UNTIMELY RUMINATIONS #2

Here's another blast from the past, taken from AMAZING HEROES #51 (1984), when Steve Gerber was hyping VOID INDIGO:

Gerber believes that contemporary examples of popular culture that attempt to recreate myths do not truly do so. "One of the qualities of myth is that it looks at both the light and dark sides of humanity, and the escapist mentality is incapable, really, of looking at the dark side...There's a certain ugliness in every one of us that we all have to face and confront at some time or another"-- and that, Gerber says, in myth we recognize and condemn in ourselves, therefore achieving a catharsis.

To be sure, the first sentence of this quote makes clear that Gerber isn't trying to define myth overall, unlike some of the myth-theorists I've critiqued on this blog. But he's also putting forth an overly rationalized notion of a supposed facet of myth, because it jibes with the particular work he's expousing. I wouldn't say that his observation is completely untrue. But the very mention of "catharsis" in this context makes it sound as if Gerber has a didactic view of myth-- which is ironic given that many of Gerber's works meet my definition of literary myths, precisely because they don't have an overly didactic organization.

I can see, though, why an intelligent creator like Gerber would become seduced by the Didactic Side of the Force, for as I noted elsewhere, the tropes of the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities not infrequently intermingle with one another:

Didactic discourse and mythopoeic discourse are not as intimately entwined as those of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities. The discourses can appear independently of one another, or they may intertwine within a narrative to support one another, or they may conflict with one another so as to confuse the narrative. 

Given that in the primary art of fiction there can be so many permutations in the interaction of these two potentialities, it's not surprising that they also become confounded within the secondary art of criticism.