Study the archetypes in novel of “In the margin of life” (Case study: wise old man, mask, woman).

Abstract

Closely set relation between literature and man’s spirit has provided a bed for psychological criticism in culture and literature domain. The function of this kind of criticism is to demonstrate the link between literature, scholar, and the concept of artistic creation. “Carl Gustav Jung” is one of the psychologists who affects in the growth of this kind of criticism and is the owner of the theory of “archetypes” in the psychology world. Jung, in this theory beside the “subjective unconsciousness”, believes in another unconsciousness which is common in all human beings and named it “collective unconsciousness”. He also called the common mental images in collective unconsciousness as “archetypes”.   This paper, after extraction and checking the archetypes of the characters of the historical novel “In the margin of life” of “Taha Hussein”, has performed a psychological study by descriptive-analytic method. Taha Hussein, in the novel by creation a new style, has rewritten the Islamic history by artistic language, and analyzed the events and characters of Islam advent comprehensively. The approach of the study is to demonstrate that the scholar can specify the spiritual state of his story characters accurately by archetypes which is present in racial memory of human being and is common among all humans; therefore, the reader is attracted to the literary text and discovers reduplicate joy by finding its hidden layers. Consequently, the archetypes of “mask”, “wise man”, and “woman” have sensible display in the novel and are recalled by work of art because the ancient patterns are present in the depth of the writer and the reader mind and therefore the reader is spontaneously excited and communicate with the text bilaterally.