The Poetics of Myth

Eleazar M. Meletinsky, Guy Lanoue, Alexandre Sadetsky, Guy Lanoue, Alexandre Sadetsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138141568
• eBook ISBN: 9781136749285
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

'Serious students will savor Meletinsky's rich and complex book. The opening section alone is valuable for its erudite examination of modern theory about myth, with special attention to Levi-Strauss and the structuralists. Meletinsky grasps the essentials of theories he discusses and makes clear distinctions between them Highly recommended for upper division undergraduates, graduate students and teachers/scholars of myth.' - Choice

PART ONE

MODERN THEORIES OF MYTH AND APPROACHES TO LITERATURE¹

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW²

Classical philosophy began with a rational reevaluation of mythological materials and, obviously, dealt with the problem of the relationship between knowledge and mythic narration.³ The Sophists interpreted myth as allegory, while Plato favored a philosophical and symbolic approach to popular mythology. Alexei Losev, a modern scholar of Plato and one of the most important specialists of the mythology of antiquity and of the theoretical problems of the interpretation of myth, argues that “the doctrine of the universal being becomes in Plato the dialectical and transcendental basis of all mythology.”⁴ Aristotle, especially in his Poetics, saw myth as fable. Later, allegorical interpretations of myth came to the fore. The Stoics saw in Greek deities the personification of the functions attributed to the gods, and the Epicureans argued that myths, which they saw as based on natural ‘facts’, had been used by the ruling and priestly classes for their own ends. The neo-Platonists evaluated myth in terms of logical categories. Euhemerus argued that mythical protagonists were nothing more than historical characters who had become imbued with a divine aura. Medieval Christian scholars explained the Old and New Testaments figuratively and allegorically.

During the Renaissance, interest in the mythology of antiquity emerged once again. Myth was seen positively as a series of poetic allegories tinted by a moralizing veneer; as a manifestation of the sentiments and passions that accompanied human emancipation; or as an allegorical expression of religious, philosophical, and scientific truths.⁵ By contrast, the scholars of the Enlightenment were generally negative toward myth, believing it to be the result of ignorance and delusion. Almost at the same time, several books were published at the beginning of the eighteenth century that were to influence strongly the study of myth: Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times by Joseph Lafitau,⁶ On the Origin of Fables by Bernard de Fontenelle,⁷ and The New Science by Giambattista Vico.

Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary who lived for many years among Canadian Indians, compared their culture with that of classical Greece and gave birth to the comparative method in ethnology. He reached the conclusion that both cultures had arisen from the same basic principles and sought the seed of revealed ‘higher’ religions in pagan mythology and religion. Fontenelle, a Cartesian and an immediate precursor of Enlightenment scholars, explained the rise of myths in primitive societies by the fact that, in their search for explanations, primitives attributed human, though greatly exaggerated, characteristics to the otherwise incomprehensible forces of nature. According to Fontenelle, modern superstition and prejudice are survivals of this false conception. Despite the similarity of the methodological principles they use, Lafitau and Fontenelle are fundamentally opposed. The Cartesian Fontenelle contrasts the epoch in which the imagination held sway to the age of the mechanical arts. He leans toward the latter because the former was too clearly generated by ignorance and barbarism and therefore constituted an obstacle to civilization.

In contrast to Fontenelle, Vico bases his thinking on a dialectical understanding of historical development, in which gains are inseparable from losses. He in fact favors a cyclical view of the history of civilization: the divine, heroic, and human epochs of civilization express the infancy, adolescence, and adulthood of society and of collective reason.

Vico links poetry to an undeveloped culture and even emphasizes, unlike the major players of the French Enlightenment, the sublime quality (later lost) of the poetry of antiquity. Heroic poetry of the Homeric type was born, according to Vico, from the ‘divine’—by which he means ‘mythology’—but the originality of myth is largely defined by specific and little developed forms of thought that can be best compared with the psychology of an infant. Vico is referring to the sensual tangibility, the corporeality, the emotionality, and the richness of the imagination, all of which are associated with the absence of the rational. He also invokes the projection of personal characteristics onto the material world, even up to the point of equating the cosmos with the human body: the personification of natural categories, the inability to separate the abstract characteristics of a subject from its concrete forms and attributes, and the substitution of the essence for ‘episodes’.⁸ Vico's subtle understanding of the metaphorical nature of myth and of the mythological genesis of many poetic tropes, as well as his emphasis on the fact that every metaphor or metonym is at heart a miniature myth, broadly anticipates not only the Romantic interpretation of myth but also the modern view.

Vico had interesting ideas on the evolution of the poetic language that developed out of myth and on the emergence of the language of prose from poetry. His thoughts on the transformation of metaphor into linguistic signs and on the language of symbols in the Greek epoch are still worthy of note today. Vico hypothesizes

that all the tropes … which have been hitherto been considered ingenious inventions of writers, were necessary modes of expression of all the first poetic nations, and had originally their full native propriety. But these expressions of the first nations later became figurative when, with the further development of the human mind, words were invented which signified abstract forms or genera comprising their species or relating parts with their wholes.⁹

Vico represents every aspect—logical, metaphysical, economic, political, physical, and geographical—of the archaic epoch as poetic and rooted in myth, thereby demonstrating his understanding of the ideological syncretism of primitive societies. Vico is convinced that the oldest mythic poetry was an imitation of nature in the Aristotelian sense, but only when viewed through the prism of the primitive mythological imagination. He also believes that myth can be used as a historical source when its peculiar mode of reflecting reality is taken into account: particular historical personalities become imbued, in the logic of myth, with natural qualities and actions, and mythological geography and cosmography have a basis in concrete reality. Vico, however, without any ethnographic evidence (though perhaps no weaker than Lafitau's observations), combines a profound understanding of symbols with allegory and ingenuous euhemerization, though his methods of philological analysis and etymological research are imprecise. He is not, however, able to resolve either concrete historical problems or problems that pertain to folklore. Vico's contributions in the area of philosophy of myth are therefore more often remembered today than his scientific methodology.

Vico's theory of myth and poetry is placed squarely within the philosophy of history:

The first men, the children as it were of the human race, not being able to form intelligible class concepts of things, had a natural need to create poetic characters, that is, imaginative class-concepts, by reducing them as to certain models or ideal portraits all the particular species which resembled them. [209]

Hence poetic wisdom, the first wisdom of the gentile world, must have begun with a metaphysic not rational and abstract like that of learned men now, but felt and imagined as that of the first men must have been, who, without power of ratiocination, were all robust sense and vigorous imagination. This metaphysic was their poetry, a faculty born with them (for they were furnished by nature with these senses and imaginations); born of their ignorance of causes … Their poetry was at first divine, because they imagined the causes of the things they felt and wondered at to be gods …. At the same time they gave the things they wondered at substantial being after their own ideas, just as children do, whom we see take inanimate things in their hands and play with them and talk to them as though they were living persons … [375]

In such fashion the first men of the gentile nations, children of nascent mankind as we have styled them in the Axioms, created things according to their own ideas … but they in their robust ignorance, did it by virtue of a wholly corporeal imagination. And because it was quite corporeal, they did it with marvelous sublimity … [376]

For it has been shown that it was deficiency of human reasoning power that gave rise to poetry so sublime that the philosophies that came afterwards, the arts of poetry and of criticism, have produced none equal or better, and have even prevented its production … This discovery of the origins of poetry does away with the opinion of the matchless wisdom of the ancients, so ardently sought after from Plato to Bacon's De Sapientia veterum. For the wisdom of the ancients was the vulgar wisdom of the lawgivers who founded the human race, not the esoteric wisdom of great and rare philosophers. [387]¹⁰

Vico is the creator of the first serious philosophy of myth. It is no coincidence that Vico's view of myth as part of history developed alongside the emergence of middle-class prose. The decline of Renaissance culture, which had consciously sought to amalgamate medieval Christian traditions with the paganism of antiquity, resulted in the definitive disappearance of mythological traditions that had still been fueling Renaissance culture, albeit in a humanized and aesthetically transformed form that was a sign of their poetic nature. It is no coincidence that this demythification did not originate in France, the seat of optimistic rationalism and enlightenment, but in Italy, which was undergoing a general cultural and political decline after experiencing the brilliant efflorescence of the Renaissance. From a methodological viewpoint, Vico's polemic is aimed at the Cartesian variation on the theme of historical progress.

Vico's philosophy of myth also contains in embryo—that is, syn-cretically—almost all of the main tendencies of later mythological studies, varied and contradictory as they sometimes may be: Herder and the Romantic poeticization of myth and folklore; the link between myth and poetic language analyzed by Max Müller, A.A. Potebnja, and Ernst Cassirer; the theory of survivals associated with English anthropology; the work of the folklore historians; and even distant allusions to Durkheim's collective representations and Lévy-Bruhl's notion of primitive rationality. Even James Joyce was fascinated by Vico's analysis of myth and by his cyclical theory of history. He cites his name several times—in a serious though sometimes facetious vein—in his mythicizing novel Firmegans Wake. He even uses Vico's theories of myth to organize the structure of the work.

Vico's philosophy of myth is not an ontological summary of the science of myth but it does anticipate many of the later developments that were to characterize modern research into myth.” It is commonly believed that Vico's philosophy of history anticipates many of Herder's ideas and a few of the principles behind Hegel's philosophy of history, while Vico's ideas on the cyclical unfolding of cultural development have reemerged in the twentieth century in the work of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee.¹²

Herder's work acts as a bridge between the Enlightenment and the Romantic view of myth. Herder is attracted to myths because of their naturalness, their emotional charge, their poetic character, and especially their link with national or ethnic character. Herder examines the myths of many societies, including the myths of many primitive cultures. He does not appear to be interested in myth as such but instead concentrates his studies on how myth expressed the world view, wisdom, and poetic richness of a nation.¹³

The Romantic philosophy of myth, which is perhaps most clearly delineated in the works of Christian Heyne, KP. Moritz, the theoretical critiques of Friedrich and Wilhelm Schlegel, Georg Friedrich Creuzer, Johann Görres, A.I. Kanne, and the Grimm brothers, found its highest expression in Schelling.¹⁴ In the Romantic view, myth is essentially treated as an aesthetic phenomenon that, in contrast to earlier views, is also privileged as the symbolic prototype of artistic creation. The waning of traditional interpretations of myth as allegory—an approach to some extent still found in Heine—and the growth of the symbolic approach, are the nexus of the Romantic view. It is during this period that the first tentative steps were taken toward a historical treatment of myth and its different ‘national’ forms, even if this new position was still essentially abstract and idealist. The stance assumed by a few of the Romantics toward modern individualism or medieval Christianity still sometimes strongly smacks of the more traditional cult of antiquity. While the young Schlegel seeks Dionysian effusiveness in ancient rituals and in the works of Aristophanes, Schelling and, later, Hegel remain faithful to Goethe's and Winckelmann's views on the myth and art of antiquity¹⁵

Schelling sees art and aesthetics, which he believes is isomorphic with organic life, as the most important act by which knowledge is acquired and an efficient means of overcoming the antinomy between subject and object, necessity and liberty, nature and spirit, and real and ideal—an instrument, therefore, that is capable of faithfully representing authentic essence; an instrument by which the absolute can contemplate itself.¹⁶ Schelling's aesthetics and even his entire philosophy constitute from the start a classical model of objective idealism based on Platonic conceptions. Mythology plays a key role in Schelling's aesthetic system. It is through the filter of mythology that Schelling develops his ideas on art, on the assumption that the mythical ‘gods’—understood as ideas that are the subject of real contemplation—play the same role in art as ideas per se do in philosophical speculation. Every form includes within itself an ‘integral divineness’. Mythic imagination blends the absolute with the particular and sees in the single part all the divinity of the whole:

Mythology is a necessary condition and the raw material of every art.

The nervus probandi is contained in the idea of art as a manifestation of the Absolute and of Beauty per se by means of objects that are particularly beautiful, as manifestations of the Absolute in its details, without, however, the Absolute being emptied of its content. This contradiction is resolved only by the idea of the gods, who, for their part, can be given an independent and truly objective existence only by being developed to the level of poetic integrity and autonomous universe that is called mythology.

Mythology is nothing else but the universe itself in majestic guise, in its Absolute aspect, a true universe in itself, images of the existence of chaos that are replete with the miracles of Divine creation, a universe that is itself poetry but which is at the same time the raw material of poetry. Mythology is the world and, in a manner of speaking, the only soil in which artistic creations can grow and flourish. Only within the limits of that world is it possible to have the well-defined and stable images by which it is possible to reflect eternal concepts.

Because poetry is the expressive principle of matter such as the art of form in its most restricted meaning, mythology is absolute poetry, or, perhaps, spontaneous poetry. Mythology is the eternal matter from which all forms burst forth in their full splendor.¹⁷

Schelling places the accent on the aesthetic and spontaneous aspect of myth and sees in mythol...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• FOREWORD
• BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
• PREFACE TO THE RUSSIAN EDITION (1976)
• PART I: MODERN THEORIES OF MYTH AND APPROACHES TO LITERATURE
• PART II: THE CLASSIC FORMS OF MYTH AND THEIR EXPRESSION IN NARRATIVE FOLKLORE
• PART III: MYTHIFICATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• APPENDICES