Myth as Talisman: Adaptive Teleology in The Winter of Our Discontent

Abstract

The Winter of Our Discontent engages a series of analogies and metaphors, principally the image of a talisman, to argue the need for myth in modern life, especially myth as art or as history. This theme had been present consistently throughout Steinbeck's work, most especially after his early association with the famed Jungian my thologist Joseph Campbell, whom he met through their mutual friend, the marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts. Working on To a God Unknown in 1928, Steinbeck found a new resource for understanding myth when he met Campbell, a Columbia University graduate, who had just returned from Europe where he studied myth and attended lectures by eminent scholars, including Carl Jung. In The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949), Campbell would define heroic attributes based on comparative mythology and on a merger of metaphysical and psychological theory. His fascination with myth's relevance to modern society and art mirrored Steinbeck's, and they exchanged information and insight while Steinbeck read to Campbell selections from his drafts of both To a God Unknown and The Pastures of Heaven (Parini 119). Specifically, Steinbeck examined the mythic elements of his own American culture, though, I would argue, he was more concerned about the abuse of myth than about its absence. For Steinbeck this modern need for myth thus became not so much a search for a master narrative as for myth as an adaptive narrative. Because of Steinbeck's growing recognition of the relativism of his era and his country, the protagonist of The Winter of Our Discontent , Ethan Allen Hawley, representing his generation of Americans, begins to understand that it is not