On History of Romantic Overturn in Modernist Mythology

Abstract

The paper deals with a Greek myth adopted by modern scholars, which is hypothetically treated not as an authentic picture of antiquity, but philosophical construct, developed by early German romantics on the basis of Kantian discourse. The myth-narration was understood as a way of mental transformation of the hostile environment (embodied by the rite of human sacrifice) in terms of its humanization, aesthetization, heroization, intellectualization; the purpose of individual existence was interpreted as a unity of nature, society and the person, immersion in the ‘myth-environment’ being a condition for such unity. A further evolution of the myth took place due to civilizational shifts in Europe, which ‘fragmented’ human unity and destroyed the original unity of mythology. The modernist myth (Joyce, Messiaen, Bachelard) gave place to deintellectualization, particularization and desocialization of public life that urged to turn towards the blind nature ‘before civilization’ and stimulated indifference about the last preceding stages of culture. The life force was understood as returning to pure instinct that indicates the presence of nature in man. The distinction between sophisticated connoisseurs of culture and the bourgeois ‘mass’ became especially sharp; the ‘myth’ got really destructed by transferring it from actual life to the setting of everyday comfort, bypassing the spiritual state of the individual. The ‘myth of intertextuality’ (book myth, new-Alexandrian myth) is characteristic of the period of decline, as it is oriented not towards a living person and ‘life force’, but towards narration. This tendency was most vividly reflected in N. Frye’s mythological theory (about literature as myth-making).