Mythic Archetypes…

The Philosophers’ Critique of Myth…

     What I’ve said about the great cycle of mythology known as the Matter of Troy can be said about most of the other mythic cycles or archetypes, which inspired elaboration after elaboration down the centuries.  There are, of course, any number of explicitly mythological poems, such as Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, or Dryden’s Fables.  But even more characteristic of the pre-modern imagination is the velleity to translate non-mythological subjects into mythopoetic idioms.  In his famous poem Lycidas, for example, an elegy written to commemorate the drowning death of Milton’s friend Edward King, the poet identifies King with the ancient dying and reviving gods Thammuz, Osiris, Dionysos, Orpheus, and Christ, thereby eternizing and universalizing what would otherwise have been an affecting, but merely personal, narrative.

Such mythic transpositions and displacements are too numerous to list, so I’ll give you only three more examples.  The Egyptian and Babylonian myth of the killing of the maritime dragon recrudesces, as we’ll see, in the biblical account of creation, informs the entire Judaeo-Christian salvation history, is the central narrative of the Christian sacrament of baptism, and is given new life by Melville in his novel Moby Dick.  The ancient mythologem of the Golden Age informs every page of  Thomas More’s Utopia, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and  Rousseau’s and Margaret Mead’s risible fantasies about “noble savages”.  Everything from the Grail legend, to the medieval romance of Gawain and the Green Knight, to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, to  Eliot’s Wasteland, bears the imprint of the myths of the Ancient Near Eastern and classical dying and reviving gods of the seasons and the vegetation.  And even our fashionable hysteria about the obliteration of the planet as a consequence of “global warming” is an unconscious re-assertion of the ancient Stoic eschatological myth about the destruction of the world in a universal conflagration.

 

Jung has called the archetypes of myth “controlling images”, and indeed, the human psyche does seem to be predisposed to organize and represent the raw data of existence according to these primordial mythic paradigms and categories.  But that is a subject for another course, and even if one is not persuaded by Jung, there are other, simpler explanations of why myth is the default mode of the human imagination.

Since what I have called the human conversation has always revolved around the permanent questions about existence and reality, the resort to myth, as we’ll see in a moment, is practically inevitable.

Does God exist?  Where does he come from?  What is his nature?  What does he want?

Does the soul exist?  Is it created, or has it transmigrated, with Shirley McLaine, from some other realm?  What is its nature?  What does it want?

What is birth, death, rebirth?  Is there an afterlife?

What is the nature of the world?  How has it come into being?  Or has it always existed?  How will it end?  Or will it infinitely endure?

What is the nature of man?  Where did he come from?  Where is he going to?  What are good and evil?  Why does evil exist?  What is the purpose and meaning of life?

These perennial metaphysical questions and their solutions are ultimately beyond direct human experience, comprehension, or expression; and this is, paradoxically, why they must be posited and posed by the mythic psyche.

As a prisoner of time and space, man’s imagination is constrained by the sensual and finite framework of his worldly and corporeal existence, through which he is constrained to conceive of and represent such transcendent realities– God, the soul, the afterlife–as are by definition beyond sense and time.   Myth and poetry are, of course, just such sensual and limited categories– so rankly sensual, in fact, that Plato banished the poets from his enlightened Republic.

When he did so, the criticism of poetry and myth on those grounds was already a century old.  The Pre-Socratic philosophers Heracleitus and Xenophanes had indignantly accused the poets in general, and Homer in particular, of having insulted the dignity of the ineffable Godhead in their absurd depictions of the Olympian deities in the corporeal habit and with all of the moral and psychological fallibilities of men.

Such crude anthropomorphisms suggested to them that myth was the least likely modality through which the human imagination could possibly transcend its own existential limitations.

The Matter of Troy…

 The Obligation of the Poet to “hand the matter on”…

     I’ve called this course “The Vocabulary of Myth”, and grandly described its purpose in the Calendar of Priceton University as to furnish the basic “grammar” of the human imagination down to the eighteenth century.  I must leave aside the question of why the eighteenth century sounded the death-knell of man’s mythic consciousness—my chronology is arbitrary, in any case–on the assumption that forty-eight centuries out of fifty of civilized man’s pre-occupation with mythological forms of expression represents something enduring and significant, and not to be discounted or discarded on the basis of a mere two-century-long cultural anomaly.  So, I return, unapologetically, to my description.

In this context, words such as “vocabulary” and “grammar” are metaphors, of course, poetic figures—myths, in fact, since for the Greeks poesis and mythos were synonyms—by means of which I am attempting to express the idea that mythology has always been the principal well-spring from which the basic themes of the human conversation have  bubbled up.  Let me try to prove to you that that is true, and more than merely figuratively so.  I’ll start with what is dismissed by the modern mind—at least that of my undergraduates–as the least consequential aspect of civilization, poetry, and move on to religion, philosophy, and science.

As a matter of both tradition and empirical fact, there are two grand themes, two great bodies of stories, that have been subject to endless restatement and elaboration throughout the centuries of Western literature and art from antiquity right down to our own time.  The first of these is the salvation history of the Judaeo-Christian Bible, a body of narrative whose relationship to myth will be discussed in what follows, and whose centrality to the Western Tradition requires no proof.

The second is “the Matter of Troy” (as it was called in the Middle Ages):  the story of the Trojan War and its aftermath, including the maritime adventures and homecomings (nostoi) of the Greek heroes Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Menelaus, but more generally including the entire cycle of Greek mythology whose great fountainhead was Homer’s two epic poems, the Iliad, or story of Troy (Ilion in Greek), and the Odyssey, which records the wanderings of Odysseus.  The Odyssey was thus the first successful sequel in the history of popular fiction, and its continuing influence illustrates Northrop Frye’s abiding principle about the genesis of  literature:  that it is simply made out of other literature.

As another eminent literary critic, C.S. Lewis, has characterized them, writers before the modern age were “bookish”; they felt no compunction about, indeed, only felt justified in, recapitulating the narrative themes and traditions of the great auctores who lived before them, and whose auctoritas they revered and borrowed.  As they themselves saw it, their principal vocation was to “hand the matter on” (in Lewis’ formulation), the “matter” being whatever narrative theme or tradition they had inherited gratefully from their ancient “authors”.  (Here, notably, the Christian writers of the Middle Ages and thereafter showed no diminution of reverence because those authors were pagan).   Once in the possession of a great theme, it would never have occurred to them to invent something out of whole cloth; indeed, they would have regarded the modern artistic fetish for “originality” as the symptom of a profound cultural poverty.

 

The Odyssey itself thus unleashed a deluge of imitations, extrapolations, and continuations, right down to James Joyce’s Ulysses in the early part of the twentieth century.  The first of such were the anonymous “Trojan Cycle”, or “Homerica”, as they were called, that anthology of five or six minor epics written by the “Homeridae” (figurative “sons of Homer”) from the seventh through the fifth centuries B.C., with the ostensible purpose of filling in the gaps in the record of the Trojan war and the journeys and adventures of the returning Greek heroes that their adoptive literary father, the great bard, might have left out.

Greek drama was similarly a gap-filling child of Homer:  the first Greek trilogy, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, tells the tragic story of the murder of Agamemnon upon his return from Troy at the hands of his treacherous wife Clytemnestra and her paramour Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s own brother (with the Homeric theme–comic, in the ancient sense of the word–of Odysseus’ happy return to the side of his ever faithful Penelope in mind).  It then records the tormented resolve of Agamemnon’s young son Orestes to avenge his father’s death.  (Shakespeare’s Hamlet borrows heavily from it.)

Following the Trojan Cycle and the Greek drama, the next and by far the most important Homeric continuation was Virgil’s epic the Aeneid, which recounts the escape of the Trojan prince Aeneas from the burning city of Troy, and his wanderings and adventures at sea, where he encounters, by no mere coincidence, many of the same mythological monsters and temptresses from whom Homer’s Odysseus had escaped.  In book VI of Virgil’s epic, Aeneas descends into the underworld, just as Homer’s hero had done in book XI of the Odyssey, and navigates an already familiar infernal landscape.  Landing finally on the western shores of Italy, he launches a protracted siege against the local inhabitants that follows all of the stages of the Greek campaign against Troy, until he emerges victorious and founds there the city of Rome.

The Aeneid was written in the last decades before Christ to provide the civilization of Rome, and the incipient Empire inaugurated by Caesar Augustus (under whom the poem was penned), with an appropriately grand mythological pre-history and divine pedigree.   Such is the authority of the Homeric mythological tradition that from then on it became de rigeur for every people and nation to trace its ancestry, as did Virgil’s Romans, to one or other of the escaping heroes of Troy.

Thus, according to the twelfth-century historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, the island of Britain was discovered by an eponymous founder named Brutus, another Trojan prince who (though wholly unmentioned by either Homer or Virgil) spent many years lost at sea before finally finding safe harbour on another western shore and founding there a new nation by divine destiny.  In due course, within a half century or so, two Welsh poets, Wace and Layamon, composed (one in Latin, the other in Welsh) consecutive epics about Brutus’ wanderings and fathering of the British people, both separately entitled Brut.  (But besides the epic “Bruts”, several other poems were written in the Christian Middle Ages under the apparently pressing moral and artistic obligation to hand on the matter of Troy:  the French Roman de Troie of one Benoit of St. Maur, for example, and another anonymous French Roman d’Aeneas.) 

Everyone knows the next and most important of the medieval poems in debt to Homer and his literary progeny:  Dante’s Divine Comedy.  It is, of course, the shade of Virgil himself who acts as Dante’s guide through the underworld, a descent that is explicitly modeled on that of Aeneas into Hades in Aeneid VI, which was modeled on that of Odysseus in Odyssey XI.

One could adduce any number of other examples of works by medieval sons of Homer.  In the late-fourteenth century, Chaucer wrote his romantic epic Troilus and Criseyde, Troilus being another Prince of Troy belatedly thrust into the limelight, though scarcely mentioned by Homer or Virgil.  Chaucer’s story of Troilus was, in turn, handed on to Shakespeare, who made a splendid tragedy of it, and so it went, on and on.