Myth Theory and Criticism
Myth criticism designates not so much a critical approach in literary
studies as the convergence of several methods and forms of inquiry about
the complex relations between literature and myth. So heterogeneous are
these inquiries, connecting with so many disciplines and interdisciplinary
issues, that it is perhaps best to think of myth criticism as the locus
for a series of complex, if powerfully suggestive, questions. Is myth
embedded in literature, or are myth and literature somehow coextensive? Is
myth (from Greek mythos, "tale, story") inescapably narrative in
form? Is all literature susceptible of myth criticism? How self-conscious
are literary artists in the use or incorporation of myth? How does myth
in, or as, literature evolve historically? Does a single governing myth, a
"monomyth," organize disparate mythic narratives and dominate literary
form? What tasks, besides a simple cataloging of putative mythic
components, fall to the myth critic? And most fundamentally, what does
"myth" mean in the context of literary criticism? The divergence in
answers to this last question has been so great, recourse to different
disciplines (philosophy, anthropology,
psychology, folklore) so various, that the question becomes an inevitable
terminus a quo for a survey of myth criticism.A characteristic Romantic and post-Romantic tendency in
defining myth is the denial of euhemerism, the
theory that myths can be explained historically or by identifying their
special objects or motives. The resistance to such reductionism is perhaps
strongest in the work of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, whose monumental
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is given over in its second volume
(1925) to the proposition that "myth is a form of thought." By this
Cassirer means to insist that myth is a fundamental "symbolic form" that,
like language, is a means of responding to, and hence creating, our world.
But unlike language, or at least the language of philosophy, myth is
nonintellectual, nondiscursive, typically imagistic. It is the primal,
emotion-laden, unmediated "language" of experience. As a consequence, for
mythic consciousness there is no reflective separation of the real and the
ideal; the mythic "'image' does not represent the 'thing'; it is
the thing" (2:38). This literal, as opposed to representational, quality
of myth suggests that literature that taps into the recesses of mythic
consciousness will reveal in powerful fashion the "dynamic of the life
feeling" (2:38), which gives meaning and intelligibility to our
world.Myth, understood in this honorific rather than pejorative sense, has
profoundly influenced numerous literary critics and theorists. Isabel
MacCaffrey, for example, insists in her study of Paradise Lost that
the Christian myth at the center of the epic is not for Milton an oblique
representation but rather the "direct rendering of certain
stupendous realities now known only indirectly in the symbolic signatures
of earthly life" (30). It was for this reason, she feels, that Milton was
obliged to give up earlier allegorical plans for the poem: mythic material
is simply inaccessible to allegory or metaphor, because it is itself their
"cause." A poetic method that emphasizes the separation of "idea" and
"image" runs exactly counter to a mythic conception, which insists on
their identity.Two other highly influential, nonreductionist theories of myth come
from the fields of anthropology and psychology (see Anthropological
Theory and Criticism). The French anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss, whose extensive work with South American tribal
societies has yielded extraordinary analyses, argues that the meaning of
myths lies not in their manifest content but rather in their underlying
structure of relations, which typically works to mediate between polar
extremes (raw and cooked, agriculture and warfare, life and death). In
other words, the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of
overcoming a contradiction. Ultimately this leads Lévi-Strauss to the
notion that the structure of myths is identical with that of the human
mind. Thus the mythopoeic (mythmaking) imagination, its structure and
operations, is reflected in the structure and symbols of actual
myths.The very power of Lévi-Strauss's argument about the nature and
function of myth has made it difficult for literary critics and theorists
to incorporate or utilize his accounts in a sustained fashion. His
abstract notion of "structure" (derived by analogy from Ferdinand
de Saussure's enormously suggestive conception of linguistic
structure), while appealing to the more systematic semioticians and
structuralists, is difficult to accommodate to what are typically more
labile definitions of literary form and structure in "mature" or
sophisticated literary traditions. (See Semiotics
and Structuralism.)
Eric Gould presents in Mythical Intentions in Modern
Literature an intelligent and sympathetic account of Lévi-Strauss's
thought about myth and its relation to literature but finally can do
little more than point to the anthropologist's rather dispiriting
conclusion that myth survives only tenuously in modern fictional forms and
that the novel is a literary genre that "tells a story that ends badly,
and... now, as a genre [is] itself coming to a bad end" (95). Gould's more
optimistic conclusion--that literary studies can have in common with
Lévi-Strauss's mythography a self-conscious interpretive posture--seems
only vaguely useful.For literary criticism perhaps the most productive anti-euhemerist has
been the psychologist and one-time disciple of Sigmund
Freud, C. G. Jung. Although he is usually associated
with archetypes (see Archetypal
Theory and Criticism), the distinction between archetype and myth has
often been blurred, and Jung's theories have been appropriated, mutatis
mutandis, by myth critics and archetypal critics alike. Jung's most
influential idea is that of a "collective unconscious," a racial
memory, consisting of "primordial images" or archetypes. These find
expression in characteristic forms--the Earth Mother, the divine child,
the wise old man, the sacrificial death--of the god, the mandala, the
satyr or man-animal monster, the cross, the number 4--which provide the
primordial elements in the myths and narrative constructions of widely
different cultures. Although Jean Piaget and others have expressed
skepticism about the universality or "racial" quality of Jung's
archetypes, the archetypal vocabulary is now widespread in the discourse
of those who might be called myth critics, including the most influential
member of that group, Northrop
Frye.Frye and others are attracted to Jung's theories not only because of
the richness of imagery and narrative elements (what Jung and his
collaborator Carl Kerényi came to call "mythologems") but because these
theories, like those of Cassirer and Lévi-Strauss, command for myth a
central cultural position, unassailable by reductive intellectual methods
or procedures. By entitling the third essay of Anatomy of Criticism
"Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths," Frye suggests a conceptual means
of drawing individual and apparently unrelated archetypal images--the
fundaments of psyche and culture--into a coherent and ultimately
hierarchical framework of "mythoi," one organizing not only individual
literary works but the entire system of literary works, that is,
literature. Thus, for example, works in the "realistic," or
representational, mode (the ill-fated "modern" novel Lévi-Strauss speaks
of) stand (nonpejoratively) at the opposite end of the spectrum from those
in the "mythical mode," which, because they are about characters having
the greatest possible powers and who act "near or at the conceivable
limits of desire" (136), are the "most abstract and conventionalized"
(134). The abstract and conventional qualities Frye attributes to the
mythic mode in literature are ultimately reflective of the irreducible and
inescapable place of myth itself; so conceived, Western literature,
massively funded by the powerful myths of the Bible and classical culture,
might be thought of as having a "grammar" or coherent structural
principles basic to any critical organization or account of historical
development. That Frye ultimately identifies the "quest-myth" in its
various forms as the central myth (mono-myth) of literature and the source
of literary genres is at once the logical conclusion of his approach to
myth criticism and the source of ongoing debate.No brief account can begin to do justice to the massive conceptual
power and richly varied suggestiveness of Frye's theory of myths. If
occasionally the schematization seems excessive or arbitrary, Frye's
efforts nonetheless suggest how powerfully myth can organize our thinking
about literature and about culture. His four "mythoi," or "generic
narratives" (spring: comedy; summer: romance; autumn:tragedy; winter:
irony and satire), have proved central in the ongoing project of
rehabilitating genre theory. And his conviction that the "total mythopoeic
structure of concern" extends beyond literature to religion, philosophy,
political theory, and history suggests how myth criticism may ultimately
connect with a larger theory of culture.Frye's particular critical and theoretical project has stimulated
enormous scholarly activity, but he has had considerable company in
defining the possibilities for literary myth criticism. Leslie Fiedler argues that contemporary criticism has lost its
way by failing to see how Plato's
"ancient quarrel between logos and mythos "as to which
was the primal word" ("No! In Thunder" 1:518). Answering predictably and
claiming that "mythos created poetry," Fiedler appropriates Jung's
archetypes and Crocean intuitionism to define myth
and thereby free poetry from the enervating embrace of logos (science,
rationalism, logic) (see Benedetto
Croce). Having succeeded so well in opposing mythos to logos, however,
Fiedler comes perilously close to paralyzing criticism. His own critical
project survives chiefly with his notion that literature comes into being
only with the imposition of a "Signature" upon mythic materials, a
"Signature" being the "sum total of individuating factors in a work"
(1:537), the sign of the Persona. The insistence on both signature and
myth, or archetype, with the pre-dominance of each varying in individual
literary works, creates a useful critical spectrum.Many other modern myth critics and theorists, from the Cambridge
Ritualists down to the present, have suggested productive ways of
speaking about myth in literature and the connections between literary
mythopoeia and the materials explored by other disciplines in our
intellectual culture. C. L. Barber, for example, has explored the ways
Shakespearean comedy achieves a characteristic "release" leading to social
clarification; this "release" is related in turn to a ceremonial,
ritualistic, finally mythic conception of human life that was evolving
rapidly into a historical, psychological conception among the educated
classes of Shakespeare's society. More recently, René
Girard has taken up a wide-ranging investigation of the central
cultural role of ritual sacrifice and its relation
to myths, especially those prominent in Greek tragedy. Arguing that this
ritual is society's effort to deflect upon a relatively indifferent or
"sacrificeable" victim the violence that would otherwise be vented on its
own members, Girard offers deeply suggestive commentary on such plays as
Ajax, Medea, and, most impressively, Oedipus Tyrannos. Even
in so effectively establishing connections between ritual and myth on the
one hand and tragic drama on the other, however, Girard is at pains to
acknowledge the distinctively literary qualities of the plays, what he
calls the "essentially antimythical and antiritualistic inspiration of the
drama" (95). Girard's most important critical claim is that the depiction
of the ritual victim, or "scapegoat," must be seen
in drama not as simple superstition, a crude mythic holdover, but as the
metamorphosis of earlier "reciprocal violence," a communal violence "more
deeply rooted in the human condition than we are willing to admit"
(96).Although "myth criticism" no longer enjoys its earlier vogue, its
legacy is powerful. Frye's work remains deeply influential; critics of
Shakespearean comedy or Paradise Lost must still come to terms with
the arguments of Barber's and MacCaffrey's studies; Girard continues to be
a striking presence on the contemporary critical scene; and many
individual critical studies concentrating on mythic themes, as well as on
the formal or generic consequences of those themes, form an important part
of the exegetical tradition. This seems to be particularly true for
studies of modernist and American literature. It is likely that the future
of literary myth criticism will be determined by the vitality of
mythography as a concern in other related or allied fields, as well as by
the heuristic power of the questions such criticism can generate. One of
the most important of these questions asks about the degree of mythic
"self-consciousness" in literary texts. Is literature mythopoeia or
mythology? the creation or reflective use of mythic materials? The
nineteenth-century philologist and student of myth F. Max Müller proposed
a distinction between the "mythic" and the "mythical" that gave early form
to precisely this issue. And subsequently many critics have insisted on
the very different ways in which myth is conceived and appropriated by
Homer and Sophocles; Virgil and Milton; T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James
Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Gabriel García Márquez. (The peculiarly
self-conscious and individual myth systems of poets such as William Blake
and W. B. Yeats also point up the critical question sharply.) In turn,
other critics have asked how the Western myth tradition has underwritten
canon formation and how, for example, black and feminist literatures are
to be understood in relation to, and in conscious rebellion against, this
tradition. If one accepts that the proposition "myth is literature"
is itself an aesthetic creation and hence defines further creative
possibilities (as does, for example, the Americanist and myth critic
Richard Chase), then the question of mythic self-consciousness becomes
particularly exigent.In short, complex critical and theoretical questions about myth and
literature continue to be asked. The susceptibility of literature to forms
of myth criticism depends upon the persuasiveness of answers to such
questions, as well as upon the success of literary theorists in
appropriating the empirical and conceptual investigations of myth by other
disciplines.Charles Eric Reeves
Notes and Bibliographies
See also Anthropological Theory and Criticism, Archetypal Theory and Criticism, Northrop Frye, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic
Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (1959); Douglas Bush,
Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (1937);
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949); Ernst
Cassirer, Sprache und Mythos: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der
Götternamen (1925, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer,
1946); Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, vol. 2 (1925, The
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim, 1955), Richard
Chase, Quest for Myth (1946); Joseph Duncan, "Archetypal Criticism
in English, 19461980" Bulletin of Bibliography 40 (1983);
Mircea Eliade, Le Mythe de l'éternel retour: Archétypes et
rép&ecute;tition (1949, The Myth of the Eternal Return,
trans. Willard Trask, 1954); Leslie A. Fiedler, The Collected Essays of
Leslie Fiedler (2 vols., 1971); Sigmund Freud, Totem und Tabu
(1913, Totem and Taboo, trans. A. A. Brill, 1918); Northrop Frye,
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957); René Girard, La
Violence et la sacré (1972, Violence and the Sacred, trans.
Patrick Gregory, 1977); Eric Gould, Mythical Intentions in Modern
Literature (1981); C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Einfühung in das
Wesen der Mythologie (1941, Essays on a Science of Mythology,
trans. R, F, C, Hull, 1949, rev. ed., 1963); G. S. Kirk, Myth: Its
Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (1970); Claude
Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (1958, Structural
Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf,
1963), La Pensée sauvage (1962, The Savage Mind, 1962,
trans. anon., 1966); Isabel MacCaffrey, Paradise Lost as "Myth"
(1959); Marjorie McCune, Tucker Orbison, and Philip Withim, eds., The
Binding of Proteus: Perspectives on Myth and the Literary Process
(1980); Paul Ricoeur, Le Symbolique du mal (pt. 2 of Philosophie
de la volanté, vol. 2, Finitude et culpabilité, 1960, The
Symbolism of Evil, Trans. Emerson Buchanan, 1967); John Vickery, ed.,
Myth and Literature: Contemporary Theory and Practice (1966).