THE MYTH AND THE POWERHOUSE
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tion is irreversible the literary expatiators of myth fail to grasp.
The primitive significance of myth is not to be disclosed by scru–
tinizing ancient poetry.
"It
is as vain to look to Homer for the prim–
itive significance of myth," writes A. M. Hocart, "as it would be to
seek it in Sir Thomas Malory." The epic, though a medium of
mythological lore, is at the same time, as Susanne M. Langer observes,
"the first flower, or one of the first, of a new symbolic mode-the
mode of art. It is not merely a receptacle of old symbols, namely
those of myth, but is itself a new symbolic form, great with possibil–
ities, ready to take meaning and express ideas that have had no vehicle
before."6 Poetic structure transforms the mythic material, disciplining
and subjecting it to logical and psychological motives that eventually
alienate it from its origins. To take the fact that myth is the common
matrix of many literary forms as an indication that myth is literature
or that literature is myth is a simple instance of the genetic fallacy.
Myth is a certain kind of objective fantasy to which literature has had
frequent recourse for its materials and patterns; but in itself it is
not literature. The literary work is mainly characterized by the order
and qualitative arrangement of its words; myths, on the other hand,
as Miss Langer notes, are not bound to "any particular words, nor
even to language, but may be told or painted, acted or danced, with–
out suffering degradation or distortion.... They have no meter, no
characteristic phrases, and are just as often recorded in vase-paintings
and bas-reliefs as in words. A ballad, however, is a composition.. . .
"7
We know that
Oedipus Rex
is based on a mythic ritual. But the
question is, what chiefly affects us in the play? Is it the myth, as such
indifferent to verbal form, serving as Sophocles' material, or his par–
ticular
composition
of it? The Oedipus myth has its own power, to
be sure, but one must distinguish between this power and that of the
dramatic embodiment the poet gave it. And by confusing these differ–
ent powers the inflators of myth are able to credit it with properties
that really belong to art.
Moreover, the mythic imagination is a believing imagination. At–
taching no value to fictions, it envisages its objects as actually existing.
Conversely, the imagination of art, a relatively late development in the
history of human mentality, is marked above all by its liberation from
the sheerly actual and material. Art achieves independence as it gradu–
ally detaches itself from myth. The poetic image, Cassirer notes, at-
