MANFRED PUETZ
237
kind of role-assigning is myth-making, " the good doctor lectures, "and
when it's done consciously or unconsciously for the purpose of
aggrandizing or protecting your ego-and it's probably done for this
purpose all the time-it becomes Mythotherapy."
If
you fail to assign a
role to yourself, you will consequently become a noncharacter. In other
words, loss of identity in this scheme is nothing but the failure to cast
in this or that mythical story imposed on the world. The act of holding
on to self-given fictional coordinates prevents existence from crum–
bling into nothingness. As Horner's mythotherapist finally points out,
there is safety only as long as one lives the idea that " I" means "ego"
and "ego" means mask and mask means role in a mythical scheme.
It is apparent that all this is parody. Its target is never mentioned
in Barth and yet it cannot be missed. The doctor's philosophy is a
charlatan's version of a belief that characterized and gave structure to
the works of the great Moderns. Mythotherapy means the convictions
and strategies of Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, or Thomas Mann,
to
name only a
few, turned into the parody of an applied science. T.S. Eliot once stated
in his review "Ulysses, Order, and Myth " that Joyce's use of myth as a
manipulation of parallels between contemporaneity and antiquity is a
method which should become programmatic for the Moderns. "It is
simply a way," he described Joyce's technique, "of controlling, of
ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense pano–
rama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a
method already adumbrated by Mr. yeats.... " Clearly, this method not
only provided structuring principles of history, but also affected the
way the self placed itself into history and the world. The parallels of
specific myths and general patterns of archetypes provided not only a
frame for the phenomena of surrounding reality, but also a stage script
for any self that wanted to participate in a given symbolical drama and
take its self-interpretation from there. In a way, this came close to
emulating the Greek approach toward self-understand ing. The Greeks
had a habit of first taking a few steps back, as Ortega y Gasset once put
it, before they tried to determine who and what they were. The distance
permitted them to ee the whole panorama of their mythological past,
from where they then proceeded to choose an archetypal role or the
personal example of a mythological hero as the model and basis for all
ensuing self-definitions. Naturally, there are crucial differences be–
tween the modernist approach and that of classical antiquity. Thomas
Mann, who himself frequ ently used mythical schemes in his works,
specified, in
Adel des Geistes,
one of these differences. The relation of
the classical self
to
its mythological past was usually one of identifica-
