Meaning is aesthetic. It comes to us as a feeling, and it follows one of eight styles or archetypes. Today I explore the archetype of tradition.
Style #8: Tradition. We experience tradition as a sense of continuity over time. Theocritus inaugurated the pastoral tradition in poetry in the third century B.C. with idylls about the simple lives of shepherds, filled with love affairs and singing contests, as a contrast to the sophisticated urban life he and his fellow poets and readers led in the Hellenistic Mediterranean. Theocritus inspired Vergil, who also wrote about shepherds although he turned his Eclogues into commentaries about contemporary Roman life and politics. Dante revived the pastoral genre at the very end of his life by writing two Vergilian eclogues but made them into allegories with obscure allusions. Boccaccio and Petrarch followed Dante’s lead by writing pastoral verse, in part as satires on modern life, in part as elegies to dead friends and lost simplicity. Giovanni Baptista Spagnuoli developed the genre further by composing eclogues to attack the abuses of the church and to give advice to young people. Spagnuoli’s eclogues gave Shakespeare material for his festive comedies, such as As You Like It, which compare the structured, corrupt life of the court with the freedom and poverty of the country. And so on.
Thus, we understand one work by looking at the work of predecessors which inspired it. In retrospect, we label this chain of influence a “tradition,” which the writers within it grasped with varying degrees of awareness. In a tradition, each person adds something to the legacy of the past. Or we may describe a sequence of writers, works, or actions that have loose connections to one another. These recent titles, The American Tradition in Literature, The American Political Tradition, The American Intellectual Tradition, The American Military Tradition, apply the frame of tradition in retrospect to describe common, often unconscious characteristics that extend across time.
The Future of Reading 