346
PARTI'SAN
REVIEW
say that the tales of the folk are often vague, dull or childish. We
must
be
free, as was the primitive intellectual (who may be studied
in Radin's
Primitive Man as Philosoph'{!IT),
so to interpret a myth that
it comes alive for us in the moral and intellectual context of our cul–
ture-as we have in our time interpreted the myths of Oedipus,
Joseph and Philoctetes. This may require symbolism or allegory, cer–
tainly conscious intelligence. But we cannot assume a symbol, an alle–
gory or a concept to be the same as the myth itself, or to be the only
interpretation of the myth. Apart from the dictates of parochial cul–
tural necessity, there remain constant human needs against which we
must measure the adequacy of our interpretations.
Myth has often been philosophical, frequently in advanced
cultures, less frequently in primitive cultures. We should not care, for
example, to ignore the philosophical aspects of the Oedipus, Joseph
or Philoctetes myths or of the myths which we find in the poems of
Eliot or Yeats. These myths offer us patterns of feeling and thought.
But we are likely to find in them not philosophy but (as Eliot says)
the "emotional equivalent" of philosophy. We may be sure at least
that the myth is never philosophical without being something else.
Myth is, in the phrase of Renan, "simultaneous humanity."
And we have to remember that all myths begin with the appre–
hension of some marvelous activity or potentiality. Magic and liter–
ature meet in myth.
An
unusual stone, a strange animal, a witch
doctor have
mana
for the savage just as do Oedipus for Sophocles or
Freud, Joseph for Mann, the "great tomb-haunter" for Yeats, or
Mme Sosostris for Eliot. Those concepts, allegories, symbols and the–
ologies which are loosely called mythical are so only so long as they
are still faithful to the emotional complexity of literature; for only
literature can perform the mythical function of preserving and giving
significance to the sensation of
mana.
Once disinherited from their
literary matrix concepts are not, properly speaking, myths. I propose
(following Herder) disinherited "mythical ideas" called
paramyths.
Poetry as Myth.
A myth is not "a large controlling image." The
future of mythical poetry does not depend upon reconciling poetry
with an image. It. depends rather upon making of poetry something
it is always striving against human bias and superficiality to become.
The poetical imagination when it attains any consistent fire and ef–
ficacy is always displacing the texture of the mind into the external
world so that it becomes a theater of preternatural forces. A certain
control and direction given the poetical emotions, and poetry, as it
always has, becomes mythical.
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