Just An Old Fashioned Love Song? Literary Archetypes & Trajectories in Song of Songs Gordon Johnston, Old Testament Department, Dallas Theological Seminary Paper Presented to the Solomonic/Wisdom Literature Study Group National Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society Providence, Rhode Island: November 19, 2008 “An Old Fashioned Love Song” Three Dog Night (Paul Williams) [MCA Records, 1973] Just an old fashioned love song playing on the radio; Wrapped around the music are the words of someone promising they’ll never go. You swear you’ve heard it before as it slowly rambles on and on; No need of bringin’ ‘em back ‘cause they’re never really gone … Just an old fashioned love song—one I’m sure they wrote for you and me. THOSE WHO GREW UP IN THE SEVENTY’S may remember the soft rock hit recorded by Three Dog Night. It was a song about another song—really about all love songs. Just fourteen then, I only knew that I liked it since it spoke to me about how love songs move us. Yet it expressed the essence of all I would ever come to know about any love song. The classics touch our collective soul because they penetrate the reality of our common humanity and shared experience. The great themes of all love songs are universal. In one sense, none are truly new; the new ones simply reprise recurrent themes of the old ones. New love songs simply find new ways of saying what old love songs have already said before. Individual genesis is not the creation of something entirely new, but a fresh way of expressing something old. Only decades later did I recognize that this song dealt with what literary critics call an “archetype.” 1.0 Literary Archetypes and Archetypal Criticism Samuel Johnson, the first to use the term in a technical sense, suggested an “archetype” reflects some kind of universal in human experience. 1 Matthew Arnold subsequently mused that great poems “most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the face, and which are independent of time.” 2 Gilbert Murray, father of archetypal criticism, described an archetype as “a great unconscious solidarity and continuity, lasting from age to age, among all the children of the poets, both the makers and callers-forth, both the artists and audiences.” 3 Maud Bodkin wrote: “I use the term ‘archetypal pattern’ to refer to that within us which, in Gilbert Murray’s phrase, leaps in response to the effective presentation in poetry of an ancient theme … in poetry we may identify themes having a particular form or pattern which persists amid variation from age to age, and which corresponds to a pattern or configuration of emotional tendencies in the minds of those who are stirred by the theme.” 4 1 Samuel Johnson, Works (London, 1816) 3:285; idem, “The Adventurer,” The Works of Samuel Johnson (Oxford University Press, 1824) 524: “If mankind were left to judge for themselves it is reasonable to imagine, that of such writing, at least, as describe the movements of the human passions, and of which every man carries the archetype within him, a just opinion would be formed; but whoever has remarked the fate of books must have found it governed by other causes than general consent arising from general conviction … Upon the whole, as the author seems to share all the common miseries of life, he appears to partake likewise of its lenitives and abatements.” 2 Matthew Arnold, Poems (London, 1949) xix-xx. 3 Gilbert Murray, “Hamlet and Orestes,” The Classical Tradition in Poetry (London, 1927) 237 [205-240]. 4 Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (London, 1934) 4.