1. The myth in literary theory (J.S.)
2. Le mythe (A.D.)
1. the mith in
Some critics have tried to solve the terminological problem by producing a definition of myth which encompasses all the cases of meaning one and those cases of meaning three which can be accepted if the term is only used in a somewhat broader way. According to Wellek and Warren, under certain conditions it matters little whether myth concerns religious or secular problems and the distinction between anonymity and individuality of authorship may also fall away: «We may be able to identify the creators - or some of the creators - of a myth: but it may still have the qualitative status of myth if its authorship is forgotten, not generally known, or at any event unimportant to its validation - if it has been accepted by the community, has received the consensus of the faithful».
Yet, although there is a common denominator between these two last discussed meanings, there is at least in some cases of meaning three also still a significant distinction between them. In the former sense we always are dealing with «myth» versus «logos», in the latter cases we are dealing with the concept of «myth» versus «truth». Only in the first sense are we dealing with true myth. It is connected with primitive religion in a direct way or at least with genuine archetypes of the human collective subconscious. In some cases of the third sense we are dealing with false myth. When critics stress the relationship between myth and ritual they are thinking of true myth. False myth, on the other hand, rests upon a total secularization of the mythical realm. True myth by its very nature transcends the logical sphere of the realm of outward manifestation, while false myth either reduces the infinite to the finite or applies infinite qualities to the finite. This distinction becomes crystal clear in the case of the many political myths produced by totalitarian governments, which are all too often into literature in the same way as true myths are. As an example of true myth let us take the Great Mother Goddess; as an example of false myth we have the supposed superiority of the German «Aryan» or of the Polretarian.
There seems to be no doubt that only in true myth do we find challenging complexity, interesting analysis and the hope of revealing meaningful, positive and universally applicable interpretations. This is so if true myth appears in its purest form or is at least dominant in whatever story we are considering. Where false myth dominates analysis will in most cases be of limited literary significance and interest. It will be limited to revealing to an implied in political myths of which the two political concepts we have supplied may serve as examples.
Only true myth, then, is of overwhelming significance to literary scholarship. Indeed, it has been claimed that the structure principles of literature are to myth, mythology and comparative religion as are those of painting to geometry. Because of this vast interrelationship there exists a wide range of possibilities for the literary manifestations of myth. Thus, having limited ourselves to only one meaning of myth and to its function in literature, we may now set ourselves to distinguishing different sub-types which literature has developed.
It has been distinguished, for example, between «canonical» and «apocryphal» myths in relation to a given historical situation. For many authors of Christian belief who have used both the Bible and classical mythology, the latter does not claim the same kind of authority as the former, although they are equally mythical as far as literary criticism is concerned.
It also as been distinguished between a learned or subtle myth, on the one hand, and a primitive or popular myth, on the other, although both derive from the center of imaginative experience.
In addition it has been distinguished between myth and naturalism as between two poles of a wide range within which the literary design unfolds. There are, however, many differents possibilities between these two extremes. For examples, myth sometimes plays - at least indirectly - an important role in literary manifestations of esoteric or mystical tradition, since mysticism in all its forms is often no more than a later, reflected, and differently applied form of sublimation of myth.
Because of the fact that myth is always related to a creation and is telling how something came into existence or how a pattern of behavior, an institution, a mode of reacting, etc. was established, it constitutes paradigms for all significant human acts. For this reason it plays such an important role in literature which describes or expresses human actions and reactions. For this reason, too, not only ethnology and mythology, but disciplines universally and centrally oriented to man and his way of life, such as anthropology and psychology are also interest in it. These disciplines developed special perspectives and methods for interpreting myth. Some of the most important perspectives are the synthetic-theoretical approach of Sir James Frazer, the pragmatic-functionalist approach of Bronislaw Malinowski, the psychoanalytical approaches of Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, the phenomenological approach of Mircea Eliade, and the structuralist approach of Claude LÉvi-Strauss.
Literary criticism can use many of these methods and results if they are adapted methodologically to its need. To date is seems that the greatest wealth of results for literary criticism has been produced by the Frazer and Jungian schools. The reason for this is that myths have been successfully interpreted symbolically, or, as some critics have poorly phrased it, «allegorically», since the time of Theogenes of Rhegium. It is precisely the symbolic approach which gives Frazer and the schools of psychoanalysis their particular advantages for literary criticism. The fact that often and literature myth is not literally retolf but rather adapted by means of symbolism, or, as Northrop Frye as termed it, by the principle of displacement, explains an additional aspect of this superiority.
By the term «principle of displacement» Frye refers to the fact that we rarely are directly faced with a tale of myth in literature. We can only metaphorically identify a myth in many types of literature by recognizing its link to the work at hand through some form of simile: analogy, significant association, incidental accompaniment, and the like. In a directly myth-related ancient epic we can have a moon-goddess or a water-god. In a romance we have only a hero indirectly related to the moon or water in the special way. Indeed, in more realistic modes of literature the myth-association becomes less significant and seems almost hidden. The relationship to the original myth is reduced to the level of incidental imagery. Thus, critics have to develop their own methods to grasp, understand, and show the mythical meaning in their various far-reaching, displaced, or symbolically-changed forms within literature. The best method of revealing such mythical implications, often obscure and difficult to detect at first glance, would be a comparative study of the story type.
Some critics go so far as to maintain that true myth in its pure, original form is not really known to us and cannot be grasped or reconstructed. All we can known are literary manifestations of myth. Other critics, however, believe that pinpointing possible sources of deeper rhythms of fiction will enable us to recognize myth as literature in the form of a narrative resurrection of a primeval reality. We shall then also be able to recognize older and newer literary variations of myth from the basic psychological perspectives as the fundamental struggle between the ego and the objective world in which alternating attempts are made by the one to subdue the other. The unbridgeable distance between ourselves and the primeval reality of myth, so these other critics affirm, should not and cannot prevent us from pursuing and understanding myth.
A most consciously myth-oriented writer, the Austrian novelist Hermann Broch, went so far as to claim that «myth is the archetype of every phenomenal cognition of which the human mind is capable». This might explain the innumerable problems and aspects of myth in general and its relationship to literature in particular. Myth itself, mythopoeic expression, the subjective artist as myth maker, and the artist himself as myth exemplify some of the basic problems and the broad scope involved. Indeed, the development of the use of myth in modern literature is sometimes carried so far that the result in the kind of paradoxical dialectic of myth and anti-myth. Neither can exist by itself since each one presupposes the other. The truly sacred myth, which becomes, as the mythical element in literature, a recurrent and essential part of literature, must be created again and again and thus admit to its bosom the so-called anti-mythical of parody and criticism.
The term «myth» usually encompasses two distinct qualities: the mythopoeic and the mythological. The mythopoeic element, which has been emphasized by Ernst Cassirer, referes to the view that all knowledge involves a synthesizing activity of the mind at the instant of its reception. In this respect it is somewhat of a mode od consciousness or a basic way of envisaging experience and does not necessarily imply the idea of story-telling. The mythological quality, and the other hand, refers only to a given set or sets of such ready-made stories from the various religious traditions. It could be claimed that both qualities together usually play a role in the creation of literature - the first referring to the «subjective» involvement of the poet's mind, the second to the objective traditions of explanations and interpretations of life as they were handed down. Some critics maintain, however, that the sources of myth-oriented story-telling lie somehow below or beyond the conscious inventions of the individual author. In a way probably best described in terms of C. G. Jung's archetypes of a collective subconscious, the stories serve as a kind of vehicle for meanings that have to do with the inner nature of the universe and of life itself.
Yet it does seem to aid terminological clarification if we distinguish between the to main qualities if myth - between mythopoeia and mythology. Friedrich Max MÜller suggested employing the adjective «mythic» for the first quality, where no clear-cut ideas of true and false as yet emerge, and the adjective «mythical» for the second, where some degree of deliberate fabrication comes into play. Since several members of the Cambridge school, as well as individual American and German critics have used the terms this way, it would definitely aid in the clarification and unification if they were generally used thus.
The principle of displacement by no means constitutes the sole reason why the impact of myth on literature became more and more hidden and indirect. Myth itself does on occasion changed in different ways. The ancient, «primitive» mythopoeic way of envisioning the world was replaced by the reasoning of a mythology. The mythologic provided, in various forms, materials which were embellished, recontextualized, and often re-interpreted by the individual writer. The impact of myth in connection with the principle of displacement has become less and less powerful in modern times. The results have been literary forms of the pastiche, the myth parody, and the anti-myth. Consequently, there is a growing awareness today of the need for what Friedrich Schlegel has called «the mother soil of myth».
Since myth in literature is not to be conceived as just a narrative structure - for this reason a discussion of the possibility of this meaning has been discarded at the outset - but should enter into the very life-blood of the literary work, some critics have maintained that the use of metaphysical and symbolist devices has grown out of the modern author's search for a mythology that might offer him some concrete basis for metaphor and metaphysics.
Thus, the term myth may well be used to characterize stories from the beginnings of human history when concepts and language were still prelogical. It is in this context that the term «mytholoeia» is meant to describe the human expressions of such an early age. Out of this mythopoeic thought grew both mythology as a partly rationally-understandable collection of stories, and the application of mythology to literature; The latter has also been termed the «literary exploitation of mythology». It can be found for example in Dante's Commedia, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, Racine's Andromaque, and Goethe's Faust. In the case of later and more sophisticated literature, the old mythic ideas are deliberately reconceived and re-phrased either through the sublimation of the myth into the mystical and esoteric or simply through the literature medium. There is, in addition, another possibility for myth in literature because of the search of modern writers for a more or less subjective and self-created mythology that would provide a literary foundation for metaphor and metaphysics. This general trend can be found in Saint-John Perse'Anabasis in a rather subjective form, in T. S. Eliot's Wasteland as the overlapping of subjective creation and objective tradition, and in Rilke's Duino Elegies in the form of a subjective and subconscious re-birth of some objective mythic images.
Some common ground for the ancient mythopoeia, the intermediate objective mythology, and the modern, more subjective search for a personal myth is provided by the collective «archetypes» of C. G. Jung, which underlie all three forms to a certain extent. These supra-individual images of archetypal patterns of the human subconscious, with their given set of concepts (e.g., the Divine Father, the Great Mother, the cosmological idea of a world-tree, the descent to the Underworld with its myth of rebirth), provide continually recurrent themes in human expression. They occur, however, in persistently changing modes and styles that create a wide spectrum of variations in literary expression: from the epic of Gilgamesh and Homer'sOdyssey through John Milton's Paradise Lost down to Herman Melville's Moby Dickand Fernando Pessoa's Mensagem, in which book the vers is found which states that «the myth is the Nothing which is everything».
The entire relationship between myth and literature is in any case as significant as it is multi-dimensional and complex.
Indeed, many literary works serve as excellent examples of the revitalization of myth. No less worthy of note, it is often myth that gives power and vitality to some of the greatest works of literature.
Joseph Strelka
New York State University, Albany
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