VARIETY
MYTH REVISITED
Thi~
evening I feel somewhat
like a myth myself. I keep recall–
ing a certain legendary ogre which
haunts the mind of Mr.
J.
Donald
Adams. This ogre is "the intellec–
tual who wears horn-rimmed glasses
and talks about Myth." Mr. Adams
feels that nowadays myth is getting
out of hand and that a lot of
modern critics who talk about
myth are talking nonsense. I am
always somewhat chagrined to dis–
cover, as I do on rare occasions,
that I agree with Mr. Adams. This
is one of those occasions, for I
have to agree with him that myth
is
getting out of hand.
In my book on myth, the bulk
of which I wrote five years ago,
I began with the following premise:
"The first critical step toward an
understanding of mythological lit–
erature
is
to rescue myth from
those who see
in
it only the means
and ends of philosophy, religious
dogma, psychoanalysis, or seman–
tics." Well, I was taking the long
historical view when I wrote these
words, and in the hi tory of mod–
ern times--beginning, say, with the
Renaj~sance-myth
has frequently
been denied its proper literary–
imaginative function by writers who
wished to see in it a primitive at–
tempt at scientific or philosophic
cognition, a childish form of reli–
gion, or a "disease of language."
And so I still believe that the first
critical step in the study of myth
is to disengage it from the various
intellectual disciplines with which
it has traditionally been confused
and to give it status as a particular
kind of imaginative construction.
But I found it impossible to do
this without repeatedly emphasiz–
ing the pervasively literary charac–
ter of myth. Finally I came to
the conclusion that whatever status
one could attribute to myth, it
would have to be a status mostly
within the province of literature–
that, in short, myth is literature
operating in certain more or less
definable ways which set it off from
other kinds of literature.
I said in my book that "myth is
only art," and that it was there–
fore incompetent to perform the
duties of science and philosophy.
And it is this idea which I think
we ought to stress most heavily
today. For long periods of modern
intellectual history myth was un–
deniably a kind of Little Red Rid–
ing Hood whom a whole pack of
wolves lusted to devour. But nowa–
days myth looks and acts more
wolfish than the wolves.
I have no intention of giving
up my commitment to the study
of myth in so far as it is a disci–
pline useful to literary criticism,
and I shall tell you why a little
later. But I think that if we plan
to go on with our mythological
studies, we had first better stop
