Mythic Patterns Research Articles

Mythic Patterns in River Niger and Ceremonies in Dark Old Men

There are a number of ways one might approach setting criteria for evaluating Afro-American drama. We might say, for instance, that a significant number of these plays employ reversals of the American minstrel tradition, and thus move from tragedy into satire and farce (i.e., Douglas Turner Ward's Day of Absence). Or we could say that some plays use the mysticism of Black folk tradition as a basis for building their character types (i.e., Jean Toomer's Balo and Adrienne Kennedy's The Owl Answers). We may argue that Black music (spirituals, blues, jazz) provides the key, so to speak, which enables us to decode a large number of Afro-American plays. And, finally, we could trace the development of Afro-American drama thematically by ascertaining the point(s) where the playwrights seem to be concerned with freedom, social protest, theatre for a Black audience, and so on. Though each of these approaches is valid in itself, in this essay I want to discuss another way of criticizing Afro-American popular drama. In many of these plays, there is a tension between the linear and the mythic conceptions of history. These two conceptions are diametrically opposed views, for the linear consciousness advocates the annihilation of the Black historical

Mythic Patterns in Charles Waddell Chesnutt's the Conjure Woman and Ovid's Metamorphoses

Mythic Patterns in Charles Waddell Chesnutt's the Conjure Woman and Ovid's Metamorphoses

Mythic Patterns in Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog

Mythic Patterns in Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog

Folklore and Myth

HE relationship of myth to folklore is a subject which arises inevitably out of my two earlier presidential addresses. In the first of these, Folklore and History, I indicated certain repetitive patterns in popular traditions concerning historical persons and events: the generous donor, the monster of destruction, the king returning to inaugurate a golden age. In the second, on Folklore and Literature, I was again dealing with repetitive patterns found in folk and fairy tales, which may find their way also into more sophisticated literature: the patient wife, the despised youth who becomes a hero, the fight with a supernatural adversary. Some of these are patterns of a recognizable mythical type, and this means that we have to make some attempt to consider the relation of myth to folklore. It is by no means a simple question, and since our Society came into being, there have been a series of long and heated controversies about myths, in some of which folklorists have played a major part. Much nonsense has been talked and written on this subject, and many roads enthusiastically marked out by eminent scholars as major routes to a solution have been abandoned by their successors. As Andrew Lang once stated with his customary good sense: 'The history of mythology is the history of rash, premature and exclusive theories.' Nevertheless since folklore must form part of the evidence on which theories of the nature of myth are based, we cannot afford to ignore the subject altogether. Both myth and folklore are terms notoriously difficult to define. The definition I am using for a myth is that given by Joseph Fontenrose,2 who defines it as a traditional story accompanying rituals, a story with a definite plot, purporting to tell of occasions when some institution or cult, or certain rites and festivals, had their beginning, and of the original act which set the precedent for this. There are stories of a mythical type not attached to ritual in this way, which are better included in the category of legend or folklore, even though they may have a plot similar to that of a true myth. It is worth noting also that there is material not in narrative form which may be called mythical in type, although the main controversies have been over myths as stories rather than mythical patterns or characters. It is clearly not helpful to use the term too loosely, to include the whole sum of men's feelings and ideas about the gods.3 Also, as Fontenrose points out, we must not be misled by the use of the term myth in current literary criticism, where it seems to be employed for any large controlling image which the critic

Myth and Neurosis in Ibsen’s Mature Plays

Myth and realism are quite incompatible, we suppose. Their curious marriage in Ibsen's plays, in which mythic patterns are enacted by the Norwegian burghers and their matrons, poses problems which call the nature of modern myth criticism into question. The case is not unique, of course. Eliot praised Joyce's use of myth in Ulysses, and described its function as that of a template, imposing form on the chaos of modern life Л But Ibsen, writing earlier, depicts not a chaotic world which needs shaping, but a highly structured world in the process of unravelling. Orley Holtan's important study of mythic patterns in Ibsen's plays2 employs a method borrowed from Jung, Frye, Cassirer, and other proponents of the archetype, who classify myth semantically, according to content. 3 Holtan therefore looks for archetypal myth structures in Ibsen's work Frye's quest pattern and Campbell's monomyth, for example and for myth content, such as the inclusion of supernatural beings and improbable events. This method prompts him to conclude that only the early and the late plays of Ibsen are mythic in nature. He classifies the social dramas of the middle period in terms borrowed from Frye, as myth displaced in favor of realism: They operate in a human world in which the supernatural is absent and causes and effects are, in large part, realistically determined.4 By aligning myth with the sacred and realism with the secular, Holtan fails to avail himself of those critical tools which would allow him to overcome the dichotomy of myth and the real, and to analyze simultaneously the compelling structural principle which governs Ibsen's last twelve plays. Contemporary structuralism, particularly the myth criticism of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, offers a way of looking for repetitions, similarities, differences, and other relationships

The Mythology of Holy War in Daniel and the Qumran War Scroll: a Point of Transition in Jewish Apocalyptic

At the end of the last century H. GUNKEL drew attention to the mythic pattern of conflict between a god and a chaos-monster as a central motif in Jewish apocalyptic.l) Using the Babylonian myth of Marduk and Tiamat, GUNKEL argued for extensive Babylonian influence in Israel, much of which came in the pre-exilic period, but which also supplied the figurative language for apocalyptic. Since the discoveries at Ugarit, GUNKEL'S theory of Babylonian influence has been seen to be exaggerated, but his insight into the importance of the conflict motif has been vindicated. In the Ugaritic texts, Baal does battle with Yamm, the sea monster, for the kingship of the gods. He is victorious in the battle and returns to set up his temple and enjoy a banquet with the gods.2) In the OT, motifs from this pattern are frequently adapted and applied to Yahweh.3) Yahweh's victory over the Egyptians at the Red Sea, and again in wars of conquest, established him as the divine warrior par excellence. In the pre-exilic prophets and the Deuteronomistic history this portrayal of Yahweh fades into the background, but it re-emerges strongly at the time of the return from the exile.4) In the exile Israel had again fallen

The Earl of Toulouse: A Structure of Honor

O uch studies of The Earl of Toulouse as have been published are chiefly ^ concerned with the sources from which it derives.1 Of course, some studies have dealt with the theme or mythic pattern of the innocent per­ secuted wife as it occurs in the poem;2 but no one has looked at it sim­ ply as a piece of literature, a fictional work which utilizes a distinct pat­ tern of actions and words to present a particular idea in concrete form. It is exacdy in this fashion that I should like to examine The Earl of Toulouse. Thus, by a study of the poem’s structure, I hope to show that it is condioned by and presents in an affirmative manner an idealistic con­ ception of honor. The poem may easily be divided into four sections. This division is clear because the narrator announces a shift in the narrative at the ends of sections one and two:

The Natural History of Major Barbara

WHEN IN 1949 FRANCIS FERGUSSON DESCRIBED the content of Shavian drama as "unresolved paradox," using Major Barbara and Heartbreak House as an illustration, he not only echoed countless early critics, but also furthered the label-sticking method of interpretation which has vitiated so much of Shaw criticism. "The play," says Fergusson, "is a parlor-game based upon the freedom of the mind to name and then to rationalize anything, without ever deviating from the concept to the thing." It is, therefore, not grounded in reality, but merely "a string of jokes which touch nothing.” This thesis certainly does run counter to Shaw's professed dramatic aims, and its influence seems due both to Fergusson's persuasive style and to concepts of realism which shortcircuit the subtle relation of the dramatic signs with their extradramatic referents. This difficulty in relating the play's ideas to some consistent Weltanschauung, some formative reality, has apparently led a recent study, in spite of criticizing Fergusson and brilliantly enlarging our understanding of Major Barbara by describing the play's mythical pattern and analogies, to conclude that "as a total structure of ideas the play remains a paradox in which antitheses retain their full value and cannot be resolved away.”

From Ritual to Romance in Within the Gates and Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy

SEAN Q'CASEY SIMULTANEOUSLY MIMICS and modifies some distinguishing dimensions of myth, both Christian and pre-Christian, in his Within the Gates (1934), a modern morality set amidst the vanishing greenness of a crowded London park, and in his Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949), an Aristophanic allegory situated' in a drought-seared, fence-enclosed Irish garden. Indeed, O'Casey's mythopoeic imagination achieves a marriage of myths in these two dramas as Christian clerics collide with fertility figures, maypole dancing challenges formal Christian worship, and ancient fertility symbols like the silver shaft and the cock's crimson crest contrast with the pious parishioners' cross and rosary beads. O'Casey's basic intent, however, seems to be a desire to use myth both structurally and satirically: (1) to employ myth as a means of organizing his dramas into ritual sequences, and (2) to employ myth as a satiric stratagem which accentuates the difference between the function of mythico-ritualistic elements in the lives of ancient and modern man. Emphasizing the degenerative adaptation of antique mythical patterns — patterns designed to restore potency to people and provinces — O'Casey apparently laments modern man's reluctance to enter joyously into the rites of revivification which could redeem and revitalize both self and society — the sick soul and the modern wasteland.

Poems from the Hebrew (review)

Reviewed by: Poems from the Hebrew William Rosen (bio) Poems from the Hebrew Selected by Robert Mezey. Etching by Moishe Smith. 159 pp. (Thomas Y. Crowell, $4.50). This anthology for children aged 12 and up is one of a series; other volumes assemble translated poems from the German, and from Africa, France, India, Ireland, and Italy. [End Page 236] Is there a distinctly Hebrew spirit, vision, and sensibility? one is likely to ask after reading through this collection. It is a question Uri Zvi Greenberg poses in an excerpt that introduces "The Modern Poets," the longest section of the book: "And is our nervous system in any way like that of the Gentiles?" And he replies: "The Hebrew mouth is more like a wound; behind the Hebrew forehead an eagle screams." In reading these poems, one becomes aware of historical patterns that have helped shape both a consciousness and a literary sensibility. The Biblical selections, with their songs, psalms, and prophecies are more than personal celebrations and laments; they record the joy and sense of obligation of a people who believe in a special covenant with God. An individual is of supreme importance because God watches each; whatever happens to one person may therefore represent the experiences of many and even represent the destiny of a nation. To celebrate life is to praise the wonders of God, not as abstractions, for the Hebrew language is uncomfortable with such things, but with concrete images and sharply defined details. The beauty of the world is to be enjoyed fully in this life: How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes. But when adversity comes, the anguish is particularly sharp because of the feeling of a broken covenant, of personal betrayal. Job would try to see and reason with his God. During the Diaspora, personal anguish can be even greater: there is still the feeling of special dedication to God, but the experience of living in alien lands seems to stress sharply the mythic pattern that each individual who is born is somehow dispossessed. My heart is in the East, and I in the uttermost West—My food has no taste, there is no sweetness in it are the words of Judah Halevi in the section "The Poets of Moorish Spain." Job's defiant quarrel with God becomes in Abraham Ibn Ezra's poem a resigned protest against the inevitability of bad fortune, its wit, a defense against total despair: If I decided to sell lamps,It wouldn't get dark till the day I died. Some stars. Whatever I do,I'm a failure before I begin.If I suddenly decided to sell shrouds,People would suddenly stop dying. It is understandable that many Jews in the Diaspora dreamed of Eden, a return to the promised land where one might live in harmony with nature and family. "Man is nothing but the soil of a small country,/ nothing but the shape of his native landscape," writes Tchernichovsky. But the return does not miraculously [End Page 237] resolve all conflicts—that would make dull poetry indeed. There are, as before, poems that defiantly praise present life against postponed hope; poems that shout their outrage at genocide. In their own land, at last, the Hebrews celebrate the will to live, now triumphant over despair against all odds. And still there is a sense of apartness and special dedication, if not to God, then to man and to life itself. The present dilemmas, best represented in the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, are remarkably similar to old ones. A German by birth, with European sensibilities, Amichai writes of the experiences of one who has become an "insider" but can never lose the perspective of the "outsider." Belonging to the history of his people whether he wants to or not, he finds the landscape of Israel strange—even savage—as in the poem "Mayor." In "National Thoughts" he describes what it is like to be "trapped in the homeland of the Chosen People," and how The language which described God and the Miracles,Says:Motor car, bomb...

Book Reviews

Martin Lamm, August Strindberg, reviewed by Evert Sprinchorn John Rees Moore, Masks Of Love And Death: Yeats As Dramatist, reviewed by Andrew Parkin Gerald Weales, Clifford Odets: Playwright, reviewed by Glen Loney Harold Orel, Letters To Molly, John Millington Synge To Maire O'Neill 1906-1909, reviewed by Harold Orel Orley I. Holtan, Mythic Patterns In Ibsen's Last Plays, reviewed by Sverre Arestad Dan H. Laurence ed., The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays And Their Prefaces, reviewed by Eric Salmon Stanley Weintraub, Journey To Heartbreak: The Crucible Years Of Bernard Shaw 1914-18, reviewed by Sidney P. Albert

Mythic Patterns in Ibsen's Last Plays by Orley I. Holtan (review)

Mythic Patterns in Ibsen's Last Plays by Orley I. Holtan (review)

Myth and Interpretation

HE IDENTIFICATION of mythical patterns, the discovery of divine presences and underlying structures of ritual origin, the assimilation of particular literary works to universal archetypes have all become the commonplaces of modern critical practice. The reasons for this, and the problems inherent in such critical procedures, will best appear, I think, through a series of cases in which myth is used as an interpretative means. I shall begin with the simplest kind of case, where correlations are made between an aspect of plot or character and its mythical prototype, with the intention of finding a new dimension or level of meaning in the particular work. I shall go on to more complex cases, and finally to the overall relating of literary genres and mythical patterns in the work of Northrop Frye.

Mythic Patterns in Ibsen's Last Plays

Mythic Patterns in Ibsen's Last Plays

Milton's Comus and Spenser's False Genius

It now seems possible to say, on the basis of some additions made here to a set of known antecedents for Milton's Comus in Spenser's poetry, that during the gestation of that work Milton had in detail before his mind's eye an interlocking series of mythical patterns formulated by his predecessor in Books II and III of The Faerie Queene. The mind seen in action here startles us nearly as much by its economical deployment of resources as by its independence and confidence.

Hawthorne's Polar Explorations: "Young Goodman Brown" and "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"

T_ _HE MISADVENTURES of Young Goodman Brown and Major Molineux's youthful cousin Robin have in recent years been as extensively interpreted as any of Hawthorne's shorter works. Since both tales are ambiguous and puzzling in the characteristic fashion of the best Hawthorne stories, it is not surprising that they have elicited attention from a variety of critical perspectives. Their imagery, symbols, cultural milieus, historical backgrounds, psychoanalytic implications, and mythic patterns have all been so thoroughly examined that we know as much about the individual tales as we can rightly expect from the application of the critical intelligence. Nevertheless, all this critical acumen and industry has allowed one curious lacuna to remain. Although alone among Hawthorne's tales these two are so closely parallel in form and manner as to be properly considered companion-pieces, there has been no investigation of this fact. Passing comments there are aplenty, but curiosity apparently has stopped there. It may be that the close similarities in structures, characterization, theme, and imagery have been considered too apparent and obvious even to the casual reader, or it may be that these parallels have been assigned to coincidence. But the obvious in Hawthorne, as in James, is often only a surface which disguises, like Poe's purloined letter, matter of more than passing moment. The meaning of the scarlet letter and the golden bowl is quite obvious, but no serious reader would stop his consideration at the mere fact of adultery. Coincidence, on the other hand, while possible, is hardly

Shakespeare’s Caesar: The Language of Sacrifice

Shakespeare’s Caesar: The Language of Sacrifice Peter S. Anderson For Pompey dead is to Caesar something of what Caesar dead is to be to Brutus and the rest. Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare Once the relation between man and the deity is secured by sacralization of the victim, the sacrifice breaks it by destroying this same victim. Human action thus brings about a solution of continuity and, as it had previously established communi­ cation between the human reservoir and the divine reservoir, the latter will automatically fill the gap by discharging the anticipated benefit. The scheme of sacrifice consists in an irreversible operation (the destruction of the victim) with a view to setting off an equally irreversible operation on another plane (the granting of divine grace), which is required by the fact that two “ recipients,” situated at different levels, have previously been brought into communication. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind I The eidos of Shakespeare’s radical critique of the “Roman thing” in Julius Caesar is the sacrifice of a “ Caesar-principle” by a “ sonprinciple ” to an absent, but no less veridical divinity, Pompey. 1 The sacrificial form which the action of the play takes is itself clear, mixing as it does savagery and ceremony.2 But the fuller mythic significance (associated with both the primitive and the Dionysian) emerges only when we perform as radical a critique on Julius Caesar as Shakespeare has performed within on the grand concept of the Roman State. For while it is the figure of Caesar himself in whom are condensed Empire, God-King, and Father— his possibly monarchical rule is in­ deed the problem for his honorable, loving, ambitious, and rebellious “sons”— it is more the spirit of Pompey, sprung out of the unsuccess­ ful Civil Wars with Caesar, which haunts Shakespeare’s temporal frame of heritage and lineage than the presence and Ghost of Caesar. To see, then, the shape and form (the eidos) of the mythic pattern of sacrifice in which Caesar is sacralized and victimized by his “sons” as they seek contiguity with the divinity Pompey, we may 3 4 Comparative Drama figuralize our experience of the play (itself a process) by spacing time out. That is, we may treat Shakespeare’s process of time (the play itself) in spatial terms— as Husserl puts it, treat process as type (or as a Ramist would, adopt a “place logic” ). This method is essentially to change or reduce the form of the process as we find it in Julius Caesar (Husserl’s term is eidetic reduction). The phenomenological method of eidetic reduction (or the spatialization and reduction implicit in Ramus’ method) imitates, in not an accidental way, the language endowment of the play. For, as we shall see, the metonymic language of sacrifice which all of the play’s figures share, gradually reduces the referential meaning of concepts (the Roman State, honor, love, ambition, rebellion)— first to more and more private signs of an axis of communication with the divinity Pompey, and finally to the simple perception of image. We may start to hear the language of sacrifice by letting the eidetic locus speak for itself, hear its logos, and we may discover that it is enough of a “ commonplace” to tell us what it means. The eidetic place of the sacrifice in Julius Caesar is Pompey’s basis. We consider the sacrificial place and recognize, dismissing our own irony, that it is the locus dislocatus. The sacrificial place is not only and more obviously where Caesar as a victim is displaced, where he is the me­ dium of exchange with the gods, but a fortiori where there is displace­ ment: it is the place of displacement, exchange. Let us pause at Pompey’s basis and see what it tells us in its very locus, for the rest of the story of sacrifice which is Julius Caesar seems to accummulate and be spun out from here. In what is perhaps the most common place for Rome, is Pompey’s statue— in the heart of the metropolis, in the center of the mother city’s political activity. If we scan in spatiotemporal terms, the statue of Pompey stands at the mid...

Review: Pater's Portraits: Mythic Pattern in the Fiction of Walter Pater, by Gerald Cornelius Monsman and The Literary Character of Walter Pater, by Gordon McKenzie

Review: <i>Pater's Portraits: Mythic Pattern in the Fiction of Walter Pater</i>, by Gerald Cornelius Monsman and <i>The Literary Character of Walter Pater</i>, by Gordon McKenzie

The Mythic Pattern in Waiting for Godot

The Mythic Pattern in Waiting for Godot

The Mythic Pattern In Waiting For Godot

THE OUT-OF-DOORS SETTING OF Waiting for Godot suggests that the tragicomedy falls into a seasonal mythic pattern. However diminished they may be, we are furnished with a sun, a moon, and a sky; there is also a tree, a bog and solid earth. The two tramps are, or have been, itinerant workers—grape harvesters. They have had a close contact with earth's life; they are "two tramps in mud time."