Philip Rahv
THE MYTH AND THE POWERHOUSE
One must know how to ask questions: the question
is who was Ariadne and which song did the sirens
sing?-FRIEDRICH GEORG JUENGER.
Much has been written of late about myth. What it is and
what it will do for us has been widely debated, yet I cannot see that
any clear statement of the intrinsic meaning of present-day mytho–
mania has emerged from the discussion. The exponents of myth keep
insisting on its seminal uses, appealing indiscriminately to Yeats and
Joyce and Mann and other examplars of the modern creative line,
while the opponents point to the regressive implications of the new–
fangled concern with myth, charging that at bottom what it comes
to is a kind of nebulous religiosity, a vague literary compromise be–
tween skepticism and dogma, in essence a form of magico-religious
play with antique counters in a game without real commitments or
consequences.
To be sure, not all exponents of myth are of one type. Some
make no excessive claims; others have turned into sheer enthusiasts
who blow up myth into a universal panacea, proclaiming that the
"reintegration of the myth" will not only save the arts but will lead
to no less than the cure of modern ills and ultimate salvation. So
extravagant have been their claims that even Jacques Maritain, who
is hardly to be accused of a naturalistic view of myth, has been moved
to rebuke them, primarily for confusing metaphysical and poetic
myths, that is confusing the fictions composed by the poet
qua
poet
(which may be called myths, if at all, only in a loose analogical
sense) with the great myths deriving their power solely from the
belief that men have in them.
1
For myth actually believed in is not
understood as a symbolic form, competing with other such forms, but
as truth pure and simple.
Now why should a distinction so elementary be generally over–
looked by the cultists of myth? For the very good reason, obviously,
