Monday, April 12, 2010

RITUALS OPEN AND CLOSED

Over two months ago, at the end of NO MYTHS FOR MISTER GROTH, PLEASE I said:

There are some significant differences between archaic myth and all forms of modern literature, though they do not relate to the aforementioned method of promulgation. I'll be addressing this topic in a future essay, tentatively titled, "Rituals Open and Closed."


Though in that essay I took issue with Gary Groth's pig-ignorant confusion of the principles of myth and literature, the fact is that there's a great deal of confusion even among scholars who actually study both phenomena, including the two I probably cite most frequently, Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell. In this essay I touched on the relationship in terms of speculations on their common origins:

Religious concepts, like concepts of art, surely evolved through a process of trial and error, in which the storyteller perceived patterns of meaning and managed to communicate them to his audience. But as Frye observed, religion's purpose is to say "this is so," while art's purpose is to say, "what if such-and-such were so."

Though I reject the simplistic notion that myth, as myth, was unchanging, or even universally intended by its makers to be unchanging, obviously art (at whatever point it became definitively separated from myth) could change to meet the needs of the community much more quickly. This would lead to a greater emphasis on the use of the individual intellect to use symbolic tableaux for didactic purposes-- one of the earliest being the Gilgamesh Epic, where the hero, derived from older and cruder-seeming myth-tales, becomes an object lesson on the meaning of man's mortality.


A little later I added:

any poetics that tries (as mine does) to wed aspects of Frye and Campbell will tend to let Frye be "king-of-the-mountain," at least most of the time, because Frye has a superior cognizance as to how both mythworks and artworks are made.


I still believe that, though I have had occasion to see ways in which Campbell exceeds Frye:

And just as I thought Campbell was perhaps a bit too imprecise regarding the dividing line between art and myth, so that I opined that Frye might serve to present a little more rigor in that department, Frye's dividing line between literary and subliterary is a bit too rigid and could benefit from some Campbellian input to show how even works that might be deemed "thematically escapist" possess their own orderly structure and communicate their own sort of messages


But if Frye's barrier between literary and subliterary was too rigid, there might be ways in which his equation of art and myth were too loose, though for different reasons than those of Joseph Campbell. Simply put, Campbell's equation of the two was based more in Jung and all of his Kantian forbears, while Frye was far more indebted, as I've shown here, to the Cambridge "myth-and-ritual" school. For Campbell, the thing linking art and myth is the "innate idea." For Frye, it is ritual, albeit in a figurative sense.

As most comics-critics are (as seen in my above example) largely ignorant of mythology, they generally prefer to see art as independent of the processes of mythology. Most comics-critics prefer to see literary works as heuristic tools by which authors work through their crises and the like, and for them art is individualized and thus as far as one can get from the formulas and/or rituals by which mythological narratives are sustained. Their conception of art is a bunch of separate trees which no-how no-way comprise a forest, except in the imagination of the learned critic who shapes them into the kind of forest he calls a "canon."

In contrast, I agree with Frye's tendency to see works of art in continuity with works of mythology, and that the process that unites them is that of ritual. But I have one refinement, hearkening back to my earlier-cited point about how art was more capable to responding more quickly to change in a given community than myth could.

Myths do change over time. There is no way that they cannot, being transmitted by ever-mutable human beings. But because myths are supposed to link thei audiences with the divine, myths are not dominantly SUPPOSED to change as humans do. (In saying this I may seem to be departing from a statement made above about "universal" unchangingness of myth, but I'll clarify this in a separate essay.) Thus these types of narratives are CLOSED rituals, based on the expectations of their audiences.

The narratives of art and literature, however, are OPEN rituals. They repeat many of the same tropes one finds in mythico-religious narratives, but even though certain figures and themes are repeated again and again to win audience approval, there is no sense that any of these stories must follow a "canon." Thus the narratives of art are OPEN rituals, which the audience believes free to be changed whenever someone comes up with a better version of an old story.

This is the one flaw I've found in Frye's early essay "Archetypes of Literature," where he uses the arguments of the myth-and-ritual school to make a persuasive case for humanity's need for rituals in both artistic and mythic narratives. But as I think a closer reading of Cassirer might have shown him, human priorities in one "form" of cognition (to use Cassirer's term) are not the same as in another such form.

Against my open/closed distinction one might argue that works of art do, indeed, get treated as if they were closed entities. And yet, because we know more about the processes of art than of originary myth, it's easier to see that they are not. One may put Twain's HUCKLEBERRY FINN on a canonic pedestal, right enough, but when one knows that Twain left out large portions of the narrative because he simply didn't think they worked well, one cannot doubt that even the author saw his text as essentially mutable. Whether the authors of any originary myths saw their texts that way will never be known with certainty--

But based on modern treatments of myth and religion, I tend to doubt it.

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