GOULD RUSH

 One of the earliest essays I wrote when I commenced this blog in 2007 was MYTHICITY, THREAT OR MENACE?, which partly concerned Eric Gould's 1981 MYTHICAL INTENTIONS IN MODERN LITERAURE. The book was not a major influence on my thinking, and I'm not even sure when I read it. In fact, at the time I wrote the 2007 essay, I didn't have a physical copy of INTENTIONS, and up to now, the only times I quoted Gould, it was from the few INTENTIONS passages in William G. Doty's MYTHOGRAPHY. However, thanks to a bargain purchase on Amazon, I now have a good copy of Gould's book.

I don't know if INTENTIONS justifies a large-scale explication. I expressed some disagreements with Gould in that early essay, and in the two or three others here where his name appears. My only strong influence from his work was his argument for the term "mythicity," meaning "the nature of the mythic," as Gould says in the introduction. From a Google search I don't get the sense that this term caught on with other literary critics, and it only gets mentioned in reference to INTENTIONS or to my own essays-- with one exception. A blog called Culturesmith devotes an essay both to Gould's term and to its earlier coinage by one Wilhelm Dupre in his 1975 book RELIGION IN PRIMITIVE CULTURES. It may be that Gould credited Dupre somewhere in INTENTIONS, but the latter's name is not in the index or the select bibliography.

Here's the only citation of Gould I made in the original essay:

The fact that classical and totemistic myths have to refer to some translinguistic fact-- to the Gods and Nature-- proves not that there are Gods, but that our talents for interpreting our place in the world may be distinctly limited by the nature of language.

This also appears in the intro to INTENTIONS, and my reaction to it now is the same as what I said in PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 3, where I was disputing what author Brian Attebery said against what he called "myth critics," including Joseph Campbell:

In my own essay I registered my disagreement with Gould on that point. Nevertheless, Attebery seems to have vaulted over the epistemological question, "what authority does religious 'belief' possess, even if it expresses the collective worldview of a given tribe, nation, or ethnicity?" I would be the last to validate the Doubting Thomas fallacy of the materialists, "If you can't dissect the risen body of Christ, that means no such body ever existed." But belief can be epistemologically valid insofar as its narratives reproduce epistemological patterns that are, in a sense, common to all human experience, not just to particular human groupings. For me at least, that transcendence of particular cultures trumps the "limits of language" that Eric Gould finds so disconcerting.

At base, Joseph Campbell shared this belief in such patterns, though he was, as I've said elsewhere, rather scattershot in his hermeneutics during his unquestionably distinguished career. But since Campbell and some of his fellow travelers are not validating myth based only upon whether the myth-narratives "authorize" a particular group's "belief," it's not surprising to me that Atteberry implicitly dismisses many comparativists that came into prominence in the 1960s, lumping together "Claude Levi-Strauss, Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, and Mircea Eliade" as proponents of "myth criticism."

Though Gould's book had nothing to do with anything Atteberry wrote, or even the fantasy-genre with which Atteberry was concerned, as it happens Gould's introduction spells out his disagreement with Atteberry's focus upon purely historical manifestations of religious myth. Gould notes that "the issue for literary studies has long been the synchronic problem, that of trying  to explain what the mythic is..." The contrast between synchronic and diachronic approaches to linguistic analysis appears in this Wiki citation:

Synchrony and diachrony are two complementary viewpoints in linguistic analysis. A synchronic approach – from Ancient Greek: συν- ('together') + χρόνος ('time') – considers a language at a moment in time without taking its history into account. In contrast, a diachronic – from δια- ('through, across') + χρόνος ('time') – approach, as in historical linguistics, considers the development and evolution of a language through history.^[1]

Gould does not actually say in the intro that his is a diachronic approach-- of analyzing a subject across many different historical manifestations-- but that's the interpretation I take from his mention of the "synchronic problem." As noted above, I've found my own solution to all "synchronic problems," largely in the domain of epistemology-- though I have more recently averred that "epicosms," the domains of epistemological patterns, are inextricably interlaced with the domains of ontological declaration, or "ontocosms." I further in passing that I think Gould is far more preoccupied with ontology than with epistemology, though in a very different manner than Attebery, so I'm not sure how useful a re-read of INTENTIONS will be.