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RICHARD WASSON
The plot of Barth's ideological farce reveals the weakness of
myth and Mythotherapy. The self and the selves of others are too
complex, finally too mysterious, to allow for simple mask-wearing
and role-assignment. "The more one learns about a given person,"
Horner says, "the more difficult it becomes to assign a character to
him that will allow one to deal with him effectively in an emotional
situation. Mythotherapy, in short, becomes increasingly harder to
apply, because one
is
compelled to recognize the inadequacy of any
role one
assigns. . . .
As
soon as one knows a person well enough
to hold contradictory opinions about him, Mythotherapy goes out
the window. . •."
Out the window with Mythotherapy goes symbolic form as a
useful way of interpreting life and art. Horner at one point is tempted
"to dramatize the situation as part of a romantic contest between
symbols." "Joe was The Reason or Being ... ; I was the Unreason,
or Not-Being; and the two of us were fighting without quarter for
the possession of Rennie, like God and Satan for the soul of man.
This pretty ontological Manichaeism would certainly stand no close
examination, but it had the triple virtue of excusing me from having
to assign Rennie any essence more specific than The Human Per–
sonality, further of allowing me to fornicate with her with a certain
Mephistophelean relish, and finally of making it possible for me not
to question my motives...." The concern here, as in Murdoch, is
ethical; if one turns life into a symbolic drama, one not only deprives
it
of its specificity, its concreteness, but one also eliminates one's sense
of responsibility to others.
Another mistake of Mythotherapy lies in its use of the technique
of doubling. To overcome his sense of inadequacy with the doctor,
Horner takes on the manner of Joe Morgan, adopting his mode of
argument, his stance in the world, even going so far as to treat Ren–
nie as Joe does. But the doctor points up the weakness of this kind
of role playing. To safely take over the character of another as part
of one's internal dialectic, one must have an already stable
seH,
which neither Horner nor the protagonists of most existential novels
have. And then too, as the doctor indicates, "you couldn't act like
him when you're in his company, could you?" The process of
doubling, of incorporation and projection, so central to the dramatic
myths of existential novels, to the poetry of Yeats and Eliot, simply
