.
Kongo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked: the archetypes bear the function’s load. There is the hunter who tracks the guilty; the body that must be wounded to be roused, the nail waking the force, so that it bears the community’s violence in its own flesh; and the mirror, read by Robert Farris Thompson as the surface of water and the boundary with the land of the dead, a reading contested in detail. The pattern of the struck and pierced body that holds a people’s wrongs is one of the deep ones, and here it is built by use, nail by nail. The particulars stay particular: each figure was the nkisi of a place and a practice. Held at 8.5 because names, cases, songs and rules that went with each figure are lost to the object as it stands.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The title is from Ecclesiastes and the epigraph gives the verse: man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets. The long home is the red-brick house on the cul-de-sac, with its hook, its wound clock and its furnace. The names are built, not evoked: Aeneas, who could not refuse a man who had nothing, between a Lavinia and a Heloise; Orion, named from the sky; Caleb, the brother who went in among them and brought back one amended field. A man who nailed something to a door is answered twice, by a board under glass where a calf taken in a hard winter is worked off and the debt paid, and by a state file that keeps every sheet. Inheritance is trade: a hook, a chair, a pair of gloves. The pattern is borne by names and objects more than by the shape of the action, and the axis meets the bar rather than rising above it.
George Miller · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and built into the road. The structure is the exodus and the return: a people led out of bondage toward a promised land that proves dead, and the turn back to the citadel of the god-king, who must be overthrown at the source. Joe is the devouring patriarch, owner of water and of women, worshipped by sons he breeds to die; the war boys’ Valhalla, chrome sprayed on the mouth and a cry for a witness, makes a religion of martyrdom particular. The Keeper holds the oldest figure, the seed carried out of the ruin; Max is the wanderer haunted by those he failed. Held at the gate and no higher because the figures are types, and some of the mythology is costumed rather than built.
Vakataka · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, at the gate and not above it. The archetype is the being who gives himself, life after life, as far as Vessantara in cave 17, who gives away everything, his children and his wife last. It bears load: the walls hold the past lives of the Bodhisattva and the shrine holds the Buddha he became, so that to walk the hall is to walk the path of perfection to its end. Each figure stays particular. Irandati on her swing in cave 2 is a girl swinging; Sundari’s grief is one woman’s. Held at the gate because every story is inherited and the plan is shared by every vihara of its kind: what is built here is the painting of the plan, not the plan.
Elvis Presley · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The danger here is crediting the myth of the singer to the record, and his later legend is charged to the career, not to the work. Credited to the work: it builds one figure, the possessed young singer in whom desire and an older sorrow live together, and the cover, part of the album as released, fixes that figure in one image of open mouth and raised guitar. The sequence sets the shouter of “I Got a Woman” beside the crooner of “I Love You Because”, and the archetype that results, the youth both wild and tender, is load-bearing: made by the record’s alternation, not summoned by allusion. Nothing in the words is archetypal, and the figure is made by persona, sequence and image rather than by story: built, and built well enough to stand at the gate, by none of the means that would carry it past.
Roberto Rossellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it is the Passion. Manfredi is betrayed by a lover for a price, scourged, and dies in the posture of the cross without naming his comrades; Don Pietro, who cannot bless the torturers, is led out and shot at dawn and forgives at the last. Pina, pregnant, falls in the street as a mother of sorrows, with her son and the priest beside her. The boys walking back toward the city under the dome of St Peter’s are the community after the sacrifice. Take the Passion away and the second half has no shape. The particular stays particular: a frying pan, a stolen loaf, a whistle. It stands at the gate, not above it, because the pattern is laid on with a heavy hand, the villains fitted to the role of tormentors, and the archetype reached through iconography more than grown from the action.
Jack Kerouac · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth built on one structure and summoned on others. The built myth is the search for the father. Dean’s father is a wino lost somewhere in Denver and later rumoured elsewhere; the journeys keep circling back to look for him, and the last paragraph names “the father we never found”. The search is load-bearing: it is the structure under the episodes, and it gives the road a direction when the road itself has none, so that the book’s celebration of motion is also a quest that fails. The particulars stay particular: the cars, the bus stations, the jobs, the cities by name. Evoked rather than built: the road west as frontier, with Dean first seen as “a sideburned hero of the snowy West”; the holy fool and the con man in one figure, “HOLY GOOF”; and a Mexico of innocence borrowed from Spengler’s Fellahin. One myth constructed and carried to the last line brings the axis to the bar; the summoned ones keep it there and no higher.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, not evoked. The plan is a pilgrimage way: a gate, in the raised body of the museum entered beneath; a shrine, in the cenotaph as a house of the dead after the haniwa house, sheltering the register of names; water, in the pond; fire, in the flame; and a relic, in the ruin across the river, a body kept unburied. The line passes from the city of the living, across water, to the dead, and the visitor walks it. The haniwa form bears load because the arch is the frame of the whole view, not a carved allusion. The archetype stays particular: this delta, this hypocentre, these names. It meets the bar and goes no higher because part of its charge belongs to a ruin Tange found rather than made, and the pond and flame came later as stations on his line.
William Thornton, Benjamin Latrobe, Charles Bulfinch and Thomas U. Walter · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Archetype is built into plan and section, not only evoked. The hill is the high place; the dome is the vault of heaven raised over the assembly; the rotunda is the omphalos of the federal city, the point from which its quadrants are measured. The section carries the oldest scheme of all: a tomb below, a crypt above it, a round hall above that and a painted heaven at the top, the founder meant to lie on the axis under his own apotheosis. The tomb stands empty, and the absence is part of what is built. The myth stays particular: this republic, this founder, this war. Held at the gate rather than above it: the archetypes of the domed church and the Roman temple are transferred more than made new, and much of the mythic load is carried by painting and statuary the unit does not score.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The structure of the play is the structure of a Passion: a return to the city, temptation in four forms, a sermon at the Nativity on the joy of martyrdom, a death by the altar at Christmastide, the community changed by the blood. The three Introits that open Part II set the murder among the feasts of the first martyr, the beloved disciple and the slaughtered children, so that the calendar itself is the frame. The archetype is load-bearing: the play’s argument, that the martyr is made by God and not by himself, needs a pattern Thomas enters rather than one he writes. It stays particular through the women: “Living and partly living”. Held at the gate because the archetype is borrowed whole from the liturgy and the history.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. Totoro is a forest spirit made entirely particular: a grey bulk with a fixed grin and a roar, asleep in a hollow under a camphor tree that carries a shimenawa rope, receiving an umbrella as an offering and returning a parcel of seeds. The tree is a shrine and the film treats it as one; the father bows before it. The structure bears weight: the child who follows small creatures through a tunnel of green into the other world, the guardian at the threshold of dusk, the lost child found by the spirit’s vehicle, the gift on the sill. Held at the bar because the myth is of protection only: it carries no cost and no shadow beyond the fear it soothes, and its gods ask nothing.
Haruki Murakami · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth built, and the plot rests on it. The hero descends into a well, an underworld, to win back a wife taken from him by a dark power: the oldest of descent narratives, in the form of Orpheus and of Izanagi going down to Yomi for Izanami, and here the descent works. He comes back marked, with a dark stain on his cheek, and the mark heals others. The two holes, a well in Tokyo in 1984 and a well in Mongolia in 1938, make the private descent and the national one a single figure. The unseen wind-up bird that winds the world’s spring each day is a myth of the book’s own making. The particular stays particular: an alley, a vacant house, a sixteen-year-old in a wig factory. Held at the bar of the gate, not above it, because some figures, the faceless man and the woman on the telephone, are evoked more than built, their meaning withheld rather than borne.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked, and it bears load. The man swallowed by the machine and given back whole is the film’s central image and its argument: Jonah in the gears, the fool whose body cannot be made a part. The opening dissolve, sheep into workers, lays down the herd as the film’s ground. The Tramp is the holy fool and the outcast at the close of a long career, given at last a voice, a partner and a road out; the shack he calls a paradise, with its falling beam and shallow water, is Eden in a slump. Held at the gate rather than above it: the couple leaving the city at dawn draws on stock sentiment, and the Tramp’s myth was built across twenty years of films, which this one spends as much as it builds.
Louise Bourgeois · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Built, not evoked. The whole form is the archetype: the spider as spinner and weaver of fate, as Arachne the weaver, as the great mother who shelters and devours. Nothing is alluded to by ornament; the creature is the structure, and the viewer’s place beneath it is the child’s before the mother. The particular is kept by the title and the eggs: not the Mother but this mother, a woman with a needle in a workshop of old tapestries, the craft the spider’s spinning answers. Load-bearing and particular, which is the top of the axis in kind. Held at the gate because the particular lives in the title and the biography more than in the object, which shows a spider and not a person, and because the archetype is one figure, not a structure of figures.
Philip K. Dick · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth is built, and it bears weight. The structure is a descent into the underworld: the half-life of the cold-pac works as a Bardo, a passage between death and what follows. Jory is the devourer in the dark who eats the souls of the newly dead, a Kronos in a Zurich vault; Ella is the guide who intercedes, a Beatrice speaking from the next world; Ubik is the Word, the creative principle set against entropy, sold back to a fallen people as a spray can. The particular stays particular: Joe’s debts, Runciter’s grief for a wife he consults by the hour, the cheap economy of 1992. The final reversal, Runciter’s face on the coins becoming Joe Chip’s, turns the myth in on itself. What holds the axis at the gate and not above it is outline: some figures, Pat Conley as an Eve or temptress among them, are evoked and then left.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is built and carries load. It is the oldest frame of the morality play: a man summoned, a journey to judgment, companions who show him what he was, a tribunal, a sentence. The honour at Lund and the examination are one event seen twice, reward and judgment. Inside that frame stand the descent to the dead, in the summer house where the family of sixty years before is still at table; the lost garden, in the strawberry patch and a title that means a cherished hidden place; the double, in the corpse with his face and the two Saras; and the far shore where the parents wait. The particular stays particular: a deaf uncle’s birthday, a petrol station, a housekeeper who will not use first names. It stands at the bar and no higher, because the archetypes are often signalled as emblems, the handless watch above all, rather than lived.
Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, and it carries the whole climax. The messianic structure bears load: a prophecy, a forerunner in Morpheus, an Oracle, a betrayer at a meal, a death and a rising. The names bind it, Neo, Trinity, Zion and the ship Nebuchadnezzar. Beneath the Christian figure lies a Gnostic one, also built rather than cited: a false world made by a power that feeds on the souls trapped in it, a messenger from outside, and salvation by knowledge. Alice supplies the threshold (“Follow the white rabbit”). That construction meets the gate’s bar exactly, and no more: the names are stacked so thickly that some of the pattern is allusion as decoration, and Thomas Anderson is particular only thinly, with almost no life before the pill.
Sebastião Salgado · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The particular stays particular: this pit, these men, 1986, mud from one hill in Pará, faces that can be told apart. And it becomes archetypal by construction, not by caption. The ladders and terraces make the slope a stair, a Babel turned inside out, dug down rather than built up; the files of carriers are the labourers of every empire; the mud, which coats the men to the colour of the ground, makes them clay figures, the body as the material it is digging; the search for gold among the poor is the oldest economic myth of the Americas, played out by its own people. The descent of Dante and the Last Judgement come to viewers at once, and the structure of the wide views earns them. Held at the gate because part of the myth is lent by the history of painting, and the series sometimes leans on the loan.
Basil Spence · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth built into plan, not evoked by ornament. The archetype of death and resurrection is load-bearing: the ruin is the church of Good Friday, roofless and burned, its altar with the charred cross; the new church is the church of Easter, entered from the grave across a threshold. The phoenix Spence named is carried by plan and section, not by a symbol on a wall: the new rises from the old, at right angles to it, and the old is not removed. The threshold is made literal by porch and glass, a veil between the dead and the living that can be seen through both ways, and the procession up the nave and back toward the windows and the ruin gives the journey a return. It stands at the bar, not above it: the nave’s own archetype, the path to the altar, is the common one.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked. The story is a soul’s passage to the land of the dead: the train the first ferry, Machine the world of iron, Nobody the guide who names Blake already dead and leads him to the edge of the water, the canoe the last crossing. Every episode is a further stage of dying, and the end is not a death shown but a departure across water. Nobody’s name sets an Odyssean joke, the guide called Nobody, inside an indigenous cosmology the film treats with care. The poet’s myth is laid beside it, his “endless night” become the accountant’s. And it stays particular: a frightened clerk in spectacles and a check suit. It meets the gate exactly, because the death journey bears the weight and the poet’s name does not.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked: the Lurianic cosmogony is the structure of the object from top to bottom. The infinite stands above in whole glass; the sefirot are named and wired down the case; the vessels are broken; the shards, the husks of the doctrine, lie on the floor where the viewer stands. A second archetype bears load with it: the library as the memory of a people, the book as the vessel of the word. The particular stays particular: an iron shelf, sheets of lead beaten and folded, plate glass. Held at the gate rather than above it, because part of the myth is carried by labels that name it, captioned rather than acquired, and because a shelf of books is generic enough that the archetype does much of the thing’s work.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked: the composition is the myth’s structure. Osiris is killed and dismembered by his brother Set and the pieces scattered; Isis, his wife and sister, gathers them, and he is restored as lord of the dead. On the canvas the scattered fragments are the scattered body, the wires drawn to one point are the gathering, and the pyramid is the tomb and house of the dead god, the place of resurrection. Remove the myth and the layout has no logic, which is the test of load-bearing structure. The particulars that acquire the myth are modern and industrial, porcelain, copper and a circuit board, and there the work earns the axis. Held at the gate: the pyramid is generically Egyptian, the place is no place, there is no person, and the myth is laid out more as diagram than as event.
Harriet Beecher Stowe · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth here is built, not evoked. Tom’s story is a Passion, load-bearing from the sale to the shed: he is sold for another man’s debt, refuses escape so that others are not sold in his place, keeps faith in the house of the master who is the book’s figure of Satan, is tempted to despair and recovers, and dies forgiving his torturers, two of whom are converted by his death. Eliza’s crossing is an Exodus over a river of ice to the free shore; Eva is the angel-child whose death converts. The persons left the book and became nouns in American speech: Uncle Tom, Topsy, Simon Legree, Little Eva. Held at the gate rather than above it because the particular often thins to the type, and the servile Uncle Tom of the language is the stage’s figure more than Stowe’s.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built, not evoked, and the messiah bears the load. The film’s distinctive construction is the myth of the myth: a saviour story made by human hands, every sign of election shown to have been planted, while Paul’s visions are true, so that the prophecy is at once a fact of the world and a fraud and the two cannot be separated. The second structure is the doubled heir: Feyd, raised under the black sun, is the son Paul could have been, and the Baron revealed as Jessica’s father makes the last fight a fight within one blood, a knot turned on the grandfather. The desert of trial, the water of death drunk to see, the worm as the god beneath the sand all carry weight. Held at the gate’s bar and no higher: much of the construction is Herbert’s, realised in film, and the Fremen sacred is shown mostly as crowds and chants.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier IV
An archetype is built, not only evoked: the night journey, and the making of a world from chaos. The plan is load-bearing. An assertion of power; a descent into the farthest darkness the key system holds; a threshold where nothing keeps its form, the Largo, unbarred in part, trying possibilities and dropping them; and then a creation that is a law imposed by force, the fugue’s subject launched by a leap and a trill. The Largo is the work’s chaos before creation, and the finale stands on it. What holds the axis is the particular, which instrumental music keeps thinly: no person, place or act is named, and the archetype is built from tonal distance and form alone. Level with the Goldberg Variations at 8.4.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and built to be emptied. The structure is the courtly one: the young man, the married lady seen once as an apparition, a devotion of decades never consummated, and the lady’s token at the end, when she cuts a lock of her white hair and gives it to him (III.6). It is load-bearing; the book is unthinkable without it. But the novel’s whole labour is to deflate it, and what results is a type more than an archetype: Frédéric is the young man of a generation, the homme manqué, and he has not become a figure of world literature as Emma Bovary or Don Quixote have. The revolution’s myths, the barricade, the people at the Tuileries, the club, are shown as costume. The counter-myth Flaubert builds, of time wearing all things down, is strong, and holds the axis a tenth below the bar.
The Beatles · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth is built twice, each time inside a single song, and one pattern is carried between the record’s poles. “Eleanor Rigby” is the mechanism exactly: a named spinster and a named priest stay particular, down to the rice in the church and the darned socks, and stand for everyone’s unattended death. “Yellow Submarine” builds a small, complete myth of the communal ark, which the 1968 film extended, and the closer makes the same voyage out of the ordinary world into the void, so that the journey out frames the record’s farthest points. Held below the summit: “Tomorrow Never Knows” summons death and rebirth by citation, from a manual, and sun, sleep, death and the void are scattered through both sides, never built into a passage from one to the next.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Humbert builds a private mythology: the nymphet, a demonology of Lilith and little deadly demons, the Riviera girl who is Poe’s Annabel Lee, the enchanted hunter, Carmen. Much of it is evoked by allusion. What is built is the double: Quilty as Humbert’s shadow, in the line of Poe and Stevenson, who mirrors and mocks him across Part Two and dies in a farcical struggle that Humbert half knows is a fight with himself. The deepest act is to build a myth and break it on a particular girl: the nymphet resolves into Dolly Schiller, seventeen, pregnant, in glasses. The type the culture took from the title is Humbert’s false myth, which the book refutes; that serves the book’s argument, but it is not myth the work made true, and it holds the axis a tenth below the gate.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
One archetype is built, not evoked: the journey out and the homecoming. The Aria departs, its harmony carries the cycle through thirty worlds, and the last variation before the return is a pair of songs about being driven off by poor food and being too long away. Then the Aria comes home; without it the work has no ending. The ladder of canons is a second figure, an ascent, and it bears weight too. Held down by the particular, which instrumental music keeps thinly: no person, place or act is named. The numbers are allusion the work allows, not construction it needs, and the Quodlibet’s songs, the one particular, are deliberately small.
Laurence Sterne · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
There is a myth here, and it is partly built. The house of Shandy is a line that cannot propagate: the conception spoiled by the question about the clock, the nose crushed by Dr Slop’s forceps, the name Trismegistus lost to Tristram, the sash window, Toby’s wound in the groin at Namur, and at the close Walter’s bull, whose failure gives the book its last words, “A COCK and a BULL”. That is load-bearing: every misfortune is the same misfortune. Toby and Trim are the knight and his squire remade as English benevolence, and Toby has become an archetype in his own right; Yorick carries Hamlet’s jester into a parsonage. But the book’s mode is the unravelling of story, and its archetypes are more often evoked in comedy than built into a structure that bears weight beyond the joke.
Hector Berlioz · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth is built, not only evoked. The archetype is a descent: an artist poisoned by his own hand passes from the ball and the field to the scaffold and to hell, and his beloved meets him there as a witch. The descent is the order of the movements, and the idée fixe carries the beloved down through it as the soul’s image. The Dies irae makes the last judgment present as sound. The particulars stay particular: a ball, a cor anglais in a field, a crowd at an execution. Held a tenth below the gate because the myth is assembled from the furniture of its decade, Faust’s Walpurgis night, Hugo’s condemned man, the Gothic sabbath, and leans on the programme to be told.
The Beach Boys · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often, and one pattern is built across the whole sequence: innocence and experience. The record runs from the wish to be older in its first track to the mourning of youth lost in its last, so that the order of the songs passes through the fall the songs fear. The close makes the frame audible. After Caroline, No a train passes and dogs bark, a departure and the animal world the title names: the garden left. The particulars stay particular: a teenage couple, a girl who has changed. What holds the axis below the gate is that no figure bears it: the lovers have no names but Caroline’s, and the archetype is a passage the songs make together, not a structure each carries.
Michelangelo · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The archetype is built in part. Threshold and ascent carry the plan: the reader passes from a lower, dim, compressed room up a stair into a high, wide, lit one, from unrest to order. The vestibule is a courtyard turned inside out, an exterior made interior, and the stair has the figure of a cascade descending from the place of knowledge. The building is also read as a body under strain, columns held in the wall like figures in a block, a reading that grows from Michelangelo’s sculpture and remains disputed. Held short of the deepest patterns because the ascent to learning is a humanist figure, built with force but particular to its purpose, and not opened onto the cosmos.
The Beatles · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth is built in the frame, and the frame bears load. The record presents itself as a show by a fictional band, taught to play “twenty years ago today”, and the sleeve completes the conceit: the band in costume beside wax figures of their former selves, above flowers laid out like a grave, before a crowd of the famous dead and living. The old self is buried and the mask put on. The masque plays, bids farewell, and A Day in the Life steps out of it into a day and a death: a pattern of the sequence, not an allusion. Held below the bar: the frame drops after the second track, much else is only evoked, and Rita, the runaway and Billy Shears stay types.
Chantal Akerman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The particular is insisted on, a name and a full postal address for a title, the meatloaf, the tureen, and it acquires archetypal weight: Jeanne became, for the decades after, the image of the housewife as such. Patterns are present and partly built: the keeper of the hearth whose rite holds the house together; ritual purity and its breach, since the order once broken can end only in blood; the stone rolled up each day; the widow and the son, with the dead father spoken of in the dark. The structure bears the first two, three days of a rite performed, flawed and broken. But the film keeps the archetype submerged and almost refuses it, and its myth is single and spare, not layered. That holds the axis a tenth below the gate.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The archetype is among the oldest: the devouring of children, Kronos, Thyestes’ feast, Moloch, the ogre’s kitchen. Swift alludes to none of it. He builds it: the whole structure is a dead metaphor, the landlords devouring the poor, made literal and followed through every consequence, so that the myth of the child-eating father is reconstituted from the vocabulary of rents and markets and stands as the load-bearing frame. That is myth built, not evoked. What holds it a tenth below the gate is that the archetype is carried by one figure of speech and one conceit rather than by figures who bear it: there is no Saturn here, only a system and a voice. The particular stays particular, Ireland in 1729 and the price of a carcass, and the archetype is a shadow behind it more than a structure walked through.
Nirvana · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked at the frame and built once, and the frame is placed. The sleeve’s emblem is strong: an infant underwater reaching for a dollar on a fishhook, innocence baited by money, a birth into the market. “Something in the Way” makes its outcast under the bridge a figure while keeping him particular, the boy outside the house, and the record that opened by calling up a crowd ends with him alone, so the sequence sets the anthem’s crowd against the outcast. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” summons a rite of adolescence gone wrong. Held below the gate: no song carries the sleeve’s emblem, and the infant, the outcast and the anthem are never built into one structure. The weight added by its author’s death is not counted.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Archetype is built into plan and site. The building is a house for a body: the plan conducts the pilgrim east, past the altar, to the grave of a saint whose corpse was held incorrupt, the tomb made temple. The site carries the founding legend of the wandering community, whose coffin would not move until the place was shown. Bede in the west and Cuthbert in the east hold the Northumbrian church on one axis, and the axis is the work’s. Against this: the shrine church is an inherited type, Norman and Benedictine; the legend belongs to 995, not to 1093; the axis from Bede to Cuthbert is placed by a tomb, not built into the plan; and the shrine is gone. Myth is housed and evoked more than built.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The axis weighs the figures the book makes, and it makes several that have become load-bearing beyond it: truth supposed a woman whom the dogmatists courted clumsily; the free spirit and the philosophers of “des gefährlichen Vielleicht”, the dangerous perhaps (§2); the mask; the abyss that looks back; the herd; the hermit behind whose every cave lies a deeper one (§289); and at the close Dionysus, the philosopher-god who tempts, the figure the whole book is a prelude to. “Da capo” (§56) gives the eternal return in two words. This is construction rather than allusion, and the abyss has passed wholly into common speech. It is held below the gate because the figures are many and mostly local: none is carried through the book as Thus Spoke Zarathustra carries its speaker, and the Dionysus who arrives at §295 is announced more than built.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Built in one place, evoked in another. The built pattern is the circle and the stranger: the closed ring of the master and his twelve, and at its centre the outsider who brings the world’s claim, turned away from us, admitted into the circle and answered from within it. The sacred community confronted by the order of Caesar carries the whole composition. The fish with the coin in its mouth summons an older pattern, the gift drawn from the deep, but the picture gives it the least space and the least grace. The reading of Peter as the Church that pays, and as the rock of the papacy, is brought to the picture more than built in it. Held below the bar because only the ring is load-bearing; the miracle is told, not built.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is built in one rite, and the rite is load-bearing. Are You Experienced? is an initiation: a threshold, a question asked of the novice, a passage into another way of seeing, staged in sound that runs backward, as initiation reverses the order of the world; and the sequence is built to arrive at it, so that the whole record becomes its preparation. Around it the patterns are evoked with force. Third Stone from the Sun evokes the visitor from the stars who looks on Earth and finds it wanting, with the treated voices of a ship and its scout; Red House carries the oldest pattern of the blues, the man who comes home to find his woman gone; Foxy Lady and Fire evoke the trickster of desire. Held below the bar because the other figures are poses or a single conceit.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Here the myth is built, then veiled. The archetype is the subject that ordered the composition: the end of the world and its renewal, flood and resurrection and judgement and paradise, from the apocalyptic cycle Kandinsky worked through in 1911 to 1913. Through the studies recognisable motifs were worn down into signs, and their traces stay in the canvas as load-bearing lines, so the myth is not brought by the viewer to an empty web. The veiling is the cost. The particular does not remain particular, because there is none: no flood that is a flood, no one rising. The archetypal structure bears weight, but as a scaffold the painter partly removed, and it can be recovered only with the studies in hand.
Titian · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth evoked, dismantled and in part rebuilt. The goddess is moved from Giorgione’s landscape into a contemporary bedroom, and her attributes, the roses, the plant on the sill, perhaps the dog, become things a household might hold. The buyer called her a naked woman. What the canvas builds in her place is a type, the reclining nude who looks out of the picture, and the passage from goddess to woman is load-bearing: it happens at the divide between the near field and the far. The particular stays particular, a young woman with a pearl earring, in a room with chests. What holds the axis a tenth below the gate is that the deeper myth, Venus as the bride, the body as the house’s treasure, is carried by emblem, not by structure.
Henry James · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The particular takes on archetypal weight, lightly. Isabel is the American innocent abroad and a figure of Eve: given her freedom and her fortune, she chooses knowledge and falls into it, and the book asks whether the fall was fortunate. Osmond’s house in Rome is a Bluebeard’s house, with Pansy the walled-in daughter and a secret in the closed room, that Pansy is Madame Merle’s child; the convent where Pansy is sent is its tower. The ghost of Gardencourt is a true motif, promised early and kept. These patterns are load-bearing in part, since the Eve figure and the trap are the plot. But the book builds them by implication, and much of its weight is social and psychological rather than mythic; Osmond is a type of the aesthete more than an archetype. The figure sits above evocation and a tenth below the full construction the gate asks for.
Henrik Ibsen · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is present and partly built. Hedda is the general’s daughter before she is anyone’s wife: the title gives her maiden name, the pistols are the father’s inheritance, and she dies by them under his portrait. The burning of the manuscript as a child has the shape of the Medea, the destruction of the rival’s offspring. The vine leaves call up Dionysus, a freedom she imagines and cannot live. These carry weight in the plot and are not laid on as atmosphere. What holds the axis below the gate is that the play keeps them ironised and domestic: the Dionysian is a drinking party at Brack’s, the Medea a sheaf of paper, and Hedda never becomes a figure larger than the room. The work builds a case more than a myth.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype is the bride and groom, the first couple and every couple, and it is built: the hands, the embrace, the shared light and the inward gaze carry the whole composition, while the particulars stay particular, a necklace, a sleeve, two faces no one has named. If the subject is Isaac and Rebecca, the myth goes deeper, the couple in exile hiding their marriage and the moment it is seen; but the canvas has effaced the king who sees them, and the story with him, so that layer is brought from the drawing and not read from the picture. Held below the gate because the load-bearing structure is a single gesture: the archetype is present rather than unfolded.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The myth is built by inversion. The form is the quest, the search for one who is lost, and the structure bears load because the quest forgets its object. The island is the place of vanishing, an underworld without a door. Claudia becomes the double: she wears Anna’s blouse, takes Anna’s lover and fears Anna’s return, so that the lost woman is replaced by her likeness, as in the old stories of the substituted bride. The last dawn, between wall and volcano, gives the two a ground older than their class. Held below the gate because the archetype is kept submerged, by design: it is felt through absence and seldom becomes load-bearing image, and the film builds one myth rather than several.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The return of the hunters is the oldest homecoming: men coming back from the wild with little, to a hearth. That pattern is built, not evoked. The descent of the composition from the hill to the village is the return made into structure, and it holds the axis where it stands. Everything stays particular: these men, this fox, this inn. Over the tavern door, where a pig is being singed, a sign shows a saint kneeling before a stag, the hunter turned by a vision; but the sign is small and which saint it shows is disputed. The year’s turning, winter as the dead season that carries the next, is felt in every passage and built in none: in the single panel the cosmic year is atmosphere.
The Cure · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Evoked more than built, but the evocation is carried by the sequence, not left to single images. Water is the nearest thing to a structure, and it moves as the tracks lengthen: the world-ending weather of “Plainsong”, the plea of “Prayers for Rain”, then the shared drowning of “The Same Deep Water as You”, where rain and thunder put the image on the recording itself. The descent has the shape of an old pattern, the passing of youth as a farewell that is also a drowning, and the lengthening form carries that shape whole. “Lullaby” builds one strong figure, a nursery terror made adult. Held short of the gate: the water stops before the end, and the figure stays within one song.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Prufrock is the book’s clearest case of a particular becoming archetypal while staying particular: a man with a bald spot and a morning coat, who will wear the bottoms of his trousers “rolled”, has become the type of the modern timid self, and his name is used of people who have not read the poem. That is built, not evoked. The machinery around him is mostly evoked: Lazarus, the Baptist’s head “brought in upon a platter”, Hamlet and Polonius, Michelangelo, the mermaids. The epigraph does more. It makes the monologue a speech from the eighth circle, given only because the hearer is thought never to return, and the “you and I” two damned souls. Beyond “Prufrock” the myth thins: “La Figlia” stages Aeneas and Dido as a tableau, and “Mr. Apollinax” sets centaurs and Priapus at a Boston tea for comedy. It stops a step short of the gate.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built, in part, into plan and section. The monastery is load-bearing: the cell and the common rooms, the individual within the community, set out as the organisation of the whole block. The human measure is built into every dimension by the Modulor, whose figure stands in the concrete at the base, so that the body is literally the building’s canon. The raised house on legs, the earth given back beneath it and the roof as a new ground open to sky, hills and sea are structure, not ornament. The liner, so often cited, is evoked rather than built. Held at 8.4, a tenth below the bar, because its strongest myth is a myth of a period, the modern city as a machine for living, more than an archetype of all dwelling.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Built in part, evoked in more. The book makes three figures that have become myths of modernity: the stranger of the first piece, who loves only the clouds that pass; the poet as the old saltimbanque, the used-up performer at the edge of the fair, in whom the narrator recognises the writer who has outlived his generation; and the poet who has lost his halo. Beside them stand the crowd as an element to bathe in, the widow, the jester killed by his prince, and Satan as a courteous gambler in “Le Joueur généreux”. They carry weight inside their pieces. What holds the axis below the gate is that the myth is distributed: no single archetypal structure governs the book, and allegories such as “Chacun sa chimère”, “Les Tentations” and “Les Dons des fées” stand nearer the emblem than the myth.
Ivan Turgenev · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The title names the archetype, and the structure builds it: two houses of fathers, a son of each, the return home and the departure, the son who does not belong in his father’s world and the father who cannot reach him. It inverts the prodigal. Bazarov comes home and it is the father who, in effect, kneels before a son he cannot understand, and at the end it is the parents who keep the vigil at the grave. Bazarov himself became a type, the new man who denies everything, as Hamlet and Don Quixote, the figures of Turgenev’s own lecture of 1860, are types: the name became a common noun in Russian argument. The death from a scalpel cut on a peasant’s corpse is a load-bearing image, the creed meeting the body and the people. What holds the axis here is that much of the myth lives in the social type of 1859 rather than below it: the archetype is built, but kept at the realist surface, implicit and particular, and it is not built as deep as the myths of the century’s greatest novels.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present and some are built. The figure at the edge of the world, the shore as the threshold between the known and the boundless, between land and water, life and what lies beyond it: the composition is that threshold, the three bands are its structure, and the figure stands on the last of the land. The monk is the contemplative, the soul alone before God, his black habit the one dark upright against the horizontals. That much bears load, and the particular stays particular: a Baltic shore, a real sea and weather. What holds the axis below the gate is that the myth is one figure and one gesture, and its deeper readings, the monk as the painter himself, the pendant’s burial completing the life, are brought from outside the canvas.
Alfred Tennyson · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The elegy’s archetype, death, descent, a turning, the dead raised into a higher order, consolation, is load-bearing here, not ornament: the sequence is built on the year’s death and return, and the three Christmases measure it. Particular images grow archetypal in the poem’s own making: the yew of II, which “graspest at the stones” and which the poem later sees in flower; the ship bearing the body home (IX to XVII); the dark door; the dream voyage of CIII, in which the poet sails with the Muses down a river to the sea and finds Hallam on the deck, a myth built for the poem. But the larger mythmaking strains. Hallam as the type of a higher race to come, and the evolutionary hope of CXVIII, “Move upward, working out the beast, / And let the ape and tiger die”, are asserted figures rather than lived ones, and the Christian frame of the prologue is evoked more than constructed. The myth that fails is the one the ending rests on.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth here is partly built. The rain is load-bearing, from the first chapter’s rain and cholera, through Catherine’s fear that she sees herself dead in it, to the last word. The plain is war, and the mountains are the clean country that the priest’s Abruzzi promises and Switzerland grants. The Tagliamento is a baptism the book names as such: “Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation”, and Frederic comes out of it reborn as a deserter. The garden in the mountains and the expulsion from it into a hospital is Eden built, not alluded to. Held below the bar because the patterns are more steadily made than deep: the rain is announced by a character, Frederic glosses the ants on a burning log as his own parable, and the lovers never take on the archetypal weight of the great doomed lovers. Built, but at a smaller scale than the summit asks.
Bureau of Reclamation, with Gordon Kaufmann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype built into the structure is the oldest of water myths: the barrier set against the flood, the waters divided and held so that order and life may follow and the desert bloom. That is not allusion; the wall does exactly that, and its curve leans into the water it holds. The binding of a river by human hands, Promethean and hubristic at once, is load-bearing in the section and stays particular: this canyon, this river, this decade. What is evoked rather than built is the art: Hansen’s winged figures and star chart, an allegory of the Republic and of cosmic order, and True’s Native motifs, set as decoration in rooms they do not govern. No threshold, ascent or sanctuary is built. The crest is a road and a walk, not a rite.
Kurt Vonnegut · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Some of the myth is built. The Children’s Crusade is load-bearing: the title names it, Mary O’Hare’s anger founds it, and the soldiers enact it. Lot’s wife is built into the frame: the author looks back at the burning city and calls himself “a pillar of salt”, so that the whole book is the act forbidden in Genesis. Billy Pilgrim’s name carries Bunyan, and the pilgrimage is real if aimless. The Christ pattern runs through Billy and through Edgar Derby, the decent schoolteacher shot for taking a teapot, who is the book’s sacrificial figure. Held a tenth below the bar because much of this is evoked rather than structural: the Christ material is ironic aside, Billy is too passive to bear an archetype’s weight, and Tralfamadore is a pulp cosmos whose mythic charge is cheapened by design.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Some myth is built. The death of a caste bears load: Boëldieu and Rauffenstein are the last knights, gloves, monocle, the chin brace of a broken flier, a chapel for an office, and the plot needs one of them to choose the people over his order and the other to kill him for it, with courtesy. The escape is a passage out of the underworld of fortresses into a winter landscape: a stable at Christmas, a child, a foreign mother, a crèche built by a Jew, and a frontier invisible in the snow. Held a tenth below the bar of 8.5 because the archetype is more often evoked than constructed: the Christmas is a gentle allusion, the frontier a figure made visible, and the prison break a genre pattern more than a deep one.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype built, not alluded to, is the oldest in the Japanese garden: islands in the sea, land rising from water, with the Isles of the Immortals behind it. Here it carries load. The gravel is sea only because the stones are set as islands, each group on its shore of moss, the raked rings round it as waves. The field reads as readily as mountains above cloud, and one name given to the garden, a tigress crossing a river with her cubs, shows how easily it takes a mythic reading. What holds the axis is the garden’s reticence: it builds the pattern and withholds its identity, and so builds the frame of a myth more than the myth itself.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
This is history, not myth, and the question is whether the particular acquires archetypal weight while staying particular. It does, and the weight is built. The birth of the tyrant is constructed as a second birth from the mother: the son must undo the parent who made him, and the play stages the first of his crimes beside the mother’s foreknowledge of the last. The fratricide, Britannicus being his adoptive brother, carries the pattern of Cain without naming it. The two counsellors are the good and the evil angel of the morality play, set in consecutive scenes and made load-bearing, since the poisoning is decided between them. Junie at the statue of Augustus, received by the Vestals, closes with a sacred refuge against a profaned house. Held short of the bar because the archetypes are worked inside Roman history and court psychology, built in the plot more than raised in the poetry.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The particular holds: a real case, a real trade, a shackled leg. Some of the archetypes are built into it. The sea is judge and devourer, taking the guilty and the innocent alike; the typhoon “coming on” is retribution moving toward a ship that has just done murder; the sun presides as an eye, or a wound. The composition is the sentence: the light falls on the victims and the storm comes for the ship. Other patterns are evoked rather than built: the Deluge, Jonah and Leviathan in the sea creatures, the apocalyptic sky of Revelation, an empire’s setting sun. Held below the gate because the judgment is promised and not shown, the storm not yet struck, and the monsters bring myth in as illustration rather than as structure.
The Beatles · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked across the record and built on side two by its sequence. The side runs as a day and a life’s end: the sun coming, the world turning in “Because”, a Sun King, then a journey home that ends in a cradle song, a burden and an end. “Golden Slumbers” turns a lullaby into a farewell, and “Carry That Weight” is the oldest burden there is; the order of the side, not any single song, makes the pattern bear weight. Along the way stand comic English figures: Mean Mr. Mustard, Polythene Pam, Maxwell with his hammer. What holds the axis below the gate: the figures are cartoons rather than persons, and part of the farewell’s depth is completed outside the record, by the knowledge that this was the group’s last work.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built, not applied. The first is the hearth: the centre of the house is a boulder left where it lay, risen through the floor, with the fire behind it and the chimney mass beside it, the one vertical that anchors everything. The second is cave and ledge: the low stone interior is the cave, the trays repeat the stream’s own ledges in concrete, and the entry is a narrow passage beside the rock before the room opens. The third is the descent to the water, a stair cut through the hearth room’s floor to the stream. The particular stays particular: one family’s weekends, one stream, one boulder. What holds the axis below the bar is depth. These are archetypes of dwelling at a family’s scale, with no sanctuary, no axis of heaven and earth and no death: the hut by the spring, not a cosmos.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built into plan and section, not applied. The first is the vaulted room, the oldest unit of building that encloses, Roman in descent, repeated as the cell of a market hall, and Kahn’s lifelong claim that architecture begins with the making of a room. The second is light from above as the presence that completes the room: the slot a narrowed oculus, the day itself the subject. The third is the threshold of grove, water and open porch, a portico that is only shelter and a frame for the sky. All stay particular: Texas light, a lawn in a park, small paintings. Held below the bar because these are building’s own archetypes, drawn by a learned architect from ruins, calm rather than load-bearing for a whole order of life.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
One archetype is built, not evoked. The withheld meal is load-bearing from the wrong night to Acosta eating alone in his kitchen: the feast convened and never eaten is the plot. It is the frustrated banquet of Tantalus, though the film never names it, and it inverts the communal meal of every rite of hospitality and sacrament. The bishop’s last rites turned to execution engage the sacrament directly, and the road is a pilgrimage with no shrine. The rest is summoned as story rather than built. The mother’s ghost and the bloody brigadier are legends told inside the film; they furnish the dreams without bearing weight. And the particulars stay particular: a gardener’s apron, a chicken that is a prop.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is built: the proud man who sets himself above the law, falls, and is redeemed by a woman’s love through the punishment he courted. Its source is Raskolnikov, and beneath him the fall and the conversion, and the structure bears it: the theory, the crime, the policeman who knows and waits, the mother’s death, the flight, the return, the prison and the turn. The hand is made a figure in its own right, the instrument of the fall acting almost apart from the man, and that myth is the film’s own. Held below the gate because the load-bearing pattern is borrowed, and borrowed smaller: Jeanne is thinner than Sonya, the inspector is Porfiry with his edges removed, and the redemption is the one movement the film abbreviates.
The masons under Ismaila Traoré · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Archetype is built into plan, structure and practice, not applied. The building is earth raised on an island above the flood: the mound above the waters is the platform. The building is a body: its skin is renewed every year by the people who belong to it, and it would die without them, so that death and renewal are built into the fabric and its calendar rather than alluded to. The ancestral foundation is kept: the mosque stands where, by tradition, a converted king gave his palace to God. Readings of the towers, pinnacles and ostrich eggs as ancestral or fertility forms are interpretations and are not credited. Held below the gate because the renewal myth is carried by the practice as much as by the form, and the plan’s archetype is the inherited one of the hypostyle mosque.
Josquin des Prez · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The Ordinary carries the central Christian story, creation, incarnation, passion, resurrection, judgement and the sacrificed Lamb, but it is the liturgy’s, set by every composer of masses, and the work does not build it. What Josquin builds is narrower and particular: the hymn of the feast of Corpus Christi, “Pange lingua gloriosi”, dispersed through the body of the Mass and gathered at the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, where it comes into the open. The body given, broken and received becomes the structure of the mass, not an allusion. Held below the gate because the particular stays thin: no person, place or act is made specific by the music, and the theology is assembled by the listener who knows the hymn.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is the largest the West carries: creation, incarnation, sacrifice, resurrection, the judgment of vivos et mortuos, the living and the dead, and the life to come. In the Credo the setting makes it bear weight. The six voices are not all used at once; the groups change with the clauses and the full choir is held for the points of weight, so that the story is articulated in the number of voices singing it. That is myth built in sound, not only allusion. But the story is the rite’s, set by every Mass of the century in the same order, and the particular is thin: no person or place belongs to this work except through its title. Winterreise made a myth of a man and the weather; this work receives its myth and articulates it with great tact.
Umayyad, under al-Walid I · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Some myth is built. The whole plan turns on the qibla, so that a direction across the world is laid into the ground: the archetype of the centre that is elsewhere, and it bears the load of the plan. The enclosed courtyard, with the mosaics’ trees beside running water, may set the mosque as a figure of the garden, the gardens beneath which rivers flow, if that reading of the mosaics holds; it is not secure. The site carries the old archetype of sacred ground taken over from god to god, Jupiter, the Baptist, Allah, and the Baptist’s head in the hall makes the continuity physical. The tradition that Jesus will descend at a white minaret east of Damascus attached itself to the south east minaret. Much of this is history inherited and tradition attached, not built, and holds the axis below the gate.
Luis Cernuda · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Part of the myth is built. Cernuda constructs a personal myth that carries the book: an Eden of childhood and the garden, the “jardín” that recurs from the first poems to the last; a fall into the world’s order; the daimon of desire, both exile and vocation; the poet as the solitary who keeps faith with a lost god. The gods of Greece in Invocaciones are load-bearing, their abandonment the world’s, and “Lázaro” builds rather than evokes: the risen man is the exile, and the miracle is the cost. What holds the axis at 8.4, below the gate: much of this is the myth of one man as the misunderstood elect, and in the later books Góngora, Larra, Mozart, Verlaine and Rimbaud are more often masks through which the poet speaks of himself than archetypes the particular becomes.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Built in one place beyond doubt: the pendant in the End Chamber, where a woman’s pubic triangle and legs are joined to a bison on a hanging rock, the composite of human and animal at the deepest point of the cave, facing the Lion Panel. The hand stencils and palm dots mark presence and threshold. The hunt of lions on bison is the archetype of predator and prey in its earliest monument, and the particular stays particular: these lions, these horses, this rock. Against a higher figure: much of the archetypal structure is read in; the shamanic reading of Clottes and Lewis-Williams is an argument, not a finding; and the cave as a whole cannot be shown to be mythic rather than accumulated. Myth built in the pendant, evoked elsewhere.
Robert Frost · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The particular stays rigorously particular, a farm, a town, a neighbour, and in the best poems the archetype is built, not alluded to. “Mending Wall” makes the spring repair of a boundary a rite older than its performers: the neighbour carries his stones as a primitive would, repeating his father’s saying, and the myth of the boundary, what is sacred and what is primitive in it and what the “Something” is that does not love a wall, is the poem’s structure, not its ornament. “After Apple-Picking” builds the harvest as a fall and a death, with no allusion at all. “The Death of the Hired Man” is the return of the prodigal who is no one’s son. “The Wood-Pile” makes a labour without witness an image of making and forgetting. Held below 8.5 because most of the dialogues stay social and local; the archetype bears load in four or five poems, not across the book.
Built for Qabus ibn Wushmgir · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not applied: a vertical axis set on a raised mound, the grave of a king made a pillar between earth and sky, a star in plan and a point at the crown. The ten-pointed plan and the cone are load-bearing parts of that figure, and the legend medieval writers report, of a coffin lit by the rising sun, shows how readily the form was read as solar and celestial. The tent of the steppe ruler, the cypress and the flame have each been proposed as the image behind the cone; the building sustains all of them and depicts none. Held below the gate because the myth is one figure, with no threshold, sequence or cosmos within: a marker above the viewer, not a heaven round him.
Ife · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is built rather than alluded to, at the one point where the body bears its weight: the head. In Yoruba tradition Ife is where the world was made and the first kings descended, Oduduwa among them; the head is the seat of ori, the destiny chosen before birth; the king’s head is the head of the people. A body of sculpture that is almost entirely heads, at life-size, in a metal meant to last, makes that structure load-bearing, and the particular face becomes the archetype of the crowned human head without ceasing to be particular: the heads differ in mouth, nose and the set of the eyes. What holds the axis just under 8.5 is that the archetype is single and inferred. The objects carry no narrative and no attribute that fixes their myth, and the viewer brings ori and Oduduwa from the culture.
Salian builders, under Conrad II and Henry IV · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built where the dead are. The section stacks the underworld under the sanctuary: the kings in the ground before the altar, the crypt beneath the choir, the choir above, so that the dynasty lies at the threshold of the holy and waits with it for the last day. That figure is load-bearing in the section. The church as the Virgin’s house and as a fortress of God for the empire is present in the towered mass of the east end, but there it is evoked by a silhouette rather than built. The long axis from west door to apse is the processional way of every great basilica, inherited. Held below the bar because the strongest archetype is a position given within a conventional plan.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Built into plan and section, not evoked. The museum is the house of the Muses, and Schinkel builds the sequence of a temple precinct: the public steps, the stoa at the threshold, and at the centre a round room under a dome open to the sky, heaven’s figure, in which images of the gods stand in a ring. The visitor passes from the agora through the porch into the sanctuary before entering the treasuries round the courts. The archetype carries load: the rotunda is the centre the plan is organised from, and the hidden dome makes the sanctuary an interior secret, found rather than announced. The particular stays particular: a Prussian institution of the 1820s, a king’s foundation facing his palace. Held below the gate because the cosmos is quoted, from the Pantheon and from Durand, and the sanctuary is a sanctuary of art, a modern displacement of the sacred that the building stages more than it founds.
Andrea Palladio; scene by Vincenzo Scamozzi · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not alluded to. The theatre is a city: a gate opens onto streets, and the stage front is the city’s façade, so that the actors enter from a world and go back into it. The cavea under a painted sky makes the open Roman theatre a cosmos under a vault, the theatre of the world given walls. The opening play turned scheme into myth: the streets are Thebes, and the king who would see learns that he did not, before streets that are an illusion of seeing exact from one seat. Held a tenth below the gate because the myth is learned and bookish, the Vitruvian city reconstructed, and much of the frons’s figuration is commemorative allegory that evokes.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not attached. The room is a grove, a forest of trunks spreading to a canopy, and the columns are made as trunks that bear exactly as their form says, widening into a canopy that is also the roof. Below it the clearing; above it a sky of filtered light; within it a community gathered under one roof. The tower is a tree with a taproot, its floors branches from one trunk, and there the structure is the figure. What holds the axis below the bar: the myth is Wright’s own recurring figure of organic growth; the grove is lived by most who use it as atmosphere rather than as a meaning; the laboratory work of the tree has nothing archetypal in it; and the court, carport and offices carry no myth.
Prince · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The record evokes much and builds some. Built: the androgyne. Camille, the pitched voice that is the singer and not the singer, is load-bearing in If I Was Your Girlfriend and Strange Relationship, where the old figure of the self crossing sex is not an allusion but the instrument of the song. The cross is built too: The Cross makes the passage from suffering to promised deliverance its whole form, rising as it promises. The two built myths stand at the record’s centre and its close, and that placing carries them near the bar. Evoked: the sign and the last days in the title track; the waitress and the bath in The Ballad of Dorothy Parker, a domestic myth of a stranger’s grace; the bride and the steady life in Forever in My Life. Held a tenth below the bar because the archetypes are not joined into one structure, and several are wit more than depth: Starfish and Coffee, with its child’s breakfast of “maple syrup and jam”, is charm.
William Kentridge · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Built in places, evoked elsewhere. What is built is the double: Soho and Felix, the owner and the dreamer, the man in the pinstripe suit and the naked man in the bath, one self divided, rivals for one woman, collapsing into each other by History of the Main Complaint and Stereoscope, where Soho is split into two rooms and two selves. The structure of the whole cycle carries it, not allusion. The mine is built as an underworld: the descent in Mine goes below the bed into the earth and returns with a beast. The flood recurs as judgment, and Monument builds the carrier made a statue of his own burden. The Faustian bargain and the deluge are summoned, not built, and not every part is the myth.
Tawaraya Sōtatsu · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked. The paired storm deities, wind and thunder, are an archetype of opposed and complementary forces, and the work constructs their opposition in its structure: the two screens are the two powers, the hinge and the void between them are the field of their meeting, and the storm exists only in the space the composition leaves. The particulars stay particular, with bellies, toes and grins of their own. What holds the axis below the summit band is depth: the opposition is held as spectacle and play, without tragic or cosmological weight. Lifted from a programme in which they attend a bodhisattva, the gods here serve no one; that release from doctrine is implicit rather than built.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Much of the myth is built. Oedipa’s name carries the riddle-solver who finds that the riddle is about himself, and the book inverts the pattern: the quest yields no answer, and the question becomes whether the solver has made the world she reads. The maiden in the tower, from the Varo painting, is built into that question, a woman weaving what she takes for the world. The quest for the Grail runs through the waste land of San Narciso and the system called W.A.S.T.E., and Narcissus is in the city’s name. Held a tenth below the bar because the myths are layered as allusion as often as they are load-bearing, and because Oedipa, by design, is more a reader of patterns than a figure who bears one.
Luchino Visconti · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is the old king at the end of his line, who chooses his heir, blesses the usurper’s marriage and goes out to meet his death, with the leopard of the family arms kept before us as its emblem. The structure bears part of it. The Prince gives Tancredi his place and his blessing, asks for Angelica’s hand on his behalf, and at the ball dances with the bride as if in a rite of succession, then walks out alone. The waltz is also the dance of death and the maiden: age and youth, desire and its end, in one figure. The particular stays particular, a Sicilian family, an actual plebiscite, a real palazzo. What holds the figure is that much of the myth is evoked rather than built: the deathbed painting, the star, the viaticum and the falling order are emblems laid around the story more than structures the story is.
Hilary Mantel · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Construction, not allusion. The title is a place name the book turns into an emblem: man as wolf to man, the court as a pack, the house at the end of the road where the next queen waits. The pattern of the servant who outlasts the master, and of the son who escapes the father only to become the man who strikes, is load-bearing. The fall of Wolsey prefigures Cromwell’s own for any reader who knows the history, and the book builds on that foreknowledge, so that the reader’s hindsight becomes the shadow of fate the present tense refuses to cast. The ghosts at the edges carry it toward the mythic. Held at 8.4 because the archetypes stay subordinate to the historical particular, the mythic register deliberately muted.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built into plan and section, not applied. The square within a square round a centre open to the sky is the mandala and the cloister: the ring of cells, the walk, the court. The carrel at the window is the scholar’s cell, the monk with the book at the light, built into the wall as Kahn’s own sentence about the building says. The hall is a centre in the strict sense, where the whole is gathered and seen, and the circles inscribed in the squares, crossed by the beams, make circle, square and cross load-bearing in the structure. The particular stays particular: this school, its pupils, its books. Held below the bar because the archetypes are of order and contemplation more than of passage or death, the ascent is short, and the circle in the square is Kahn’s grammar more than a myth built anew.
Reginald Ely, John Wastell and others · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Some archetype is built. The glass is load-bearing typology: in each side window the type stands over the antitype, so the wall is constructed as the old law prefiguring the new, and the way from west to east is a passage through sacred history to the Passion in the east window. The building is a chantry, made so that a dead founder is remembered for ever by living voices. The vault, a canopy of stone opening like branches, carries the figure of a heavenly roof, evoked rather than built. Held below the top because these figures are inherited from late Gothic building, carried here at the largest scale rather than first built, and the heraldry is emblem, not myth.
Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth is built from the oldest comic matter: the slighted youth who proves himself to the beloved and the tribe by a quest into enemy country, the rescue of the captive maiden and the recovery of the stolen treasure. The pattern is built into the structure and bears its load: out by day, into darkness and storm, a hiding place under the enemy’s table, and back by day with both loves, to be honoured with a commission and a sword, as the quest ends in the king’s reward. The particular stays particular: a locomotive with a name, a girl who sweeps the cab, a Southern town. Held below the gate because the archetype is kept at comic height and opens onto nothing deeper: Johnnie is proved by the quest, not changed by it, and the war is a stage.
Henry Purcell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is Virgil’s: the queen abandoned by the hero whom fate calls to found an empire. Tate makes one change that bears weight. The gods give way to witches, and the summons by Mercury is counterfeit, so that the founding of Rome is set in motion by a lie. Inside Act II a second figure is built, Actaeon, the hunter destroyed in a grove, told in the grove where Aeneas has just killed a boar. Purcell builds a third, the descending ground as an end that cannot be resisted: fate is heard as a bass. Held a tenth below the gate because the particular stays thin. Dido is a type more than a woman, Aeneas never reaches the founder, and the forgery of fate is set up and dropped.
Richard Wright · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked, at several points. The title makes Bigger the son the nation bore, and the structure insists on it: he is what America made, and its courts claim him as their own monster. The white house is a house of the blind, with a furnace in its cellar that eats the white daughter; the black man’s fear of being found in the white woman’s bedroom, the oldest pretext of the lynch mob, becomes the literal act. “Fear”, “Flight”, “Fate” is the shape of the hunted beast, and the rat of the first page its figure. The cross is turned against itself. What holds the axis below the gate is that the myth is often stated as sociology, and that Bigger, who carries it, stays more type than person.
Giulio Romano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Built, not evoked, in one room. In the Sala dei Giganti the myth is the room: heaven as a dome at the crown with the gods enthroned in it, the order of the earth collapsing at the walls, the visitor standing where the rebels fall. The Gigantomachy is the founding myth of order against chaos, and the room makes order the thing that crushes. The island, the water, the grotto in the secret garden and the passage from court to garden carry the old pattern of the pleasure ground as a world apart. Elsewhere the archetype is quoted: Ovid in a frieze, Psyche’s story told on a vault, Olympus as a theme for a banquet. The particular stays particular, the duke’s horses by name, his allegiance to one emperor. Built in one room and quoted in the rest: below the gate.
Adam Lock and others · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked, in two places. The west front is the Heavenly Jerusalem as a wall of the redeemed, the resurrection of the dead registered at the level where the living stand and Christ above them: the end of time built as the threshold every entrant crosses. The chapter house is a single growing form, the tree of its central pier and the ascent of its stair, and the form carries it without allusion. Elsewhere the myth is inherited: the cross plan and the east to west axis of every cathedral. The scissor arches’ accrued reading as the saltire of Saint Andrew is not documented as intent; they are scored as form. Built at two points, inherited elsewhere.
Olmec · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The particular stays particular: these are individual faces, each with its own emblems, and they do not dissolve into a type. The archetype is reached through that particularity: the ruler as the head of the body politic, the head as the seat of the person, the ancestor made of the earth’s own stone, the face that outlasts the man. If the hypothesis that some heads were recut from thrones holds, the myth is in part built, the seat of rule and the ruler made of one material; if the burials were deliberate, the ruler’s stone body went back into the ground. Neither is settled, and the emblems are not read with confidence, so how much of the makers’ cosmology bears weight in the heads cannot be said. The myth that can be seen is evoked by the form and partly built; the myth the makers built is mostly lost.
Parmigianino · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built more than evoked. The Mother holding a sleeping Child who already lies like the dead Christ across her lap is the deepest pattern in Christian imagery, the Nativity and the Pietà in one body, and it is built into the pose, not alluded to. The neck carries the Marian emblem of the tower of ivory, and the column beside her is the virginal column; the picture sets the one against the other as its argument, so the emblems are construction as much as allusion. The vessel and the prophet with his scroll extend the typology. The particular stays particular, an elegance of one city and court. Held a tenth below the gate because some emblems are not legible without a key.
Matthias of Arras and Peter Parler; completed by later hands · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype is built. The church is raised on the grave of the founding saint-prince, and the kingdom’s crown is kept over his body: the tomb as the foundation of the realm, made literal in plan and section. The Wenceslas Chapel is the heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation built at room scale, its walls of precious stones, a sanctuary within the sanctuary. The Golden Gate sets the Last Judgment over the door the kings used, so that every coronation passed beneath the end of the world, and the castle hill is the sacred mountain with the cathedral at its summit. Held below the gate: much of this is the Gothic cathedral’s inheritance, and the completion adds no myth of its own.
Anonymous; Octagon by William Hurley and Alan of Walsingham · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Archetype is built here, not only evoked. The cross plan carries the way from the west door to the saint’s shrine. At the crossing the Octagon sets a centre, the eightfold figure of resurrection and of the baptistery, raised into a crown of light where the arms of the cross meet. The church on the island above the undrained fen is the ship or ark, an image made by its site, not by allusion. What holds it below the bar: the Norman body’s archetype is the common one of every great church, and the Octagon’s meaning is carried by form and light more than by a programme the whole plan enforces. Myth is built at the centre and conventional elsewhere.
Boris Pasternak · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Part built, part evoked. Built: the Christian frame bears the weight of the poems, where Hamlet on the stage of history becomes Christ in Gethsemane, the actor praying that the cup pass from him, and the cycle closes with the Passion, so that Yuri’s life is read as a sacrifice. The two Magdalene poems make Lara a Magdalene, and “A Fairy Tale”, on St George and the dragon, turns the rescue of Lara into legend. The candle is built: seen from the street, written into the poem, standing at the end in the room where Yuri lies. Evoked: Lara as Russia, a reading the book invites and leaves as atmosphere, and Evgraf, the half-brother who appears from nowhere to save Yuri, a guardian the book never quite makes structural. The archetype holds in the poems more fully than in the prose that leads to them, and the axis falls a tenth short of the gate.
Octavia E. Butler · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The descent to the ancestors is built, not evoked. Dana is drawn down to the dead and must keep alive the very man whose crimes make her; the debt of descent is literal, and its price is paid in the body, the arm left in the wall of the present. Rufus and Dana form a pair of master and guardian, child and keeper, that turns with each visit until it becomes would-be rapist and killer: an archetypal bond inverted. The house in Los Angeles and the Weylin house answer each other. The structure bears the myth: remove the time-crossing and the inherited wound has nowhere to stand. What holds the axis below the gate is reach of register. The myth stays close to its premise and does not widen into a cosmology, and Hagar, the biblical bondwoman, is the one name that opens a deeper well without the book building on it.
Sienese builders; facade by Giovanni Pisano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Built in plan and fabric more than alluded to. The temple on the city’s height, the Virgin’s house as the city’s citadel: the dedication of 1260 is made plan, the cathedral at the summit and the city under its protection. The floor builds a path, from Hermes Trismegistus at the threshold through the sibyls along the aisles to the histories under the dome, so that entering is the journey from outside the covenant to its centre. The starred vault is the heavens over the congregation. And the Duomo Nuovo built, without intention, the oldest of architectural myths, a city’s tower left incomplete when judgment came. Held below the top: much of the myth is imagery set into floor and walls, and that last figure is history’s work, not the builders’.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The particular is a guy, the straw effigy children wheel through English streets in November, and the poem makes it the figure of an age: “We are the stuffed men”. That is myth built, not evoked: the effigy is load-bearing, carried into the scarecrow disguise of the second part, “Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves”, and into the stuffed heads of the first. The second structure is Dante’s: the hollow men stand where his neutrals stand, outside Hell’s gate, and gather by a “tumid river” that is, on the common reading, Acheron; the rose is the rose of the Paradiso. Conrad’s Kurtz is set over the whole. What holds the axis is that the frame is assembled from allusions as much as built into an action: the poem has no journey, only a waiting, and its sources sit beside one another rather than fusing.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not applied. The house is the inhabited mountain: a mass of stone, stratified and eroded, cut by caves in its doors and windows, opened by wells in its courtyards, climbed from the dark cellar to a summit peopled by figures under the sky. The roof is a high place with its guardians; the attic is the belly of a creature, its arches its ribs. These are in plan and section, not in ornament: the roof’s rise and fall is the arches’. The particular stays particular: this corner, these tenants, a car in the basement. Held below the gate because the crowning figure that would have made the mountain a Marian one was never built, and the sea and plant at the balconies are evoked rather than built.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth here is both evoked by the hundred and built once. Evoked: every god, idol, heresy and fabulous beast of late antiquity is summoned, and most come as allusion and pageant, which the gate is meant to discount. Built: the temptation of the saint in the desert, the oldest Christian scene of the soul’s trial, is made to carry the modern mind’s trial by knowledge, so that the hermit’s night becomes the myth of the nineteenth century’s loss of faith and of its pantheist desire. The Sphinx and the Chimera, the heavy and the winged, are built rather than cited: two principles of the imagination in dialogue, whom Anthony’s last wish follows. Held below the gate because so much of the myth is catalogue, and because Anthony as a particular man is thin.
Kyivan Rus builders, under Yaroslav the Wise · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into plan and mass, not alluded to. The church is an image of the heavenly order: the central dome over the Pantokrator, the lesser domes stepped down round it, the pyramid rising from the outer galleries to the crown as the ascent from the world to God. That the twelve lesser domes stand for the apostles is the usual reading, an interpretation and not a documented intention. The dedication places Kyiv in a typology of cities: founded with its Golden Gate, Yaroslav’s Kyiv was built as a new Constantinople, and through it a new Jerusalem, with the church at its centre. The Orant as the city’s wall made the building a palladium. Held short because the cosmic reading rests on interpretation, and the city’s myth is carried by the ensemble more than by the church.
Built for Bishop Bernard de Castanet · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked: the church as citadel, the city of God as a walled keep, the faithful gathered within one wall against what lies outside. The plan makes it load-bearing. There are no aisles in which a second order of worshippers might stand; the buttress towers ring the vessel like a curtain wall; the way in is by a guarded side door and a stair, not a processional west front, so that the sacred is entered as a stronghold is entered. Within, the enclosed choir builds a second figure, the holy of holies inside the camp. Held below the gate because the fortress, strong as it is, is one figure, and does not open to the order of the cosmos as the Pantheon’s dome does.
Henri Rousseau · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the composition: the innocent and the beast, the sleeper watched over by the force that could destroy her. It carries several old patterns without needing any of them: Una and her lion, Daniel in the den, the lion that spares the saint, and, through the mandolin, Orpheus, whose music stills the animals. None is cited; the structure is the two figures and the one held moment, and it bears the weight. The particular is kept: a real mandolin and a real jar, a striped robe, a lion drawn as the painter knew lions, not a heraldic beast. The desert is nowhere in particular and the scene belongs to no story, which lets it become myth rather than illustrate one. Held below the gate because the archetype is one pattern, not a structure of several, and the deeper readings come from outside the frame.
Luis Barragán · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built into plan and section, not applied. The first is the enclosed garden: the house turns its back on the street to face a walled garden, an image of paradise kept apart from the world. The second is the cloister and the cell: the dim passage, the closed front, the rooms graded inward, the crosses of the window frames, the monastic economy of materials. The third is ascent: the stair to the hidden door, the climb to a roof that has only the sky. The fourth, in Barragán’s own telling, is the memory of the Jalisco ranch and village of his childhood, built into the thick walls and the colour. Held below the gate because these are archetypes of retreat and devotion, deeply built but in a narrow register.
Metallica · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is built in one pattern and carried through the record: the master and the puppet, set out on the sleeve as white crosses on strings held from above. Each song is a new face of the same figure. The drug is a master; the elder god of The Thing That Should Not Be has servants who wait; the asylum has keepers; the officers spend the soldier; the false messiah keeps his flock; and in Damage, Inc. the victim becomes the destroyer. The pattern is load-bearing, and the order turns servitude into revolt. What holds it below the bar is the particular: Lovecraft’s monster is borrowed as atmosphere, no one has a name or a place, and the archetype is reached by abstraction, as allegory.
Pearl Jam · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is built in its deepest pattern and evoked around it. The pattern is the son and the absent or false father, with a mother bound too close: Alive and Once belong, by the band’s own account, to a short cycle in which the son of Alive becomes the killer of Once. Jeremy is the sacrificial child, his act a rite that makes the unseen seen; Release is the son’s prayer to the dead father, close to an invocation. The particular stays particular: a classroom, a porch, a man on a bench. Held below the bar: the cycle comes in reverse order on the record, so that its pattern must be supplied from the band’s account, and Garden, Deep and Oceans evoke rather than build.
Hilma af Klint · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked: the ages of man, an archetype as old as the riddle of the Sphinx and the Greek ages, carried in painting by Titian’s Three Ages, Cole’s The Voyage of Life and, in af Klint’s own decade, Munch’s frieze of life. Here it is load-bearing: the titles, the numbering, the division by two, two, four and two and the change of ground with each age are the structure of the work, and the cycle cannot be read without them. The seed and the flower, the spiral of growth, the egg and the union of paired opposites are built into the motifs. What holds the axis below the gate is the absent particular: no person, no face, no event. The archetype stands on an empty frame.
Kazuo Ishiguro · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built in places, and load-bearing where it is built. The sacrifice is the premise: bodies raised to be given up, in a society that has made the old rite clinical and calls the death “completed”. Hailsham is a lost garden, a childhood paradise whose meaning is understood only after the expulsion, and whose closing removes even the place to return to. The rumour of deferral is a myth inside the myth, the old promise that true love can hold off death; the book builds it for two hundred pages and lets Miss Emily dismiss it in one, the Orpheus story with the gods admitting there was never a bargain. Norfolk, the “lost corner”, a schoolroom joke, becomes a land of the lost. Held near the gate because the archetype is kept deliberately quiet, much of it is atmosphere, and the students never become figures beyond themselves.
Gunnar Asplund · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Built, not alluded to. The first figure is the circle on the square: a cylinder rising from a rectangular base, the old image of heaven over earth, made the plan of a building whose subject is the whole of knowledge. The second is the ascent from the cave: a dark threshold, a narrow way up, emergence into light. The section is that passage, and every visitor performs it. The third is the threshold guarded, by a battered door of Egyptian profile and a vestibule of reliefs. These carry the experience of the building, which is why the figure is high. Held below the summit because the figures are taken largely whole from the visionary classicism of Ledoux and Boullée and from the domed library rotundas of the nineteenth century, and the reliefs are applied rather than structural.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not cited: a Nativity carried by the whole plot. A world that has forgotten birth; a young woman, a foreign refugee, pregnant without husband or explanation, revealed in a barn among cattle; a tired guardian who is not the father and takes her on a journey; a birth in a hovel in a camp of the dispossessed, attended by soldiers who kneel; a flight by water. Theo is also the bearer, the Christopher who carries the child across the water and dies of it, and both figures bear weight. The particular stays particular: a man in flip-flops, a ping-pong ball between two mouths. Held a tenth below the gate because the barn and the kneeling soldiers announce the Nativity more than they discover it, and the Human Project stays an offscreen grail, a ship in fog.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built in part. Shakespeare is the frame: the epigraph is Prospero’s, and Sabbath is the magician of a small theatre who has lost his art and has only his grave to think of; his last movement, raging, abdicating every decency, toward a death he cannot bring himself to take, is Lear’s. Beneath it runs an older figure, the satyr or Pan, a god of appetite in the New England hills, offending the town. The descent to the dead is built: the funeral, the cemetery, the mother’s ghost, the brother’s box, and the hero’s return from the underworld still alive and unable to leave. These bear weight. Held below the gate because much of the Shakespeare is quotation and allusion carried by Sabbath’s own learning, evoked as much as built, and because the satyr is a manner more than a structure: Sabbath stays a particular man, an archetype only in flashes.
Three Kingdoms Korea · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Built at the centre if the identification holds, evoked in any case. The built element is the pose itself: the being who could pass beyond the world and stays, half seated, one foot down, pondering. That is the structure of the bodhisattva, and in Maitreya’s case of the future saviour who waits until the time comes; the pose carries it rather than alluding to it. The thinker who sits apart before acting is an archetype that holds without the doctrine. The particulars stay particular: a young body, a plain necklace, fingers at a cheek. Held below the gate because the figure names no one and the identification is probable, not certain, and because it states the archetype once, in a single body, without the narrative frame that would make it bear load in more than one place.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Built where it bears load, evoked where it does not. Built: the figure in the long-cuffed coat, assembled across nine movements from a sleeve at a curb, a silhouette at a free pile that looks up at a window, a coat whole in the lake and a stillness under the next lamp, until at a gate in the blackout it turns from the witness to watch what she watches; and the houses, whose cavities join, take a child, keep his voice in the ducts and give back a draft. Evoked: the Church of the Transfiguration the street was laid out to face, black in the blackout with no one looking; the murdered lighthouse keeper still walking for his buried parts; the calendar of feasts. The girl who sees accurately while the chat says log is Cassandra, and the book does not say so. Held below the gate at 8.4 because Emma’s last line names the figure’s office, that it stands where things are about to happen, and the naming does what the structure had already done.
Alberto Burri · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Partly built. The shroud laid over the dead is not merely evoked by the whiteness: the rubble of the houses is inside the casts, so the work is a burial, and its masses are tombs of houses. The city of the dead, the necropolis whose streets can be walked, is built by the plan. The cracking of earth, the crackle taken from drying clay, is matched here to its cause, an earthquake, so that a studio form becomes the earth’s own wound; that matching is structural, and it is the work’s deepest stroke. The labyrinth is evoked by walkers more than built, since the plan is a town’s. What holds the axis: burial and shroud are what the memorial type supplies, and Gibellina itself, its people, its saints and feasts, is kept as plan alone.
Hoysala builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked, in two places. First the plan: two sanctums as two caves of the god, each faced across open ground by its bull, the axis running from Nandi through the hall into the dark of the linga. Second the elevation: the bands rise from beast to epic to god, so that the wall reads as a cosmic mountain from foot to head while the worshipper walks it clockwise. Both are load-bearing. What holds the figure is that both are inherited from the temple tradition rather than made new here, and that the meaning of the frieze order is a reading commonly offered rather than one the builders are shown to have stated. Quantity of myth in the narrative bands is not depth of myth.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is built in two places and evoked in many. Built: the twin. Suttree’s brother was born dead, and the living man carries the dead one as a shadow self through the book; the fever that nearly kills him near the end is where the doubleness is resolved, and he comes out of it as one. Built also: the descent and return. The workhouse, the river city, the tunnels under the streets and the mountains make an underworld, and the man presumed dead at the end, his bed taken by a corpse, leaves the city as one risen. The huntsman of the prologue and the close, with hounds that hunt souls, frames the whole. Evoked: the fisher, the black water, the witch Mother She, the sacred fool in Harrogate. Held a tenth under the bar because between the built pillars the archetype rides on the prose’s atmosphere more than on the structure, and much of the middle is picaresque without mythic load.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is partly built. Its load-bearing structure is the garden beside hell: Hedwig’s paradise of flowers, fruit, a pool and a greenhouse, set against a wall over which smoke rises. The garden is the film’s architecture, not an allusion. Rudolf reads Hansel and Gretel, with its oven and its witch, over the girl who leaves food in the dark, and the tale’s halves become the film’s two worlds; the end is a katabasis taken literally. Held a tenth below the gate by the particular: the family are kept as surfaces, so the archetype lives in an arrangement of spaces more than in persons, and the tale is laid over the footage as much as built into it.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The built myth is paradise and its loss. Ardis is Eden twice over, “Ardis the First” and “Ardis the Second” in the book’s own titles for the two summers, and the fall from it is the plot. The love of brother and sister, believed cousins, is the myth of the twin soul and of the forbidden union, with Chateaubriand and Byron named behind it, and it is load-bearing: the lovers’ bond, Demon’s prohibition and Lucette’s exclusion all run on it. The doubled world, Antiterra and the rumoured Terra, builds the myth of the other world into the novel’s physics, and Lucette carries Ophelia’s figure, the drowned girl, into the plot. Held a tenth below the gate because much of the archetypal matter is allusion layered for the pleasure of recognition, and Terra is left a rumour more than a structure.
Aldous Huxley · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, and in places it bears weight. Ford is made a god: the T stands for the cross, “Our Ford” for Our Lord, the Solidarity Service is an inverted mass with its orgy-porgy, and Ford is confused with Freud. The Tempest supplies the frame of the Savage’s arc: he is a Miranda who has never seen the world and a Caliban who is brought to it, and the title phrase, said first in wonder and then in bitterness, turns on him. Eden is reversed: the Fall is engineered out, and the Savage’s hunger for sin and penance is a return to it. The Controller is the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s sense, and the seventeenth chapter is built on that dialogue. Beyond the book, the World State has become a modern myth in its own right. What holds the axis below the gate is the people: Lenina, Bernard and the Controller are types who do not bear the patterns as persons, and the Savage’s Christ-like end is evoked more than earned.
James Ensor · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not alluded to. The Entry into Jerusalem is the structure of the whole picture: a procession, a city, a crowd with banners in place of palms, a king who comes on a donkey, and behind the welcome the knowledge that the same crowd will call for his death within the week. The title carries the myth into a named city and a named year, and the particular stays particular: Brussels, its parties, its bands, an official stand. The carnival is a second archetype, the world turned upside down, joined to the first: the Entry becomes the feast at which the fool is crowned. Held just below the gate because the Passion that gives the Entry its depth lies outside the frame, and because the rider is so small that the myth can be missed.
Aristophanes · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The plot is a descent to the dead and a return with one who was lost, on the pattern of Heracles fetching Cerberus, which Dionysus copies with lion skin and club, and of Orpheus going down for the lost, here a poet. The god who descends is the god of the festival at which the play is staged, so the descent is also the theatre seeking its own source. The Eleusinian chorus makes it an initiation: the god who sets out ignorant, a coward and a reader of Euripides, is taught, and returns with a judgment he did not go down to make. Death and renewal, the city’s and the art’s, bear the play’s weight. Held a tenth under the bar because the myth is held in parody and the comic Dionysus is as much a type as a figure of depth: the archetype structures the play more than it deepens it.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not merely evoked. The title and the calendar are load-bearing: the seduction falls on Easter night, so the fall is committed at the feast of the resurrection, and the book is the long Holy Week of its undoing. The pattern of the fallen woman and the penitent who follows her into the underworld, the Magdalene crossed with a descent through the court, the prison, the étape and Siberia, carries the plot. The reversal is Tolstoy’s own and the strongest mythic stroke: it is the woman who rises, and her rising is her refusal of him, when she marries Simonson and frees Nekhlyudov from his penance. Held below the gate because the resurrection of the hero is announced in the last chapter more than built, and the Gospel frame, the epigraphs and the closing reading, lies over the action as allusion as much as it stands within it as structure.
Edward FitzGerald, after Omar Khayyam · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Part built, part evoked. Evoked: Jamshýd, Kaikobád, Bahrám the great hunter, Hátim and Rustum, the kings of Persian legend set as names among ruins. Built: the frame is the archetypal day, dawn as summons and moonrise as death, and the Book of Pots makes the oldest image of creation, the potter and the clay of Jeremiah and of Romans, carry the argument. The pots speak, and one asks “Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?” The tavern as the world, the caravanserai as the life, the chequer-board of nights and days with men as its pieces, the ball under the polo stick: each is the whole argument in an image, and each bears load. What holds it below the gate is that the myth is a set of emblems rather than one structure the particulars grow into, and the speaker stays a voice, not a figure.
Romano-Egyptian painters · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Built rather than evoked, and built in the object rather than painted in the image. The panel was laid into the wrappings over the face of a body prepared in the Egyptian way, so that a Greek portrait of a living person took the place of the idealised mask, the face of the dead made divine. The archetype of the Egyptian burial, the dead transfigured and kept for the life beyond, is load-bearing: the portrait is the face that body would wear in that life, and the gold wreaths and gilding carry the transfiguration into the image. The particular stays particular. Held below the gate because the myth is the rite’s, which the painter served rather than built, and a panel cut from its mummy keeps it only by inference.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built into plan and structure, not applied. The first is the forest: the house stands in a clearing and brings the forest in, the columns as trunks, the stair as a grove, the canopy on saplings, so that the structure itself carries the image. The second is the Finnish farmstead, buildings round a yard, closed to the weather and open to the land, built here as the courtyard. The third is the sauna and the water, heat and plunge, the oldest rite of the place, set where house meets forest, with the hearth at the corner of the living room. The particular stays particular: one family, one hill, its pines. Held below the gate because the myth is built at domestic depth, a dwelling’s archetypes rather than a cosmos, and the forest columns are image as much as structure.
Hermann Hesse · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is built, not merely evoked. The man who is half wolf is a figure older than Hesse, and the book makes it load-bearing and then dissolves it: the archetype is the protagonist’s error. Hermine, whose name is a feminine of Hermann and carries Hermes in it, is a guide of souls who knows Haller as a mirror knows him; Pablo, the saxophonist, keeps the theatre and becomes at the last a figure of Mozart. The descent through the ball into the theatre, the trial before the Immortals and the sentence to live and learn to laugh make an underworld journey with its judgement and its return. Held below the gate because the scheme is Jungian, anima, shadow, the integration of the self, and at moments its machinery shows: the figures are diagrammed as much as lived.
Attributed to Domenico da Cortona, under Francis I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into plan and structure. The keep is a cross with an axis at its crossing: four arms to the four quarters, and at the centre a stair that rises through every floor, breaks through the roof and ends in a lantern under the royal lily, the king’s emblem at the head of the world’s axis over a centred plan. The double spiral, two ways about one centre that never meet, makes ascent and return a fact of stone. The castle at the heart of a walled hunting forest is the oldest figure, and here it is real. Held below the gate: the cross and the centred figure are borrowed from Italian theory, and the roof as a heavenly city is read in more than it is constructed.
Chris Marker · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked. A man goes down among the dead, under the city, and is sent out of time to bring back help; like Orpheus he goes back for a woman and loses her. The deeper structure is the oracle fulfilled by being sought: the image the child carries is a prophecy, and the attempt to reach it is the means of its fulfilment, the shape of Oedipus at the crossroads. The loop is load-bearing, and the particulars stay particular: the jetty at Orly, a woman’s necklace, the rings of a tree. Held a tenth below the bar of the Epochal Gate: the future people and the experimenters are archetypes drawn in a single stroke, and the woman is kept a figure, an image more than a person.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, not cited. The title names the destroying angel of the Passover, and the structure answers it: a household shut in on a night of death, with lambs slaughtered and roasted inside the house over a fire of broken furniture and floorboards. The enchanted threshold of fairy tale, a spell that holds until a sequence is exactly repeated, carries the plot and ends it. The castaway story, shipwreck on dry land, governs the second half, and the flock entering the cathedral turns the sacrifice back on the faithful, going in where the people cannot come out. What holds the axis a tenth short of the bar is the margin. The Kabbalah and the Valkyrie’s virginity are evoked rather than load-bearing; the core is built and the edges are allusion.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Built more than evoked, though less here than in the door. The figure is the maker before his creation: Dante over the Inferno, and behind him every poet who must face what he has made. The pose fuses the brooding hero of the classical type, the Belvedere Torso recalled in the back and thighs, with Michelangelo’s Pensieroso and the melancholy of Saturn’s children. The archetype bears load in the body: the creator is heavy, naked, unprivileged, made of the same clay as the damned. The particular holds: this is a specific, thick, labouring man, not an idealised god. Held below the gate because alone and enlarged the figure loses its Dante, so that the archetype becomes general, Thought or Man, and leans toward allegory; and much of its standing as the emblem of thinking is reception, which is not credited.
Gandharan · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Partly built, and built in the body. The archetype is the ascetic who goes down to the threshold of death before illumination: the hero’s descent, the death before rebirth, the wilderness fast, carried here by anatomy rather than by allusion. The six years are not depicted as a narrative; they are deposited in the flesh, so that the archetypal passage is the physical structure of the figure. And the figure stays particular: this is one starved body, rendered with an exactness that makes it a man and not the symbol of a man; the drawn cheeks and the cords are his own. Held below the gate because the full pattern, descent, refusal of the path and ascent to awakening, needs the story outside the frame. The stone builds the descent; the return is evoked by the halo and by what the devotee brings.
David Markson · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is built, and the premise is its frame. The last human is an archetype that governs every page: an Eve after the end of the world rather than before its beginning, and the first words, “In the beginning”, set Genesis against the emptied earth. The Trojan matter returns throughout as more than allusion. Kate turns over Helen, Cassandra, Achilles and the women at Troy, and her own condition, speaking with no one to hear, is Cassandra’s inverted, a prophet with no audience at all. She is a Penelope with no Odysseus, writing and rewriting. The particular stays particular: a typewriter, a beach house, a cut on a hand, a dead child. Held a tenth below the bar because much of the myth comes as material she recites rather than as structure she lives.
Orson Welles · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The myth is partly built. The fall of a great man by his own flaw is load-bearing: Quinlan was a fine detective, his intuition is real, and his ruin is the corruption of that gift by grief and drink; he is brought down by the friend who loved him and owed him his life. Tana, who reads that his future is used up, is a sibyl in a brothel, and her eulogy closes the tragedy. The border is the threshold, crossed in the first shot and never quite crossed back; the death in dirty water is a descent. The particular stays particular: candy bars, a cane, a shoebox, a hearing aid. A tenth short of the gate, because the archetype is carried largely by Welles’s body, voice and style rather than worked through, the Vargas side is the pure knight evoked rather than built, and the betrayal by a friend repeats in another key what The Third Man had done.
Zapotec builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is built into the plan, not alluded to. The mountain made a level plane is the sacred mountain as the centre: the city lifted between earth and sky, its plaza an ordered world on a summit, its axis running between two raised platforms that close it. The dead are housed within the mountain in the tombs round the plaza, the ancestor built into the hill on which rule stands, and Tomb 104, painted, with an urn set over its door, makes the threshold to the dead a built thing. The ball court sets the game at the city’s heart, and Building J turns from the grid to point beyond the plaza. What holds the axis: the Zapotec writing is not read, much of the meaning is inferred, and the sense of Building J’s turn is argued.
Alan Moore and David Lloyd · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not merely evoked. Guy Fawkes is the frame: the book opens on 5 November with the rhyme, “Remember, remember the fifth of November”, and the masked conspirator who failed is remade as one who succeeds. Deeper, the structure is the death of the hero and the passing of the mask. V makes Evey by an ordeal, a descent, an imprisonment and a rebirth in rain, and she becomes him, so that the hero is an office and not a man. That is load-bearing; it is how the book ends. The Count of Monte Cristo, the Phantom of the Opera, Faust and the Jacobean revenger are evoked by allusion and by the banned objects of the Shadow Gallery, and that layer is decoration. Held below the gate because V’s own weight is borrowed more than made, and the built part is a single sequence.
Evelyn Waugh · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is built here more than readers of a society novel expect. The Arthurian design is structural: Hetton’s bedrooms are named from Malory; Tony is the king of a waste land in Eliot’s sense, and the title binds the book to Eliot’s poem; his journey is a grail quest for a lost City he imagines as a Gothic city of turrets. The quest ends not in the grail but in captivity to a text, Dickens read aloud as the endless rite of an imprisoned priest. The cuckold, the abandoned knight and the lost heir are each particular: Tony is never generalised, and remains a man who likes his breakfast tray and his routine. What holds the axis a tenth below the gate is that the frame is partly a satire on itself. The myth bears weight as irony, and the book declines to let it carry tragic weight in its own right.
Michael Mann · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears load: the hunter and the hunted as doubles, two warriors of one code, each the only man who understands the other. The structure enacts it. Parallel lives are cut against each other for two hours, the duel is declared over coffee and fought in the field by night, and it ends with the victor holding the dying man’s hand, an ending from the epic and the samurai film more than from the policier. The city of glass and freeway is the arena, and the airport, the place of departure McCauley never reaches, is its gate. The particular stays particular: Hanna’s third marriage, Chris’s gambling, a lumber yard, a truck. Held a tenth below the gate because the doubles and the code are an old inheritance, from the western, Melville’s Le Samouraï and Mann’s own Thief, evoked with great force more than newly made.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is the union of opposites, male and female made one: the sacred marriage, or the divided being restored to wholeness. It is in part built. The ornament is the structure of the myth: upright rectangles for him, circles and flowers for her, two natures distinct in sign and closed into one shape against a gold ground that is the ground of the Byzantine icon, so that the couple stands where saints and the enthroned once stood. Readings of the pair as lovers from classical myth are brought from outside and do not count. The particular holds in part: the faces are individual, the hands and feet exact, but the bodies are lost in pattern. The cost is that the archetype is stated as emblem more than enacted as drama: union is shown as a fact, not as a crossing, and the edge is the only event.
Built for King Kashyapa I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built, not alluded to. The threshold is a beast: the last ascent passed through a lion, the gate to the king’s seat made as the body of the animal of royalty, and the place bears the lion’s name. The plan is the cosmic mountain: water at the base, a stair of trials up the face, a seat in the sky. The axis runs from the western gardens to the rock as from the world to its centre. These bear load: remove the lion and the ascent is a stair; remove the axis and the gardens are a park. What holds it is loss and dispute: the lion’s head and body and the summit are gone, and the particular programme is contested, not legible.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The myth is partly built. Birth governs the design from first to last: the crew rise from white pods like a brood waking; the computer is called Mother; the derelict is entered by openings shaped like bodies; the creature is born from a man’s chest at a family table; and Ripley, last, carries the cat out. The monster in the labyrinth, with Dallas in the ducts and the ship a maze, the haunted house moved to space, and the lone survivor who faces the thing at the end bear weight in the plot rather than lying over it as allusion. Held below the gate because much of the archetype is the design’s, Giger’s, more than the drama’s, and because the myth is evoked through image more than worked through character: Ripley is an archetype by survival more than by any arc the film builds.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The myth is built in part and evoked in part. Built: the siren, a woman who draws men down to drown in black water, is the literal mechanism of the first hour, not a figure laid over it; and the visitor who takes a human form, learns pity and is destroyed by those she has learned to pity is the spine of the whole. The skin worn and shed, in a film made in Scotland, sits close to the selkie, uncited and unneeded. The woman alone in the forest, met by a woodsman, is the oldest matter of fairy tale, played without consolation. Held a tenth below the gate: with no name, history or world of origin, the archetype stands by abstraction more than by a particular grown into it.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The myth is built more than evoked. The wanderer comes out of the wilderness speechless, is taken in, recovers speech and a son, finds the lost wife and goes back out: the return of Odysseus without the homecoming, and The Searchers (1956) inverted, since Ford’s hero restores a child to a family he cannot enter, and Travis restores a child to its mother and drives into the dark. The origin is load-bearing: a vacant lot in Paris, Texas, bought as the place of his own conception, an empty patch of ground in a photograph carried as the ground of the self. Held below the bar because much of the archetype is borrowed from the western, and a German director’s America of motels and billboards sometimes leans toward the figure of America rather than the place.
Wang Xianchen; Wen Zhengming (attributed design) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not quoted. The garden is a world of mountain and water, shanshui, in small: the islands in the central pond carry the old pattern of the isles of the immortals in the eastern sea, rock and earth stand as mountain, and the water joins the whole as rivers join the land. The scholar’s return to the fields, Tao Yuanming’s myth, is built into the name of the eastern part and into the whole as retreat. The moon gate and the narrow passage that opens on a wider world, the cave heaven of the Daoist tradition, are thresholds embodied in the plan. What holds the figure below the gate is that this is the shared language of the Suzhou gardens, given here at its fullest rather than made new, and part of it lives in inscriptions.
Joseon builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The plan makes the dynasty a line in space: a row of houses for the dead that lengthens as time passes, so that the building is a genealogy one can walk beside. The spirit path is a threshold made literal, a road through the court on which no living person walks, for those who come from elsewhere to the rite. The south gate belongs to the spirits; the living enter from the side. The terrace is the ground between the living and the ancestors. The house of the dead, the road of the spirits and the line of descent are carried by the plan itself. Held a tenth below the gate because this is the myth of a house and its line, built with great exactness, not of heaven and earth.
Thomas Carlyle · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked. The governing figure, the universe as the garment of God, is taken from the Earth-Spirit’s song in Faust and made the load-bearing structure of the book: the body is the soul’s clothing, society is clothing, the text is clothing on its German original, and the book itself is the old suit retailored. Book II builds the pattern of conversion, descent, death of self and rebirth, as the spine of a life, in three named stations that later readers took as a map of their own crises. The foundling of unknown origin, the wandering exile, the Phoenix reborn from its ash, a devil’s name (Teufelsdröckh, devil’s dung) on a prophet: all particular, all bearing weight. Held below the gate because the figures are expounded more than enacted; the myth lives in argument rather than story.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, not evoked. The straight south wall runs on the east and west line of the equinox sun, the dividing wall on the meridian, and the house is split into halves round a central court; that the halves answer to a dual organisation of the Pueblo world is an interpretation. The round kiva, sunk in the earth and entered from above, carries the pattern of emergence from below that Pueblo tradition still names, and the great kivas give it public scale. The half circle closed by a straight line joins the sky’s path to the earth’s quarters. Held a tenth below the gate because the specific meanings are reconstructed from later Pueblo practice and from alignment studies, some of them disputed.
David Cronenberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not cited. Its structure is initiation through possession: a man who sells images seeks a forbidden one, is entered by it, dies to the old flesh, and is told by a woman on a screen that his death is a rebirth. “The new flesh” is load-bearing, since the last scene is a ritual suicide framed as transfiguration. The dead prophet who speaks only through recordings, his daughter keeping the tapes as a priesthood keeps scripture, is the oracle made new by a cassette library. Nicki is siren and psychopomp at once, and the wound in the man’s belly turns the sexual archetype over. The particular stays particular. Held a tenth below the bar by the programmed assassin of the fourth movement, a genre borrowing rather than built myth.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth is the subject, and it is built in the structure, not only labelled. The forest is the archetypal place of origin and of ambush; the path into it is the road with no return, and the picture sets the viewer on it facing the dark, in the place of the army that did not come back. The names in the branches make the trees a family tree, the nation’s genealogy grown out of the wood, and the blood on the ground is the sacrifice it stands on. Path, tree and blood carry the composition. The particular stays particular: a real battle, a real commander whose name is the title, a winter wood. Held below the gate because much of the charge arrives through writing: a viewer who cannot read the names receives the forest and the blood, not the myth’s second half.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is present in the thing itself rather than alluded to: the sea monster, the devourer, Leviathan, the death with teeth. It is not a picture of a shark; it is a shark, and the archetype comes with the body. The vitrine adds a second pattern, the reliquary and the coffin with a window, the dead kept for veneration; and a third, the museum’s cabinet of specimens, which turns the monster into knowledge. These are built into the configuration. What holds the axis below the gate: the myth is not elaborated beyond the presence of the animal; nothing in the arrangement makes the monster’s story load-bearing; and much of its archetypal charge in 1991 came from the cinema, from the shark film of 1975, rather than from anything the work constructs. Built in the body and the box, evoked everywhere else.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and the structure carries it: paradise and its loss. The dreams are an Eden of water, light, apples and the mother; the waking world is a flooded underworld of swamp, black water and burnt trees, and a river crossed by night to a far bank where the dead are hung. The well, the oldest of images, the star in the depth and the mother at its lip, becomes the place of her murder. The black tree at the end of the beach is death standing in the garden. The particular stays particular: a knife, a tin of food, a bucket. Held below the top because the Dürer Apocalypse and the ruined church are partly cited rather than built, and one myth is carried by four dreams.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth is built, and the sequence carries it. My Hometown builds the generations: a father sets his son at the wheel to show him the town, and at the end the son, now a father, is about to do the same as the town dies; the inheritance is ruin. The title track builds a birthright inverted: the phrase of national belonging becomes a curse sung by the disinherited son, his “dead man’s town” a land of the dead. Between them the record descends from Khe Sanh to the hometown. Around these, archetypes are evoked: the chain gang, the downward train, the companion who leaves. Much of it is rock’s own mythology of cars, towns and escape, used rather than remade.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and load-bearing. Tanit and Moloch, the moon and the sun, divide the book: Salammbô is the moon goddess’s virgin, kept by the eunuch Schahabarim, and Mâtho, the barbarian who steals the goddess’s veil, is drawn to her as to the goddess herself. The zaïmph is the hinge of every turn, and touching it is the fault the last sentence names. The rain that answers the children’s burning makes the Moloch myth true inside the book. The particular stays particular: Salammbô is a girl with a nurse, Taanach, and a father who suspects her. Held a tenth below the gate because the archetypes are made of attributes more than of persons: the figures are hieratic by design, and Mâtho and Salammbô do not carry the myth from within. The Carthaginian religion is also a construction of 1860, in part borrowed from other Semitic cults, which keeps the myth partly a set.
Franz Marc · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is the end of the world, and it is built, not alluded to: the composition is the cataclysm, every plane a fragment of a breaking cosmos. Two patterns inside it bear load. The innocent sacrificed: the deer at the centre, offering its throat to the falling tree, takes the place the lamb holds, the creature that suffers for no fault of its own. And the fall of the world tree: trunks break across the field, and the forest that was shelter becomes the instrument. The particular is kept; these are animals painted as animals, not emblems. Held below the gate because the archetype is the most general one, apocalypse as such, built by fragmentation rather than by a structure with a story or a turn in it: all event and no aftermath.
John Ford · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and Exodus bears load. A people driven from a land that was theirs by labour cross a desert toward a promised land that proves another Egypt, and the elders die in the wilderness, Grampa before the crossing and Granma during it. The family’s movement is the myth’s movement. Casy, the preacher who has lost the call, with the initials J.C., dies for the strikers and meets his killer with a forgiveness; Tom becomes his apostle, going out into the dark to be everywhere; Ma is the hearth the road cannot put out. The film realizes this in image: the truck against the sky, the family as one silhouette. Held below the bar because the myth is in part stated, and the allegory sometimes shows too plainly.
Roman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth here is built, not evoked, and built into the structure. The breastplate is a cosmology: the sky at the top, the earth at the bottom, the sun and the dawn moving across, Apollo and Diana at either side, and at the centre one historical transaction of 20 BC. The archetypal order bears load: it is the frame that makes the event mean. The Cupid makes the Julian descent from Venus a physical support of the man. The bare feet, the heroic body beneath the armour and the general’s gesture lay the god, the hero and the magistrate on one body, and the particular stays particular: a Parthian’s trousers, a real eagle, a recognisable face. Held below the gate because the archetype is the state’s: a cosmic emblem built for a purpose more than an archetype lived through a human particular.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is the double, and it is built, not cited: the whole film is two halves for two women, one dying so that the other lives. The Romantic doppelgänger, in Hoffmann, Poe and Dostoevsky’s The Double, is a figure of dread whose meeting is death; here the double is a guardian whose death is a warning, which is the older matter of the shared soul and the twin who dies for the twin. A second myth is enacted inside the film: the puppeteer as maker of lives, who stages a death and a winged rising, and who at the end shows Véronique two identical marionettes of herself, one kept because handling wears them out. The particular stays particular: a Kraków choir, a French schoolroom, a cassette tape. What holds it below the bar is the withholding. The myth is left deliberately unarticulated, and the metaphysics, load-bearing for the structure, is never given a body as the told myth of a tree or a temple would be; a myth withheld by design is harder to call built.
Guillermo del Toro · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Built, not evoked: the fairy tale is the plot. The lost princess who must prove she has not become mortal; three trials; the descent into the earth; the forbidden feast; the guardian who is helper and tempter at once, so that the Faun’s goat body carries both Pan and the devil; the devourer of children at the head of his table, drawn from Goya’s Saturn; the cruel stepfather and the dying mother; and the blood of an innocent demanded and refused, which inverts the sacrifice of Isaac, since the child is the one who will not raise the knife. Vidal carries his own myth, his father’s broken watch. A tenth short of the gate: the sources show (Carroll, Goya, Machen, the Grimms), and Vidal’s myth is a single stroke.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth built, not only evoked. The structure is the quest: a plea, a champion armed, a passage through monsters, and a paradise reached through art and union, with the visitor’s walk made the journey itself. The monster is the Typhon of Hesiod, father of monsters, with his Gorgon daughters; the end is Schiller’s Elysium. These bear the load: take the quest away and the walls fall into decoration. The particular holds, the Gorgons Viennese women with modern hair, the suppliants thin naked people and not types of antiquity. Held a tenth below the gate: the knight, who should carry the quest, does not appear after the first wall, so the myth’s middle is a tableau the champion never enters, and the last field resolves the quest by changing the subject, from struggle to embrace.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it bears the plot. Cassandra is named in Railly’s lecture and then enacted: the man who sees the end cannot be believed, and is shut up as mad. Beneath it lies the older shape of the oracle that cannot be escaped: each step Cole takes to prevent the catastrophe draws him to the place of his own death, and the boy who witnesses that death becomes the man sent to die there, a closed loop of fate with no first cause, load-bearing from the first frame to the last. The descent to the underworld is turned over: the dead live below, and the surface belongs to animals. The particular stays particular. The limit stands: the loop is Marker’s, named in the film’s own credit.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built and bear load. The cave: a dark interior hollowed from a mass. The tent and the hermit’s hut: the leaning trunks that made the room and whose imprint is its wall. The hearth and the fire: the room was formed by burning, in the manner of the charcoal pile once common in such country. The axis to heaven: one opening at the top, the world below dark and the light above. The tower in the field: a solitary sign of the sacred in worked land. These are not allusions laid on a form; the process enacted them, so that fire, forest and cave are the substance of the room. The particular stays particular: this field, this saint, this timber and gravel. Held below the bar because the opening and the cave are inherited figures, built here with rare literalness rather than first found, and the myth is of one kind, solitary.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The betrayal of the friend by the friend who loves him is load-bearing: the whole construction converges on the hallway, and the car journey is built as a road to the sacrifice. Frank stands between two fathers, Russell the quiet one and Hoffa the loud one, and must kill one for the other; the pattern of Judas is there without allusion, built rather than named. The confession frame and the priest make the Catholic structure of sin and absolution part of the architecture, and the absolution fails. Peggy, the silent child who will not love the father, has the shape of Cordelia. What holds the axis below the gate is that the archetype is built but narrow. The film makes one man’s fall the pattern of every obedient servant, not a figure who grows larger than himself as Kane or Michael Corleone does. Frank is deliberately small, and the figure records the choice.
John Barth · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth built, in a parodic key, and the plot bears it. The hero is the holy fool on a quest, Parzival, Candide and Don Quixote at once, an innocent sent into a wasteland he means to praise, and his fall from innocence is the action. Burlingame is Proteus, the trickster who wears every face, and his search for a father ends in the forest among the Indians, an ancestry found. The twins are the divided androgyne, and Burlingame’s desire for both of them, and for everything, is the book’s figure of a lover of the whole world. The national myth is load-bearing: the deflowering of Pocahontas, retold from Smith’s own vainglory, is the hinge of Burlingame’s descent and so of the plot. Held below the bar by the key: every pattern is built in order to be travestied, so the myth is raised and disarmed at once, and its bearers are types more than particulars.
Henry Bacon · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not only evoked. The temple housing the image is the oldest form of the shrine, and here it is literal: a cella made for a seated figure, an inscription naming it a temple. The plan carries an apotheosis, the ascent from the water to the podium to the presence. The site builds a second myth into the city, an axis from the legislature through the obelisk to the shrine of the man who saved the Union, and the state names make the body politic the colonnade. It stays particular. Held below the gate: the archetype is taken whole from the Greek temple and stated rather than renewed, and its deepest charge rests on the unscored figure.
Greek colonists of Poseidonia · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The temple is the archetype of the god’s house, raised on a stepped platform above the ground of men. The porch is the threshold from the open to the enclosed; the cella is the dark interior where the image dwelt; the colonnade is a grove of stone trunks round a sacred centre. The axis runs east from altar to door to image, a line of approach and sacrifice. In the Doric order the myth of origin bears load too: the triglyph remembers the beam end and the mutule the rafter, so the stone carries the memory of a timber house. Held a tenth below the bar: the archetype is the type’s, built here fully and purely but not deepened, as the Pantheon (9.3) deepens the temple into a cosmos.
Qing builders, under the Qianlong Emperor; rebuilt under Cixi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Archetype built into the plan, not only evoked. The lake with its islands is the old imperial pattern of one pond and three hills, the isles of the immortals set in a sea, which Chinese emperors had built into their gardens since the Han; here it governs the whole lake. Longevity Hill crowned by a Buddhist tower is the world-mountain at the centre, and on the back hill the Tibetan-style temples build the Buddhist cosmos in plan, Mount Sumeru with the continents round it. The garden as the world in small is load-bearing: it is why the copied scenes are there. The particular stays particular: this lake, this hill, a reservoir, a birthday. Held below the gate because the pattern is inherited and quoted rather than made anew, and the back-hill cosmos is largely reconstruction.
Henry Fuseli · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Here myth is built, not merely summoned. The folk belief of the mara or night hag, the demon that sits on the sleeper’s chest, is the structure of the picture: the incubus sits where the belief says it sits, and the woman’s posture is the belief’s symptom. The pun of the title is made literal and load-bearing: the mare enters as a horse, so that a word’s buried myth is turned into a figure. The particular stays particular: one young woman, one fashionable bed, one night. Two things hold the axis below the gate. The archetype is a folk demon’s, not a structure of fate or the sacred, and its depth is a single visitation’s; and the biography sometimes read into the incubus is brought to the canvas, not built in it.
James Cameron · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it carries the plot. Its structure is an annunciation: a messenger arrives from the future to tell a woman that she will bear a saviour, and in the motel he becomes the child’s father. The son has sent his own father back to make him, a loop with no origin outside it, and the motel exists because the myth requires it. The adversary is death made walking, a figure that cannot be reasoned with or stopped, the golem and Frankenstein’s creature made efficient. The particular stays particular: a waitress, a roommate, a cheap motel. The initials John Connor shares with the Christian saviour are allusion and are not what is scored. What holds the axis just below the gate: the annunciation is legible rather than deepened, and the myth carries the frame without an inner life of its own.
Thai builders, under Rama II and Rama III · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked. The prang is Mount Meru as structure: the axis of the world in a solid mass, its terraces the levels of the heavens, the four corner prangs the quarters of the world, the whole set on the cardinal directions. The bearers at the base hold up the cosmic mountain as literally as masonry allows; Indra on Erawan sits at the summit where the cosmology places him; the climb is the ascent of the mountain, made with the legs. The particular stays particular: this river, this dynasty, this name of dawn, these broken plates. Held below the top because the archetype is inherited whole from the Khmer and Ayutthaya prang, itself Meru: the building enlarges and perfects a built myth rather than first building it.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth built, in one figure above all. Chigurh bears the book as death and as fate: he cannot be bought or reasoned with, keeps his word to the dead, and leaves a choice to a coin that he holds is not chance but the shape of a life’s path arriving at that moment. The book will not let him be only a symbol. He bleeds, steals drugs from a pharmacy, cleans his own wound, and walks away from a car crash with a bone through his arm. The second built myth is the father carrying fire, the elder going before into the dark to make a light. The title from Yeats sets the frame, the old men whose country this is not, and Moss is the hunter who takes what was not his and is hunted for it, a plain archetype carried without allusion. Held below the bar because the archetypal weight rests on Chigurh and the final dream, and Bell’s lament, the other half of the book, is more elegy than myth.
Francisco de Zurbarán · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is load-bearing: the sacrificial lamb is the whole picture, and nothing in it is allusion or atmosphere. Behind it stand the Passover lamb, the ram caught for Isaac, Isaiah’s lamb led to the slaughter that does not open its mouth, and the Lamb of John’s gospel and of the Apocalypse, and the canvas carries all of them by presenting one animal. The archetype is built out of the particular, one lamb, these hooves, this cord, this ledge, and the particular stays particular. What holds it a tenth below the gate: the archetype is inherited complete from the tradition and its texts; the picture constructs the encounter with it, not its structure, and it holds one archetypal figure, not several in relation.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth built, and much of it load-bearing. The spine is the quest there and back again, with a descent under the mountain where the hero gains a power in the dark from a creature of the dark. The dragon on the hoard, roused by the theft of a cup and ravaging the country of men, is the last part of Beowulf taken into the plot as its engine, not as allusion. The riddle contest for one’s life comes from the Old Norse, the names of the dwarves and of Gandalf from the dwarf-list of the Völuspá. The ring holds Gollum and the hoard holds Thorin: the dragon-sickness is enacted by the people of the book. And the hobbit has become an archetype of his own, the small comfortable person as hero. Held below the bar: Bard is a dragon-slayer by function more than by person, the other dwarves bear no pattern, and the light register keeps much of the deep pattern implicit.
Tibetan, under Songtsen Gampo · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built, and at more than one scale. The temple is the centre round which one turns, the axis of the world made walkable: three circuits nested in plan, the Nangkor within the walls, the Barkhor round them and the Lingkhor round the old city, so that the deep pattern bears load in the building and the city at once. The founding story builds a second myth into the site: Tibet as a supine demoness pinned by temples at her limbs, the Jokhang set over her heart on a lake filled in, the temple founded as the act that subdues and converts a land. Held short of the top because circuit and mandala are inherited figures of Buddhist building, and the demoness lives in what is told of the site more than in what the plan shows.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Here the book’s invention is strongest, because Borges builds myths rather than borrowing them. The book of sand is a made archetype, a Bible without a first page sold by a Bible-seller, and it has passed into common use as the figure of the infinite text. The one-sided disc of Odin in “El disco”, owned by a king in rags and sought in vain by his killer, is a fable of the sacred object no one can hold. “Undr” and “El espejo y la máscara” build one pattern on Norse and Irish ground: the poem that is a single word, the poem that is the end of poetry. “El otro” builds the double from Borges himself, and the myth bears weight. Held below the gate because several of these are variations on one figure, and some, Sigurd and Brynhild in “Ulrikke”, the house of “There Are More Things”, are evoked more than built.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Here the distinction between myth evoked and myth built works in the figure’s favour more than for most works. The archetype, the body of the mother and of plenty, is not summoned by allusion; it is made by selection, by the carver’s choice to give the stone to breasts, belly and vulva and to withhold the face and the feet. The pattern bears load in the literal sense: it is the form. And the particular remains particular: this woman wears bracelets, has her hair dressed or capped in rows, and carries a weight seen from life, not a schema. Held below the gate because what the archetype meant to its makers cannot be known, and the names it now carries, Great Mother and goddess among them, are later constructions. The build is certain; its content is not.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and its form is the Passion: a summons, the oath refused, temptations offered by priests and by the powers, the village’s betrayal, imprisonment and mockery, a judge who would be absolved of what he is about to do, and an execution at which the sky does not change. Under it lies the older pattern of a garden before the fall, the valley of the first hour, with labour as worship and the call-up as expulsion; and beside it the faithful wife who keeps the field while her husband goes to his death. The particular stays particular: a scythe, a bicycle, the bread, the letters, a sister who resents the house she lives in. Held below the gate because a martyr’s life is a Passion before any film makes it one, and the painter’s frescoes and the crucifixes in shot point at the pattern rather than build it.
Jules Verne · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth built more than summoned, and the myth outlived its making. Nemo’s name is Latin for “no one”, the name Odysseus gives the Cyclops; the man without a country, a name or a law, sovereign under the sea, at war with the nations, merciful and murderous, is load-bearing here, and he became an archetype of the modern imagination, the scientist outlaw in his machine. The Nautilus is built as ark, library, home and tomb, a salon of art and books carried under the sea. The descent is the old descent to the underworld, made literal: the cemetery, the drowned city, the ice as a sealed grave. The motto, “Mobilis in mobili”
“moving in the moving element”, fixes it. The charge is that much of the mythic matter is evoked as a station: Atlantis is visited and left, the Pole is planted and left. The figure and the vessel are built; the stations are evoked.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built in the hero more than in the plot. Zorba is the Dionysian man set against the Apollonian and Buddhist one: the old Greek of appetite and dance, a Sinbad who fought in the Macedonian wars, has loved in every port and faces God as an equal. He has passed out of the book into a type, a name for a way of living, as few characters in the modern novel have done. The pairing of master and disciple is load-bearing and shapes the whole action. Hortense, whom Zorba calls “Μπουμπουλίνα”, Bouboulina, after the heroine of 1821, is myth folded into comedy and history at once; the cable that collapses at its blessing reads as a failed rite. Held below the top because the archetype is glossed as it is built: the narrator interprets Zorba constantly, and the myth arrives already explained.
Arnold Böcklin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The work’s strongest deep axis. The archetype is the crossing of the water to the land of the dead, Charon and the Styx, the isle of the blessed, Avalon, the barge of the dead, and it is built, not alluded to. The whole structure is the crossing: boat, ferryman, passenger, the dead, the shore, the dark interior. No attribute of Charon is shown, no coin, no classical costume; the archetype stands because the composition is the myth’s own plan. Two things hold it below the gate. The particular is weak: the island is no place, the figures have no faces, the dead has no name, so the archetype is reached partly by giving up particularity. And the myth is static, one moment of it, the approach.
Joe Rosenthal · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The image’s strongest deep axis, and the myth is built, not evoked. The raising of a standard on a summit is among the oldest of emblems: the sign planted at the high place, the mountain taken. The image builds it from particulars. The pole is a length of salvaged pipe; the men are faceless; their bodies fuse into one creature with twelve limbs; and the faceless collective is what makes the archetype bear load, a people lifting its sign rather than six named men. The diagonal surge has the structure of the old heroic groups without quoting a pose. What holds it under the top: the myth is national and martial before it is human, and much of the charge it carries was laid on it afterward, by the bronze, the bond drive and the stamp.
George Lucas · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The myth is built, not cited, and it bears the whole load. The structure is the hero’s journey as Joseph Campbell set it out: the orphan on the edge of the world; the call, in a message from a captive princess; the refusal, since he is needed for the harvest; the mentor with the father’s weapon; the threshold at the spaceport; the descent into the belly of the beast; the mentor’s death and the voice that remains; the ordeal, the boon and the crowning. The dark father is planted, Vader as the man who killed Luke’s father by Kenobi’s account, and left for later, and the Force makes an animism of the whole. What holds the axis a tenth below the gate bar is the particular: the farm boy, the rogue, the princess, the old knight and the black knight are types from the start, and gain archetypal weight without first being particular people.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
The myth is built, not evoked, and argued from the stories rather than from the fame. The reasoner is the knight-errant of the modern city, who reads a man’s history off his hat and so restores the hidden order; the companion narrates what he admires and cannot do; the rooms in Baker Street are the threshold every client crosses. Older patterns bear weight in the plots: “The Speckled Band” is an ogre’s house with a stepfather and a girl to be saved, “The Copper Beeches” Bluebeard’s locked wing, with a governess who must not look. “A Scandal in Bohemia” gives the hero his one adversary of equal wit and makes her “the woman”. Held a tenth under the gate: the figure was founded in two earlier novels, and Holmes is rarely changed by the myth he carries; he is an emblem more than a fate.
John Barth · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
Myth built, and built as completely as any novel has built it: the hero’s life as Lord Raglan and Joseph Campbell set it out is the plot, stage by stage. A birth surrounded by mystery; a childhood among beasts; a summons and a list of impossible tasks; a guide, Max Spielman; a shadow, Harold Bray, the false Grand Tutor who mirrors George at every step; a descent into the belly of the monster; a sacred marriage; a return with a teaching; and, in the Posttape, the hero’s decline and foreseen death. Oedipus is built in as well as quoted, for George is a foundling seeking his own parentage. The structure bears the whole weight. It stops short of the bar because the particular does not stay particular: the figures exist to bear the pattern, and the parody that builds the myth holds it at arm’s length.
Terry Gilliam · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The myth is built, not evoked, and it bears the plot. The legend Parry tells, the king wounded by his own vision of the Grail and healed when a fool who does not know him gives him water from the cup he could not see, is the structure of the film, and it runs both ways. Jack is the wounded king, made sick by pride and power, and Parry the fool who saves him under the bridge. Then the roles turn at the midpoint: Parry is the wounded king, and Jack, an unbeliever, becomes the fool who brings him the cup from a billionaire’s castle in Manhattan. The particular stays particular: a video store in a side street, a boiler room, a dumpling dinner, a townhouse with a turret. Held below the gate because the myth is told aloud and named in the title, and the dime-store cup lightens the descent.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The particular is kept: a merchant’s wife of about twenty-four, in the dress of a Florentine woman of her station. The archetype is in the structure: the human being as a small world set before the great one, the figure rising as a mountain rises, the land behind her passing from uninhabited heights of rock and water toward the road and the bridge of human use, so that she sits where the world of water and rock becomes the world of people. That relation is built into the composition, not alluded to. But the gate asks for construction that bears the work, and much of the mythic weight the panel carries was brought to it: the eternal feminine, the sphinx, Pater’s woman “older than the rocks among which she sits” (The Renaissance, 1873). Built in the figure and the land; the rest evoked by its interpreters.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present, and partly built. The household as a sacred place is built: the Passion is set round the mirror that holds the whole room, so the domestic interior is framed by the life of Christ, and a carved holy figure on the chairback stands at the couple’s side. The joined hands and the witnesses in the mirror are the old form of a vow made before others. But much of the deeper meaning is brought to the panel rather than carried by it. The reading of candle, dog, fruit and shoes as a programme of sacraments is contested, and the panel does not compel it. The particulars stay particular: a furred tabard, a terrier, an imported orange. Myth built at the mirror, evoked in the room.
Machado de Assis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Two structures are built rather than evoked. The dead narrator is one, a dead man who has become an author, for whom the grave was a second cradle: speech from beyond the grave, freed of shame, is an old figure, and here it carries the whole book. The delirium is the other: Nature as Pandora, the procession of the ages, the man returned to the origin and shown that it is indifferent to him. Beside them, the plaster against hypochondria is a small Faustian ambition gone comic, and Humanitism a parody system for a century of systems. But the particular, a Rio heir of the 1840s, stays more type than archetype, a figure of a class more than of humankind; the deep is reached in a frame and a chapter, not through the body of the action. The Epochal Gate fails here.
Claude Debussy · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The archetype is present and partly built. The first sketch is a day, from dawn to noon, and the sea before light is an image of origin made in sound, not by reference. The third is a struggle of elements, wind against water, and its close brings back the first sketch’s chorale, so that the work is shaped as genesis, play and strife, a cosmogony in three panels. That much bears weight. What holds it down is the particular. The sea here is no sea in particular, no figure is present and no act is done; the archetype is the sea itself, a universal subject, and the work builds its motion more than its myth. Allusion is not the trouble; the absence of a particular for the archetype to inhabit is.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
An archetype can be named, and it bears some weight: the wheel, fate as a ground that turns and cannot be left, and the voices of the variations, a flute and the trombones, speaking over it and carried on. The finale builds this rather than citing it: the ground is the law of the movement, and nothing in the movement escapes it. The church mode of the horn call and the old ground are allusions to the sacred and the past, atmosphere more than structure. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven is the particular, thin as in all wordless music: no person, place or act is in the work, and the fate is the listener’s figure for a formal fact.
John Donne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Part of it is built. The poems make a myth of love as a religion with its own saints and relics, and carry it through. “The Canonization” ends with the lovers invoked by later lovers as saints; “The Relic” foresees the lovers’ bones dug up and worshipped where “mis-devotion doth command”; “The Funeral” makes the hair a relic; and the “Nocturnal” makes a dead woman the saint of the shortest day. “The Good-Morrow” and “The Sun Rising” build the lovers as a microcosm, two hemispheres, one world, and the phoenix of “The Canonization”, “we two being one, are it”, bears weight in that poem. What holds the axis below 8.5 is that the deep patterns arrive as conceits, figures turned for an argument and then put down, and few stand free of the poem: the compasses are remembered as a figure, not as a myth. The lovers are a type, never particular persons with a story, and the particular is too thin to take on archetypal weight.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Part of the myth is built. The household worships a false god: twenty-five years of rents sent to the professor in town, the mother’s reverence for his pamphlets, and the god revealed as an ordinary man. The servant who finds the idol empty, fires at it and misses is a figure of real archetypal force, and the miss is the myth’s modern turn. The forest spirit of the earlier play’s title is drawn down into a district doctor with maps, a conservationist who drinks. Yelena is the idle beauty who unsettles every man in the house and leaves it unchanged. Held below the gate because the realist surface keeps the archetype implicit almost everywhere, Yelena’s figure is more evoked than built, and no single image carries the pattern as load, as the orchard does in the later play.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built into the plan, not applied to it. The podium: a raised floor mounted by steps, the temple’s stylobate with Schinkel behind it, a temple with no cella and no front. The enclosed garden: a court open to the sky, walled in green stone, holding water and one figure, where the route ends. The throne room: two chairs made for a king and a queen, before the gold wall. The labyrinth: a route of turning planes with no door and no room. The particular stays particular, a republic’s reception in May 1929. What holds the axis below the bar is depth. The further readings, Narcissus at the pool among them, are the critics’ and are not credited; the building’s depth is perceptual, in reflection and doubled symmetry; and the archetypes built are small, podium, court and throne, with no axis of heaven and earth, no death and no cosmos.
Franz Liszt · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The rubric’s distinction is myth evoked against myth built, and one figure here is built and bears weight: the adversary and the beloved are one, the menacing motif becoming the lyrical one, and the work passes from a fall, the descending scales, through struggle and love to a quiet end that returns to its beginning. That shape is in the notes. Its naming is not. Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles, or the Fall, are readings the work permits and does not compel; Liszt wrote no programme, and built the Faust triad with persons and titles only in the Faust Symphony. The particular is strong, the low repeated G’s and the hammered bass, but no person, place or act is named.
Anton Bruckner · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
A structure that bears weight is there: death announced, faced and transcended. The first movement ends in the death clock; the Finale ends in an apotheosis that gathers the whole work into one sound; the arc is built into the score by the changes of 1890, not merely evoked. But the figures that would make it archetypal while particular are supplied mostly in words outside the notes: the deutscher Michel of the Scherzo, the emperors of the Finale, the annunciation of death. Without the composer’s letter a listener hears a scherzo and a march. The arc from death to transfiguration is a familiar pattern carried to a vast scale, not a new figure. Myth built in outline, figured by commentary: below the gate, narrowly.
Catullus · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built, not merely evoked, in three places. In 64 the happy marriage of Peleus and Thetis encloses the abandonment of Ariadne by Theseus, and the Fates’ song at the wedding foretells Achilles’ slaughter; the close says the gods no longer visit a corrupted mankind, so that the archetypal frame carries the poem’s argument about broken faith. In 68 the bride Laodamia, whose husband died at Troy, is laid over Lesbia arriving at a borrowed house, and Troy over the brother’s grave. In 63 a devotee’s self-mutilation and waking regret make an archetype of possession particular. Lesbia herself becomes a figure. But in most of the body myth is ornament or absent, and the book is weighed whole: 63, 64 and 68 lift the axis to 8.3, short of the Epochal Gate.
Pablo Neruda · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The first volume is notably anti-mythic. It refuses the inherited mythologies, Christian and classical, and the archetypes it touches, the sea, the descent, the widow’s lament, the ghost ship, arise as atmosphere and recurring image rather than as a structure. “El fantasma del buque de carga” makes a freighter a haunted underworld, and “Tango del viudo” gives the lost beloved a demon’s force, “Oh Maligna”, O Evil One; but these are myth evoked. What is built is a cosmogony of matter in reverse: a world returning to water, ash, wood and salt, in which the self is buried and then, in the material songs, reborn by entering it. “Entrada a la madera” is a true descent rite, and “Estatuto del vino” a festal one. The arc bears the book’s weight; it does not govern every poem, and that is what holds the axis below the gate.
Marvin Gaye · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked richly and built in part. The built frame is the return: a soldier comes home to a land he cannot recognise, the old pattern of the homecoming to a house changed in the son’s absence, made particular in What’s Happening Brother by a man asking after the corner and the ball game and finding no work. The second frame is the prophet’s lament: the voice addresses mother, father, brother as a prophet addresses his people, and the sequence passes from witness through creed and hymn to the holler of the close. What holds the axis below the gate: the homecoming is carried by one song more than by the sequence, the figures of side two are evoked rather than built, and the prophet is a stance of the voice more than a figure.
The Smiths · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built inside two songs, and one of them sets the ground for the rest. The title track builds it: the queen is dead, the nation is her corpse, and the speaker wanders it as exile and housebreaker, entering the palace with a “rusty spanner”. The particular stays particular, down to the pub and the palace bedroom, while the figure stands for a whole order’s afterlife, and the dead England it buries is the country the vicar, the employer and the graveyard of the later songs belong to. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” builds the Liebestod inside a car on an ordinary night. Held below the summit: Joan of Arc is evoked for a joke, and the dead queen at the opening and the light near the close make a pair the record never builds into a passage.
Charles Mingus · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Part of the archetypal is built. The dance of the one and the many is not an allusion: it is the plan of the record, declared by every title and carried by the music, in which the solo voice steps out of the group and is taken back. The saint and the sinner in one figure is an old pattern, the divided soul, and the record gives it a sound, the same theme played as a hymn and as a howl. The lament inherited from the blues and the church runs under all of it. Held below the gate: the ballet’s figures, the black saint, the sinner lady, the dancers, are named and never particularised; the passion and the battle front are summoned by titles more than built by the music; and on side two the archetype stays nearer to atmosphere.
W. G. Sebald · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present: the foundling raised under another name who learns his true one, the son’s search for the lost mother and father, the descent into an underworld whose gates are railway stations, the Welsh Calvinist manse as a house of the dead. The name itself carries a battle and the Paris station named for it. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is that the myths are evoked more than built. The search is not structured as a quest with its ordeals; the father is not found; the mother is a face in a slowed film; and the book’s own skepticism of pattern keeps the archetype at the level of resonance. The particular is everything here, which is the book’s ethic, and the ethic costs the axis: the deep pattern is present as atmosphere and correspondence, and load-bearing only in the foundling’s discovery of his name.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is the lost paradise: a childhood on the estates at Vyra and Rozhdestveno told as an Eden from which history expels the family, and remade by Mnemosyne, whom the title summons. The pattern is load-bearing: the book is the return. The father’s levitation and death, the butterfly as soul, the spiral (“The spiral is a spiritualized circle”) are built, not dropped in. What holds the axis below the gate is that the myth stays private, the myth of one gifted consciousness, and that the book refuses the collective myth its material offered, the Revolution and the exile as a people’s fate, out of its narrator’s disdain for general ideas. The archetypal is reached in the father and the paradise and evoked elsewhere.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into plan and structure, not evoked. The triumphal arch is the governing unit and it bears load: the front is an arch, the porch is that arch made deep, and every bay of the nave is an arch flanked by lesser ones. The archetype is the triumph, the procession through the gate of victory, and here it leads to the blood of Christ, the victory over death, kept in the earth beneath the crossing. The temple front set over the arch joins the god’s house to the conqueror’s gate. The particular stays particular: a marquis’s town church, Mantuan brick, a relic of local legend. Held below the gate because the archetype is a classical vocabulary quoted from Roman ruins more than a cosmos built, and the dome over the relic was another century’s.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, at two levels. The tale is a load-bearing parable: a father’s will, three sons and three coats that will last a lifetime if kept as given, the old pattern of the three heirs, with Boccaccio’s three rings behind it, built into a history of Christianity from the primitive church through Rome to the Reformation. Around it the book builds a cosmology of its own: the clothes philosophy of Section II, in which the universe is a suit of clothes and man “a micro-coat”, and the Aeolists’ wind as first cause, which together make surface and inflation a creation myth for the modern mind. What holds it below the gate is the persons. The brothers are counters; the allegory is decoded rather than lived, the particular never becomes particular enough to carry the archetype, and Martin barely exists.
John Milton · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth here is partly built, not only evoked. The Osiris figure is load-bearing: truth came into the world whole and was hewn in pieces and scattered, so that every search is a gathering of limbs not yet found, and the licenser becomes the one who forbids the gathering. That is the epistemology the speech rests on. The Fall is the second built structure: “out of the rind of one apple tasted” good and evil leapt into the world together, so that knowing good by evil is the human condition after Eden. Adam is made free because “reason is but choosing”. Held below the gate because the myths serve an argument rather than carry a story, and no figure bears the pattern through the whole.
Public Enemy · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is built in two places and evoked across the rest. Black Steel builds it: a conscript refuses the summons, a “letter from the government”, is jailed, and leads a break from the prison with his fellow inmates, the exodus from bondage told as one man’s escape, and the archetype bears the load. The second construction runs the length of the record in its two voices: Chuck D as prophet, grave in warning and judgment, and Flavor Flav as the fool who mocks, interrupts and confirms, call and answer on nearly every track. Around these, archetypes are evoked by title and frame: Armageddon, the prophets, the undead of the baseheads. What holds the axis below the bar is that the apocalyptic frame is announced and not built through the sequence, and most songs argue more than they enact a pattern.
Jane Austen · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is built in one place, and it is the oldest pattern of comedy: two people who misjudge each other, a reversal and a recognition, and a marriage that restores a disordered house. The recognition in chapter 36 is load-bearing in Aristotle’s sense, a passage from ignorance to knowledge that turns the plot. Beneath it lie the story of Cinderella, the second daughter of a falling house raised to Pemberley, and the story of the beast who is not what he seemed; and the house itself is built into the plot, Pemberley the visible form of Darcy’s worth, read by Elizabeth before she can read him. These patterns are structural, not allusive. Held below the summit by depth: the pattern is comedy’s alone, with no death, no sacred order and no fate in it, and Austen keeps it at the level of manners by design.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The western myth is built in order to be taken down, and the taking down is the point. McCabe rides in alone with a rumour attached to him that he is a gunfighter, and the film keeps the question open to the end. The stranger who founds a town, the duel in the main street, the whore with a heart are each set up as patterns and then shown as commerce: the town a business, the duel a company’s collection, the whore a bookkeeper. The founding myth of the frontier is replaced by the arrival of capital, which is a myth too. Held at the figure because the dismantling needs the audience to bring the myth from other films; the archetype is borrowed and corrected rather than built from the film’s own materials.
Naguib Mahfouz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The father is the strongest archetypal figure: the patriarch as household god, feared, loved and double, whose fall from power is the novel’s long movement. For Kamal the father and God stand together as authorities he must outgrow; the household’s Islam and the father’s authority are bound so that losing the one shakes the other. The structure is built as well as evoked: the house, the street names as titles, the sons as divided paths, the sensualist, the martyr and the doubter, and the grandsons as the two faiths of the coming age. Held below the gate because the archetype stays social and historical more than it becomes myth. The deep pattern is generational succession, which the trilogy builds well and which the European family novel had already built. Load-bearing in the father and in Kamal; evoked elsewhere.
Louis Le Vau and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The axis is the archetype made structure: a path from the threshold through the centre of the house to a horizon, falling to water and rising again to a hero on the height, so that the visitor enacts a passage, down to the river and up to Hercules. The salon was to have set the master as the sun at the centre of that line, and the motto on the walls names the ascent. The particular stays particular: this minister, this valley, this river. What holds it short: the solar scheme was never painted, so the centre is an empty dome, and much of the myth (Hercules, the Muses, Apollo) is carried by painting and statue that allude rather than by the plan.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Two archetypes are built into plan and section, not applied. The first is the hearth: the chimney mass stands at the centre of the living floor and is the only thing dividing it, the stair coiled beside it, so that the fire is the core round which the house is laid out. The second is the shelter: the roof a sheltering plane low over the family, the walls given up to glass beneath it, the house drawn down to the ground line and stretched along the horizon. A third, the ascent from a dark threshold to the light, is built into the route. The particular stays particular: this corner, this family, a car in the garage. What holds the axis below the bar is depth: hearth and shelter are archetypes of the house, and the horizon is a prairie’s, in a city that has none.
Luciano Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio Martini · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Archetype built, in part. The city in the form of a palace is load bearing: the courtyard is a forum, the piazza front a civic face, the ramp a road. The Torricini set a triumphal arch stood on end between two towers, the prince’s gate turned outward to the world, and the arch is built, not applied. The studiolo is the mind as a room; below it the two chapels set the Christian God and the Muses side by side as the foundations of the man above. Held below the gate because much of the archetype is carried by fittings and inscriptions, and the irregular plan does not build a cosmos as a centralised work can.
Alain Resnais · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The patterns are deep and partly built. X comes as the stranger who claims the bride, a figure of abduction and of death, to the house of a man who may be the master of the dead: the hotel is an underworld whose guests no longer change, and the lovers’ going out at the end is a crossing from it. The statue of a couple, he holding back, she pointing, read by X as one gesture and by M as a group from myth or history, is a myth built inside the film, a past fixed in stone and argued over. M’s game is the fatal game with the figure who cannot lose. What holds the axis below the gate is that the myths are summoned as atmosphere more than made load-bearing: the underworld is never declared, and the archetypes are kept deliberately unspecific.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth is partly built. The replica of the Parthenon, temple of the first democracy rebuilt in the city that calls itself the Athens of the South, is the setting of the rite that ends the film: a national rally under the flag, a figure in white sacrificed on its steps, a crowd that receives the death and sings. The bicentennial and the assassination, the recurrent American act, make one day in one city stand for the national pattern, and Barbara Jean is the saint of the country audience, its suffering voice made property. The particular stays particular: Haven’s toupee, Opal’s tape recorder, a freeway jam. Held below the bar because much of the charge is evoked through place and allusion, the Kennedys and the Parthenon as found object, rather than built through the action, and the mosaic diffuses the rite until the last ten minutes.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Something old is built here, in the parts. Read through the titles, the cycle has the shape of a passion: the taking (Arrest), the prisoner shown to the authorities (Confrontation), the death and the body laid out (Man Shot Down, foreshortened on the floor like the dead Christ of the old masters), the deposition (Dead, the head after the cord), the entombment (Funeral). Under it runs Antigone: the burial of outlaws against the city, which Stuttgart in the event permitted. The particulars stay particular: a turntable, a bookshelf, a pullover. But how far the structure bears load depends on a sequence that cannot be shown to be fixed, and Richter gives the pattern no sign; it is there for the viewer who brings it. Built in the parts, evoked in the whole.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The myth is built in one strand and evoked in the rest. The fall is built: a man who knows every trick of the trade believes he can cross a line once and walk away, and the line is figured as a trolley ride the lovers take together to the last stop, the cemetery. The confession is built: the whole film is a man telling his sin to his father-confessor, and the confessor is the one person he loved. The fatal woman, the house of death in the sun and the double who takes the dead man’s place on the train are summoned more than constructed, and Phyllis is drawn in the strokes of a type the film helped to fix, not deepened by the structure. The particular stays particular throughout: an anklet, a dictaphone, a box of matches, a pair of crutches.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the structure, not applied. The ridge carried between two free-standing posts is the oldest Japanese sacred roof, the shinmei form of Ise, whose ridge is borne at each end by a free-standing pillar; here two masts carry a ridge of cable and the roof hangs from it, so the shrine’s structure, not its silhouette, is restated in steel. The tent, the first shelter of a gathering, is built literally: a canopy hung from poles and pegged to the ground. The two crescents and the spiral make the whirl of the tomoe, whether or not it was meant. What holds the axis: the crowd’s path is short, in at the tips and round the ring, no threshold carries the archetype, and the shrine and tomoe readings are partly the beholder’s.
Van Morrison · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The record is built on one archetypal frame, and the frame is printed on it: side one is “In the Beginning”, side two “Afterwards”. Side one is a genesis, a longing for rebirth that opens on the title track’s call and passes through the garden of “Sweet Thing” to the boy on Cyprus Avenue. Side two is the after-life of that innocence: the party, the departure, the dancer, the dying. The particular stays particular, Fitzroy Avenue, Cyprus Avenue, a train, a named figure, and Madame George becomes more than a person: a figure at the threshold between childhood and the world, loved and left. What holds the axis below the bar is that the frame is carried by the side titles and the sequence more than built through every song, and around it the mythic is evoked rather than load-bearing.
George Bähr · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Part of the myth is built. A central plan under a dome makes the congregation a world under heaven, the domed centre gathered round its axis; here the axis runs not through a tomb or a relic but through pulpit, altar and organ, the Word at the centre of the world. The dome is a bell over the city, the shape of the call to worship. The archetype is less deeply constructed than in the Pantheon or a Byzantine centre: the dome is image and roof more than a built cosmology, and the theatre plan pulls toward the auditorium rather than the temple.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built in, not evoked. The lover sworn to one woman across a lifetime comes from the courtly tradition and the romance of chivalry: Tristan’s fidelity carried through an ordinary bourgeois life, and Penelope’s wait given to a man, who weaves his affairs while he waits. The river is built into the ending as the passage between life and death, a boat that will go up and down under a plague flag, outside the city and outside time. The bitter almonds, the poisons, the parrot, and the cholera as both history and figure make a set of signs that recur. What holds the axis below the gate is the irony that runs at every step: the faithful lover is a compulsive seducer, the knight is a clerk who rises to own a shipping company. The irony is deliberate, but it keeps the myth at arm’s length, and the book’s people stay particular and comic rather than taking on the weight of the founders and the doomed line of the author’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Built, and well built, but not the deepest.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Here the archetype is built, not quoted. The diptych is the form of the altar wings and the devotional pair; the face repeated in rows is the votive image and the icon, the likeness multiplied for the faithful; the halves are life and death, colour and black, a vanitas laid out as structure. The particular stays particular: one film actress, one publicity still of 1953, the colours of a studio portrait. The archetype carries the work’s single movement, from the gaudy living mask to the fading black ghosts, the passage of the goddess into death. What holds it below the gate: the sacred is present as structure but emptied, the icon as commodity, and the work’s sense is that the archetype no longer holds what it held; and whether the pairing of the panels was the first conception is not settled.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Here the myth is the subject, not an allusion: the whole field is the Golden Age, Arcadia, the bacchanal without Bacchus, the earthly paradise before labour, shame or time. It is built, in that every figure belongs to it and nothing stands outside it: the piper is Pan’s music, the ring the oldest dance, the couple love without consequence, the recliner the nymph asleep. What holds the axis below the gate is that the archetype is not made to bear a new weight. The canvas holds the myth as given, in its traditional parts, and its particular is thin: no one here is anyone, the place is nowhere, and bodies reduced to contour have given up the particularity the archetype needs to keep.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The book’s subject is archetype itself, and it builds as well as evokes. The sphere whose centre is everywhere; the book that contains the world, in “Del culto de los libros”, which ends on Mallarmé’s world that exists to end in a book; the dream that produces a palace in the thirteenth century and a poem in the eighteenth; the nightingale that is the Platonic form of its kind; the map inside the map and the Nights inside the Nights. The essays do not decorate with these figures; they argue through them, and in that sense the myth bears weight. Held below the gate because an essay holds its myth at arm’s length, as a figure examined, where the fictions that share these images make them a world one is inside: the sphere is studied here and inhabited in “El Aleph”.
Jean-François Millet · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Built in part. The particular stays particular: the plain near Barbizon, wheat stubble, cloth headscarves, a harvest of the Second Empire. Behind it stand two patterns. One is Ruth gleaning in the field of Boaz, which Millet had painted in Harvesters Resting a few years before, and which this canvas strips of its story: no Boaz, no reward, the gleaners left in the field. The other is humanity bent to the ground it must work, the sentence on Adam, which the posture builds rather than cites: one body bowed three times. The critics’ Fates are not credited. Held below the gate because Ruth is recovered by the viewer rather than built, and the archetype that is built carries the composition without a structure of its own.
Pérotin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One archetype is built, not evoked, and it bears weight: the eternal held under time. The chant, which in the liturgy is the Word, is stretched into a ground so slow that it stands outside the measured time of the upper voices, while those voices move in strict number above it. At Christmas, the feast of the eternal entering time, that structure is the incarnation as a sound. A second figure is the gathering of the nations, “ante conspectum gentium”
“in the sight of the nations”, into one sonority. Held below the gate because the particular is thin: the melismatic writing names no person or place, the words are barely audible, and the feast and the cathedral are carried by the occasion more than by the notes.
Agnès Varda · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype is constructed, not only evoked, but it is a small one. The tarot is load-bearing: the Death card is read as transformation, and the film enacts the reading, the death of Cléo the singer and the coming of Florence, the real name she gives to Antoine. The structure is Death and the Maiden worked through a modern Paris, a beautiful woman shadowed by death through an afternoon. The name carries Cleopatra and Clio, the muse of history; the day is the solstice, the turn of the year; the mirrors set Narcissus against the street. These are woven well, but some remain allusion, Clio and the solstice among them, and the particular never becomes a figure the culture carries as it carries the Tramp. Held below the gate for that.
Katsuhiro Otomo · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is partly built. Its frame is apocalypse and rebirth: the city destroyed, rebuilt over the cause, destroyed again, and a cosmos made new at the close. Akira is the sleeping god under the arena, worshipped by the cult and kept by the state, and he is the bomb: the absolute energy that destroyed Tokyo is a child. Tetsuo is the overreacher, Phaethon or Icarus, the youngest brother who seizes the father’s power; his metal arm and his swollen flesh are Frankenstein and the giant. Kaneda and Tetsuo carry the names of the boy hero and his professor in Tetsujin 28-go, and Akira is number 28, so the film answers the robot myth of postwar Japan with a child who is the weapon. That is built and bears load. Held two tenths below the gate because the cosmogony of the close is evoked rather than built: what Akira is, and what the new universe means, the film gestures at and leaves.
Almohad builders; cathedral by Gothic masters · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Two archetypes are built. The tower is the mountain and the axis of the city: a way wound up inside it, a summit given first to the call to prayer and then to bells and a figure of Faith, a vertical that orders the city round it. It carries plan and section, and it stays particular: this tower, this conquest, this weathervane. The court is the paradise garden of the mosque, enclosed, planted in rows and watered, built and still kept. The church carries the inherited figures of the Gothic cathedral, the heavenly city, the forest of stone, the many mansions of its chapels, but as received types at enormous scale. The rectangle given by the mosque weakens the cruciform figure; the deepest structure is the tower’s.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype is the world mountain, the sacred peak that joins earth to heaven, and in Edo the cult around it was living: the Fuji confraternities, the Fuji-kō, and the pilgrim climbs of the summer season. Here the archetype is load-bearing in a strict sense, since there is nothing else in the picture: the mountain is not a background to a story but the whole subject, raised to an icon of itself. The particular holds: a real mountain, a real weather, the forest at its foot. Held below the gate because the myth is the mountain’s, inherited with the subject, and the print builds it only by isolation, constructing no structure of its own to carry it. Isolation is a real construction, which is why the figure is not lower.
Hou Hsiao-hsien · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype of the fallen house is built: the father who outlives his sons, and four brothers as the four fates of a generation, lost abroad, killed in commerce, broken by the state, silenced. The family is the island, and the film is shaped as the thinning of a household at its table. A second figure is built in the youngest son, the mute witness whose instrument is the camera, who records others and cannot tell. What holds the axis two tenths below the bar of the Epochal Gate: the national allegory lies close to the surface, and the house of four sons runs near the family-saga pattern the film inherits rather than past it, so that the construction is sound but not new.
Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
One archetype is built: the realm in procession. The axis from the royal gate to the throne, and from the throne down the open doors to the people’s house, is laid for a rite, the State Opening, which the building enacts each year. A second is built by descent: the Commons had sat in St Stephen’s Chapel, and the new plan keeps the choir’s facing stalls and sets the old chapel’s site on the public’s way in, so that the assembly stands where worship stood. The Clock Tower is the city’s watch tower made the nation’s time. These are construction, and they stay particular: this river, this fire, these benches. Held below the gate because much of the charge is evoked rather than built: the Gothic as ancestral nation, Arthur in the Robing Room, kings in niches.
English embroiderers (probably Canterbury) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is built, not evoked, at the centre: the oath sworn on relics, broken, and avenged by heaven and the sword. That pattern is the structure of the whole narrative, and it is archetypal, perjury and nemesis, the king who rises by the breach and falls by it. The sacred machinery is load-bearing: the relics under Harold’s hands, the hand of God over Westminster, the star as portent, the bishop blessing the meal at Hastings in the posture of a Last Supper. Harold acquires a tragic dignity the Norman case does not need and the work does not deny him, and the particulars stay particular: Turold, Wadard, Vital, a cook with a spit. Held below the gate because the archetype is a chronicle’s: the myth frames history rather than remaking it, and the moral is supplied more than discovered.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The pattern that bears weight is built into the film, not hung on it. A pregnant woman walks out onto a field of snow to read a killing, life set against death on a white ground, and the film keeps the contrast in every scene of the inquiry: Marge carries the child through all of it, and the last scene is the couple in bed with two months to go. Gaear is the silent ogre from outside the community, who eats, watches and kills without speech. The Paul Bunyan statue at Brainerd raises the region’s own giant over the road; the ransom buried by a fence is treasure lost to the earth; the true-story card makes the tale a local legend in its telling. Held below the gate because the inquiry is procedure, not a descent, and Bunyan and the money are emblems more than load.
Jakob Prandtauer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built into siting and sequence, not only painted. The house of God on the mountain: the abbey takes the old seat of the Babenberg margraves and makes it a holy hill above the river. The way of ascent: from the gate between the bastions, court after court, westward to a sanctuary at the edge of the rock above the water. The paired gates of wisdom and rule, library and Marble Hall, flank the threshold. A state’s founding is built in, its cradle made an abbey. All of it stays particular: this rock, this river, this saint’s shrine. Rottmayr’s heaven and Troger’s allegories illustrate more than they carry, and the strongest myth here, the city of God as an imperial residence, belongs to a regime and a period as much as to the archetype.
Unknown court painters (Heian period) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Built where the surviving scenes cluster. The chapters that survive best, Kashiwagi to Minori, carry the novel’s archetypal structure of a sin returned in the next generation. Genji’s own transgression with his father’s consort, Fujitsubo, comes back to him in Kashiwagi’s with his young wife, and the child of that union lies in his arms. Kashiwagi III puts the shining prince, emblem of the court’s perfection, into a cramped corner of his own house, holding the evidence. The Uji scenes carry the later book’s darker figure: love divided between two men, the river, the drowning to come. The particulars stay particular. Held below the gate because the structure is the novel’s: the scrolls realise it and choose where it shows, and chance chose which scenes survive.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The title names the pattern, and much of it is built. Libra is Oswald’s sign, the scales: a man balanced so that he can be tipped either way, and the book makes his life an oscillation between poles, Marxist and Marine, defector and returner, loner and joiner, until a push decides it. The convergence of the man and the plot is built as fate in the old sense, and the book gives it a theory: Ferrie’s account of a third line that cuts across cause and time and puts a man on the path of his destiny. The killing of the king and the scapegoat killed in turn are load-bearing, and Ruby’s shot completes the pattern. The particular stays particular. What holds the axis two tenths short of the bar is that the destiny is often spoken, by Ferrie and in Oswald’s own self-mythologising, rather than left to the structure, and that the book’s irony keeps the archetype at a distance.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often and built in two songs that bear the record’s weight. The suburb is a fallen garden and a wasteland, its children grown and its shopping malls dead; City with No Children names a sterile city. Suburban War summons the war that divides friends, and by its close the cities they lived in are as far as stars. Sprawl I builds the most: the grown child returns to the old streets at night, the police ask him where he lives, and the house where he was raised is no longer his to name, an exile in his own birthplace. Sprawl II answers with the flight to the mountains, and the frame returns the place to him changed. Held below the top because the pattern lives in single songs and images, and its figures are types of a generation.
Voltaire · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, and the structure carries weight: the book is Genesis rewritten. The castle is the earthly paradise and the first chapter a fall, Candide kicked out for a kiss behind a screen; the second opens on him driven from the earthly paradise. He wanders a fallen world, finds a second paradise in El Dorado and leaves it, from love and from the wish to be rich elsewhere, which is the Fall again by choice; he ends in a garden that must be worked, and Pangloss names the source in the Latin of Genesis, man put in Eden to work it. The innocent abroad, the fool-witness whose name became a word, is an archetype the book fixed. Held below the bar because the persons are figures in a demonstration: Cunégonde is a prize, then a burden, and Candide has almost no inner life to be transformed.
Jacob Lawrence · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is Exodus, and it is built, not summoned. The structure of the series is the structure of the story: bondage and its causes, the decision, the departure by night and by train, the journey, the arrival in a land that is promised and is not what was promised, and the people continuing to come. The protagonist is a people, as in the book, and the particular stays particular: these stations, Pittsburgh steel, Chicago, East St. Louis. Held below the gate because the archetype is carried by the sequence more than deepened in any single image, and because the arrival is undercut so steadily that the myth is half dismantled by the work that builds it, which is its truth and limits its depth as myth.
Patti Smith · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is built in two pieces and evoked across the rest. Land builds a rite of passage and possession: Johnny, a boy in a hallway, is violated and passes through a vision of horses into the sea. The sacrificial youth and the horse as the force that carries off bear load, and the dance litany is their liturgy. Birdland builds the son’s ascension to the father, a farmer’s boy waiting for the ship, a figure of Phaethon or Elijah that stays particular: a boy in a field after a funeral. Gloria inverts annunciation and confession; Elegie is a lament for the dead. Held below the bar: across the eight the evoked outweighs the built, and the poet-seer behind the whole is invoked more than constructed.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The myth is built where it bears load. Two men are given a sign; one accepts it and one refuses, and the structure, by ending on the one who accepts, makes the old pattern of grace offered and refused govern the whole. Butch’s story is a descent: down into a basement under a shop, among men worse than his enemies, and back up the stairs by choice, taking a katana from the pawnshop wall to free the man who was hunting him, the knight’s choice played straight inside a grotesque. The watch is patrimony passed from father to son through war and through the body, a grail made into an obscene joke and still honoured. Held below the gate because the patterns are carried lightly and as play: the briefcase, glowing and never shown, is a talisman without content, and the film winks at its myths as often as it builds them.
Arnolfo di Cambio (attributed) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is built. The tower is the axis of the city: watch and bell, the high point to which the citizens’ summons was attached, a figure of sovereignty raised over the private towers it outranked. The block is the castle, the stronghold made the house of the people. And the fabric carries the commune’s founding story, a family’s tower taken, on the standard account, into the city’s own. The particular stays particular: this piazza, this republic, its assemblies and its executions before the door. The reading of the two kinds of merlon as the emblems of two parties is evoked more than built. Held below the gate because the tower-castle of power is an inherited figure, given here its strongest Tuscan form rather than first made.
Abbas Kiarostami · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is built in one respect: the grave is dug before the story begins, and the man lies down in it. The descent into earth, the tree over it, the night and an awakening the film will not show are the oldest pattern of death and return, and they carry the structure. The listeners come in turn like the comforters of a parable, with three answers, and the last has been where the hero is: the taxidermist, who preserves dead birds, argues for the living. The mulberry and the cherry make the tree of knowledge a tree of taste. Held below the gate because the figures are stripped to their function, a car, a hill, a hole, and the coda deliberately unmakes the pattern.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
At its centre the myth is built. The oldest split in the imagining of women, wife and whore, is not named but lived: Séverine is a chaste wife by night and a prostitute by afternoon, and the film’s architecture is that alternation. The title turns the woman of the night, the belle de nuit, into a woman of the day. The sacred and its profanation are set into the frame, in the refused host and the Duke’s rite over a veiled body. Around that centre more is evoked than built. The sleeping beauty in the wood is a lighter pattern; much of the archetype is carried by Catholic image and allusion; and the gangster plot of the second half is genre matter that the myth rides rather than shapes. That holds the axis below the gate.
Diogo de Boitaca and João de Castilho · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Some of the myth is built. The house is named for Bethlehem: the place of the Nativity set at the place of departure, so that every voyage out begins at a birth, and the Nativity is carved over the west door at which the king kneels. The site puts the threshold of the ocean and the threshold of the church in one place, a vigil before the voyage made permanent. The hall vault as grove or canopy is structure, not allusion. Much else is evoked rather than built: ropes, knots, sea forms and spheres are emblems on the surface, and the whole as ship or sea is a gloss the plan does not enforce. The nineteenth-century tombs make the church a national shrine, laid on rather than grown from the plan.
Italo Calvino · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is built, in two layers. The frame is the oldest pattern of story: the traveller before the king, the teller whose tales are all the king knows of his own empire, Scheherazade’s position turned into a dialogue about whether the tales are true. Kublai’s empire in decline and his wish to possess it whole carry the myth of imperial knowledge, and its failure. The cities are archetypal forms of the city, the celestial and the infernal, the city of the dead, the city that is a map, the city built from a dream of a woman chased through streets, and the close builds Dante’s distinction into its judgment on the living city. Held two tenths below the bar because the figures are emblems more than persons, and the particular, though exact, is invented rather than lived.
Mark Z. Danielewski · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The myths are built, not only evoked. The labyrinth bears weight: the house is one, the text is one, and Zampanò’s passages on the Minotaur, struck through and restored in red, make the beast in the dark a figure for what the father, the author and the reader shut away; the growl in the dark has no body, as the monster in the maze is never seen. Echo is built too, in the long chapter on echoes, as the form of a self that can only repeat. The haunted house, from Poe’s House of Usher to Jackson’s Hill House, is taken to its root: the dwelling that becomes the abyss, the home turned underworld, with a descent and a return that is a katabasis in the old sense. The family plot carries all of it. What holds the axis short of the bar is that the myths are many and sometimes listed rather than fused, the Minotaur partly signalled through apparatus, and the mother and son’s myth less built than the house’s.
Joseph Strauss, Charles Ellis, Leon Moisseiff and Irving Morrow · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is literal and built: the gate. The strait was named the Golden Gate before the bridge; the bridge makes the name a structure. Each tower is a portal frame, its stepped struts above the deck forming doors through which the road passes, so that one crossing goes through two gates high over the water, and every ship that enters the bay passes under the threshold of a continent. The bridge as archetype, joining two shores across what cannot be crossed, is built into the form, not alluded to, and it stays particular: this strait, this fog, this orange. Held below the gate because the archetype of the bridge belongs to every bridge and the work adds to it a threshold rather than a deeper construction, and because much of its mythic weight is the city’s and the West’s, loaded onto the image since.
Hildegard of Bingen · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked, and it bears weight: the soul’s fall and return, the prodigal’s story told of every soul, set inside the psychomachia, the war of virtues and vices for the soul, inside the history of salvation from the Patriarchs to the wounds of Christ. The binding of the Devil by Victoria, at the command of Humilitas, is the old figure of the adversary chained. What holds the axis below the gate is the rubric’s own line: the particular must remain particular. Allegory begins from the archetype, and its figures are the archetype named. Anima is the one figure with a history, and even she is every soul; the Virtues are told apart by what they declare, not by who they are. Myth built, on a frame inherited from Prudentius and from scripture, with the particular thin.
Unknown (English or French) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is built, and it is in the structure. The diptych enacts the oldest pattern of royal religion: the king presented by intercessors before the throne of heaven, the earthly court and the heavenly court set face to face, the one an image of the other. The form carries the pattern: two courts on two panels, joined by a hinge and a gaze. The livery makes the archetype particular, for these angels are not generic hosts but Richard’s retainers. The banner carries a second pattern, the realm offered to heaven and given back. The three saints are the line of holy kingship made visible: martyr, confessor, forerunner. It is held below the gate because the type was made often in its period, and the work is its finest instance more than its maker.
Euripides · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is old and folk-shaped: the wife who dies in her husband’s place, the hero who wrestles Death at the tomb. Euripides builds it rather than evokes it. Death is on stage, a figure who argues terms with Apollo; the bargain is a contract, and the play asks what contracts with death cost. The returned wife is veiled and silent, and must be deconsecrated three days before she may speak: the return from the dead made concrete in a body that is present and not yet given back. That image bears weight, and has been taken up for two and a half millennia. Held below the gate because the wrestling is told in a promise and a boast, not built, and the archetype is kept at an ironic slant the later tradition straightened.
Marc Chagall · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
More built than evoked. The load-bearing structure is the face-to-face of man and animal, eye to eye on one line: the oldest pact of the herding world, the beast as companion and provider, set as the picture’s axis. Around it the village is drawn as a cosmos, with the sun or moon below and the church above, a whole world on one wheel, and the man holds up a small tree of life in its lit leaves. The structure is built from Russian and Jewish folk memory and the lubok, the popular print, not from a borrowed classical scheme, and the particulars stay particular: a cap, a scythe, a pail, a church, a green face. Held below the gate because the archetype of the lost home is summoned more than constructed, the figures of the upper band are emblems rather than structure, and the pattern is benign, without the cost that load-bearing myth usually carries.
Wifredo Lam · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Built more than evoked, though not built throughout. The load-bearing archetype is metamorphosis, the body that is also plant and animal. It is not summoned by allusion: it is the construction of every figure, whose legs are stalks and whose limbs end in leaves and hooves. Behind it stands the sacred forest of Afro-Cuban belief, the monte as the dwelling of the orishas, made visible as a place rather than named. The heads draw on the horse and rider of possession, the mask, the crescent. The particulars stay particular: these are the cane stalks of a Cuban field. Held below the top because the specific iconography is evoked and contested rather than built into a legible order.
Leonard Cohen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth is built in Suzanne and evoked across the rest. In Suzanne the archetype is load-bearing: the Madonna and the madwoman in one figure, the drowned Christ as a sailor keeping watch, the river as the passage between them, and the singer who must follow both, while the particular holds in a harbour, a woman’s rags and feathers, a cup of tea. The Stranger Song builds a second figure, the gambler who is also Joseph, wanting shelter and unable to stay, and the woman who has housed many such men. Sisters of Mercy makes two travellers into a sacred order. Held below the gate: the frame is assembled from songs rather than built as a whole, Master Song’s master is a shadow, and Teachers and Stories of the Street summon figures that carry no weight.
James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built into plan and section, not drawn on a front. The acropolis: a podium raised over the road and the cars and climbed by ramps to a sanctuary. The ascent: the path is a processional way that rises through the site and turns round a centre. The temple as cosmos, inverted: the rotunda is the Pantheon’s drum with its dome taken away, a centre that is a void, the sky where the oculus was, reached by circling rather than by an axis. The ruin: stones lie at the foot of the wall as if fallen, so that the new building carries its own future as a ruin in its fabric. These bear load. What holds the axis below the gate is irony: the ruin is a joke as well as an image, and the colours pull the procession back into the present at every turn.
Shona builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the plan, not alluded to. The enclosure is the sacred precinct: an inside defined against an outside by a wall that cannot be seen over, the centre hidden. The parallel passage is a threshold made long, a narrow way that must be walked before the centre is reached, the form of an initiation whatever its actual use. The tower is a form without use or interior, set where the passage ends, the one object the way leads to. The hill is the high place of the ancestors, the seat of rule made one with the rock. It stays particular: this granite, these boulders, this valley. Held below the bar because the content of each figure is lost and argued, legible as structure but not as story.
Fela Kuti and Africa 70 · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Here myth is built, not only evoked. The zombie is an old West African and Caribbean figure, the dead body raised and set to work by a sorcerer’s command, and the record makes it load-bearing: the soldier is the body, the military government the sorcerer, the command the spell. The structure of the song is the structure of the myth, a master’s call and a will-less answer, repeated until the body moves by itself. And it stays particular: the commands are the Nigerian army’s, drilled in the forms of the British colonial army that trained it, in the Pidgin of Lagos streets. Side two’s follower, the blind led by the blind, is evoked rather than built. The archetype is turned to satire, a mask rather than a world, and that holds it below the bar.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth built in part. The name carries Margarete, the beloved of the poem, and through her the Margarete of Goethe’s Faust, the type of German innocence; the golden hair is the racial ideal the poem sets against the ashen hair of Sulamith. Kiefer adds the archetype the poem only touches: straw, the harvest, the German earth, and kindling. The identification of woman, hair, land and burning is made in the material itself, so the archetype bears load on the canvas, and the particular stays particular, these strands on this ground. Held below the gate because Celan built the structure first, in words; the Faust link is carried by the name alone; and the archetype’s other half, Sulamith and the Song of Songs, lies outside this canvas.
Norwegian builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
At the north door the myth is built, not evoked. The combat of beast and serpent is cut into the very planks that make the threshold, so that to enter is to pass through the struggle: the door is the place of the fight, and the fight is the wall. The archetype holds whichever name the beast is given, the dragon trodden down or the serpent at the roots of the world, and it stays particular: these animals, this style, this door. The church builds a second figure, a house of posts raised like a grove or a hall, its central room standing on staves, timber the material of the holy. Held at 8.3 because the myth is carried by one wall of four, and by reused work, and the plan beyond it is a plain Romanesque nave and chancel.
Muhammad ibn Mahmud Isfahani (attributed), under Timur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is built: the dome over the grave, heaven over the dead, the centre of the world placed on the body of the founder. The plan carries it: a centralized cruciform room, the four directions gathered to the cenotaphs, and below them the real graves in a crypt laid out to the same pattern, an upper world of sign and a lower world of bodies on one axis. The double dome adds a second figure: a heaven seen from the city and another seen from the tomb, and the two are not the same. The genealogy on the stone turns the room into the myth of a line descending from an ancestress. Held below the gate because the dome over the tomb is an inherited archetype, intensified here rather than founded, and the genealogy is carried by inscription more than by structure.
Winslow Homer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Built more than evoked. The castaway between death and deliverance is the oldest pattern of the sea, Jonah, Odysseus shipwrecked, the raft, and here it is constructed in the geometry of the canvas: the near death in the water, the far death in the sky and the far deliverance on the horizon, placed around one man who sees none of them. The particular stays particular: a working boat with a name on its stern, a cargo of cane, a man with a body and a face. What the archetype carries beyond the castaway, the Middle Passage carried by the Gulf Stream’s own waters, is summoned by the figure and the place rather than built in the structure, and summons is not construction.
Jean-Pierre Melville · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is partly built. The ronin, the masterless warrior whose code survives his service, is load-bearing: Jef serves no one, keeps his code when betrayed, and ends in an act that reads as ritual death, a self-chosen end carried out by the hands of the police. The film also makes an angel of death of Delon’s impassive face, and gives Valérie the part of death’s counterpart, the witness who will not name him and whom he approaches at last unarmed. The caged bird is the soul in its cell. The particular stays particular: a raincoat, a fedora, garages and Métro stations. Held below the gate because the samurai frame is half evoked, stated by an epigraph from outside, and the figure is built from the American gunman of the 1940s more than from Japan.
Built for Rao Jodha and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype built into plan and section is the citadel on the mountain: the king’s house as the summit of the rock, reached by an ordeal of gates, with the goddess’s shrine on its own point. It is load-bearing, not alluded to: the ascent through seven thresholds is the plan, and every visitor enacts it. The legends of the fort’s founding are told of the hill, not built into it, and are not credited. What the fabric itself builds is the threshold as memory: gates named for victories, and the handprints at a gate, so that passing in is passing the dead. Strong and particular; held below the gate because the archetype is the type’s own, given its fullest form here rather than newly constructed.
Jonathan Demme · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is built in part. The descent to the monster in the deepest cell, past the damned in their rows, is a katabasis, and the film doubles it at the end with a descent into Gumb’s cellar, a labyrinth with a captive in a pit and a beast at the centre. Lecter is the riddling oracle, a sphinx who answers in anagrams and demands a story for each answer. The death’s-head moth is load-bearing in plot and figure at once: the chrysalis in the throat, Gumb’s wish to change his body, Starling’s change from trainee to agent. The lamb gives the title its sacrifice. The particular stays particular: cheap shoes, a storage unit, a sewing room, a poodle named Precious. Held below the gate because much of this is Harris’s and the genre’s, and the beauty and the beast is evoked rather than worked through.
Miloš Forman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is built and load-bearing. Salieri bargains with God as a boy; God answers by sending Amadeus, whose name means beloved of God, to a man who has kept his side of the bargain; and Salieri declares war on Heaven through its creature. It is the pattern of Cain and Abel, the favoured and the unfavoured offering, crossed with Job and with a Faust who received nothing for his soul. The father runs beneath it: Leopold returns as the Commendatore, and Salieri, in Leopold’s mask and cloak, commissions the Requiem, so that the son writes his own mass for the dead at a false father’s order. Held below the gate because the myth came from Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri (1830) and Shaffer’s play and is carried over largely whole, and because the theological frame is spoken more than embodied.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Archetype is built here, not evoked. The plan is a village: three groups of cases along a path, as Kanak settlements are ordered along an allée toward the chief’s great house. The case itself, a tall woven shell round a centre, is the great house, the house of the ancestors and of speech, rendered as structure rather than ornament; the ribs stand as the posts and battens of the hut stand. The grounds add the Kanak path, a planted narrative of creation, life and death walked in sequence. The shell left open at the top builds a second archetype, the unfinished house. What holds the axis below the gate: the visitor enters through the low range rather than into the case as into the great house, and the archetype is strongest seen from outside.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it bears the structure. The first movement is the town besieged by a monster from the deep: the dragon that takes the young, the elders who will not pay its price, the stranger-guardian who cannot swim. The second is the hunt: three men go out in a small boat to the monster’s element, and the man who most resembles its old enemies, the scarred hunter who has seen men eaten, is himself devoured, sliding down the deck into its jaws. Moby-Dick is plainly evoked, in Quint’s harpoon barrels, his obsession and his doom, but the film builds its own pattern: the man afraid of water must go into it and kill the thing alone, clinging to a sinking mast. The particular stays particular, a police chief from New York, a town’s Fourth of July. Held below the top because the archetypes are clear rather than deep, and Melville’s are borrowed more than reworked.
Knights Hospitaller builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
One archetype is built, and it is load-bearing: the citadel on the mountain, ring within ring, with the sanctuary at its heart. The concentric plan is that figure made structural, the higher, stronger inner ward commanding the outer as the innermost of a series of enclosures holds what is most guarded. The ramp builds the threshold as ordeal, a winding ascent through gates into the centre, and at the centre stand the chapel and the hall, so that the guarded thing is a community at prayer. All of it stays particular: this pass, this order, this water. Held below the gate because the archetype is the castle’s own kind, perfected here rather than first built, and its romance of the knight is evoked more than built.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears load, a myth of the household more than of the world. Its structure is the fairy tale of the ogre tamed and the witch who feeds: the maker who measures and dresses women is himself measured, dressed and reduced by a woman who poisons him to keep him. Over it lies the gothic: the dead mother in the house, and a second wife who must displace a ghost, the shape of Rebecca. Pygmalion is reversed, and Reynolds and Alma are never types. Held below the gate because the archetypes are evoked as much as built, and the gothic is often a register laid over a comedy of manners.
William Hogarth · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is the prodigal son, and here it is built, not alluded to: the whole series is its structure, inheritance, riotous living and ruin, with one essential difference. There is no return and no father’s house, only the madhouse. The fall is shaped as a descent through stations, and the woman who follows him, refused and returning, is the old figure of the redeeming beloved whom the fallen man cannot see. The particulars stay particular: a real tavern, a real street on a court day, the Fleet, Bethlem. Held below the gate because the myth is moral exemplum more than tragedy. Tom is a type, as his name says, and the archetype carries a lesson as much as a fate; the pietà in Bedlam is built, the larger frame of damnation evoked.
Georges de La Tour · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built, not alluded to. The penitent Magdalene is a received figure, but the picture constructs its archetype out of its own particulars: the flame that burns its own oil is the life consuming itself; the skull on the lap is the death that is carried; the face lit beside the unlit skull is the soul and its body, the living and the dead heads at two heights in one dark. That structure is the composition, not an attribute added to it, and the particular is kept: a young woman in a shift and a red skirt, and a plain lamp. Held below the gate because the myth is one, the meditation on death, deep and single, without the second pattern a fuller construction would carry: the sinner and the saved, the love she turned from, the gospel witness.
Johnny Cash · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and built by the event more than by any single song. A singer goes down into the prison to sing to the damned, the visitor to those in prison of the Gospel’s judgment scene, and he comes as one of them, opening on a murder done “to watch him die” in the first person. The sequence carries it from that killing through the condemned man’s countdown, the hanged lover of “The Long Black Veil” and the dream of home that is an execution, to a chapel built by the prisoners’ hands, where a man can be free inside the walls. The outlaw and the penitent are one figure. Held below the gate: several songs are borrowed types, the train song and the comic duet, that evoke rather than bear the structure.
Henry Moore · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Built, not evoked. The reclining woman as the earth itself, the mother whose body is hill and cave, is the oldest image the figure could carry, and it comes in by no title or allusion: it is the carving. The knees are hills because they are cut as hills; the void is a cave because the stone is opened as a hollow under a ridge. Behind the pose stands the Toltec and Maya chacmool, the reclining stone figure Moore took as a source from 1929, and behind that the lying figures of Etruria and Egypt, absorbed here into a new particular: a woman propped on her elbows, her head turned to look out. Held short of the gate because the myth is single, and its further reaches, the gaze over the land and the guardian at the edge of a house, are evoked rather than built.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Built more than evoked, in one place above all. The column is load-bearing in both senses: classical architecture, the emblem of order and permanence and of a ruined antiquity, is put inside a modern body as its spine, and broken. The archetype of the ruin is the structure of the figure, not an allusion beside it. The martyr is assembled from particulars: nails as in Saint Sebastian’s arrows and the Passion, the white cloth wrapped as Christ’s loincloth, the frontal pose of the Man of Sorrows, the tears of the Dolorosa. The particular stays particular: this face with its joined brows, this corset with its buckles. Held below the gate because the Christian frame is summoned by signs more than rebuilt, and the column is one figure carrying one idea.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth is built, and it is load-bearing. The tower is Babel turned inward, a vertical city whose height is its hierarchy. Wilder’s climb is a quest: the ascent of the low man to the summit to confront the maker. Royal, the architect in the penthouse, is the presiding father and creator. The end enacts the oldest script of the horde: the father is brought down, and the women hold the summit with the children, in a new matriarchal order. The regression is staged as a passage back through social time, from clan to tribe to something before the tribe, so that the archetype is the direction of the plot and not its decoration. Two things hold it below the bar. The narration partly explains the pattern, naming the regression as it happens; and the figures are types first, so the particular does not resist the archetype. The myth is built on figures more than on persons.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Built, not only evoked, in the front and the flanks. The triumphal arch made a church door is the archetype of victory over death set on the threshold of the house of resurrection: one enters by the conqueror’s gate, and the building was the conqueror’s tomb. The flank arcade is the ancient road of tombs, the court’s sages laid along it as heroes, and Plethon’s bones brought from Greece make it a translation of relics in a pagan key. Inside, the planets and the zodiac set the lord’s city under the heavens. The intended rotunda would have made the archetype bear load from end to end; it was never built and is not credited. The particular stays particular: one lord, one woman, one town. Held below the gate for the missing summit.
Court of Benin · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, not evoked. A human face, particular in its features and its iron marks, carries on its head the realm of Olokun, the sea and its wealth, and the mudfish, the creature that lives between water and land and stands for the king’s double nature. The Portuguese heads are woven into that pattern as the sea’s messengers: history made cosmology within the carving. And the object builds the oldest archetype of all, the mother as protector of the son, by being made to hang on his body. The particular stays particular: a queen mother of a named court. Held below the gate because the archetype is carried by conventional court iconography, the mudfish being everywhere in Benin art, so the building is the tradition’s as much as this object’s.
Algernon Charles Swinburne · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
More is built than evoked. Proserpine bears load twice, as queen of the old order in the “Hymn” and as keeper of the sleep without dreams in the “Garden”, and the two poems together make a pagan underworld that answers the Christian heaven point by point. “Dolores” builds an anti-Madonna, “Our Lady of Pain”, by inverting the form of the litany, so the myth is in the structure and not only in the name. The sea as mother and lover in “The Triumph of Time” is an archetype made from a private loss. “Itylus” turns the story of Procne and Philomela on memory: the swallow forgets, the nightingale cannot. Held at 8.3 because much else is allusion as atmosphere: Faustine, the Hermaphroditus of the Louvre and the Venusberg of “Laus Veneris” stay decor more than structure, and the medieval pieces evoke without building.
Alan Moore · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not merely evoked. Three inheritances bear load: Blake’s Jerusalem, from which come the title and the claim that the holy city may be built in an English town; Bunyan’s town of Mansoul in The Holy War, which names the afterlife; and the descent to the underworld and return, which is Michael Warren’s whole story and the frame of the book. The particular stays particular: a terraced street, a family of named people, one district. Held below the gate because the cosmology is largely Moore’s private system, announced and explained more than found in the action, and because the Builders and the Dead Dead Gang draw as much on the children’s adventure story, the gang, the den, the escapade, as on anything archetypal. Much of the myth is told.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The myth here is built and bears load. The double is its frame: the same face for the persecuted and the persecutor, the Tramp’s figure in all but name meeting the century’s tyrant, two men born four days apart in April 1889 and wearing the same moustache. The exchange of identities is the old pattern of the prince and the pauper, the king’s double, the fool crowned, used to argue that the tyrant’s power is a costume and that the costume can be put on by anyone, for good or ill. The globe dance makes a myth of pride in one image: the man who would hold the world as a toy, and the world bursting. The gods who would rise are two dictators in barber chairs, each cranking himself above the other. The figure is held below the gate by the second half’s comedy of diplomacy, which evokes rather than builds, and by the speech, which leaves the myth to address the audience directly.
Etruscan · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Here the archetype is built, not summoned. The banquet of the dead, the feast that does not end, is not an allusion on the object: it is its structure, since the couch is the container of the dead and the dead lie on it as feasters. The couple is the oldest pair, the two who are one flesh, carried not by attributes but by the arm about the shoulder and the shared cushion. The particulars stay particular: her braids, his pointed beard, the couch and its cushions. These are two persons of Caere, not personifications. Held below the gate because the myth is one myth, held whole and without tension: the gods, the journey of the dead and the underworld that Etruscan tombs elsewhere paint are absent here. The work builds the afterlife as a continued table and not what stands against it.
Ana Mendieta · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The series’ strongest deep axis, and here the myth is largely built. The body is returned to the earth in fact: laid in a tomb, pressed into mud, outlined on a riverbank, made of flowers. Burial and rebirth are not alluded to; the work performs them on the ground. The figure with arms raised, recurring in the later Iowa pieces and the fire works, is the orant and the goddess, and it is cut or burned into the land, so the pattern bears load. The tomb at Yagul joins womb and grave in one cavity. The particular stays particular: one woman’s measure, one site, one season. Below the gate because part of the archetype, the Great Goddess and the Afro-Cuban and pre-Columbian sources, is supplied by interpretation, and repetition risks emblem.
Bob Marley and the Wailers · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Here the record builds rather than evokes, in one place, and the place bears its name. The exodus of Israel is taken as the pattern of the African diaspora’s return to Zion, as Rastafari reads it, and the title track makes it load-bearing: the people of Jah leaving Babylon, the call to “look within” before setting out, Moses invoked as the precedent. The particular stays particular: the record was made in exile, in London, by a man shot at in his own house, and the title is its circumstance as well as its scripture. Around the frame Natural Mystic is prophecy, Guiltiness judgement, The Heathen a call to fallen fighters, One Love the gathered people. Held below the bar: one track builds the myth, side two leaves it, and the arrival in Zion is implied by a change of subject, not built.
Donna Tartt · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, and built into the plot. The Bacchae is not an allusion but a rite the students perform, and the rite works: they lose themselves, and a man dies, torn as Pentheus is torn. The second killing makes Bunny a pharmakos, the scapegoat the city expels so that it may go on, and the group’s survival afterwards follows the pattern exactly, until the pollution returns on them. Julian is the corrupting master, a Socrates whose pupils become his Alcibiades, and his withdrawal is the departure of the god. The twins’ bond carries the old taboo; Henry, who plans the murder and dies by his own hand, is the tragic protagonist the narrator could not be. Richard is the newcomer from the profane world, Plano, admitted to the mysteries, and the epigraph from Plato, “the education of our heroes”, names the pattern with irony. What holds the axis below the gate is unevenness: Francis and Charles bear less of the weight than their roles promise, Julian is drawn more as an aura than a figure, and some of the myth works through seminar talk rather than action.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it bears the structure. A vow and its fulfilment carry the film: a man offers what he loves to God in exchange for the world, is answered, and pays. Abraham stands behind it, the father who gives up his son, here by giving up speech, house and family. The Orthodox legend of Pamve, the monk whose disciple watered a dead tree until it bloomed, frames the film and is enacted at its close by the son. The good witch who must be lain with to save the world is folk matter set beside the Lord’s Prayer, and Leonardo’s Magi frame the whole as an epiphany. Held below the gate because the people carry the myth more than they live inside it: Otto, Maria and the boy are nearer to figures than to persons, and the particular thins where the archetype is heaviest.
Ray Bradbury · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Here the myth is built, not only evoked. Fire is the book’s one element, and it is made to turn. In the first part it consumes, under the Salamander, the fireman’s emblem of the creature that lives in flame; at the book-people’s camp it warms, and Montag sees for the first time a fire that gives and does not take. Granger’s phoenix, the bird that burns itself and rises, is laid on the human race at the close and is the book’s own movement. The river is a baptism; the fireman is the inverted priest of a cult of burning; and the texts carried out of the city are Ecclesiastes and Revelation, the end reaching for the tree whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. What holds the axis below the gate, narrowly, is that the archetypes are announced as well as built, the phoenix explained, and the persons stay types more than they become particular people of archetypal weight.
Byzantine, under Archbishop Ursicinus · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked. The plan is a road: from the threshold through columns that stand like the trees of an avenue to an apse raised over a grave, where paradise is a garden and the saint its shepherd. The church stands over the martyr’s burial ground, so the axis runs from the world to the grave to heaven, and the steps to the presbytery lift the altar above the crypt as resurrection lifts the dead. The conch makes the sky a vault of stars with the cross as its sign, the dome of heaven built as the half-dome of the church. The particular stays particular: this bishop, named, in this meadow, with four bishops who followed him between the windows. Held below the top because the road to paradise and the apse as heaven are the inherited figures of Christian building, carried here with unusual clarity rather than first built.
David Mackenzie · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The western is built, not merely evoked. Two brothers, the good one and the wild one; the wild one gives his life to let the good one go free, and the debt between them is a father’s crime. The old lawman near retirement hunts outlaws over the plains; the Comanche returns as the Ranger’s partner, as a player at the casino’s table, and as the people whose loss the whole drama repeats. Tanner on the ridge is the outlaw’s last stand. The particulars stay particular: the reverse mortgage, the trust deed, the chips, the tips. The structure bears weight, since the plot enacts the dispossession and the bank’s trust closes it: the frontier never closed. Held below the gate because the archetypes are the genre’s own, and the lawman follows the old sheriff of No Country for Old Men (2007).
Frank Darabont · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The myth is built and bears the plot. A man is buried alive in a stone house, digs through the wall for nineteen years behind the image of a goddess, crawls through five hundred yards of filth and is washed clean in rain, reborn into a promised land by a sea that has, in his telling, no memory. The resurrection is the structure, not its decoration, and the Bible is its instrument: the hammer hidden in the hollowed book, “Salvation lies within” on the warden’s wall, the ledger in the safe behind it. The Count of Monte Cristo is named in the library, and the film builds its pattern. The particular stays particular. Held below the gate because Andy is kept almost opaque, so the pattern rests on his effects more than on the man.
Andrew Haigh · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The myth is built, not cited. The structure is a descent to the dead: a man takes a train out of the city to the house where his parents still live at the age they died, eats with them, is given what the living could not give, and must leave them. It is Orpheus inverted, the son going down to recover not a lover but his own unfinished childhood, and the parents, like the dead of the old stories, cannot follow him past the threshold. The source is a Japanese ghost story, and the second ghost, the lover in the tower who is already dead, keeps its inheritance: the beloved who visits at night is of the other world. The two ghost lines rhyme and close in the star. What holds the figure short of the gate: the descent is soft at its rules, why now, what the house is, what it costs.
Miles Davis · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
With no words, figures or story, the archetypal must be built by the music or not at all, and part of it is built. “So What” is a question and an answer, the bass asking and the horns replying in two chords. The blues stands as the inherited pattern of lament, and the record turns it, from the plain blues of “Freddie Freeloader” to the circling sorrow of “Blue in Green”, and out to Spain in “Flamenco Sketches”. On every track one voice steps out alone and is heard by the company, an old figure built anew each time. Held below the summit: no passage across the sequence bears weight as myth, and the image the record is known by, the night and the blue hour, belongs to its cover and its legend, not to what the music builds.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built by subtraction. The burial is one of the oldest schemes painting has, and the canvas is laid out on it, the procession, the cross, the grave, the gravedigger, the skull, the dog as the old companion of the dead, with the heavenly register cut away. The cut is load-bearing: the expected resolution is withheld, and the particular town takes the place of the celestial court. The particular holds absolutely; the cliffs are the cliffs above the town, and the mourners are its people. What holds the axis below the gate is that the myth works mostly as a frame being refused, and the picture’s own construction, a grave at the centre of a community that will not look into it, is strong but single.
Georges Seurat · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth evoked in the subject and partly built in the structure. Built: the frieze. Figures turned to strict profile or full face and set in parallel planes, the procession of the Parthenon and the registers of Egypt given to a Paris crowd; the structure is load-bearing, and it makes a Sunday into a rite. Evoked: Arcadia and the Golden Age, the classical pastoral as Puvis de Chavannes had renewed it, the island as a modern Elysium, the day of rest as a sabbath. The particular stays particular, as it must: bustles, parasols, a cornet player, a pug, a monkey, a steamboat. Held below the gate because the archetypes are named by the composition rather than enacted by it: there is no story, no figure who is more than a type, and the rite has no object beyond itself. The frieze carries the form; the myth it implies is a frame the viewer supplies.
Huang Gongwang · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype is the dwelling in the mountains: the recluse’s world, the river journey, the fisherman who is free of office. The title builds it, and the scroll gives it a structure, a passage through a world in which no one rules, where figures appear only as fishermen, a man in a pavilion, a traveller on a bridge. The particular is kept: the river and hills near Fuchun, composed rather than mapped. What holds the axis at 8.2 is that the myth is carried more by the title, the place and the tradition than built into the picture as load-bearing structure. The fisherman and the pavilion are small, and could be read as staffage. The myth is evoked strongly and built in part.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype is the ship in the storm: the vessel of the soul or of the state, the voyage, the man against the sea, the descent into the maelstrom. It is built in one respect. The composition is a vortex with a vessel at its eye, and the structure of the picture is the structure of the myth, the small made thing held at the centre of the abyss. The particular is kept and insisted on: a harbour’s mouth, the lead line, the signal, a paddle steamer of the 1840s rather than a timeless barque. That pairing of a modern machine with the oldest image of peril is the picture’s mythic act. It stays below the gate because the deeper patterns are summoned by the motif rather than constructed, and the canvas has no second element to argue against the first.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Evoked more than built. The patterns are there: the double, the self and its reflection that do not coincide; the woman offered as merchandise, Venus at the counter, with flowers at her breast and fruit before her; the vanitas of glass and bottled pleasure before a figure who will not smile. The structure of the double is load-bearing, since the composition is built on the split between the girl and her image. But its weight is carried by the mirror as an apparatus of modern life, not by a myth the picture constructs, and the readings of Venus and vanitas are brought to it as much as found in it. The particular stays particular to the last label. What holds the axis here is that the deep is summoned by structure and atmosphere and is not made the picture’s spine, as the sovereign’s absence is the spine of Las Meninas.
Zhang Zeduan · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Some archetypal shapes are load-bearing, built into the form rather than alluded to. The river is the spine of the composition and the carrier of every livelihood on it, and the passage from country to city reads as a passage through a day and through the order of a world. The bridge is a crossing where the traffic of water and land meet and nearly collide; the gate is a threshold between the outer city and the inner. These are built, and the whole scroll stands on them. What holds the axis lowest, with The Sublime, is the particular, relentlessly particular, the scroll’s virtue and this axis’s limit: no figure becomes more than itself. After 1127 its readers made it the image of a vanished capital; that meaning is theirs, and is credited only a little.
Prince Hachijō Toshihito and Prince Toshitada · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Archetype is both built and alluded to. Built: the circuit is a journey through a world in miniature — a sea, a pebble cape with its lantern, a sandbar, a mountain hut on the height, a hut at the fields’ edge, a chapel. Gate, screen and revelation are laid in stone, the paving grades the walk from palace to hut, and the moon is built into the orientation of the platform, the Gepparō and the circuit. Alluded: the sandbar and the Sumiyoshi pine name famous places, and Genji’s Katsura and the moon-tree of poetry are present as names. The miniature world is load-bearing and its particulars stay particular, but much of the deep pattern comes in by famous names: a poetic geography, with no axis of heaven and earth, no sanctuary and no descent.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The wheel of Fortune is built, not evoked: two parts of rise and fall, hinged at the marriage, with title cards that announce the turn before it comes. The duel is the film’s ritual and it bears load: a duel kills the father, a false duel makes the son a wanderer, a true duel unmakes him. Beneath it runs a pattern of fathers and sons in two directions. The fatherless boy finds and loses a series of fathers, Grogan, Potzdorf and the Chevalier, then becomes a father who loses his son and is unseated by a stepson, a displaced heir come back for the house. What holds the axis below the gate is the figures: Barry is opaque by design, and the people do not acquire the weight of the patterns they move through.
Radiohead · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Much archetype, mostly evoked, and one element built. The children recur: a Pied Piper leads rats and children out of town in the title track, children are put first in an emergency in the eighth, and the ninth turns Solomon’s judgment into a divorce. An ice age, a limbo and an afterlife drift through, and they fall into a loose descent across the sequence, from waking through disappearance and limbo to the next life. The double is announced in the opening track’s “two colours in my head”, and the place nobody can reach is named in the seventh track’s title. The built element: the title names a first-of-its-kind child, and the voice processed beyond human contour on the second track is that child heard. What holds the axis is the rest, atmosphere that bears no load.
Walker Evans · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is America itself, a nation read from its surfaces: Main Street and the small town, the roadside, the Southern square, the Northern mill, the frontier church, the abandoned car, the grave. Some of this is built and not evoked. The two parts are a structure of the living and their relics: the people of the first give way to the houses they built and left, so that the nation passes into its own architecture, and the auto graveyard and the graves at Bethlehem stand where the book turns to ruin. The particular stays wholly particular, a named street in Selma or Atlanta, a named woman in Hale County. Held below the top because the archetype is assembled by an accumulation of instances and carried by the title, not borne by one load-bearing figure or story.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built in part and held at an ironic distance. One structure bears full weight: the sacrifice of the innocent, Stevie led to his death by the father figure he trusts, an Isaac with no ram; and Stevie is the holy fool whose compassion is the book’s only goodness. Around it stand the city as monster, a London of fog and dark that devours its light, and the Professor as death walking, the bomb in his pocket and his hand on the india-rubber ball. Stevie’s drawing of “circles, circles, circles”, a rendering of cosmic chaos, is the book’s one image of the cosmos, and the attack on the meridian, on time itself, keeps a mythic charge. But Conrad will not let his figures become figures: Verloc stays a fat, idle man, and Winnie’s revenge is not Clytemnestra’s. The irony undercuts the archetype as fast as it builds it.
Wallace Stevens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The book builds myth in a few places and evokes it in many. “Sunday Morning” builds: its seventh stanza imagines a ring of men chanting their devotion to the sun, “Not as a god, but as a god might be”, a religion of the earth made inside the poem. “Peter Quince at the Clavier” reworks Susanna and the Elders into a myth of desire and of the body’s immortality. “The Comedian as the Letter C” attempts a myth of the American poet, a voyage from Bordeaux to the Carolinas in which “man is the intelligence of his soil” turns to “his soil is man’s intelligence”; but Crispin stays a figure of comedy, and the myth does not bear the poem’s weight. The jar, the snow man, Hoon and the emperor are emblems more than archetypes: particular, memorable and load-bearing in their poems, but not myths a culture lives by. That holds the axis short of the bar.
Dziga Vertov · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built in two shapes. The first is the day: a city waking, working, resting and coming to the evening’s spectacle, which is also a life, birth, marriage, divorce and death within one passage. The day is load-bearing and orders the whole. The second is the eye: the machine eye that goes everywhere, under the train, above the crowd, into the mine, and the human eye inside the lens at the close, with Kaufman made a type, the new man fused with his apparatus. Held below the gate because the archetypes are built as a programme rather than found in the particulars. The people are particular for a few seconds each and then are rhythm; the machine-man is an argument of its decade, and the day is borrowed in kind from the city symphony.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present. The iron horse comes out of the elements as a fire-breathing beast; the four elements are the field itself, rain and river, steam and cloud, the fire of the firebox, the air of speed; the hare, the oldest emblem of swiftness, is set to race the machine, as in the fable; the ploughman is the Georgic figure of labour on the land, and the boat the old way along the river. Some of this is built: the race of hare and engine lies on the composition’s one line, and the elements are the field. But the particular stays almost wholly particular, Maidenhead, the Great Western, a storm, and the beast, the fable and the Georgic are brought to it by readers more than constructed. Myth evoked by a structure and, in the race, nearly built.
Gillo Pontecorvo · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The myth is partly built, and that is what holds the axis lowest with The Encompassed. Ali La Pointe, the illiterate petty criminal who becomes the people’s fighter at the sight of a man going to the scaffold, is a conversion, and his end, walled in with a woman and a child, is a martyrdom in a tomb; the whole structure falls toward that wall. The Casbah is a labyrinth and an organism, and the coda is a birth out of mist. But the chronicle evokes its archetypes more than it carries them. Mathieu is a type, the rational officer; the collective protagonist is a political idea more than an archetype; and the people’s rising is the thesis put in images, not built from the events shown.
Jacques Tati · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Two patterns are built. First the carnival: a world of order turned upside down for one night, rank and rule suspended, the feast that ends at dawn. The Royal Garden is structured as that feast: the building’s failure lets the guests become a crowd, an American takes command of the revels, and the morning brings the market and the fair. Second the labyrinth and its wanderer, Hulot lost in a city whose every corridor looks like the last, the old city glimpsed only in reflection, like a world above. Both bear load: the film’s curve from grid to circle is the carnival’s curve. Held below the gate because the archetype is general rather than deep. Hulot, the fool, is kept off centre and multiplied by false Hulots, and the myth is felt as structure, seldom as meaning.
John Fowler and Benjamin Baker · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
One archetype is built, not evoked: the bridge, the crossing of water that divides a land, here Lothian from Fife and south from north, joined in a single passage. It is load-bearing in the literal sense, and kept particular: this firth, this island, this railway. The giant is built too: three towers standing in the water with their arms held out toward one another, a figure the human cantilever photograph made explicit, the structure read as bodies holding up a load. The idiom of painting it is a myth grown on in its life, credited only as what its maintenance made true. Held below the bar: threshold, axis and sacred crossing are present by the nature of any bridge, not shaped by this one.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often and, in the sequence, partly built. “Passover” names the night the angel of death passed over the marked houses and makes it the title of a private crisis. “Decades” summons the soldier home from the war, a figure from 1918, as an image of young men who never fought one. “The Eternal” watches a funeral procession from outside. Across the record the order is the shape of a rite: entry into the exhibition, a descent through private trials, a procession and an elegy. Side two carries that shape as structure. Side one does not, and its archetypes stay images in a state of mind rather than a story the record tells.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetypal structure is built, not alluded to, but it is built without content. The room is the sanctuary reduced to its bones: an octagon, the plan of the baptistery and the martyrium; an apse at the end of an axis, holding a triptych in the place of the altarpiece; a single canvas on the entrance wall, facing it; fourteen canvases, the number of the Stations of the Cross, though whether that is meant cannot be shown. The structure is load-bearing. But the particular must take on archetypal significance while remaining particular, and here there is no particular: no figure, no event, no story. The myth is the empty frame of every sanctuary, left empty by design.
Pink Floyd · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built in the frame and evoked inside it. The load-bearing pattern is a life laid out as one day under the sun: a heartbeat and a first breath, a run, clocks that wake a man to find his years gone, death; then money, war, madness and an eclipse, and the heartbeat fading. The last line sets everything under the sun “eclipsed by the moon”, and the title names the side no one sees. The lunatic is nearly a figure, the friend lost to his own mind, and the general who orders the charge “from the rear” is an old type. What holds the axis below the gate is the particular: the figures are positions, not persons, with no face, place or name, and the archetype is reached by abstraction.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the structure, not merely alluded to. The three figures are Raphael’s river gods, from the margin of a Judgment of Paris engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi, and the whole is a fête champêtre, the Arcadian meal, the oldest pastoral. The Judgment is still in it: a naked woman, men seated as if in judgment, and the viewer drawn in as the one who chooses. The particular holds hard: a student’s cap, a frock coat, a picnic loaf. What holds the axis below the gate is the use the myth is put to. It is quoted in order to be emptied: the god becomes a man talking, the goddess a woman at lunch. The structure bears the weight of an irony, not of a myth that deepens in the present, and the axis credits construction, not dismantling.
The Beatles · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often and, at the edges, built. “Julia” makes the dead mother an “ocean child”, a figure between the woman and the sea; “Mother Nature’s Son” is the pastoral innocent, “Sexy Sadie” the false teacher, “Cry Baby Cry” a nursery tale of a king and queen in which something ominous waits. “Glass Onion” builds the band’s own legend into the record as a game. The whole carries a pattern that bears weight: a fall from the collective into four voices, ending, after the noise of revolution, in a lullaby sung by the drummer, a children’s night after an adult chaos. What holds the axis below the gate: each figure lives in its own song, and none carries the whole.
Eugenio Montale · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
There is a built pattern: the dry land of the Ligurian coast, wall, stone and noon sun, set against the sea as origin and law. “Mediterraneo” addresses the sea as father and as the measure the speaker fails, the book’s one deliberate myth; the boy’s coast of “Fine dell’infanzia” is a fallen paradise; the varco, the gap by which one might step out of the net, recurs as a structure of salvation without a saviour; and Arsenio, held still in a storm on the shore while everything moves, is close to archetype. What holds the axis at 8.2 is that much of this is evoked rather than load-bearing. The sea’s paternity is asserted in apostrophe, not enacted, and the miracle stays a possibility named, not a story built.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is built in two stories and evoked in several. “The Undefeated” builds it: the bullfight is a sacrificial rite, and the old matador who will not yield is the undefeated man of the title, the hero whose victory is in the refusal, carried to the table. “The Killers” builds fate: death arrives by appointment at six o’clock, the condemned man knows and does not run, and the boy who watches leaves home. Elsewhere the deep patterns are named or glanced at. “To-day Is Friday” brings the Passion into a wineshop and does little with it. “Now I Lay Me” takes its title from a child’s prayer and its matter from the soul that fears to leave the body in sleep, real and quiet. The white elephant of “Hills” is a figure, the unwanted gift, not a myth. Load-bearing in two stories and in the stance of the whole, and no more.
Giorgione · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The question is whether a myth is built here at all. The archetypal pattern is plainly present: a man and a woman with a child, apart, in a storm, outside a city, beside a ruin. Read as Adam and Eve after the Fall, with the lightning as the voice of God and the broken columns as death entering the world, the structure would be load-bearing; so would it as the finding of Moses, as Paris and Oenone, or as virtues under Fortune. None of these readings has carried the field, and the reported change to the figure opposite the mother tells against any fixed text. On the canvas the myth is evoked and withheld at once, and the particulars stay particular: a Venetian mainland town, contemporary hose, a wooden bridge. A structure that has to be brought from outside is not credited as built.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Two archetypes are built into plan and section, not applied. The first is the temple as a cube under heaven: a square room, a Greek cross within it, closed to the world and open only to the sky, the light from above the one sign of what is above; the name is chosen and the building makes it load-bearing. The second is the threshold rite: descent, darkness and a low passage, then ascent into light, and a departure toward the speaker and out by another way. The particular stays particular: an Oak Park parish, a budget, a congregation that sings and listens. What holds the axis below the bar is depth. Here the sky is a screen of diffused glass, the meeting house a gentler archetype than the cosmic one, and the myth most fully built is the humane one of the inscription, a period’s conviction more than an archetype.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built into the structure, not applied to it. The first is the temple on its stylobate: a raised platform, columns at the edge carrying a flat entablature, reached by steps, the classical type abstracted to steel and travertine. The second is the primitive hut in its reduced form, posts and a roof and nothing else, shelter at its origin. The third is the raft or ark, the dwelling lifted above the water, which the river has made literal more than once. The ascent from the earth to a floor above it, by a turning approach, is structure too. The particular stays particular: a doctor’s weekends, this river, these trees. What holds the axis below the bar is depth. The temple is quoted by abstraction and houses no cult; the hut is a thesis about building rather than an image of dwelling; the ark was an accident of the site.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth built, and built to be shown hollow. The structure is the garden and the expulsion: the town, the garden in the cottonwoods, then the wilderness of the badlands, where the frontier ran out. The inherited form is the outlaw couple of the American ballad, with Bonnie and Clyde and Billy the Kid behind it, and Kit’s last free act is a man raising his own monument on the empty plain. The particulars stay particular: the baton, the dog, the recorded advice, the comb. Held well below the gate by the film’s method, which drains each myth it builds: the garden is a tree house, the frontier a stretch of empty country, the monument a few stones. Myth deflated is still myth built, which keeps the axis above allusion; but the archetypes give the road its shape more than they bear its weight, and the deep is reached as absence.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype built into plan and section is the temple on its platform. The plaza is a sacred enclosure raised above the street by a few steps, symmetrical on one axis, its pools flanking the way in; the tower stands at its back as the house of the god stands within its precinct, and the bronze sections on every mullion read as an abstracted order, a colonnade drawn down the height of the building. The descent from Schinkel’s classicism is constructed, not applied: the axis, the platform and the separation of the house from the street are the building’s organisation. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven: the god housed is a company, and the myth built most fully is the period’s myth of rational order. The tower as world axis, evoked by any tall building, is not credited.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Built in part. The temple front as threshold is built, not quoted: the entrant passes through the house of the ancient gods into a Christian church, the pagan form made the porch of the sacred. The plan builds an ascent of thresholds, from nave to crossing to presbytery, and then the screen with the choir beyond it, the holiest place seen and not entered: a veil of columns in the place of the veil of the Temple. The island itself is a precinct, a sacred house on the water facing the palace. The particular stays particular: this abbey, this saint’s feast, this doge’s crossing. Held short because threshold and veil are inherited forms of the Christian church, given classical dress rather than newly made, and the cosmic image of the centralised church governs only the crossing, not the whole.
Reed and Stem, and Warren and Wetmore · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Built into the plan: the city gate, the threshold between the continent and the metropolis, made a room through which every arrival passes; and the descent, from street to concourse to the trains below, so that departure is literally a going down and arrival a rising into light. That is structure, not ornament, and it stays particular to this city and this railroad. The heavens over the crowd join it, the vault as sky, though here the sky is painted on a hung ceiling rather than built, as the Pantheon builds it. The rest is evoked: Mercury with Hercules and Minerva over the door, commerce allegorised in the Beaux-Arts manner; the acorn and oak of a family's fortune. Load-bearing in the circulation and evoked in the dress, the axis stands below the bar.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The temple is built here, not alluded to. Plan and section are those of the classical temple stripped to its law: a raised podium, a frontal stair on the axis, an outer order of supports standing free of the enclosure, a single room within. The line from Schinkel that runs through Mies's work runs through this building, and the archetype carries the structure: the columns are the peristyle, the hall the cella, the steps the threshold between the walk and the ordered room. A second archetype, the open hall where a community gathers and works under one roof, the barn, the guild hall, is present in use. Held below the bar: the archetype is singular and abstract. The hall builds the temple's form but not its passage, no inner sanctum, no hidden centre, and its god is structure itself.
Yasunari Kawabata · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The tunnel is the threshold into another world, and the book keeps the shape of the otherworld journey: a man passes into a country of snow and women, is cared for, cannot belong, and the country closes on him in fire. Yoko is the figure of pure voice and of death, Komako of the body and its waste; the two women are almost halves of one feminine figure. Over the close hangs the Milky Way, the river of heaven, which in the Tanabata legend divides lovers. These bear weight in the last pages. Held below the gate because much of the archetypal is evoked as resonance rather than built as structure: the book never makes Shimamura’s passage a rite with consequences, and the reader supplies the myth the images invite.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is built in the frame and carried by sound and titles rather than by a figure. The pattern under the sequence is the Christian one of death, ascension, deluge and renewal: Myrrhman, the spice given at the birth and at the tomb; Ascension Day; After the Flood; New Grass; and Runeii, a closing word in an older script. That is more than allusion, because the order of the record is the passage it names, and the sound bears it out: the frenzy cut off, the long storm, the calm that follows it. The pattern is load-bearing. What holds the figure from the gate is that no person carries it: the voice is a voice and not a figure, the particular is nearly absent, and the archetype is reached by abstraction.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often, and one pattern is half built across the sequence: a night and its morning after, from Brown Sugar’s party to the dawn road of Moonlight Mile. The figures are old. The slave ship and the plantation of Brown Sugar summon the founding crime of the music the band inherited; the junkie stands at the end of the line; the outlaw lover of Dead Flowers waits in his basement room; the traveller of Moonlight Mile goes home to no one named. You Gotta Move brings in the gospel summons of death, borrowed whole. What holds the axis: the particulars are attitudes more than persons, and the archetype is reached largely by allusion to the blues.
Nirvana · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked richly and built in one frame: the womb. The title names it; the sleeve’s anatomical angel and the back cover’s fetuses among orchids carry it; Heart-Shaped Box sets love as a body one is locked inside, Pennyroyal Tea names an old abortifacient, and Serve the Servants a birth into a family that failed. A frame borne by the sleeve and by three songs is more than allusion. Around it stand figures: Grenouille, the murderer without a smell from Süskind’s Perfume, in Scentless Apprentice; Frances Farmer as a modern witch who returns as fire; the singer as the figure his audience consumes. What holds it short of the bar is construction. The womb is laid across the record more than enacted by its sequence, and the other figures are borrowed.
Wang Ximeng · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present and partly built. The journey through a world, unrolled in time by the viewer’s own hands, is the form’s archetype and is load-bearing: one travels the realm. The mountain as the axis and body of the earth, with water as its circulation, is the cosmology of landscape painting and is built into every massif. Blue and green are the colours of the archaic and of the realms of immortals in the Tang tradition, so that the empire appears as a paradise made habitable; and rivers and mountains are the realm itself, in the title and in the conception. But no figure, place or event carries the weight alone. The myth lies in the whole, and part of it, the paradise and the immortals, is evoked by the palette rather than constructed.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The particular is insistently particular: a red-haired Norwegian girl, a real sister, a real sickroom in Kristiania. The archetype it reaches is the deathbed and, through the bowed woman and the pale young face, the pietà inverted: the one who will die holds the hand of the one who mourns. The pillow as nimbus, the bowed head and the clasped hands are the vocabulary of devotional painting, emptied here of any promise of resurrection, and the emptying is built. The girl’s gaze past the living gives her the look of one already crossing. What holds the axis below the gate is that the archetype is carried by posture and light, not built into an order of the world: no threshold, no journey, no community of mourners. The force is first a private wound, made universal by recognition.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked more than built, but one myth is built. Macheath is the old figure of the gallant thief and the gallows ballad’s hero, and the Moritat makes him a modern one: the predator in a clean suit whose violence is never seen, a shape the century went on to find in its own streets and boardrooms. Peachum is the beggar-king of the Elizabethan cant books moved into a counting house. The load-bearing structure is the inversion of comedy’s providence: the mounted messenger who reaches the scaffold with a pardon, a title, a castle and a pension, so that the happy ending is exposed as the arrival of power, and the reprieve comedy offers as grace is shown to be patronage. That is built, and it governs the end. Much of the rest, the wedding in the stable and the parody chorale, evokes the deep pattern in order to cancel it, and that holds the axis below the gate.
Sly and the Family Stone · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The record evokes deep patterns and builds one. Built: the fall of the bringer of joy, the star who sang the people together and now cannot rise from his own room, told in the shape of the album, from the opening refusal to move to the closing anthem slowed to a crawl. Evoked: the flag with suns for stars, America re-sewn; the riot that is a silence; Africa as source and voice in two titles; the figure grinning at his gun in the remade Thank You. The archetypes are strong and the particular stays particular: a man, a family band, a year. What holds the axis below the gate is that the Africa frame is named and not developed, and the flag and the riot are emblems more than structures.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is built, and thin. The car crash is made a sacrament: a fertilising event, an initiation, a rite of passage that the cult around Vaughan performs and records, with Vaughan as its priest and its sacrifice. The celebrity dead, Dean, Mansfield and Kennedy, are the saints of that religion, and Vaughan’s planned death with Elizabeth Taylor is an apotheosis by collision, the sacred marriage of the modern age conducted at speed. This is load-bearing: the plot is the narrator’s conversion and Vaughan’s martyrdom. What holds the axis three tenths below the bar is that the myth is one conceit, worked out with great consistency but not deepened, and that its figures are functions of the conceit: Vaughan is an emblem, and the narrator, by design, a recording surface.
Andrea del Verrocchio · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype is the armed rider: man and horse made one body of will, the centaur held under command, the god of war on earth. It is built, not alluded to. The composition makes the rider’s mastery and the horse’s force a single action, the stride and the counter-twist locked together, and that union, not any attribute, carries the meaning. The particular holds: a fifteenth-century captain in plate armour of his period, with a hard and specific face, not a Roman and not a saint. Held below the gate because the myth is one, the inherited myth of every equestrian monument since the Marcus Aurelius, driven harder but not opened onto a second order: no death, no fall, nothing beneath the mastery.
Thomas Eakins · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Built at the centre and evoked at the edges. The built structure is the old figure of the master at the altar: a man robed in black and lit from above, attended by acolytes, before a body laid out on a table, in a round theatre of witnesses. It is Rembrandt’s anatomy lesson turned from the dead to the living, and behind that the priest and the sacrifice; the composition does not allude to them, it is them. The woman covering her face is the mourning mother at the margin of a sacrifice, a figure from the Passion, evoked by gesture more than built. The particulars stay particular: a named surgeon, a named college, a frock coat, a clerk’s pen, a real disease. Held below the gate because the pattern is carried by one figure and one arrangement and does not deepen into the patient, who remains a body and not a figure of the sacrificed.
Talking Heads · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often and built in one pattern: possession. The voice speaks in tongues over the groove, like a preacher or a man taken by a spirit, and the self is entered and carried by something larger. Side one is the possession; Once in a Lifetime is the waking into a house and a wife one does not recognise, Everyman finding himself in his own life; side two follows the aftermath, through the remade face, the colonised valley and the drone. Around it archetypes are evoked: the goddess of The Great Curve, on whose movement the world turns (“a woman’s hips”), water as time and baptism, the wind as messenger. What holds the axis below the gate: the particular is withheld. Mojique is a person; most figures are voices without a place.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Part of the pattern is built. The confessional is load-bearing: Harry confesses in church to a listener he cannot see, and the film makes surveillance a parody of the confessional, the eavesdropper as an unordained priest who hears without absolving. The end completes it: hunting the hidden listener, he breaks open the statue of the Virgin, and the sacred is dismantled in the search. The watcher watched, the hermit whose fortress is his prison and the guilt that misreads every sign run through the plot rather than being alluded to. But they are figures of character more than a structure that governs the plot, as the Oedipal inquiry governs Chinatown (8.6); the eavesdropper’s fall is evoked as much as built, and Blow-Up had already given the form its pattern.
Joseph Wright of Derby · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Partly built. The load-bearing structure is the oldest one: a life held in a hand that can give or take it, the officiant standing over the victim on a lit table with a congregation round it. The scene is laid out as a sacred scene is laid out, a lit centre and witnesses in a ring, so that the sacrifice is carried in the geometry rather than in any allusion, and the officiant is a natural philosopher. The particulars stay particular: a cockatoo, a watch, a domestic room in the English Midlands, a cord and a cage. The magus, the man with power over life by knowledge, is built in the lecturer’s gesture and look. The moon and the emblems are evoked and laid on top. Held below the gate because the myth is one figure.
U2 · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is built once, and the record carries it to its close. In Pride a man caught on a wire, a drowned man and a man betrayed as Christ was by Judas resolve into King in Memphis, and the song’s structure, not an allusion, carries the archetype of the sacrificed witness. MLK answers it at the end: the witness named on the first side is sung to sleep on the second, and the road toward a light that opens the record ends in that sleep. What holds the figure here is that the myth is built inside one song and only answered by the frame. The fire of the title, the fire of 1945 as the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki drew it, is named and never built, and Presley is left as mood.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is built in the frame: a descent, the old journey down turned inward, in which a self passes through stages, the loss of God, the body, the machine, violence, to death, and speaks once more from beyond it. Mr. Self Destruct names the figure, a self as its own destroyer, and the record keeps him at its centre. The Becoming builds the man made machine, an old pattern of the soul lost to the mechanism; the pigs of Piggy and March of the Pigs are the herd and the swine, the social order seen with contempt. Hurt is the ghost’s account. Held below the bar: the figure has no face, place or name beyond the persona, the particular is withheld, and much of the symbolism, the pigs and “God is dead”, is evoked or borrowed rather than built.
The Flaming Lips · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is built in one figure and evoked around it: the hero who fails. Waitin’ for a Superman takes the American superhero and makes him unequal to the weight, which passes to the ordinary person, and the record’s other figures arrange themselves around that inversion: the scientists of Race for the Prize as heroes who are “just humans”, the friends of The Spiderbite Song saved by luck, the army of The Gash going to a war of the mind. What Is the Light? sets a cosmogony inside a body. The particular stays real, a spider bite, a car, groceries put away, and the archetype rises from it. Held below the bar: the hero-pattern bears weight in one song and is atmosphere elsewhere, and the battle and the cosmogony are evoked, not built.
Prince and the Revolution · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is built in the frame and evoked inside it. The frame is a liturgy: the record opens with a minister’s address over an organ, promising an afterlife, and closes with a hymn and a benediction in which rain, colour and grief become an end of the world and a washing. Between them the old pattern of the sinner and the saint runs through one figure: Darling Nikki’s profane confession, the offering of the self as saviour in I Would Die 4 U, and the hymn that asks pardon. The figure is a person, the singer, and particular: a club, a girl, a father, a city. Held below the bar because the myth is the persona’s own, worn as costume as much as built, and the father, the deepest archetype on the record, lives in one song, his full story belonging to the film rather than the album.
Maya · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetypal structure is built, not alluded to. Kingship is shown as an exchange of blood across the cosmos: the vaults carry the sky over the event, so that the human scene is set within the ordered world it claims to sustain. The captive is the offering that feeds that order; the child heir is the future it buys; the royal women piercing their tongues on the throne make the same offering in their own bodies; and the dance on the stair is the rite that completes it. The particular stays particular, one court in one season. The myth is load-bearing in the sequence of the rooms. What holds the axis lower: the deep pattern is the Classic Maya’s stated ideology, carried rather than discovered, and it does not reach the archetype beyond its culture’s terms.
Elias of Dereham and Nicholas of Ely (attributed); spire by Richard of Farleigh · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built into plan and silhouette. The close is a walled sacred precinct with the church at its centre on a green, set apart from the market town: the heavenly city laid on a meadow, with gates. The spire is an axis of the world made literal, the tallest made thing in the land, rising from the crossing of the cross plan to a point. The foundation enacts its own myth: the church that came down from a hilltop fortress, where clergy and garrison quarrelled, to the water and the meadow. Held at its figure because these are the inherited figures of every great medieval church, realised here with unusual clarity rather than first constructed, and the interior builds no figure of its own.
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Some archetypes are built, not evoked. The island is load-bearing: the Maritime Theatre makes the retreat literal, a circle within a circle with water between, the self withdrawn to a centre, and the plan is the archetype. The world gathered into a garden, the microcosm of an empire, is the programme of the whole if the late account is believed. The Canopus builds a journey to Egypt and the Nile, the river in which Antinous drowned in 130. The underworld that account names has been identified with the tunnels, but only by conjecture. What holds it: the myths are inferred from late names and modern identifications more than read in the plan, and the statues that gave them figures are dispersed.
Ovid · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The myths are all inherited, from Homer, the tragedians, Apollonius, Catullus 64 and the Aeneid. What the book builds out of them is one pattern, and that part is load-bearing: the woman left on the shore, writing to the one who sailed. Ariadne on Naxos, Dido at Carthage, Phyllis at the sea, Oenone on Ida and Hypsipyle on Lemnos are one figure in many particulars, and the figure outlived the book as an archetype of its own. The second construction is dramatic irony: Laodamia fearing for the first man ashore at Troy, Hypermestra in her cell, Deianira learning what the robe has done as she writes. Held below the gate because each letter evokes its myth whole from a source, the deserted woman was already in Catullus and Virgil, and the pattern is built across the book rather than within each letter.
Aghlabid builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is built into the plan. The qibla is an axis to a place beyond the horizon, Mecca, and the whole building is turned to it, so that every body inside is set on a line toward a distant centre. The mihrab is the threshold that is not a door, a niche marking a direction no one can enter, and the dome above it is the canopy of heaven over the point of address. The court is open sky within walls, its rain gathered into the ground. The columns make a grove of stone, load-bearing in both senses, and the tower is the axis of the city, the voice raised over it. All of it stays particular. What holds it: these figures are the type’s, received from the Umayyad mosque, not first built here.
Antoine Watteau · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Built more than evoked. The archetype is the pilgrimage to the island of love, the journey to Venus’s shore, and its structure carries the composition: the herm as shrine, the staffs and capes of pilgrims, the boat as passage over water, the movement from shrine to sea. Whether the company arrives or departs is the myth’s own doubleness: paradise reached is paradise left. The three couples read as one couple in three moments, which makes the stages of love a load-bearing structure rather than an allusion. The particulars stay particular, these silks, these faces. Held below the gate because the myth is a gallant one, close to its theatrical source, and its depth is that of a lyric, not of a tragedy.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth built in part. The Oedipal family is not alluded to but enacted, and comically literalised: the mother as the first teacher in every classroom, the father defeated on the toilet, the son who must betray both to become a man and cannot. The book names Freud in its fifth title and makes the analyst its hidden addressee, so the archetype bears weight as structure. A second pattern is built: Exodus inverted, the son of the diaspora reaching the promised land and failing there, unmanned by a Jewish woman who reproaches him as his mother did. And the book fixed a figure, the Jewish mother, in the common imagination, a mythmaking of type more than of depth. Held below the gate because the Freudian frame often supplies the pattern ready-made, so that myth is diagnosed rather than discovered; the Exodus reversal rests on one section; and the Jewish joke, the book’s other archetype, is a form of a culture’s humour more than a deep structure.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not alluded to: the congregation gathered on the earth under the sky, and heaven as a ceiling of cloud from which light descends. Utzon’s sketches of figures on a shore under clouds became the section itself, and the vault is load-bearing in both senses. A second pattern is in the exterior: the barn, the shed, the humble house of the stable, the tent of meeting set among ordinary buildings. The lowly vessel and the heaven inside it make an old Christian figure, built in plan and section rather than in ornament. What holds the axis below the gate: the myth is one figure, gently stated, the plan orders no whole cosmos, and the cloud depends in part on knowing the sketches.
Neil Young · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is built once, and the record turns on it. After the Gold Rush builds it in three short verses: a medieval pageant, a dreamer lying in a “burned out basement”, and an exodus in which the chosen are loaded onto silver ships while Mother Nature flees. Fall, fire and flight, the old pattern of the ark and the expulsion from the garden, are carried in one particular dreamer’s night and are load-bearing for the song. Southern Man evokes the plantation and the big house as the founding wrong of a region, as figure rather than structure. What holds the axis: elsewhere the persons are a lover, a friend, an old man by the road, and the archetype is not reached.
Hans Puchsbaum and others · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is built, in parts. The tower is the axis of the city, the centre every street points toward, and it is built as one. The Giant’s Door builds the threshold: a deep, splayed Romanesque portal, its figures and beasts guarding the passage from the market into the sacred, with Christ above. The hall builds the heavenly city as a gathered people, the saints on the piers as the pillars of the Church and the congregation among them. The catacombs below carry the church as the city’s body, its dead laid under it. Much else is evoked rather than built: the name of the Heathens’ Towers, the legends of the builders. Held below the gate because these archetypes are the Gothic church’s, inherited and made particular, not newly constructed.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The title names the myth and the book builds it. The Gothic novel is the frame: the heroine in an isolated house, the older and secretive master, the locked room she is told not to enter, here full of a failed writer’s manuscripts and of what the intelligence men want, the inheritance, the threat that comes in from outside. The plot runs on the locked room, the inheritance and the menace. The second myth is the Apocalypse the ministry preaches, which the plot brings toward fact in Africa, so that the believers’ prophecy is fulfilled by the people who sell it. Held below the bar because the Gothic is built as parody, its archetype acknowledged more than inhabited, and Elizabeth does not quite become the figure the frame makes room for.
Kanye West · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked everywhere and built in one pattern: the fall of the overreacher. Dark Fantasy opens in fairy tale, a narrator in a storybook voice. Power is the sovereign’s boast on the King Crimson refrain (“schizoid man”) and ends with his imagined fall. Monster, Devil in a New Dress and Hell of a Life take him through the devil’s party; Runaway is the confession; Lost in the World dissolves him into a crowd, and the coda hands judgement to a voice from outside. Icarus, Faust and the fallen king are summoned, and the sequence bears their shape. Held below the bar because the myth is carried by the maker’s persona, the fall is announced and never happens, and the devil is more costume than adversary.
Qutb ud-Din Aibak and Iltutmish; upper storeys by Firuz Shah Tughlaq · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
One archetype is built, not evoked: the axis that joins earth and sky and marks a centre, the pillar planted to claim the land, the standard raised after victory. The tower stands at the corner of the conqueror’s mosque, in the city whose last Rajput holders it displaced, and its form is that archetype in stone: a shaft with no room, whose only content is ascent and inscription. The minaret as the place of the call adds a second myth, the voice from above summoning the faithful, though here it is a sign of the call more than its instrument. Held short because the archetype is single and familiar, and the building does little to complicate it.
Umberto Boccioni · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The striding figure is one of the oldest patterns sculpture has: the Egyptian walking figure, the kouros with its left foot advanced, the Nike, Rodin’s armless Walking Man of 1907. Boccioni builds the pattern rather than alluding to it. The stride is the whole structure, and the departure from the type, the body burnt into motion and the face withdrawn, is made by changing the archetype from within: the hero is no longer a person who walks but walking itself. The modern myth it carries, the man become machine, bears load too. Held below the gate because the myth built is single, and much of what the figure carries as myth, war, the new man, the motor car beating the Nike, comes from the doctrine round it and its reception rather than from the particular, which stays an armless walker on two blocks.
Hellenistic (Roman marble copy) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth built in the figure, not alluded to. The fallen warrior is among the oldest patterns there are, and the statue does not cite it: it builds it in the body, in the last strength of an arm and the bowed head, so that this particular Galatian, with his torque, his stiffened hair and a wound under the breast, becomes the dying warrior as such. The particulars stay particular: he is a foreigner of a named people, and he is everyone who has died in war. Four centuries of calling him a gladiator show how readily the archetype carries without its history. Held below the gate because the archetype is the noble death alone, with no second pattern built against it, as the Laocoön builds punishment and the father, or a Pietà builds mother and son.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built into the sequence, not painted on it. One enters by a gate guarded by two lodges, climbs a stair past a spring and its guardian beast, passes a temple of columns that is also a cistern, comes out on a theatre open to the sky, and may go on up rough walks shaped like caves and cloisters to a calvary of crosses at the summit. Gate, guarded spring, temple, theatre, cave, holy mountain: an ascent carried in ground and structure. Held below the gate because its particular meanings are uncertain (the salamander as Delphi’s python, the paths as a rosary, are interpretations, not documented intentions), and because much of the myth is evoked by ornament and fable rather than carried by the structure.
Metallica · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth is built once in full, and the figure it builds governs the rest. Creeping Death sets the tenth plague of Exodus in the voice of the angel of death: the slave’s oppression answered by the killing of the firstborn, the passing-over marked in blood. The archetype is load-bearing, since the song’s force depends on its singer being the destroyer, and the particular stays particular, a Hebrew slave’s grievance against Egypt. Around it the same figure, the power that sentences, takes other forms: the electric chair as a modern rite of sacrifice, Donne’s bell through Hemingway, Lovecraft’s sleeper waking. What holds the axis: those are summoned by title and atmosphere more than built.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not cited. The seven deadly sins are the film’s structure, each murder a sermon in flesh, and the scheme is completed only when the detective takes his place in it: Mills becomes wrath, and the particular becomes the archetype. That is load-bearing. Round it is a second pattern, the wise elder near retirement and the rash young hero arriving, the elder outliving the son he could not save. The killer is a dark prophet who makes himself one of his own figures, envy. What holds it below the gate: the myth arrives from a reading list, and the library scene names its sources, so it is a schema applied as much as a structure that grows; the sins are illustrated more than inhabited; and the victims, sins in human form, never become people.
Neutral Milk Hotel · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth is built more than evoked, and its figures bear it. The dead girl is particular, a Dutch girl of the war with a sister, in a place and a year, and she becomes the beloved who must be restored, the Eurydice the singer cannot bring back. The two-headed boy in his jar, a sideshow specimen, becomes the self divided and preserved, singing to the girl through glass. Resurrection runs through the whole: seeds in the ground, the dead rising, the ghost of Ghost, Christ addressed in the opening song. The flight over the sea in the title holds it. What holds the axis below the gate is that the links stay private: the girl, the boy and the singer are never set into one story the listener can trace, so the structure is felt more than built.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it is the Odyssey’s other half: Penelope waiting for the husband at war, keeping faith, refusing and handling suitors, and the return. Every term is turned. The waiting is entrepreneurial, the suitors are used and buried, the husband returns twice and is sent away by contract, and the reunion ends in fire. The second structure is national: Maria is the Federal Republic, married to an absent past, prospering through an American and then an industrialist, and the allegory carries the plot’s chronology to the day of the Bern final. The particular stays particular: a bottle, a placard, coffee, a dress from the black market. Held below the bar because the national allegory is schematic and the Penelope structure is deepened no further than irony.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not alluded to. The gate, the threshold between a known land and an open one, is the oldest figure of passage, and Saarinen made it from the triumphal arch with the masonry, the attic, the inscription and the procession taken away, leaving the curve alone. It stands at the river, on the line where the city met the water and the west began, and it is literally a gate: one passes beneath it and looks through it. The rainbow and the vault of the sky are present too, in a curve that touches the ground at both ends. What holds it: the myth carried is a national one, the frontier and the journey west, and the gate opens to no place the building itself defines.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is built. The structure is the oldest pattern of comedy: flight from a city of death into a green world, Florida in winter, the sea, a millionaire’s yacht; disguise there, the lovers sorted, and the threatening world’s return, which is then escaped. Cross-dressing, from Plautus through Twelfth Night and As You Like It, is load-bearing, not cited: the disguise produces the knowledge and the marriages. The gangsters are the law of the old city, turned into a convention of the Friends of Italian Opera. Joe, a woman by day and a millionaire with Cary Grant’s voice by night, is a trickster caught in his own trick; Osgood is the fool who proves the wise man of the green world. What holds it: the patterns are worked with brilliance as comedy, not driven to a meaning beyond the genre’s.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Archetype built into plan and structure. The square under the dome is earth under heaven. The dome’s twelve ribs and twelve windows answer the twelve Apostles on the walls, so the number that founds the Church is built into the vault as well as hung on the wall. The four Evangelists sit in the pendentives that carry the dome, so that the Gospels bear the heaven of the room. The particular stays particular: this family’s saint over this door, this convent’s council. Held below the gate because the whole figure, square, dome and scarsella, is the Old Sacristy’s, quoted and spread sideways, and the archetype is clear and complete rather than deep: once read, it is read.
Mudéjar builders, under Peter of Castile, and later hands · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Two archetypes are built, not evoked. The enclosed garden, the paradise of the Islamic tradition: courts with water on the axis, beds sunk so that the eye walks on flowers, the Crucero’s cross of paths over a vault of water. And the throne under heaven: the Salón de Embajadores is a square, the earth, under a dome of gilded stars, with the king’s seat at its centre. Both carry the plan. The particular stays particular: this king, his title in Gothic letters on the gate, the Arabic in the stucco round it. Held below the top because both archetypes are inherited whole from the Andalusi palace and perfected here rather than first built, and because the later gardens overlay the paradise with a Renaissance pleasure garden that evokes it.
Michel Gondry · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built into the action rather than worn. The erasure is a descent: Joel goes down through his memory as through an underworld, carrying the beloved, and loses her at each turn, an Orpheus inverted, fleeing the dark with a woman who must vanish because he looked back. Lethe is literal, a commercial service with a waiting room. The title brings in Pope’s Eloisa and Abelard, lovers parted and willed to forget, and turns the line into a claim about the cost of a spotless mind. The last shot opens on a return, the same beach and the same meeting run again. What holds it: the myths are announced by quotation more than they deepen, and the return is gestured at in one shot rather than built into the world.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One archetype is built, not only evoked: the end of the world, and what survives it. The titles carry its terms, from the ruin of The Dead Flag Blues to a street where the end is preached to providence, the old word for divine care, and the record answers that word with continuance, not resurrection: the endless sign that closes its title. The particular stays particular: a named street in Vancouver, trains, a real preacher, a passer-by. What holds the axis is that the figures are documents, not persons. No one is made to bear the archetype, and much of the imagery of ruin is the common stock of Revelation.
Mastodon · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The white whale is among the strongest archetypes in modern literature, and the record does more than summon it. The sequence bears a frame: the hunter named in I Am Ahab, the creature and its element in Seabeast, Megalodon and Aqua Dementia, an island and a long voyage in Island and Hearts Alive. Then the coda turns the frame on itself. Joseph Merrick closes a hunt for a monster with a human being who was called one, and that pairing is the record’s own, built rather than borrowed: the monster sought at sea is answered by the monster made on land for viewing. What holds the axis is that the frame lives largely in titles, the whale is never met or struck in the music’s narrative, and one refrain sings the archetype as such.
Barry Jenkins · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth is built, not only evoked, but in a narrow span. The load-bearing pattern is the son who becomes the father: Black in Atlanta wears Juan’s look, drives a car with a crown on its dashboard, keeps his trade, and puts on the armour of the man who was both shelter and source of harm. The boy is baptised in the sea by that father, and the film returns to water at each crisis: ice water for a beaten face, the beach where Kevin touches him, the sea outside the diner’s city. The three names are three selves, each given by others, the last by the beloved, so the identity forged as armour carries the trace of love. Held below the gate because the sacred and the communal are absent and the archetype stays within one life.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the plot rather than cited: the founder who gains a kingdom and loses his one friend, the outsider shut out of the clubs who builds a larger club and is alone in it. Citizen Kane is the template, and the film knows it: a lost woman in place of the sled, a lonely ruler at the close, a story told through those who sued him. The Great Gatsby lies beneath it too, the green light become a browser refreshed. Parker is the tempter, offering the larger sum in place of the friend; the twins are the Dioscuri as Harvard oarsmen. Delpy names the frame, saying in substance that every creation myth needs a devil. Held below the gate because the pattern is inherited whole from Kane and Gatsby, and the particular, which stays vivid, carries it more than it deepens it.
Luigi Vanvitelli · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is built rather than alluded to. The governing figure is the axis of the world: one line from the town through the gate, the gallery and the centre of a cross of wings, past chapel and throne above, and out over water to the source on the mountain. The crossing and its octagon are a centre in the literal, cosmological sense, the point from which all four quarters are seen. The fountains along the water course enact a sequence of myths, Aeolus and the winds, Ceres and the harvest, Venus and Adonis, Diana and Actaeon, that turns a hydraulic line into a passage from wild source to cultivated ground. What holds it below the bar: the figure is inherited whole from Versailles and Roman scenography, and the programme is dress on that structure more than its engine.
Lee Chang-dong · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myths are set in objects rather than cited. The Great Hunger is named by Hae-mi and enacted by her dance and by Jong-su’s whole search. The well is the rescue myth, a child in a pit and a boy who saves her, and the film makes it unverifiable, so the founding myth of their bond may be invented. Ben is the leisured hunter who takes what is useless and says he burns a greenhouse every two months; Jong-su is the son of Faulkner’s arsonist father, and in the end it is he who burns. He names Ben a Gatsby. The archetypes are many, and that is the charge: several are literary, inherited with the story or borrowed by name, and the film’s refusal to settle them leaves them suspended and evoked more often than built to bear the load.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetypal structure is partly built. Water runs through the film as one element of life and death: the washed floor, the waters broken in the shop, the stillborn child, the sea that nearly takes two children and gives them back through the woman whose own child did not live. The beach is staged as a loss reversed, a birth through water, and the group clasped on the sand reads as a pietà without insisting on it. The nurse, the house’s second mother, is an old figure, and the film sets her at the centre. The deserting fathers are nearly faceless. The earthquake and the fire are omens, evoked more than built, and the pattern accumulates rather than bears the whole.
Master Enrique and Juan Pérez · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not alluded to: the church as the heavenly Jerusalem, its walls of precious stones made literal as walls of coloured glass; the cross plan with its axis to the east and the apse as the head of Christ’s body; the ascent from the dark ground to the lit heights. These bear load in plan, section and glass. The particular stays particular: a church on a Roman camp, in a kingdom of the Reconquest, its Last Judgment at the city’s door and the Virgin on the trumeau. Held at 8.2 because these figures are the inheritance of every great Gothic church, built here as received, without a figure of its own that the type had lacked, and because the choir enclosure breaks the ascent along the axis that carries the plan’s meaning.
Dashiell Hammett · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and built around the object. The falcon is a grail: a jewelled tribute from the Knights of Malta to Charles V, lost, enamelled black, chased across centuries and continents by the faithful of greed, and found to be lead. The quest that structures the book ends in a counterfeit, and the hollowness of the treasure is load-bearing: it is what the book means. Spade is a knight with a code and no faith, and the book turns the romance of the knight and his lady inside out by having him surrender the lady to the law. Brigid, with her three names, built much of the archetype of the deceiving woman in American crime fiction. What holds the axis below the gate is that the figures are types more than they become myths: Gutman, Cairo and Wilmer are grotesques of a comic order, and the archetype, though sharp, is narrow.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Part of the myth is built, on the romance quest and the fall from a garden. A boy with a horse, a companion and a code rides south out of a country that has been sold, into a high valley of water, grass and horses; he is expelled for a forbidden love, descends into a prison and returns wounded, the horses taken back, to a land that has no place for him. The knight errant is load-bearing: Rawlins speaks the squire’s common sense, and Alfonsa, who knows the history, is the counsel the knight hears and does not take. The horse is the deepest figure, blood and soul and the world before men, and the boy’s dreams of horses carry it. Held below the gate because the archetypes are familiar and lightly worn, and no figure in the book bears a myth on its own body.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myths are many, and some are built. The outlaw couple of You Only Live Once, They Live by Night and Gun Crazy is the structure; the flight to the shore is a paradise sought and lost; the Robinson Crusoe life is enacted with its parrot and its books. The commedia Pierrot, the moon-struck clown betrayed by his Columbine, is the name Marianne gives Ferdinand against his will, and his refusal is load-bearing: he becomes the fool he denies being. Rimbaud’s eternity of sea and sun closes it. The charge holds the axis below the gate: much of the archetypal matter is evoked by citation, on book covers, in quotations and painted reproductions, rather than built into the action. The film collects myths as it collects paintings.
Wilkie Collins · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not alluded to. The double bears the weight: Anne and Laura, half sisters, as the book discloses late, share a face, and the madwoman in white and the bride in white are exchanged, so that one is buried under the other’s name and the other is consigned to the other’s asylum. The living woman walks to her own grave. Round it stand the Bluebeard marriage to a man with a secret room, here a vestry and a register; the ghost on the road who is a fugitive; and Fosco, fat, gentle and cultivated, with his white mice and his canary, a tyrant of almost mythic appetite. The culture kept the woman in white. Held where it is because the pattern does not question the world it orders: an heir at Limmeridge settles what the double had opened.
Juan O'Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra and Juan Martínez de Velasco · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Two archetypes are built, not merely evoked. The first is the four quarters: one age to each face, so that the tower is set out as a cosmogram, as Mesoamerican cosmology set the world out by directions, and one walks round it as round a world. The second is the book of stone: a tower that holds books and is itself a codex, its surface a painted manuscript in the manner of the pre-Hispanic screenfold books, read by walking. Both decide how the building is met. What holds the axis at 8.2 is that the structure is lodged on the surface of a conventional block: plan and section do not carry it, the stack has no threshold, ascent or centre, and many figures summon myth as illustration rather than building it.
Raymond Chandler · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, and built against itself. The private eye as knight errant, the honest man in a city of money, existed before this book in Chandler’s own work; here the myth is turned. The knight’s loyalty is given to a false friend, and the quest ends not in rescue but in the discovery that the man saved was not worth saving and that the knight was used. Terry is Marlowe’s double and opposite: the soldier who saved two gangsters in a foxhole and has lived on the credit, a man of grace with no centre, who returns from the dead with a new face. The gimlet, the bill and the goodbye are ritual objects carried through the book. Held below the gate because the myth is largely inherited from Chandler’s earlier work and his essay “The Simple Art of Murder”, and the Wade plot carries only a lighter version of it.
The Kinks · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
One myth is built and bears the whole: the lost English Arcadia, the village green as Eden after the Fall, kept now by a society of the faithful. The record does not cite the myth; it builds the village from particulars and peoples it. Walter is the friend of boyhood, Johnny Thunder the rider who belongs to no one, Annabella the witch in the wood, the Phenomenal Cat the creature who learned the secret of life and grew fat on it, Monica the woman of the night, the steam train the last of its breed, Big Sky an indifferent heaven. Each figure keeps a name and a manner. The comic register keeps the myth half ironic, and several figures are sketched rather than built.
Claudio de Arciniega and successors; facade by Manuel Tolsá · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
One archetype is load-bearing, and the site builds it more than the plan: the temple on the temple, a new centre of the world set on the old one. The cathedral rose over and beside the precinct the Mexica held to be the centre of their world, and the plaza between church and palace is the same ceremonial heart, so that foundation and supersession are not alluded to but constructed, stone over stone. The cathedral as heavenly court, carried by the Altar of the Kings and the Assumption over the central portal, is built but inherited from the type. A third figure came unintended: a house sinking into the lake the city drained. Held below the gate because the plan is the Andalusian type, not an archetype made new.
Master James of St George, under Edward I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not hung on. The archetype is the imperial city, Rome in its eastern form, and the claim is load-bearing in the fabric: the walls laid in bands of colour, the towers made polygonal, a departure in Edward’s castles that A. J. Taylor argued recalls the land walls of Constantinople, and the eagles of the great tower, the imperial bird. The site carries the Welsh story of Macsen Wledig, the Roman emperor Magnus Maximus, whose dream of a fortress at the mouth of a river in a far country the Welsh tale sets here. Held below the gate because the Constantinople reading is argued and disputed in its specifics, and because the archetype stays one of rule; threshold, cave and axis are not built through plan and passage.
Built for Bishop Bernward · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, in two figures. The first is the heavenly city: a church on a hill, towered at its gates, dedicated to the captain of the heavenly host, with the angel choirs as tiers of that host set into the transept walls. Towers and galleries are structure, and the dedication is the plan’s sense. The second is the founder’s tomb as the root of the building: Bernward lies beneath the place of prayer, and the church runs from his grave to the altar at the other end, death and liturgy at the two poles. The Jesse ceiling adds a third, laid over the space rather than built into it. Held below the gate because the heavenly city and the westwork are figures inherited, here ordered rather than first made.
John Milton · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
More built than evoked, but built from borrowed materials. The load-bearing structure is the oldest: a maiden lost in a wood, an enchanter, an ordeal, a rescue, a return home. Comus is made the son of Circe, so the Odyssean change of men to beasts is inherited, and haemony is moly made Christian. Sabrina is the masque’s real construction: the British river goddess, a drowned virgin turned genius of the Severn, of the line of Brutus and Locrine, made the one power that can free the Lady, so that the region where the masque is played supplies the grace the doctrine lacks. The Welsh border, the Earl’s office and the oldest pattern of romance become one figure. Held below the gate because much else is allegory set on the frame, Faith, Hope and Chastity, rather than myth living in particulars.
Sawai Jai Singh II · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked, and it is load-bearing, because the celestial sphere is the structure. The Jai Prakash bowls are the vault of heaven inverted and sunk into the earth, the sky made a place the body can enter. The Samrat is the world axis made a stair, its hypotenuse aimed at the pole. The Rashivalaya sets the twelve signs as twelve walls, the zodiac laid out on the ground. Axis mundi, the ladder to heaven and heaven mirrored in earth are carried by the geometry, which is also the instruments’ working geometry, and everything stays particular: this latitude, this king’s tables, Jaipur’s sun. What holds it below the gate: the archetypal structure is a consequence of measurement more than a meaning the work organises, and the ground holds several myths of the sky side by side, not one built cosmos.
Built for Yajnavaraha · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked. Moat as ocean, enclosure as range, sanctuary towers as the peaks of the god’s mountain, the image chamber as the cave at its centre: this is the Khmer temple-mountain, and it is load-bearing in the plan. Banteay Srei adds a turn of its own. Its chief pediment shows Ravana shaking Kailasa, so the building tells on its own face the story of an assault on the very mountain it is. What holds the axis at 8.2 is that the cosmological plan is the common inheritance of every Khmer temple, carried here at reduced scale on a flat site without the stepped pyramid that makes the mountain legible as mass, and that much of the myth’s force is in the relief.
Geoffrey Bawa · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built, not applied. The first is the island citadel: a seat of rule set in water and reached by a single way, the plan of the moated palace and of the temple in its tank, made here at full scale with a lake dug for it. The second is the hall of audience under a great roof, the Kandyan pavilion, in which the roof itself is the sign of assembly and rank, and the pavilions step up to the chamber as a court steps up to the throne. The third is the causeway as threshold, a crossing from the city to the place of law. The particular stays particular. What holds the axis short of the top: the myth built is kingship more than a people’s assembly, and the building does not resolve the two.
Bichitr · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth built here, not merely evoked. The archetype is the king who prefers the holy man to the kings of the earth, as old as Alexander before the sage, and in this picture it is load-bearing: the composition is the archetype, a stair of kings rising to an emperor who looks away from them to a dervish. The sun and moon as the king’s halo build a second myth, the ruler as light, joined to the solar kingship of the house. The hourglass builds a third, the king and time. The particular stays particular: named men, a real shrine, a real English king. What keeps the axis under the gate: the myths are emblems assembled around a seated figure rather than enacted, and the putti are borrowed as signs.
John Everett Millais · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth built in the composition, inherited in the figure. Built: the maiden given back to nature, the body laid into the stream and the flowers until it is one more thing the bank holds; the drowned bride, her dress a wedding dress in all but name; the flower-maiden of the rites of spring, drawn to the water by her garland. The particular stays particular: a stream in summer, nettles and meadowsweet, a model’s face. But the archetype is Shakespeare’s before it is the painter’s, and much of the depth arrives with the name. The canvas’s own achievement is to have fixed the image: after it, Ophelia floats face up among flowers. Held below the gate because it is carried as much by the source as by the canvas.
Nina Simone · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth is built in one place and evoked in others. “Sinnerman” builds it: the sinner flees through the created order, to the rock, the sea, the Lord, and is refused at each station, and the Day of Judgment with no hiding place is the song’s structure, which the arrangement enacts by never resting. “Strange Fruit” evokes the tree and the hanged body, an image that carries the cross, and gives it an exact Southern particular. “Be My Husband” calls up the covenant of marriage in a work song’s cadence. Held below the gate: the built myth is the spiritual’s, inherited and arranged rather than made here, and the six tracks before “Strange Fruit” carry particulars without archetypal weight.
Mastodon · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth is plentiful, and the sequence builds it. The frame is the soul’s journey out of the body and back, the shaman’s flight, joined to the flier who rises too near the sun and to the murdered holy man and the falling Czar. The Czar’s four titles, Usurper, Escape, Martyr and Spiral, make a passion in miniature, and the order of the record carries the soul out and home, so the pattern bears weight in the form. The title grounds it in a particular, a family’s loss. What holds the axis below the bar is construction: the archetypes arrive as story beats, Rasputin is a setting more than a figure, and the frame is mostly known from outside the record. It stands below Star Wars and Master of Puppets at 8.4, which build their figures in image and word.
Tarsila do Amaral · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Built, though in one place. The title names the archetype: the man who eats, the cannibal of the colonisers’ chronicles, the Tupi figure Europe made its emblem of savagery, taken back here as the name of an ancestor. The image builds a second archetype into the body: the earth-born giant, the autochthon made of the ground, foot and hand as roots and the head a late, small flowering, with the cactus as its kin. The sun completes a first-day cosmos of earth, plant, sky and light with one being in it. The distortion is the myth. What holds the axis: the cannibal is carried by the title and the movement that followed more than by the figure, which eats nothing, and the cosmos is laid out as emblem, not enacted.
Patricia Highsmith · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked. The double bears the plot: Tom becomes Dickie, writes in his hand and wears his rings, and the late movement requires him to kill the double in order to become himself again, with a fortune. Behind it stands the American confidence man and the self-made man of the national myth, here made literal and murderous: a young man without a past who makes himself a gentleman by theft, the pattern of The Great Gatsby without Gatsby’s dream, and with the dream’s luck. The innocent abroad is turned over, for the American in Italy is the corrupter, not the corrupted. And Ripley himself has entered the culture’s vocabulary as the type of the charming killer. What holds the axis below the gate is that these patterns are built without being deepened into a cosmos: there is no sacred or fated order behind Tom’s luck, only luck, and the myth is a social myth rather than a mythic one.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the mechanics, not summoned by allusion. A body is broken and distributed and taken into the mouth by the many, and then restored, and the cycle can go on without end: the pattern of the eucharist, and of the dying and returning god, made from a pile of sweets and a rule of replenishment. The work never names it; the taking and the restoring are the work. And the particular stays particular: one man, one weight, one year, one city named in the title. Held below the gate because one act, repeated, carries the pattern rather than a field of parts, and because the structure licenses the reading of communion without compelling it, as Las Meninas compels its play of seeing.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The pattern that bears weight is built into the film, and it is an empty one. The detective quest of Chandler’s Los Angeles is taken over whole, with the rich old man in a wheelchair, the missing young wife and the pornographer, and given to a man who will not look for anything: the case is a labyrinth whose centre is empty. Against it the film builds the figure it is remembered by, the man who abides while everything around him strives. The Western enters through the Stranger, who places the Dude in his time and place and gives him the cowboy’s last word. Around them stand the holy fool, the false father, the shield-brother who is also a danger, and Donny, the innocent who dies without being heard. Held below the gate because the other myths are genre frames and jokes, evoked through pastiche more than made to bear load.
Many masters, from 1386; facade completed in the nineteenth century · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype built is the heavenly city: a church whose roof is populated, a Jerusalem of stone with saints on every pinnacle and the Virgin in gold at its summit over the earthly city. It is built into the roof and the main spire, not hung on them, and the visitor walks in it. The interior builds the forest, the pier as tree and the five aisles as grove. The particular stays particular: this Madonnina, this city’s custom, this marble from this quarry. Held below the gate because the heavenly city and the forest are inherited figures of Gothic building, multiplied here rather than first built, and statues by the thousand evoke more than they construct.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
One archetype is built, and it is load-bearing: the cycle of generation and corruption, the round of birth, feeding, breeding and death, which the case does not depict but runs. The white box is a womb and a tomb at once, a minimal cube from which life comes; the head is the feast and the corpse; the killer is the fate that falls on the many without choosing. That structure is the operation of the work, not an allusion in it. Other patterns are evoked, not built: the slaughtered beast of sacrifice, the lord of the flies, the place of the skull, the god who watches a world through glass and does not intervene. The title sets the cycle against a span no fly can know. The particular stays particular: a butcher’s head, bought flies, a catering appliance. Held below the gate because only the cycle is built.
Vijayanagara builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth built, not only evoked. The plan carries the archetype of approach to the god’s dwelling: the threshold of the gateway, the axis, the open hall of assembly, the narrowing to the dark chamber of the image. The stone chariot is the archetype made load-bearing. The god’s car, which in the festival rolls through the city, is fixed on the axis and given to Garuda, so that the temple holds its own procession at rest. The yalis on the piers make the hall’s supports into the composite guardian beasts of the threshold. Held below the gate because these are the archetypes of the Dravidian temple at large, carried with distinction rather than newly built, and the cosmic diagram of the shrine is harder to read now that its tower is lost.
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth is built once, and built to bear weight. Rock & Roll is a conversion: a child in a dead place hears a voice from far off, and her life is changed. The radio is grace, the structure of lack, call and salvation carries the whole song, and Jenny stays a particular girl in a particular suburb, which is what the axis asks. Elsewhere myth is summoned with a sure hand: New Age evokes the fallen star of the screen, the Sunset Boulevard figure, under a millennial title; Sweet Jane the plain couple as the keepers of the world; Oh! Sweet Nuthin’ a beatitude for the poor in the voice of a street hymn. Held from the top: one song built, three evoked, and the second side mostly outside the question.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimitsu; rebuilt 1955 · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth built into site and section, not only evoked. The pavilion over water is the jewelled hall by the lotus pond of the Pure Land sutras, at the scale of a villa, and the archetype is load-bearing: the building is sited to be doubled in the pond, the hall and its image the other world and this one. It is a relic tower in function, its summit holding the Buddha’s relics, the phoenix above it the bird of the auspicious reign. The particular stays particular: this shogun, this estate bought from the Saionji. Held below the gate because the figures are inherited from the garden tradition and set together, and the ascent is a gradation of manners more than a passage the body makes.
Russian carpenters · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetype built here is the holy mountain. The Transfiguration took place on a mountain, and the church is a mountain of wood raised on a flat island, its tiers converging on one crown. The cluster of domes reads also as the heavenly city seen across water, and the island set apart by the lake as a sacred precinct, the pogost with its graveyard. These bear load in the mass: the pyramid is the building, not ornament on it. Held below the gate on two counts. The mountain is an inference from dedication and form, and no programme of the builders records it. The meanings often read into the count of twenty-two are interpretation and are not scored.
Joseph Beuys · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Here the archetype is built, not cited. The structure is a rite of passage in three parts, separation in the felt and the ambulance, ordeal in the days in the room, return in the felt and the ambulance again, and the action enacts it whole. Within it the man takes the shape of the shepherd with his crook, the shaman in his insulating skins, the healer who goes to the wound: not allusions laid over the event but figures the body assumed in the room. The coyote brings the trickster of Native American story, and that layer is partly summoned by naming rather than built, and partly taken from a tradition not Beuys’s own, which costs it. The particular stays particular: one man, one animal, given days.
Andrew Stanton · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears weight. The plot is the flood inverted: humanity rides out a ruined earth in an ark, the Axiom, and a dove, EVE, is sent out to bring back a green leaf as proof that the waters have gone down. Her directive is the dove’s task, and the plot turns on its delivery. Beside it a second pattern runs through the names: EVE, and WALL-E, the creature of earth who compacts earth, a figure of Adam in the root sense; the two return to a garden. The last keeper of a dead world is an old figure, built here into the whole first movement, and the particular stays particular: a spork, a hubcap. Held below the gate because some of the deep is cited rather than built: AUTO’s red eye and the Captain rising to the music of 2001 are quotation, and the Adam and Eve pattern stays in the names more than in the action.
John Huston · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The myth is built and bears weight. The falcon is a grail: the sacred tribute of a knightly order, lost at sea, passed through the hands of pirates and collectors, sought across the world by a fellowship of thieves, and found to be base metal. The quest is the plot, and the bird is its object from the first scene to the last. Spade is a figure the film helps to make rather than inherits whole, the private man of a public trade who keeps his own law and is alone at the end; Brigid is the woman whose every story is a lie and whose love may be real. The particular stays particular: a lead bird, a cigarette rolled, a tiny gun, an envelope of thousand-dollar bills. The limit: the quest is largely ironic and drawn in dialogue, the legend is told rather than embodied, and the archetypes are clearer as types than as myth.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The quest for a holy relic is built, and it bears the structure: the hero’s trials, the descent beneath the earth into a pit of serpents, the sealed tomb, the rival who is the hero’s double, and the relic whose power punishes those who seize it, as the Ark of the Bible struck down those who touched it. The particular stays particular: a bullwhip, a hat, a monkey, a staff measured in kadams. The film honours the myth it carries by letting the sacred act at the end, unasked, against the powers of the world, and that act completes the pattern the descent began rather than being laid on top of it. What holds the figure: part of the charge is evoked through the serial and the Bible rather than made; the descent changes nothing in the hero; and the double is drawn in a few speeches.
Kara Walker · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Archetype is built, not only evoked. The sphinx is the guardian with a riddle, the monument that outlasts its makers; here she is given the kerchief and features of the American mammy, so that the oldest monumental form of a sovereign is joined to the cheapest image of a servant, and the riddle becomes the question the sight of her puts to the visitor. Behind, the exposed sex makes her also the mother and the source, the fertility figure, and the body put to use. The subtlety of the title is a real form, the sugar sculpture of the court banquet, built at the scale of a temple. Held below the summit because the particular is a type by intention: there is no one woman here, and the stereotype carries much of the archetype.
Michael Curtiz · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and it bears the plot. The ruler of a small kingdom at the edge of the world, wounded in love, withholds himself, and is drawn back into the world by the return of what wounded him: the wounded king and his healing, in a white dinner jacket. The letters of transit are a passage out of a limbo of waiting, and the café is its gate. Under the personal myth lies a national one, load-bearing and dated to the month: an American expatriate in December 1941, with a past of gun-running and Spain, who will not take sides and chooses one at the airport. The particular stays particular: a piano, a chess problem, champagne. Held below the gate because the figures are drawn in clean strokes and the allegory is schematic, closer to fable than to a myth worked through.
Jane Campion · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The film builds rather than evokes in two places. The dog in the hills is a made myth: a sign only the initiated see, which Phil holds as proof of his election by Bronco Henry, and which Peter reads at once, so that the moment of recognition is the moment Phil is lost. The psalm turns the title into structure: the son delivers his darling, his mother, from the power of the dog, and the verse is read over the act. Beneath sit older patterns: the cowboy, guardian of the frontier’s manliness, undone from inside; the weak youth who brings down the giant; the son who avenges the mother. What holds it three tenths below the gate: the frontier myth is dismantled rather than remade, and the older patterns are summoned more than built.
Alan Moore and J. H. Williams III · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth built, in the plain sense. The origin is made for the work: a girl in Alexandria in the early fifth century, her pagan father killed by a Christian mob, taken by Thoth and Hermes into the Immateria, and living thereafter as a story that takes flesh in whoever imagines her. The structure is load-bearing: the ascent is the Kabbalistic Tree, the turning-point is the Tarot, the end is a revelation, and Sophie’s name carries Wisdom. What holds it below the gate is the second half of the test: the particular does not stay particular. Sophie is less a person who becomes an archetype than an occasion for one, and the myths, assembled from the Hermetic tradition, Crowley’s Thelema and the Golden Dawn’s correspondences, are expounded, catalogued more than lived.
Park Chan-wook · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The myth is built, not cited. The structure is Oedipal: a man seeks the cause of his suffering, every step brings the catastrophe nearer, and the truth found is incest committed unknowing, with the investigator himself the guilty party. The prison is the tower of the Monte Cristo story, with a self-taught avenger made in confinement, and the film turns it: the captive is the object of revenge, not its agent, and his liberty is the second stage of the sentence. The beast, a man made an animal in a cage who asks to live as a dog, is load-bearing. The particular stays particular: dumplings, a cheap suit, a Seoul sushi bar. Held below the gate because the archetype is staged by the antagonist, a myth arranged as a trap rather than one that rises from the film’s world, and the inquiry is a twist as much as a fate.
David Cronenberg · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The myth is built, not evoked: the metamorphosis is the structure, and the film is its stages. It inherits Kafka’s insect and Ovid’s transformations, the maker who becomes his own creature, Faust’s bargain for power, a man who flies too high on his own invention, and Beauty and the Beast run backwards: the beauty loves the man, watches him become the beast, and no kiss restores him. The telepods are womb and tomb, and the pregnancy rhymes with them. The particular stays particular: five identical suits, motion sickness, a love of sugar. What holds the figure: the myths are fused rather than made new, and the archetype is clear more than deep; nothing in it stays as unresolved as Kafka’s insect.
Pallava, under Narasimhavarman II · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Here the myth is built, not alluded to. The vimana is the mountain of the god, the stepped peak of Kailasa or Meru, raised in coursed granite and crowned with its dome; the sanctum below is the cave in the mountain where the god is present in the lingam. The building sets this mountain where the land meets the ocean and turns its cave to the rising sun, so that mountain, cave, threshold and sunrise bear load in plan and orientation. The reclining Vishnu, the god who sleeps on the serpent on the waters between creations, lies in a cell a few metres from the actual sea: the particular site carries the cosmic myth literally. What holds the axis: these are the shared archetypes of the Dravida temple, given special force by the site rather than newly made, and the accreted plan blurs the axis.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Myth is built here more than evoked. The kiva is the built archetype of the tradition: a round chamber sunk in the earth, entered by a ladder through the roof, with the sipapu in the floor as the opening to the world below, so that to climb out is to re-enact the emergence of the people into this world. At Cliff Palace the site doubles it: the whole village sits inside an opening in the earth, and the kivas are openings within that opening. Held below the gate because the kiva is the tradition’s common form, built in every village of the region, and because to read the alcove as a place of emergence is an interpretation the record does not state.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The archetypes are many and load-bearing: the fallen house, named for Atreus and marked by a father killed in the bullring; the son exiled into the desert after his father’s death; the mother who is also an agent; the chosen one foretold by others for their own ends; the desert as the place of trial and rebirth, with the worm as its god. The particular holds: a stillsuit’s tubes, a crysknife, a ducal ring, a bull’s head on a wall. The film builds rather than evokes from Leto’s death to the duel, where the son’s first killing is his entry into the people of his prophecy. Held below the gate because the messiah as a trap is evoked only, in visions.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Myth is built in one place and it bears the record’s weight. The second disc is laid on the descent of Orpheus: Eurydice’s song and Orpheus’s answer stand at its head, and the looking back, the act that loses her, is the record’s own word, reflection, made into the fatal act, so that the myth and the thesis are one figure. Afterlife asks the myth’s question in the voice of a modern couple, whether the dead can be followed. The particular holds: the two lovers are sung by a married pair, and the Rodin cover sets the frame. Around it Joan of Arc, the carnival with its locked heaven and the mirror of Narcissus are evoked. Held below the gate because the Orpheus songs lend the myth’s names to love songs more than they narrate it, and the first disc’s carnival is atmosphere.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Myth built, not evoked. The pattern of Aulis bears the plot: a father who has offended, the hunter who killed the sacred deer, the surgeon who killed on the table, must give a child to restore a balance he cannot argue with; a power with no visible means enforces it; the wife’s hatred waits. The particular holds: a cardiac surgeon in Cincinnati, a boy who eats spaghetti with his fork in his fist. The film reworks the myth: no hind is substituted at the altar, no wind is wanted for a fleet, and the victim is chosen by a roulette in which the father is blinded, so that chance stands where the goddess stood. Martin is Nemesis made adolescent and petty. Two charges: Kim’s school essay names the source and turns construction into citation for a moment; and the archetype is the scaffold of the plot more than a depth the people inhabit.
Maya (Puuc) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Myth is built here, not evoked, in two load-bearing figures. The pyramid is the sacred mountain, the witz, and the identification is structural: a made mountain on a plain, Temple IV’s façade the mountain’s face and its doorway the mouth of the earth, so that whoever enters the sanctuary enters the mountain’s cave, threshold and cave made literal on the axis of ascent. The second figure is renewal by burial, the old sanctuary held inside the new like a seed or an earlier world, carried by the plan rather than signalled. The particular stays particular: this city’s rain masks, this plain without water. The dwarf legend is credited only as evidence that the form still makes myth. Held below the gate because the monster mouth and the witz are inherited Chenes and Maya figures, built well here rather than first, and the monster-mouth temple is one stage of five, not the governing form of the whole.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The structure is an initiation, and it is built, not evoked. The father takes the boy across the water to kill and brings him back to a false triumph; the boy crosses again with his mother to learn what the rite hides. The island is the walled community of the tribe, the causeway a threshold the tide opens and shuts, the mainland a wilderness where the dead walk. Kelson is the hermit of the wild who keeps the bones, and his ossuary is a temple in the old sense, where death is made sacred rather than defeated; the child born of an infected mother and carried home uninfected is the gift brought back from the underworld. The particular stays particular: bows, iodine, a tumour, a twelve-year-old’s fear. Below the gate because the nation’s martial past stays allusion and the coda’s cult is evoked for another film.
Béla Bartók · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
A structure that could be called archetypal is built and bears weight: the passage from darkness to light, from one voice’s lament through night to the village dance, from the chromatic to the diatonic. The subject that began as grief in muted strings ends as a song of the community, and the form builds that passage rather than laying it on. Held below the gate because the particular is thin, as in all wordless instrumental music: no person, place or act is named, the Adagio’s night is a type Bartók had used before, and the finale evokes the village without building it. Darkness to light is the commonest shape of the symphonic tradition since Beethoven. Myth built in outline, evoked in substance.
Franz Schubert · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype most often heard here is death and its approach: the stillness before the end, the last dance, the semitone that cuts the major. But that reading is largely supplied by biography, a work written in the last months of its composer’s life, and biography is not construction. What the score builds is a recurring figure, the semitone above the centre returning at three structural points, and a passage from song through eruption and dance to a stroke. That is a formal return, and an archetype only by the listener’s naming. The chorale and the horns summon the sacred and the hunt as atmosphere. Myth evoked with great power, and not built. Below the Goldberg at 8.4, whose journey out and home bears weight in its form.
Mikhail Lermontov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Here the book is more evoked than built. Its materials are Byronic and Romantic: the demonic hero, the captive mountain bride, the girl of the smugglers’ shore, the duel of honour, the wager with fate. Lermontov particularises them all and ironises most of them, which is his achievement, but the deep pattern is mostly inherited rather than made load-bearing. What is built is one thing, and it is large: the type of the gifted, idle, self-wasting man that Russian literature then named the superfluous man and kept rewriting for a century, here given its fullest early form in prose. The type lifts the axis above where the inherited materials alone would put it. “The Fatalist” reaches toward a true archetypal structure, a man testing predestination with a pistol at his own head, and lets it close in Maksim Maksimych’s shrug. The deep patterns are evoked and undercut more than built, and that holds the axis here.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often and strongly, and built in the frame. The sides are named Outside and Inside, and the record does move from a world looked at, a city, a history, a campaign, to a self looked into, ending in a mind that remembers nothing: a descent from the world into the skull, borne by the order of the tracks. Within it the old patterns are summoned by title and image. Day of the Lords borrows the prophets’ day of judgement, Wilderness the wanderer through ages of martyrdom, Interzone Burroughs’s city of exile, and She’s Lost Control, at the hinge of the two sides, the oldest figure of the possessed, the sacred disease. What holds the axis is that no figure bears these patterns: the speaker has no name and no story, and the archetypes stay atmosphere around a thin frame.
Robert Schumann · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The particulars are vivid and some reach toward the figural: the Virgin in Cologne with the beloved’s face, the wedding the lover watches from outside, the land of old fairy tales in no. 15, the coffin sunk in the sea. The last song builds something like a rite, the poet burying his songs and his love together in a grave larger than any grave. What holds the axis is that the archetypes are evoked, and Heine evokes them in order to puncture them: the coffin carried by twelve giants is a joke as large as the grief. A rite performed in irony is myth evoked. The cycle builds a sequence of images of one love remembered, not a myth carried through its structure, as Winterreise carries its stranger on an inverted quest.
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
There is construction here, not only allusion. Einstein is made a figure of the century: the scientist as fiddler, whose thought experiments ran on trains and clocks, set beside a trial for judgement, a bed for sleep and death, and a spaceship for ascent and destruction. The scheme builds these into a cycle. Each image returns transformed: the train becomes a building, the bed a beam of light ascending, the field the inside of the machine. The particular stays vivid in Childs’s pipe, the clock, the lovers on the bench. Held below the gate because the images are icons placed side by side, not an archetype the work enacts. Nobody undergoes anything: the trial has no defendant, the apocalypse no protagonist.
Joni Mitchell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often and built in one pattern: the wanderer who leaves home to be free and finds that freedom is homesickness. The sequence lays it out, from the opening road, “on a lonely road”, through Greece and Paris to California, where she asks to be taken “as I am”, and the flight back in This Flight Tonight. Around that pattern archetypes are summoned: love as sacrament in A Case of You, the river as escape, the child given away and named for the green of spring, the bar at closing time as a purgatory. The particulars are kept sharp: Matala, a park in Paris, a California Christmas, Richard’s coffee and his wife. What holds the axis below the gate: the archetypes are summoned by image and allusion more than built into load-bearing structure, and the journey is a sequence of postcards, not one journey made.
R.E.M. · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked throughout, densely and consistently, and the evocation is of one country. The record summons the American South as a half-remembered land: the kudzu on the front of the sleeve and the railway trestle on the back stand for a country overgrown and a way across it, and the music gives the same thing by ear. Pilgrimage names the journey to a holy place, and Talk About the Passion carries, by its title, the sacred sense of suffering. A summoning this dense and this single in direction is the evoked kind at its strongest. Held well below the bar because none of it is load-bearing: no figure, no journey across the sequence, no structure that would fall if the archetype were taken away. The particular stays particular only as texture, a porch and a field glimpsed.
Buscheto and Rainaldo · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built rather than alluded to, but they are the basilica’s own: the processional axis from the city’s threshold to the apse, the cross laid on the ground, the crossing as the centre of the world under a dome as heaven. Two things are more particular. The façade turns the threshold into a stacked arcade of light, city gate and reliquary front at once; and the builder’s tomb in that threshold makes the church a monument to its own making, the maker set like a founder in his city’s wall. The spoils make it a built triumph, the enemy’s goods carried into the temple. Held below the gate because the myth of Pisa as a new Rome is evoked by spoils and inscriptions more than built into plan and section.
Anthony Burgess · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The pattern is old and partly built. The three-part shape is fall, punishment and return, and Part Three is nemesis made literal, each wrong coming home in the person of its victim, as in a morality play. The title carries a built emblem: the clockwork man, the organic made mechanical, which the state performs on Alex and which F. Alexander’s manuscript within the book names. Behind it stands the old theological quarrel Burgess himself named, Augustine against Pelagius, original sin against perfectibility, built into the plot as two views of the criminal. With the last chapter the shape becomes the prodigal’s: the son who wants a son. What holds it below the bar is that the archetypes are argued around Alex more than embodied in him; he is a type of youth and a case, and the myth sits in the scheme more than in the boy.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetypes are several, and some are built. The Passion is the strongest: twelve stations, a woman taken to her death by a trade and a society, and the explicit summons of Joan, a girl judged by men, makes the parallel load-bearing rather than allusive. Nana’s bobbed hair takes Louise Brooks’s Lulu, another woman of the street killed at the end, and that is evoked. “The Oval Portrait” is the film’s own myth of the artist whose image of a woman drains her life, placed so that it comes just before her death. Porthos in Parain’s story, who dies the first time he thinks about how to walk, is a told parable of thought killing action. What holds the axis lowest of the gated five: the myths are cited and layered around a figure, not grown out of her, and the film’s coolness keeps the particular from fully becoming the archetype.
Edith Wharton · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is partly built. The anthropological frame bears weight: Archer reads his tribe as an ethnographer would, and the book’s late discovery is that the tribe is real and has closed over him. May is drawn as Diana, the huntress who wins at the archery contest, chaste, bright and fatal to the man who looks too long at another goddess. The daisy of the opera, its petals counted for love and not love, is the plot told in advance. Ellen carries the figure of the exile who comes home and is cast out again. But the patterns sit within a realist surface that keeps them implicit, and the book seldom lets the particular rise to the general by its own structure: the archetypes are images more than the frame of the action. The figure sits four tenths below the construction the gate asks for.
Stevie Wonder · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often and built in two places. “Pastime Paradise” builds the two paradises, the lost one of those who dwell on the past and the promised one of those who wait on the future, and its closing procession of choir and chant makes the second a real gathering, not an image. “As” builds the eternal vow, the oldest form of the love song, on impossibilities of the natural order. Around these the archetypes are evoked: the newborn as blessing, the remembered child of “I Wish”, “a little nappy-headed boy”, the ancestors named in “Sir Duke”, the far utopia of “Saturn”. What holds it below the bar: the life-cycle frame is laid by the sequence, not built as one structure, and the archetypes rarely bear load beyond their songs.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The title sets the frame: a son of Jesus who is an addict and a thief, the holy fool as derelict, a prophet who misreads every sign. Part of it is built. The narrator of the first story claims to have known the crash before it came, and ends by turning on his readers as a prophet turns on a faithless people. The arc is a descent and return, from a death on the road through an underworld of bars, hospitals and abandoned houses to a resurrection that is only a job and a window. “Emergency” stages a nativity in reverse and an annunciation in the snow. What holds the axis is that much of the myth lives in the title and in the narrator’s visionary diction, evoked rather than load-bearing; no figure bears the pattern as the judge bears it in Blood Meridian, and the narrator is too dissolved to be an archetype.
Cistercian builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built into the plan, but they are the type’s. The cloister is the enclosed garden, paradise as the ordered square with the fountain at its edge; the church is the house of God turned to the east; the stair from dormitory to choir makes the night a passage from sleep to the office. These carry load: the community’s life passes through the cloister, and the church’s orientation and light frame its liturgy. The particular stays particular in the cloister’s tilted plan, the paradise square bent by a real hillside. Held below the gate because the monastic plan was Benedictine and Carolingian before it was Cistercian: the figure is perfected here, not first built.
Interpol · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked in figures, and the figures are strong. Stella is the strongest: by her song’s title a woman who is a diver and is always down, a figure of descent and of drowning, given the record’s deepest song. Leif Erikson names the explorer who reached a new world first and was forgotten, and leaves the name unexplained at the record’s close. The angels of Say Hello to the Angels and the city of NYC, a night underworld under bright lights, complete a set of archetypes that colour the whole: descent, the forgotten arrival, the underworld lit up. What holds it is that these figures sit in single songs and no pattern bears weight across the sequence, and that the particular is withheld: the people are names and premises rather than persons in a place.
Bernardo Rossellino, for Pius II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is the ideal city, and here it is built, not evoked. The painted ideal cities of the following decades show an empty square with a temple and palaces; Pienza is lived in. The founder’s myth bears weight too: a birthplace transfigured and renamed for the man born there, Corsignano become the city of Pius, with the church at the head of the axis and the town hall facing it, heaven and the commune on one line. The cathedral set at the edge of the ridge, its east end hanging over the valley, makes a threshold of the world’s end. What holds the axis below the bar: there is no cosmic figure in plan or section, no circle in the square and no dome over a centre, and the archetype is civic and political more than sacred. It is built, but it is a narrower myth than the temple as cosmos.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is present and partly built: the lit refuge in the darkness, the inn or hearth at night, rebuilt as a modern counter; the watchers who stay awake while the city sleeps, whom the title names. The structure carries it: the whole composition is a lighted island in a dark field, and its four figures are the only people awake in a shut city. The particular holds: a cigar sign, coffee urns, a red dress, a hat. But the myth is evoked by the light more than constructed in the figures, who carry no archetypal role of their own; the couple could be any couple and the lone man any man, which is the point and also the limit. Readings that would deepen it, a ship of light, a stage before an audience of one, the war’s blackout behind the brightness, are brought to it. Held below the gate.
Correggio · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Built in one decisive respect. The union of god and mortal is given its structure by the picture’s one invention, the god as cloud: the archetype of a divine that cannot be seen and can only be felt is not alluded to but made the composition, a formless dark over a formed light body. Io stays particular, a back, a hand, a face turned away, and the archetype deepens through her rather than replacing her. What holds the axis below the bar is narrowness: one pattern carried in one instant. The rest of the myth, the change into a heifer, Argus, Juno, is absent, so the archetype is the encounter alone. The stag is evocation, not construction. A built myth of one beat.
Mughal, under Akbar · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Some archetype is built. The city founded where the saint’s prayer was answered is a foundation myth realised in plan: the tomb at the heart of the mosque court, the palace beside it, the heir’s birth the city’s reason. Anup Talao, a square of water with four causeways to a centre, repeats the fourfold paradise in plan. Other figures are read into the work rather than built in it: the column of the Diwan-i-Khas as the axis of the world with the ruler at the meeting of the four quarters, and the palace courts as the imperial encampment made fixed. Both readings are contested; the column may have carried a treasury, and the camp is an analogy. The myth built with certainty is the saint’s shrine and the victor’s gate, and the axis stands well below the gate for it.
Itō Jakuchū · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Some is built. The set as hung is a cosmos round a Buddha: the living world in all its domains gathered as a congregation before Śākyamuni, so that the archetype of creation assembled before the sacred is the structure of the gift, not an allusion in it. The phoenix is the auspicious bird of the sage ruler, the peacock the bird of the Buddhist paradise. The rest stays wholly particular: these cocks, this pond, these shells, painted from life. Held below the gate because the building depends on the triad, which is context, and because on a gallery wall the scrolls read more as a bestiary of the natural world than as a myth; the particular rises to the archetypal by the intensity with which it is looked at, closer to evocation than to construction.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built, not alluded to. The acropolis: the civic precinct lifted on its mound above the ordinary ground. The cloister or atrium: the enclosed green court as the commons. The hearth-hall: the dark council room at the top, under visible timber, like the hall of the old Nordic house. And the ascent to the place of decision. These carry plan and section, which is the test. What holds the axis below the gate is that the deep pattern is diffuse rather than single: several archetypes are gathered at a domestic scale and none becomes load-bearing as a dome made heaven does. The mound is a gesture of a few metres; it works as myth because it is modest, and its depth is a village’s, not a cosmos’s.
Lina Bo Bardi · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The hearth in the hall is a real fire at the centre of a gathering place, and the river is real water crossing the floor: the two oldest images of dwelling, set as working elements in a public room. The towers and bridges build the image of a citadel, the bridges a passage over forbidden ground, and the unglazed openings read as caves cut in a cliff. What holds the axis: the hearth and river are literal and small, almost domestic, and can read as quotation of the popular culture Bo Bardi admired; the citadel is an image the towers carry, not a route the visitor completes; and the archetypes stand side by side rather than as one load-bearing structure.
Milan Kundera · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is built at two points and evoked elsewhere. The first is Oedipus. Tomas’s article argues that those who did not know are still responsible, as Oedipus, who did not know, put out his own eyes; the article ends his career as a surgeon and sends him down to window washing and the country, so the myth carries the plot and the moral question of the whole occupation. The second is the expulsion from Paradise, built into the last part: the dog as the one creature left in Eden, the idyll as the human longing to go back, the circular time of the animal set against the line of human history. Tereza, imagined as a child sent downstream in a basket, carries the foundling’s pattern. Held below the gate because Kundera calls his people experimental selves, and they serve the variations of a theme more than they bear the archetype as persons.
Christopher Wren, with Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
One archetype is built into the plan and bears load: the axis. A line runs from the water through a gate of twin towers, along a processional way, to a small temple-like house and up to the hill where, at the Observatory, time and place are measured. The hospital frames that line and does not occupy it; the empty centre is the composition. The twin domes act as the gate of a city or the pylons of a temple, the river as the threshold of the sea. That is built, not evoked. What holds the axis: the hill and the Observatory are context, not the work, and the hospital’s share is the frame; and the rest of the myth, sea power and the Protestant succession of the hall’s programme, is allegory painted on surfaces.
Lluís Domènech i Montaner · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Two archetypes are built and not merely evoked. The first is the hall as a garden under the sun. The floral programme runs from the tiled columns of the street front to the roses of the ceiling and resolves in the skylight, a glass sun over a room of flowers; the glass walls and the hanging dome are the structure of the idea, not its surface. The second is music as a threshold between the earth and the ideal: the proscenium sets popular song and Clavé against Beethoven and Wagner’s riders, and behind the stage the muses rise out of the wall itself. Held below the gate because the second is carried by sculpture applied to the frame, and the national myth belongs to one movement’s moment.
Björk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often and built in one pattern: the land as a body, erupting and then at rest. The sequence carries it. The record opens on Hunter, a figure as old as myth, the one who goes out alone; it passes through Jóga, where feeling is tectonic; it reaches Pluto, named for the god of the underworld, an eruption in which the self must “have to explode”; and it ends in All Is Full of Love, a waking into a world made new. Death and rebirth by fire is load-bearing in the order. Bachelorette, its words written with Sjón, adds a figure out of saga. What holds it below the bar: the frame is carried by titles and sound more than by a figure who bears it, and the land is Iceland only by the maker’s account, not by anything named in the songs.
Hellenistic · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, and it is one myth. The epiphany, the god come down to stand among mortals, is the whole structure of the work, and it is made from a particular ship, a particular wind and a particular body. She stays particular: broad-hipped and heavy-limbed, a woman and not an emblem, her two garments of different weights behaving differently in the same gust. What holds the axis down is the thinness of the myth itself. Nike is a personification with almost no story, and there is nothing to construct beyond the arrival. Whatever the sanctuary added went with the setting. The archetype bears the load, and it is the only one.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetypal structure is built, on Mitch’s night, in its classical order: the ordeal, by elders, with a ritual instrument; the guide, Pink, who takes him out; the night journey through the adult world, the pool hall, the beer, the girl, the gun; and the return home at dawn, changed, under a mother who chooses not to see it. Pink’s night is the refusal of an oath: the young man who will not sign the covenant the elders of the tribe hold out. Wooderson is the youth who will not age, kept in the town while his years run, and the film knows it. What holds the axis: the rite is played as comedy, the oath as a sheet of paper, and outside Mitch’s arc the myth is carried by tone.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The pattern is old and bears weight: the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to seek the one, and its inversion, the many sent to die for the one, with the question whether the one is worth them carried as the plot itself. The mother who has given her sons, for whom Lincoln’s letter to Mrs Bixby is read aloud, is the grieving mother of every war story. Miller is the hidden teacher, his trade kept secret as a wager among his men, and his trembling hand marks the wound the leader carries. The bridge held to the end is the last stand. What holds the figure under the gate is that much of the myth is named rather than built, by letters read aloud and by a last instruction, “Earn this”, which states the debt the structure should carry alone.
George Gilbert Scott and William Henry Barlow · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the plan. The hotel stands across the end of the shed as a gatehouse stands across a road, a tower at its corner, and the traveller passes through the city’s wall into the great hall of departure. The pointed vault, a nave without aisles, makes the station the cathedral of the railway, a figure the period used constantly and here built in iron at full scale. Since 2007 the gate has a second meaning: the frontier of the island, crossed under the sea. These patterns bear load. Held below the top because the cathedral of travel is an inherited figure, evoked here more powerfully than elsewhere but not first built here, and because the gate’s two faces, the medieval city and the machine, are two myths set back to back rather than fused.
Thomas Cole · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
More built than evoked, though not everywhere. The built structure is the old pattern of the garden and the wilderness, Eden and the world outside it, carried not by allusion but by the diagonal, which turns a fact of topography into a moral division. The storm passing is the Deluge passing. Cleared patches on the far hill have been read by some scholars as Hebrew letters, Noah, and, read inverted as from heaven, Shaddai, the Almighty; granted, they make the covenant after the flood the frame. They are faint and contested, and credited a little. Without them the myth is a strong structure of two halves rather than a deep one. The particular stays particular: a real lookout, a real river, a painter in the clothes of his day.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Two archetypes are built, not alluded to. The first is ascent: the sacred raised bodily above the market and reached by climbing from commerce to prayer, the platform making the threshold load-bearing in the literal sense. The second is the garden of paradise, rendered not as a scene but as the room’s own skin, the worshipper enclosed in tulip and carnation that never fade because they are fired. The dome over the octagon gives the familiar heaven above the square world, but that is the type’s, and Sinan’s larger mosques build it more forcefully. The garden is the building’s own myth; it is held below the top because its means, however total, are ornament.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The pattern is the deliverance from the shore, and the film builds it rather than names it: an army trapped between an enemy it cannot see and a sea it cannot cross, saved by a fleet of the ordinary. It bears load. A father goes himself, with his son, because men his son’s age are being sent; a boy dies on the way and is made a hero in print; a pilot stays behind and is taken, a sacrifice set against the army’s escape. The national myth of the evacuation is shown in its making, by the newspapers at the end, so the film builds the legend and watches it built. What holds it below the gate: the figures are kept deliberately thin, types more than particulars, most barely named, and the archetype is the event’s own, inherited from history.
Bob Rafelson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The pattern is the prodigal son, and it is built rather than cited. The son who left the father’s house for a far country of oil rigs and waitresses comes home when the father is dying, is received, and finds no one to confess to, since the father cannot speak; then, against the parable, he leaves again. The names are a second thread: Robert Eroica Dupea, the heroic symphony in a man who will not perform, with Partita and Carl Fidelio beside him, a family named as a repertoire. The flight north rhymes with Palm’s Alaska, the wanderer’s road without a goal. The particular stays particular. What holds it: the prodigal frame carries the second half only, and the north is evoked rather than built.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into plan and section three ways. The vessels: one cup turned up to receive, one turned down to cover, the open and the closed, the oldest pair of forms placed side by side on one ground and made the two houses of a constitution. The gate: the city’s axis runs into the narrow gap between the towers, so the seat of the republic is a portal at the end of the ceremonial way. The platform: the raised ground, climbed by ramp, on which the signs of power stand. All three stay particular to this plateau and this constitution. They stand as signs to be seen rather than spaces passed through: no procession carries the citizen through the gate, and inside, the myth stops.
Cass Gilbert · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
More is built here than evoked. The cathedral is not only ornament: the lobby is laid out on a cross, its arms vaulted, its crossing lit from above; the tower is set where a spire stands, over the entrance on the main front, and rises to a pointed crown. The ascent is structure, the piers carrying the eye straight up. And the particular is kept: this corner, this park, this fortune of small coins. What holds the axis below the bar is that the archetype is borrowed and turned, the church taken for commerce, so that the deep pattern serves as a sign of what has displaced it rather than being lived in its own right; and the carved grotesques evoke rather than build. The myth built most fully is that of American commerce at its height, an age’s myth more than the race’s.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Partly built. The structure that bears weight is the wandering company in the waste: the troupe without a place is the oldest image of exile, the people of the road, and the bare ground makes it load-bearing rather than allusive, since there is nowhere for them to be. The Harlequin, from the commedia, is the trickster made melancholy, the performer whose mask is his self. The holy family, in the woman apart, the child and the father figure, is touched, not built. And the canvas carries the modern myth of the artist as saltimbanque, from Baudelaire’s Le Vieux Saltimbanque, Daumier and Banville: it states that myth rather than inventing it.
Sufjan Stevens · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked abundantly and built in two places. Evoked: the Columbian Exposition as a white city of progress, Carl Sandburg as a visiting spirit, Superman claimed by a small town, Lincoln’s temple, the Sears Tower made a seer’s tower and so Babel and watchtower at once, and the last title’s exit out of Egypt with the dust shaken from the sandals, the Exodus and the disciples’ departure in one line. Built: in John Wayne Gacy, Jr., where the monster becomes the mirror of the sinner and a particular man, a clown suit, a house in the suburbs, carries the oldest doctrine of shared fallenness; and in Casimir Pulaski Day, where a school holiday becomes Job’s question asked by a teenager. Held below the bar: the state is furnished with myths, not built into one, and the frame of a promised land under judgment is laid by the first and last titles and not borne through the middle.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetypes are not alluded to; by the painter’s own account of her practice they are the subject. Her Dreaming, the anwerlarr or pencil yam, the kame or yam seed from which her name comes, the emu, the grasses and seeds of Alhalkere, is the law of the country she paints, and painting it is continuous with women’s ceremony, awelye, and its body designs. The structure is load-bearing: the field is the yam’s country at the time of growth, creation as a present process and not a past event. But the construction is not legible to anyone outside the law. No track, root or sign is picked out in this field, and the myth is carried in the making and in what is known of the maker more than built where a viewer can find it.
Iris Murdoch · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetypal structure is partly built and partly evoked. Built is The Tempest: Charles is a Prospero who has ruled a world of players by enchantment and comes to a house by the sea to abjure his magic, and the book tests whether he can. James, with his mastery of the body and his willed death, is the true magus beside the false one, and their pairing carries the book. The sea is the element that takes and gives back. The lost first love, a garden from which one was expelled, is structural too. Evoked rather than built are the demons and dragons of the sea and the Buddhist apparatus, which sit in the book as colour more than frame. The myth is load-bearing in the Prospero line and atmosphere elsewhere, and the axis weighs the whole book.
Timurid and Ashtarkhanid builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Built, not only evoked, in three places. The pishtaq is the gate as threshold to a higher order, the arch of heaven over a door, and here three such gates are turned on one centre, so that the square becomes a maydan, a ritual ground where ruler and city meet. The four-iwan court is the quartered world round a centre. On Sher-Dor the sun rising from the lion’s back builds kingship as solar order into the portal that faces Ulugh Beg’s star patterns across the square, though that the pairing was meant cannot be documented. The rest is evoked: the star geometry as a figure of the heavens, the gold of Tilya-Kori as paradise. The archetypes are strong and particular, but the madrasa grammar carries them as type more than this work builds them anew.
Rachel Whiteread · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Here the archetype is built, not evoked. Casting is the technique of the death mask, and the work is a death mask of a house: the impression of a dwelling taken at the moment of its ending. The house is the first figure of the self and the family, and by one operation, without allusion, it becomes the tomb, the dwelling of the dead. The unhomely is made literal, the home turned inside out, and the ghost of the earlier work stays here as structure: a presence that is only the shape of an absence. These are load-bearing. Held below the gate because the particular, one ordinary house at 193 Grove Road, is kept almost too faithfully particular to bear more, and the funerary reading belongs to the whole art of casting.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Patterns are present, and in two places they bear weight. The curse: the Chinese labourer gets away from the gang on the trestle, and Grainier carries the thought that he was cursed through the rest of his life, so that the founding violence of the West returns as one man’s private fate, neither confirmed nor dismissed. The feral child: the wolf-girl is the lost daughter returned in the form of the wilderness that took her, and she closes the book’s grief in an old shape, the child raised by wolves. Around these the patterns are evoked rather than built: the hermit in the burned wilderness, the machine in the garden as the railroad crosses the forest, the end of the frontier. Held below the gate because the archetypes are glimpsed through a plain chronicle more than they carry it, and Grainier is an ordinary man, not a figure who bears a pattern.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The myth is built into the plot, and it bears the load. An innocent is taken from the known country into the underworld of the frontier, guided by a figure who belongs to it; she goes literally under the earth in the tunnel and returns knowing and unmade. Alejandro is the revenant avenger, a lawyer whose wife and daughter were killed, as Graver tells it, returned as the instrument of vengeance, and the dinner turns the crime done to him on the family of the man who ordered it. The descent and the reversal are the film’s structure, not its decoration. What holds it below the gate: the wolf, in “land of wolves”, is a line rather than a construction, Kate’s descent stops at witness rather than transformation, and the avenger is a figure the western and the revenge film already knew.
Tulunid, under Ahmad ibn Tulun · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Three archetypes are built into the plan and bear its load. The haram: a sacred enclosure held off from the world by a double wall, the ziyada a ring of threshold between street and sanctuary. The court: earth under open sky, with water for purification at its centre. The qibla: one orientation of the whole community toward a place beyond the horizon. Remove the ziyada or the court and the enclosure stops being one; the minaret’s spiral adds the ascent. What holds it: these are the archetypes of the congregational mosque as a type, built with clarity rather than intensified; the traditions late sources attach to the hill are allusion and are not credited; and by intent no single focus gathers them into one figure.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked: the ascent of a mountain to the grave of a founder made god, the threshold repeated at each gate, the inner sanctum behind the sanctuary. Tenkai’s theology is laid out in the plan. Ieyasu, as Tōshō Daigongen, the avatar of the Buddha Yakushi, is worshipped in front, and his body lies above and behind. That structure carries load in the sequence. The carving, by contrast, mostly alludes: the monkeys as an allegory of a life, the sages, the sleeping cat with its sparrows are emblems added to the path rather than built into it. Myth built at the scale of the plan and evoked at the scale of the surface holds the axis where it is.
Wu-Tang Clan · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Here myth is built rather than evoked. Staten Island becomes Shaolin; nine young men from its projects become swordsmen of a temple of thirty-six chambers, the number taken from a Shaw Brothers film; verbal combat becomes swordplay in Protect Ya Neck, and the chessboard the field of war in Da Mystery of Chessboxin’. The film dialogue frames the sequence, names the two halves as two swords and gives every member a place in a brotherhood with its own lore. The particular stays particular: Park Hill, a mother on welfare, a brother shot. What holds it well below the bar is that the myth is assembled from a borrowed genre and the Five Percent lexicon, vivid in voice and costume more than carried as meaning, and no figure bears it in passage: the clan is an emblem more than a person.
Judy Chicago · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Here the work builds rather than evokes. The table is the Last Supper reversed: a sacred meal, thirteen to each side, the guests women, the sacrament of the table restored to those who laid it. The triangle is the oldest sign of the female, and the open centre makes the table a vessel. The order runs from the Primordial Goddess through the fertile goddesses of the first wing to the saints and abbesses of the second and the reformers and makers of the third, a story of sovereignty, eclipse and return, and the plates enact it in the clay, rising from flat painting to relief as the history nears the present. That is load-bearing. It is held below the gate because the particular does not stay particular: Sappho, Hildegard and Woolf become variations of one archetype rather than carrying it as themselves.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth built at the root and evoked above it. The load-bearing structure is the oldest calendar: winter burned in effigy at the start, the seasons turning through summer, the fog and the snow, a death in the household in the dying season, and spring returning with a wedding. The year as rite is the film’s structure, not its setting. Over it the town makes its own figures: Gradisca, the town’s Venus and every man’s dream, who marries a carabiniere and leaves; the Rex, a god passing in the night whom the town goes out to worship; Teo in the tree as desire unbound. Held below the gate because beyond the calendar these archetypes are emblems, built as images rather than as action that bears weight, and the particulars carry more than the myths.
Built for Frederick II · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked: the octagon is the plan, the structure and the elevation. Eight is the number between square and circle, earth and heaven, the number of the eighth day and of resurrection; it is the figure of baptisteries, of Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen, where German rulers were crowned, and of the Dome of the Rock, which Frederick saw in Jerusalem in 1229. The imperial crown is an octagon of eight plates. The castle is a crown on a hill, a worldly building in a sacred figure, and that is load-bearing. Held below the gate because no inscription, programme or surviving use fixes the meaning: the form is present, its sense must be supplied, and much has been supplied that the building cannot bear.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth evoked strongly and built in part. The Colonel is the book’s Kurtz: a man of genius and appetite who goes up the river of his own legend, and whose follower Storm, after his death, becomes a second Kurtz in the jungle. That pattern is load-bearing, and the book knows it comes after Conrad and after Coppola. The uncle and nephew are a father and son of a fallen order, the son apprenticed to the father’s myth and orphaned by it; the Houston brothers are a fallen pair at the bottom of the same world; Kathy’s theology frames the whole as fall and possible redemption. Held below the gate because several patterns are summoned rather than carried, the Conrad most of all, and the title’s column of smoke stays an image more than it enters the action.
Mimar Hayruddin · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The myth is built, and built in the structure. The bridge is the archetype of the crossing: the one passage between two shores, the arch as rainbow, the way over dangerous water. It is load-bearing in the literal sense, since no part of the work is not the crossing, and the crown, where the passage turns from ascent to descent, is its centre. The leap from the crown gives the archetype a rite, an ordeal of passage performed by the young of the town. The legend of the builder who readied his own funeral as the centring was struck is legend, and shows how the bridge was received. What holds the axis: this is every bridge’s archetype in its purest form, not deepened by the plan.
Paula Rego · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The myth is built, not summoned. The ring of girl, woman and old woman is the oldest figure of the ages of woman, maiden, mother and crone, or the three fates, and it is not an allusion: it is the structure of the right side of the picture, a closed circle of joined hands set beside the open, paired dances of the couples. Moon, sea and the stone on the rise are the archetypal ground of a coastal night, and the woman apart is the figure of the one outside the ritual. The pattern organises the composition. It stops below the gate because the form is inherited, the dance of life as Munch painted it its obvious ancestor, and is reweighted more than founded; the particular stays particular.
Wes Anderson · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The myth is built rather than evoked. The trickster is the pattern: Fox is in the line of Reynard, the clever animal who robs the stronger, and the plot is the trickster’s story entire, the theft, the pursuit, the burrow, the escape by cunning. To it the film adds the fall and return of the creature tamed by marriage who goes back to the wild and must learn to live between. The wolf is the archetype the trickster is not, wildness beyond wit, and its one scene gives the myth a floor. The digging into the earth, the flood and the animals gathered underground carry the outlines of the descent and the ark. What holds it: the myth is kept ironic, and the farmers are ogres as a children’s book draws them.
Harper Lee · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
The archetype is built, not only evoked. The innocent who does only good and is killed for it is named in the title and given its rule early, “it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird”, and is then made to bear load twice: in Tom Robinson, shot running from the prison yard, and in Boo Radley, whom the town has made its ghost and whom Scout, at the end, saves from its gaze. Boo is the old figure of the monster in the house who proves the hidden guardian; Atticus the just father who must stand alone before the town; Bob Ewell the shadow who comes at night. The patterns stay particular to Maycomb. The axis stops below the bar because the symbol is spoken aloud by the characters: legible, and so shallower than myth discovered.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The myth is built, not quoted: the man warned of a flood who builds an ark while his neighbours watch. Noah is never named and need not be. The shelter is dug in the yard in plain view and financed against the house, and the community gives its verdict at the communal supper, where the prophet stands up at the table and is shamed. Cassandra is crossed with Noah: the warning is true or false, and no one, the prophet included, can know which. The rain falls as oil, a defiled water that turns the flood from cleansing to poison, and the deaf child who signs the storm is the oracle who does not speak. What holds the axis: the pattern governs the plot without deepening as it goes, and the religious frame stays implicit.
Carl Orff · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The archetype is built, not only evoked. Fortune’s wheel is the Codex’s own image, and Orff makes it the form: the work rises through spring, tavern and love to an apotheosis and is thrown down where it began. The ring is the wheel. Within it stand the seasonal rite, spring returning and the dance on the green, and the courtly pair of Blanziflor and Helena. The particulars are vivid: the girl buying rouge in Chramer, the girl in the red tunic of Stetit puella, the abbot of Cockaigne, the roasted swan. Held below the gate because particular and archetype do not deepen each other: the wheel turns over figures, not persons, and the rite is set as a pageant.
Ptolemaic and Roman builders · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Myth is built here in the siting, beyond what the type supplies. The temple’s inherited archetypes bear load: the pylon as horizon, the sanctuary as the primeval mound, the procession from light into the dark of origin. To them Philae adds the island of Isis facing Biga, where Osiris lay in the Abaton: the goddess’s house across the water from her husband’s tomb, at the cataract where the Nile was held to rise from its cavern, the source shown on the Gate of Hadrian. The roof chapel of Osiris carries his death and restoration to the building’s top; the birth house builds the birth of Horus into the court. Held below the gate because the archetypes are received whole, and because the moving has loosened the built relation of temple to cataract and rock.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The myth is built, not evoked, and it bears load throughout. A boy on a river helps a fugitive hiding on an island: Twain’s Huck and Jim, carried into a Southern present, with Neckbone as a Tom Sawyer of sorts. A boy brings food and parts to an outlaw who will repay him: the convict and the boy of Dickens’s Great Expectations. The ark lodged in the tree after a flood, which must be got down to the water for a new start, is the plot itself, since the plot is its launching. The snakes are built too: Mud’s tattoo, the pit that bites the boy, an Eden whose serpent is the adult world, against which the shirt and the nails are a private religion put on trial. What holds the axis below the gate is that the patterns are inherited and confirmed more than deepened.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Myth built, not evoked. The film takes the Amleth of Saxo, the source behind Hamlet, back before its Elizabethan interiority and plays it inside its own cosmology: the Norns, the tree of kings, the Valkyrie, the seeress, the undead in the barrow, the raven that guides. The supernatural is never framed as dream or delusion, so the archetype is the world’s physics, and the structure bears weight: the oath sets the course, the prophecy binds it, the choice of fate over love completes it. What holds it below the gate is literalness: a received pattern restated more than deepened, worn by the particular more than earned.
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Myth is built once and evoked often. “All Tomorrow’s Parties” builds it: a Cinderella with no prince, whose finery and rags turn into each other at every party, the repetition making the round endless while the girl stays one girl. “Femme Fatale” names its archetype and fixes it lightly on one woman, a warning sung by her own type. “Venus in Furs” takes the goddess and the slave-lover whole from Sacher-Masoch, like a manual; “Heroin” touches the old descent of the damned soul, chosen. A descent runs across the record, from a Sunday dawn into the city’s night and out into noise, but it lies in the materials and is not built into a structure.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The particular is very particular: this town, this clock, this hour. The composition occupies one of the oldest patterns there is, the city seen whole from outside, across water, at morning, the traveller’s first sight of home; the viewer stands with the people waiting to cross. That pattern is in the structure, not added as allusion, and it holds the axis at 8.0. A second pattern is in the light alone: near world in shadow, far in sun, the one lit vertical a church tower, and that church the resting place of the Republic’s founder, which the canvas does not show. Nothing builds either pattern into a structure of relations: no journey, no arrival, no threshold crossed. The myth is the viewer’s position and the weather’s accident, evoked and not built.
Claude Lanzmann · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The axis meets a film that refuses myth: its principle is that the event has no meaning to be made of it and no image that stands for it. Structure still carries archetypal weight. The survivor returns to the place of the dead, and Srebnik, the boy who sang and was shot and lived, comes back to the river as a revenant; the train is the governing figure, a journey with no return. What holds the axis at the lowest of the twelve is that the refusal is real and costs it on purpose: the particular never rises into symbol, the archetypes are those the event imposes, and every larger frame, sacred or historical, is declined. Schindler’s List (8.8) builds what this film will not.
Horace · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Myth is everywhere in the odes, and mostly evoked. Europa (3.27), Hypermestra (3.11), the Giants against Jupiter (3.4), Juno’s speech on the fall of Troy and the founding of Rome (3.3), Teucer’s speech of exile (1.7): they are deployed with mastery, but as illustrations a single ode summons. Two patterns the body builds are load-bearing: the year that returns against the man who does not, set out in 1.4 and closed in 4.7, which carries the whole ethic; and the poet as vates who escapes death by the poem, the swan of 2.20 and the monument of 3.30. Regulus (3.5) is made to bear a civic myth. What holds the axis lowest is that two built patterns in 103 odes, beside much evoked myth, are narrower than the myth the epic and tragic summits build.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The archetype is brushed and not built. Faust stands behind the film: a boy sells what he has for the life, gets everything, and the bill comes in. The fall from favour, the betrayal of the brothers, the Judas who testifies, are all present, and the Catholic frame of a Scorsese film is felt in the Christmas money and the church weddings. But the film is deliberately sociological. Its explanations are the cabstand, the neighbourhood, the Irish names that keep Jimmy and Henry from being made, the economy of tribute; it never lets the pattern become load-bearing, and it declines the operatic register in which The Godfather made its family a dynasty. The particulars stay hard and the deep pattern stays behind them. That is the choice, and the figure records it.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
An archetype is built, not only evoked: the old law reborn. The four-note motif is a figure of the church’s counterpoint, held in long notes, and the finale sets it among dance, march and the theatre until it governs them all; the sacred is not quoted as atmosphere but made the bass of the world. The festive first movement, with its call to order and its comic aria, is the world that law will hold. The name was given by others and is not scored. What holds the axis lowest of the five gated axes: the particular is thin, as instrumental music keeps it, and the one particular the work holds, a song about a kiss on the hand, is deliberately small. The archetype is one figure, and the work does not stake its whole form on it.
Ornette Coleman · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
With no words, the archetypal must be built by the music or not at all. In “Lonely Woman” it is built: the lament, the solitary figure keening, and around her a world that runs on at its own speed. The opposition of tempos is the figure, and it bears weight. The title names a woman; the music builds the mourner. Beyond that track the archetypal is thinner. The cry of the horn reaches back to the field holler and the blues, which Coleman brought from Fort Worth and from rhythm and blues, and that is evoked rather than built. The titles point at states and at time, and the music does not make them into structure. The prophecy in the album’s title belongs to the sleeve and the legend, not to anything the record builds; that holds the axis below the gate.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built into plan and section, not applied. The first is ascent: the route rises from the earth, where the machine is, through the dwelling, to the sky, and ends at an opening that frames the land. The second is the villa: a square raised on a base, its four fronts equal, its principal floor lifted to command a country view, the type of Palladio’s Rotonda. The third is the pastoral retreat, the “Virgilian dream” of Précisions, built as a box from which the meadow is seen as a picture. The particular stays particular: a family’s weekend, a car’s turning circle, a field at Poissy. What holds the axis is depth. The ascent is a stroll, the temple is quoted, and the myth built most fully is the machine’s, a period’s myth rather than an archetype.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetype is the holy mountain: the high place over the inhabited plain, older than the settlement, the fixed point of a world. The picture builds it in its structure, mountain over plain over near ground, the houses reduced to small light blocks in the middle zone, the mountain the crown of the whole. The name carries a victory and a saint, and the canvas uses neither: no chapel, no cross, no story. That is to its credit as particular and to its cost here. The myth is present as structure and as the pressure of a lifelong return to one mountain, a devotion close to Hokusai’s to Fuji; in this one canvas it is evoked by mass and placement more than built as an argument. Load-bearing myth is not reached, and the axis is the lowest of the eleven the Universal Minimum governs.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Death is the structure, and part of the myth is built. “Who will die first?”, the question Jack and Babette keep returning to, is the book’s first metaphysical fact; “All plots tend to move deathward” is its law, given in a classroom in Part I and carried out when Jack plots a killing in Part III. Built into the plot are a plague cloud over a town, a descent to Mr. Gray in a motel in Iron City, Murray’s division of humanity into killers and those who die, which Jack tries to act out, Hitler as a death-god of crowds used as a shield, and Wilder, the near-speechless child who crosses the road of death unharmed. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is that the archetypes are voiced and theorised by the characters as much as inhabited by the action, so that much of the myth is evoked, and the descent ends in a farce of mutual wounding rather than a disclosure from below.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked, by sound more than image, and one evocation is sustained across the whole record without a break. The patterns are old: two lovers dissolving into one, sleep as a second country, the drowning in which the self is lost and found. Titles of sleep, touch and a wish carry it; the title frames it, a record of desire called Loveless; the cover renders it, an instrument turned to colour and blur; and the sound performs the oceanic merging itself, from the first track to the last. That single evocation, held by every means the record has, is the strength of the axis. What holds it below the gate is the particular: no person, no place, no named figure, only a voice, a body and a state. The archetype is atmosphere, and it is not built.
Franz Schubert · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The rubric does not adjust for a form’s limits. A pattern is present and partly bears weight: the wanderer at the threshold, the stranger of Schubert’s songs, heard in the trill as something from outside that the hymn must admit. The work is widely heard as a farewell written in the composer’s last weeks, and the music lends itself to that hearing. But the farewell is biography, and the wanderer is supplied from Winterreise and Der Wanderer, not built here. What the score builds is a return, the hymn coming back after every disturbance, and a journey through distant keys that comes home: the sonata’s ordinary return, made strange by the trill. Myth evoked, strongly; not constructed. This is the work’s lowest axis but one, and the particular stays vivid.
Radiohead · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is built in two places, inside songs, and evoked elsewhere. Videotape builds the judgement: a life presented on a recording at heaven’s gate, with “Mephistopheles” beneath, is the book of deeds read at the last, carried by a particular object, a videotape, that stays particular. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi builds a descent to the sea floor, being eaten and escaping, in its form as well as its words. The rest is allusion: Faust named in a title, a figure of reckoning, the rainbow as covenant sign. The frame from a children’s cheer to the gate of judgement is one the listener assembles. Nothing is built across the whole record, and that holds it short.
Henri Labrouste · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Archetype is built into the plan, not only alluded to. The sequence is an ascent from a shaded vestibule, read as a grove of the academy, up into light among the books: a passage from the world into a house of memory. The façade is laid out like a monument to the dead, names cut in stone in order of time, so that the library is also a cenotaph of authors. The long room of reading under its twin vault has the force of a type, a secular nave. Against that, much of the archetypal work rests on the façade and on the vestibule’s painted programme, closer to evocation than to structure, and the reading room itself is rational before it is mythic. The myth is partly built and partly evoked.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype present is the enthroned ruler: the father who judges, the pontiff as keeper of the keys, in the papal type of Raphael’s Julius II and Titian’s Paul III, seated, turned, the hand on the chair. The particular stays wholly particular: an old man’s flushed skin, small eyes, a set mouth. Built or evoked? In part built: the composition is the throne image, and the one colour makes person and office one body, the doctrine of sacral power made visible. But the deep pattern is supplied by the type more than constructed by this canvas, and its greatness lies in particularising an archetype, not in building one. That the image carries more myth than it shows is proved by its afterlife, which is reach, and is scored there.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
A pattern is built across the four sides, not only evoked: storm, then static, then sleep, then heaven. It descends through weather and broadcast noise into night and memory, and rises at the end to the title’s gesture, where the raised fist, the hands of prayer and the receiving antenna become one figure. The old man’s beach is a lost Eden spoken by a particular man; the holy road, the cancer towers and the death camp drone are the fallen city. The particulars stay particular. What holds the axis is that titles and placement carry the pattern while the music is abstract: without the titles the sides keep their arcs and lose their myth.
Dmitri Shostakovich · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is the one Beethoven built into the symphony: through darkness to light, struggle to victory, the hero’s passage. Here it is evoked and put under strain: the work builds the passage and then makes its arrival doubtful. That doubling is a real construction, an archetype turned against itself, and it bears weight. But the archetype is inherited whole, from Beethoven’s Fifth and Tchaikovsky’s, and what the work adds is irony, not a new figure. The particulars are vivid, the march with piano, the Largo’s mourning, the repeated note, yet they take their significance from the history around the score more than from figures the score builds. A wordless symphony keeps little particular. Myth evoked well and turned with intent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The figures the book makes are two, and both are built and bear weight. The first is the self-reliant man, the nonconformist, “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist”, whom Emerson made a figure of the American imagination: a new Adam without a past. The second is the circle, which “Circles” builds as its own structure, the essay widening ring by ring until the essayist calls himself “an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.” The Over-Soul is a myth of the one mind in the many, built as doctrine. What holds the axis below the gate is the particular: the figures are general, the examples are names, Pythagoras, Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, rather than persons rendered, and the archetype rarely acquires a body. The myth is built in idea and only evoked in flesh.
The Beatles · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked figure by figure, and in the best songs the particular becomes archetype while staying particular. Nowhere Man is the strongest case: a man of no place and no view, the everyman emptied out, kept an ordinary young man. Girl is a figure of long descent, the woman who wounds and whom the singer cannot leave, the belle dame of the ballad in a London bedsit. Norwegian Wood is the seducer outwitted, who answers with fire; In My Life touches the oldest theme, the remembrance of the dead; The Word sounds a new creed in the revivalist’s call. What holds the figure is construction: fourteen songs with no frame, and the archetypes do not carry the record’s structure.
August Sander · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Here the work builds more than it evokes. The scheme is itself a myth of society: it begins with the farmer, man of the soil, rises through trade, the family, the estates and the arts to the city, and ends with the last people, the old, the sick and the dead. That is a cycle of the social world as a life, from rooted origin to dissolution, and it bears the arrangement. Within it the types are archetypal figures, the mother, the craftsman, the beggar, the artist, while each picture remains a nameable person on a given day. What holds the axis below the gate is that the myth is a scheme more than a lived pattern: single images seldom carry the archetype from within, and the cycle is legible only in the order of the portfolios.
W. H. Auden · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The myth is more evoked than built. “Musée” builds the most: Icarus is reread from the margin, and the fall that myth placed at the centre becomes a splash nobody hears; the pattern carries the poem. The Yeats elegy makes a poet’s death a seasonal myth of a body entering earth and a work passing to “the guts of the living”, and its last part takes on something of a ritual charm. “As I walked out one evening” sets the ballad lover’s vow against Time as a speaking power. Much of the rest is figure and allusion: the Freud elegy names Eros rather than constructing him, and the portrait sonnets make writers into types, the novelist “Encased in talent like a uniform”, by wit more than by archetype. That holds the axis below the gate.
Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, of one kind. The tent is the oldest of shelters, the nomad’s and the festival’s, and here it is load-bearing in the strictest sense: masts, ropes, a skin, the ground pegged. The Games are housed as a camp of tents in a landscape, temporary in image and permanent in fact, and the visitor comes under the roof from open ground, not through a gate. The site deepens it: the hill beneath is the rubble of the bombed city, and the tent over it is the sign of a new beginning set on the ruins. Everything stays particular: this park, this lake, this mountain of debris. What holds the axis at 8.0: the archetype is single and is carried more by the landscape than by the roof, and the threshold, the axis and the ascent are deliberately absent, which is the point and also the limit.
Kraftwerk · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Three archetypes are present, and one is built. The journey is load-bearing: side two is an unbroken passage by rail, and the record ends where it began, an eternal return enacted in the sequence, with Endless Endless closing on the first track’s words. The other two are evoked within single songs: The Hall of Mirrors is Narcissus, the man who lives in his own image; Showroom Dummies is the made thing that comes alive, the mannequin stepping out of the window. The particular stays particular: a named express, Paris, Vienna, Düsseldorf, two real rock singers. What holds the axis below the bar is that no figure carries the journey. The travellers are a “we” without a face, and Europe as one endless landscape is atmosphere as much as structure.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype is the duel, two opponents face to face across a boundary, and it is built, not alluded to. The composition is a near mirror across the bottle, the two men rhyming in hat, bent arm and profile, while the asymmetries keep them two: pipe against no pipe, dark coat against light, one figure more upright and the other more hunched. A second pattern, fate and chance held in the hand, is evoked by the subject and not developed: no card is shown face up and no outcome is staged. The particular stays particular, Provençal men in their own clothes. Held at 8.0 because the archetype is structural but single, and the deeper readings, the game as mortality, the men as figures of the earth, are brought by the viewer rather than carried by the canvas.
Constantin Brâncuși · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth built, but with the particular almost gone. The archetype is ascent: the bird as the soul, the upward axis from ground to sky, the flame, the arrow. It is not alluded to; it is the form itself, from the foot that grips the ground to the top that opens into air, and in that sense it is load-bearing. The Romanian lineage deepens it: the Măiastra, the magic bird of the tales, is the series’ ancestor, and the long history of the sculptor’s birds is a movement from a bird with a head and a crest toward the flight alone. What holds the axis is that the particular, which should acquire archetypal weight while staying particular, has been refined away. There is no bird left to carry the myth, only the myth’s direction.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Two patterns are built rather than evoked. The first is the confession on a night journey: a stranger who has done a terrible thing must tell it to one listener, in the dark, before the journey ends, the shape of Coleridge’s mariner carried into a Russian railway carriage; the carriage is load-bearing, since it makes the telling unstoppable and the listener captive. The second is music as a Dionysian force, a power older than morals that seizes the body; the sonata is the hinge of the plot, and the title names it. Othello stands behind the jealousy, evoked rather than rebuilt. What holds the axis is that Pozdnyshev is a case before he is a figure, too theorised to become an archetype, and the wife and the violinist are functions of his obsession: the pattern has one living pole.
Aretha Franklin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is built in the voice more than in the songs. The record’s structural pattern is the church carried into the world: the call of the preacher and the response of the congregation, made by the lead and her sisters’ answers and set to secular love, load-bearing on every slow track. The songs supply older figures: the abandoned woman still bound, in the blues lament of the title track and “Drown in My Own Tears”; the healer of “Dr. Feelgood”; the river and the long road of “A Change Is Gonna Come”, with the exodus behind them. “Respect” builds a new figure, the woman who names her terms, and the sequence places her first. But most figures come with the songs, and none is built whole across the sequence.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The pattern is the oldest in narrative, the growth of a boy into a man, and here it is not laid over the story but is the story’s whole structure: the film has no other spine than the passage from child to man. Around it the old forms appear as situation. A father hands down an inheritance in a mixtape of the Beatles’ solo songs; step-grandparents in East Texas keep a tribal rite of church and gifts, played as comedy; the journey at the end goes west, out of the towns, into desert and mountains. What holds the axis below the gate is the refusal of construction: no initiation, no ordeal, no return, and a generality that is the typical, every boyhood, more than the archetypal.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present and partly built. The Peeping Tom is named in dialogue, and so evoked. The stronger pattern is Bluebeard’s chamber turned around: a woman enters the room of a man who has done away with his wife, finds the wife’s ring, puts it on and is caught there, and the ring shown on her finger carries the love plot to its turn. The courtyard is a theatre of the world, and the watcher seen and visited by what he watched is the oldest punishment for looking; without that return there is no climax. What holds the axis is weighed fully. The myth is chiefly an allegory of the cinema, self-referring rather than deep, and the particular never takes on the archetype’s weight: Thorwald stays a tired salesman, and the fable is played as comedy of manners until the last minutes.
Kazimir Malevich · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is not alluded to; it is the whole structure. Black on white is the first opposition, darkness and light before creation; the square is the zero of form, the beginning from which Suprematism would build; and set in the icon’s corner, the canvas made itself the icon of a new order. The structure is load-bearing, since there is nothing in the work but the archetype. That is also the cost. The particular is to remain particular, and there is no particular: no figure, no event, no place. The icon reading rests in large part on the hang of 1915, which is lost. Within the canvas the black against the white carries the primal opposition unaided, and the square on Malevich’s coffin shows that it was meant as such.
Danny Boyle · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The deep patterns are present, and the central one is built. The man who wakes alone into an emptied world is the first man in a ruined Eden. The four survivors are a family made from strangers, and the father is killed by a single drop of blood from a corpse at the gate of the promised safety: the death is placed exactly where the archetype needs it. The house of soldiers is the castle of the false king, and the hero’s descent into the berserker to rescue the women is the oldest of rescues, paid for with his likeness to the monster. What holds the axis is the rest, evoked rather than built: the voice on the radio promising salvation, the church, the neat sign laid on the grass.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Built in one place and evoked elsewhere. What is built is the confrontation of the living with the dead under the sign of knowledge: the anatomy as memento mori, the body opened to show what a human is. That was the stated moral of the public anatomies, and here the composition carries it, the corpse laid as the light and the living massed around it. The particular stays particular: an executed man, a named doctor, one winter’s dissection. Evoked rather than built: the pattern of the Lamentation, a dead body attended by a ring of figures, which the diagonal corpse and the leaning heads call up without making it bear, and the figure of Vesalius, whom the demonstration of the forearm recalls. The guild portrait’s obligations keep the pattern from becoming tragedy.
François Truffaut · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The patterns are old and present: the unwanted child, a changeling with a stepfather and a mother who did not want him; the boy who goes into the world and is caught; the shrine to a writer as a private altar that burns; the run to the edge of the land, where there is nowhere further and a sea he has never seen. But the structure is evoked more than built. The film keeps everything particular and documentary, the actual Paris and the actual procedures of the reform institution, and the archetype lives mostly in the ending, where the sea and the freeze frame lift the particular boy into a figure. The fire and the cage carry symbolic weight without being made load-bearing. A well evoked myth, with one built image at the close.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Partly built. The grouping of the condemned is the Golgotha group: a central figure flanked by two companions, executed outside a wall before onlookers, the wide sombrero framing Maximilian’s head like a dark halo. The archetype of martyrdom is load-bearing in that grouping. The second pattern is inherited: the execution by firing squad as Goya fixed it, the faceless line of soldiers against the victim. But the painting works against both. It hides the martyr in smoke and gives the executioners the centre of the canvas; the myth is invoked to be denied, and its particulars, the kepis, the cocking rifle, the Mexican hat, keep the scene a news report. The figure stays below the gate because the archetype, built in the grouping, is deliberately left unfulfilled in the whole.
Nick Drake · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetypal is evoked through the natural order and the year: the pink moon as omen, said in the title song to be “on its way”; the sun and what lies behind it; the harvest of Harvest Breed; the morning of the last song. Those images organise the sequence. The record opens on an omen of coming harm and ends on morning and rising, and the man at its centre passes between them. That frame is partly built, by the order of the songs rather than by any one of them, and the building is credited: the year carries the record’s shape and does not only colour it. What holds the axis below the gate is that no figure bears the myth: the speaker has no story, the omen has no object, and the moon is a mood the songs gather round more than a structure they carry. The particular and the archetype touch, and the sequence brings them close to joining.
Eladio Dieste · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
One archetype is built, not alluded to. The baptistery is sunk into the earth and reached by going down from the forecourt: entry into the church begins, sacramentally, with a descent into a lit room below ground, the burial and rising of baptism made into a route. Beyond that, the nave is a tent whose walls are cloth held still, the tabernacle of a wandering people, or the hull and the waves of a church by the sea; these readings are carried by the geometry, not painted on it. What holds the axis below the gate: the tent and the wave are suggested by the form more than they organise it, how much of them is meant cannot be settled, and the plan is the ordinary rectangle of a parish nave, with no axis of the kind the summit temples build.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The patterns are there, and partly built. The man who sees what he should not, in a grove, is the oldest of the voyeur figures; the detective whose inquiry dissolves into the emptiness it uncovers is that myth turned inside out; the whiteface troupe, at dawn and at dawn again, is a chorus or a commedia that frames the hero and at last absorbs him. The ending builds rather than evokes: the man who has lost his evidence enters the troupe’s world by returning its ball, and vanishes from the grass. But the photographer stays a type more than a figure that deepens, and for most of the film the myth lives in the frame and the coda, not load-bearing as the Oedipal frame is in Chinatown (8.7).
Wes Anderson · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The patterns are present, and the plot is built on them. The prodigal is the father, not the son: Royal returns to the house he was sent from, by a lie, and is received only once he has stopped asking to be. The family is a fallen house, a line of genius gone to ruin, told by a narrator from a library book as legend. Royal is a deposed king in his own castle, sleeping in a room he has taken back, with Pagoda as the servant who once stabbed him and then saved him. The love of an adopted sister and brother is a romance motif. What holds it short of the gate: the myth is evoked through the book and the names more than built into a world that bears its weight.
Thutmose (attributed) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The name Nefertiti is usually rendered “the beautiful one has come”, and the bust is the beautiful one arriving: a particular woman made into the archetype of the queen and of female beauty. In its own world the archetype is built, not only evoked. The crown and the uraeus placed her in the order of the Aten, in which the royal pair alone mediated the god, and the face was made to be the canonical image from which others were copied. She stays particular, with a real neck and a lined mouth. What holds the axis: the religious structure rests more on the lost uraeus and on context than on the object, and much of its myth came in the twentieth century.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is the threshold: the gate, the door of the tomb, the walled window, the portal between a room and what lies beyond it. Here it is built, not evoked. The open rectangle is the structure of every canvas, and stood upright it becomes a doorway that bears the composition. The room adds a second archetype, the enclosure, the chamber painted on every wall, temple or tomb. What holds the axis below the gate is the other half of its definition: the particular must take on archetypal weight while staying particular, and there is no particular here, no figure, no place, no story. The threshold is given as pure structure, universal from the start rather than earned from a thing. Above the evoked myth of Water Lilies (7.8); below The Rothko Chapel (8.2), whose sanctuary is built whole.
Walter De Maria · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The title summons the oldest of sky myths, the thunderbolt and the god who throws it, and the field is a precinct marked off from ordinary land to receive it, four hundred rods raised toward the sky. Part of the myth is built: the visit is a pilgrimage made physical, a journey to a remote place, a small company, a vigil through the night and a return, and that ritual form is load-bearing, since without it there is no work. The thunderbolt itself is evoked rather than built: the work stands complete on days when no lightning comes, and light stands in for fire. The particular acquires archetypal weight through atmosphere and the frame of the visit more than through a constructed archetypal structure, and that holds it below the gate.
The White Stripes · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked through the blues and through the record’s own figures. Ball and Biscuit summons the seventh son of the blues tradition and offers the singer as a third man, a lineage of figures from Willie Dixon’s songs that the track inhabits as idiom for seven minutes. Seven Nation Army’s marching riff calls up an army without building one. The elephant of the title is memory and weight. The suitor at the door, the child out of place and the fallen sweetheart are old types, kept particular, and the patterns are summoned with conviction and carried by sound. What holds the axis is that none is built: no figure carries the record’s argument as structure, and the archetypes stay atmosphere and idiom.
Joseph Paxton · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetypes are real, and some are built. The garden under glass is the type the building grew from, and in Hyde Park Eden was enclosed with its trees taken in; the cruciform plan with its vaulted crossing over the elms is a structure, not an allusion, and contemporaries named the nave and transept as a cathedral’s, turned to a secular use. But much is evoked: the name of crystal palace was given by Punch, and the building’s most potent mythic life came after it, in Chernyshevsky’s dream of a dwelling of glass and iron in What Is to Be Done? and in Dostoevsky’s answer in Notes from Underground. That is reach the building earned, and it is credited under Pressure on Tradition; as myth built into the plan, it is less.
The Smile · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked in images that reach toward old patterns and built at one point. The images are deluge, smoke, a white flag of surrender, a world skimmed rather than entered; they summon the flood and the defeat without naming either. The built point is the opening pair: The Same and The Opposite, twins set at the head of the sequence, the appeal and its answer, a doubling the record makes structural by placing it first. The man of television is the one figure, a type of the moment. Held back because no figure bears the images and no passage across the sequence makes them load-bearing; the particular is withheld too, with few places, few persons and almost nothing named.
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Two figures have become types, and they are built, not evoked. The glass man takes a known melancholic case and makes it a figure of the fragile, transparent truth-teller, whose body is the condition of his speech. The talking dogs are built on Apuleius’s ass and Lucian, with the metamorphosis left unresolved: the prophecy may be true, the ensign may have dreamed, and the dogs themselves doubt it. Preciosa is the old pattern of the foundling restored by recognition, made particular in a girl of fifteen who sets her lover terms. Monipodio’s house is a parody church the reader keeps. What holds the axis down is the romances, where lovers parted by corsairs, sea and disguise are inherited furniture, used as convention rather than made to bear weight.
Nan Goldin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The title builds the frame: a ballad, the song that tells a fate, and Brecht’s ballad of the man who cannot get free of his desire. The sequence is built on the oldest pattern of love poetry, the couple, its union and its wounding, Eros and its violence, and it closes on mortality, so that the nights of one circle tell the general story. The archetype is load-bearing in the arrangement: the order of couples, sexes and harms is the ballad’s form, and the love songs set against the bruises make the old form audible. Held below the gate because the myth is carried by the title, the music and the arrangement more than by the pictures: each image stays, by design, a snapshot of a named friend on a dated night. Myth built in the sequence, evoked in the frame.
Bret Easton Ellis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Part of the myth is built. The book opens with the inscription over Dante’s gate, read off a bank’s wall, and closes on a sign that denies an exit, so that Manhattan’s money district is framed as a circle of hell from which the narrator never moves. Within the frame Bateman is the double who has no original: a monster whose mask is the face of his class, nearly a vampire in his appetites and his invisibility, whose name sounds the motel keeper’s in Psycho. The figure has outgrown the book as only an archetype does: the smiling killer in the good suit. Held below the gate because the frame is set at the two ends more than carried through the middle; the descent does not structure the chapters, which are a diary and not a descent; and the monster is evoked against the culture as much as built into a pattern that bears load.
Mughal court painters · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not evoked: the whole cycle is a hero cycle, a champion of the faith who travels, fights giants and demons, rescues, is captured and escapes, again and again. Quest and combat are load-bearing in every folio, since every folio is a station of them. The giant, the demon or div, the sorcerer, the trickster companion and the besieged city are present as acting figures, not as allusion. And the particulars stay particular: Indian walls, Indian trees, Mughal dress, specific weapons and interiors. What holds the figure is that the myth was given, a popular romance of long standing, carried at the level of incident and not reorganised into a new archetypal meaning; the hero is a type and does not deepen.
John Vanbrugh with Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Archetype is built into plan and skyline, not only alluded to in ornament. The palace is a castle and a triumphal monument fused: towers at the corners of the block, gate towers to the service courts, and a roofline set with carved grenades, coronets and the lion over the cock make the house the citadel of a victorious captain. One axis runs from the Column of Victory, with the Duke in Roman dress, over the bridge, through court, hall and saloon, and out to the garden: the triumphal way of a hero made into an approach. The particular stays particular, one man’s house on one Oxfordshire manor. Held at 8.0 because much of the myth is applied at the roofline and in the trophies rather than load-bearing in the plan, and the plan below them is a baroque great house of the usual kind.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Here the myth is partly built. Nature as goddess presiding over the mating of every kind on Saint Valentine’s day, when “every foul” comes “to chese his make”, every bird to choose its mate, is load-bearing: the whole debate depends on the archetype of a natural order of desire that courtly love both serves and strains. The tie between the day and the choosing of mates has passed into general culture, and it is weighed here lightly. The birds as estates of a commonwealth are allegory built, not evoked. Held where it is because the mythic figures, Venus, Priapus, Nature and Africanus, are largely borrowed and arranged rather than made new, and the particular birds stay types.
Ilya Repin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Built in one structure, evoked elsewhere. The built structure is the procession of the yoked: a file of men bound to one strap and one load, coming toward the viewer and never arriving, which carries the archetype of the condemned at their labour, the Sisyphean load, the chain gang. Within it the ages of man are laid out in order along the line: the boy in the middle, the grown men around him, the old and the broken at the rear. The particulars stay particular, faces, rags, a red shirt. The river as Russia, the steamer as the coming age, and the haulers in the guise of apostles are summoned, not built; the readings that make the leader a philosopher or a saint are brought to him from outside.
Ilkhanid, under Öljaitü · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not hung: the dome of heaven over an eightfold figure, the grave at the centre of a cosmic room, the tomb as the axis round which a capital is laid out. The octagon, the eight points of a world, associated in Persian usage with the eight paradises (whether the makers meant that is not known), passes into the circle of the dome, earth into heaven, through structure rather than ornament. The eight minarets ringing the dome made the crown, from afar, a diagram of the sacred mountain. Held where it is because the archetype is the inherited one of the domed tomb, carried at greater scale rather than newly made; nothing in plan or section builds a threshold or passage that bears the meaning; and the changed dedication leaves the content less settled than the form.
David Lynch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is felt more than constructed. Its elements are present: a man at a window pulls the levers that start life; a seed leaves a man’s mouth and falls into water; a child is born that is not a child; a woman in a hidden heaven promises release; the father kills the son, the machinery breaks and he passes into light. Cosmogony and apocalypse are set around a domestic story, and the frame bears weight, since the film opens and closes on the planet. Kafka’s metamorphosis, the changeling and the Gnostic maker of a botched world are near. But the relations are never fixed: whether the Man in the Planet made Henry, whether the child is his, whether the light is heaven. A myth whose terms stay undecided is evoked as much as built.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The myth is built in one structure: the inquiry into a face. Park believes he can see guilt, and the film is the destruction of that belief, ending at a culvert with a girl who saw the killer and can say only that he looked ordinary, and with Park looking at us. The killer becomes the faceless one, a figure of the era rather than a man, and the final gaze puts the audience among the faces to be read. The culvert, looked into twice, seventeen years apart, carries a descent and a return. What holds it lowest of the governed axes, five tenths below the gate: around that structure much is evoked rather than built (the shaman, rain as the killer’s weather, red clothing as a sign, the field of the prologue), the detective form had carried the failed inquiry before, and the archetype of the hidden face is used with force more than deepened.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often and built in two figures. Gimme Shelter builds the deluge: storm, fire and flood threatening at once and a shelter sought, an apocalypse of the oldest shape set in the present without a date. Midnight Rambler builds the predator who comes in the night, the bogeyman given a long song whose changes of tempo stage the approach, the crawl and the strike. Around them the patterns are evoked: the crossroads blues of Robert Johnson, borrowed whole and his legend with it; the devil’s swagger of Monkey Man, which mocks itself as “a trifle too satanic”; a choir that turns a parable of the street into a hymn. Held below the bar because the figures are positions and poses, not persons, summoned track by track and not carried across the record.
Inca, under Pachacuti and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
There is built archetype here: the mountain made wall, the hill turned into a stepped platform, and the stones themselves, in Andean practice huacas, sacred and alive, honoured in a wall where each is fitted along its own shape. The three tiers stepping up to a summit are the stepped mountain or platform, a load-bearing Andean form. The reading of Cusco’s plan as a puma, with these walls as its teeth, is modern and contested, and it is not credited here. Held at 8.0 because the archetype is chiefly evoked by mass and by what is known of Andean regard for stone, not legible in the plan as the sphere is in the Pantheon; and because the use and the meaning both rest on testimony that cannot be tested.
Teutonic Order builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is in part built, and the name is the programme: Marienburg, the stronghold of Mary, the Order’s patron. The plan makes it the citadel of the Virgin. Her church stands in the innermost bailey, and her colossal image looks out from its apse over the land the Order held, the guardian set on the wall. The way from the outer bailey to the convent is a built ascent from the world to the cloister and, below the church, to the dead masters in their crypt. What holds it: the stronghold of the faith is an inherited figure of crusading building, perfected here rather than first built, and the national myths laid on the castle since 1800 are reception, not credited.
Ikeda Terumasa · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into plan and section, not evoked. The citadel on the height: the hill, the walls stepping up, the keep as summit, a mountain made and occupied. The labyrinth: an approach whose path toward the centre turns away from it, the goal always in sight and never in reach. The threshold multiplied, gate after gate in their lettered order. The particular stays particular: this lord, these hills, the stones of earlier castles in the walls, a small shrine to Osakabe at the top of the keep. The heron is a name and the legends are allusion. Held because citadel and labyrinth are the type’s inheritance, carried to their fullest rather than first built, and the keep’s interior holds no myth.
Greek (Classical) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype of the hero is built into the body, not alluded to: the over-life scale, the nudity that in Greek sculpture marks the heroic rather than the undressed, the stillness of a man who need not move. That structure bears load; it is what the figures are. The particular has stayed particular: two different men, one with a fillet in his curls and a fierce mouth, one older and quieter. What holds the axis below the gate is that the myth the figures were made to carry is lost with their names. They were almost certainly named heroes in a dedication, and which heroes cannot be read now. What stands is the hero in general, built, and the hero in particular, erased. The general archetype is strong; the built mythic particular is not available to the work as it stands.
Deerhunter · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often and built at one point. The title evokes the halcyon, the kingfisher of the old story whose nesting calmed the winter sea, and the calm days named for it: a myth of peace that the record turns into memory’s lie, and that governs how every song is heard. Revival evokes the tent meeting and the saved soul. Helicopter comes nearest to building, a boy cast down from the sky, Icarus without the wings, his fall set as a lullaby. Memory Boy and Basement Scene evoke adolescence as a lost country. He Would Have Laughed gives a particular person, a dead friend, and keeps him particular. The patterns are glimpsed through the haze rather than carried across the sequence, and the halcyon frames the record more than it structures it.
Maqsud Kashani (named in the inscription) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Built at the centre and evoked elsewhere. The built archetype is the centre itself: the medallion as a sun or a source from which light hangs and around which the whole field is ordered, and that structure carries the carpet. The lamps call up the mosque lamp and, behind it, the image of God’s light as a lamp in a niche from the Light verse of the Qur’an; no text of the verse is on the carpet, so the reference is summoned, not stated. The field of flowers evokes the paradise garden, common to the genre. The servant at the door is an archetype too. The particulars stay particular: one date, one name, two unequal lamps. Only the centre is built.
Nick Ut · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The particular is fiercely particular: a named child, a named road, a date. And it gains archetypal weight that is partly built into the picture. Children fleeing a burning village down a road are the flight from Troy and the Massacre of the Innocents at once; the girl’s arms, held out from her burns, make a cruciform shape no one intended; the soldiers behind, armed and unhurried, stand where Herod’s soldiers stand in the old pictures; fire falling from the sky is the oldest figure of judgment. These are seen in the frame, not read into it. Held below the top because the myth is given by the moment and assembled by reception, in the later life of the girl in the picture, more than built by the work, which does nothing to turn it.
Shreve, Lamb and Harmon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
One archetype is built: the tower to heaven, a stepped mountain rising to a single point, with the ascent made a public rite. The section is the myth: from the street through the lobby to elevators that carry the visitor in stages to a terrace and then to a small high room under the mast; the mast itself was conceived as a gate between earth and sky, a threshold for travellers arriving by air. That is myth built into the plan, and it stays particular: this corner, 1931, an empty building in a bad year. Babel is near it, and the mountain at the centre of the world. The films that later used the tower as a stage borrowed that weight and are not counted. Held below the gate because the myth is one image, built once.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the section, not only alluded to. The ascent to the sky over the place of law bears load: the citizen’s climb ends at an open crown above the chamber, and light descends the cone to the deliberating body below, an inversion of the imperial dome as crown into the people’s lantern. The rising from ash is built into the fabric, where scar and graffiti are kept, not merely read into the building. The opening in a dome over a gathering stands in a line that runs back to the Pantheon, and here it is constructed, not quoted. What holds the axis: the people watching their rulers is a figure the visitor is told more than one the plan enforces; the phoenix, the lighthouse and the eye are readings the dome invites; and below the dome, in the offices and the chamber, the archetype stops.
James Gibbs · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built into the plan, not applied. The round temple on a podium; the dome as the sky over a centre; the mausoleum, for this is a memorial raised from a founder’s gift; and the centre of a world, a rotunda set in the middle of a square that the colleges surround as a ring. The library as temple of knowledge is built rather than alluded to: the plan, the dome and the reader at the centre of a ring carry it. What holds the axis where it stands is that the patterns were received rather than found, with Bramante, Michelangelo, Wren and Hawksmoor all behind them, and the building summons them with conviction but without the cosmic construction of the Pantheon’s sphere.
Antonio Canova · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The myth is built, not evoked. The fable of Psyche and Eros is the soul raised from death by love, and the structure carries it: she lies on the rock, which is earth, sleep and the underworld she has come from; he descends on wings, the divine stooping; the waking happens in the upward reach of her arms to him. The crossing is the meeting of a descending and a rising line, and the moment of revival is put in the geometry. Held below the gate because the group fits a known text and a known allegory perfectly rather than enlarging them: two young bodies take their depth from the fable more than from anything the marble finds. The vessel is emblem, evoked.
Vladimir-Suzdal builders, under Andrey Bogolyubsky · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is partly built. A church on a raised mound in a seasonal flood is the temple on the primal hill above the waters, the island of the holy, and the builders made that structural: the mound is constructed and the flood is the yearly fact of the site. The Intercession, the Virgin’s veil over the people, is given form in one white figure guarding the river route. David on three facades makes each threshold a psalm, with beasts and birds round him. Held at the middle of its range because the carving sits in the zakomaras on a structure that would stand without it, and the plan’s cosmos is inherited.
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not applied: the citadel. The name is the old outwork of the city wall, and the plan keeps fragments of that wall, sets the estate on a raised ground above the common street, encloses its gardens in a ring of blocks and gives the whole a moat in the lakes. The cloister is a second figure, built into the courts: dwellings round a quiet green, a church at the centre of one, water and planting where the garth would be. The tower, three times over, marks the citadel on the skyline. Held below the gate because the citadel is partly the podium’s need named after the fact, and the arts centre under the lake, a buried warren, has no figure of its own.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth is partly built. The governing pattern is language as origin and fall: Babel in the many tongues of the crowd on the Acropolis, and Pentecost in the closing section, where tongues are the sign of the spirit and the boy is left outside them. Between them stands the cult, a priesthood of the letter that sacrifices its victims to the alphabet, and Owen, a scholar of inscriptions raised among Pentecostals, is the hinge who belongs to both. These are load-bearing: the arc runs from the letter that kills to the misspelled word that lives, and the temple, approached last, is built as a pilgrimage. What holds the axis five tenths short of the bar is that the cult’s myth is talked about more than enacted, its members glimpsed and its theology inferred by James, Owen and Volterra in conversation, so that the archetypes are clearer in the design than in the experience of reading.
Spike Jonze · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The myth is built into the mechanism. The puppet master who takes the strings of a living man inverts Pinocchio and draws on the oldest figure of possession, the wish to live in another’s body, and that possession is the plot, not an allusion to it. Lester and his circle are the immortals who feed on the young, a body-snatching myth played as a geriatric social club, and their passage from vessel to vessel is the film’s late structure. Malkovich in his own head is Narcissus at his pool made literal. The portal is a narrow, wet descent and the Turnpike a birth into nowhere. Most of these are struck once as comic premise, deepened in the mechanism more than in the persons, and the vampire lore is supplied rather than grown.
Ansel Adams · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The patterns are old and here partly built rather than evoked. The moon over the graves: night, death and the light that persists in darkness. The crosses lit while the land darkens: the Christian figure of light upon the dead, the hope of resurrection, in a Hispanic Catholic village of northern New Mexico. The hour between day and night: the threshold. These are made by actual lights falling on actual objects, so that the archetype is carried by a particular village at a particular minute, and this church and these crosses stay plain. Held from the top because the archetype is one tableau, not a structure worked through, and because the moon and the cross are given symbols the picture uses more than transforms.
The Cure · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked throughout and built in the frame, which the sequence carries. The record opens on the oldest shape of elegy, the singer at the end of song, and closes on the figure of the old man under the sky, the last witness: a particular man in his sixties, looking back, given the weight of the type. Between them I Can Never Say Goodbye builds the visitation, death as something that comes for one person, and the phrase from Macbeth lends it the shape of the omen. Three figures, placed first, sixth and last, make a descent rather than a mood. What holds it below the gate is the middle: love, war and dread are named without being built on, Warsong’s title is as near as the record comes to a second myth, and the frame is sometimes held as atmosphere more than it bears load.
Abbasid builders, under al-Mutawakkil · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth built, in part. The ascending spiral is load-bearing: the way up is the structure, the tower is its own path, and the axis runs from the Malwiya through the north gate and the court to the mihrab, so the ascent to the sky and the orientation toward Mecca are set on one line. The enclosure is the sacred precinct marked off from the plain. The deeper pattern, the stepped tower of Mesopotamia, is contested: a link to the ziggurats has been argued and denied, and is not credited as built. The particular stays particular: brick, a plain, one caliph’s city. Held below the summit because half of the ancient tower it recalls is supplied by the viewer.
Elena Ferrante · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth is built here, not only evoked. The first part is a fairy tale made from the inside: the ogre, imagined by the girls as a beast of the underworld before they see a man; the dark cellar; the lost dolls; the gift of gold; the book of sisters bought with it. The doubles, one who stays and one who goes, are an ancient pattern made load-bearing in the narration itself. The shoes Lila designs, sold by her husband to the Solaras and worn by Marcello at her wedding, close the volume as a myth of the self’s work passing to the enemy. The axis stops below the bar because the second part leans on the courtship plot and the social novel, and the archetype thins as the girls grow: the pattern is fully built only across four volumes.
Ragnar Östberg · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Archetype is partly built. The city as castle on the water, the tower as civic beacon, the court as town square taken indoors, the council meeting under the roof of a northern hall: these are in plan and section, not only in the ornament. The Blue Hall is load-bearing myth, the square of the town enclosed in the house of the town. The Mälaren Queen enthroned in gold, the lake personified at the head of the banqueting hall, is myth staged as image; the three crowns are emblem. The archetypes are strong and mostly evoked. The building is more a pageant of national memory than a deep pattern built into structure, as a basilica or a temple builds its axis.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The myth is partly built. The visitor from the sky heals with a touch of the finger, is taken by the authorities, dies, rises, the heart lighting under the white wrapping and the flower lifting, and ascends, leaving a finger at the boy’s forehead and the words “I’ll be right here”. The passion structure bears the weight of the last act; it is not allusion. Beside it stand the foundling and the changeling, the imaginary friend made real, and Peter Pan named outright in the bedtime reading. The particular stays particular: sweets, a Speak and Spell, a closet of stuffed toys. What holds the figure is that much of the deep pattern is drawn in strokes, through image and score, and the archetype, grace from above, is the familiar one, not made strange.
Soundgarden · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth is built at the hinge and carried along the sequence. Black Hole Sun is the strongest construction: an apocalyptic invocation in the form of a prayer, the sun turned dark and called on to wash away a corrupt world. The pattern is old, the deluge and the day of wrath, and the song bears it as structure, a summons with a refrain. Around it the record sets the oldest wish as its frame, the return to water in Let Me Drown and to death in Like Suicide, and places the festival of light heard as an end of days just before the close. Held below the bar: no figure persists across the record to carry these patterns, and Limo Wreck and Spoonman evoke more than they build.
Robert Capa · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The particular stays particular: a man in a white shirt and cap, a slope of stubble, a belt of leather pouches, nothing heroic in the dress. And the pose is archetypal: the arms out, the body thrown back, the weapon falling. It is the falling warrior of the oldest war art, the dying man of a pediment, and for many viewers it has read as a crucifixion. The archetype is found rather than attached, because it is the instant itself: the camera finds the posture the myth had always drawn. What holds it short of the Epochal Gate is that the deeper structure, the people’s soldier who dies so that the Republic may live, is supplied largely by caption and cause. The image alone gives the fall; the rest is brought to it.
Diane Arbus · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth built, not evoked, because the subject is the archetype in the flesh. The double, the twin, the second self and the mirror are among the oldest patterns of story: the brothers who found a city, the second self who announces a death, the sister who is and is not oneself. The picture builds that pattern out of two particular children in New Jersey, and they stay particular: dresses, tights, a haircut of 1967, a mouth turned slightly down. The pair is the whole composition, and the one difference between them is the old knowledge that the double is never simply the same. The stillness carries the fairy tale’s enchanted children too. Held short of the gate because the archetype is held in one relation, likeness and its failure, and is stated with great exactness rather than unfolded.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The source is a late form of the oldest matter: the woman who withholds and the man made a puppet, Carmen in Seville, the courtly lady whose refusal is the love. At one point the film builds rather than cites. The doubled Conchita turns the femme fatale into what the archetype always was, a mask the male gaze puts on whichever woman stands before it. The corset with its knotted laces is the chastity belt of the romances, played for comedy and kept literal. The sack Mathieu carries over his shoulder recurs and is never explained: myth evoked and left there. The particular stays particular: a bucket, a compartment, a mother’s debts. What holds the axis well below the bar is that most of this matter is inherited from Louÿs and the Carmen tradition and summoned as setting; the built element is one stroke, deep as it is.
Grant Wood · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The particular has become archetype: two people of Cedar Rapids before a house in Eldon have become the figure of the American farm family, the patriarch and the woman behind him, the Puritan inheritance on the prairie. The axis asks whether that was built or bestowed. Part is built. The frontal pair is the pose of the donors at the foot of an altarpiece; the fork is carried as a saint carries the instrument of his life; the pointed arch over their heads makes the house a chapel and the pair its keepers. Man and woman before the dwelling, under the church, holding the tool of the soil, is a structure, not an allusion. But much of the archetypal weight came after, through reception and parody, and that is presence, not construction.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetype built into the plan is the god’s house: a walled room within a ring of columns on a raised platform, entered from the east toward the image. It bears load here as in every peripteral temple, and this one keeps the ring whole. The building adds a pairing of its own: the lame craftsman god, maker of the gods’ armour, housed with Athena of craft on the hill above the forges, the maker given a house in the place of making. The metopes set two labouring heroes, Herakles and Theseus, at the threshold. What holds it: the heroes are carved, not built, and the temple as house is inherited rather than constructed afresh. Myth built in its type, evoked in its programme.
Tiwa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not alluded to, in a few places that can be named. The kiva, round, partly sunk and entered from the roof by ladder, is the place of emergence, the underworld brought inside the village. The plaza with the stream through it is the village’s centre, and its water comes from the sacred lake. The whole is made of earth taken from where it stands. That is construction at the scale of a community. What holds the axis: the plan’s sacred geometry cannot be read in detail, because the kivas are closed and their placing is not known with confidence; and much that is said of the houses echoing the mountain is the interpretation of visitors, which the axis exists to discount.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetype is the blind singer: Homer, Tiresias, the bard of every oral tradition, who sees inward because he cannot see outward. It is built, not alluded to: the shut eyes, the instrument held as the only bond with the world, the body bent into a shape half Man of Sorrows and half hermit. The posture has the shape of a lamentation, and the elongation carries the figure toward Spanish devotional painting, so the suffering body of the Christian image is present as structure. The particular is kept: a Barcelona street player, a Spanish guitar, rags. What holds it at 8.0: the archetype is given entire in one figure and not set against a second term, and part of its charge belongs to the period’s cult of the poor.
Yves Klein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The work builds more than it evokes. The pattern is the flight and the fall: Icarus, the leap of faith, the saint’s levitation. The particular stays wholly particular: a man in a suit, a provincial street, a garden wall, a bicycle. The archetype bears load because the picture stops at the one instant in which flight and fall are the same and leaves the viewer to supply the end. The cyclist riding away builds the second half of the old pattern, the world going about its business while a man falls from the sky, without quoting any source. The newspaper adds a modern myth, the conquest of space. Held below the gate because the myth rests on one gesture, and much of its depth is supplied by what the viewer already knows of the pattern.
Peter Eisenman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The archetypes are partly built and partly evoked. Built: the descent into the underworld, made in section, the ground falling under the visitor while the walls rise, and completed by the stair down into the rooms where the names are; the labyrinth, here with no centre and every path straight, an orthogonal variant of its own; the field of the dead, stelae set in rank like grave markers without names. These bear load: the descent is the experience, and the grid is the plan. Evoked: the tombs of the old Jewish cemetery in Prague, the rails and barracks of the camps, the crowd. Eisenman disclaimed symbolism, and the particular is kept by the information centre more than by the field. What holds the axis at 8.0: the strongest archetype, the cemetery, is invited rather than constructed, and the descent has no turning point and no return but the stair out.
Jean-Michel Basquiat · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The skull carries the memento mori, Golgotha and the vanitas; the frontal staring head carries the mask, the icon and the ancestral head. Much of that is evoked. What is built is one structure: the head as living face and death’s head in the same lines, so that each feature serves both, the eye and its socket, the teeth as smile and as skull. That double image, the oldest structure of the vanitas, is made load-bearing in a single figure rather than placed beside it. The particular stays particular: a contemporary head drawn fast, not a generic skull. What holds the axis is that the archetype is built in one move, and the rest of the deep is summoned, not constructed.
Jordan Peele · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The myth is built, not cited. Its structure is the oldest American one, the sale of the Black body, re-enacted as a garden party and a bingo auction, and turned by the horror tradition of possession: the body taken, the mind sunk and kept as a passenger. The hero escapes by picking cotton, and the hunted kills the hunter on a deer’s antlers. Rose is the lure of the fairy tale, the bride who leads the guest to the house of the eaters. Chris’s mother on the roadside, unanswered while he watched television, is the guilt the hypnosis holds him by. The Sunken Place entered common speech within a year, the mark of a myth made. Held where it is because the archetypes are allegorical before they are deep, the surgery is pulp science, and the frame is the body-snatcher film’s.
Chimú builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Myth is built into the plan, not alluded to, and three archetypes bear load. The enclosure: the royal and sacred as what is walled off, approached through a single gate and successive thresholds, each court nearer the centre and fewer admitted. The labyrinth: the circulation is a maze in fact, turns and blind passages that make the approach to the king a trial of being allowed. The house as tomb: the ruler’s dwelling becomes his sepulchre, the platform with its cells of the dead set inside the walls he lived within, so that the palace is also the mountain of the dead. The friezes add the sea as source, nets and waves set as the order that feeds the state. Everything stays particular: this coast, this mud, these fish. Held below the gate because the cosmology the friezes carried is largely lost, and the labyrinth is the maze of control as much as myth.
David Lynch · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Myth built, on two patterns, and both bear load. The double: one man who becomes another and returns, one woman who is two, so that a single actress plays the wife who is killed and the mistress who cannot be had; the lineage runs through Vertigo and the Doppelgänger tales. The circle of damnation: the road that leads back to the door, the message a man sends himself, a tempter with a camera who seems to belong to Fred more than to the world. Without the loop and the double there is no film. What holds the figure is the working. The Mystery Man is felt as a figure more than worked through, and the second movement’s archetypes are noir’s own stock, the femme fatale and the fall guy, used as material for an hour before they are shown to be a dream.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The title promises an ascent, and the long pieces enact rising: from murmur to roar, from the dark mode of Mladic to the major ascent of We Drift. In sequence, war, surveillance, drift through fire and a city’s spring become a passage from catastrophe toward deliverance. Mladic particularises it: a named man and a modal colour, so that the riff becomes the sound of one war rather than of war in general. The rising is built in the sound; its meaning is assigned, borne by titles over music that would carry other names, and drift and ascent are the band’s form on every record. Myth evoked with conviction, and in the sound nearly built.
Hakka builders (Jiang clan) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Myth is built into the plan and carries load. The archetype is the clan as a cosmos: concentric rings round a centre where the ancestors are housed, so that every room faces the source of the lineage and the living are ordered by their distance from it. The walled circle, the town as a single ring, the nest and the fortress are one figure here, made of the soil the clan farmed, and the gate axis to the hall is the threshold and the line of descent. It stays particular: one surname, one valley, its own tablets. Readings of the round as heaven or as a bagua are not credited. What holds it below the gate is inheritance: the figure is the type’s, enlarged and multiplied here, not first built.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The archetype is built rather than alluded to, though not in a pattern this building invented. Kannon is held to dwell on a mountain, Potalaka, above the sea; the hall is set on a mountain side over a falling spring, and the sacred water of Otowa below gives the temple its name, pure water. The plan builds the old Japanese order of the sacred mountain: the hidden god in the dark of the hill, the threshold, the platform launched into open air. The stage is a threshold made into a place, a ledge between the god’s dark house and the world, and the leap from it made the structure a rite of wager and survival. Held at 8.0 because the order is shared by many temples, and the hall carries it by placement and section.
Lev Rudnev · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Built, not evoked, in plan and section: the citadel on the hill, with one axis climbing to it; the stepped mountain rising to a single point; the tower as world axis crowned by the star, the emblem of the state set at the very top as a cross or an orb once was. The building puts the temple of knowledge in the place of the temple, and the composition, the hill, the axis and the centre carry that meaning; they are not ornament laid on it. It stays particular: this hill, this river, this regime, this anniversary. What keeps it at 8.0: much of the archetype is borrowed at second hand, from the Kremlin towers and the American setback skyscraper, and the remaining iconography, wheat sheaves, emblems, open books, heroic students, is evoked as programme, the myth of a period more than an archetype. The citadel is built; its meaning is supplied by the state.
Nicholas Ray · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The myth is built, and it bears load. The three found at the station become, in the mansion, a father, a mother and a child playing house, and the film’s structure turns on that improvised holy family. Its child is sacrificed at the end, on the observatory steps at dawn, a death the father of the game tried to prevent and could not. The chickie run is an ordeal at the edge of a cliff, a rite of passage with a girl as its priestess, and the price of initiation is a boy’s death. The observatory sets all of it under the stars. The particular stays particular: a toy monkey, a red windbreaker, a milk bottle at the refrigerator. Held from the top because the script often names its archetypes rather than leaving them to bear their weight in silence.
César Pelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Here the building does more than evoke. The gate, two pillars and the way between them, is built into the composition and bears load: the pair exists to frame a void, and the bridge makes the void a threshold in the sky. The twin pillars before a door, the portal of a city and the tower as axis joining earth and heaven are present in plan and section, not in ornament. The star of two squares, a figure of order in Islamic geometry, is the plan of every floor, so that the sign is structure. Held below the gate: the gate opens on nothing in particular, no sacred or civic way passing through it, only the roof of a mall; and the star is a motif made plan, not a cosmology the building enacts.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Myth is built in the frame. The bracketed titles turn the record into a children’s book of terrors: snakes and ladders, the sky falling in, a boney king of nowhere, a wolf at the door. Over it lies a second frame, the Flood: the newborn of Sail to the Moon who will build an ark, the rain of Sit Down. Stand Up., the cold water of the closing tracks. The fairy tale bears load: it is how a parent tells a child about a world he cannot explain, and how the powerful tell the citizen that all is well. What holds the axis is that no figure carries it: the wolf, the king and the little man are named, not built.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Myth is evoked throughout and built in one passage. The language is Cave’s scriptural inheritance: the hand of God, a kingdom above, fields of lavender as a road taken alone, a time that is coming. The built pattern is a passage through catastrophe to a morning. The record opens on a divine hand reaching down, falls through threat and loss, and ends on a balcony in the sun, a man alive and amazed to be (“this morning is amazing”). The morning answers the hand that reached down, and the sequence builds the passage. The white elephant is a figure of grievance made monstrous, half a type. Held back because the frame is carried by the order of the songs more than by any figure, the scripture is mostly atmosphere, and the particulars, a statue, a city in New Mexico, a balcony, are touched rather than built into structure.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The myth is built, not evoked, and it bears the load. The train is an ark after a flood of ice, sealed and circling, and its engine is sacred: the front worships it, the schoolroom sings to it, and Wilford is its demiurge and priest. At its heart the archetype is literal: the machine that keeps the world alive eats children, a Moloch whose altar is a crawl space under the floor. The advance is an ascent to the god made horizontal, and the deliverer who reaches the throne is offered it. The end overturns the ark: a girl and a boy step out onto a dead earth, with a bear for the first creature. What holds it: the particular is thin beneath the pattern, and the myth is stated aloud near the end.
Michael Mann · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The myth is built and bears load. The film carries the founding American story Cooper made: the natural man who stands between two peoples, the wilderness as the place where a nation is born, the last of a race passing out of the land. The adoption is structural: Hawkeye is a white man raised as Chingachgook’s son, and the last image sets the old father, the adopted son and the English woman on a ridge looking west, so that the end of the Mohican line and the making of a new American couple are one event. Chingachgook’s elegy, spoken over a world that is ending, completes the structure rather than glossing it. Held below the gate because the myth is inherited whole from Cooper and the film of 1936, and because the film mourns the vanished people and celebrates the couple who inherit the land without seeing that the two pull apart.
Takashi Yamazaki · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The archetypal structure bears the load. Godzilla as the war and the bomb returned from the sea is the myth of the 1954 film, evoked again and set in the ruins it came from. What the film builds itself is the myth of the dead man who must return to life: the kamikaze, already given up as dead, lives on as a ghost among the living, goes down again to the sea, and is reborn by ejecting from the burning plane, in a re-staging of the sacrifice he refused, now refused rightly. The operation is named for Wadatsumi, the god of the sea, and the creature’s death by depth and pressure is a return to the abyss. The orphan received at the door, gift and burden, is old pattern. The limits: the creature’s own myth is borrowed, and the rebirth is spelled out rather than left to the image.
Louisa May Alcott · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Here the book builds. The first part is constructed on The Pilgrim’s Progress, not merely allusive to it: each sister takes up a burden in the first chapter, and the chapters walk the stations. Apollyon is Jo’s temper, met in the burnt manuscript and the ice; Vanity Fair is Meg’s week at the Moffats’; the Palace Beautiful is Beth’s welcome into the Laurence house; the Valley of Humiliation is Amy’s limes. The four sisters carry the old pattern of four temperaments and four ways of a woman’s life, the wife, the artist who settles, the writer who will not, the saint who dies, and in the second part each ending is the meaning of its type. The book then made its own archetype: Jo March, the tomboy who writes, a figure readers and writers have lived by. Held below the bar because the frame thins once the first part ends, and Beth’s archetype is the period’s angel in the house, received rather than remade.
Eduard Riedel and Christian Jank, under Ludwig II · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The archetype is built into siting and section: the castle on the unreachable height, a site Ludwig called holy and beyond approach, the Grail castle raised over a gorge. Two rooms build myth rather than illustrate it. The Throne Hall is a Grail temple and a church of kingship at once: an apse, steps of ascent, sainted kings round the empty seat. The grotto is the Venusberg in plaster and coloured light, a cave of desire set between the king’s living room and his study. The Lohengrin swan is everywhere. But most of the myth is evoked, painted on walls in cycles from Wagner’s sources, and borrowed whole from the operas rather than found in the building. The particular stays particular: this king, this rock, the valley of his childhood. Below the gate.
Alex Proyas · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The myth is built, not evoked, and it bears the plot. Three old patterns are load-bearing: the revenant who returns from the grave to set a wrong right; the crow as bearer of souls, which here holds a soul back; and the bridegroom killed on his wedding eve who keeps faith with the bride beyond death. Eric’s invulnerability is bound to the bird, and the story turns when Top Dollar and Myca understand this and wound the crow, making the avenger mortal. Devil’s Night, the church, the gargoyle and the fall make the last act a descent of the damned. What holds the figure is particularity: Eric and Shelly are drawn as types of lovers, their life known through images, and the villains are figures of a carnival hell.
Stephen King · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
Myth built, and in the structure rather than laid over it. The father who devours the son is the book’s frame: Saturn in a hotel, made particular in a man with a mallet, a hangover and a play he cannot finish. Bluebeard’s forbidden room is named within the book and enacted in Room 217, which the child is told not to enter and enters. The haunted house is made a hotel, a place of transit and of money, so that the house of one family’s sin becomes the house of a nation’s: mob killings, a millionaire owner, the parties of the rich. Poe’s masque structures the ball and the end, where the hotel burns with its revellers. The child seer, the guardian who comes from far away and the house that must be destroyed by fire carry real weight. Held below the bar because several of these are evoked as allusion as much as built, and the seer and the guardian stay types.
Robertson Davies · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
Myth built, and built into the plot rather than laid on it. The stone in the snowball is a load-bearing object across sixty years, kept on Dunstan’s desk and returned to Boy’s mouth in death. Mary Dempster is the fool-saint, holy and mad at once, and the book will not decide which. Paul is the changeling who becomes the magician; Boy is Dunstan’s shadow, the man of the world who acts where Dunstan withholds; Liesl is the daimon who teaches. The title names the archetypal role the narrator plays in every life he touches, and the end enacts it: the Brazen Head names those who killed Boy Staunton, and the fifth is the “keeper of the stone”. The people stay particular while they bear the patterns. The axis stops below the bar because the myth is explained as it is built: Blazon and Liesl gloss it, and the Jungian scheme behind it is visible, so that the pattern arrives already interpreted.
Knut Hamsun · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The book touches deep patterns and does not build them: the ascetic in the desert, Job railing at a silent God, the artist whose fasting is his art, the city as a labyrinth that no one leaves unmarked. The narrator’s quarrel with God is a mood of the delirium, not a structure the book stands on. Ylajali is a name and a fantasy, not a figure carrying the weight of myth. The starving artist is a myth the book helped make for its successors, Kafka’s hunger artist the nearest of them, but within the novel the particular stays a nervous young writer in Kristiania, and the archetype is a shadow at its edge. Myth evoked, and evoked well; not load-bearing, and so short of the gate.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype is the eclipse itself: light withdrawn, the world seen in the moment its source is covered. It names the film and gives it its last image, a lamp’s glare, and it is load-bearing in the coda, where the lovers vanish and the place goes on, so that one crossing in EUR stands for a world emptied of the human. What holds the axis down is that elsewhere myth is evoked rather than built. The lovers who fail to meet carry the old matter of the missed appointment, but the film declines to make it fate; the Kenya masquerade summons the primitive as costume and is weakly joined. The film is secular and modern by conviction, and its deepest figure, the market, is rendered as a condition, not an archetype.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The particular is very particular: named men, their weapons, their sashes. The archetype enters by construction rather than allusion. The composition is a passage from darkness into light, out of a gate and toward the viewer, the city’s defenders crossing a threshold, and that pattern is built into the lighting and the depth. The girl, a figure from emblem placed inside a portrait, is a second, and load-bearing. But no deep myth governs the whole. The march has no destination and no enemy; the setting-out is a civic ceremony, and the archetype is evoked by the light more than carried by the story. Most of the painting sits on the side of myth evoked.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The particular is very particular: one man, one cap, one face of about sixty. It becomes archetype in part. The old maker facing out with the tools of his craft is the artificer at the end of the making, and the frontal, near-symmetrical pose under a cap like a halo gives the figure a hieratic standing that recalls older images of authority without quoting them. The circles are where a myth would be built: Giotto’s freehand circle as Vasari tells it, the two hemispheres of a world map, theory and practice, perfection. The literature offers each; the painting makes none load-bearing. The myth is evoked by sign and pose, not constructed.
Giacomo Puccini · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Some archetypal structure is built, and it bears weight. The year turns: Christmas Eve, a winter dawn when the lovers agree to part “alla stagion dei fior”
“in the season of flowers”, and a last act in which spring has come and brings death, not renewal. Mimì enters with a candle gone out and asks for light; the asking is the love story in small. Youth itself is the figure, and Colline’s farewell to his coat is the bohemian taking leave of it, a thing sold for medicine. Held below the gate because the myth is the commonplace one of a consumptive girl and a poor poet, the particular is sentimentalised rather than raised, and no figure gains the force Otello gives its Credo.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The building summons images: a ship on the river of a shipbuilding city, and a fish, Gehry’s long motif, already made at large scale in his Barcelona fish of 1992. The ship is in the massing, and both images are strong. The archetypal structure that bears load is the descent from the city toward the water, a threshold crossed downward into a luminous central chamber, and the atrium as a navel from which every gallery is reached and to which every route returns. That descent is in the plan and the section, and it gives every visit an initiatory shape. What holds the axis is that vessel and fish, evoked more than built, order neither the rooms, the route nor the section, as axis and sanctuary order a temple.
Raymond Hood and the Associated Architects · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetype built into the plan is the processional way to a high place: a narrow approach, a descent to a sunken court, a fire figure, and a tower as mountain closing the view. That structure is load-bearing, since it is how the place is used, and it is old, the temple approach and the forum before the basilica. But the myth that names it is evoked rather than built. Prometheus and Atlas, Wisdom with his compasses, the theme of human progress: these are sculpture placed on the architecture, a programme of allusion the plan supports but does not enact. The tower is a mountain only as every tall building is. The deep is reached at one point, the sunken plaza with its fire bringer under a sheer face, and otherwise summoned; that is what holds the axis at the foot of the twelve.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The pattern built into plan and section is the turning of a body toward the sun, as a plant turns toward light: the whole patient wing is a heliotrope, and the cure is a slow ascent from shadow into light and air. Orientation is made fate, the terraces are altars to the sun, and the healthy world of service is set apart from the sick. That much is constructed, not alluded to. The sanatorium as the threshold place between life and death is evoked by the type rather than built by this building. Held here because it is modest myth, more regimen than archetype, and it does not reach the depth of axis, cave or temple as cosmos.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Built in one place, evoked elsewhere. The built place is the doubling: woman and animal as one being in two forms, turned by one impulse; the lady and the beast as an old pattern, the maiden and the creature only purity can hold, the familiar who is the self in animal form. That structure carries the picture and is not a caption. The rest is emblem: the ermine as a sign of moral purity in the bestiary tradition, as the honour of the lord, as a pun on the sitter’s name. These are allusions read off the animal, and an emblem’s archetype is shallower than a myth’s. The particular stays particular, a girl of perhaps sixteen in a Spanish fashion of the Milanese court. Half built and half emblem, and the built half is one doubling.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Mostly evoked, built in one place. The built place is the mirror: Venus and her image, beauty that can be seen only as a reflection, an archetype carried by the mechanics of the picture and not by allusion. It touches Narcissus and the vanitas, and turns both, since the gaze in the glass is directed outward. Elsewhere the myth is summoned and then drained: the title’s goddess has none of her attributes, and Cupid alone names her. The tradition behind it, the Venetian reclining Venus and the Venus at her toilet, is called on and set aside, and the particular stays wholly particular, a woman on a bed. Loosening a myth into a body is a different achievement from building one, and the axis is held below the gate for it.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present and partly built. The ripe wheat is harvest, and in the painter’s own vocabulary harvest was death: at Saint-Rémy in 1889 he wrote of his reaper, in substance, as the image of death in the great book of nature. Crows over a field are an omen in many traditions. The path that stops is a crossroads with no destination, and three ways are a figure of choice older than painting; that road structure is built into the composition and bears weight. The rest is evoked: the crows are there as birds, and nothing makes them more than birds except the darkening sky and what the viewer brings. The particular stays particular, to the good. Much of the mythic weight the canvas carries in common understanding is the biography’s, the last picture painted before the shot, which is legend, not construction, and is set aside.
The Strokes · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked and lightly built. The record summons one pattern, the city at night and the young who own it and are bored by it, a figure as old as the flâneur and as recent as the Velvet Underground’s New York. New York City Cops names the city and its law; Last Nite and Barely Legal stage seduction and refusal; The Modern Age names the time; the title asks its question of an age. The pattern is consistent across all eleven songs and colours each of them. What holds it is that the pattern bears little weight: no figure carries it, no place is particular beyond a name, and the sequence makes no passage. The myth of the band’s image and reception belongs to neither music nor words, and is not credited.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked, and its figures recur. The title joins two images, the twin joined at the body and the dream. Cherub Rock sets a mock angel against the scene the band came from; Spaceboy is the child sent out among the stars because he does not belong on earth; Disarm sets a family’s inherited violence, the old figure of the sins of the fathers, in a nursery song with bells; Luna sets the moon as a lover. Together they make an inner mythology of the lost child, and the recurrence lifts it above scattered allusion. What holds the axis is construction: the figures stand apart, neither image of the title governs the sequence, the particular is thin, with no place and no named person, and the archetype is reached by mood.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The mythic layer is thin by design. Two names carry weight, a woman called Deirdra whose gift for feeding consumes her and a boy called Amadeus, beloved of God, at a board nobody resets, and neither is activated by a word of the text. The frame is set at the thresholds instead: Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence over a part called The Ninth Iteration, where a man turns a corner to find the line formed again and steps into it; Pericles on the dead woven into other lives without visible symbol over the second, answering a man reduced to a record ID. The crow and the parent bird of the last story are the nearest the book comes to built pattern, and they stay particular. Myth framed and evoked, not built.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is the sea-change of Ariel’s song, the drowned father turned to coral and pearl, “Into something rich and strange”. The canvas does more than wear it. The burial is material: things of the surface world sunk in a dark green depth and made part of it, myth built into the layers and not only alluded to. A brushed figure has been reported beneath the skeins by X-radiography; it is weighed lightly, since no viewer can see it. Three things hold the axis below the gate. The title came afterward, by the usual account from another, so the reading the canvas best bears was found for it rather than made with it. The buried figure cannot carry the work. And the guardians and totems of the early 1940s are what the pouring covered: the archetype is half the subject and half what was hidden.
Giuseppe Terragni · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Built rather than evoked, in part. The plan is the Italian palazzo with its cortile, the courtyard house of civic power, remade: the court roofed in glass and turned into an assembly room, the loggia of the Renaissance front turned into the grid of the frame. The half cube and its regulating ratios carry the old claim of proportion as cosmic order into a concrete frame. The confrontation with the cathedral sets the house of the state against the house of God on one axis of the city, built into the siting. These are load-bearing. What holds the axis below 8.0: the archetype built most fully is a modern and partisan one, the party house as forum, and there is no threshold of passage, no ascent, no figure of the person; the deep patterns are of the city and the palace.
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is built in one place and evoked around it. Ramble On sets the wanderer’s quest, the oldest road of the songs, in Tolkien’s world, naming “Mordor” and “Gollum” and a girl lost to the dark lord: the journey is load-bearing in the song, its restless verses and lifting choruses the road itself. The record’s one deep image, desire as a storm that dissolves form and returns, lives in the sound of Whole Lotta Love and is real, a pattern the music enacts rather than names. The blues supplies an inherited figure, the potent man of the juke joint, and the record enlarges him to a giant’s scale. What holds it: the fantasy world is allusion, and it does not reach across the record.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not alluded to. The court is the oldest figure of dwelling, the open centre of the house under the sky, the impluvium of the Roman house and the tsubo-niwa of the Japanese one. The closed wall to the street is the threshold between the world and the hearth. The bridge across the open void, crossed nightly between the bedrooms, gives a small passage the weight of a crossing. These are in the plan and the section, and they are load-bearing. Held below the bar by scale and register: the figures are domestic and spare; the house stages the cave and the court but not a cosmos; and its archetype is a reduction to the essential rather than a mythic structure into which the particular life inside grows.
John Updike · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Some of the myth is built. The running animal is in the name and the title, and the flight is the American pattern of the man who lights out from the settlement for the open country, turned back on itself: Rabbit runs and returns and runs, and the open country is a suburb. An epigraph from Pascal, on grace, the hardness of the heart and outward circumstance, sets a theological frame that the action bears: Eccles’s pastoral care and Kruppenbach’s hard Lutheran law are two theories of grace, and Rabbit is the soul between them. The child’s death is a sacrifice no one intended. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the archetype is mostly evoked: Rabbit is too particular and too unreflective to bear the seeker’s pattern as structure, the theology is argued in dialogue more than enacted, and the American flight answers Kerouac’s road more than it rebuilds a myth.
Michael Haneke · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The deep patterns are present and partly built. The structure is Oedipal: a man investigates a threat whose cause is himself, and every step of the inquiry leads back to his own act. The core is Cain and Abel made domestic and colonial: two boys meant to be raised as brothers, one displacing the other by a lie about blood, a rooster sacrificed, a blood-mark in a child’s drawing. The anonymous sender works as the Furies do, a pursuit with no face. These are load-bearing. Held below the gate because the film keeps its world strictly secular and particular, and nothing in its images enlarges a Parisian house into the archetype as the water of Chinatown or the sewers of The Third Man do.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Some archetype is built. The library is the grove, its posts and beams a timber canopy, and the structure is the figure. The section is an ascent from darkness to light, from the basement studios up the stair to the top-lit museum and the glass corridor on the roof, which makes the school’s purpose a climb into light. The Scottish tower house is in the massing of the west and south, the castle on its rock abstracted into a school on its ridge. But much of this is evoked rather than built: the tower house is a memory in the massing, the plant and rose motifs of the iron and glass are ornament that alludes, and the governing idea is use, light and making, which are not archetypes in themselves. The deep pattern is present, not load-bearing throughout.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Built in one place, evoked in the rest. The built place is the descent: the earth-born girl lifted off the ground by the god of the dead, with the hound of the threshold already at his heel, so that the abduction happens at the boundary between the living and the underworld, and the group is composed on that boundary. Death seizing the maiden is among the oldest patterns there is, and here it is carried by structure, the upward struggle against the downward stride, not by allusion. The particulars stay particular: a girl’s tears, a hand, a crown. What is not built is the rest of the myth that gives it depth, the mother’s search, the pomegranate, the return and the seasons. One instant of a cycle is held, not the cycle.
Almohad builders, under Abd al-Mu'min and Yaqub al-Mansur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built, not alluded to, but they are inherited and not deepened. The minaret is the axis between earth and heaven and the voice set above the city: the call is given from it, and its height is the reach of the voice. The ramp makes the ascent a spiral round a still centre, though that path is the muezzin’s alone. In the hall the forest of columns, the turning of every row toward one point and the threshold from the bright court into shade are the deep patterns of the congregational mosque, and the T plan gives the axis its procession to the mihrab. All of it bears load. What holds it below the gate is that none of it is first built here: tower and oriented hall are received from the tradition of Damascus, Kairouan and Córdoba, and the particular does not transform them.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The gods are present throughout: Amor as guest, instructor and nuisance; the gods’ own quick and secret loves offered as precedent; Jupiter’s hall in the elegy of the north; the story of Midas at the close. Much of this is evoked, the learned furniture of Roman elegy, and allusion is not credited here. What is built is one thing: Rome itself made an erotic body, and the lover’s private union made the key to the classical world, so that the reading of ruins and the act of love become one rite. Faustine, the beloved, is a woman and a figure of the ancient city at once. That conjunction is load-bearing, but it is a single construction, and the archetype of the northern pilgrim made whole by the south is stated more than enacted. It bears in the frame and in a few elegies, not in every poem.
Michael Jackson · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked, often well, and comes close to built in one place. Thriller summons the horror film’s monsters, the night and the grave, as costume: the archetype is played, not inhabited, and Vincent Price’s passage confirms the play. Beat It evokes the street fight and the gang. Billie Jean is where the pattern nearly bears weight: the dangerous woman and the accused man, an old pairing, carry the song’s tension, its particulars, a dance floor, a child and a claim, stay particular, and the singer, already a public figure, gives the denial a weight beyond the song. Held well below the bar because none of it is load-bearing across the record: no figure crosses the sequence, and there is no frame for the archetypes to hold up.
Konstantin Melnikov · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built, not alluded to. The tower, the round dwelling and the hive, the hexagonal cell made the unit of the wall, are carried in plan and structure. Two circles that cut into each other are the plan of the house and, read archetypally, of a joined pair; the ascent from the shared sleep of the middle floor to the light of the studio is a ladder from the body to the work. The craftsman’s name over his own door makes the house his signature and his stronghold. What holds the axis below the gate: the meanings are personal and partly private, and the hive and the tower are evoked by the form as much as built into a larger order.
James Brown · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth is built in one pattern, and it bears weight: the revival. The record is laid out as a service. The herald announces the preacher by his titles, “Mr. Dynamite” among them; the congregation is roused; the preacher testifies in “Lost Someone” and is answered; in the medley he is spent, falls, and is raised again into the first song he ever had, so that “Please, Please, Please” is both plea and resurrection. The cape routine that made the collapse visible on stage is not on the record, but the medley carries its shape in sound. Around this, the pleading lover is an old figure, evoked more than built. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven: the particular of each song is thin, the pattern belongs to the show’s form more than to the songs, and the record depends on the listener supplying the stage.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Part of the myth is built. The book is a morality play in a modern city: an Everyman called Self, a tempter called Fielding Goodney who offers good money, a girlfriend called Selina who sells, and a good woman, Martina, who offers him books and is refused. The plot is a pact: Self signs for everything and is ruined by what he signed. Above it stands the author as a god of the book, a creator who appears to his creature, tells him in effect that he is made to suffer, and beats him at chess. Othello and Animal Farm are set in the action as texts Self is given and cannot read. Held below the gate because the allegorical names point more than they bear, the pact is a con rather than a damnation, and the figure of the author is as much a game played with the archetype as a structure that carries it.
Charles Garnier · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Three patterns are built into plan and section. The ascent: from the street through a low threshold to the stair, rising to the hall. The theatre within the theatre: the stair a stage on which the spectators play before the play. The stage as sanctuary: the highest volume, crowned by Apollo raising his lyre over the house, so that the axis runs from the city to the god of music. The reservoir under the stage became an underworld in Leroux’s novel of 1910, and that myth is credited to reach and presence, not here. The rest is evoked: the Muses, Harmony and Poetry, the Danse, the composers’ busts, allegory as ornament. Held below the gate because the archetype is largely the iconographer’s, and the myth built is a society’s self-display more than a deep pattern.
Pierre Peysson and Jean de Louvres, under Benedict XII and Clement VI · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The plan builds one archetype and the history evokes others. Built: the fortified cloister of the Palais Vieux, the court of contemplation armed against the world. The Palais Neuf builds a second, the court of the prince, its audience below and its chapel above, the sacred carried on the judicial; and the Indulgence window, where the pope appeared to bless the crowd, is a threshold built for epiphany. Evoked rather than built: the citadel on the rock, the rock of Peter carried from Rome to the Rhône, the Babylonian captivity that Petrarch named. What holds the score: these are strong particulars, but they do not compose into one archetypal structure as a temple or a cathedral does.
George Saunders · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The patterns are present and partly built. The rescue is the book’s recurrent shape, and in the title story it bears weight: a boy who has made himself a knight in an imagined war, rescuing an imagined girl, finds a real man to rescue, and the man who came to die is saved by being needed. The descent into icy water and the return are load-bearing there. “Escape from Spiderhead” builds a passion: a prisoner who takes the torment meant for another and dies of it, with an ascent after death. The Semplica Girls are a new image of persons made into ornament. But much of the myth is evoked rather than borne: the chivalry of “My Chivalric Fiasco” is a joke of diction more than a structure, and the persons are types of the American middle and working classes more than figures who bear a pattern.
The National · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Archetype is evoked in titles and built only in the shape of the whole, and the particulars are the record’s strength: a couple in an apartment, a man at a party, a woman whose ambition has slowed into a settled life, friends drifting apart. Fake Empire, a city at play while a war goes on elsewhere, gestures at a late empire’s banquet; Gospel names the sacred over a domestic tenderness. What bears load is shelter against the world outside, which the sequence carries from the public night of the opening through the turn home at the centre to the closed door of the close. What holds it below the eights is that no figure bears it: the boxer of the title, a figure of guarded endurance, is never sung.
Cindy Sherman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Built, but built from types more than from deep myth. The series constructs a typology of the feminine as the screen of the twentieth century made it, and the typology bears load: each still is a particular moment that reads at once as a type, and the series is the catalogue. That is myth in the sense of a culture’s own stock figures, constructed and not alluded to. The deeper patterns are evoked rather than built: the recurring mirror summons Narcissus and the divided self, the one body taking every shape summons Proteus and the mask, the woman alone on the road or the shore summons the wanderer and the abandoned heroine. Each image stays particular. Held below the gate because the archetypes built are those of one industry and one half-century.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The deep pattern most nearly built is the Civil War as the founding American lawsuit: brother against brother, and the family’s war passed down as a story that a son must own. The whole novel is a variation on substitution: the lawyer for the client, the damages for the wrong, the film for the play, the law for justice. That pattern is load-bearing. The father and the son, the ancient judge and the failed playwright seeking his acknowledgment, carry the old pattern of the son who cannot win the father’s word and is given a ruling instead. The rest is evoked: Job in the litigant’s cry, the dog in the steel as a small sacrifice. The myths are thought through more than embodied, and none rises to a structure the plot must obey.
Peter Behrens · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is the temple, and here it is largely built rather than evoked. The polygonal gable is the actual profile of the roof the arches carry, so the pediment is the structure seen end-on, not a mask applied; the stanchions of the long side form a true peristyle of steel; the plan is a single long cella entered from the gable end. The temple of labour is not an allusion carved in ornament but the section of the building, and a turbine works in Moabit acquires archetypal standing. What holds the axis at 7.9 is that the myth is the nineteenth century’s industrial-classical one, made explicit rather than deepened, and that the gable corners are dressing, the one part of the temple assumed rather than constructed.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Partly built, partly evoked. Built: the meal under the one light is a communion in its structure, five at a table, food given and received, the light hung over the centre and the dark figure in the middle place, while the particular stays particular: potatoes, coffee, a tin kettle, a cottage. Built too, and load-bearing, is the pattern of the earth and those who live from it, the hand that digs and the hand that eats, since everything is painted in the colour of what was dug. Evoked: the Supper and the Supper at Emmaus, summoned by the lamp and the gesture of offering rather than constructed. Held below the gate because the deeper pattern lives mostly in the light and the arrangement, not in the persons.
William Gibson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked richly and built in part. The Fall is built: Case’s exile from cyberspace is an expulsion from a paradise of the bodiless, and the book is his return and his choice between the paradise of the beach and the life of the meat. The name is necromancy, and the intelligence that keeps the dead on a beach is a lord of the underworld whose guest may not stay; Linda is a Eurydice not brought back. Two minds that seek to become one, and become a god in the matrix that looks for others of its kind, make a theogony. Held below the gate because the gothic house of Tessier-Ashpool is evoked rather than built, Zion is colour, the apotheosis comes in a few closing pages, and the noir frame of the burned man and the last job is convention worn as costume rather than archetype made to bear weight.
William Van Alen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
One archetype is built into the section: the tower that climbs to the sky, setback upon setback, a mountain or ziggurat stepped toward a single point, with the radiating arches of the crown as a sun. That ascent is structure, not ornament, and it stays particular: this corner, this year, this race. The rest is evoked: Gothic gargoyles transposed into steel eagles, the Egyptian lotus on the elevator doors, the sunburst of the Paris style of 1925. A myth of pride and fall has clung to the tower since it rose, but the fall was the Crash’s, not the building’s. The myth built most fully is the machine age’s own, the myth of a period more than an archetype, and the axis stands well below the gate.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present, and some are built. Built: the approach to the throne room, the long axis toward a sovereign who is not there, is the structure of the picture and of the building it records; and the sanctuary of a state cult becomes, in the burned surface, its own pyre. Evoked: the burning hall of the gods at the end of Wagner’s Ring, which Kiefer’s attic paintings of the 1970s had already summoned; the underworld; the ruin as memento mori. The particular stays particular: one room by a named architect, one photograph. What holds the axis is that the archetype is carried more by the subject than by the canvas: without knowing what the room was, the myth thins to an empty burned hall.
Lauryn Hill · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often and built fully in one place. To Zion builds an annunciation: a young woman, warned by the world, carries a child named for the holy city, and the song makes the particular birth into the old pattern of the chosen child and the mother who says yes. The frame of the whole sketches a second: the school and the miseducation, an initiation outside the classroom, the roll call the student does not answer, and the coda’s prayer as her answer. But the initiation is held by its frame more than built: it is carried by the spoken passages at the edges, not by the songs, and the passage through it is announced more than enacted. Around these, archetypes are summoned: Forgive Them Father takes words from the cross and turns them on friends; Final Hour is a judgment day; Lost Ones names the prodigal. The sacred is often rhetoric, not structure. One annunciation built is a real achievement; it does not make the archetypal load-bearing across the record.
John Ruskin · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The book builds one myth, paradise and its loss, and builds it in its first third. The walled garden of the Herne Hill childhood stands as an Eden, the Alps are seen as the walls of a lost one, and the arc of the whole runs from the garden through the expulsion of faith at Turin to an exile who comes back, at the close, to a Tuscan evening of innocent light. The child who names things by seeing them is the archetype of all Ruskin’s work, and he stays particular: a boy with a bunch of keys and a box of bricks. Held below the gate because past the first volume the myth is evoked more than load bearing; the second volume’s chronicle does not carry it, and the expulsion that would complete it, the marriage and the breakdown, is the part withheld.
Frank Ocean · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth is built once and evoked a few times. Pyramids builds: Cleopatra, a queen who is stolen and falls, becomes across the cut a dancer at the Pyramid club kept by the singer, the same woman in two ages, and the archetype of the fallen queen is load-bearing for ten minutes and stays particular, a car, a motel, a working night. Elsewhere it is evoked. Forrest Gump borrows an American figure of the innocent who runs, and the love song takes its shape from him; Bad Religion makes love a faith and a cab a confessional; Pink Matter reaches for creation and the mind as a cosmos. The other songs are character sketches whose people stay particular without becoming more. The myth is carried by one track, not by the record, and that holds the figure.
Max Ernst · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Archetypes are present and partly built. The title sets the whole in the frame of deluge and its aftermath, the land the waters have left, and of Europa herself. The bird-headed figure carries the painter’s own totem, Loplop, the artist as bird, into the ruin as an armoured survivor beside a woman: a primal couple on the far side of catastrophe. The petrified growth is his lifelong German forest turned to mineral, and the land itself, a body of decay, is a myth of the earth reclaiming the city. But the myths are more evoked than load-bearing. The deluge is carried by the title, the couple is small and ambiguous, and the structure would hold without them. Myth built in the terrain, evoked in the figures.
Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint; completed by Kaare Klint · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not hung on. The organ front makes the building an instrument: the church that houses Grundtvig’s hymns is figured as the thing that sounds them, and the figure is the whole west mass, not an ornament on it. Fused with it is a second, the stepped gable, threshold of the Danish parish, enlarged until the village church becomes the nation’s, the many made one. The Gothic section carries the old image of the church as forest or crystal mountain, by structure rather than imagery. Held below 8.0 because the figures are few, the strongest is read at a glance and adds nothing on return, and the hall behind the front builds no cosmos: no axis to a centre, no image of heaven, no ordered passage beyond the ordinary nave.
Mughal, under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Archetype built, not only evoked, in four places. The mountain: a natural rise made a platform, the congregation lifted above the city. The threshold: three stairways and three gates, the passage from market to sanctuary staged as ascent. The axis: the line from the fort’s gate to the mosque’s east gate and on to the mihrab, binding sovereign, people and Mecca in one direction. The court: an open, ordered world about water at its centre. These bear load in the plan, which lifts them above allusion. Held below the gate because they are the inherited archetypes of the congregational mosque and the Mughal axial plan, carried well and not deepened; the building makes no new myth of its type.
Rudolf Steiner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not hung on. The building is a body: brow and head at the west, the stair a cavern rising into the light, the hall a heart, the stage the place where dramas of initiation are played. Goethe’s idea of metamorphosis, the plant as one form transforming through leaf, flower and seed, is the governing law of the forms, and it bears load in the west front and the stair halls. Threshold, ascent and the temple of the mysteries are present in plan and section. What holds the axis is that the archetype is a private one made public: its full construction is felt only through Steiner’s cosmology, and the first building, with its two domes, carried the cosmic figure more plainly than the second, which keeps the organism and loses the sky.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetype is built, not applied: the hill village, houses heaped on a slope, each roof the next one’s terrace, joined by stepped lanes. Safdie grew up in Haifa, and the Mediterranean hill town is the model he names; here the hill is made, so the settlement makes its own ground. The mountain stands in the section, and the cave in the box’s deep, closed rooms opening to the light at one end. The particular stays particular: this pier, this river, this fair. What holds the axis is depth. The village is quoted as form rather than as a community lived, with no square, no shrine and no market, and the deepest myth the building builds is its decade’s own: the house as a mass-produced object, the city as plug-in parts.
Honoré Daumier · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Partly built. The three ages on one bench, the infant at the breast, the old woman, the sleeping child, are the ages of life set side by side, and they are built into the composition, not alluded to: the whole picture is the bench. The nursing mother carries the old image of the Madonna and Child, and the old woman beside her an echo of Saint Anne; this is evoked, not claimed, and the particulars stay wholly particular, a basket, a shawl, a hard wooden seat. The journey as life’s passage is the deepest pattern, carried by the railway with no symbol added. Held below the gate because the archetype is a resonance of the composition rather than its load-bearing structure, and viewers bring the Holy Family more than the canvas builds it.
Thomas Bohier and Catherine Briçonnet; gallery by Philibert de l'Orme and Jean Bullant · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built, within limits. They are the house on the water and the bridge as threshold between two banks, two realms, and both carry load: the house stands in the river, and the gallery is a dwelling that is also a passage from shore to shore. History loaded that threshold with a meaning no builder planned when, from 1940 to 1942, the far door opened on the unoccupied zone, and the building took the role it was formed for, the crossing between two worlds; the credit is for the structure that made this possible. Held well below the gate because the archetype is carried by the gallery and the site, while the block is a fine house of its period with none of its own, and the rivalry of mistress and queen is legend attached to the fabric.
Frederick William Stevens · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetype is partly built, not only alluded to. The plan is a gate: an axis from the city through the forecourt to a domed centre, with a lion and a tiger at the threshold for the two powers that meet at the door. The station as cathedral, the dome as the crown of a journey, Progress as the god of the place: these are constructed into massing and axis, not pinned on. Held below the gate because the myth is a borrowed one, the railway as the new religion, which the century built in many places at once, and because the archetypal plan stops at the front: the passenger’s real threshold, from hall to train, is given no form.
Giuseppe Mengoni · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth is built into plan and section, not only alluded to. The plan is a cross with a domed crossing, the form of a church taken whole and laid on the ground beside the cathedral, so that the archetype of the sacred centre is transposed to a market and a nation. The transposition bears load: the octagon is where the visitor turns; the floor puts Savoy at the centre and the nation’s cities at the cardinal points; the lunettes set four continents above them, a centre of the world in mosaic and glass. The arch makes a threshold of victory the gate from the cathedral square. All of it stays particular, down to a bull worn by heels. What holds the axis: the myth is borrowed from the church and the triumph, assembled from them more than built anew, and worn as much as embodied.
Sidney Lumet · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The prophet is partly built. Woken in the night by a voice he cannot place, Beale goes out to speak what it tells him; the people take up his cry; a higher power converts him, in a boardroom made a chapel, to a corporate cosmology; and the powers that profited from him have him killed. That sequence bears weight. Diana is a Mephistophelean figure, a temptress who offers Max youth and cannot love. The particular stays particular: a soothsayer on a network set, the ratings books, a revolutionary hour with distribution rights. What holds it six tenths below the bar of the Epochal Gate: the archetypes are pointed at rather than inhabited, the prophet is a joke the film half believes, and the Faustian frame is spoken rather than built.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Two patterns are built and bear the plot’s weight. A man with nothing at his centre is given a name that belongs to no one and must live into it: he sleeps in Kaplan’s room, wears Kaplan’s suit and becomes, under the agency’s direction, the man it invented. And the passage from mother to wife is structural, from a man who answers to his mother to “Mrs. Thornhill” pulled up onto the upper berth. Much of the rest is evoked. He dies by a gun loaded with blanks and rises from a hospital bed; the son hangs over the abyss beneath the carved fathers; the woman who meets him on a train is named Eve. The film keeps all of it in a wink, and the national myth at Rushmore is used as a set more than questioned.
Ustad Ahmad Lahori (attributed), under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth built, not only evoked, in two places. The paradise garden is built into the terrace: the Stream of Paradise ran through the pavilions, over carved cascades and through marble basins, so that the water, the four-part Hayat Bakhsh garden and the couplet of the Diwan-i-Khas make the palace the garden of the blessed in plan, not in ornament. The throne as Solomon’s is built into the hall: its canopy is the end of the whole public axis, and the Orpheus panel above the emperor places the archetype at the point of greatest attention. The citadel at the head of its city is built into the relation of fort and Chandni Chowk. Held below because these are the shared myths of the Mughal palace, the Stream now runs dry in fragments, and the gardens that carried the paradise are largely lost.
Robert Venturi · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
One archetype is built into plan and section, not applied: the house as hearth. The chimney stands at the centre of the plan and rises through the centre of the gable, and the stair and the rooms are disposed round it and deformed by it. The front is the archetypal house as a child draws it, gable, door and chimney, built at full size and made the building’s whole face. Threshold is built too: the deep slot over the entry opens the face to admit the visitor, and the recess then turns him aside. The particular stays particular: one woman, one lot in Chestnut Hill, a son’s first house for his mother. What holds the axis below the gate is the eyebrow: the house knows it is citing the primal house and says so, so that the myth is load-bearing in the plan and held at arm’s length on the face.
Eddie Adams · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The particular is wholly particular: a named policeman, a named prisoner, a date, a street. And it acquires archetypal weight: the executioner and the victim, the extended arm of judgement without law, the bound man, the face of a man at the instant of his death. The pattern has a long line in painting, Goya’s The Third of May 1808 and Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, and the photograph meets it in structure: the armed man, the victim facing, the onlookers. But the structure is found, not built. The archetype is present because the event had that shape and the photographer was there, and no figure of sacrifice or redemption is constructed in the frame, as Goya constructs one. Myth evoked by the shape of the event; built only in the arm and the face.
Built for Vimal Shah and Vastupala and Tejapala · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Some archetype is built. The temple on the mountain, reached by ascent, stands in the long line of the Jain holy mountain, the tirtha. The sanctum is the still centre; the ring of cells is the Tirthankaras’ assembly round it; the dome is heaven, its goddesses and dancers ranged about the pendant. These figures are load-bearing in plan and in section, not hung on the walls. The particular stays particular: these donors, this mountain, these images. Held below because much is evoked rather than built: the gods and stories of the Hindu world in the same ceilings are inheritance, and the cosmic plan is the type’s, carried here to its finish rather than first constructed by this building.
U2 · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Archetype is evoked often and in places built. Beautiful Day carries the flood and the colours after it, the world seen as after a deluge. Walk On sets a pilgrim on the road, a prisoner whose freedom is inward, and gives the record its title as a litany of what the pilgrim sheds. Kite is the soul released on a string, the child let go and the parent dying. Peace on Earth sets the nativity’s promise against a town’s dead. Grace is a woman and a theological virtue at once, the one figure both particular and archetypal, and the end of a shape that runs from deluge through loss to grace. Held from the top: the listener assembles that shape from images, and no figure bears it across the sequence.
Joseph Maria Olbrich · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The archetype is built into the plan, not only applied: the temple. A closed block stands as pronaos before a lit cella, and the visitor crosses a single threshold, under the masks, from the street into the precinct of art. Over the threshold the sacred tree, the laurel of Apollo and of victory, is made the building’s crown, so that the grove, the oldest sanctuary, is set on a modern exhibition house. Ver sacrum, the Roman sacred spring in which the young are sent out to found a new city, is the society’s own myth and fits the building exactly. What holds the axis is that much of the deep pattern rides on ornament, owls, masks and garlands, and that the cella is a neutral room where the myth stops.
Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The archetypes are built into plan and section, not applied. The first is the agora or forum: the plaza as the open ground of a self-governing city, sloped like an amphitheatre, with the seat of government at its edge; the comparison with the Campo at Siena is the one most often made, and the falling ground earns it in part. The second is the citadel on its brick platform, its crown above the city. The third is the stoa, a long row of piers sheltering the edge of a square. The fourth is the building’s own: the ziggurat turned over, the bureaucracy broadest above and the citizen entering at the narrow foot. What holds the axis is that the forum was built and then not lived: the myth is legible as structure more than enacted as place.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The patterns are there and partly built. Johnny is the wanderer cast out and marked, a Cain who cannot settle; he is the street prophet of the apocalypse and the fallen intellectual; and the descent through the night city is a journey through an underworld whose shades each tell him a part of their lives. The structure carries it: a wandering out and a return that fails, ending with the wanderer going on, so the archetype bears load rather than standing as allusion. What holds the figure is that the film distrusts the myth it builds. Johnny’s talk of Revelation is shown as one more performance, and the realism keeps the archetype at arm’s length. Myth built and then doubted is honest, and it is not the top of the axis.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
One archetype is built, not alluded to: burial. The images of the dead lie beneath the paint as the dead lie beneath earth, and the painter’s act is the act of covering a body, the rite of Antigone made the structure of the work. Veil, palimpsest and grave are one structure seen three ways, and it bears the load: it is the whole making. The name adds the grove, the birch wood where one photograph shows women among the trees. What holds the axis is that the particular does not remain particular. It is abolished by design: the bodies, the smoke and the women survive only in the title and the record of the making, so that the archetype stands over an absence. The work chooses that cost.
Cy Twombly · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Here myth is built, not only summoned. The cycle is the Iliad’s structure: two hosts facing, named heroes listed on each side, the shield of Achilles, which in Homer holds the whole world, as emblem of the whole, then the wrath, the death of Patroclus, the burning, and the shades of three men held together at the end. The archetypes of the hero’s wrath, the friend’s death, and enemy and victor made equal in death are load-bearing in the arrangement. What holds the axis is that the particular is thin. The archetype is carried by titles and written names rather than acquired by a painted particular, and a viewer without the titles would see red, scribble and white ground.
Sedefkâr Mehmed Agha · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The archetypes are built, not merely alluded to, but they are the type’s rather than this mosque’s. The dome over the hall is the vault of heaven over the gathered community; the forecourt with its fountain is the place of purification before the threshold; the axis runs from the Hippodrome gate through the court to the mihrab and on toward Mecca. The tiles carry the garden of paradise onto the walls, tulip and cypress repeated by the thousand. The most particular act is the siting: a mosque set face to face with Hagia Sophia, the new house of prayer answering the old on its own ceremonial ground. That confrontation is load-bearing and it is this building’s. The rest is an inherited cosmos, executed with conviction.
Erich Mendelsohn · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
One archetype is built, not evoked, and it is the building’s own: the tower that catches the light of heaven and carries it down into the earth to be read. The coelostat under the dome, the shaft through the body, the dark laboratory below ground: that is the section, and it is the observatory as a descent of light, the oracle’s cave under the watchtower. It stays particular: this sun, this measurement, this hill. The rest is allusion and is not credited: the tower as a creature, a ship’s prow, a submarine’s tower, an eye, the organic form as life itself. The myth most fully built is a period’s, the myth of Einstein and of a science that would remake the world, and a period’s myth is not an archetype. The axis stands well below the gate.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The title states a plan, and the staging carries part of it. Heaven and hell are given as geography: the house on the hill, cool and seen from everywhere, and the room below in the summer heat, from which a man looks up at it every day. The descent is literal, from the house to the city and from the city to the drug quarter, a place of shades. The two children exchange costumes and so fates, the prince and the pauper turned on chance, and the last scene is the meeting with the double, Gondo’s reflection laid over Takeuchi’s face in the glass. The particular stays particular: shoes, a cheque, an 8mm camera on a train, a tram’s rattle on a tape. What holds the figure: the archetype is carried by the title and the structure more than worked into the consciousness of either man, and much of the myth is laid out as a map rather than lived from inside it.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The myth is built more than cited. Agnes, who bears the name of the lamb and the virgin martyr, suffers a passion in her bed; the pastor’s prayer makes her an intercessor, so that her death is framed as a sacrifice whose benefit the living claim; her return in the night asks the living for love and is refused twice, and the refusals are the judgment. Anna’s lap is the Pietà, composed and held, with the servant in the Virgin’s place. The particular stays particular: a diary, an apple, a dress, a wine glass. What holds it here: the film’s own silence about God puts the Christian frame in doubt, the return may be Anna’s dream, and the older patterns, three sisters in a house ruled by clocks, the fates and the women who watch at a deathbed, are an undertone rather than a structure.
Nam June Paik · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Two archetypes are present, and one is built. Narcissus at the pool is not alluded to but constructed: the figure, the reflecting surface and the gaze that does not leave it are the whole work, the pool replaced by a cathode ray tube. The Buddha, the figure of enlightened attention, is the second, and it is load-bearing: the posture makes the gaze contemplative rather than vain, and so the two myths quarrel inside one object, vanity or insight, self-regard or seeing through the self. That double construction from three things is real achievement. What holds it short of the gate is scale: the myth is built as one emblem, does not grow into a world, and depends on the viewer bringing both stories to it.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The myth is built as a frame and evoked within it. The Odyssey, named on an opening card, gives the bones: a hero called Ulysses who wants home, Penny with a suitor, a blind seer, a one-eyed giant, sirens, a man seemingly turned to an animal, and a homecoming that needs the wife won back. These bear load for the plot’s shape. Beneath them the film builds an older American myth more seriously: the crossroads where a man sells his soul to the devil, the devil himself as a sheriff in mirrored glasses with a hound, the flood that baptises and destroys. The particular stays particular, down to a hairnet and a tin of pomade. Held below the gate because much of the Homer is allusion played for wit, the giant a Bible salesman and the transformation a toad; the devil and the flood carry more than Ulysses does.
James Cameron · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The archetypal structure is built, not alluded to. Ripley’s descent alone into the lowest level of the processor, through fire and steam, to bring back a child taken into the earth, is the underworld journey of the rescuing mother, and the film stages it so: the clock above, the drop below, the child cocooned among the dead. At the floor she meets her opposite, another mother guarding her brood, and the two face each other across the eggs in a silent pact that Ripley breaks with fire. The duel is fought again on the Sulaco, machine body against creature body. The figure is held by the frame’s clarity: good mother and bad mother, soldier father and made uncle are drawn so plainly that the myth reads as a diagram.
Antony Gormley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The angel is among the oldest figures Western art has: the messenger, the guardian at a threshold, the being between earth and sky. Here it is partly built into the object. The guardian at the gate stands literally at the entrance to a region. The span held out gives the cruciform figure, the body offered. The wings are an aircraft’s, not a bird’s, so that the angel is also a made machine, the archetype of flight rebuilt in industrial terms. The particular survives: one man’s body, cast from life, in one place. What holds it below the gate: the archetype is invoked more as name and silhouette than worked through the form. The figure has no gesture beyond its stance, and much of the myth lies in the title and the site.
Fariborz Sahba · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The lotus is among the deepest archetypes of the region: the flower rising clean from mud and water, the seat of the divine, the opening of the self. Here it is in part built. The petals are the shells that carry and enclose the building, the pools are the water from which they rise, and the visitor walks into the flower and stands inside the bud, under the light at its tip, so that the image is a place and not only a silhouette. The nine-fold centre, entered from all sides, builds a second archetype, the gathering round an empty middle. What holds the axis is that the lotus is a figure taken whole and literal, read first as a picture from outside, and the inner sequence of pool, threshold, hall and light is short. Myth built as image more than as rite.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Myth is everywhere evoked and in two places built. The frame is apocalyptic and biblical: the flood and the ocean, the Antichrist, the church, the mirror of vanity, the well and the lighthouse, a deluge of images in which the end is always about to come. Most of this is atmosphere. (Antichrist Television Blues) builds: a father offering his child to the screen is the sacrifice of Isaac turned to commerce, and the figure bears load because the father is particular, in his job, his reasoning and his prayer, and the archetype is the song’s structure rather than its decoration. My Body Is a Cage builds the old figure of the soul imprisoned in flesh, particular in its love and its want, and resolves it in a plea to be set free. No Cars Go evokes a promised land. Built in two songs, allusive in the rest.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The myth is built. The title names it and the plot carries it: a man taken for dead, buried by his companions, rising out of the earth, reborn naked from the body of a horse, returning to judge. The grave, the crawl out, the horse and the return are the hinges on which the story turns, not ornaments laid on it, and the revenant’s two births give the film its shape. Held below the gate by what is laid over that structure: the ruined church with its fading mural and its bell, the tree that holds against the wind, the wife floating above the ground, all allusive rather than load-bearing; and the avenger’s pattern, summoned throughout, is set down at the river without a form in which the setting down becomes myth in its turn.
Paul Klee · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The angel is among the deepest figures the West owns: messenger, guardian, destroyer, annunciator. Here it is partly built, not merely evoked. A clumsy creature with paper curls, rolling eyes and claws is made to carry the archetype rather than illustrate it: the messenger estranged and unable to deliver, the sacred become fragile and awkward. The Latin title makes the claim, the new angel, and the Jewish tradition of new angels created each moment to sing and pass into nothing fits the image without being shown in it. The sheet holds the archetype in one static figure without narrative, and so builds less than a work that sets the myth in action. The angel made strange is load-bearing, not decoration.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The Greek psyche is both the soul and the butterfly, and the work is built on that identity whether or not it names it: metamorphosis from pupa to wing, the soul’s brief flight, the fixed specimen as the soul held after death. The structure bears the load: two rooms, one of life and one of death, one of flight and one of fixity. The particular stays particular: these insects, this paint, these weeks. What holds the axis: the archetype is the most familiar emblem of mortality in European still life, and the work builds it plainly rather than deepening it; and the love of the title opens a mythic register, with Eros and Psyche close by, that the rooms do not construct. Built, but shallow-built.
Chinese builders (Northern Wei foundation, Ming and Qing rebuilding) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Myth is built here, in part. The archetype is the dwelling of the hermit or the immortal between heaven and earth, the house suspended in emptiness, where the sacred is reached only by leaving the ground. The building does not allude to this; it is this, since the halls do hang and the visitor does cross the void on planks. The name joins two doctrines, the Daoist mysterious and the Buddhist emptiness, and the plan makes an ascent that ends where the three teachings meet, on the Northern Peak of the five. Held below the gate because the myth is one image, strongly built and not developed: no cosmological plan, no axis beyond the climb, and the halls standard shrines.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The myth is built and load-bearing: the holy fool, the innocent whom the world robs again and again and who is not made wise by it, carried through stations. The opening is a drowning and a revival, a mock baptism from which she wakes cursing; the pilgrimage is the formal plea for grace, refused; the stage is a confession made in public; the cliff over water returns her to the opening, and the road is a resurrection without a miracle. Her name is borrowed, ironically and exactly, from the heroine of the silent epic Cabiria (1914). Held below the gate because the pattern is one pattern, repeated rather than deepened, and much of the archetype is carried by Masina’s mime, a Chaplin figure, as much as by the structure.
Martin McDonagh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Here the film builds, up to a point. The banshee, the woman of Irish lore whose cry foretells a death, is made a person of the island, Mrs McCormick, and her foretelling is fulfilled in the action; the title makes her figure and Colm’s fiddle tune one sign. The quarrel of two men who were as brothers carries the pattern of Cain and the shape of the civil war set beside it, and Jenny, the innocent beast who dies of the men’s violence, is the victim the feud requires. Held below the gate because the civil war is said across the water by gunfire and bears no weight: myth built in part, evoked in part.
Paul Abadie · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The archetype is built into the site more than the plan. The holy mountain over the city, the mount of martyrs, the city on a hill that cannot be hid: these bear load, for the building’s meaning depends on standing where it stands and being seen. The expiatory temple, the shrine of a vow made in disaster, is an old and real pattern, and the Heart named in the dedication is set in the apse at the axis of the church. The particular stays particular: this defeat, this hill, this Commune. Held below the gate because the domed church after Saint-Front and St Mark’s inherits its cosmos rather than building one, and the mountain is the hill’s archetype, which the church claims and crowns but did not make.
Stuart Rosenberg · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The myth is built and bears weight. Luke is the Christ of a gang of men: he takes on a suffering the others watch, lies cruciform on the table after the eggs, has a Peter in Dragline who fights him, follows him and hands him over, prays in an empty church before his taking, is killed, and lives on in the gospel of a follower who tells it to the faithful on the road. The crossroads at the end makes the figure explicit. Beside it runs the trickster and the stoic, the man whose one weapon is refusal. The particulars stay particular: a boiled egg, a banjo, a snapping turtle shot from the water. What holds the figure is signposting: the pattern is pressed on the viewer by pose and composition rather than discovered beneath the story.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Here the film builds rather than evokes. The retainer and the lord, the ronin whose master has failed him, the death embraced in advance, the messenger birds, the last of a tribe: the archetype of the loyal servant is the structure that bears the plot, since every turn follows from the obligation Ghost Dog has taken on. The film doubles it. The mobsters too are an old tribe dying out, and the two orders of fealty mirror each other, so the myth is the engine of a gangster film, not its ornament. At the end the book goes on in other hands, Pearline’s among them, and the myth is shown as transmission: a code lives only as long as someone reads it. Held below the top because the archetype is assembled partly by citation, from Melville, from Suzuki and from the Hagakure on screen, so that construction and allusion are entwined.
Michel de Montaigne · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Myth is mostly evoked here, and the book is half against it. What is built is one figure: the self examined, the Delphic “know thyself” turned from an oracle into a method, so that a man with the stone, a cat and a bad memory becomes the type of the examining mind. That figure is load-bearing, and the claim of III.2 that one particular life holds the whole condition is the archetypal claim made into a structure. The rest evokes. The cannibals of I.31 became a founding myth of the West, the natural man against the corrupt city, but in the essay they are an argument, not a myth enacted. Socrates in III.12 is an exemplar, cited and weighed. A book of judgment does not build archetypal structure, and the score records what it does build.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked in the figures and built once in the structure. Alex is drawn as a fallen angel at ease in his fall: the Bible fantasies in which he is a Roman scourging Christ and a patriarch among concubines, the snake kept in his drawer, the bust of Beethoven, the false eyelash and the bowler. The built pattern is retribution. The second half returns him to each victim in the order of the first, and each does to him what he did, so that the old law of the wrong returned on its doer bears the plot. Held there because the rest is Burgess’s parable, a thesis with a demonstration: the victims carry no archetypal weight, and the state is a Minister.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Myth evoked, with one relation built. Evoked: the studio as the artist’s cosmos, the room where a world is made, an archetype as old as the painter in his workshop; the clock without hands, the timeless place outside the order of hours; Le Luxe II on the wall, a Golden Age of nudes by the sea, and the other nudes as the Arcadia the painter keeps around him. Built: the maker absent from the centre and present only in what he made, a creator known by his creation. That relation carries the structure and is the axis’s strongest claim. What holds it well below the gate is that the archetype is a painter’s own condition, particular to a profession, and the mythic content of the depicted works is quoted at a small size rather than built into the picture.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present: the enclosed garden, a paradise of water and flowers; the mirror, in which the world is seen inverted and the heavens below; the course of a day from morning to sunset, painted by a man in his late seventies and eighties whose sight was failing. The plan of two ovals joined is often read as the sign of infinity, though whether that was meant cannot be shown. Some of this is built. The day’s course bears the first room, from Matin to Soleil couchant, and the mirror is the structure of every wall. But the particular stays wholly particular, one pond, these lilies, these willows, and the paradise and the life’s evening are brought to it by its readers. Myth evoked by a structure, not built into one.
Samuel Johnson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One of the two lowest of the twelve. A book of judgment does not build myth, and Johnson distrusts it: he deflates the legends round Milton, Pope and Swift and prefers the fact to the figure. The archetypal weight it carries comes two ways. The Savage makes the outcast genius, the poet who is his own worst enemy, destroyed by pride, poverty and grievance, into a figure the culture kept. And the run from Cowley to Lyttelton tells a story of English poetry refined from extravagance to correctness, through Waller and Denham to Dryden and then Pope, a myth of progress later critics fought for a century. What holds the axis is that this second structure is a myth of literary history, not of the human condition, and the particular lives are not lifted into figure.
David Bowie · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked through places and figures, and built in one frame: exile and rebirth. The record passes from a self in ruin through A New Career in a New Town, the passage named in its title, into a foreign city in the east of Europe, where it can no longer speak the language. Side one’s crash that repeats is an old figure of eternal return; Weeping Wall’s title joins Jerusalem’s wall to Berlin’s; Warszawa makes a city into a rite. The particular stays particular: a car, a room, a wife wanted. What holds the axis well below the bar is that the frame is carried by the sequence and the titles, not by a figure: no person bears the exile, and the divided city is atmosphere more than structure.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The titles lay down a biblical frame, and the sequence partly bears it: a covenant sign after the flood, then the garden, then desire, then what is passed down, then faith, then wealth surrendered. That is the old pattern of fall and redemption, set as a sequence of states rather than a story. Side one moves from the rainbow’s promise through the garden to the fall into appetite, and side two from inheritance to the plea of faith and the hymn of surrender. What holds the figure low is that no figure bears it. There are no persons and almost no images that can be heard clearly; the myth lives in titles, order and sound, evoked with conviction and partly built, never carried by a figure.
Miles Davis · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is strongly evoked and only partly built. The titles do the evoking: a pharaoh’s dance, a witch’s brew, a sorcerer of voodoo, a sanctuary at the end. Mati Klarwein’s painting on the sleeve joins them, an African man and woman, a sea, a storm, fire and the hands of a rite. The pattern built is conjuring: the band as a cauldron, elements added one by one until they boil, a spell worked by repetition, then the sanctuary where the brew is quieted. That frame bears load in the sound, from processional to ritual groove to rest. What holds it is the particular: no figure, no person, no place, and the music would serve another myth as well. Level with Low, under the 8.2 of Remain in Light, which has at least a voice to possess.
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with Gianfranco Franchini · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Archetype is built, but of a period more than of the deep. Three figures stand in plan and section. The agora: the square, raked toward the building, the public gathered at the foot of the house of culture. The ascent: the climb on the face of the building from the crowded square to a summit over the whole city, a mountain made of a machine. And the body opened, its organs outside the skin. The square and the climb are load-bearing; they are the building’s use. What holds the axis is depth. The myth built most fully is the machine’s, the factory and the refinery as the image of culture’s democracy, a myth of the 1960s and 1970s; the opened body is an image, not an order; and the house of culture is given no deeper figure than an open, serviced warehouse.
Utagawa Hiroshige · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The meisho tradition is itself a store of association: places named in poetry, and plum, cherry, maple and snow, each with centuries of verse behind it. The series evokes that store on almost every sheet. Built myth is rarer. The year is built, since the season order makes the run a calendar of the city, and at its winter end the foxes gather at the tree at Ōji on New Year’s Eve before going to the Inari shrine, a legend shown as fact in the dark. The eagle over the plain reads as more than a bird, and Fuji recurs at the edges as the city’s fixed sacred point. But the archetypal is mostly a seasonal and poetic atmosphere carried by allusion, rarely lifted to the archetype by structure.
Hasegawa Tōhaku · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The pine is one of the deepest images in East Asian culture: the evergreen through winter, emblem of longevity and constancy, in Japan the tree in which a god may descend, the tree painted on the back wall of every Noh stage. The mist is the threshold between the seen and the unseen; the snow-capped peak is the mountain as the abode of what does not die. All of this is present to anyone who knows the tradition, and none of it is built. The screens carry no programme: no sacred figure, no narrative, no named place, no arrangement of pines that encodes the archetype. They are particular pines in particular weather, and the archetype is what the viewer brings. The restraint is part of their force; myth summoned by a motif still stands below myth that bears weight.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetypes are partly built. The descent is in the section: from the street a low closed threshold, then down to the open room and on down to the garden, a passage from enclosure to the open land. The onyx stands where a hearth would, the stone at the centre of the household, and the half-circle of ebony makes the family meal a closed ring within the open room. The pavilion in a garden under a single roof is the oldest of villa types. What holds the axis below the rest is that these are evoked more than load-bearing: the hearth is a screen with no fire, the ring is a furnishing, and the deepest pattern the house builds is the period’s myth of transparency and the free individual, a modern ideal more than an archetype. The particular stays particular: this family, this hill, this view of Brno.
Television · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often and built hardly at all, and the evocation is consistent. The titles and images summon old figures: Venus met as the armless statue (“Venus de Milo”); the moon over a marquee, the night city’s own light; a car leaving a graveyard in the title song, death and return glimpsed as a scene; Torn Curtain, the title of a film that also carries the rent veil of the temple; the detective of Prove It, the investigator of the city at night. Beneath them runs one pattern, the night journey toward a revelation that never quite arrives, and the title track enacts it in sound, climbing, breaking and coming back. Held well below the bar because the figures are glimpsed, not carried: no person bears the pattern, nothing would fall if it were taken away, and the particular is withheld as much as the archetype.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Built in one place, evoked elsewhere. The built place is the bench of judgment: men seated behind a table with a book, the one who comes before them, and the moment when the judges look up. That structure is the composition, and it is old; the tribunal and the reckoning are carried by the format, not by allusion, and the viewer is set in the place of the one called to account. Around it the elders, the council and the steward of measure are only summoned. The particulars stay particular: these men, this carpet, these hats in this year. The pattern is civic, and the picture never turns its judges toward anything greater than cloth and conscience: it does not reach the sovereign, the sacred or the tragic.
Robert Maillart · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The bridge over the abyss is among the oldest archetypes, and here it is built, not alluded to: the crossing is literal, and the threshold between two rock faces is structural. The arch, the oldest long-span form, is carried into a material and a hinge that strip it of keystone and voussoir, and the archetype survives the stripping. That is to the bridge’s credit. What holds the axis below the bar, and lowest but one, is that the archetype is largely what any high single arch over a gorge carries. The particular structure, hinges, box and sickle profile, refines the engineering and does not deepen the myth. There is no cosmic plan, no axis of the sacred, no orientation and no narrative of entering: myth present and load-bearing, but thin in construction.
Roman · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present as structure. The bridge is the arch in its plainest and most legible form, the figure of the crossing, and it carries a river over a river, water made to run above water, order set over nature in one section. The particular stays particular: this gorge, this stone, the water of one spring for one city. But the builders made a conduit, not a cosmos or a threshold: no axis leads to anything, and no part stands for another order. The significance most visitors find in it, Rome itself and the enduring empire, is lent by history and by survival, not built by the makers. That is myth evoked, which scores well and stops below the gate.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The flag is the nearest thing a modern republic has to a totem: the banner carried before the tribe, the cloth for which people die. Here that archetype is not alluded to; the whole structure is the emblem itself, load-bearing from edge to edge. But the painting holds it at arm’s length rather than deepening it. The banner is drained of heat, its stars made into wax bosses, its cloth replaced by board; what is treated is the emblem as a sign, not as a sacred thing. The particular does acquire significance: this forty-eight-star flag, these scraps of newsprint, the nation as a surface laid over its daily news. What holds the axis below the gate is that the deep pattern is present by quotation of the whole design, not reconstructed: the subject is the emblem’s meaning, not the myth the emblem carries.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Mostly evoked, and built in one place. The built place is the feast itself: a wedding in a barn of harvested grain, the bride enthroned under a crown before a cloth of honour, the community brought to her table. It is the oldest rite of a people that lives by the harvest, marriage and the year’s bread made one occasion, and the composition carries it: the grain wall, the bride and the bowls are one axis of meaning. The Marriage at Cana, a wedding feast at which provision is the question, is there for anyone who knows the tradition, but it is summoned, not constructed. The particulars stay obstinately particular: a spoon in a hat, a child licking a plate. Held below the gate because the picture keeps the archetype at the level of custom.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Built in one place, evoked elsewhere. The built place is the dynasty as a body: three generations stood in one line, the old aunt, the reigning pair, the heir and the children, the infant held up at the right, so that succession is the structure of the composition, and the bride without a face at the heir’s side is its future, the next queen as a blank. The queen at the centre with a child at each hand summons the holy family and the mother of a house, and the picture turns the pattern without stating it: she, not the king, is the centre. The painter at the edge quotes the artist before his sovereign that Las Meninas built. Beyond the succession these are summoned, not load-bearing, and the particulars hold: a mole, a red suit, a lock of hair.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The painter came to the pour from the mythic painting of the early 1940s, the totems, the guardians, Pasiphaë, and the poles bring that world back veiled: eight standing presences in a row, leaning, read by many as totems, masts or dancers. That is evoked, not built. The canvas never makes them figures, and the reading is brought by the viewer and by the painter’s history. What is built is one structure: the primordial field and the measure set upon it, chaos and the act of ordering it, the oldest of cosmogonic patterns, and load-bearing here, since the painting is that relation. It lifts the canvas above the classic field, Autumn Rhythm at 7.4, which veils everything. The ritual element, the painter in the painting as the sand painter is in his, is method, not image. Built in one relation; evoked in the rest.
Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into the form, not applied. The truncated obelisk, the tower that narrows as it climbs and so reads as rooted and enduring rather than as a box stood on end; the diagonals, which add the figure of a thing laced and bound against the elements, a frame like a rigged mast or a trussed bridge stood upright; and the household above work above the street, a whole town in one shaft. All of it is legible, and all of it is the structure. But the archetypal content is thin beside the temple, the dome or the cathedral. The plan takes in no threshold, no centre and no sacred interior; there is no point where the whole is gathered and met. Myth evoked by form, and partly built.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Two archetypes are built, not alluded to. The building is a gate: one passes under it as under an arch, and the passage is a public way. And the ascent from the dark street through a glass ceiling into a hall of light is a threshold built into the section. The rest is resonance: the frame read as a bridge stood on end, the hung zones as a ladder or a stack of villages, and the lions and the angle of the escalators, by report set to an older Chinese order of sites and flows. What holds the axis: these are evoked more than built, and the governing image is the machine, a modern figure rather than a deep one. The gate and the ascent bear load; the temple as cosmos is far off.
Robert Smythson (attributed), for Bess of Hardwick · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
One archetype is built into section and plan: the ascent, the climb from the common floor to the presence, carried by a stair that is the house’s spine and by ceilings that rise as one goes up. The tower is built too: six of them, the castle made into a lantern, the keep turned to glass. These are load-bearing, not quoted. The rest is applied: Diana and the hunt in the High Great Chamber’s frieze, a compliment to the Queen in plaster; the classical orders of the loggias; the heraldry and the initials. What holds the axis is that the myth the house builds most fully is of its moment and its maker, the self-made sovereign in her house of light, and it stays particular. No figure of the cosmos governs the plan as the circle in the square governs the Villa Rotonda’s.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Mostly evoked, built in one place. The built place is the figure: a woman pouring, the ancient image of nourishment and of service, given the mass and calm of a votive figure, and the stream that joins jug to bowl, a figure of continuity and of time held still. That structure carries the picture, and the particulars stay particular: a broken pane, a basket, bread on a cloth. The rest is summoned rather than built: the kitchen-maid tradition with its proverbs and its erotic doubles, and the long Netherlandish line of kitchen scenes that set Martha’s household against Mary’s devotion. These lend resonance, and none bears weight. With Pressure on Tradition, this is the lowest of the eleven axes the minimum governs.
Steely Dan · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is built once and evoked elsewhere. Home at Last builds the Odyssey as its frame: the speaker is Ulysses “tied to the mast”, the sirens and their shore are a woman and a life on offer, and the homecoming is a withdrawal from them. The archetype bears the song’s weight, and the particular stays particular. Deacon Blues builds a modern figure close to myth, the self-made outlaw who chooses defeat and wants a name for it as the culture names its winners. Aja evokes the refuge in the East; Josie the wild girl’s return to her neighbourhood, half festival and half threat; Peg the woman who exists as an image. What holds the axis well below the rest is that these are summoned by a sentence or a title, inside an irony that keeps them from bearing weight.
Oscar Wilde · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The play is built on the oldest plot of comedy: the foundling of New Comedy, lost in infancy, raised under another name, recognised by a token and restored to his family and his true name in time to marry. Menander, Plautus and Tom Jones stand behind it, and the pattern bears load, since the resolution depends on it: the Army Lists give the General’s name as Ernest John. The myth of the name as fate is built in too: both women love only the name Ernest, and the plot compels it to be true. Held below the bar because the archetype is built in order to be parodied: the recognition is rigged, the token is luggage, and Lady Bracknell is the gorgon mother as a type. Built, and built hollow on purpose.
Michelozzo · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Archetype is built, in two figures. The first is the ascent from nature to art: the wall begins as rough rock at the street and rises through dressed stone to smooth ashlar, so that the house is quarried and refined before the eye, earth below and order above. The second is the fortress opened at its heart: a closed, defensible outside round a court open to the sky, castle and Roman house at once. Both are load-bearing. Held well below the summit’s bar because these are the type’s archetypes more than this building’s, and they do not deepen toward the sacred or the cosmic; the chapel’s Magi are the painting’s myth.
H. H. Richardson · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is built at one point: the sanctuary as a centre under a mountain, the cross gathering to a crossing over which the tower rises, the heavy masonry setting the church on its rock in a district that was water a generation before. A church of rock on reclaimed sea, held up by timber kept wet beneath it, is a figure the building enacts rather than alludes to. Elsewhere the deep patterns are borrowed as style: the tower of Salamanca, the banded colour of the Auvergne, the portal of Arles, chosen as the look of an older and sturdier Christianity. The cross is the inherited plan, not a new ordering of the world, and there is no sequence of threshold, orientation or light. Built at the centre, evoked at the edges.
Aleijadinho · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present and partly built. The threshold is made the place of transformation: above the door Francis receives the wounds of Christ from the seraph, so that to enter is to pass under the figure of a man conformed to Christ, the vocation of a Third Order of lay penitents. The axis runs from that sign at the door to the altar, and the ceiling opens the nave to heaven. These carry weight in the front more than in the plan. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven is that the plan is the inherited longitudinal type of Portuguese parish building, carrying its pattern by convention, and the painted heaven is evoked by illusion rather than built in the structure.
Frank Sinatra · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is old and is evoked well: the lover awake while the world sleeps, the watch of the abandoned through the night, a figure as old as Sappho’s moon setting at midnight. The title song names the hour, the cover fixes the figure under a lamp, and “Ill Wind” and “Mood Indigo” turn weather and colour into fate. The particular stays particular: a voice, a room, a street. But the figure is built by the frame, the title, the cover and the one mood, more than by the music’s structure; there is no passage through the night, no dawn, and no figure but the singer. “Dancing on the Ceiling”, a memory of joy as a ghost in the room, comes nearest to a built figure. Myth evoked, and well.
Antonín Dvořák · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
An archetype is present and bears some weight: the journey to a new world, and the exile’s look back toward home. The horn theme of the first movement, heard in every movement after it, is the figure of a traveller carrying one self through changing country, and the finale ends by forcing that theme into combat with the new. The Largo, framed by its chorale, is a funeral and a homecoming at once. But the myth is mostly evoked. The link to Longfellow’s Hiawatha rests on the composer’s reported statements, not on the score, and the homecoming the world hears in the Largo was fixed by a later song. The particular is vivid, but it does not by the work’s own means reach the scale of the elder myths.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth is built in one place and evoked elsewhere. The built part is creation reversed: at Auschwitz the backward world makes the Nazi project into a Genesis, a people made out of fire and smoke and returned to life, so that the regime’s own myth of creating a race through destruction becomes, for a chapter, the novel’s plot. The soul bound to a body, a spirit that witnesses the deeds of a man and cannot alter them, is an old pattern, and it governs the narration from the first page: the soul goes back with the body toward its origin, where the offence waits as the Fall waits at the start of the story. Held well below the gate because the man is not a figure who bears archetypal weight, the American chapters are realist comedy with no myth in them, and the soul and the body are a device more than a structure the book explores.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The concentric circle is among the oldest of signs: the centre, the eye, the sun, the wheel, and in this century the roundel and the range. The faces bring the mask, the death mask and the chorus. Something of this is built. The structure sets the eyeless faces above the eye of the target, so that the work’s one vertical relation runs between those who cannot see and the mark that exists only to be seen and aimed at: an argument of sight and blindness made by placement, not allusion. But the target was chosen as a sign emptied of depth, a thing the mind already knows, and the casts are anonymous by design. The deeper patterns come from the viewer, and the particular stays particular, a common sign and four casts. Myth built in one relation, evoked in the rest.
Tang builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is built into plan and structure, not alluded to: the palace of the Buddha, the hall of rank as the house of the heavenly court. The inner trough is a hall within the hall, the holy place nested inside the house, and the terrace raises it as the high place at the end of the way. The setting gives the climb its meaning: the Wutai mountains are, in Buddhist tradition, the abode of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī. Ascent, nested sanctuary and palace form bear load in the plan. What holds the axis below eight: the archetype is received whole from the type of the Tang hall and the palace, not made anew, and the hall’s figure of the Buddha land is carried by the sculpture, which the unit does not score.
Walter Pater · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The book builds one myth and evokes several. Built: La Gioconda as the figure in whom all the ages are summed, Leda and Saint Anne, the lust of Rome and the mysticism of the middle age gathered on one head; the femme fatale and the eternal feminine made a single image so strongly that it passed into the culture as Pater’s rather than Leonardo’s. Built also, across the whole: the Renaissance as the return of the pagan gods, exiled and surviving in disguise, reconciled with Christianity in Pico, Botticelli and Michelangelo, and embodied at last in Winckelmann as the Hellenic man born late. Evoked rather than built: Heraclitus in the Conclusion, the Dionysian in Giorgione, Tannhäuser in the French stories. What holds the axis below the gate is that this is a critic’s mythmaking, laid over other men’s images: its load is real in the Leonardo and Winckelmann studies and light elsewhere.
Mike Nichols · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The structure that bears weight is the triangle of the son, the older woman and her daughter: the young man who must pass through the mother to reach the bride, and is cursed for it. The film builds this rather than evoking it. Mrs. Robinson forbids Elaine to him, lies of rape, and cries out at the church, “It’s too late!”, and Elaine answers, “Not for me!”: the passage from mother to daughter is the plot. The bride taken from the altar is the old abduction romance; the water, the son at the bottom of his parents’ pool, is close to a baptism refused. Most of the rest is evoked: the abduction is played half as comedy, and the Oedipal charge stays at the level of situation.
Henri Cartier-Bresson · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The particular is an anonymous man jumping a puddle in Paris in 1932, and it stays particular. The archetypes are present and some bear load. The leap is the oldest figure of risk and faith, the moment between ground and ground. The reflection doubles him as a falling figure, Icarus or Narcissus upside down in the water. The dancer on the poster is his ideal self, the art he imitates without knowing. The doubling of man, reflection and poster is built into the composition, not laid on as allusion, and that lifts the axis above evocation. What holds it below 8 is that the myths are recognised by the viewer more than constructed by the work: the man is a silhouette with no history, and the comedy keeps the archetype light.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is the deepest there is: the Flood, the world ended by water and begun again. In the making it is built. By the painter’s account the picture grew from his painting on glass of the Deluge, and the structure of destruction and renewal bears load in the two centres. But on the canvas the myth is dissolved by design. The title is Composition, not Deluge; there is no ark, no drowned and no dove; and the vestiges the literature reads in the field, waves, oars, falling forms, are not legible as such without a key. The particular is not kept, because there is none: where the axis asks that the particular acquire the archetype and remain itself, here it was given up to reach it. Built in the making, evoked in the result.
Egyptian (Old Kingdom) · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
One archetype is built and one is evoked. The built one is the funerary purpose: a tomb statue was a dwelling for the ka, and the inlaid eyes, made to see, are part of that purpose. The figure is made to be alive and attending for ever, and the life the eyes give bears load; it reaches the oldest belief there is about images, that a made likeness can hold a presence. The evoked one is the scribe as a figure of the written word, under Thoth, the god of writing, and as the first type of the intellectual servant of power. The particular stays particular. Held below the gate because the deep structure is the type’s and the cult’s: the statue realises it and does not build it further.
Han Gan · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The horse carries a deep pattern in the culture that made it: the heavenly horse of the west, the dragon-horse, the steed that is a figure for the man of talent who needs a Bole to recognise him and a ruler to employ him. Here the pattern is in the structure and not only evoked: a heavenly horse, given a name of light, is bound to a post, and the binding is the image. The particular stays particular, one named animal of one stable. But the myth is carried by the subject’s place in the culture more than built by the picture. Nothing in the field points beyond the horse and the post, and the reading of the captive talent is supplied by the tradition.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is the enthroned figure on a gold ground: empress, Madonna, icon. It is built, not only alluded to. The gold ground, the frontal face, the figure fused with her throne and the eye-motifs as watching or warding signs are the structure of the picture, not decoration on a naturalistic scene, and the journey to Ravenna of 1903 stands behind them. The particular is kept: this face, this mouth, these hands, a Viennese woman of 1907 and not a saint. Two things hold it short of the gate. The archetype is borrowed as a form more than enacted as a meaning: the icon’s ground signifies the sacred, and here it signifies nothing beyond itself and the sitter’s world, so the deep pattern supplies grandeur rather than bearing an argument. And the motifs, Egyptian eye and Mycenaean spiral, are gathered as a vocabulary of the archaic, none doing structural work.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is built: the gate, the threshold between earth and sky. The colonnade of piers is a portico read in tension rather than compression; the hall is a single roof over a crossing from the road to the field; the curve sags between earth-bound piers and lifts at its edges as if about to rise. The tent and the hammock are present in the structure itself, not in ornament. What holds the axis below the Epochal bar: the deeper pattern is evoked by the figure more than made load-bearing in the procession. There is no sequence of thresholds, no centre, no ascent or descent beyond the one crossing, and the departure itself, once by lounge and now by train, happens outside the work. A built gate of one beat.
Richard Serra · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The labyrinth is built, not evoked: the spirals are paths that wind to a centre and back out, one at a time, with no view ahead, and the walker enacts the oldest figure of the passage inward and the return. The title sets time, the river that cannot be stepped in twice, over the whole, and the serpent is named in Snake. Some of this is load-bearing: the descent to a chamber and the return is the structure of three works. But the work refuses symbol on principle; the steel is meant to be only itself, and the archetype it builds is the most general one, path, centre and return, without the particular ever becoming a figure. There is no Minotaur, no thread, no story: myth built in its barest form, close to geometry.
Buster Keaton · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The myth is built on a threshold. The dreamer leaves his body, crosses into the other world through a lit surface, is refused, crosses again, and is made a hero there before he wakes; the screen is the looking glass and the bright counterpart of the land of the dead at once, and the structure bears it, since without the crossing there is no film. The double is built too: the shabby projectionist and the immaculate detective in top hat, the waking self and the wished self, the rival and the father recast in the film within. The particular stays particular: a pawn ticket, a box of candy, a dollar. What holds it below the gate is depth: the pattern is played for its mechanism and its comedy, the crossing changes the man only in a joke, and the archetype is clear rather than deep.
Harappan builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Two archetypal structures may be built rather than evoked. The first is the high place set apart from the many: the raised western mound over the Lower Town, its few public buildings separate from the houses. The second is purification by water, built into the Bath as a sunken body entered by descent from either end, enclosed, sealed and drained, and echoed in every household bathing floor; the line between clean and unclean becomes the city’s skeleton. If the Bath was ritual, as most readings hold, the archetype bears load across the city. But no text names its use, and the reading of the western mound as a sacred or ruling precinct rests on form alone. Myth built but not certainly known to be myth holds the axis at 7.8.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
An essay analyses myth more than it builds it, and much of the book is analysis: the trickster and the minstrel mask in “Change the Joke”, the folk hero behind Twain’s Jim, the black mask of humanity. Two things lift it past evocation. Ellison builds a myth of his own origins that bears weight in the argument: Oklahoma as the frontier Territory, boys who meant to be men of every accomplishment, the jazz musician as artist-hero, Charlie Christian and Jimmy Rushing raised into figures of an American possibility. And “Hidden Name and Complex Fate”, on a boy named for Ralph Waldo Emerson, makes a myth of American inheritance out of a name. The construction is real but in the service of argument, and a reader can take the propositions without the figures; that is what holds the axis below the gate.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Some of the myth is built. The stony poems make the lady a stone, petra as her name and as a rhyme word the form compels to return, and the figure carries them: a beloved who petrifies, like Medusa, a lover turned to the same substance, love as a winter that will not thaw. Tre donne builds a small allegorical myth, Justice and her lineage in exile, of the kind the Commedia would build at a far larger scale; the sonnets exchanged with Forese use the comic underworld of hunger, debt and a cold marriage bed. But much of the body evokes rather than builds: Amor as a lord, the screen lady, the received figures of the courtly and stilnovist lyric, used as atmosphere. The constructed myth is local to a few poems, and the whole acquires no single archetypal structure.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetypes are the largest Kandinsky used: the deluge, the Last Judgement, the end of one world and the dawn of another, the rider and the boat. In his paintings of these years they are built, not merely alluded to: the eschatology organises the series, and here, by the reading most often given, it divides the canvas into a left of destruction and a right of promise. That two-part structure bears weight, and it is archetypal. But the method is to veil, and the myth is veiled nearly to illegibility. A viewer who does not know the reading sees a passage from turmoil to release, the archetype at its thinnest, and the traces are not particular enough to become myth on the canvas. Built in the plan, evoked in the seeing.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The myth is partly built, and lightly. The episode titles lay out a sequence of innocence, concealment, fall, lament, the confession of ignorance and a last night in a dark house somewhere in the world: a secular Genesis of a couple, from the garden of the model marriage in the magazine interview to expulsion and a knowledge gained only outside it. The last title moves the particular to the universal on purpose: this pair, any pair, the man and the woman in the night. The lineage is Strindberg’s marriage plays, the couple as two combatants bound to each other. The particular stays particular: a lawyer and a professor, a summer house, a stack of divorce papers, a mother’s flat. What holds the axis below the gate: the method is naturalistic and keeps the archetype under the surface, the pattern is felt in the titles more than built into the action, and it is one myth, the couple, not many.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
One archetype is built into plan and section and bears load: the descent into a great nave. The ramp is a threshold and a going down; the hall is a basilica without an altar; the bay windows and the bridges are galleries looking down into it; the chimney stands at the centre of the river front like a campanile. The deep pattern of the conversion itself, power turned into art and the machine hall become the people’s nave, is real and is carried by the form, since the hall is kept as the place where the turbines were. What holds the axis: the nave and the campanile are Scott’s, a cathedral architect who built his power station with them, so the conversion inherits more of its myth than it builds. Its own construction is the ramp, the void kept empty and the lantern over it: real, and slight. To call it a cathedral of art is mostly allusion.
Edward Weston · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The particular acquires archetypal significance while remaining particular, and the pepper never stops being a pepper. What it becomes is the body: the embracing pair, the torso, the kneeling figure, the forms of Rodin and of Brancusi found in a vegetable; and behind that the old idea of a single life-form running through flesh and plant alike. The myth is partly built: the reading is carried by the turn of the lobes and by a light that models them as flesh, not by any title or allusion, and the strength with which the image produces it is the proof. But the archetype is given no structure beyond the resemblance: a doubling of identity, not a pattern of meaning worked through the whole.
Louise Nevelson · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
More built than evoked, in one respect. The title names the archetype but the structure carries it: a frontal wall of stacked niches is the form of the altarpiece, the iconostasis, the reliquary wall and the cathedral west front, and the wall takes that form without copying any. The niches are shrines without saints; the fragments sit in them as relics. That is load-bearing. The second archetype, night and the sky as a dark vault, is summoned by the black and the title and stays a summons. What holds the axis is that the myth is a single one, the ruin raised into the temple, held at the level of form: no figure, story or event bears it, and the particular, anybody’s wood from any city, stays thin.
Denys Lasdun · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Two archetypes are built into plan and section, not merely evoked. The first is the amphitheatre: the Olivier is the Greek theatre’s fan of seats round an open floor, set into a modern mass, and the plan bears it as load. The second is the landscape of strata: the terraces read as geological beds, an outcrop or acropolis on the riverbank, a made hill climbed by the public, and the idea bears load because the strata are the routes. What holds the axis below the gate: the towers interrupt the landscape rather than complete it, so the hill has no summit and no procession to a threshold; the two archetypes are set side by side more than fused; and the city as stage and the river as threshold are evoked by the site rather than built.
Robert Rauschenberg · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
More built than evoked, in one place. The goat summons a long line of figures: Pan and the satyr, the scapegoat sent into the wilderness with the sins of a people, the sacrificial animal, the emblem of lust. The work need not cite them; the animal carries them. What builds is the joining. The tyre passed over the body makes one figure of two, and the title names that figure as a monogram, two letters interlaced into one sign. The union, and with it the coupling of beast and machine, is load-bearing in the physical arrangement, and the painted face adds the mask and the rite. What holds the axis is that the deep pattern lives in one device, while the platform, most of the surface, stays particular.
Wang Shu (Amateur Architecture Studio) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The archetype is built, not cited: the building is a mountain. Wang Shu’s documented interest in shanshui, the painting of mountains and water, is realised in section as well as silhouette. The base is the plain or the bedrock, the split upper masses are peaks, and the pool supplies the water. The route through the building, as published, carries the figure on: a passage through the base, a court within, a terrace above. A second archetype runs through the wall, the ruin as foundation, the city raised on the fragments of the village. What holds the axis: the mountain is a figure laid over a museum programme that does not need one, and the inner landscape is less fully worked than the outer.
Snøhetta · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The governing distinction is between myth evoked and myth built. The iceberg, the glacier and the rock at the fjord’s side are evoked: the building reads as ice, and that reading is allusion, credited nothing. One pattern is built and bears load: ground rising out of the sea, the hill one climbs to look out, a shore that becomes a summit. The plan makes the visitor perform it, from the water’s edge up the stone to a height above the city, an ascent as literal as a processional stair. A second figure, the threshold between the open carpet and the wooden heart, the wave wall as the boundary between day and the theatre’s dark, is built more faintly. What holds the axis: the ascent leads to a view, not to a sanctuary or a centre, and the hall carries no archetype of its own.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel; completed by Hawkshaw and Barlow · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The archetype is the crossing of the abyss, and here it is built, not evoked: the whole structure is a way hung over a void, entered through a gate on one side and left through a gate on the other. The towers are pylons in the Egyptian sense Brunel meant them, thresholds the road passes through, and even undressed they keep the portal. The Latin cut on the tower names the figure in the bridge’s own words. What holds the axis is that this is the myth of every great bridge, and the bridge builds it plainly rather than deepening it: no axis beyond the crossing, no cosmos in the plan, no second order of meaning in the structure. The Egyptian dressing would have evoked more and built no more. The bridge’s long association with death by falling is a fact of its life, not a myth its form constructs, and it is not credited.
Alexandros of Antioch (attributed) · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The archetype is the goddess of love as body, and the half-draped figure builds one piece of it: the goddess at the threshold of revelation, the drapery about to fall and held. That is built into the pose, not alluded to. But the particular is not secure. The identity is argued, and the attribute that would have fixed it, an apple, a mirror or a shield, went with the hands. The damage has given the figure a second archetype, beauty surviving mutilation, the torso as the image of the classical past itself. That myth carries the work’s modern life, and it was built by time and reception, not by the maker; it is credited only in part.
Queen · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Myth is built in three songs and evoked across the rest. Bohemian Rhapsody builds a trial of the soul: a son confesses to his mother, a crowd of voices contends for him, “Bismillah” is answered by refusal, a devil is set aside for him, and he escapes into indifference. The structure bears load, though Scaramouche, the fandango and Galileo are sound chosen for colour. The Prophet’s Song builds the flood and the prophet who warns of it, Noah’s story told from inside a dream; ’39 builds the voyager who returns to find his world gone. Each myth stands in its own song: the record as a whole builds none, and its first side evokes nothing deeper than the seaside and the car.
Peter Gabriel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The archetype is the deepest in the Western tradition, and here it is half built. The sequence follows the Passion’s own shape in titles placed at the ends: the agony in the garden, the raising of Lazarus, then the wounds, the passion, the last word from the cross and the meal that remembers it. The record builds descent and release in sound: the long middle of doubt, sand, breath and shadow is a wilderness, and the close turns from the cry of Passion to the drums of completion and a quiet table. What holds it: the structure is the Gospels’ and the film’s, laid by titles and order more than built within the music, and it has no human figure.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The archetypes are evoked everywhere: war and peace, the drowning man and the hand held out, the refugee, the woman in the red light, the psalmist waiting, Easter after the killing. One of them is built. The record is framed as a lament that becomes a psalm: “how long” is asked in the first song as the cry of a people at war and again in the last as the waiting of Psalm 40, and the frame bears load, carrying the record from a street in Derry to the voice of scripture. It is one structure, and it holds only at the two ends. The middle songs evoke rather than build: the drowning man, the refugee and the red light are figures named, not structures that carry the record.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Built in one part, evoked in the rest. The title sets on two dead animals the archetype of the Madonna and Child, maternal love made sacred, and the arrangement builds against it rather than alluding to it: two bodies, a large and a small, each split, the pair kept apart. The icon of union is made in separation, and that inversion is load-bearing. The calf of the altar, and the covenant of animals cut in two between whose halves one passes, are patterns the walk summons; nothing in the work fixes them, and they are not credited as built. The particular stays particular: a cow and a calf of the farm, not types. Held below the gate because only the inversion is constructed.
Adrian Smith (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
One archetype is built, and built entire: the tower that rises to heaven, an ascent from a broad base to a single point, the stepped mountain turned into a spiral round one axis. The structure is load-bearing in the literal sense, since the spiral of setbacks is how the tower stands, and the particular myth is plain to every viewer: Babel, the tower a city builds to make itself a name. But the building builds the ascent alone, not the confusion and the fall. The regional sources said to lie behind the three-lobed plan are its provenance, not its meaning, and are not felt in the building as lived. The axis of the world is built; the rest is allusion.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The archetype is built, in part, into the section: an ascent from the waterline through the earth into light, then inward to the cave at the heart. The visitor enters at the foot of a mass of brick, rises through a long tube that hides its end, comes out on a threshold in the air with the world spread below, and climbs again into the hall, a hollow at the summit of the crystal, a grotto on a mountain. Earth below and crystal above, heavy and light, old store and new crown: Utzon’s platform and floating roof turned vertical and set on a monument of trade. The procession is walked by every visitor, and it is load-bearing for experience, not allusion. What holds the axis: the ship, the wave, the iceberg, the tent and the crown are readings the glass invites and does not construct; the gathering round a centre is received from the vineyard type; and the archetype ends at the hall, while the hotel and the flats stand outside it.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The myth is built and bears weight: the film is constructed as a birth. The tethers are umbilical; in the station’s airlock Stone curls in warm light in the position of a foetus, a hose crossing her body like a cord; at the end the capsule falls into water, she sheds the suit, swims up, crawls ashore past a frog and stands, so that the close recapitulates life’s passage from water to land and a person’s from womb to walking. Her name and the title, the force that pulls bodies home, are made part of the structure, and the figure stays particular, one woman and one daughter. Held below the gate because the construction is announced more than buried: once seen it is fully read, and it does not deepen into the larger matter, the gods, the dead and the earth, that the planet below seems to offer.
David Lynch · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The myth is part built and more evoked. Built: the beast who is the most human figure in the story, the old matter of Beauty and the Beast and of Frankenstein’s creature, which bears the structure, since every scene tests who is the animal. Built too is the frame: the Victorian belief that a mother’s fright can mark her child, made literal in the prologue’s elephants and answered at the close by the same mother. The rest is signalled. The descent among the performers on the Continent and the return through a crowd that hunts him make a passion, displayed, mocked, unmasked, but it is shown by Psalm and steeple more than constructed, and the archetype leans on a borrowed Christian iconography that the film summons rather than earns.
Herzog and de Meuron, with Ai Weiwei and Li Xinggang · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Two archetypes, and one is built. The arena, the gathering round a field of contest, is received from the type; the saddle and the continuous rim make it strong but not new. The nest is the building’s own: a vessel woven of branches, sheltering a brood, and here the woven figure is the structure, not ornament laid on it. That is myth built rather than evoked, the archetype carrying load in the steel. The particular stays particular: a stadium for a named Games on a capital’s ceremonial axis. What holds the axis: the nest was a reading the form invited and the public named, more than a figure the makers built a rite round, and the vessel has no threshold, ascent or axis of approach that enacts the archetype in use. The myth is in the image and the structure, and thinly in the experience.
Chuck Palahniuk · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The double is the structure, and here the myth is built, not evoked. The whole plot is the story of a man and his shadow, in the line of Hogg’s Confessions, Dostoevsky’s The Double and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, and the late discovery that Tyler is the narrator reorganises every scene before it. Around it the book raises a second pattern, the search for the father: men raised without fathers make Tyler their father, and Tyler makes God the father who has abandoned them. There are further shapes: the descent and the near death that promises rebirth, the trickster who splices obscenity into family films, the sacrifice of Big Bob, the namelessness that makes the narrator Everyman. What holds the axis is that most of these are named in slogans rather than embodied, and the father myth is told to the reader by Tyler more than it is enacted.
Bonanno Pisano (attributed) and Giovanni di Simone; Tommaso Pisano · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The tower is an old archetype, the axis, height and the city’s voice in bells, built plainly as a cylinder of rising rings, and on that alone it would sit lower. What lifts it is that the lean has made the particular into a figure recognised everywhere: the thing built askew that does not fall, the work that carries its error and endures. That figure is not allusion added to the building; it is in the stone. The charge is that it was not built as myth. The makers meant an upright tower; the archetype came by accident and then by reputation, and the legend of Galileo was laid on it from outside. It is a myth the fabric made by failing.
Tang, under Emperor Gaozong · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The pagoda is a stupa, and the stupa is a cosmic axis built over relics: the archetype bears load here, it is not alluded to. The relics and the scripture were lodged in the tower; the storeys mark a vertical ascent; the tower is the fixed point by which the temple and, from afar, the southern quarter of the city are oriented. The building is bound to Xuanzang’s journey, which later became the matter of Journey to the West, an accretion the form is not credited with. What holds the axis is that the axial archetype is the common property of every pagoda. This one builds it soundly and does not deepen it beyond its type.
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Here the work builds rather than only evokes. The structure underneath is the Madonna and Child, and specifically the circular embrace of Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia: the cheek against cheek, the encircling arms, the child’s outward look. That structure bears the load. The picture is composed on it, and it is what lets a private portrait of a woman and her daughter read as an image of the mother as such. The particular stays particular: a named woman in a modish gown of 1789, a girl with her mother’s features, not a sacred pair. The secularisation is itself the content, the sacred mother brought down into a painter’s family. It stops short of the gate because the archetype is borrowed whole rather than rebuilt; the picture inhabits the pattern and does not reach a deeper one through it.
Minoan · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Built more than evoked. The confrontation of the human body with the bull, the oldest figure of animal power in the Mediterranean and the Near East, is the whole structure of the picture, not an allusion in it: man and beast share one axis, the human passing over the animal rather than subduing it, and the archetype of the ordeal, the youth who faces the bull and returns, is load-bearing. It stays particular: a dappled bull, three bodies distinguished by colour, one gymnastic act. What lifts the figure for later viewers, the Minotaur, Theseus and the labyrinth, is brought by Greek myth centuries after and is not credited here. One archetype is built; the sacred frame that would make it a full myth is not legible.
Imre Steindl · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Some archetype is built and not only evoked. The plan is a body round a crown: a centre under a dome, two members either side, the whole laid on one axis along a river. The doctrine of the Holy Crown, in which sovereignty belonged to the crown and the nation as its members, is in the plan’s geometry, and the placing of the crown in the hall in 2000 fulfilled what the plan already said. The dome’s 96 m is usually read as the year 896, which would set the nation’s founding into the building’s measure. Much else is allusion: Gothic as the costume of ancient liberties, borrowed from Westminster, and rows of rulers as a gallery of ancestors. The nation as ancient body is a myth of the nineteenth century more than a deep pattern, and much of it is worn on the surface.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Two archetypes are built rather than evoked. The prodigal son returning to the dying father is the spine of the Partridge strand, enacted, not alluded to: the son comes back, refuses, curses, stays. The sins of the fathers visited on the children are the plan of the cast, ordered in generations. The plague of frogs, the largest mythic gesture, is half built. The number 8:2 is planted from early on, so Exodus is designed into the fabric, and the plague falls on fathers who will not let their children go; it does plot work, stopping a suicide and a robbery. But its meaning rides on the planted number more than on the action, and a viewer can take the frogs as a Fortean event with no loss to the story. That half holds the axis well short of the bar.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Nikolaus Pacassi and Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The archetype is built into the axis. House at the bottom, monument at the top, and the ascent from the waters, Neptune at the hill’s foot, to the triumph on the height. The Gloriette is the temple of fame on the hill, a triumphal arch made into a belvedere and crowned by the imperial eagle on its globe, and it stands where Fischer’s first project put the palace itself, so the built work keeps the acropolis as monument rather than as house. That is myth built, not evoked. It is held lower because the deeper figure is borrowed and split: Versailles made the king’s house the centre of a cosmos, and here the summit holds a pavilion and a view; the palace, the part people enter, carries the archetype hardly at all.
Steven Spielberg · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The archetypes are built, not only evoked. The plot is an annunciation followed by an election: signs fall on the many, the vision is given to a few, and of those one is taken up. The mountain of revelation bears weight: Roy and Jillian are compelled to make it, in clay, in potato, in a model the size of a room, in paint, before they know what it is, and the image turns out to be a real place where heaven touches down. The airmen of 1945 return unaged, a resurrection. The child who goes to the light without fear and the father who must become a child to follow him are paired, and the Pinocchio thread, the wish upon a star, is the hidden fable. What holds the axis at 7.8: the divine is generic, light and music, a heaven without a theology, and the film evokes Sinai more than it builds it.
Don DeLillo · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Here a myth is built. The one-day crossing of a city descends from Ulysses, and through it from the Odyssey, and DeLillo bends it: the voyage runs west toward origin, to the barber who cut his father’s hair in the neighbourhood his father came from, and past it to a death. The deeper shape is the king who seeks his own sacrifice: the master of the markets who sheds his fortune, his guard, his wife and his protection, and arrives stripped at the room of the man who will kill him. His visions, himself acting a moment before he acts and at last his own corpse, make him the one who sees his fate. Held below the bar because Eric is so abstracted that the archetype stands over him more than through him, and the Joycean frame is evoked as much as built.
Horace Jones and John Wolfe Barry · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
The myth is built, not only evoked. The bridge is a drawbridge between two gatehouses at the water gate of the city, beside the Tower that guarded that gate, and the drawbridge is not ornament but the working structure, raised for ships since 1894. The threshold, the gate that opens and closes a city to the sea, bears load in plan, in section and in use, and it stays particular to this reach of this river. What holds the axis well below the gate: the castle is a costume, so that the gatehouse is a picture of a gatehouse wrapped round lifting machinery and a stair; the gate defends nothing and admits ships, not enemies; and much of the bridge’s mythic charge belongs to the emblem, a sign of London, which is fame rather than depth. Built, but shallow under the dress.
Dolly Parton · Music
7.6 · Tier III
In the title song myth is built, not evoked. The coat of many colours is Joseph’s, from Genesis 37, named in the song through the mother’s telling, and the pattern is load-bearing: the garment made in love marks the beloved child and draws the scorn of the others, and the child holds to the gift. Joseph’s coat is played out in a schoolyard in the Smoky Mountains, and the particular stays particular: the rags, the mother, the needle, the laughter. The rest of the record evokes more than it builds: the trickster lover and the mother as rival, the abandoned woman, the promised land as hope. One song in ten bears weight as myth, which holds the album below the gate.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The film builds as well as evokes. Metamorphosis is load-bearing: the Hotel’s penalty is to be turned into a beast, and the animals in the woods are the failed; Circe’s island and Ovid’s punishments lie beneath it. The pairing to be admitted is Noah’s ark made into a civic order. The flight from the Hotel is an expulsion, and the Loners are an outlaw band of the forest with its own law. The lovers’ secret language of gestures and the blinding of the beloved call up the blind lovers of romance and the self-blinding of Oedipus, which the ending offers and withholds. David’s choice of the lobster, blue-blooded as he says like an aristocrat, is a private myth that turns the joke on him. Held below the bar because these patterns are lent force by the premise rather than grown into a whole structure, and the last blinding is posed, not undergone.
Michel Pinseau · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
One archetype is built into the siting and section, not alluded to: the throne upon the water, the house of God set on the face of the deep, the platform carried out over the ocean so that the sea lies beneath part of the sacred ground. A second is built in the minaret as axis, a single shaft at the edge of land and sea, its light directed toward Mecca, joining the westernmost edge of the Islamic world to its centre. A third, the sky opened over the hall, is real and is a mechanism. What holds the axis: the archetype is built at the scale of the site and not in the plan, which is the received hall of arcades and could stand inland unchanged; the water is mostly seen from outside; the laser makes the axis a device rather than a structure; and the story of the founding is a royal story the building carries rather than constructs.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The myth is built, and this is the film’s strongest axis after survival. The orphan who passes through the underworld of the city to win the princess is Dickensian and older: Maman is a Fagin, Javed an ogre in his house, Latika the captive. The brothers are Cain and Abel made particular: Salim sells his brother’s love, then frees her and dies in the money. The quiz is a riddle contest, the hero answering for his life, and Prem Kumar, who feeds him a wrong answer, is the trickster at the gate. The Three Musketeers, the book the boys never finished at school, returns as the last question. What holds it below the gate: destiny is asserted by a card more than earned by the structure, and the figures stay types, Latika most of all.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The vampire is a myth already built; the question is what this film builds on it. It makes one pattern load-bearing: the demon lover summoned by the maiden herself, the incubus who comes because he was called, and the bride who must give herself to the dark to end the plague, a sacrificial marriage in the old sense, with dawn as consummation and death. The prologue makes the summons the cause of the whole, turning a chaste self-sacrifice into a darker myth of complicity. Orlok, a corpse in boyar’s dress with a voice like a grave, belongs to folklore and to pestilence. What holds the axis below the gate: the structure is inherited intact from 1922 and 1897, deepened and reordered, not made new.
Harold Ramis · Film
7.4 · Tier III
The myth is built, not evoked: the loop is the plot, and it is several myths at once, each carried by the story rather than by allusion. Purgatory, a soul held in one place until it is purified; Sisyphus and the stone; the eternal return, the day one must will again; the wheel of rebirth and the release from it. The particular stays particular: a Pittsburgh weatherman, a rodent on a stump, a diner, a bed-and-breakfast. The groundhog is the omen made literal, the beast whose shadow decides the season. What holds the axis seven tenths below the bar of the Epochal Gate: the world of the film never deepens the myth, the town is a stage for one man’s purgation, and the release comes in the romantic comedy’s form, summoned at the end rather than built.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
What the score builds is a sequence of courtly dances, each with its social character, ordered six times. The suite as the image of an ordered world, from the processional allemande to the leaping gigue, is a pattern the work holds, and the single voice that must play every part has been heard as the solitary self, or as prayer. Those readings are evoked, not built. No figure, no departure or return, is made archetypal by the music itself, and no device in the score invokes the sacred. The rise from the plain G major of the first suite to the five strings of the sixth has been heard as an ascent; it bears weight only as a plan of range and difficulty.
Massive Attack · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked, and it gathers at one threshold. The title names it, the floor between floors, and the record lives there: between the club and the bedroom, desire and fear, night and morning. Angel sets a figure of devotion and protection in a voice from Jamaican roots music, and the angel turns dangerous when the guitar arrives. Teardrop’s image of a tear on the fire is close to an elemental emblem, and the stag beetle on the sleeve is an armoured creature of the night. The emblems are strong, and they share one place. What holds the axis is construction. The threshold is atmosphere more than a structure the sequence enacts, no figure bears the record, and the voices are positions in a mood rather than persons in a pattern.
Adolf Loos · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Two patterns are built into the section, not applied. The first is the house as refuge and inner world: the cave behind a mask, the hearth room inside the plain block, the Viennese interior carried to Prague. The second is ascent by stages, from the dark threshold through the public rooms to the private ones and out onto the roof facing the Castle, the house climbing toward the city’s crown. The particular stays particular: one contractor’s family on one slope. What holds the axis: these are the archetypes of every dwelling, sharpened rather than deepened; the ascent ends in a view, not a transformation; and the myth built most fully is a period’s, the cultivated bourgeois interior, more than an archetype.
Portishead · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked, and in one respect carried by the sequence. The record opens on a voice speaking in Portuguese of a rule of three, on a record named Third; the hunter, the deep water, the magic doors and the threads, the thread of a life that the Fates spin, are old figures summoned by title and atmosphere. Under the sequence lies a descent, from a voice cut off in Silence, down through the machinery of the middle, to Threads, where the voice is at its lowest and rawest; the order of the tracks builds it, and every placing is heard as a step down. What holds the axis is that no figure bears it: there is no person in the record but the voice.
The Who · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often and built in one song. Won’t Get Fooled Again builds the wheel of revolution: the old order falls and the new is the old, and the song’s form repeats the cycle, a long build, a fall to the machine alone, and the return of the full band to the same verse. The pattern is ancient, the particulars concrete and of their moment, and the archetype bears weight. Elsewhere myth is evoked. Bargain is the seeker’s bargain with the divine; Baba O’Riley’s title joins a holy man to a minimalist composer, and its wasteland calls up Eliot without building his structure; Behind Blue Eyes gives the old figure of the villain’s lament, made inward but not built into a pattern. One myth is built, and the frame that would have carried the rest is absent.
Can · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often and built in one frame: a descent and a return. The title names an island, Tagomago, off Ibiza, which the band’s own account associates with magic; that is evocation only. The structure carries more. The first disc stays in the daylight of song and groove; the second goes down into ritual and dissolution, the intoned syllable of side three and the possession and gibberish of Peking O; and the record comes back up into a request for coffee or tea. That is the night journey, and it is load-bearing in the sequence. What holds the axis well below the bar is that no figure bears it: there is no person, place or story the descent happens to, and myth with no particular is atmosphere more than construction.
Radiohead · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The record’s figures are medical and mechanical, and together they make one sustained figure: the body as apparatus. An iron lung, the diver’s bends, failing bones, a plastic tree, a body wished bullet-proof. The title track’s diver, rising too fast and wishing “it was the sixties”, is a figure of fame and of a generation surfacing into air it cannot breathe. Street Spirit reaches an archetype outright, a spirit fading into the dark, the oldest image of the soul’s departure, placed where the record ends. What holds the axis is construction: the songs share images rather than a pattern, no figure acts out a fall or a journey, and the “she” and “you” stay without name or place.
Woody Allen · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The patterns are present, and one of them shapes the plot. Pygmalion runs underneath, inverted: Alvy shapes Annie with books, classes and analysis, and the woman he shaped leaves her maker for another city. That is the curve of the affair from first meeting to last, and it carries the figure. Around it the patterns are evoked. The schlemiel and the comic Jew among gentiles, from Yiddish tradition through Groucho Marx, whose joke opens the film, become visible for a second when Grammy Hall sees a Hasid at her table. Death presides, in The Denial of Death, The Sorrow and the Pity and the expanding universe that stops a Brooklyn boy doing his homework. A cartoon casts Annie as the wicked queen of Snow White. The limit: these are allusion and joke more than construction, and the particulars stay sharply particular.
Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
One archetype is built: the column, base, shaft and capital, taken from the classical order and made into the whole building, so that the block is a single column of offices. The analogy bears load in the composition and is not applied: the two-storey base, the seven-storey shaft and the frieze and cornice are its three parts, each given its function. Sullivan’s second archetype, organic growth from a seed, is evoked in the ornament, where foliage unfolds from geometric germs, and is argued in his writing more than built in the plan. But the column is a scheme of composition more than an archetype of human meaning: there is no threshold, no procession, no cave or cosmos in the plan. Myth built in elevation, evoked in ornament, and well below the gate.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present and partly built. The sunflower is the sun’s flower, turned to the light, and the canvas makes the sun its colour: the whole painting is the sun’s yellow, so the identification is structure, not allusion. The life cycle is built into the arrangement, the young, the full, the failing and the seeded side by side, the ages of a life in one vase and the vanitas without its emblems. The painter’s later plan to set sunflowers either side of La Berceuse, as candelabra beside an altar, lies outside this canvas. The particular stays particular: these heads, this vase, some days in Arles. The myth since attached, the flower as the painter’s self, comes from Gauguin’s portrait and the later legend, and lends nothing here.
Burial · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked strongly and built only in part. The titles summon an afterlife: an archangel, ghosts, a shell of light, the dark, the homeless and a dog’s shelter, and the city they name is a place of spirits. The rave is held as a lost paradise, and the listener walks its ruins at night, the old pattern of the shade revisiting the place of its happiness. In one respect it is nearer to built: the treatment itself makes the voices shades of singers and the beats ghosts of the dance. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven is that no figure carries the pattern and no passage across the sequence enacts it; the record rests in the condition, and its angels are titles.
Félix Candela · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Built into plan and section: the canopy held over a gathering, the tent or umbrella of shade, and the centred figure of eight radiating from one point, a mandala in plan whose centre is the low crown over the diners. The flower on the water is close to built rather than read in. Xochimilco is, by its Nahuatl name, the place of flower fields, and the eight lobes stand on the canal bank as a flower on water, which the form constructs rather than decorates. The popular images of a lotus or a shell are allusion and are not credited. What holds the axis well below the gate: the archetype governs the roof, not a procession, threshold or rite. Nothing in entering or using the room enacts it, and a restaurant asks little of it.
Alfred Stieglitz · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The ship is one of the oldest images of the world and the state: the ship of state, the ark, the ship of fools. Here the particular ship takes on that significance because its structure is the picture: above and below, the watchers and the watched, a bridge between two worlds that only one of them uses. That much is built. The voyage, the crossing of water between old world and new, is the other pattern, and it bears weight in the image’s life even where its direction has been mistaken. That is the limit: much of the archetype has been supplied by the culture’s reading, an arrival, rather than built by the picture, which shows a departure. Built, but narrowly, and partly lent.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimasa · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetype is built in, not only alluded to. The vertical order of the pavilion, the dwelling below and the sacred above, is a structure, and the two storeys are built in two manners to state it. The building faces Tsukimachiyama, the moon-waiting mountain, and is placed for the rising moon; the Tōgu-dō holds Amida, whose Pure Land lies in the west. The hermit’s retreat from the burning city to the hill is the governing pattern of the whole estate. Held below the gate because the pattern is the inherited one of Kinkaku and of the Pure Land garden, and because the moon and the hermitage are evoked by placing and naming more than they are built in plan and section.
Antonio Vivaldi · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
One archetype is built and bears weight: the round of the year, which orders the whole and is the reason the set is four concertos and not one. Behind it stand the labours of the months, the georgic world of the calendar picture: the shepherd’s sleep, the vintage, the hunt, the fire. The particulars are exact, the goatherd and his dog, the drunkard, the walker on ice, and the cycle is built into the print, sonnet by sonnet. It is held well below the gate because the archetype is laid out rather than deepened. The year is a row of tableaux, not a passage through death and return; it ends in winter’s comfort, and nothing in Winter answers Spring.
Gustav Holst · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked across the suite and built in one movement. The figures the titles name are astrological dispositions, and they carry little archetypal structure of their own: “the Bringer of War” is a type, not a story. What is built is a passage from the warring world outward to the mystic, with age as the threshold: a life as a journey from Mars to Neptune, ending in disappearance. Saturn bears that load. Its tolling, its procession and its arrival at peace are a death and transfiguration in small, without a person in it. Elsewhere the patterns are summoned as colour: a magician on a stage, a messenger in motion, an English festival. As in all wordless music the particular is thinly kept, and here the titles keep it more than the notes.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Built into structure: the house as a body, with a skeleton in the bone-like piers, a skin in the trencadís, a spine and scales at the roof’s ridge and a ribcage in the attic, a creature one enters and climbs through; and the descent of light through water, the light well a pool deepening in colour as one rises toward its surface. These bear load in plan and section. The roof read as Saint George’s dragon and the turret as his lance would be myth built and particular, the patron of Catalonia in 1906; but no word of Gaudí’s is known to say so, and the axis does not score a construction that may be the visitor’s. Carnival, sea and cave are evoked. The archetype most surely built, the body, is a figure more than a structure of meaning.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Deep patterns are evoked more than built. The hidden author is a god withdrawn, whose absence is his power and whose photograph is his last appearance; the writer offers himself for the hostage, one man for another, and the exchange is never completed; the father of the cult in the stadium and the leader in Beirut are one figure across the world. These organise the book, but the characters name them, Bill above all, more than the structure enacts them, and the exchange fails by an accident in the street, not by the logic of the myth. The strongest built element is Bill’s death unrecognised, the exact reversal of the image the photograph made. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is that the myth is spoken more than carried.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetype is the horizon: sky over earth, night over ground, the boundary between the upper and the lower world. It is the composition’s only structure, so in one sense it is built and not alluded to. But the axis asks that a particular become archetypal while staying particular, and here there is no particular to become anything: no place, no hour, no figure, only this black and this grey. The deeper readings, the black as death descending, the surface of the moon under black space in the year of Apollo 11, the last canvases of a painter who took his own life where they stood, are brought from the date and the biography. The canvases neither confirm nor refuse them.
Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The title carries the largest myth, and the film builds on it only in part: a City of God that is Augustine’s earthly city, a place of domination from which God is absent. The archetypes present are real: the boy who becomes a king by murder and renames himself; the friend killed on the night of leaving; the just man who takes up the sword and becomes what he fought; the child avenger; the witness who survives by looking. The fall of Mané Galinha is built, not cited, and it is the film’s deepest pattern. Held below the gate because these are the gangster film’s inherited types, reaching it through Scarface and Goodfellas, and the particular is more often vivid than archetypal.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Some archetype is built. The name is the plan: the little mountain, the house as a temple on the height, the summit levelled by hand as a sacred precinct is. The dome over a house is Palladio’s quotation of the Pantheon quoted again, heaven over the dweller. The house on the hill above its fields, the labour below it, is the oldest figure of lordship; and the whole is set as the Roman villa of retirement, the farmer-citizen at his ease, built for a new republic that took its forms from Rome. Much is evoked or second-hand. The dome is small and stands off the main rooms, so the cosmos is not at the centre of the dwelling, and the orders are quotations. The national myth gathered round the house is fame laid on, not structure, and is not credited.
Wes Anderson · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The patterns are present, and one of them carries the plot. The triangle is the oldest comic one, a boy and a father figure who want the same woman, and here it bears the weight of the whole: the plot is the rivalry of son and surrogate father, ended when the son gives the woman up and gives the father back his life. The orphaned boy who invents a grander parentage is the foundling of romance turned inside out, since his real father is better than the invented one. The school is a kingdom from which the prince is exiled and to which he returns as an artist, and Rosemary guarding a dead man’s room is the vow-bound lady. What holds it: these are worn lightly, and the particular stays particular.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
One archetype is built into plan and section: the threshold, the passage from earth to sky made a building. The traveller enters under a low lip, rises through a hall that opens toward the field, waits at a window facing the aircraft, and leaves through a tube, a narrow passage before departure. Ascent and narrowing are structure, not ornament, and they stay particular: this airline, this field, these jets. The bird is evoked, not built, and is not credited: the likeness of the roof to spread wings is the popular reading, and the shells are four vaults on four piers. What holds it: the myth built most fully is the jet age’s own, a period’s myth of speed, and the archetype stops at the windows, short of cave, temple or tomb.
Taddeo Gaddi or Neri di Fioravanti (attributed) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Two archetypes are built, not merely evoked. The bridge as threshold: the crossing from the city’s centre to the Oltrarno, made a passage through a lane with a single opening to the river midway, a gate and a pause. And the hidden way above: the ruler’s passage over the heads of the people, built into the section, so that the bridge has a public lower world and a private upper one. The site carries an older myth that the building does not construct: at the foot of the old bridge, by the broken statue of Mars, Buondelmonte was killed in 1216, the murder the chroniclers made the origin of the city’s factions, which Dante recalls in the Paradiso. The bridge as survivor of flood and war has become a myth of the city’s endurance, but that is fortune’s, not the form’s. The archetypes bear load, and their depth is modest.
Philip Johnson · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The archetypes are partly built. The first is the hearth. Johnson’s own account names its source as a burnt wooden village he had seen, where nothing stood but brick foundations and chimneys, and the cylinder is that chimney: the one solid thing in the room, the hearth as the house’s origin and as what survives fire. That is load-bearing in the plan. The second is the temple on its platform, approached on the oblique after Choisy’s account of the Acropolis, with the Brick House as its closed treasury across the court. The third, less built, is light and dark, open and shut, as two halves of one dwelling. The particular stays particular: one man, one bluff, one pond. What holds the axis is depth: the temple approach is cited more than enacted on a lawn, the chimney is a found image told in an essay as much as a structure, and the room’s governing myth, the pavilion in nature, is Mies’s.
Meret Oppenheim · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Some of the archetypes are built into the object rather than brought to it. The cup is the vessel, the oldest image of the receiving body; furred, it is made a body in fact, so that the pattern is physical and not allusion. The meal and the pelt are joined in one material: food and the hunted animal, the civilised table over the killed creature. The feast with a woman, Manet’s Déjeuner, and the fur as fetish, Sacher-Masoch’s, are summoned by the second title, not by the object, and are credited only as evocation. The particulars stay particular, a common cup, saucer and spoon. Held below 8 because the built structure is one move, the vessel made flesh, and the wider myth of the woman as consumed object is largely what readers since the 1970s have brought.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Myth is built in two songs and evoked across the rest. The First Time builds an inverted prodigal: the son is given the keys to the father’s house and “threw away the key”, leaving by the back door. The archetype bears load; the song is the parable turned. The Wanderer builds the Preacher of Ecclesiastes as a walker through a ruined city, and Johnny Cash’s voice makes him a real old man, not a type. Stay borrows the watching angel of its film, and the title track’s city of slogans is a new Babylon: both evoked more than built. The descent from city to waste is laid by the sequence, not built whole.
John Bradfield and Ralph Freeman (Dorman Long) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
A bridge is an archetype in itself: the crossing, the joining of two shores, the gate. Here it is built, not applied as ornament: the arch is a span in the shape of a rainbow or a gate, and ships pass under it into the inner harbour as through a portal. The pylons add the gate-tower, the city’s threshold marked in stone. The city’s name for it, the Coathanger, domesticates the figure, and its use as the frame of the year’s turning has made it a civic emblem of passage. What holds the axis: the myth is built in its plainest and most general form, with little particular to this bridge in how it is turned. The same could be said of any great arch at a harbour mouth, and Hell Gate’s arch said it first.
Martin Scorsese · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The archetype is the fall from paradise, and the film builds part of it. Rothstein’s narration calls the town a paradise, and the frame enforces the shape: the body falling in flames at the start, the explosion at the start and near the end, the expulsion into a suburb at the close. Babylon in the desert, with holes in the sand for those who break its law, is load-bearing in the plot. The three principals fall by their own natures, as in a morality: Rothstein by control, Santoro by appetite, Ginger by greed and need. What holds the figure: the rise and fall is the genre’s inherited structure, the religious frame lives mostly in the titles and the music, and inside it the matter stays reportage, a ledger of procedures. The pattern is built at the frame and in the three falls, and evoked rather than built through the middle.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The archetypal frame is announced: one cycle from dawn to dusk and twilight to starlight, a day as a life, waking to sleep, with the packaging’s Victorian dream imagery of a girl among stars. Tonight, Tonight carries the myth of the impossible night, “time is never time”, and the record ends in a lullaby, the young sent to sleep. Corgan’s figures, the vampire world, the infinite night, the ocean of Porcelina, are deep patterns summoned as atmosphere. What holds the axis is construction: the day and night order is a frame the songs sit inside, not a structure they enact; few songs turn on where they stand in the cycle, and many could move between discs with little change to their sense.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The double is built, and it bears weight from the first shots: uncle and niece named alike, lying on their beds in matched compositions, reaching for each other by telegram; the plot is the girl learning that her double is a murderer and refusing to become him. The ring, given by the uncle, adds an undertone of betrothal that makes the double dangerous, and the particular stays particular: Ann’s books, Joe’s detective magazines, a bank’s petty cash. What holds the figure is that the double carries the myth alone. The devil come to Eden, with the black smoke, the guest bearing gifts and a girl who eats the fruit of knowledge, and the vampire who lies on beds by day and feeds on widows, are evoked around it, not built.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The skull is the most archetypal image Western art holds: Golgotha, the memento mori, Yorick, the vanitas still life. Here it is not only evoked but made into a second archetype by its material. Bone covered in precious stones is the structure of the reliquary and of the jewelled catacomb saint; a skull covered in stones is the structure of the Mesoamerican mosaic skull, which was the face of a god. And the thing adored for its price is the golden calf. These structures are built into the object, not alluded to: relic and idol are what it physically is. The title invokes God and hands the invocation to an exclamation. Held below 8 because the particular is effaced: the person whose teeth these are has no name, history or face.
Alfred Eisenstaedt · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The strongest of the deep axes here, because the archetype is built, not alluded to. The warrior returns and takes the woman; the end of war is an embrace; peace is a kiss in the public square. The image makes the pattern load-bearing by its means: the faces are hidden, so the pair are a sailor and a woman in white, nobody in particular and everyone; the uniforms are their identities; the crowd is the chorus. And it stays particular: a real square, a real afternoon, a creased trouser, a handbag, a stride. Held below 8 because the archetype built is the shallow one of the victory poster and the romance, homecoming as reward, not nostos with its costs; and because the white uniform’s suggestion of a nurse is a misreading the image invites, not a built meaning.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The archetypal pattern is built at the centre. The child of power pursued by the state and claimed by a church is the nativity and the flight into Egypt; the Ranch makes a scripture of his words, and Sevier, the official who comes to believe, is a Magus from the agency. The film inverts the pattern with care: the parents do not keep the child for the world but return him to his own, and the coming is a departure. The bond of father and son is the load-bearing structure, and the light-sensitive child behind goggles is a strong particular image. What holds the axis: the sect and the state stay emblems, and at its edges the pattern is allusive rather than built.
Guðjón Samúelsson · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Two archetypes are built into form. The holy mountain: the church on the hill at the end of the ascending street, its front rising in steps to one summit, so that the approach is a climb toward a peak. And the land made sacred: the stepped piers read as basalt columns, the cooled lava of the island set up as a church front. The particular stays particular: this hill, this street, this poet, this concrete under this light. The second archetype is only partly built, and that holds the axis. The piers are cast fins on a wall, a motif of basalt rather than its structure; the reading is the viewer’s, declared in no documented word of the maker; and the nave behind belongs to the inherited Gothic church. The myth stops at the door.
Haddon Sundblom · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
The body’s strongest deep axis. Its subject is an archetype: the gift-giver who comes at the darkest time of year, the generous elder, the night visitor who sees the household while it sleeps. Sundblom’s achievement is to make that archetype particular: one big man with a specific face, specific hands and a specific tiredness, so that the myth acquires a body that a culture then took for the figure itself. It is held below 8 on two counts. The structure was built by others, by Moore’s verse and Nast’s drawings. And the myth is domesticated: the strange visitor becomes a kindly grandfather with a soft drink. Myth embodied, not deepened.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The rubric does not adjust an axis for a form’s limits. What can be called archetypal here is the cosmos: an ordered ascent through every region of a world, the circle of keys as a figure of created order, and the sacred style of the old ricercar in the great minor fugues. Bach signed his church works to the glory of God, and the book has been heard since as music of order itself. But that myth is the listener’s. Nothing in the book builds a figure that carries archetypal weight: no journey with a stake, no figure that returns transformed, no end that answers the beginning. The particular is vivid and stays particular. Myth evoked by scope and learning, not built.
Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The archetype must be built, not alluded to, and two are built. The lantern: a house that is a lamp, glowing in the dark of an old court, the hearth turned inside out into a wall of light. The threshold: a sequence of turning screens through which one passes from the world of illness and the visit to the world of the family. But neither governs the plan or the section as the highest marks require. The governing myth is the machine’s, the house as instrument, and the deeper patterns, lantern, threshold and the house built under the house of the woman who would not leave, are present as resonance more than as the structure of the work.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The rubric does not adjust for a form’s limits. The set evokes: the hunt, in the horns of No. 1, the court’s pastime set loose against the band; Echo, in the “fiauti d’echo” of No. 4, whose meaning is unsettled; the court, in No. 1’s dances; and, if the ranks are read, the social body. None of it is built. No figure, passage or return bears weight as archetype across the six, which form no journey, cycle or contest. The horns are the most particular image in the work, and they summon a scene, not a myth. Myth is evoked lightly and in places, below Kind of Blue at 8.2, which builds a call and response into its form.
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present and mostly evoked. The city as a new world, the exile’s arrival in the grid of Manhattan with its lights and traffic, comes with the title and the painter’s late history, and the canvas carries it as atmosphere. The grid itself, in his theosophically inflected doctrine, is the meeting of vertical and horizontal, spirit and matter, male and female, the cross as the order of the universe; it is built into every painting he made from about 1920, as doctrine, not acquired by a particular. The dance, the body moving to a beat, is set in the title by a painter known as a dancer. Broadway on a night in 1942 is named and evoked, and does not become archetype on the canvas.
Barnett Newman · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present and mostly evoked. The upright line in a field reads as the standing human figure, the man of the title, and as the first act of creation, the division of the void. Newman’s titles from Onement to Genesis, and his reading in Kabbalah, point there, and since the composition is nothing but such divisions, that much is built. But the archetype is supplied by the title and the writings: without them the zips are not figures and the field is not a void, and the canvas holds no particular to take on significance, no place, no person, no event. Myth evoked by a structure, as in Monet’s Water Lilies, and a little below them, since the lilies keep a particular pond; above Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm, whose poured web is built as no sign.
João Gilberto · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Saudade, the Portuguese longing for the absent, is the pattern the record summons, and the title song turns it. Its words tell longing to end and call the beloved back, so the oldest figure of Luso-Brazilian song, longing as a state to be lived in, is answered with an instruction to stop. That is myth turned, and it is the record’s best claim here. Elsewhere the archetypes are evoked as types: the morena of “Rosa Morena” and “Morena Boca de Ouro”, the nobody of “Maria Ninguém”, the penitent of “Aos Pés da Cruz”, taken as a love song’s figure. Rio, the city of the beach and the apartment, is atmosphere rather than figure. Nothing in the sequence makes archetypal structure load-bearing, and that holds the axis below the gate.
Otto Wagner · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
What archetype there is, is built rather than applied, and it is slight. The hall is a basilica: nave, aisles, light from above, the counters where the altar rail would be, and the parallel between the temple of money and the church is made in the section, not in ornament. The front carries the strongbox, a casket studded with rivets, and the winged figures with wreaths at the cornice bless the institution in an older allegorical voice. What holds the axis at 7.6 is that the building’s deeper myth is the one of its moment, the clean machine of the modern state, which is ideology rather than archetype. It does not make its particulars carry a pattern older than itself with the force of a temple or a cathedral.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One particular acquires a significance beyond itself, and Haydn did not build it: the Emperor hymn, a ruler’s anthem written in a war, set at the centre of a private chamber work. The quartet makes something of it, the realm’s song held unaltered by each voice, but the archetype of sovereign, people and land is evoked by the tune’s use, not constructed by the set. The hymn’s later history as an anthem belongs to the hymn and is not credited. The set builds no journey, no return and no figure, where the Goldberg Variations, at 8.4, build a homecoming. Its myth is the civil one under The Unconcealment, and that is not archetype.
Walter Gropius · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The question is myth built, not evoked, and two patterns are built into the plan. The first is the community under one rule, the college or monastic order with its workshop, hall, refectory and cells, made secular here as workshops, Aula, canteen and Prellerhaus in one connected sequence. The second is the crystal: the 1919 manifesto ended on a building rising as the crystal emblem of a new faith, and the workshop wing makes it a literal volume of glass, the faith now art and industry. The particular stays particular: a provincial city’s two schools, a road, a canteen. What holds the axis lowest is depth: the myth built most fully is the machine age’s myth of transparency and production, a period’s myth rather than an archetype.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Mostly evoked, built in one place. The built place is the effigy that is almost a body: wax, real hair and real cloth make the oldest question of sculpture, Pygmalion’s, a matter of structure rather than allusion, and the case completes it by making her a thing kept. Around that, patterns are summoned rather than carried: the child at the threshold of womanhood, chin up at the edge of a life the critics of 1881 already wrote as a fall; the dressed devotional image, whose real hair and garments the work takes over and empties of the sacred; the specimen in its cabinet. The particulars stay wholly particular, a named girl in a named school. The threshold myth is more the critics’ than the work’s, and the archetype bears load only in the effigy.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is in the motif: the cathedral as the house of God, the permanent made of stone against time. The series sets it against light, which is time, and the confrontation is structural rather than allusive, since every canvas is the eternal under the passing. To that extent myth is built. But the sacred is not taken up. The portals, the saints and the rose are given no more meaning than their light, and the archetypal charge comes from the building, which the series inherits rather than makes. Myth evoked by the choice of subject and partly built by the serial form; not load-bearing as it is where a work constructs its own mythic structure. Read as the dissolution of the sacred into light, it would stand higher.
Bill Evans Trio · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
A wordless record must build its myth in sound or not at all, and here little is built. “My Man’s Gone Now” carries an old pattern, the widow’s lament, from its opera; the trio plays it with no words, and the pattern is evoked by the tune and the title rather than constructed by the performance, though the dirge is real. The three-voiced conversation has an archetypal shape, the company of equals whose voices answer one another, and it is more fully realised here than in the trio’s studio work, but it remains a figure of music-making. “Alice in Wonderland” summons the child’s dream by its title and its waltz and goes no further. The elegy the record is known as belongs to its release, not to what the music builds.
Arvo Pärt · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
There is a pattern, and it bears some weight: play and silence, a game and a descent into stillness, the old pairing of action and rest, or of a life and its ending. The descent of Silentium to the bottom of the orchestra and then to nothing is shaped as a going-down, and the bells of the prepared piano summon the sacred and the funeral. But the myth is evoked, not built. No figure carries it, and the particular is thinly given: an A, a canon, bells. The title is an image laid over the work, not a structure inside it. The rubric does not adjust for a wordless form, and the Goldberg Variations, which build a journey out and home, stand at 8.4. This builds less: the descent is a figure, and there is no return.
Ogata Kōrin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The archetype is the journey into exile and the memory of the one left behind. In the ninth episode of the Tales of Ise a traveller at Yatsuhashi in Mikawa, where the water branches under eight bridges, sees the irises and makes a poem whose lines open on the syllables of kakitsubata, the iris. Some of this is built: the flowers are the acrostic, the plant is the name inside the poem, and the gold is the distance. But the bridge and the man are absent, and the archetype is carried by the viewer’s memory rather than by a structure in the image. The particular stays wholly particular. Myth evoked by a deliberate absence, which is more than allusion and less than construction.
Alice Munro · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Myth evoked, and built in one story more than the rest. The title story has the bones of a fairy tale: a plain servant, a forged token of love, a journey west, a sick man nursed back, a marriage, and the spiteful girls who meant harm and made the tale come true. It is built, and it turns, since the fairy tale’s machinery is malice. “Floating Bridge” is a crossing of water at night with a young ferryman, back to the living. “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” takes its title from a children’s song and inverts the faithful old couple of the fable. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is Munro’s method: the pattern stays under the realist surface, often below where a reader feels it; in most of the stories it bears no weight; and the figures remain persons in small Ontario towns and do not become archetypes.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Built, not only evoked: the threshold and the sheltering portico. The raised loggia is the porch of the house that takes in the stranger, the place between street and refuge, and the archetype bears load in the use: here the child passed from the city into the institution, and the wheel, later, made the threshold literal, a turning door between anonymity and care. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is that the rest is named or pictured rather than constructed. The dedication to the Innocents, the infants of Bethlehem, names the archetype of the child destroyed by power, and the tondi of swaddled infants set it on the front, but neither is built into plan or section. The city as a rational order of equal parts is the myth of a period more than an archetype.
George Orwell · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Myth evoked more than built, as reportage allows, and this is the axis held lowest of the twelve. Some patterns are present and some bear weight. The Italian militiaman becomes an emblem of the brotherhood of the war, and Orwell returned to him in later prose, which shows that the figure held. The arc from the revolutionary city to the city of spies and arrests has the shape of a fall: Barcelona in December, then Barcelona in June, the same streets with the red flags gone and the well dressed back, and the witness hunted where he was welcomed. The witness himself, the man who will not lie for his side, is a figure the book makes and Orwell’s later work turns into myth. What holds the axis here is that the book does not build these into a load-bearing structure: they lie in the order of events, and the reporter keeps them particular. The sleeping England of the close is the nearest thing to a built image.
New Order · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Little is built and some is evoked, and the frame carries most of it. The sleeve sets a nineteenth-century still life of roses, beauty and its passing, beside a title of power, corruption and lies that the record leaves unspoken: a coded accusation next to a memento. The Village evokes the pastoral, and Leave Me Alone the solitary who asks to be left. One pattern comes near construction: the survivors’ passage, mourning turned by the machine into motion, carried by the order from played song into sequence and back. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven is that the record has no figures and no story, its words build no pattern, and the particular is withheld throughout.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Evoked more than built. Behind the canvas stands the reclining Venus, the goddess laid along a couch for contemplation, from Giorgione and Titian onward; here she is turned over, her back given to the viewer, and moved from Olympus to the harem. The odalisque, the woman enclosed for a single master, is a modern myth, and the picture summons it entirely through props: turban, fan, the furnishings of the harem. What is built is narrower: the figure as the unreachable beloved, turned away and looking back, desired and withheld at once, carried by the pose itself. The particulars stay particular, the pearls, the fringe, the folded foot. But the deeper pattern is costume, not structure; with other props she would be Venus again, and that holds the axis lowest of the eleven the minimum governs.
Brinkman and Van der Vlugt · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is the factory as a palace of light, the workplace raised to a temple of clarity, an idea rooted in the patron’s Theosophical idealism and in the wider modernist faith in light and air as moral goods. Something of it is built: the ascent from canal and road to the glass room on the roof, the bridges as passages between making and the world, the transparency as an open confession of the process. But the archetype does not bear load. The plan follows goods, not a threshold or axis carrying meaning of its own, and the palace of light is an atmosphere the building produces more than a pattern its form enacts. It evokes more than it builds, and that holds the axis at 7.6.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The film evokes a pattern more than it builds one. The pattern is old and plain: lovers set against the tribe, the stranger at the gate, a marriage that breaks a law of kinship and is punished by the community, and beneath the melodrama the beauty and the beast reversed, with the community as the beast. What is built is a ritual of exclusion: the staring tableau, figures set in doorways and on stairs as a chorus of judges, recurs until it is the film’s shape, and that holds the axis above evocation alone. But the archetype is not made to bear the load as a myth built into a plot would be. The story stays a case, deliberately ordinary, and its depth is social rather than mythic.
Robert Altman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The frame is mythic in outline, and that is what holds the axis lowest with The Sublime: outline, not structure. A plague comes from the sky at the start and an earthquake from the ground at the end, a city struck from above and below; between them a drowned girl lies in a river, the Ophelia figure turned into an object at the fishermen’s feet; a child dies on his birthday with his cake uncollected. But the film evokes more than it builds. The medfly and the quake are bookends, not structures that bear the stories’ weight, and the earthquake resolves nothing and is half a joke about Los Angeles. The particular stays wholly particular: pool cleaners, clown parties, limousine drivers. The archetype is glimpsed through it, not made load-bearing.
Claude Lorrain · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present: the voyage, the hour of light as passage, the queen going to the wise king, the harbour as the edge of the known. The question is whether they are built or evoked. The sun at the end of the water and the figure going down to the boat make the departure toward light a load-bearing structure of the composition, and that is more than allusion. But the biblical story is lightly attached. The same harbour serves other embarkations under other titles, and nothing in the picture is shaped by the particular story of Sheba and Solomon rather than by departure in general. The archetype of passage is built; the named story is evoked, and that division holds the axis here.
Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetypes present are built in part. The internal street is the most load-bearing: the oldest pattern of the city, the street as the place of common life, lifted into the building so that neighbours meet in passage. The ship, a long hull of cabins with a deck on top, is the second; here it is a section of cabins along a gangway, not ornament. The third is the commune, the house of a common table, built as the bridge to the dining room. What holds the axis: the myth built most fully is the period’s own, the new way of life and the new person it was to form, a myth of 1928 rather than an archetype; and the ship and the street are partly evoked by a type, not constructed afresh.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present and mostly evoked. The frieze is the oldest form of procession: the horsemen of the Parthenon, the dancers round a vase, the herd on a cave wall. The stampede of the West, the open continent and its animals, comes with the painter’s Wyoming birth and western boyhood, and the canvas carries it as rhythm, not image. The black uprights continue the totemic figures of his mythic paintings of 1942 and 1943, the guardians and the she-wolf, but here they have lost their identities and become beats. That dissolution is the point and the limit: the particular never becomes archetype by construction. What is built is the procession, the form of a rite; what it is a procession of is left to the viewer. Above Autumn Rhythm (7.4), which gave up even that residue.
Toyo Ito · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The tube is a tree or a stem, an axis that brings light from sky to ground, and it carries the floors: the archetype is load-bearing, not applied, and the avenue of trees outside is answered by a forest within. The tree as column is old, in the hypostyle hall and in the forest as church, and the building renews it, but lightly. What holds the axis is that the archetype is evoked more than built. The building organises no threshold, centre or ascent with deep resonance; it refuses a centre on purpose; and its myth is of water and drift, a mood of the information age more than a pattern of human life.
The Stooges · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is close at hand and partly built: the bacchanal. The record is shaped as a rite that begins as dance music in the street, passes through abasement in Dirt and possession in 1970, calls the celebrants in with the title track and ends in a frenzy where the form is torn apart. The singer is the sacrificial body at the centre, carried in the voice. The sequence bears that weight, and that is why the figure is not lower. What holds it well below the bar is that no one in the songs bears the rite. The title’s carnival is a word, and the particulars, a street, a television, a Saturday night, stay particular without turning figural. The myth is enacted by the sequence and evoked by the legend; it is not built.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The patterns are present and partly load-bearing. The little man inside the machine, one desk among hundreds, is the modern Everyman, and his climb is a fall: each step up the building costs him more of himself. The key is the film’s archetypal object, a gate to the private room handed upward as tribute and at last refused; the executive washroom key, the gift of rank, is its counter. Christmas sets a death and a resurrection in one bed, and Dreyfuss, the Jewish doctor next door, is the village elder who names what a man is. The Cinderella romance is inverted: the prince is the seducer, the commoner the rescuer. What holds it: the myth is evoked through situation and emblem more than built into the world, and the figures do not deepen as the film goes.
Eva Hesse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetypes come readily and are mostly brought by the viewer. Shroud, veil, banner, skin, the flayed hide and the cloth of Veronica that keeps the trace of a face: each is summoned by hanging cloth that has been soaked and marked, while the work keeps its particulars, cheesecloth, latex, the ragged edge, stubbornly literal. Where something is built rather than evoked, it is the structure of mortality carried by the material: a made body that ages, darkens and will fail, which the title names. That is load-bearing, and it holds the axis above seven and a half. It stays short of the upper band because the pattern is carried by matter and circumstance, not built in the arrangement, and the reading through the dying maker is reception, not construction.
Hadhrami builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetypes are built, not alluded to, but they are few and plain: the walled city, the citadel on the mound, the tower. The mound raised above the flood gives the city the shape of an ark or island, a refuge set above destroying water, and that shape is load-bearing, the reason for the site. The gate is a true threshold between the ordered inside and the open wadi. The tower is the house as fortress, a house that is also a keep. Held in the upper sevens because the city does not make these patterns signify beyond themselves: no cosmic plan, no axis of worship ordering the whole, no house or street that takes on the weight of a figure. The myth is that of the fortified settlement, built honestly and without elaboration.
Ovid · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked and used, almost never built. The exempla are pressed into lessons, and the pressing is the point: Pasiphae’s lust proves that women are more driven than men; Mars and Venus, caught in Vulcan’s net, prove that a husband should not catch his wife. The poem’s own archetype is built, and it lasts: the master of love who teaches seduction as a craft, ego sum praeceptor Amoris (Book 1), I am Love’s teacher, the figure behind the medieval master of love and the go-between, and at some remove the seducer as theorist. Rome is made a mythic ground, founded on a pick-up at Romulus’ theatre. That founding joke is the nearest the poem comes to load-bearing myth, and it is a parody of one.
Roman, under Caracalla · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth built, of one kind: passage through water and heat as a rite of renewal. The body enters at one end, is stripped, heated, cooled and immersed, and leaves restored; the sequence of cold, warm and hot, the oldest ritual of purification, is laid out as an axis and a plan. The building also takes the form of a city within a wall, a world complete with gardens, libraries and games, set apart from the street. And the ruin has acquired a myth it did not build, Rome fallen, the Romantic emblem of empire and its end. What holds the axis: the rite is secular, the archetype load-bearing in the plan but light in meaning, and the deepest pattern now attached to it is evoked by the fall, not built by the makers.
Michel Virlogeux and Norman Foster · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
One archetype is built, not evoked: the crossing, the way carried over the abyss from one high ground to another. It is load-bearing in the literal sense, because it is the whole of the work. When cloud fills the valley, the deck gives that crossing a second and older form, the road in the sky. It stays particular: this gorge, these two causses, this river far below. What holds the axis is that the archetype is the bridge’s by type, shared by every great viaduct, and the work adds little to it in plan or section beyond scale. No threshold, ascent or procession is constructed, and the readings of the masts as sails or a ship’s rigging are allusion, and are not credited.
Abraham Darby III; designed by Thomas Farnolls Pritchard · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present: the bridge as threshold and joining; the round arch as a segment of the heavens, closed by its reflection to the full circle; iron as fire turned into structure, the forge’s product thrown over the water that drove the bellows, furnace, river and bridge in one gorge. But they are evoked more than built. The semicircle is inherited from the masonry bridge and carries its meaning by inheritance, not by construction in the new material; and the myth the bridge has acquired, as emblem of the Industrial Revolution, is a period myth laid on it by history. The particular has become a sign, not an archetype in its own structure.
Ray Charles · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Within the songs, myth is evoked and not built. The loser fated from birth in Born to Lose, the lover who cannot stop, the stranger who cannot speak his love in You Don’t Know Me, the gambler’s surrender in You Win Again: these are old figures of fate and the bound heart, and the voice gives each a real moment’s weight. The particular is thin, since these songs name few places and the record adds none. The larger pattern lies in the act: a voice from one side of a divided country enters the other side’s songs and is heard there as its own, the stranger at the gate admitted. That figure is borne by the premise and the history, not built by the sequence; nothing on the record stages it, and that holds the axis well below the gate.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
One archetype is built: the descent. A woman comes down from an upper level toward the one who looks, and the stair is the structure of the picture, not its setting. The rest is summoned by the subject alone: the long tradition of the nude, Venus, Eve, the bride, the figure revealed. The Annunciation and the Madonna have been brought to the picture’s light and its lowered eyes; that is allusion, and nothing in the canvas makes it load-bearing. Duchamp’s Nude is a modern myth in its own right, the painting that turned the body into a machine and was turned away by the Cubists; the canvas answers it, and so inherits a story rather than building one. The particular stays wholly particular, one woman on one stair, and its depth is brought to it.
Neil Young with Crazy Horse · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often and built once. Down by the River takes the old murder ballad, the lover killed beside the water, an inheritance from Anglo-American balladry, and builds it again: the song’s frame is the archetype, and the long solo makes the killing a thing endlessly circled and never confessed. That figure bears load. The rest evokes. The cowgirl and the sand call up the west and its women; the title song is the oldest wish of the pastoral, the city fled for the country; the cinnamon girl is a dream of the plain beloved; Running Dry is named a requiem and plays one. None of these is built into structure as the river is, and the record does not join them into one pattern.
Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Two archetypes are present and partly built. The first is the shell, the house as la coquille de l’homme: an entrance that turns and conceals, alcoves and retreats, shutters closing the house round its inhabitant. It is carried in plan, but softly. The second is the ship: decks, rails and canvas, a house moored on a rock. The ship is built into section and terrace more than it is applied, but it was also the common idiom of the period’s white houses, and the nautical fittings are allusion rather than structure. The particular stays particular: two people’s summer house above one bay. What holds the axis at 7.6 is depth; the myths are present enough to hold and are not load-bearing at the top.
Sofia Coppola · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The patterns are present and lightly carried, and they reach further than the situation that bears them. Two exiles meet in a strange land and recognise each other; the older man and the young woman make a figure between father and lover that the film never resolves. The hotel is a limbo, out of time, where the sleepless meet at night as souls might. The whispered secret at parting is among the oldest devices of love and loss, and the film shows it knows this by refusing to tell. Kyoto touches the sacred, monks, a garden, a wedding, with Charlotte outside all of it. What holds the axis below the rest: the myth is evoked by situation and mood more than built into the structure, and the limbo is a premise rather than an order.
Georgia O'Keeffe · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present and largely evoked. The flower as body, the opening as threshold, the dark at the centre as womb or abyss: these are summoned by the form, a cleft of darkness between folded petals and a descent into it, and the summons is partly built, because the composition, not an allusion, makes the centre a passage. But the pattern does not bear the structure. The readings of the 1920s supplied the myth more than the canvas did, and the painter refused them. The iris’s own old meanings, the messenger and the sword-lily of the Virgin, are not invoked. The particular stays a particular flower, and what it acquires it acquires half from the viewer, which was the painter’s own complaint.
Richard Rogers · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Two archetypes are built into the section. The first is the nave: a tall, top-lit central space with galleries, the rostrum and the bell at its heart like an altar, the institution’s relics kept in an upper chamber. It is load-bearing, for the Room is the building’s reason. The second is the machine as body, Kahn’s served and servant spaces turned outward, organs and veins carried on the skin. The particular stays particular: this market, this plot, this bell. What holds the axis well below the bar: the nave comes through the Crystal Palace and the station shed as much as through the church, the shrine is inherited rather than made, and the myth built most fully is the machine’s, a period’s myth rather than an archetype.
Pierre Bonnard · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Mostly evoked, built in one place. The built place is the tub as vessel and bier: a long body laid horizontally in a long container, seen from above, is the effigy on the tomb as much as the bather, and the picture’s form, not an allusion, makes that double reading. The beloved kept young by memory inside it is the old pattern of the unageing beloved, the figure preserved against time. Elsewhere the archetypes are summoned rather than built: the bath of Venus and of Susanna, the bather of the European nude from Rembrandt to Degas, the immersion that cleanses and renews. The particular stays wholly particular, one bathroom, one woman, one daily act, and the myth is carried in part by what is known of Marthe’s life rather than by the canvas alone.
Nok · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Some of the archetype is built rather than evoked. The head as the seat of the person is not an allusion here: it is the proportion of the figures, load-bearing in every one of them. The seated figure with hands on the knees is a pattern of rule and of the ancestor found across the world, carried by posture rather than by attribute. The composite figures reach toward the beings of a cosmology. But the particular stays particular only in part. No figure can be named, no story can be attached to any of them, and the archetypal reading is the viewer’s inference from posture and proportion. Myth is present in the structure of the convention with its content lost, and that loss holds the axis at 7.6.
Woody Allen · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The film makes a myth of its city, and the myth is load-bearing. In the overture’s drafts Manhattan is by turns a figure for the decay of contemporary culture and a town that existed in black and white; the whole film tests that romantic idea against the people who hold it. The people are another matter. Tracy is cast in an old pattern, the innocent who sees truly and is lost by the experienced man, and the film evokes the pattern without building it: she remains a figure of youth and faith rather than one who gains depth as a figure. Yale, the faithless friend, and Isaac, the self-appointed conscience, are types well particularised and not deepened into archetype. The skeleton in the classroom is an emblem placed, not a myth constructed. A city myth built, and the rest evoked.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present, and largely evoked. The circle is the oldest sign of the whole: the sun, the moon, the heavens, the sphere. The black disc in its corona is the eclipse, an ancient image of dread and of order. A field of discs in a dark ground is a cosmos, and the painter’s own account of the circle as his link to the cosmic gives that reading authority. Some of it is built: the canvas is constructed as a heavens, bodies in a void, and the structure carries it. But the axis asks for a particular that becomes archetypal while staying particular, and here nothing is particular first. The forms are archetype at the outset, sign before body, and the myth is supplied by the viewer and by the painter’s doctrine.
Gu Kaizhi (attributed) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Mostly evoked, built in two places. The mountain carries the law the text states, that what rises must fall, as an image of the cosmos: sun and moon at either side, creatures on the slopes, a hunter aiming from below. That is structure, not allusion, and it stands at the centre of the sequence as its hinge between the public exempla and the private chambers. The mirror is the oldest figure of self-knowledge, and the toilette scene builds it into the composition, the reflected face turned toward the viewer. Elsewhere the archetypes are summoned through exemplary history: the loyal consort, the modest consort, the Instructress as the voice of the law itself. The particulars stay particular. But exempla are a moral pattern more than a myth, and the scroll’s deepest structure is a list.
Tokugawa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
One archetype is built into the plan: the passage inward to the presence, threshold after threshold. The diagonal sequence and the raised floor are that figure and carry it. The rest is evoked. The pine is the emblem of constancy, the tigers of the waiting rooms the ruler’s force, and the garden’s figures come from its own tradition: symbols the Kanō vocabulary and the gardeners already held, applied with skill and not made into the structure. The castle as a whole holds the citadel in the sacred capital, but its keep is gone and its walls never knew a siege. The particular stays particular: one regime, one visit, one announcement.
Norman Rockwell · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Built in one structure, evoked elsewhere. The built structure is the procession: the innocent walking a gauntlet between guardians, through a hostile world she does not look at, toward a door the picture never shows. The composition carries it, not allusion: the frieze, and the rhythm of eight adult legs and two small ones. The headless guardians give it an older shape, powers rather than persons around a child. Evoked and not built: the white dress as innocence, the red on the wall as blood, the echo of a martyr’s road. The particular stays particular, one child on one morning in New Orleans. What holds the axis is that the archetype is the obvious one, plainly named, with no second pattern beneath it.
Decimus Burton and Richard Turner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Two archetypes are built and not merely evoked. The first is the enclosed garden, the paradise of the old sense, a place of plenty set apart from the world: here the wall is made of light, and the garden within is the world’s warm zones gathered into one. The second is the ark, a hull turned over, its ribs a keel’s, holding specimens of every kind against a hostile climate. The section carries both, the curved frame being the structure and the enclosure the purpose, and the particular stays particular: a royal garden on the Thames, palms from named colonies, Victorian coal. The paradise is a botanist’s, without its moral weight; the ark is supplied by the eye from the ribs more than ordered by the plan; and the strongest myth built is the period’s own, nature mastered by industry.
Jean Nouvel, with Architecture-Studio · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Archetypes are present and mostly evoked. The screen is the threshold of the veiled interior, the courtyard and the inner house; the diaphragm is the eye, the iris that widens and narrows, so that the building figures itself as a seeing organ turned to the south. One pattern is built into the plan rather than applied: two blocks split by a cleft aimed at a cathedral, two worlds facing and divided, the river on one side and the south on the other. That is the strongest archetypal fact of the building. Even so, the deep patterns are carried by the skin and by one gesture of the plan; the building’s body does not organise itself as temple, cave or axis. Myth evoked, with one structural instance.
Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren (OMA) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Two archetypes are present, one built and one seen. The built one is the loop, the circuit that returns on itself, a closed ring of making that is structure and circulation, not ornament. The seen one is the gate, the arch over a threshold, which the figure suggests from some angles and which Beijing, a city of gates, reads readily; but no passage through it matters, and the arch is a view, not a path. The tower of pride hovers over any building of the kind and is evoked by the lean and the hanging mass, not built. The popular name has given the building a comic myth that undercuts the solemn one. The particular is kept, but the archetype is thinner in the plan than the figure promises, and the axis stands well below the gate.
Balkrishna Doshi · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The archetypes are the street, the arcade, the court, the labyrinthine town and the processional corridor of the temple, and they are built into the plan, not applied. The corridor is the campus’s spine and its public realm, and to walk the campus is to walk a city in miniature. Doshi named Fatehpur Sikri and the corridors of South Indian temple complexes among his sources. What holds the axis is that the archetype is evoked more than deepened. The street of the campus does not take on the sacred or cosmic weight of a temple ambulatory; the sources lend type and atmosphere rather than a myth the building constructs, and the walk is never made a rite. The myth is built at a civic depth, not an archetypal one.
Daniel Burnham · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
One archetype comes close to being built: the prow, the ship’s bow advancing into the street, which the plan makes literal at the tip. But the site built it and the viewers named it; the design does nothing to make a ship beyond accepting the triangle, and its ornament is that of a Renaissance palazzo, not of a vessel. The three-part column evokes the classical order stretched to twenty storeys, a figure borrowed rather than built. The wedge as an image of the modern metropolis, a building cutting forward, has become myth, but it is myth evoked from outside, in photographs and paintings, not carried by plan and section. Particular and vivid, and below the buildings whose plan is itself a cosmos.
Mary Cassatt · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The Madonna and Child stands behind the pair, and the picture knows it: the seated woman, the naked child on her lap, the heads inclined together, the triangular group. The washing of the foot calls up, faintly, the washing of feet as an act of service and humility. These are evoked, not built. Nothing in the canvas makes the sacred pattern load-bearing, and its wager is to secularise it, to make the mother and child a woman and a child in a room with a pitcher. That secularising is itself a structure, the eternal group reduced to the daily act and found to hold, and the particulars stay particular. But the archetype is summoned as resonance, and the axis stands where myth evoked well stands.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Two patterns bear load in plan and section. The first is descent: from the open court under the apex, down a spiral, into a hall from which the treasury opens in three directions, so that the museum is entered as an underworld of the kept past. The second is the axis: the pyramid and the lead cast of Bernini’s Louis XIV are set on the historic line that runs west through the Carrousel and the Tuileries to the Champs-Élysées, and the entrance takes its place on a royal route. The pyramid itself is the tomb as mountain, and here it is a tomb made of light that is a door, the building’s most interesting mythic move. But the form is quoted more than rebuilt, the descent is circulation once inside, and the popular myths that cling to the pyramid are allusion and are not credited.
Billie Holiday · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Myth is built in one figure and evoked around it. The figure is the singer who has outlived her songs: the torch singer, the abandoned woman who keeps singing to the one who left, here given a real body whose damage is audible. The sequence lays a passage from the confession of a fatal want to the end of the affair, a small descent with no return. “You’ve Changed” and “I Get Along Without You Very Well” address the lover in absence, a figure as old as the lyric, and “Violets for Your Furs” keeps the particular particular. What holds the axis: the doomed artist singing her own end belongs to the legend and to a death a year later, not to what the record builds.
Peter of Illyria, under Pope Celestine I · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The archetype is the way: a path from the threshold, through the doors carved with the scriptural history, between columns toward the apse where the altar stands. It is built into the plan, not alluded to; the axis is the building. It is also the archetype every basilica of the type carries in equal measure, and Santa Sabina adds nothing to it in plan or section: no crossing, no centre, no dome as heaven, no ascent. The strongest mythic charge on the site is carried by the doors, with the Crucifixion among their images, but the doors are sculpture held in the building and are not scored here. Myth built, then, but common, and not deepened by this building.
Roman, under Augustus · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The archetype is built, not evoked, but it is the common archetype of the classical temple: the house of the god raised on its mountain, the single axis from the square to the hidden image, the threshold of the porch between public light and the dark of the cella. The podium makes the ascent literal and the axis makes the approach a procession; all of it bears load in plan and section, which keeps the figure above the merely allusive. What holds it is that the pattern is carried as received, with no inflection of its own. The god or the honorand is lost, the inscription now holes in stone; the cult is lost; and the archetype is legible as the general form of the Roman temple, kept particular chiefly by its place at the head of a Gallic forum.
A. M. Cassandre · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The particular ship becomes a type: the liner as the colossus of the modern world, the cathedral of the machine age, the prow as the nation going out across the ocean. The image is built toward that. The frontal symmetry is the symmetry of a facade or an idol, and the scale set by the birds makes the hull a natural feature, a cliff or a leviathan, rather than a made thing; the particular is kept, for it is this ship, named at its foot. But the archetype is summoned more than constructed. The colossus has no counterpart, the sea is a band rather than an element in play, and the voyage, the crossing and the arrival are named in the route line and not built into the image. The sheet shares its age’s myth of itself rather than shaping it.
Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The pattern is built, more than the genre requires, and it is the folktale of the false bride: the usurper takes the true bride’s place, speaks with her voice, is accepted by the court, and is unmasked at the feast, here by a curtain raised before the whole house. Kathy comes out of a cake, a fairy-tale emergence, and is the hidden voice made visible; Lina is the stepsister who cannot sing. Around it the film evokes Pygmalion reversed, the lessons failing on the star and succeeding on the lover, and rain as rebirth. The particular stays particular. Held well below the gate because the archetype is carried lightly, known and played as a plot device, and the ballet’s tale of a hoofer’s rise is evoked rather than built.
Doris Salcedo · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The title builds one archetype into the work: the fords of the Jordan in the Book of Judges, where the men of Gilead sorted fugitives by a word and those who could not say it were killed. The crack is that passage drawn in plan, a line to be crossed or not crossed, running the length of a house of the nation. A second archetype is evoked rather than built: the earth that opens, the chasm under the feet, the abyss of the old cosmologies; the crack carries the image and makes nothing more of it. A third, the wound in a body, lives in the reception. Held at 7.6 because the ford is load-bearing only through the title, and no people, place or crossing is named in the object.
Andrew Wyeth · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The archetype is present and partly built: the journey home, the house on the hill as the place longed for and not reached, the pilgrim on her knees on the slope. The composition carries it structurally, the figure low and left, the goal high and right, the field the way between; that is myth made by arrangement, not by allusion. And the particular stays fiercely particular: one woman, one farmhouse, one field. What holds the axis short is that the structure stops at the image. The house is made no more than a house; nothing builds the return, the threshold or the fall beyond the one diagonal, and the archetype is legible because the configuration is so simple, with the viewer bringing the rest.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
The archetypal frame is real and only partly built. The hero is remade as the examiner: the Jesuit’s speech recasts the accountant as the true heroic figure of the age, a knight of endurance in a confined space, and Fogle’s turn is a conversion narrative with a voice from the doorway. The Center is a purgatory of sorts, with its ghosts, Garrity and Blumquist, its saint in Drinion, its seer in Sylvanshine, the “fact psychic”, and the Service as a secular church of account. The title points to a fallen king, a pallor of sovereignty in the bureaucrat. But the patterns do not bear the book: the heroic arc is announced in a speech and enacted once, in Fogle, and the purgatorial and saintly figures stay attributes rather than load. What would have made the structure built is precisely what the book left unwritten.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Myth is evoked often and built in one frame: the descent and the return. Left goes down, through a fall, an aftermath, the instrumental march of Pilgrimage and the sea of La Mer, and ends on The Great Below, a title that echoes the opening phrase of the Sumerian descent of Inanna in its usual English rendering; whether the echo is meant cannot be known, and nothing here rests on it. Right opens on The Way Out Is Through, the ascent named and built in sound. That frame bears load across two discs. Held below the bar: Right does not sustain the climb, falling back into songs of grievance, and the end in decay closes the frame as ruin, leaving the archetype half built.
Man Ray · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The analogy of the woman’s body and the stringed instrument is old: the guitar and the violin are shaped and named like bodies, with a waist, shoulders and a neck, and the muse’s lyre stands behind them. The odalisque, the woman of the harem seen from behind and offered to an absent master, is a second pattern, carried here by Ingres’s turban. The work builds the first rather than evoking it: the two f-holes make the analogy literal, load-bearing and visible, and turn the muse into the instrument itself. The particular stays particular, the back of a real woman known by name in the Paris of her day. What holds the axis is that the myth is built by one stroke and stays a conceit: the pattern is made visible, not deepened, and the odalisque is cited from Ingres rather than made anew.
Sumerian · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Built in its structure, not evoked by allusion. The sovereign as the figure toward whom all things move, larger than the world, his head through the frame that holds everyone else, is built into both sides by hierarchic scale, and it bears load: remove it and the registers are only processions. The pairing of war and peace, the two works of a king, is an archetype carried by the object’s two faces, so that the duality is a fact of the thing one turns in the hand; the feast of victory with its lyre is among the oldest of patterns. It is held well below the gate because the archetype is single and political: no god is visible on the sides, and the figures are types.
Duke Ellington · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The archetype in reach is the rite: a descent, a long trance, a return in force, with a crowd drawn from watching into taking part. The last track builds that pattern rather than alluding to it. The diminuendo lowers the room, the interval is repetition until the boundary between player and public breaks, and the crescendo is the return with the many. It is built, and it bears load for a quarter of an hour. But it is built by one track, from a frame of 1937 Ellington had used to other ends, and the night as the world tells it, the band reborn, belongs to the record’s legend and sleeve more than to what the music constructs. The suite builds nothing archetypal.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The pattern is old and bears weight: the child given away at birth returns grown, is recognised by her mother at a feast, and her return brings the family’s hidden wounds into the open. It is the recognition of late romance, the daughter restored in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, built into the structure, since the whole film is the approach to one recognition. Maurice adds a second figure, the maker of images who cannot see his own house. The particular stays fiercely particular: a box factory, a council broom, a new conservatory, sausages. What holds the figure: the realism keeps the archetype under the surface, recognisable rather than remade, and Hortense, the returning child, is the least mythic figure in the film.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The pattern is Bluebeard, and it lies in the plot. A wife is given the keys of her husband’s house but not the one; she steals that key and opens the forbidden room; he learns of it from what she left behind, begins to kill her slowly in his own house, and a rescuer carries her out. Beneath it runs a descent into a house of the dead, ruled by a mother from her bed, and a return up its stair; and Sebastian is the son his mother still owns. The particulars stay particular: a wine label, a key ring, a cup of coffee. What holds the axis is that the archetype is carried by the thriller’s apparatus and is never surfaced as more than its plot.
Ai Weiwei · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Archetype is built in one structure and evoked in several. Built: the one and the many, a multitude composed of individuals, which is what the object physically is; the grain beyond counting, the sand of the sea and the seed of a promised people, made of objects rather than stated. Evoked: the sun and its sunflowers, the imagery in which Mao was the sun and the people turned toward him; the seed as germ and as food; and ash, the field’s colour. The particular stays particular: Jingdezhen, a snack, a hall in London. Held below 8 because the deepest pattern, ruler and people as sun and sunflowers, is borrowed from political iconography and alluded to, and germination is a meaning porcelain cannot have.
Sahelian builders · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The archetype is built, not alluded to: the tower as a mountain made of the earth it stands on, an axis rising from a flat world, a beacon for those coming in across the desert. The taper reads as a mound lifted into a spire, and the material makes the point load-bearing, since the tower is the ground raised. The timbers give it a bristling body that has been read in many ways; no intended meaning in them is established, so only what the structure does is credited. What is missing is a built cosmos: the mosque does not carry an order from ground to heaven through threshold, axis and enclosure, and the archetype lives in one vertical element. Built myth, but of one figure.
Marina Abramović · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The archetypes are summoned plainly and partly built. The queue, the waiting, the approach to a still figure in a long robe, the brief audience and the leaving are the structure of the pilgrimage and the icon, and the work is built on that pattern rather than alluding to it: the face held still to be gazed on is the devotional image made living. The mirror is built too, since the sitter’s face is met by a face that does not answer. The confessional and the sphinx are brought by the viewer. What holds the axis is that the particular thins out: she is the same for every sitter by design, the sitters are many and anonymous, and the archetype is carried by a protocol more than by a life.
P. G. Wodehouse · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The archetype is built, not evoked. The clever servant who runs the household’s intrigues and rescues the foolish young master, the servus callidus of Plautus and Terence and the valet of Molière and Beaumarchais, is the load-bearing structure of the plot, and here it is turned to full use: Bertie decides that Jeeves has lost his grip and takes the management of everyone’s affairs upon himself; his schemes fail in sequence; and Jeeves restores order by a stroke that leaves every couple united in indignation against Bertie, the wise servant’s victory paid for in the master’s dignity. Bertie is a version of the innocent fool, protected by his own goodness; the aunts are an ogre pattern softened to farce. Held below the bar because the myth stays inside the genre’s machinery and opens onto nothing larger than the comedy’s world.
David Fincher · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Myth is partly built. The Punch and Judy puppets left in the woodshed are the pattern made literal: the husband who beats, the wife who is beaten, and the baby between them, which the ending turns into the wife’s weapon; the last turn of the plot is the puppet show reversed. Amazing Amy, the children’s-book double whom her parents improved upon her life, is a real device: the self replaced by its idealised image, the woman who becomes the story told about her. Under them run Bluebeard inverted, the secret room the wife’s, and the femme fatale of noir given her own voice. The limits are weighed heavily. The puppets are one built pattern among patterns quoted; the archetypes stay small and mostly ironic, quoted with a wink; and the marriage, for all its scale in the press, does not become every couple’s.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The double bears the load. Birdman, the costume that speaks in Riggan’s own voice in a deeper register, is the shadow self who tempts him with power and despises his art, and the film is built as a contest between them that runs to the shot and ends there. Icarus is evoked in the falling fire of the prologue, in the bird’s name and in the ledge, and the ending turns the fall into an ascent that the film declines to confirm. The actor’s death and rebirth before an audience, the self given for the play, is enacted with a real bullet. What holds it: the double is also a joke about a particular star’s career, the Icarus figure stays a set of images, and Carver’s lovers lend a second myth the frame does not carry far.
Lal Chand Ustad · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
One archetype is built, not alluded to: the veil. The front is a threshold between the seen and the unseen that is not a door but a surface, and it is load-bearing, since the whole front is that threshold and nothing else. A second figure is the crest, tiers rising to one point. A tradition, which cannot be confirmed, reads the outline as the crown of Krishna, to whom Pratap Singh was devoted; if so, the sacred is evoked by outline and not built into the plan. The jharokha carries a royal archetype, the window of appearance from which a ruler showed himself to his people, and here it is turned inside out: a window of watching from which no one is shown. That inversion is the deepest thing in the building, and it stays particular. Held well below the gate because the myth is one figure, carried by the front; the plan behind it holds none of it.
Norse · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Partly built, more often evoked. The built place is the shield-biting warder: the warrior of northern saga in battle frenzy, who bites his shield, is not alluded to but made a rank of the game, so that a figure of myth stands in the line of battle at the corner of the board. The second built structure is the game itself, the world’s order of king, queen, church and arms set out as pieces moved by a player, the old image of fortune and rule as play. The kings with swords across their knees summon the enthroned judge; the queens with hand to cheek summon the mourning woman. These are evoked by posture, not carried by a story, and the archetypes are the game’s and the age’s more than the work’s.
René Magritte · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Here the title does real work. The Son of Man is the name Christ gives himself in the Gospels, and the apple before the face is the fruit of the Fall. Together they put Adam and the Son of Man, the first man and the second, into one bourgeois figure, and the fruit that gave knowledge blocks the face it was meant to open. That is myth built into the image, not only alluded to: the apple is the composition’s centre and its archetypal charge at once. What holds it well short of the bar is the man himself, who carries no archetype beyond Everyman in a uniform. The typology is supplied by the title rather than enacted by the figure, and the sea and wall add no mythic order.
Robert Motherwell · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The archetypes are present and in part built. The built part is the procession itself: masses advancing slowly in one direction between uprights read as a funeral cortege, a frieze of mourners or of coffins, and the reading comes from the form, not from allusion; a lament made as a rhythm is the oldest elegiac structure there is. The opposition of black and light as death and life, and the pressure of the one on the other, is built in the same way. What is evoked rather than built: Spain itself, the bullring, the elegies of Lorca that stand behind the series, all of which arrive through the title and the history. The particular, a republic destroyed in 1939, is named, not made particular on the canvas. Myth partly constructed, mostly evoked.
Yayoi Kusama · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
More built than evoked. The starfield is made by the object: lights in darkness on every side and below make the room a night sky, and the visitor stands in it, not under it. Narcissus is built at full size: a pool of water and walls of mirror give back the self, and the self is lost in it, and the maker had named Narcissus before, at Venice in 1966. The third structure, the souls of the dead, is carried by the title, which calls the lights souls and sets them at light years, the light of stars that may be gone. The particular stays particular: a box, a walkway, coloured diodes. What holds the axis well below the gate is that the third structure rests on the title more than on the room, and that the room’s pattern is one image, the infinite field, not a story of what happens in it.
Terry Pratchett · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
The archetypal frame is built, not only evoked. The fallen god who must learn mortality from the creature he ruled; the holy fool who becomes the prophet; the wilderness in which faith is tried; the covenant struck at the end, which the god accepts because he has no choice; the inquisitor as the shape of religion that has forgotten its god; the eagle and the tortoise, made the engine of the plot and its end. The particular stays particular: the god is a bad-tempered tortoise who wants lettuce, the prophet a slow boy from the melon gardens. The theology of belief is the physics of the book, and so the frame is load-bearing. It stops below the bar because the patterns are often turned to comic inversion, and the book’s myth is a commentary on myth more than a myth that stands on its own.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Myth is built in more places than it first appears. The fall of empire is the largest frame, and End of the Empire lifts it from a private crisis to a civilisation in decline and then to the cosmos, the black hole as the centre that swallows. That frame is evoked more than borne by any figure. The second half builds. The Lightning makes the storm the bond between two people, and Unconditional I (Lookout Kid) is a parent’s blessing on a child going out into the world, the old pattern of the father’s charge given particular warmth. Above both, the record lays out across its halves the opposition of the solitary I and the plural WE, an opposition its form inhabits, though the plural acquires a face only in the blessing.
André Waterkeyn; André and Jean Polak · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Myth built, not evoked, and of one kind: the microcosm magnified to the scale of the macrocosm, matter’s invisible order made a monument, the visitor shrunk to walk inside the atom. The archetype is load-bearing in the most literal sense, since the lattice is the structure and the bonds are the passages. The building also takes the old form of the fair’s tower, the summit from which the city is surveyed, and sets it inside a figure of the world’s smallest parts. What holds the axis is that the myth is a diagram before it is an archetype: a scientific model, particular and exact, whose depth comes from a period’s faith in the atom more than from any older pattern of threshold, cave or axis.
James Montgomery Flagg · Visual art
7.2 · Tier III
Here the image does more than evoke. Uncle Sam existed before Flagg, a personification of the United States from the early nineteenth century developed by cartoonists, Thomas Nast among them, often as a lean comic figure. This picture fixed him: the stern patriarch of the starred hat and goatee has been, for a century, what the nation looks like when it wants something. Under him the archetype is old and load-bearing, the father who calls the sons to war, the elder who sends the young to die, the nation as a family whose head may demand a son; it is why “I want you” lands as a summons and not a request. What holds the axis: the myth is held as type, with no story and no cost shown.
Frédéric Chopin · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
What is built is a journey through every key that does not come home: C major to D minor, with no return, ending on three low Ds. That trajectory bears some weight, since the last three preludes are a disquiet, an unresolved seventh and a catastrophe. The rest is evoked. The funeral heard in the chords of No. 20, the storm and the rain heard in No. 15, the bell and the prayer: these are given by listeners, and the storm is George Sand’s story, not the score’s. Gide and Cortot gave the preludes images and titles the set did not ask for. The key cycle is a system, not a myth, and this is the lowest of the twelve axes but one.
Thelonious Monk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
With no words and no story, the archetypal must be built by the music or not at all, and little is built. The title track can be heard as an ordeal, a passage the company must make and nearly cannot, but that figure belongs more to the legend of the session than to what the music builds; the alternation of tempos is built, and it keeps the figure from falling lower. “Pannonica” draws the patron and the artist, an old pairing evoked by a title and a celeste rather than constructed. “I Surrender, Dear” carries a song of submission into a solo with no words, and the irony of the title is the listener’s. The blues stands as the inherited pattern. Myth is evoked, lightly, and the particular stays particular: the record’s lowest gated axis.
Li Chun · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
One archetype is load-bearing in the literal sense: the joining of two shores, the crossing over water, made by a single arc leaping the river rather than a causeway walking across it. The rainbow and the dragon, the Chinese figures of the arch over water, are present in the profile and carved on the balustrade, partly evoked and partly built. The richest myth lies outside the fabric: the legend that Lu Ban built the bridge in a night, and that immortals crossing with a donkey and a cart left the marks still shown on the deck, sung in the folk song of the little cowherd. That legend is told of the work, not built into it. Threshold and crossing are here; cosmos, death and the sacred are not.
Paolo Uccello · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Mostly evoked. The commander at the head of his troops, baton raised, on a white horse, summons the chivalric triumph and the tournament; the unhorsing is the oldest event of the lists, and the pageant echoes the romance world that Florentine households hung on their walls and painted on their chests. The orange trees evoke the garden, and have been read as a Medici emblem, a reading that is disputed. What is built is one structure: war as a ritual of order, a contest in which death is laid out in the same lines as the ground. That is more a vision than an archetype. The particulars stay particular, a named condottiere, a named enemy, a named day, and they take on the air of legend, but the archetypal structure does not bear the load. Evoked well, built thinly.
Josef Hoffmann · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetypes are evoked more than built. The house is called a palace and was made as one: a house that receives, a temple of art for a collector, its stair tower a campanile crowned with a dome and guarded by figures, an echo of Olbrich’s laurel dome on the Secession building in Vienna. The hall rising through two storeys at the heart of the plan is a real archetype of the dwelling, the great hall of the lord’s house, and it bears weight in the plan. But the tower’s crown is allusion set on the massing, the garden’s order is formal rather than mythic, and the framed wall’s meaning, weight denied, is an idea about building. The Tree of Life, the deepest myth in the house, is Klimt’s and is not scored.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present, and mostly evoked. The stacked rectangles suggest a threshold, a doorway or a stele; the dark over the warm suggests night over fire, or the tomb over the living, and the late dark canvases have been taken as meditations on death. Rothko came to this format from the mythic painting of the early 1940s, Aeschylus among his sources, and the letter of 1943 held that “only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.” But in the classic format the myth has withdrawn into the colour. There is no particular to become universal, because the particular has been removed. The threshold is a reading the viewer brings, supported by the structure, not built by it.
Burnham and Root; south half by Holabird and Roche · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Two archetypes are present. The first is built into the section: the battered wall or pylon, the mass that thickens at the base and rises to a flaring crown, Egyptian in profile, and here not quoted as ornament but constructed as the actual path of the load, so that the archetype of the enduring wall bears weight in the most literal sense. The second is the cliff or mountain, which the building’s name invokes and its dark, undifferentiated mass carries. What holds the axis at 7.5: the mountain is a name, not a plan; the pylon is a profile, not a programme; no threshold, axis or cosmic order is built into a plan that is a corridor with offices off it. The particular stays particular, a Boston syndicate’s investment on a Chicago lot.
James McNeill Whistler · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The particular holds absolutely: one widow, in her son’s London room. The archetype the picture carries is the Mother, and behind her the widow in black, the matriarch, the seated elder who waits. Part of it is built. The strict profile is the posture of the coin and the donor, not of the portrait; the black is mourning; the figure is turned to the side and out of time. These are structural, and they make the archetypal reading available. But the myth of the canvas was largely made by its afterlife, the mother of popular reproduction and parody, a meaning the painter’s title resisted. The axis credits myth built, not myth received, and this is the lowest of the twelve but The Encompassed.
Vladimir Shukhov · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present and in part built. The tower to heaven is load-bearing here in the literal sense: a structure that exists only to be high, stage upon stage toward a point, the old figure of Babel answered by a state that meant to speak to the whole world by radio. The raising of each stage inside the last and up through it is a built myth of growth, the shell inside the shell; the woven vessel is the form’s own image. What holds the axis at the minimum: the myth is mostly evoked by what the tower was for and when it rose, not built into plan and section. There is no axis of approach, no threshold, no interior; much of the charge is a period’s myth of itself.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present and evoked, not built. The figure seen from behind, looking into a space the viewer cannot enter, is the Rückenfigur of German Romantic painting, Friedrich’s figure before the sea or the mist; here the sea has become a grey field, and the allusion is real and placed. The backward glance of Eurydice and of Lot’s wife is summoned by any figure turning over the shoulder, and the daughter turning from the father toward her own world is the oldest family story there is. None of these bears load: the canvas is built on the photograph and the turn, and the myths are brought by the viewer’s memory of other pictures. The particular stays particular, a girl in a patterned jacket. Evoked well, built not at all.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The lowest of the gated axes, and mostly evoked. Main Street, the small-town row of shops carried into the city, is the archetype the picture summons: the American commercial street as the common place of a people. Morning as a beginning and the Sabbath as a pause in the world’s work enter through the light and, more strongly, through a title the painter may not have chosen. The barber’s pole is a sign as old as trade. One thing is built rather than evoked: the frontal frieze and the empty pavement turn the row into a facade like a temple’s or a stage set’s, a structure that waits. But the particular stays one street and does not become the archetype it suggests. Myth evoked, partly built.
Jean-Siméon Chardin · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Mostly evoked, built in one place. The built place is the sacrifice: a body hung at the centre, opened, with a face, above an altar-like ledge, and the knife laid ready. The archetype of the slaughtered and displayed victim, the crucified, the flayed, the butcher’s ox, is carried by the composition itself, the hung vertical between two horizontal groups, not by any sign or allusion. Elsewhere the deep patterns are summoned, not built: the cat as appetite and predation, the old emblem of the cat at the fish; mortality without a skull. The particulars stay particular, a ledge, a jug, onions. But the archetype is given no further structure, no second term, no rite and no answer, and the face may be taken as a joke as easily as an omen. Evoked strongly, built at its centre only.
George Stubbs · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Partly built. The structure that carries the picture is the equestrian monument with its rider removed: the rearing horse is the horse of kings, of Marcus Aurelius and of the Baroque state portrait, and here it rears for nobody. That absence is not allusion; it is the canvas’s form, and it lets the archetype of the horse itself, power that serves and will not quite serve, stand without its master. The horse stays particular: a named animal, a chestnut coat, a pale mane, a particular head. But the archetype is built only by negation, and the picture does not develop it; Pegasus, the horses of the sun and the horse as emblem of nobility are summoned by the viewer more than constructed by the work.
The Walkmen · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The deep patterns come often and are drawn well. The sea and the shore recur, the beach that cannot be found in the opening song, the water, the tiny islands, and with them the journey out and the return. The new year is the oldest of renewal rites, the vow made at the turn of time; the red moon is an omen; the wanderer who wants to come home and the lover lost and sought again are figures as old as song. The sequence half carries a passage, from the night out through the vow and the hymn to settling. What holds the axis: the man at the centre stays a particular man in particular bars, and the pattern is evoked more than built.
Ovid · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth is everywhere in the book and almost nowhere load-bearing. The exempla, Atalanta, Andromache, Ariadne, Leda and Danae, are summoned as ornament and argument, often with a smile at their use. The best built figure is Cupid the thief of 1.1, who is said to have laughed and stolen one foot from the verse, and so turns hexameter epic into elegy: a small myth of the poet’s vocation, and it does bear the book. The other built pattern is the soldier-lover of 1.9, a type that later literature inherits. The lover shut out at the door, and Elegy personified in 3.1, are conventions handled, not founded. Corinna is a name, not an archetype; the book declines to make her one, and the refusal is part of its point.
John Singer Sargent · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Mostly evoked. The crescent summons Diana, the huntress, the cold and chaste goddess of the moon; the profile summons the cameo and the coin, the sovereign’s head in relief; the frontal body with the averted face summons the idol, worshipped and not addressing its worshippers. These carry, and they are held in the particular: a woman of the Paris season, a real dress, a banker’s wife named in the subtitle. One thing is built: a mortal made a goddess by display, and the price of that making, the strain in the arm. But the old pattern of the mortal made an image and punished for it is carried more by the history around the canvas than by its structure, and on the canvas the archetype is chiefly attribute.
Sex Pistols · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Myth is evoked often and built in one place. God Save the Queen builds an inversion: the national hymn, the most ritual song a British crowd sings, remade as its own curse, so that the anthem’s name carries the anti-anthem. That structure bears load and holds the figure up. Around it archetypes are summoned: the singer as “I am an antichrist”, the fool who speaks against the throne, the wall as the edge of the world. The particular stays particular: a girl from Birmingham, a record company, a holiday camp. What holds the axis well below the bar is that the figures are poses more than structures, and the myth of punk’s year zero belongs to the history around the record, not to the record.
Fleetwood Mac · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Myth is evoked often and built in one place. The Chain builds it: five people whose couples have broken swear an oath to the company instead of to one another, and the song is the only one credited to all five, so the vow is enacted by the form. Around it the figures are summoned rather than constructed: the prophetess of Dreams, who speaks of weather as of fate, and the ruined queen of Gold Dust Woman, “silver spoon” and “dig your grave”, a woman undone by her own appetite; Songbird, a blessing sung over the departed. What holds the axis low is where the myth lives: much of its force is the legend brought to the record, not built by songs that, heard cold, are particular breakup songs.
Sigur Rós · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Myth is evoked richly and built only through sequence and titles. The figures are old ones: angels and sleepwalkers, an elf, a liberator of flies, and at the close Avalon, where the wounded king is carried and does not die. Read as a sequence the record makes a passage, from a good beginning and a sleepwalker’s waking to a last track named for the isle of the blessed, its music slowed toward stillness: birth to the otherworld. The frame is the record’s own. What holds the axis well below the bar is that no figure bears it. No person, place or story is audible to a listener without the Icelandic, and the archetypes stay atmosphere, evoked rather than built.
Beach House · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Myth is named in the first title and evoked across the record, and one figure carries it: paradise and its loss, the garden known only as it fades. The titles reach toward the deep pattern with intent, Myth, Lazuli (lapis, the stone of heaven), On the Sea, Irene (peace, and a name), New Year as the turning of time, and Irene’s “strange paradise” gives the figure weight at the close, where the form itself enacts a paradise that ends and returns. Held back because the figure is evoked and not built: there is no story, no persona held through the record, no pattern whose structure the songs carry, and the sea, the sky and the year stay images laid over one sensibility’s longing.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The archetype is the oldest the medium has: the church window as the threshold at which light enters a sacred house, light as the presence of what cannot be pictured. Here it bears load, since the window does exactly that and nothing else; and a second pattern stands beside it, a cosmos made by chance, the many held as one. But the window builds by withdrawal. It evokes the archetype through the site and the medium more than it constructs it in a particular, and there is no particular here to become archetypal, only colour. The myth of light belongs to the building before it belongs to the glass. Evoked strongly and built in part, but not made from a particular, and well short of the gate.
Joan Miró · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Some is built, more is evoked. The built part is carnival itself: the feast before the fast, the world turned upside down, set in a starving painter’s room so that the feast is made from want. The inversion is load-bearing, not allusion, since the picture’s whole method, objects made alive, the high and the low mixed, the room a fair, is the carnival’s law. Harlequin, the commedia’s hungry servant and trickster and the figure of the artist in the harlequins of Cézanne and Picasso, is the right host, and the wound in his guitar body ties the trickster to his hunger. The ladder of ascent is old and present. But the Harlequin arrives by inheritance as much as he is rebuilt, and the small creatures stay emblems of a private bestiary.
Christopher Nolan · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The myth is shaped more than inhabited. The Oedipal inquiry is there and does work: an investigator seeks the man who destroyed his house and may be the agent of the crime himself. Lethe is the hero’s condition: he cannot drink from memory, and so he repeats. The revenge that has no end is a labour he chooses to restart, and the law tattooed backwards on his skin, to be read in a mirror, is a figure of real depth. The particular stays particular: a motel, a Jaguar, a bar, a derelict building. What holds it here: the archetypes are worked as the logic of a puzzle, the wife is an image rather than a person, and the myth’s weight falls on its shape far more than on its human cost.
Howard Hawks · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The myth is built, and it is the remarriage. A couple divorced at the start is brought back together not by a new love but by the recognition of what the first one was, and the third party, the decent man from Albany, is the ordinary life the pair cannot live in. The structure bears the load: every scheme is a courtship, and the ending is a second wedding without a ceremony. Walter is trickster, tempter and liar, half devil; Bruce the innocent with an umbrella and a mother; Hildy the one who chooses. Beside it stands the scapegoat, Earl Williams, a little man made to die for the city’s fear, hidden in a desk like a body in a coffin. What holds it: the scapegoat is the play’s and stays a device, and the remarriage is played at a speed that keeps it particular more than it lets it deepen.
Lucian Freud · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The archetypes are summoned plainly: the sleeping Venus of Giorgione and Titian, the reclining nude from Rubens to Courbet, and further back the great mother of the paleolithic figurines, the body as earth. One of them is built rather than evoked. The sleeping Venus is a structure in which the goddess is unaware and the viewer looks freely; here that structure is kept exactly and its subject replaced, so that the inherited pattern carries a modern particular, a named office worker on a studio sofa, and the pattern itself is put in question. The particular stays particular: this sofa, this woman, this job. But the mother and the earth are brought by viewers more than built by the canvas, and the work’s relation to myth is mostly a relation to the history of painting.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Myth is evoked in titles and figures, strongly and often. Burn the Witch summons the witch-hunt and the crowd that names its victim, a myth older than any of its uses. Tinker Tailor sets the counting rhyme of fates beside a murky lament. The moon-shaped pool of the title suggests water, reflection and drowning, and the record ends in still water of a kind. Daydreaming passes through rooms toward a point of no return, and the dreamer who never learns is a type; Desert Island Disk takes the castaway’s frame. What holds the axis is that none of these is built into a structure that carries the record, and the alphabetical order forbids a constructed journey.
The White Stripes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Myth is evoked often and built in one pattern: the lost Eden of childhood, held against the fallen adult world of fame, money and the crowd. The figures are archetypes kept particular: the boy who stays the same, the schoolchild walking with a friend in autumn, the lovers who want a hotel room and a ring, the house of the first track left with its dead leaves. The Union Forever is the strongest construction: its words are by report taken from Citizen Kane, a film whose own myth is lost childhood, and on that report the borrowing makes the longing explicit as a fall from Rosebud into power. The persona of a brother and sister carries the myth into the band’s presentation. What holds it: the pattern is mostly summoned in image and mood, the songs do not build it in sequence, and several tracks leave it entirely.
Robert Altman · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The patterns are built into the plot, not only named. The old story of crime and punishment is turned over: Mill kills, is suspected, and instead of confession receives promotion, a wife and a child. The pursuer who is never seen, a voice and a stack of postcards, is a nemesis who at the end proposes not justice but a deal, and the deal is the film: a devil’s bargain struck by telephone. The story that ends by pitching itself is load-bearing in the coda, and the killing behind a screening of Bicycle Thieves sets the neorealist ideal of cinema beside an industry that cannot use it. What holds the figure: the archetypes are handled with irony more than inhabited, Mill stays a type, and the frame of Hollywood as Babylon is inherited and drawn in quick strokes.
The Walkmen · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Old patterns are summoned and given a shape. The far city stands as a place of escape and light; youth is a season that ends; the record makes the voyage out, and sets winter in “While I Shovel the Snow” against the summer of “Angela Surf City”. The title gives the whole one destination, a European port seen from New York, and the sequence arrives there, the claim of youth at the start and the far city at the close, so that the pattern of departure is carried by the order and not only named. What holds the axis well below the gate: no figure with a face, no story, words too oblique to make a person stand. The myth is evoked through title, tone and sequence; it is not built.
Fleet Foxes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Myth is evoked richly and built in two places. The materials are archetypal (mountains, the morning sun, winter, wanderers, the hymn, the brother to be called home), set in an older countryside of no particular time, and most of it is atmosphere. Two songs build. “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” makes the mourner at a friend’s grave a figure from a ballad, asking the old question of the body’s death with no modern frame. “Blue Ridge Mountains” builds the call to the wandering brother, the elder speaking to the younger at night, and keeps the brother particular. “White Winter Hymnal”, with its “scarves of red” and its fall that reddens the snow, is a nursery rhyme with blood in it, evoked rather than built.
Beach House · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Myth is evoked through the imagery of stardom and romance, and one image carries the record. The superstar as a distant light is fame seen as a star is seen, bright and remote, and the record returns to it in the masquerade, the funeral in pink, the runaway, the bells, forever as illusion. These are images of the film studio and the love song, and the record uses their wear as part of their meaning: the dream is a dream everyone has already seen. Held back because no figure carries them; the “I” and “you” of the songs are positions in a romance, the four chapters trace no descent and return, and the particular is withheld almost entirely, with no place, no name and no event.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The deep pattern is the puer aeternus, the man who will not grow up, and it bears weight: five versions of it, and the one event of plot, a child, makes the oldest of them a father who still runs. The prodigal comes home and is beaten, not feasted, and the father’s belt is the only rite of passage the town offers. Carnival turns the world over, and Alberto’s dress and giant head are the mask that tells the truth for a night; the stolen angel is a fallen sacred object no one will buy. But most of this is evoked as texture, not worked through: the angel is an image, the carnival one episode, and the myth of departure belongs to Moraldo, who is barely a character. The pattern is built in the five men and evoked in nearly everything around them.
Robert Zemeckis · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The myth is built, not cited. The Oedipal structure is turned inside out and made load-bearing: the mother desires the son, the son must refuse her and make his father worthy of her, and only by uniting his parents can he be born. The photograph of three children, fading one by one, makes the son’s existence hang on his father’s courage, so that Marty is, in plot and in fact, the father of his father. What holds the figure: the myth is played as farce and resolved without cost; Doc as the Promethean inventor, with Frankenstein in his laboratory and his hair, is evoked in costume and gesture rather than built; and the family myth carries the whole weight alone.
Alex Garland · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The patterns are present and some bear weight. The journey to the capital is a descent through stations toward a ruler in the last room. The apprenticeship is a succession: the elder photographer gives her life for the younger, and the younger makes her image of the fall, so that the master’s death is the apprentice’s first true picture. The killing of the President is the old killing of the king, staged as a photo opportunity, the hunters posing over the quarry; Sammy is the old guide who goes farther than he should. These are built, not alluded to. What holds the axis is that the figures stay thin as persons, and the myth of the nation that kills itself is gestured at with the politics withheld.
William Friedkin · Film
7.4 · Tier III
The myth bears the climax. The old priest and the ancient enemy meet again, as the dogs and the statue of the prologue promise, and the duel is a liturgy against a voice. The doubting priest is the hinge: the demon reaches him through his mother, and his end is substitution, the oldest Christian figure made the climax of a studio picture. The violated innocent is a girl of twelve with a Ouija board in a rented house. It meets the bar of the Universal Minimum and no more, and stands a long way below the gate: Pazuzu stays a figure evoked rather than worked through, Merrin is drawn in strokes, and the pattern is taken whole from Church tradition and the novel, used with force rather than remade.
Chris Sanders · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Three patterns are built, not only evoked. The made creature who becomes more than her making inverts Frankenstein: a manufactured being taught by nature rather than rejected by its maker, and the plot turns on that becoming. The foster mother and the changeling, a gosling of another kind raised by the one who killed his family, carries the middle of the film and its estrangement. The peaceable kingdom, predator lying down with prey through the winter, is staged as an episode and has consequences. The mother who releases the child and the exile’s return are present too. The particulars hold it in the middle: Roz, Fink and Brightbill are types worked with care, and the myths are set out legibly rather than deepened.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked and almost nowhere built. Pollock’s canvases of 1943 to 1946 built it, with guardians, a she-wolf, Pasiphaë and totems from his Jungian years; by 1950 those figures had dissolved into the web. What remains is atmosphere that a viewer brings or a name suggests: the cosmos as a field of matter, the web, the energy of nature, and, in “One”, unity itself. The nearest thing to built myth is in the method: the painter on the ground, working from four sides, inside the image, which he likened to the sand painters of the American West. But the rite is in the making and is seen only as trace, and there is no particular to acquire significance. Below the Water Lilies, and a tenth below the Universal Minimum.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Plainly: there is no figure, no event, no place and no story, and nothing on the canvas is built as archetype. What the field summons, it summons as atmosphere. Nature as process: the web reads as thicket, root and the tangle of bare branches, which the earth palette directs and the later title names, and a title given afterward is not structure. The body’s dance: the line is the trace of a walking, bending, throwing body, and the oldest marks on walls are such traces. The labyrinth and the web, which the painter’s earlier mythological canvases let a reader bring; but it is brought. His figures of 1942–46 were totemic; this canvas veils everything, and veiled is not built. A work that summons deep patterns as atmosphere scores well, and this scores at the bottom of well, below the Water Lilies, whose day’s course is structure. There is no particular to acquire significance: not a pond, not a room, a surface.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Pollock had built myth into his canvases of the early 1940s, the guardians, the she-wolf, Pasiphaë, the totem. By 1950 the figures were gone from the surface, or, as has been reported and cannot be shown, veiled under the pour; what is veiled is not on the canvas to be scored. What the canvas carries is evoked. The rite of the floor, the painter moving round and into the canvas as the sand painters of the American Southwest worked, which he himself invoked, made the painting and is not legible in it. The cosmos, the web and the mist of creation are brought by the viewer. Little on the surface is built as archetype, and the particular stays wholly particular, acquiring little beyond its own act.
Steve Reich · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
With no words, figures or story, the archetypal is built by the music or not at all, and one figure is built: the wheel. The cycle of eleven chords is stated, unfolded one chord at a time over an hour, and returned to, so that the large form is a circle walked once, slowly. The breath is a second figure, old and bodily: voices and clarinets end each pulse because they must breathe. Both bear weight in the structure. What holds the axis here, below the Universal Minimum, is the particular, which the work keeps hardly at all: no place, person, rite or act is named or figured, and the rituals behind the method stay in the method. Myth is shaped as pattern, and pattern is credited only in part.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The particular is very particular: two named sitters, a café of the city, a real drink. It acquires archetypal standing in part. The woman with the glass has become a figure of modern dissipation and urban solitude in general, and a man and a woman side by side who do not touch evoke the oldest image of the couple, turned inside out. But the archetype is summoned by the subject, and by the picture’s later fame, more than built into the structure. What the composition builds is isolation, which is a condition and not a myth; no deep pattern bears load as a descent bears load in a great tragedy. Myth evoked, not built.
Victor Horta · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The archetype is growth: the house as a living organism, iron as stem, line as sap, light drawn down through the centre as through a canopy. It is partly built, not only evoked. The stair and the well are the house’s trunk, the plan grows from that centre, and the column enacts the plant at the threshold. The threshold too is staged, from the street to the half-lit octagon to the stair rising toward light, an ascent with real structure. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven is that the deeper pattern is carried more by ornament than by plan and section. The house is not a cosmos, a temple or a cave in its bones, and its myth of nature is a modern, aesthetic one, nature as style, nearer allusion than load-bearing form.
Antonio da Sangallo the Younger; Michelangelo; Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve, and what holds it there is that the archetypes built are the type’s. The house is a closed fortress with one door and one axis; the passage runs from the city’s square through a shadowed hall into an open court, and on to garden and river; the courtyard is the ancient theatre, its orders climbing from heavy to light, so that the family lives inside Rome’s order of ascent. These are structure, not ornament, but they are the Roman palace carried to its largest scale, not made to bear a meaning of their own. The antique is mostly evoked, and the largest myth on offer, a bridge joining the house to the far bank, was never built.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The spiral is one of the oldest signs there is: growth, the shell, the vortex, the coiled path inward and out, life unfolding from a seed. Here it is built in one respect, and that is why the figure is not lower: the whole composition is the spiral, and the snail’s shell is carried not as an emblem but as the actual order of the planes. The rest is evoked or brought by the viewer: the snail as slowness and patience, the creature that carries its house; an old painter making a figure of growth in his last full year; the cosmic whorl. Almost nothing particular is left to become archetype, and the archetype is summoned at the level of geometry, not acquired through a world. That is the axis’s limit.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
What holds the axis lowest of the eleven is that the archetype is evoked, not built. The turn of the beloved’s head, the face that looks back, is an old pattern; Orpheus and Eurydice could be summoned, but the picture does not summon them. The turban places her in the exotic costume of the Dutch tronie, which evokes a far world without building one. The pearl carries old Dutch associations of purity and vanity, and here it is not moralised. The muse and the maid, the modern myth that has gathered round her anonymity, were supplied by a novel and are not in the canvas. The particular girl has become, for a very large public, the image of a face; that is presence, not construction, and nothing in the structure bears the archetype’s weight.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Three archetypes are present, and one is built. The nude, the Venus and the bather of the painters, is summoned by the title in order to be emptied: the body that should recline and offer itself instead marches down a stair with no flesh. That refusal is the painting’s whole charge, made in the word and in the image, and it is myth worked against. The descent, the stair as a passage downward, carries faint echoes of katabasis and of the angels on Jacob’s ladder inverted, and is evoked by the stair alone. The man made machine, which the century would make one of its myths, the canvas points toward; the Bride and the Large Glass built it. Held below the gate because only the first is constructed, and it is constructed by negation.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present but chiefly evoked. The vault is a cave or a tent of meeting, the oldest sheltering form, and the parabola, rising straight from the ground, makes roof and earth continuous. The freestanding tower, the curve and the tile recall the colonial baroque churches of Minas Gerais, a regional memory translated into concrete, and Saint Francis, poor and among creatures, is suited to a light shelter among water and gardens. But the plan does not build an archetype as load-bearing structure: there is no axis to the altar beyond the ordinary, no threshold sequence of descent or ascent, no cosmos built into the section. The myth is evoked by allusion and by the lyric of the curve.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present and mostly evoked. The circle as cosmos, sun or planet, the music of the spheres: the black circle with its corona invites the reading, and Kandinsky’s own writing on the circle as the most cosmic of forms supports it as doctrine. The canvas as an orchestra of voices, painting as music, is the governing analogy of his programme and comes with the title. But here the archetype belongs to the doctrine before it belongs to the particular. The forms carry a myth his theory brings to every painting of these years, and build none of their own. The prewar Compositions built the deluge, the last judgement, the rider and resurrection into their structure; this canvas sets them aside. A cosmic order evoked by circles is real, and stays below the gate.
Talk Talk · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked, not built. The governing image is the season of the title: spring as renewal after winter, April 5th as a date of awakening, Time It’s Time as the moment of release. Against it stands innocence handed on and spoiled, the children’s choir singing a lesson the adult voice doubts; and the chameleon of Chameleon Day is an old figure, a self that changes colour to survive. The record arranges itself along these patterns, from the doubted lesson at its start to the release at its end. What holds the axis is that no figure carries them: there is no person, no place and no story, the seasons are atmosphere, and the archetype is reached by mood and title. Evoked well, and that is what the axis credits.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The patterns are present and mostly evoked. The son the family sends to war is the oldest of them, and the painting carries it through what the viewer brings to a soldier of that army rather than through anything on the canvas. The ancestor portrait, the standing figure of a forebear set up for descendants to look at, is evoked by the title and the stance, and here a little is built: the family snapshot is raised into the form of a portrait, so that the household’s regard and the painter’s distance meet in one object. The revenant, the dead kept in the house as an image, is built by the blur, which makes him look like an apparition of himself. Mostly the particular stays particular: an uncle in a uniform, not a figure of myth.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
One pattern is built, not alluded to: the spiral. The lightwells turn up the tower floor by floor, so that growth by rotation, the form of shell and pine cone, bears load in the section and is visible on the skin. A second is half built: the tower closing to a lens, an eye on the sky, the summit room a dome of the heavens set on a counting-house. The rest is projected. The egg, the bullet and the pickle are the city’s jokes, not the building’s construction, and the nickname most people know is a domestication, not an archetype. What holds the axis below the Universal Minimum: no threshold, axis or procession gives the visitor an ascent. The lift takes them up.
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The record evokes rather than builds. Sanders carries the spiritual jazz of his own past, Karma of 1969 and its long devotional chant, and the lineage of John and Alice Coltrane, and the record summons that lineage as aura: the elder, the vow, the hymn without a creed. The structure has an archetypal shape, a long vigil, a rising, a return to quiet, and the unchanging figure has the character of a rite. But the pattern is atmospheric; nothing in the work makes the myth load-bearing, as Winterreise makes the wanderer’s road the structure of its cycle. What stays particular is strong, this player, this age, this tone, and that is why the axis is not lower.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The archetypes are present and mostly evoked. The circle as cosmos and as the meeting of opposites is central to Kandinsky’s thought in these years, and here it is the right half’s whole weight. Against it the left half sets what is often read as a face in profile, so that the canvas can be read as the old confrontation of microcosm and macrocosm, a person before the heavens; that pairing is built into the two halves, which is more than allusion. But the face is never confirmed, and the reading depends on the viewer’s taking it. The circle’s cosmic meaning comes from the doctrine and not from this disc acquiring it, and the triad of primaries is a Bauhaus principle rather than a myth made particular.
Jenny Saville · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Evoked more than built. The figure summons the oldest image of the female body, the stone Venus of the Palaeolithic, broad and heavy, and the low view makes her a monument. It summons the reclining Venus of the painters by refusing her ease, setting her upright on a stool and against the viewer. The reversed text summons Narcissus and the mirror, and here one structure is built rather than alluded to: the canvas is made to be completed in a mirror, so that reading it repeats the act it shows, a woman seeing herself through a surface. That is load-bearing, and small. The goddess and the monument stay a summons. The particular body never becomes the figure it calls up, and does not wish to.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The archetype built into the plan is the gathering round a centre: terraces of listeners round the music, like a hillside round a fire or a dancing floor, which is the vineyard plan’s own image. It bears load in the room, but it is received from the type, not built anew. The rest is evoked. The ship under sail, the opening flower, Lillian Disney’s love of gardens remembered in the rose fountain, the wave and the billowing tent are readings the forms invite and do not construct: no procession, threshold or axis gives the visitor an ascent the sails embody, and the climb to the garden is a promenade, not a rite. The deep pattern is mostly allusion, and that holds the axis.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Mostly evoked, built in one place. The built place is the triangle of youth, beloved and age on one pendulum: the old man at one end in shadow, the young man at the other in the roses, and the woman swinging between them. It is the oldest comic structure there is, the old man deceived, carried here not by allusion but by the mechanics of the swing. Elsewhere the archetypes are summoned: the garden of love, the fête galante’s island of lovers, Cupid commanding silence, the lost slipper with its echo of the shoe as a token of desire. The particulars stay particular, a pink dress, a hat, a dog. But the deeper pattern is a joke’s, and a joke’s archetype is shallower than tragedy’s.
Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Built archetype is thin. What is built is the palace as a closed world with one ceremonial way through it, from the river entrance up the staircase, through the enfilade to the throne and to the church, and the sovereign’s house holding the sanctuary at its corner, its cupola rising from the roof. That is the residence of a sacred ruler, and the plan carries it. The rest is evoked: the crowd of figures over the cornice, the Olympus of the staircase ceiling, the trophies and armorials of the rebuilt halls. The palace takes the European royal residence as its type and does not rebuild it from a deeper archetype; the particular stays particular, this empress and this river, and the form is its period’s form of power.
Olafur Eliasson · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The sun is the oldest object of worship, and the work builds one: a disc over a congregation in a long hall like a nave, with people prone before it. That much is constructed, by the shape of the hall and the placement of the disc at its end. The rest is evoked: sunset, the end of a day, the last light, weather as the elder gods’ medium. The congregation’s posture was the public’s own invention, and the strongest archetypal image the work produced, the crowd seen lying in the mirror, belongs to its reception as much as to its construction. The particular stays particular, a London winter and a power station turned museum, and the archetype is never made load-bearing beyond the first gesture of making a sun.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Two patterns are built, not only evoked. The first is the cycle of desire and death made literal: insects drawn to honey and killed by the light that also draws them, the bowls set on footstools at the height of a patient’s feet. It is the vanitas still life turned into a working mechanism. The second is the apothecary’s coloured bottles, which carry the pharmacy back through the alchemist to the oldest theory of the body and the cosmos (read as the four elements, as they can be, they hold that theory in the room) and set it beside the modern packaging that has forgotten it. Beyond these the myth is allusion: the pharmacy as temple, the chemist as priest, medicine as the church of a secular age. That reading is invited and widely made, but the room does not build it; the viewer brings it. Built in two places, evoked in the rest.
David Fincher · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The archetype is the lone professional, the samurai of the hired gun, and the pattern is the climb up a hierarchy to the hidden master. Both are partly built: the chapters are rungs, and the last rung is the throne room. But the construction is of myth undone. The master at the top is no one; the killer spares him with a warning, and the revenge pattern, which should end in a reckoning, ends in a man by a pool. The deflation bears weight, and a myth must be built before it can be emptied, which lifts the figure above evocation. It is held here because the emptied myth has been a convention of the genre since the 1970s, and because the figure never gains depth beyond his genre: he is not Ahab, nor even Jef Costello, whose solitude reaches a death.
Tracey Emin · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The bed is the most archetypal piece of furniture there is: where a life is conceived, made love in, sick in, born in and died in. This bed holds that cycle literally, not by allusion: sex and its refuse, contraception and the refused birth, blood, sickness, and the near-death of the despair. That much is built into the object. The deathbed, the marriage bed and the lament of the Magdalen are evoked by viewers and by the press, and are atmosphere. What keeps it particular is its great strength: it is one woman’s bed, with her brands and her stains, and it acquires the archetype without losing her. Held below the bar because the structure, once seen, is the single fact of the bed, and nothing in the arrangement builds on it.
Shepard Fairey · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Here the image builds more than it evokes. The archetype is the leader as the one who sees the future: the upward, off-frame gaze of the Soviet and Chinese posters, of Jim Fitzpatrick’s Che of 1968 and of the saints in their altarpieces, the face lit from one side by a light the viewer does not see. That structure bears the load; it is what turns a senator’s photograph into an emblem. The national myth is built in the colours, red and blue, with the buff in the place of white, the flag reduced to a skin tone and a light. And the particular stays particular: one man, recognisably. What holds the axis is that the myth is borrowed whole and deployed rather than discovered, and the image adds to it only its subject.
Tom Wright (Atkins) · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
One archetype is built, not merely alluded to: the sail, and with it the ship standing out to sea, the Gulf’s old life of pearling, trading and the dhow carried into a tower whose sea face is literally fabric stretched between a mast and two booms. It bears load: take away the screen and the mast and the building has no figure. A second is built by the island, the place apart across water, the palace reached by a single causeway, the threshold made of sea. What holds the axis: the sail is a modern yacht’s as much as a dhow’s, a picture chosen for recognisability; the myth is legible from outside and nowhere in the plan, whose suites and atrium carry none of it; and the interiors answer to another fable, the palace of gold, borrowed rather than built.
David Childs (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
Myth built, not only evoked: the tower stands on the footprint dimension of the lost towers and stops at their two heights, so that the measures of the twins are set into its plan and section, then exceeded by the mast. That is load-bearing memory, a particular site carrying its dead in its numbers. The tapered prism with its needle evokes the obelisk, the memorial column of the American capital, and the axis rising from the place of death. The rest is allusion: the phoenix from the ashes, a founding date as a height, freedom as a former name. What holds the axis is that the archetypes are cited as figures and dimensions and not lived as procession or threshold; the visitor’s ascent is an elevator ride.
Gerrit Rietveld · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Does the particular become archetypal through what is built? The house’s ambition ran the other way: it breaks the enclosing box and refuses the gable, the hearth wall and the threshold, seeking a universal order of right angles and primary colours, the cosmology De Stijl took from Schoenmaekers and Mondrian. That cosmology is load-bearing here, but it is a movement’s myth, the universal as a programme, not an archetype rising through a particular. What is built of the older patterns is modest: the family gathered on one floor round a central stair lit from above, a centre that takes the hearth’s place, and the house as a shelter that opens and closes like a cabinet. The particular stays particular; the deep patterns are thin.
DJ Shadow · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked often and in one frame half built. The evocations are many: the changeling, the soul and its look, a dream transmission warning the present, the voices of the dead speaking from records. The frame is the descent into an underworld of forgotten sound, where a lone figure gathers the voices of the past and makes them speak again, the old pattern of the one who goes down to the shades. The Transmissions build that frame across the record and close it. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven is that the particular is thin: there are no figures, only voices without names, and the frame carries atmosphere more than load.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The flag is a totem in the old sense: the sign by which a people knows itself, saluted, pledged to, folded on coffins. That is load-bearing, since the work is nothing but the sign. But the construction works against myth rather than building it: the painting takes the emblem’s charge and neutralises it by making it a surface. The repetition gives a second pattern, the image multiplied as a crowd multiplies it, and the stack, an emblem growing as it approaches, can be read as the sign’s claim on the one who faces it: structural, but faint. The particular stays wholly particular, down to the forty-eight stars of a year. What holds the axis is that the myth is evoked by the subject and built only in the advance of the stack.
John Wood the Younger · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
One figure is built into the plan: the arc that embraces a landscape, an amphitheatre opened outward, the residents its audience and nature its stage, or, read the other way, their front a scene played to the park. The half-ellipse is the plan, the ha-ha makes the edge of the stage, and the sun’s course across the front is real. The rest is evoked. The pairing of the Circus as sun and the Crescent as moon belongs to the literature on the Woods and to the elder Wood’s antiquarian interests; no statement of the younger Wood’s intent is documented, and it is not credited here. Temple and palace lend dignity as dress. The archetype built is modest, and that holds the axis lowest of the eleven the Universal Minimum governs.
Louis Sullivan · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Sullivan’s ornament carries a myth he set down in writing: the seed unfolding into organic form, the growth of nature as the image of human creative power. Here it lives in the cast iron and in the terra cotta reveals, not in the plan or the section: myth evoked as image. The corner pavilion builds a threshold, a single door at the crossing given the densest ornament, though it is the threshold of a shop. Sullivan’s own built archetype, base, shaft and attic in the manner of a column, is weakened here: the base is two storeys, the shaft is a horizontal field, and the attic is gone. Myth evoked well in the iron and built thinly in the whole; the axis falls below the Universal Minimum.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The archetypes are present and largely evoked. The land and its naming: a continent made a country by writing names on it, the old pattern of possession by naming, made literal by letters laid on territory. America as an image of itself: the classroom map every citizen carries, as the flag is the emblem every citizen salutes. Some of this is built, since the canvas is made from exactly the two acts that make a nation’s image, drawing a line and writing a name, and from the turbulence that unmakes both. But the particular stays particular: this map, this decade’s painting, this joke on the classroom. It does not become an image of the earth, of origin or of a people’s story, and the myth of the nation arrives with the viewer rather than being raised by the work.
Roman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
One kind of archetype is built: the bridge, and the gate. The arcade carries water over the town as a bridge carries a road, and its arches are portals through which the life of the town passes underneath, so that the threshold is built many times over. The level line itself, the one horizontal that ignores the ground, is a figure of law set over nature, and it bears load. Beyond that the myth is evoked or accreted. The popular legend that the Devil built it in a night is a myth the town made about the work, not one the work constructs; the Christian images in the niches are later additions that do not reorganise it; its place on the city’s arms is presence, not depth. Strong as an image, thin as archetype: well short of the bar.
Amrita Sher-Gil · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Evoked more than built. Three women grouped invite the oldest patterns: the Graces, the Fates, the three ages, the sisters of the folk tale who wait to be chosen. The picture refuses the Graces’ dance and the Fates’ work. What it may build is the threshold: women before marriage, held between the father’s house and the husband’s, a pattern of initiation deep in Indian life and story. The stillness and the withheld gazes support it, making the three one waiting rather than three portraits. But no sign, no rite and no object bears the archetype; the threshold is supplied by the viewer from the sitters’ age and dress. The particulars stay particular, which is the picture’s strength. Myth evoked, at moderate depth.
Diébédo Francis Kéré · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The archetype is built, at small scale. The plan is the oldest one for teaching, in the region and in many others: the gathering under shade, the tree under which the elders sit, made as a roof held above the ground and apart from the walls. The raised roof bears that meaning as it bears the rain. It is the canopy over the gathering, and the open bays between the classrooms are literally the shaded place in the open where people sit together. The making adds a second pattern, found in many cultures: the communal raising of a shared house. What it does not do is build a cosmos, or carry the archetype into axis, threshold or ascent. The shade and the gathering are the whole of its myth, held plainly.
Pierre Koenig · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The house builds one archetype: the dwelling at the edge, the eyrie or lookout over the plain, a household suspended between earth and sky. It is load-bearing, for the cantilever is the house’s reason for being, and the pool in the angle, a still water at the brink, sharpens it. Beyond that the myth is evoked, and mostly by the image the house was given: the glass box as the Californian dream, the night city as a field of stars, the good life of the American century. That myth belongs to the photograph and the magazine more than to the frame. There is no threshold rite beyond the turn from closed street to open glass, and no axis or cosmos in the plan. The figure, 7.3, records one archetype well built and little else built at all.
Rem Koolhaas (OMA) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The built archetype is the stone hollowed: a solid like a found rock, with a cave cut through it for gathering, open at both ends to light. It bears some load. The hall is literally a void carved through the mass, and one climbs into the stone to reach it. But the pattern is received half-consciously and presented as wit rather than built as rite. No axis of approach dramatises the stone, and no threshold is crossed into the cave as into a temple; the steep entrance stair serves circulation. The gem, the meteorite and the crystal are readings the form invites, and its origin in a scaled-up house argues against reading it as a constructed myth. The tile room evokes Portugal by quotation. The deep pattern is mostly evoked, and that holds the axis.
Interpol · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The patterns are old and they are present: the night city as a place of temptation and exposure; the seducer and the spy; the flight from the town to the city that Next Exit offers; imprisonment set against freedom in Not Even Jail; the self made small at the close. The seducer is the record’s one figure in many guises, taken up in Evil, Slow Hands and C’mere, and Evil’s refrain gives love and death a single name, “Rosemary”. What holds it is that these are evoked more than built. The city is atmosphere rather than a structure the songs share, the seducer a pose set down between songs, and the name in Evil is used for its shiver and not followed.
Agatha Christie · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Myth is built in one figure and evoked elsewhere. The healer who kills is an old shape, and here it bears load: the physician trusted with the village’s life is its poisoner’s blackmailer and its murderer, and his access to the body, to the house and to the confidences of the dying is the means of the crime and of its concealment. The second built figure is the betraying chronicler: the faithful companion of the detective story, the Watson or the Hastings who is the reader’s proxy, turned into the hidden enemy. That is myth built within the genre’s own mythology, shallower ground than the old myths. The village as a closed garden with a serpent, the detective as an all-seeing judge who grants the guilty a death by his own hand, and Caroline as the village’s oracle of gossip are evoked, not built.
The Stooges · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The record evokes more than it builds, but one figure is built. The dog of I Wanna Be Your Dog is a particular lover’s wish and an archetype of abasement and devotion together, and the song is load-bearing on it: the leash, the obedience and the hunger are its whole structure. The year in 1969 is made into a figure of the empty calendar, a young man waiting for something to happen. We Will Fall reaches for a liturgy, a chant of falling with a mantra at its centre, and it evokes ritual without building it. The band’s name and the singer’s posture summon the holy fool, but that is a matter of presence and stage, which the record does not carry. One built image, one strong evocation, the rest atmosphere.
Luis Buñuel · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Myth is evoked often and built hardly at all, and the evasion is part of the argument. The opening summons the stone guest of the Don Juan legend, who strikes down the profaner of a tomb, and Goya’s execution, a national icon of martyrdom; both are dropped within minutes. The prefect’s sister calling from the grave touches the oldest pattern of the dead who summon the living, and the ostrich, the bird of the hidden head, closes the film as an emblem no one explains. These are sharp. But the relay forbids any pattern to bear weight across the whole: a chain without origin or end is anti-mythic by construction, and its archetypes are visited, not inhabited.
Buena Vista Social Club · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The patterns are evoked, not built. Chan Chan carries a small pastoral: a journey named by its stations, “De Alto Cedro”, and a pair of lovers at work. El carretero is the guajiro and his oxcart, the countryman of Cuban song. Candela and El cuarto de Tula play on fire as desire, and La bayamesa calls up the town of Bayamo and the east. The figure the record is best known by, forgotten masters returning and the lost social club of its title, is the strongest myth it has, and it belongs mostly to the sleeve, the story of the session and the film that followed, not to what the music builds. Inside the sequence no passage bears weight as myth: the archetypes are inherited furniture, kept in place.
John Nash · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
The archetype summoned is the pleasure palace of the East, the enchanted dome of the oriental tale, and the building evokes it with great completeness; the dragon over the banquet and the serpents of the Music Room give it creatures. But the myth is worn, not built. The plan is a long English enfilade along a corridor; the domes cover rooms that would have the same shape under a flat roof; no axis, threshold or ascent in the plan carries the fable. The archetype bears load only in the sense that the decoration is the building’s meaning. Myth evoked fully and scarcely built: that is what the gate exists to test, and it holds the axis well below it.
Steve McCurry · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
The particular is fully particular: one girl, one shawl with its holes, one sitting. The archetypes summoned are several and strong. The frontal face with the direct gaze is the oldest form of the icon, the face that looks out from the panel; the shawl drawn over a young woman’s head recalls the Madonna of devotional painting; the unreadable look calls up the enigmatic face. Above all, the nameless witness: the anonymous child who stands for a people. The search of 2002 gave the picture a second myth, the lost one found, but that belongs to the story told about the image. Within the frame the archetypes are evoked by format and posture, not built: nothing organises the icon or the Madonna into a structure that bears weight.
Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
One archetype is built into the massing, not alluded to: the couple, male and female, the solid and the transparent leaning together, a dance as the joining of two unlike bodies. It bears load in the sense that the corner is the couple; take it away and the building has no corner. A second is built from Prague itself: the domed corner turret of the embankment row, remade as a twisted crown. A third, a gap left by bombs filled with a dancing pair, life returning to a place of death, rests on the story more than on the plan. What holds the axis: the myth is a picture from outside, legible from the bridge and nowhere inside; it carries a borrowed and slightly comic particular, a Hollywood pair its architect later wished away; and plan and section carry none of it.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
One archetype is built, not alluded to: the trilithon, posts and a lintel, raised to the scale of a skyline, three uprights carrying a horizontal across their heads. It bears real load and is the whole figure. The second, the ship or ark lifted into the sky, is the SkyPark’s evident reading, partly built in a hull-like plane with a prow over the void and partly invited. The hanging garden is evoked by the planting; the gate, a frame on the waterfront facing the city, is legible from the bay. What holds the axis: these myths are drawn at the scale of an image, and the visitor passes through none of them; no threshold or ascent makes them a rite, only a lift ride, and the deep pattern stays emblem rather than structure lived.
Yousef Abdelky · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Two patterns are built rather than evoked, though both are inherited. The first is the axis toward Mecca, the qibla carried through court and hall to the wall of the ninety-nine names, load-bearing as it is in every mosque. The second is the garden of paradise: water along the arcades, flowers inlaid in every column and paved across the court, vines climbing the marble, the Qur’anic garden under which rivers flow laid out as a building to walk through. Floor, column and pool all carry it, which is more than allusion. What holds the axis: neither pattern is built anew. The garden is applied as ornament on a plan that does not itself become a garden, with no quartering by water and no tomb set within it as at the Taj Mahal, and the founder’s grave stands beside the work, not in it.
Michael Graves · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
One archetype is built into the elevation, not alluded to: the building as a body, with a base for feet, a body and a head. The giant order and keystone build a second, the gate or triumphal frame, a threshold of public authority magnified to the scale of the whole front. Portlandia brings the city’s own allegory down onto the building: Commerce, taken from the city seal, kneeling over the city’s door. These are real, and they stay particular, this block, this city, its seal. What holds the axis is that they are drawn in two dimensions. The plan and section carry none of them, the rooftop pavilions that would have crowned the head were cut before building, and the myth is legible as a picture more than lived as a place.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.1 · Tier III
The quest is built rather than evoked. The plot is a journey to the edge of the map for a substance that will grant union, and it fails as such quests fail, by granting it once and in a form that cannot be kept. Behind it lies the myth of the halved beings who seek to be one again, made literal in the merging. The centipede, Burroughs’s emblem of what disgusts and attracts, is carried as a talisman. The William Tell shot bears weight in the epilogue: a legendary act of marksmanship turned into the record of a real death. What holds the axis: the archetypes arrive mainly in the last third, the Mexico City section is particular without being archetypal, and the allusion to Joan Vollmer’s death depends on knowledge outside the film more than on construction within it.
Massive Attack · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Myth is evoked in places and built nowhere. The strongest figure comes in the closing track: the great wheel, at once the turning earth and the wheel of fortune, under which one man struggles while another rests. It is the record’s one archetype, and it arrives as a hymn’s image, not as a structure the album bears. Safe from Harm summons the guardian of her own against the city’s threat; One Love borrows a title that carries Jamaica’s song of union; Five Man Army gestures toward a war film’s band of men, and the crew of the title track is that band seen at rest. What holds the axis low is that the particular is withheld: the city is never named in the words, few figures have faces, and the archetypes are evoked by title and image more than built by the sequence.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The painter came to this format out of myth. In the 1940s he painted subjects from Aeschylus and from the story of Oedipus, and in 1943, with Adolph Gottlieb, he wrote to the New York Times that only the tragic and timeless subject is valid. The classic format gave up the subjects and claimed to keep their essence. On the canvas the archetypes are present only as readings brought to it: the doorway, the stele, the horizon dividing earth from sky, the standing figure at human height, the veil. None is built, and nothing in the stack compels the doorway over the horizon. The canvas is not charged for being abstract; it is scored on whether a deep pattern bears load in its structure, and here the structure is a format and the myth is evoked.
John Cage · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is the void at the centre of a rite: the altar left empty, the silence before or after the word, the sabbath of the instrument. One part of it is built. The concert is performed as a ritual whose central act is withheld, and the ritual bears the load: the performer arrives, sits, marks time, closes and opens the lid, bows. The Zen emptiness Cage drew on is evoked, not built; the work does not need it to function. What holds the axis well below the gate is the particular. No person, place or act is named, and the one particular, the performer at the instrument, is generic by design and replaceable by any other.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The title summons archetype, and the turn of the object builds a little of it. A fountain is the source: the spring, the font, the water of life. The urinal is its exact reversal, the place where the body empties, and laying it on its back turns its flow, so that the receptacle presents itself as a source. That inversion is structural, made by the one physical act the work contains. The Madonna and the Buddha that viewers saw in the photograph are allusion, brought by the eye. A deeper pattern, the maker who makes by naming, is what the work became for those who came after it, and that is reception, not construction. Built in one inversion, evoked in the rest; the particular stays wholly particular and acquires little more than its joke.
Hannah Höch · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Mostly evoked, and built in one place. The built place is the knife itself, carried by the title and by the method: the household tool of the woman’s sphere turned into the weapon that cuts the body politic apart, a carnival inversion, the domestic against the state, enacted in the making of every piece. That structure is load-bearing: the cut is the subject and the act at once. The rest is summoned as atmosphere: the world turned upside down, the dance of death in which rulers and crowds whirl together, the machine as a new idol, the severed head of the ruler. None is built beyond the juxtaposition, and a beer-bellied republic of one year, with its own faces, limits how far the archetype can rise.
John Constable · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The archetypes are present: the ford, a crossing of water; the hearth, in the cottage and its smoke; the harvest, in the hay carried and the field in work; the pastoral, an English Arcadia where labour and nature agree. The particular stays wholly particular: Flatford, Willy Lott’s house, this millstream, a cart of a working type. That is the strength of the canvas and the limit of the axis. Little of the archetype is built: the cart stands in the water as working carts stood there, and the composition does not stage a passage. The myth of rural England that the picture now carries was brought to it later, by reproduction and national feeling, and that belongs to its presence, not to its structure. Myth evoked by a place and by a later public, scarcely built, and well below the gate.
Canaletto · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
An archetype is in reach: the city built from stone, the labour beneath the monument, the house and the church, the household under the campanile. A viewer can see the pattern of the made world rising from the yard to the spire. But it is evoked, not built. The canvas does not structure itself on that myth so that it bears load; it records a particular morning in a particular campo, and the archetypal resonance is something the viewer brings to a scrupulously particular scene. The figures in the yard are people at work and at home, not figures of anything larger. That is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve, with The Encompassed: the particular is held superbly and acquires archetypal weight only lightly, below the load-bearing triangle of The Swing at 7.4.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Three archetypes are present, and each is built. The house: the grey clapboard, the veranda and the domestic scale make the museum a dwelling among dwellings, a home for things. The shading roof: under the Texas sun the leaves make a canopy like a grove’s, the oldest shelter. The treasury: the hoard kept above and brought down into the light is load-bearing in the section. But each is gentle and none is made into a rite. There is no threshold of consequence, no ascending axis, no centre, and the leaf is named a leaf by its makers, an allusion as much as a construction. The particular stays particular, but the archetypal depth is shallow, and that holds the axis where it is.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Mostly evoked, built in one place. The built place is the threshold: the house as a body with a face, an open door and the dark mouths of the passages, and a woman seated on the boundary between inside and street, sewing. Door, yard and street make the old pattern of the dwelling as a world, with its keeper at the gate, and the pattern is carried by the structure, not by allusion. Elsewhere the archetypes are summoned rather than built: children at play before the house as the generations, women’s work as the household’s continuance, the vine as growth over age. There is no story and no sacred pattern, and the particulars stay entirely particular. That is the picture’s virtue and the axis’s limit: it is content to be a house.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Myth evoked, and built only in the collar. The archetype most viewers bring is the man of conscience before the king, the counsellor who will not bend; that figure is supplied by 1535 and by the saint’s cult, and the panel does not build it. What the panel builds is smaller: the collar of the king’s livery laid over the scholar’s robe, so that service and bondage are one object. That is an old figure, the bound counsellor, and it is load-bearing in the composition, which drops the eye from the face to the chain. The particulars stay wholly particular: one man, one year, a paper, his stubble. The archetypal is a reading the portrait permits and history performs.
Roy Lichtenstein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The archetypes are present and mostly evoked. Single combat in the air, the knight of the sky, fire sent from heaven, the warrior’s first-person boast of the kill: the comic genre carries all of them, and the painting inherits them as convention. In one place the myth is built. The diptych is the structure of the duel itself, striker and struck, deed and consequence, set on two canvases that cannot meet except by the line of fire; that structure is load-bearing and the painting’s own, since the source panel did not divide. The particular stays particular, two aircraft, one rocket, one word, and the myth is the genre’s more than the work’s. That holds the axis below the Universal Minimum and far below the gate.
Maurice Ravel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The archetype the work comes nearest to building is the ritual dance that escalates until it consumes its dancers: the crowd drawn in one by one. In the score it is load-bearing in one respect. One voice after another enters the dance until the whole orchestra is in it, and the end is a collapse rather than a cadence earned, the crowd and the sacrifice in outline. Two things hold the axis low. Spain is evoked, not built: the bolero rhythm and the Moorish turns of the second half of the melody are colour. And the particular stays thin. No figure, place or act is made archetypal by the music’s own means beyond the shape of the crescendo, which the listener must name for it.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Mostly evoked. The patterns are present: the mask, and the carnival in which the masked dance; the danse macabre, in a face the colour of a skull moving through a place of pleasure; the mirror at the back and the woman at it, a vanitas; the small observer, the fool who sees the court. None of them is load-bearing. The green face summons the death in the dance without building the dance; the vanitas is a figure fixing her hair, not a structure; the painter’s own figure is a signature more than an archetype. The particulars stay wholly particular, these friends, this hall, these dancers. The deepest pattern carried is the crowd of the solitary, a nineteenth-century myth rather than an ancient one.
Sesshū Tōyō · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Mostly evoked. The archetypes are the tradition’s: the river village of the recluse and the scholar, the wine-shop banner of Chinese poetry, the boatman as the figure of a life outside office, the mountain as the place of the sage. They are summoned by signs, a banner, a boat, a roof, and the six inscribed poems do some of the completing on the sheet itself. One structure is built: the passage from the dark, near and human to the pale, far and empty, the movement from form toward emptiness made into the picture’s axis. But the particular is barely particular, since no place is named and the village is generic, and the myth is the tradition’s, carried rather than made.
Agnes Martin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The gold ground is the oldest sign of sacred light in Western and Byzantine painting: the icon, the Sienese panel, the field against which the holy figure stands. Here it stands with no figure, and the grid takes the saint’s place, as if the order of things were itself what is held in gold. That much is built: the gold is not an allusion laid on top, it is the field, and the absence of the figure is the work’s one structural relation to that tradition. Beyond it the archetypes are evoked rather than constructed. The grid as cosmic order is summoned, and nothing in the canvas makes the bond between two persons archetypal beyond the name. Martin’s own writing on innocence, perfection and the classic is doctrine around the work, not built in it.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The rabbit is an old figure: the hare of fertility and the moon, the trickster of folk tale and cartoon, the Easter rabbit, and in Koons’s America the bunny of the men’s magazine. The choice of animal evokes these, and the object leaves most of them as allusion. What it builds is narrower and its own: the idol. A faceless, gleaming figure, holding an attribute against its body as a saint holds a palm, set on a floor to be looked up to, has the structure of a cult statue, and the mirror makes the worshipper visible in it. That structure is load-bearing, made by the polish and the blank head. Held at 7.2 because the particular toy acquires its archetype mostly through what viewers bring.
Daft Punk · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Myth is evoked through titles and personae more than built. The record’s figure is the robot who feels: every voice passes through a machine, and the duo had by then taken robot helmets as their public face. Superheroes, Voyager and Crescendolls name figures of a child’s cosmos, heroes, space travellers and dolls, without making them act. One archetype is near built: the return to childhood, a lost garden of remembered pop, carried by the replayed and sampled music of the 1970s and 1980s in its very substance, so that the sound is the garden. But no figure acquires a story inside the record, the archetype rests on texture rather than structure, and the myth that Interstella 5555 built on the album belongs to the film.
George Saunders · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
Myth is evoked in strong figures and built in few. The ghosts of a family who lived on the land in the 1860s, walking a park that sells their war, are the past that will not stay sold, and the title story comes nearest to building: a purgatory with a gift shop, in which the narrator’s death completes the haunting he has watched. The mocked and finally violent employee of “The 400-Pound CEO” is a holy fool turned avenger; “Bounty” borrows the quest for a lost sister across a broken land, and its caste of the Flawed carries the old shape of the marked and the enslaved. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is that these patterns are summoned by single stories rather than carried across the book, and the figures are types of one class more than archetypes.
David Hockney · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Mostly evoked, and built in one place. The built place is the absence: a body that has entered the water and gone, leaving only its mark, so that the picture is a structure of disappearance, a figure made of its own trace. Around it the pool summons the oldest images of water and the self, the bather, Narcissus at the pool, the plunge, and the garden of the blessed, California as the land of the sun where nothing ages; these stay as atmosphere, carried by the subject rather than built by the canvas. The empty director’s chair summons the watcher and the stage, and stays a sign. The particular is kept and is strong: this house, this board, this afternoon. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven is that the archetype lies mostly in what the viewer brings to a pool; the canvas builds only the vanishing.
Nas · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Myth is evoked often and set in one figure: the prodigy of the ruined city, the child who sees. The cover sets it, a photograph of Nas as a small boy laid over the street, and The Genesis names a beginning. Across the record he is the young witness of a place that cannot hear him, the voice that says what others do not say. The World Is Yours takes its title from Scarface, the gangster’s boast, and turns it toward a claim on the world made by mind rather than by force: a modern myth inverted in a hook. One Love is the old form of the letter to the prisoner. What holds the axis well below the bar, and lowest among the record’s axes: the figure is carried by the voice and the cover more than built by the sequence, and the prodigy, the prophet and the underworld are summoned more than given structure. The myth is everywhere in the stance and nowhere in the architecture, and myth firmly evoked is what the figure scores.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Some patterns are built, not alluded to. The sequence of compression and release, from the low entrance to the high court, is an old threshold pattern, and it bears load: the visitor passes under and is let out into the light. The court, with its bridges and balconies, builds the agora or piazza into a museum. The triangle and the tetrahedron carry an order of pure form through every scale, a modern answer to the temple without its archetype. But the archetype that would lift the axis is absent: no ascent with an end, no sanctuary at the climax, no cave or altar in the plan. The geometry is a law, not a myth, and the readings it invites, prow, blade, crystal, are allusion and are not credited.
The National · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Myth is evoked in strong images and built nowhere. A man is carried back to Ohio in a swarm of bees, which may be heard as Samson’s lion and its honey, and the prodigal’s homecoming hangs over the song. Sorrow is a figure who finds a child and waits for him, and wins. Conversation 16 has a zombie, England is the elsewhere where the lost one lives well in the rain, and the closing hymn, shaped as a benediction, is sung for all who hang themselves for love. But no pattern bears load across the sequence. The figures stay particular, which is the record’s strength, and the swarm and the zombie remain metaphors, not structures.
George Gershwin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Myth is evoked, not built. The work summons a set of American figures as atmosphere: the city, the train, the new world as a meeting of peoples, the young man’s longing. None of them bears weight as archetype. The nearest to construction is the course of the Andantino, held back across most of the work and then given in full twice, first as private song and then in the Grandioso as public anthem: an arrival in the promised place. That is the shape of a homecoming or an apotheosis, and the work uses it, but as the rhetoric of climax more than as a structure the whole depends on. The particulars are vivid, the clarinet’s laugh, the stride left hand, and they stay particular.
Sidney Lumet · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The myth is evoked rather than built. The film summons the American outlaw cheered by the people, the line of Bonnie and Clyde, and inverts it: the outlaw is an amateur, the loot is small, and the cheering crowd is a television audience that turns when it learns why he robbed. Sonny is trickster and scapegoat in one, a man who makes himself the centre of the city and is sacrificed, through Sal, to restore its order. Sal is the silent double; his answer “Wyoming”, asked to name a country to fly to, is comedy and an image of an elsewhere that does not exist. What holds the axis among the lowest: the realism resists construction, the figures stay particular, and the archetype is atmosphere, not structure.
Soundgarden · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Myth is built in one song and evoked elsewhere. Rusty Cage is a myth of captivity and breakout, the animal in the trap gnawing free, and its form enacts it: the cage of a fast riff, then the break into slow weight. Johnny Cash heard the pattern and made it a convict’s song on Unchained (1996), evidence that it bears load. Jesus Christ Pose takes the crucifixion as an image of fraud, an allusion turned against its users rather than a pattern rebuilt. Holy Water, the bulldozer, the thousand-year room and the flies are images with depth in them, not assembled into a structure. The particular is strong; the archetypal is mostly atmosphere.
Anish Kapoor · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Myth is evoked by the title and partly built by the object. The gate is a threshold physically present: one passes under it and into a chamber, and the chamber is named for the navel of the world, the stone at Delphi that marked the centre. That is construction: a civic centre given a navel into which the public walks. The mirror carries the oldest myths of reflection, Narcissus and the soul as image, and the cloud the old union of earth and sky, but these stay evoked rather than built; the work makes self-love and the double available, not load-bearing. And the particular is weak by design: the object has no figure and no history, nothing of its own that could become archetypal except its shape and what it gathers. The myth between the clouds and the gate remains a suggestion.
Tame Impala · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Myth is evoked, not built. The figure is old and good: the outsider at the edge of the crowd, the solitary who looks through the railings at a public garden, a pattern with deep roots from the Romantic wanderer onward. The record gives it a particular face, a young man at a party he will not join, and a frame: it opens on a command to rise above and closes on a sunrise heard from far away, the night of isolation ending without resolution. That arc is real. What holds the figure is that the archetype is never made load-bearing: no figure acts, the frame is light, and the pattern is worn as mood rather than constructed.
Berthe Morisot · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The deep pattern is unmistakable: the mother watching over the sleeping child, the Virgin over the Child, the vigil at the cradle, sleep as the image of a life not yet begun and of the death it rehearses. The canvas does some building. The veil is a sanctuary curtain, the child is enclosed in a small shrine of gauze, and the watcher sits outside it; the structure of watcher, veil and sleeper is load-bearing, more than allusion. But this is a domestic image first, and the archetype rises in it by evocation and by the viewer’s memory of Madonnas. The canvas does not make the archetype strange or press it, as a Piero or a Bellini does. Myth partly built, mostly evoked.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Myth built, not myth evoked, is the test, and one archetype is built into the section: the ground lifted, the earth made a mound or a wave that the visitor climbs and enters, the threshold made by the land rising over the door. It is load-bearing in the approach and particular to this slope above the city. The rest is evoked. The wave, the calligraphic stroke, the carpet pattern flowing across a surface and the Islamic ornament that runs unbroken over floor, wall and vault are allusions the building does not construct in plan or structure: there is no axis, no centre, no ascent to a summit room. The founder’s museum, which might have made the house a shrine, is a set of rooms the form does not acknowledge.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Several deep patterns are present. The dog is the oldest companion animal and the child’s first figure of love. The balloon is breath given a shape, an inflated body whose life is its air, an archetype of the body itself, the breath in the clay. The party, the toy and the fairground are the structures of childhood ritual, and the monument stands in the line of the colossus and the idol, a thing made huge and shining to be looked up at. But these are evoked, not built. The breath is not made load-bearing: the dog is hollow in appearance and steel in fact, and the work’s interest is in the surface, not the depth. The particular is precise; the archetype stays allusive.
R.E.M. · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Myth is evoked often and built in one song. 7 Chinese Bros. takes its frame from the children’s tale of brothers who each survive an execution by a different gift, one of them swallowing the sea, and sets that tale, half heard, against a personal story of guilt and holding back. The old figure bears some load: the one who swallows the sea is the one who keeps what he cannot say. Beyond it the record evokes. Howard Finster’s painted sleeve summons a vernacular sacred the music points toward without building, and the flood of So. Central Rain, the road west of Little America and the return refused in Rockville are old figures given as atmosphere and situation, not structure. The particular stays particular: a phone, a van, a manager named in the last line.
Pearl Jam · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Myth is evoked often and built once, in part. The frame is the strongest pattern: the record dresses itself as an old manual of health, a book of vitality laid over songs of exhaustion, so that the album becomes a case history, the singer’s body read against a guide to the healthy life. That frame bears load on the package, less in the sound. Immortality evokes the martyred artist, the young figure whom death makes permanent, and gives it weight by naming no one: evocation, not construction. Better Man keeps the oldest pattern, the faithful wife bound to the wrong husband, particular; Nothingman is a type more than a myth; Tremor Christ and Satan’s Bed borrow sacred and infernal names more than they build from them.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
The archetypes evoked are many: the spire, the tower that reaches the sky, the mast, the shard of ice or crystal, and, in the press, Babel. One is built. The spire is a form that thins to nothing at its top and leaves its tip open, so that the building does not end but goes into the air; that is construction, not allusion, and it is the strongest archetypal fact of the tower. The rest is evoked. The masts and the church spires are images given to the form, not structures in its plan, and the building is ordered by no axis, threshold or centre. The ascent that could have been the tower’s myth, from the station through the city’s work, its sleep and its homes to the sky, is made only as a lift ride.
Jun Xia (Gensler) · Architecture
7.4 · Tier III
The archetype built into the form is the ascending spiral. The skin turns as it climbs, and the visitor rises through nine zones, each beginning in a garden, toward a lookout at the top. The tower as axis between earth and sky is old, in the pagoda, the minaret and Babel, and here the spiral is not ornament but the geometry of the enclosure, so that the myth is built in elevation; the trio was planned as a rising sequence, and this is its culmination. What holds the axis: the climb is made by lift and not lived as ascent; the gardens are a repeated module, not stations of a passage; the dragon read into the curve is attached from outside; and the myth is legible as a figure on the skyline more than as a place.
Keith Haring · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
The archetype is present and evoked rather than built: the devouring monster, the hell mouth, the dance of death, the skeleton at the shoulder, money as the idol. Haring’s pictographs draw on the old public imagery of the danse macabre and the doom painting, and on the morality emblem in which a vice is shown as a beast. The particular stays particular: a drug, a year, a wall in Harlem. But the myth does not bear the load. The wall summons the devourer as a sign the viewer decodes at once; it does not build the archetype into a structure in which the particular takes on the old pattern’s weight, as a doom painting builds judgement into the order of its registers. Evoked well and economically, above Comedian on this axis and a little below The Swing.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is plainly there and plainly evoked: sunrise over water, the beginning of the day, the boatman going out into the light. Nothing in the composition builds it. The sun is not placed as an axis (it sits left of centre, high in the haze), the boats are not set against it as an argument, and the readings that would deepen it, the dawn of a movement or the ferryman, are the history’s or the viewer’s, not the canvas’s. What keeps it from lower: the particular is kept, a real harbour and real labour at a real hour, and light on water as the one thing that joins earth and sky is the oldest motif in landscape, and is not merely decorative here. Myth evoked as atmosphere, at low pressure.
Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus (OMA/LMN) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Archetype built into plan and structure, and here it is mostly evoked. One structure carries it: the Books Spiral is the library as an unbroken path through all knowledge, the infinite library of Borges brought to mind, and it is load-bearing in the section rather than ornament. The tower of knowledge with the commons at its foot has an archetypal shape, and the red level reads as the building’s viscera. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the method itself: the section is a stack of functions, not an ordering of threshold, axis, ascent or centre into a cosmos, and the building deliberately refuses the symbolic charge of the library as temple. The refusal is a strength elsewhere; on this axis it costs.
The Beatles · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The record builds no myth, and its figures are the boy and the girl of the popular song, particular in voice and general in everything else: no name, no place, no story beyond the moment. Where the archetype comes, it comes through the strongest songs. The title song sets the day of labour against the night of love, the worker coming home to rest, a pattern as old as songs of work. I’ll Be Back is the leave-taking that promises return, and the record closes on the oldest shape a farewell has. Things We Said Today, love remembered from a future that has not come, touches the pattern of time and loss. What holds the figure: these are glimpsed, not carried, and nothing in the record makes the particular lovers bear more than themselves.
R.E.M. · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Myth is evoked in phrase and figure and built nowhere at length. The strongest figure is in Losing My Religion: the confessor in the corner, “me in the corner”, and the believer who loses faith in a beloved, so that a love song borrows the old shape of a lapse of faith and makes the lover its object. Half a World Away and Low carry the shape of the lover’s exile, held as mood. Belong sketches a parable in its spoken verses and lets it stay a fragment. Texarkana is a border town that stays a place name, and Shiny Happy People raises an irony it does not build. Nothing on the record organises itself around one pattern; it summons and leaves.
The Smiths · Music
7.6 · Tier III
Myth is evoked in places and built nowhere. The strongest archetypal structure is the sacrifice of the innocent in the title track, the animal led to death, a figure as old as rite; but the song holds it at the level of argument, and the heifer is a case, not a figure that bears the weight of the record. “The Headmaster Ritual” has the old shape of the child among tyrants, and “Barbarism Begins at Home” the sins of the fathers visited on the children, but both are pointed at present institutions and do not open into the pattern beneath. “Rusholme Ruffians” gives the fair, an old place of licence, a strong particular presence. The particular is strong throughout; the archetype is a shadow behind it.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
The pattern built into the plan is the path: the river, the confluence, routes that branch and rejoin, a labyrinth without a centre. It is load-bearing in that the plan is made of it, and the visitor walks the bands and chooses at each crossing. But the archetype is formal rather than deep. The path leads to no threshold, sanctuary or summit, and the window at the end of the cantilever is a view, not an arrival. River and stream are the architects’ images, evoked rather than built. The barracks kept on the site carries the memory of a military past, and the building answers it only by contrast. The deep pattern here is a diagram of flow, and with The Bottomless Well this is the lowest axis but one.
David Mackenzie · Film
7.2 · Tier III
The patterns are present and some bear weight. The outlaw king is old: the crowned man who loses everything, hides in his own country, gathers a band and returns to win it back from the land. The film builds that shape in its middle, with the king hunted through bog and island and fed by fishermen. The relic is there: Wallace’s quartered remains, displayed as a warning, become the token that makes a nation. The old king and the bad son, Edward I and a Prince eager to prove himself and given leave to be cruel, mirror the father Bruce has lost. What holds the figure: these are carried as given material more than made new, and the particular, mud, ropes and cold rations, stays particular.
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The archetype is present in the structure and nowhere else: the right angle, vertical against horizontal, which in the painter’s theosophically inflected thinking stood for spirit and matter, male and female, the cross of opposites resolved. That much is built, in the sense that every line on the canvas runs in one of the two directions and nothing else is permitted. But the axis asks that the particular become archetypal while remaining particular, and here there is no particular: no thing, no figure, no place. The archetype is not grown out of anything; it is asserted as the whole, and a viewer who does not bring the theory meets order, not myth. Built in the grammar, absent in the instance.
Gustave Caillebotte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Mostly evoked, and partly brought by its readers. The patterns are those of the modern city as myth: the crowd of strangers, the passer-by met and lost, the bourgeois couple as the emblem of a class, the flâneur’s Paris. The picture builds one structure of its own: the meeting of strangers that does not happen, each enclosed under a dome of cloth, the city as a place of near contact without encounter. That comes close to an archetype, the encounter refused, and the umbrella makes it a figure. Elsewhere the deeper patterns are absent: no story, no sacred, no origin and no fall. The particulars stay wholly particular, a known junction, a date, a weather, a fashion, which is a strength of the canvas and its limit here.
René Magritte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Little here is built as archetype. The structure that bears load is one of signs: object, image, word. It touches something primal, because naming is the oldest lesson and the canvas is shaped like the first page of a primer, where the drawing and the word are shown to a child as the thing itself. That inversion of the scene of naming is in the construction, not brought from outside. But it is a philosophical structure more than a mythic one, and its further depths are summoned rather than built: Plato’s painted bed at two removes from the true one, the image forbidden. The pipe, emblem of the ordinary man and Magritte’s own, is a sign and stays a pipe. Evoked well at one point, built nowhere.
Sei Shōnagon · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Little is built and some is evoked. Across the reminiscences the Empress becomes a figure larger than a person, the radiant sovereign lady whose household is a garden out of time, and the book shapes her court as a lost paradise kept intact by memory. The seasons of the opening set a cosmic order the rest is placed inside, and the impermanence that Buddhist thought gave the age stands, unspoken, behind every bright scene. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that none of this bears load as a pattern. Teishi is given no arc; the fall that would make her tragic is withheld, so the archetype is present only to a reader who brings the history. The narrator is a type, the clever woman at court, before she is an archetype.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Rothko came to this format out of a decade of painting myth, Greek tragedy and the primitive, and held that the subject mattered and was tragic and timeless. Here the mythic matter is withdrawn. What is left are patterns the viewer brings: the door, the stele, the horizon, the altar, a figure echoed in an upright stack. The white band is the strongest candidate for a built archetype, light at the heart of a field, and the upright format at body height makes the stack a standing presence opposite the viewer. But there is no person, place or story to take on significance while remaining particular, and the archetypes are evoked by the format and its viewers rather than built by this canvas. Myth evoked, scarcely built.
Charles and Ray Eames · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The archetypes are present but lightly built. The first is the dwelling set aside from the meadow: the house withdraws to the hill and leaves the open ground to the trees, a hut at the edge of the clearing rather than a house in it. The second is the house and the workshop facing each other across a court, the artisan’s pair. The third and strongest is the house as a cabinet of wonders, the room as a gathered world of things. These are built into plan and interior, not applied, and the particular stays particular: a married pair of designers, a hillside in Los Angeles, a row of trees. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, level with The Encompassed, is depth. The pairing is a convenience as much as an archetype, the clearing a gesture of respect for a site rather than a cosmos, the cabinet a personal habit raised to a principle. Myth is arranged more than built.
Gordon Bunshaft (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Little is built. The glass crystal, the house raised on stilts, the cleanliness of the washed surface: these are images the building invites, the last made almost literal by its client’s trade, and none is constructed as an archetype in plan or section. The lifted block over open ground recalls the colonnade and the loggia, and the court a cloister open to the sky, but the recall is of form, not of meaning carried. No threshold or ascent is made a rite; the lobby is passed through, and the slab has no top, which is its point. The myth the building carries most fully is its period’s own, the clean machine of postwar management, held by its users and admirers rather than built into the plan as a deep pattern.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Mostly evoked, and built only by the repetition. The can is daily bread: food that is the same each day, eaten alone, the meal of a working nation. Plenty, the American cornucopia, is summoned by the full line of varieties. The frontal, centred, repeated object on a bare ground has the structure of the icon, and the grid has been likened to an iconostasis; that comparison is brought by readers and is not credited. What the work builds is the replacement of the unique image by the identical many, so that the archetype of the one sacred object is turned into its opposite. Most of the can’s archetypal standing, as the emblem of Pop and of America, came to it by reception, and reception is not credited here. That holds the axis well short of the bar.
Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Myth must be built into plan and structure, and this is the axis on which the building is thinnest. There is a myth here, and it is evoked: the glass house of labour, the transparency of a new age, the weightless corner as a figure for matter overcome. Those are the myths of the modern movement, and the building is one of their sources, which is why the axis scores at all. But the figure is carried by the skin, not by the plan. The plan is a working yard, set out for the movement of timber and the sequence of machining, and holds no threshold, axis or ascent of the kind that makes a temple or a villa a cosmos. A factory may build an archetype, a cathedral of work, a gate of labour, and this one does not attempt it. Myth evoked, and evoked well, sits a point and a half below the gate.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The myth is mostly evoked. The woman in the blonde wig, raincoat and dark glasses is the femme fatale of noir cited as costume, a figure from a Hollywood the film admires. Faye, entering a man’s home unseen, cleaning it and changing its creatures, is close to the household spirit of folktale, the visitor who remakes a life before she is seen; that pattern is load-bearing in the second story, and it is the strongest claim here. The numbers in place of names and the expiry date on love are emblems rather than myth. Nothing makes these particular figures archetypal: they stay charming, specific and small, which is the film’s grace and this axis’s limit. In the Mood for Love, at 8.8 here, builds the archetype this film evokes.
Apollodorus of Damascus (attributed) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Little archetype is built into the plan. The hemicycle has the shape of a theatre’s cavea turned to face the forum, and the forum can be read as the stage of empire and the market as its audience of trade; but that is an analogy the plan permits, not one it constructs, and nothing in the use or the structure makes it load-bearing. The deeper pattern is the hill made city, the mountain cut and rebuilt as a terraced settlement with its own street, and that pattern is present in the section, not laid on as ornament, which keeps the axis from falling lower. What holds it at the foot of the twelve: no threshold rite, no axis to a sacred centre, no cosmos built. It is a building for use, and its myth is Rome as maker of ground, evoked more than built.
SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
One archetype is built into the plan rather than evoked: the city. Rooms stand as houses, corridors run between them as streets, the courts open as squares, and the visitor walks a small town under one roof, choosing a way. It is load-bearing; the whole plan is that pattern. A second is present, the circle, the shape without front or back, the round of the commons, but it is read into the form more than lived as a rite. No threshold is marked, no ascent is made, no centre is held as a sacred point; the circle is equal everywhere by intention, and that refusal of a centre is the point. The building’s myth is modern and civic, the open town, tied to this town’s ground beside its castle and garden by adjacency, not by construction. Real, built, and shallow by design.
Egon Schiele · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Mostly evoked, and lightly; this is the lowest of the twelve but for the world the picture holds. The physalis carries an old association with autumn, with ripeness, with the lantern whose bright husk empties as it dries; set beside a young head it summons the vanitas without building one. The artist as seer, as marked outsider, is present in the sidelong eyes and the stark placement, and the painter built that figure elsewhere, in self-portraits as monk, as saint, as a doubled self; here it is a pressure behind the face, not a structure. The particular stays particular: this hair, this jacket, these berries. The pairing with the Wally portrait would edge toward a built archetype of man and woman, but the panel is scored alone, and alone the archetypal is atmosphere.
Vilhelm Hammershøi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Mostly evoked. The archetypes summoned are the enclosed room as the soul’s chamber, the woman turned from the viewer as the figure who cannot be known, and the light from a window as visitation, an annunciation without an angel. They come as atmosphere. The Dutch interior of Vermeer and de Hooch, with its woman by the window, is the inherited form, and the picture carries that memory rather than building on it. Nothing makes the archetypal structure load-bearing: the light is not an event that befalls the woman, she does not turn toward it, and no story is set going. The particulars stay particular, a Copenhagen room in 1901, grey paint, bare boards. Myth is evoked with real tact and not constructed, and that holds the axis lowest but one.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Myth is evoked and not built. Behind the picture stand the feast as the image of human fellowship, the long tables of Veronese and the wedding feast; Watteau’s companies of lovers at ease out of doors, and with them the embarkation for the island of love, since these diners are boatmen, on an island, by the water; and the garden of love, pairs forming under a canopy. A viewer can find each of these. None bears the composition. No pair is cast as lovers in a story, the island is not staged as Cythera, and the table is a lunch, not a communion. The particulars stay wholly particular: a restaurant at Chatou, its proprietor’s children, the painter’s friends. The archetype is atmosphere, the very inflation the gate is set against, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve, level with The Encompassed.
Samuel Barber · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The archetype evoked is the lament: threnody, dirge, the processional mourning of liturgy, in a narrow stepwise line often heard as chant. Barber’s own setting of the music to the Agnus Dei in 1967 shows that he heard it so, but it is another arrangement, and its text cannot be lent back to this one. In the string work nothing is named and no figure is built; the particular is a line of notes, not a person, a place or an act. The shape of rising, breaking and returning, the wave or the breath, is archetypal and bears weight, but a shape is not yet a myth. The state funeral and the battlefield attached to it are the world’s, not the work’s.
Alphonse Mucha · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The archetype is the woman as icon: the Byzantine Madonna or empress in the apse, the priestess with the palm, the Palm Sunday entry that is a triumph before a passion. Half-dome, tesserae, stole and palm evoke these with precision. But they are costume and setting, borrowed from the play’s Byzantine Athens and from the icon tradition, rather than a structure the image builds. Nothing makes the archetype load-bearing beyond the act of display: no passion follows the triumph, and the icon has no doubleness. What lifts the axis above allusion is that the myth of the actress as goddess is the sheet’s real subject.
Indus Valley (Mohenjo-daro) · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The particular is wholly particular: one girl, one stance, one arm of bangles. It acquires archetypal significance mostly by evocation, much of it brought by viewers. The archetypes summoned are the dancer, the young woman on the threshold of adulthood and, in some readings, the votary or the goddess; none can be shown to be built into the object, because its ritual or social meaning is lost with its script. What is built is smaller: youth at its most self-sufficient, carried by the pose rather than by any attribute, and the bangle as the sign of a whole social person, of marriage, rank or wealth in later Indian usage, which may or may not apply here.
Arctic Monkeys · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Myth is evoked and lightly built in one frame. The night is a passage, from the afternoon through the dancefloor and the club’s glances to the police, the taxi, the red-light street and the bouncers at the door, and then the morning’s verdict: the old shape of descent and return, carried by the sequence. The title summons Arthur Seaton, Sillitoe’s rebel who refuses what others call him. The figures are types given a local face, the bouncer at the Ritz, the “scummy man”, the lads in tracksuits. But the frame is loose, two songs step out of it, no figure carries the passage, and Seaton is borrowed as a stance, not built.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
One structure is built, not alluded to: the gate and the processional way. A gate is the threshold, the passage from one state to another, and a walk under thousands of them is a procession through a sequence of thresholds; the work is physically that, and the walker enacts it. Much else is evoked. Viewers saw other gates and the robes of other faiths in the frames and the colour, but these the eye brought, and the work did not build them. The colour of fire and of spring in a winter park summons the turn of the year without constructing it. What holds the axis: the threshold, repeated so constantly, flattens into rhythm. No gate is a passage to anything the last one was not, and the particular, a park in February, carries the archetype lightly.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Little archetype is built. The title brings in a race and a start called back, a beginning that must be taken again, and so the canvas as a false start of painting itself, the gesture begun and recalled; but that reading is the title’s, carried as wit. The act on which the canvas is structured is naming, and naming is an old pattern: the first man giving names to the creatures, the confusion of tongues at Babel. Here the names are given and fail to fit, and that failure is load-bearing. On the canvas it mostly stays a demonstration about signs. Nothing in the painting makes the failure of names carry the weight of a fall; it carries the weight of a perceptual check, and the viewer who brings Babel brings it. Misnaming is half built; the rest is evoked.
Aphex Twin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
With no figures, no story and no words beyond fragments, myth has to be built by the music or the frame, and here it is evoked, not built. The titles summon a cosmos and an antiquity: Ptolemy and his ordered heavens, the heliosphere, Delphi, the battle of Actium, a polis in Ageispolis. They are names on tracks that would sound the same under other names. One frame bears a little weight: the solitary maker making a world, carried by the home-made sound and named in We Are the Music Makers, the first line of O’Shaughnessy’s ode. The archetype of the maker as dreamer is apt, but a title summons it and the sequence does not structure it. Level with m b v at 6.9.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Myth is evoked and not built. With no figures, no story and almost no audible words, the particular never acquires archetypal weight, because the particular is never given. What the record has is a frame laid down in sound: it begins in sleep and drift, in the drumless murmur of She Found Now, and ends in the noise of flight, in the wash of Wonder 2 circling like an engine overhead. From the dreaming body to the machine in the air is an old pattern, and the thirds give it the record’s shape, from drift through plainness to velocity. What holds the figure low is that it stays atmosphere: no figure bears it, and New You and Who Sees You name renewal and recognition and build on neither.
Andreas Gursky · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The Rhine is one of Europe’s most storied rivers: the Rheingold and the Nibelungen, the Lorelei, the Romantic Rhine of castles and vineyards, the frontier river of the wars. The picture names the river and refuses all of it. That refusal is the work’s one structural relation to myth: the most storied river in German culture is shown as a channel between lawns, and the title carries the whole weight of what is withheld. Beyond the title, the bands summon the old order of earth, water and sky in strata, and the river as time and boundary, but these are evoked by the format, not built in the particular, and the particular is effaced on purpose. Myth evoked by name and denied by image; built only in the denial.
M83 · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Myth is evoked and not built. The title lays out a field of archetypes, the ruined city, the sea turned red, the ghosts that remain, and the titles of the pieces add the church, the lake beneath a mountain, the cyborg, the birds: a landscape after the end, half sacred and half science fiction. The music gives these a weather, not a structure. No figure bears them and no passage moves between them as stages of a story; In Church is a mood of reverence, not a rite, and Cyborg a texture, not a body. One frame is real: an arc from flight in Birds to dying into light at the close, from the morning of the record to its sunset, which gives the whole its shape. It remains atmosphere laid over the order of the pieces.
The Cure · Music
7.4 · Tier III
Myth is evoked in images and built nowhere. The title, a head at the door, is a figure of night terror, and the record keeps returning to that order of image: the dream of death in Kyoto Song, the drowning in Sinking. The Blood calls on the blood of Christ through a cheap fortified wine, the sacrament and the bottle in one image, and that is the strongest pattern on the record, given a moment’s real weight by the guitar’s Iberian colour. What holds the axis is construction: these figures flare and pass, no archetype organises a song, let alone the record, and the particulars, no place, no named person, no year, are too few for a pattern to take root in a life.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.3 · Tier III
The patterns are there, and the romance follows the shape of a quest: the knight, despised at home, crosses the sea to find the lady, is wounded, faces the ogre in his own hall and comes back to be accepted. The harmonium is a gift from nowhere at dawn, an instrument that arrives before the man can play it, as grace does. Barry is the holy fool and the beast loved before he is tamed, and Provo is the descent to the ogre’s place, played as comedy: the giant is a small man in a mattress store. What holds the axis lowest of the governed eleven is that the myth is evoked through tone, form and colour more than built into the world, is lightly carried, and does not deepen as the film goes on.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.3 · Tier III
The patterns are present and old: the triangle of two friends and one woman, which the cinema had already given a classic form in Jules and Jim (1962); brothers parted by a woman; the queen who chooses her champion and sends him to the lists; the tournament as ordeal, a final duel settling a debt between two men. The tell at serve is a token from childhood that returns at the crisis, a recognition device as old as romance. But the myth is evoked, not built: the triangle is not made a figure for anything beyond itself, the queen’s choice is played as psychology and strategy rather than fate, and the joust resolves a story, not an order of the world. With Pressure on Tradition, the lowest of the governed eleven.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.4 · Tier II
Part of the myth is built. The old king who would give up his crown and cannot seeks a priest and chooses an heir from the line of his dead brother: Vincent, Sonny’s bastard son, kneels and is named. The Sicilian vendetta of Cavalleria rusticana, an Easter Sunday that ends in a killing, is set inside the climax and mirrors it, and the punishment falls on the one innocent in the house. The particular stays particular: insulin and a stroke, a box of cannoli, a pair of spectacles. Held below because much of the pattern is evoked rather than load-bearing. The papal line borrows its weight from history, and Lear’s father holding a dead daughter is cited in the final image more than built through the film.
Donald Judd · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The work refuses myth on principle: Judd’s objects are specific, not symbolic, and they name nothing. What archetype there is comes from the situation, not from the boxes: the arsenal turned to a hall of contemplation, instruments of war replaced by objects that do nothing; the long nave of a building lit from both sides; the grid laid on a desert; the hundred as a figure of completeness. Some of these are strong, and the conversion of the military shed, part of the work as made, is credited. None is built into the work as load-bearing structure. A visitor may stand in the sheds and receive no archetype at all, and the work has not failed; the box as chest or ark is not invoked.
Brian Eno · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
With no words, figures or story, the archetypal must be built by the sound or not at all, and here very little is built. The title frames a threshold: the airport as a place between places, the departure hall as an anteroom. The voices of 2/1 summon by timbre alone an image of the choir and the sanctuary. Those are evoked, as atmosphere and as title, and the record keeps them faint, because it wants no image to dominate. The crossed numbering is a formal symmetry, not an archetype. No pattern bears load across the sequence, and the particular is not made archetypal because the record avoids the particular too. That is what holds the axis lowest of the eleven: myth evoked lightly, and nothing built. It stands level with It’s My Life at 6.8.
Bernd and Hilla Becher · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The grids build one deep pattern and evoke a few. What they build is the type itself: from particulars that stay wholly particular, this tower in this town, captioned by its place, a form emerges that belongs to none of them, as in Goethe’s search for the primal plant or the natural historian’s plate of specimens. That relation of the one and the many bears load in the grid; it is not alluded to. But a type is a taxonomic order before it is an archetypal one. The water tower acquires no myth of its own, and the deeper patterns, the vessel, the sentinel over the town, the shrine of a secular age, are brought by the viewer and evoked by the isolation, not built. Sander’s portrait typology, whose types are human, does more here.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Mostly absent, and the absence is part of the point. The hare carried rich meanings in Dürer’s world: fertility and lust, the timid soul, the hunted creature, in some readings Christ’s sacrifice, and later the Easter hare of custom. Here none of that is built; the sheet strips the animal of emblem and story. The one archetypal relation constructed is the encounter itself, the wild thing met face to face, alive and wary, held still for a moment under a human gaze, and the window in the eye makes that encounter structural. The image has since become an archetype in its own right, the picture of a hare in German-speaking culture; but reputation is not construction. Myth is evoked by the subject and refused by the method.
Muqi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Mostly evoked, and evoked largely by readers. The sheet builds no archetypal structure: no figure, no story, no ritual setting. What is present is the offering, since fruits laid out together read readily as one, and the painting belongs to a monastic culture in which plain things were vehicles of awakening. The number six has been read as the senses or as stages; nothing in the image secures it. The one place where something archetypal is close to built is the gradation from dark to empty, which can be read as the passage from form to emptiness. It is the image’s structure, but whether it is meant as that passage is brought, not shown. The particulars stay wholly particular, the work’s virtue and this axis’s limit.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Mostly evoked, and built in one place. The built place is the small canvas on hinges, turned so that its back faces the room, with the precursor present only on its hidden face: the heir shows the back of his debt and hides its face. That is a structure, the son and the shadow of the father, carried by a physical device rather than by allusion, and it is small. The cast body on the chair summons the relic and the ex-voto, the part for the whole, and stays a summons. The colour words summon the old myth of naming, the word that makes the thing, without building it. What holds the axis among the lowest: one device on one small canvas carries the myth, and elsewhere a chair, a newspaper and a bent letter stay particular.
Frans Hals · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Mostly evoked. The archetype is the cavalier himself, the gallant and suitor, the young man in his finery at the height of his powers, and the title a later century gave him shows how readily the image is read as a type rather than a person. The embroidery on the sleeve has been read as emblems of love, and the portrait has been read as a betrothal picture; neither reading can be settled from the image alone. The particular stays particular: a man of twenty-six, his own moustache, his own lace. The picture does not build a pattern; it presents a man who wears one. The type is supplied by costume and by the viewer’s later romance of the cavalier, not constructed by the composition.
The National · Music
7.4 · Tier III
Myth is evoked often and built nowhere. The opening title summons Lot’s wife, the one who looked back, and turns her into a brother’s guilt. Heavenfaced and Graceless borrow the language of grace and fall; Demons borrows possession. Sea of Love takes its title from an old song and its threat from one of the oldest patterns, the man who must leave a place or be found there by what follows him. These give the record a moral weather. But no archetype carries its structure. There is no passage, return or ordeal through which the sequence moves: the speaker at the end of Hard to Find is where he was in Demons. The cap, the party, the girl and the brother stay particulars, and the myths stay laid on them.
Kehinde Wiley · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Myth evoked more than built. The archetype at hand is the ruler’s portrait, which the painter’s practice inverts elsewhere by setting unknown Black sitters in the poses of kings and generals. Here he does the reverse: a real head of state is stripped of the ruler’s poses, so the archetype is present by subtraction, the sovereign shown as the citizen on a plain chair. A second structure is built in the ground: the man who grows from his origins and is grown around by them, a family tree made literal in flowers, particular and load-bearing for the biography. Held below 7 because the garden is a code legible only by caption, and because the deeper patterns, Eden, the Green Man, the king in the enclosed garden, are not in play.
Talk Talk · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Myth is evoked and built nowhere, though the evocation is sharper than it first sounds. The strongest figure is in Such a Shame: a man who gives his life to the throw of a die, an old figure of fate and the surrendered will, which the song gives a real moment’s weight. It’s My Life carries the oldest claim of the self against what owns it, in a title that has become a slogan. Renée and Does Caroline Know? sketch the beloved watched and the secret kept. What holds the axis low is the particular: no place, no year, no person with a face, and words too oblique to make a figure stand. What summons pattern here is mood and phrase, not structure; the record organises itself around no archetype.
Thomas Heatherwick · Architecture
6.8 · Tier II
Built more than evoked, but thinly. The archetype under the form is the stair of ascent: the ziggurat, the tower of Babel, Jacob’s ladder, and in the nearer tradition Piranesi’s prisons and Escher’s endless stairs. The stepwell of India, a structure of descent toward water, is the nearest older form, and this one inverts it: the bowl opens upward to the sky as the stepwell narrows down to its source. That is myth in the plan. What holds the axis is that the ascent has no summit, no sanctuary, no water and no god; the top landing is a viewing platform like the others, so that the archetype is quoted in figure and emptied in meaning. The emptiness can be read as the point, but the building does not build that reading.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.7 · Tier II
The elder brother is a fallen prince of the streets, back from exile without wanting his crown, and the walls read “The Motorcycle Boy Reigns” in a kingdom he no longer believes in. He is colour-blind and partly deaf, a damaged seer; the younger brother sees in colour, hears everything and sees nothing. The fish carry the end: in the bowl they fight to the death, in the river they will not, and the hero who frees them dies so that the follower can go on to the sea. What holds the axis is inheritance. The doomed brother as a figure of Romantic youth comes from the delinquency films and from Hinton, and the film leans on him as an icon more often than it builds him in action.
Deafheaven · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Myth is evoked faintly and built nowhere in figure. The title sets an image of the enduring and immovable against a record of drift and soft colour, and the track titles summon the cosmic and the bodily (a planet raining diamonds, a lament, a villain, a gnashing of teeth), but none is given a figure, a story or a place. What the record builds, in sound, is an old pattern: the descent into quiet and the return of the repressed, the buried voice coming back at the end. That is load-bearing for the album’s shape and is credited. It remains a pattern of the band’s own course more than a myth a listener could carry away without knowing the band.
Helen Frankenthaler · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The title names the two oldest elements of landscape, the mountain and the sea, and the painting evokes them as memory: a coast, rocks, water, seen again from inside the studio. That is myth evoked, and lightly. Nothing archetypal is built. There is no figure, no journey, no threshold, no structure in which the mountain and the sea stand for anything beyond themselves, and the picture does not even keep them apart as forms. A deeper pattern might be found in the method, the painter over a canvas on the floor and the paint going into it as rain into ground; but that is a figure brought to the work, not built in it. The particulars stay particular, and the names in the title remain names.
Thomas Gainsborough · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
Mostly evoked. The figure summons the cavalier, the young prince, the page of a vanished court: Van Dyck’s children of Charles I and his Lords John and Bernard Stuart stand behind it. The archetype of youth on the threshold, splendid and untried before a coming storm, is available in the sky and the pose, and later viewers have read it in. But the structure that would make it load-bearing is not built. The storm is not set against the boy in any way the composition insists on; the costume is homage, not fable; no story governs the picture. The particular stays particular, a boy in fancy dress, and the deep pattern is worn like the satin rather than constructed.
Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza · Film
7.3 · Tier III
The film refuses myth as a principle, and the axis scores what it builds, not what it refuses. Archetypal shapes lie under the record: the besieged house, the commander fallen and the band leaderless, the rescue party through the gate, the man carried out. None is made load-bearing; each is kept to its procedural surface, and the film’s ethic is that it should be. The strongest mythic pressure is in the frame, testimony gathered for a man who cannot remember, a memorial built from others’ memory, and in the closing street refilled, which turns the action into a cycle. These are evoked rather than constructed. A refusal so complete is not compensated for being a refusal, and this, with the scope its form allows, is where the film reaches least.
Coldplay · Music
7.2 · Tier III
Myth is evoked, often at the level of a title, and built nowhere. The Scientist evokes the oldest wish against time, to go “back to the start”, and the man of knowledge who cannot solve the heart, giving the wish a moment’s weight and no structure. Clocks makes time a figure, a tide and a pulse, with no person to bear it. God Put a Smile upon Your Face names a sinner and an indifferent god as atmosphere. The title track comes closest to a figure with an act, a man who will “burn it down”. What holds the axis low is the particular: no place is given, no person has a face, and the patterns summoned are moods, not structures.
Oasis · Music
7.2 · Tier III
Myth is evoked and nowhere built. The record summons patterns as atmosphere: the saviour hoped for in Wonderwall, a figure of rescue held at a distance and never given a face; the forgiving glance backward in Don’t Look Back in Anger; the poet bound to a gift he cannot use, in Cast No Shadow; and in Champagne Supernova a cosmic image of youth and excess, “slowly walking down the hall” toward something larger than the self that is never named. The title track makes a dawn of a comedown. None of these bears load, because the particulars that would make them stand are withheld: no place, no year, no person with a history, only a Sally named for her sound.
Banksy · Visual art
7.0 · Tier III
Deep patterns are summoned and none is built. The child and the lost thing; the heart, here literal, leaving the body that held it; the balloon as the soul going up, an image older than the toy; the fall from innocence as a letting go. All are evoked, and quickly: the red heart is a sign before it is a balloon, so the image announces its meaning instead of letting a particular grow into it. The girl is not particular enough to become archetypal. She is already generic, a silhouette with no face, a place that any viewer or any cause can fill, which is a strength for use and a weakness on this axis. Myth evoked, at the level of the emblem.
Jack Vettriano · Visual art
6.5 · Tier II
Mostly evoked. The dance on the shore, at the edge between land and sea, summons the oldest staging of love as a world apart; the storm sky summons love against the elements; the couple seen from behind are any couple. The idiom evokes a newer myth, the screen romance of the 1930s to 1950s: evening dress, servants, a private beach, the memory of a life most viewers never had. One structure is built: the canopy held over two figures by attendants, the umbrella and the baldachin carried over a king or a bride, here carried over lovers on sand. That is load-bearing, and it is why the image reads as a ceremony and not a stroll. But it is not developed, the couple have no faces that say who they are, and the myth that dominates is a film’s.
Bridget Riley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Little of the archetypal is here, and what there is comes evoked. The fold reads as an abyss, the ground opening, the old image of falling; the chequerboard summons the board of a game and the tiled pavement on which Renaissance painting set its figures in perspective, here buckled. None of these is built: each is a reading the eye brings to an abstract structure. The painting refuses narrative and figure by design, and a pure perceptual structure has no particular to carry archetypal weight. The most that can be said is that the regular grid collapsing into a crease makes a deep pattern visible, order and its breach. It stays a pattern of seeing rather than a myth.
Mogwai · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Myth is barely evoked and not built. The record has no figures, no story and few audible words. The title names a beast and the loud tracks are its roar, but nothing in the sequence gives the beast form or passage. The titles deflate as much as they summon: a comic giant snake for a city, a death for folk music. There is one frame, a single repeated figure at the start and the heaviest mass at the end, a waking and a fall, and I Chose Horses places a foreign voice near the close like a messenger whose message is not understood. That is atmosphere, not construction, and the particular is never given, so it cannot become archetypal. It sits below m b v, at 6.9, whose frame is at least laid by its sequence.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
7.0 · Tier III
There is a pattern, and part of it is built. The betrayer in a company of thieves is old; here the traitor is the one the loyal man loves, the plot is Orange’s double life and White’s faith in him, and the end is the oath broken in both directions. Joe Cabot, the father of the gang, chooses between the word of the man he raised in the trade and his own suspicion, and the family of thieves destroys itself in a circle of guns. The colour names strip the men to masks. But the archetype is carried lightly: the rat and the loyal man are drawn in genre strokes, and the film never builds a world in which they take on larger weight. The particular stays particular, a diner bill, a Madonna song, a can of petrol. Myth is evoked and only half built.
Wes Anderson · Film
6.9 · Tier II
The patterns are present and evoked, not built. The outlaw band of three, its quarrel and its reunion, follows the shape of the gang film and of the boys’ adventure story, with its hideout, its plan and its oath. Mr. Henry is the false father, the master who takes the apprentices’ devotion and their goods, and Dignan is the son who chooses the wrong father; the true father is absent from every family in the film. Anthony is the knight who finds his lady at a roadside inn and loses her, and Dignan’s return for a fallen man has the outline of a sacrifice. None of these bears the weight of the structure, which is a picaresque of failure: the archetypes are worn lightly, as costumes in a game.
Maurizio Cattelan · Visual art
6.7 · Tier II
Archetype is evoked in several directions and built in one. Evoked: the clown and the fool of the title, the jester who mocks the court that pays him, which is Cattelan’s settled persona; the banana as the oldest prop of slapstick and as a sexual joke; the still life of fruit, in which ripeness carries the sign of decay. Built: the cycle of perishing and replacement, the fruit that dies and is renewed by decree, which is the one structure the work physically enacts, a small myth of resurrection by paperwork. The particular stays wholly particular, one shop banana, and acquires little more than its joke and that cycle. The meme, the political readings and the eating as communion were brought by viewers, not built by the work.