Notes on the Study of Myth
RICHARD CHASE
FOR
TWENTY
years or more there has been a general feeling that
creative literature should be brought closer to myth. The resources
of naturalism, aestheticism and symbolism have come to seem insuf–
ficient for modem literature, and these disciplines have been super–
seded, or at least modified, by the search for myth. I say "the search
for myth" because the new mythological literature- the work of
Eliot, Yeats, Mann, Joyce, Toynbee, Freud and others-has been
able to make only a few tentative steps. I should like to say at the
outset that I agree with the general opinion: our creative literature
should
be brought closer to myth.
In this short essay I do not intend to offer a theory of myth but
only to suggest some restrictions on such a theory. The8e days the
word "myth" is thrown about as cavalierly as is any word which the
cultural climate envelops with glamor and charges with an emotional
voltage. It is a powerful word, but not precise. Let me set down some
of the more serious remarks about myth which I have encountered
recently. In an essay on Mann and his use of myth
(PARTISAN RE–
VIEW,
1938) and in a subsequent controversy with James Burnham,
William Troy wrote that myth
is
"a mode of cognition," that "myth,
like science, is at once a method and a body of ordered experience."
We need a new myth, he wrote in effect, to replace the narrow and
now harmful nineteenth century world-view of science and progress;
especially as a method of criticizing and creating literature is myth
far superior to science. In retrospect, Troy's account of myth seems
gratifyingly sensitive, but it was excessively metaphysical. His loose
phraseology allowed Burnham to leap in with the accusation that
Troy, and Mann, were proposing that we "revert" to a primitive
dogma or absolute world-view which would smother science. Bum–
ham held that science was the best weapon with which to attack those
basic dilemmas of modem culture posed by Mann himself. More
recently Mark Scharer, in the
Kenyon Review
(Autumn, 1942) wrote
that "a myth is a large controlling image ... which gives philosophic
meaning to the facts of ordinary life." Myth, he says, is the "indi-
