GRAND ALLUSIONS

At the end of this essay I mentioned a messboard-poster who had misunderstood me in that he assumed that all it took to create mythicity was to quote assorted archaic myths. It's a common enough misapprehension. I recently re-read John J. White's MYTHOLOGY IN THE MODERN NOVEL (1971) and was surprised that his only criterion for "modern myths" were specific references to archaic figures and situations.

Clearly this is not the approach of Northrop Frye or any other myth-critic with whom I'm familiar. If, as mentioned elsewhere, Frye posited that American "apocalyptic" SF tales owe some debt to flood-myths, he doesn't necessarily assume the primacy of the flood from the Old Testament in the minds of the writers, even though that would probably be the particular flood-myth most Americans encountered as children. Building on Jung's concept of archetypes, Fryean theory would allow for the possibility of a writer having duplicated archetypal imagery without exposure to any particular flood-myths whatsoever.

My concept of mythicity, further, is determined not by mere allusions but by symbolic complexity. And as I wrote in the previous essay, I do think that Oscar Bensol's reference to the Greek Icarus has the effect of making his "Icy Harris" coeval with other "overreacher" figures in myth. The effect is thus to generalize rather than particularize.

Here's an example of a particular allusion that doesn't lead one to anything greater:

That Jack Kirby's "Ikaris" is a reference to the classical Icarus is beyond debate. However, having reread the original Kirby ETERNALS some time ago, I could find nothing particularly "mythic" about the Kirby hero himself, even if there were other aspects of the saga that did register on my "mythicity meter." Classical Icarus flew: Kirby's Ikaris flies. That's about it.

Most of the uses of specific myth-names in ETERNALS are pretty much as superficial: "Sersi," "Makkari," "Zuras," and "Thena." Here the more generalized references are more effective: here the Celestials mime the basic function of the "watcher-angels" found in various Judeo-Christian sources, but played out against a conflict of genetically-produced "lesser gods." I got the impression this is the mythic theme Kirby might've wanted to tap into with his earlier concept on the same theme, THE INHUMANS, but that either he hadn't quite found the right direction or couldn't sell it to Stan Lee.

In many respects what I call a "null-myth" is an empty allusion to something that the author thinks will grab the reader's attention quickly, but without any insight into the content of the original thing.

More on this later.