the archetypal significance of

103 Pages·2015·0.22 MB·English

THE ARCHETYPAL SIGNIFICANCE OF
JOHN CHEEVER’S “THE SWIMMER”
by
Mary Reagan, B.A.
A thesis submitted to the Graduate Council of
Texas State University in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
with a Major in Literature
May 2015

Committee Members:

Allan R. Chavkin, Chair

Paul N. Cohen

Nancy Grayson
COPYRIGHT

by

Mary Reagan

2015
FAIR USE AND AUTHOR’S PERMISSION STATEMENT

Fair Use

This work is protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States (Public Law 94-
553, section 107). Consistent with fair use as defined in the Copyright Laws, brief
quotations from this material are allowed with proper acknowledgement. Use of
the material for financial gain without the author’s express is not allowed.

Duplication Permission

As the copyright holder of this work I, Mary Reagan, authorize duplication of this
work, in whole or in part, for educational or scholarly purposes only.
DEDICATION

This thesis is dedicated to the late Lawrence D. Stewart, PhD, who
introduced me to the beauty and value of great literature as an
undergraduate student.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank the members of my thesis committee, Allan Chavkin, Paul Cohen,
and Nancy Grayson, for their invaluable insight and encouragement. I also wish to
express my utmost appreciation to Emily Walhout at the Houghton Library, Harvard
University, and Anne Woodrum at the Goldfarb Library, Brandeis University, for
assisting me in my archival research. Finally, I wish to thank my professors at Texas
State University for their substantial contribution in making my graduate study such a
memorable and meaningful experience.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................v
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................ vii
ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................... viii
CHAPTER
I. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................1
II. THE GENESIS OF “THE SWIMMER” ....................................21
III. “THE SWIMMER” AS FRYE’S TRAGIC MYTHOS OF
AUTUMN ...................................................................................27

IV. NED MERRILL AS TRAGIC HERO ........................................48
V. THE ARCHETYPAL IMAGERY OF “THE SWIMMER” .......61
VI. NED MERRILL AS JUNG’S PUER AETERNUS .....................78
VII. CONCLUSION ...........................................................................87
WORKS CITED .................................................................................................90

vi
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
Abbreviation Description
BGW – The Brigadier and the Golf Widow
MS – Literary Manuscript of “The Swimmer”

vii
ABSTRACT
This thesis presents a new interpretation of “The Swimmer,” a short story by John
Cheever, by applying formal principles of archetypal literary criticism to analyze the
story. This archetypal analysis is supplemented by relevant material from Cheever’s
journals and manuscript archives. Grounded in Jung’s concept of the collective
unconscious as a repository of inherited archetypes, archetypal literary criticism, as
interpreted by Northrop Frye, is particularly well-suited to Cheever’s fiction because it
correlates with Cheever’s own theories of artistic creation. Chapter One explains the
critical approach of archetypal literary criticism, including a discussion of its relevance to
Cheever’s fiction, and summarizes existing scholarship interpreting “The Swimmer.”
Chapter Two discusses the story’s genesis and includes a discussion of Cheever’s
theories of short fiction. Chapter Three analyzes “The Swimmer” as an example of
Frye’s mythos of autumn, or tragedy. Chapter Three analyzes the story’s main character,
Ned Merrill, as an example of the tragic hero using Frye’s theories and also examines the
influence of Homer’s Odyssey, observing parallels between the characters of Odysseus
and Ned Merrill and suggesting the Odyssey as a possible source of the story’s title.
Chapter Five analyzes the story’s archetypal imagery, including color and number
symbolism, which expresses the story’s tragic mythos of autumn. Chapter Six explores
the tragic character of Ned Merrill as an example of Jung’s archetype of the puer
aeternus, the eternal child. Chapter Seven summarizes these various strands of
interpretation and analysis to conclude the thesis.
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CHAPTER I
Introduction
“And I think of . . . the forever boy on the forever summers afternoon.
The youthful, the summery smile collapses on a look of pain.”

John Cheever, Journals 11.1.17

In a 1966 interview in Life magazine, John Cheever’s friend and literary
colleague, John Updike remarked: “I’ve never met anyone quicker on his feet, both
fictional and real, than Cheever” (Plath 17). Updike’s comment came two years after the
publication of Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer,” which Updike considered to be
among Cheever’s “last superb stories” (Bosha, Critical Response 221). This narrative of
a middle-aged man who ages in the course of a single summer afternoon epitomizes the
literary agility observed by Updike. Cheever himself once referred to the story as “a
sleight-of-hand” (Donaldson, Conversations 64). Although “The Swimmer” has received
considerable critical attention from scholars, this existing scholarship has not to date
employed formal archetypal criticism in interpreting the story. This thesis will fill that
gap in scholarship to present a new interpretation of the story. In addition, where
relevant to this interpretation, this thesis will incorporate Cheever’s journals compiled
during the time period of the story’s composition and Cheever’s changes to the literary
manuscript of “The Swimmer” prior to the story’s publication.
This Introduction explains the critical approach of archetypal literary criticism,
including a discussion of its relevance to Cheever’s fiction, and summarizes existing
scholarship interpreting “The Swimmer.” Chapter Two discusses the story’s genesis,
including a discussion of Cheever’s theories of short fiction. Chapter Three analyzes
“The Swimmer” as an example of Northrop Frye’s mythos of autumn or tragedy.
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Chapter Four analyzes the story’s main character, Ned Merrill, as an example of the
tragic hero using Frye’s theories and also examines the influence of Homer’s Odyssey,
including the parallels between Odysseus and Cheever’s character Ned Merrill. This
chapter also considers the Odyssey as a possible source of the story’s title. Chapter Five
analyzes the story’s archetypal imagery, including color and number symbolism, which
expresses the story’s tragic mythos of autumn. Chapter Six explores the tragic character
of Ned Merrill as an example of Jung’s archetype of the puer aeternus, the eternal child.
The Conclusion summarizes these various strands of interpretation and analysis.
Archetypal literary criticism is grounded in Carl Jung’s concept of the collective
unconscious. Jung theorized that in addition to our immediate consciousness, “there
exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is
identical in all individuals” (Jung, Archetypes 43). Jung coined the term “collective
unconscious” for this second psychic system, which he contended is inherited and
“consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious
secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic elements” (Jung, Archetypes
43). According to Jung, the contents of an archetypal character are manifestations of
processes in the collective unconscious, which are first and foremost expressed as
metaphors (Jung, Archetypes 156).
Jung identified two modes of artistic creation, psychological and visionary (Jung,
Modern Man 155). According to Jung, the psychological mode “deals with materials
drawn from the realm of human consciousness—for instance, with the lessons of life,
with emotional shocks, the experience of passion and the crises of human destiny in
general—all of which go to make up the conscious life of man, and his feeling life in
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