RHETORICAL FLOURISHES PT. 2

 I begin by admitting that I'm going to apply I.A. Richards' "tenor and vehicle" categories for other purposes than simply the diagramming of isolated metaphors. Here I'm interested in the potential of the two-part construct to discuss the function of mythicity in literary work.

From the blog's beginnings I had defined "mythicity" as "symbolic complexity," and had frequently used Joseph Campbell's functions as a methodology for showing how different categories of knowledge played into the symbolic process. However, it was only in this 2019 essay that I began speaking of the things being recapitulated in symbolized forms as "epistemological patterns." To boil down a great deal of complicated verbiage, I decided that even though it had become fairly common to speak of modern literary products as "mythic," the elements of literary narratives that most nearly approximate the nature of archaic myths are those that break down the narrative's universe into epistemological patterns-- and that they are more "mythic" according to their sheer density of conception. 

Two years prior to that essay, I had rejected an insight from Northrop Frye's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM that I had prized for years during the formation of my own myth-criticism: Frye's insight that "myth is one extreme of literary design; naturalism is the other." Most of my ruminations about "affective freedom" and "cognitive restraint" probably owe something to Frye's formulation, but in ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 3,  I pointed out that I didn't think Frye's use of the term "myth" cohered with my own. For him, myth was essentially a treasure-trove of literary tropes, which might or might not be complex in the epistemological sense (as per my negative example of OLIVER TWIST). 

Yet, I confess that it's impossible to speak of "myth" without speaking of "tropes." Even when a given narrative in a literary work fails to invoke a complex epistemological pattern, a given reader may often recognize mythic potential through a manipulation of tropes, even in a simplistic manner. I've frequently remarked that little if anything in the early SUPERMAN stories of Siegel and Shuster does one find anything I consider "mythicity." But juvenile readers of SUPERMAN comics recognized Superman as a breakthrough in the sense of bringing a super-powerful hero into a contemporary setting. Those young readers probably didn't think of the hero's alleged archaic models, such as Herakles and Samson, as being anything more than tough guys killing beasts and monsters, and so they would not have even apprehended the epistemological aspects of the archaic figures. 

So I began thinking: are not familiar tropes the only means by which archaic myths communicate their epistemological patterns? Stories of Herakles have nearly no verisimilitude to them; they involve familiar stories of the hero's feats, his humiliations, and his ultimate death. Say that one believes that Herakles' victory over the Hydra represents, say, the archetypal hero's struggle against chthonic nature. No one in the story will voice such an interpretation; only later rationalists of the myth might do so. Yet the metaphysical epistemological pattern is present even if it is not stated outright, being communicated only indirectly, through the familiar arrangement of events in the trope-scenario. It's on this same level that I believe Frye was thinking of "the birth-mystery plot" that he finds in OLIVER TWIST.

In Richards's essay, he claims that before his essay critics had to make clumsy formulations of the two parts of metaphor being "the underlying idea" and "the imagined nature," or "the principal subject" or "what is resembles." He offers a more precise set of terms, calling "the thing referred to" as "tenor" and "the thing compared to it" as "vehicle." As a more concrete example, Richards offers a poem which compares "the flow of the poet's mind" (tenor) to "a river" (vehicle), though he points out that in some constructions the tenor is the most important element, and in others, the vehicle assumes greater significance.

My current concept, then, is that the expanded metaphorical structure that I have called "the mythopoeic potentiality" in literature may also be broken down into these two conjoined elements, where the epistemological pattern is "the thing referred to," the "tenor," while the familiar tropes through which the pattern is expressed is "the thing compared to it," the "vehicle." 

And so, in a roundabout way, I end up validating one aspect of Frye's argument re: myth and naturalism, even if I do so in a way that allows me to also validate the very different insights of authors like Jung, Cassirer and Campbell.