RESPECTING THE SECOND MASTER

The title of this essay functions as a companion piece to SHORTCHANGING THE SECOND MASTER, my largely negative review of the 1998 book STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME. In my review I faulted the book's authors for having reeled out a "Cook's tour" of prominent views on the analysis of archaic and modern myth, and for having claimed that theirs was a "pluralist" vision, only to turn around and deluge the reader with nothing but Far Left interpretations of the TREK franchise. The authors claimed that they were going to "serve two masters" by appreciating the arguments of both those who criticized mythic content in fiction and and those who "venerated" it, but they were really only serving one of two putative masters and shortchanging the other.

John C. Lyden's 2003 FILM AND RELIGION follows a similar course to DEEP SPACE insofar as the author sets up his critical rationale by comparing and contrasting a wide variety of critical views on the interwoven topics of myth and religion. As of this writing I've only read the first three chapters of Lyden's book, and I have two more to go that are focused purely on his methodology, before even getting to his specific analyses of different films-- some of which are well-known metaphenomenal works, while others would seem to be remote from the average conception of myth-and-religion, such as WHEN HARRY MET SALLY.

Lyden's estimations of various myth-and-religion scholars are, perhaps inevitably, a mixed bag for me. In my 2019 essay AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE, I criticized Jung for too often reducing mythological stories to purely psychological projections, and Lyden holds the same opinion. Yet whereas I found it possible to use certain insights by Joseph Campbell to correct Jung's error, Lyden makes it clear that he has no use for Campbell at all, dismissing the author largely because he finds Campbell's concept of "the monomyth" too restrictive. In truth, I have no more investment in that particular conception than did Lyden-- it's one of Campbell's weakest ideas-- but it's clear from Lyden's bibliography that he only read three of Campbell's later works, which doesn't give him much authority to analyze Campbell accurately.

Overall, though, Lydon seems to be broadly fair even to writers with whom he disagrees. I confess that I like the fact that he opposes the very thing I disliked in the DEEP SPACE book: the tendency to confuse sociological purpose with poetic creativity. In MYTHS OF PLEASURE AND PATTERNS  I wrote:

I won’t repeat in detail my conviction that mythology depends upon the evocation of epistemological patterns. But I will add that for tribal humans, these patterns would be the essence of poetry; the fusion of the objective and subjective worlds in which those humans lived. Stories that relate that the sun is really a boat traversing the sky, or that the world was made from the bones of a giant, don’t serve any scientific purpose, nor at base do they serve the purpose of Malinowski’s functionalism (to which Meletinsky seems strongly allied). While myth-stories may eventually be used to support a given culture’s social order, no teller of tales thinks to himself, “Hmm, I think I’ll make up a story about that ball of light in the sky so that this generation and those that follow will have a sense of societal unity.” Nor would any audience listen to such stories for any reason save that imaginative sojourns give them pleasure. One of those pleasures includes the listeners imagining that the mysterious non-human world is at least tinged with human sentiments and priorities—and that may be the base origin of all of the tropes of art and religion, which may precede those stories we moderns would term “myths.”

Similarly, in a section devoted to anthropologist Clifford Geertz-- the scholar with whom Lyden most strongly agrees, albeit one I've not yet explored-- Lyden strongly rejects the tendency toward "sociological reductionism" seen in scholars like Malinowski and Levi-Strauss. Lyden follows Geertz in affirming "that myths unite the ideal and the real, a notion of how things could be with a pragmatic understanding of how they are." The pairing Lyden calls "the ideal and the real" is in essence identical with what I called above "the objective and subjective worlds." Because Lyden is attempting to see ways in which the enactment of tribal myth-rituals mirrors the much later development of cinematic enjoyment, I'm not surprised that he's aligning himself with the model that best supports that analogue-- and at this point in reading the book, I have no reason to oppose that comparison. I'm reasonably certain that, given his nodding acquaintance with Campbell, Lyden will not validate myth-and-religion according to my notion of "epistemological patterns." But I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a view of the subject that I can respect.