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. 

PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 3

 Since I'm not sure I'll finish STORIES ABOUT STORIES, I skipped Chapter 3 and read Chapter 4, at least in part because it concerns Attebery's antagonistic relationship to Joseph Campbell.

But before getting to anything about Campbell, it occurred to me to relate Attebery's definition of myth as "any collective story that encapsulates a worldview and authorizes belief" to one of the first "mythographers" I evaluated on this blog, Eric Gould. In the work referenced here, Gould coined a term I've often used, "mythicity," but he did not share Attebery's broad valorization of any mythic tale simply because it "authorized belief."

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.

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." Attebery is initially a bit circumspect about pinning down what he doesn't like about myth criticism, though immediately after these citations he brackets the myth-critics as sharing "the assumption that all myths are psychically available to modern writers and readers." Attebery does not at first raise the Barthesian specter of "appropriation," the idea that it's wrong to pilfer cultural artifacts from cultures not one's own. The author's initial reticence may come about because he segues from talking about the cultural influence of the myth-critics (presumably in America and Western Europe, though Attebery doesn't specify) to discussing the concomitant rise of the mass-market proliferation of the fantasy genre in the same decade and thereafter. But when he turns his attention to Campbell's HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, it's clear the author has that devil Appropriation on his mind.

The problem with Campbell's monomyth as an analytical tool  is that it always works because it simplifies every story to the point where nothing but the monomyth is left. It ignores the many mythic stories that do not have questing heroes, and it leaves out the culturally defined values and symbols that make each tradition unique.

I disagree with only one part of this statement. As I may have said elsewhere on this blog, I have not read HERO in several years, and have not ever reviewed it, but I think it the least epistemologically valid of his works. If I had my way, Campbell would be much better known for his "four functions." But I must admit that Campbell's concept of an over-arching "super-myth," while fallible in many ways, had the effect of getting a lot of people to check out that particular book, including (allegedly) George Lucas. 

Yet Attebery makes the opposite mistake. When he bestows upon traditional myths a uniqueness that sets those stories apart from other cognate stories, he makes the same mistake Barthes did in MYTHOLOGIES. Long before there existed either "capitalist" or "post-industrial" cultures, so-called "traditional cultures" constantly swapped or stole story-ideas from each other. Did Norse Odin precede Germanic Wotan? No one knows, and no one should care. The same principle should apply to the intermingling of elements from disparate cultures in order to craft modern magical fantasies. We would not have a LORD OF THE RINGS if Tolkien had not synthesized many myth-traditions, not least the very disparate traditions of Celtic tales and medieval Christian religion. Alan Garner's WEIRDSTONE OF BRISINGAMEN is nowhere near the greatness of RINGS. But Garner's synthesis was a good one, and does not deserve to be downgraded because (according to Attebery) he "mixed mythologies indiscriminately," with "Nordic dwarves, Celtic elves, a Tolkienian evil force named Nastrond, and a Merlinesque wizard who guards a cave of sleeping warriors like those of the Germanic Frederick Barbarosa." It's odd that Attebery should invoke a 12th century German ruler in concert with a "Merlinesque wizard," rather than referencing the "sleeping warrior" myths about King Arthur, who's more frequently associated with Merlin.

In the end, the argument comes down not to logic but taste. Attebery clearly prefers modern fantasy authors to pick some corpus of culturally related myth-stories and to build from that corpus. But as I said, Tolkien himself did not do this, and as yet I have not seen the author critiquing the Oxford don on the same terms he uses toward both Campbell and Alan Garner. I too can think of many bad admixtures of disparate traditional stories, but that does not prove that "mix and match" is a bad strategy in itself. I also think Atteberry wants authors to stick to particular mythoi so that he can judge better if the creators do what he thinks most valuable: ringing in modern interpretive changes to traditional lore. 

If I make it through another chapter, I plan to address one of the major omissions in Attebery's schema: the differing dynamics of oral culture vs. written culture.

THE UNBEARABLE FULLNESS OF EMPTINESS

I've recently finished David Sandner's FANTASTIC LITERATURE: A CRITICAL READER (2004), which is a collection of essays and book-excerpts dealing with the concept of fantasy in literature, whether in the form of archaic romances, fairy tales or the particular modern genre known as "fantasy." It's an excellent collection, ranging from critics who are well known for their theories on the subject (Samuel Coleridge, Northrop Frye, Eric Rabkin) to those whose writings touch on the subject more indirectly (Mikhail Bakhtin, Fredric Jameson). But for me the best insight into the ambivalent heart of fantasy appears in the lead essay by Sandner, who says that the genre depends upon "the tension between its potential fullness and its surprising emptiness."

Having established that theme statement, he describes how two fantasy-creators-- Lewis Carroll and J.R.R. Tolkien-- both began their most significant works from contemplating single sentences that led both authors to create the respective worlds of Wonderland and Middle-Earth. I won't recapitulate Sandner's argument here, but in essence he demonstrates that dichotomy between the "empty" and "the full."

For Carroll, Sandner says, "fantasy is an empty set" that shows the implicit emptiness behind all of our arbitrary assignments of meaning, as in the scene where Alice asks Humpty Dumpty if a name must mean something, and is told, in essence, that his name does but that hers does not.

Tolkien, though, chooses to fill the void rather than empty it further. "While Carroll offered nothing to hold, and makes one dizzy with the emptiness of language, Tolkien also offers nothing in the language itself: but he hints that, read aright, it will awaken a meaning... that lies beyond the language, too full for mere words and their proscribed meanings."

Sandner then, views the genre/mode of fantasy as directly comparable to the emptiness/fullness of human language, which is natural enough, inasmuch as fantasies are made from language, even the "picture language" common to both archaic mythology and comic books.



But do these categories of emptiness and fullness describe actual qualities of language? Or are they, rather, processes, comparable to those described by medieval alchemists--"Solve" (breaking down) and "coagula" (building up)? I tend to favor the process theory.



This line of thought also brings me to consider another set of differences: between the meaning given the term *mythicity* by the critic who first used it, Eric Gould, and my own use of the term. I quoted this phrase from his book, MYTHICAL INTENTIONS IN MODERN LITERATURE, back in this essay:

"We live within a world where symbolic meanings may help-- do help-- yet are never fully able to bridge the ontological gap."

I recognized the logic behind that statement, but it still strikes me as special pleading, as if symbolic meanings are necessarily untrue because they do not, say, lead one into a universe of pure being, be it one like Wonderland or like Middle-Earth.

It seems demonstrable to me that language is always in a continuous process of "breaking down" and "building up," much like the concepts of "War" and "Love" in Empedocles. Thus Carroll's "empty set" take upon fantasy is simply his apprehension of its potentiality in the "breaking down" of seemingly fixed concepts, while Tolkien's "full set" take shows an awareness of how language, and any structure created by language, also has the propensity to "build up" associations and connections of all kinds.

And of course if one looks one can find both tendencies in the works of both authors, as I'm sure Sandner knew. I think Sandner's correct in seeing that both authors tended to dwell on one tendency more than the other, and it may be that much of what any reader favors tends more toward one tendency than the other-- be it the Beatles vs. the Stones or (to name a personal preference) the Hernandez Brothers vs. Daniel Clowes.

MYTHICITY, THREAT OR MENACE?

In an earlier post I tossed out the term "mythicity," which term was, to the best of my knowledge, originated by Eric Gould in his MYTHICAL INTENTIONS IN MODERN LITERATURE. As I understand Gould's theme (I read the book some years back but don't have it handy), "mythicity" connotes the quality of being "myth-like" that one can find in all literary productions, thus making plain how one can justifiably speak of certain stories as "myths" because of that quality, rather than because they fulfill all other qualifications of myths. A distinction between "literary myths" and "religious myths" is probably appropriate, as well.



Though it's risky to write of a scholar's meanings without his work close to hand, I do have some excerpts provided in William Doty's MYTHOGRAPHY, which support my case. Here are some of Gould's comments on the intersections of myth and literature:



"The meaning of a fiction is always potentially mythic" (113)

"It is impossible to create a fiction without approaching the condition of myth"



I agree with both of those statements, though I would probably say that what makes a fiction actively mythic is a matter of "symbolic complexity," which notion I more or less derive from Northrop Frye. Here's Gould on what myth signifies in fiction:



"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." To that I would answer, "Possibly," but Doty's summarization of Gould troubles me: "We live within a world where symbolic meanings may help-- do help-- yet are never fully able to bridge the ontological gap." In other words, primtives who don't know what a storm is, but who simply formulate a storm-god as a relational aid to the unknown phenomenon, have made an ontological myth, but one which is bound to collapse.

But is this really the case? Is is always going to "one step forward, two steps back," ontologically speaking?

I would suggest that in its most complex form the act of symbolification is a little more than just a vain attempt to bridge an ontological gap: that it is a way to see at least an aspect of selfhood. Though I'm not a Hegelian, I'm drawn to this phrase in a foreword to Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT, written by one J.N. Findlay:

"...in construing the world conceptually [absolute knowledge] is seeing everything in the form of self..."

And also....

"In its conceptual grasp of objects it necessarily grasps what it itself is..."

I will enlarge on the specific application of this conceptual grasping with respect to complexity in a future post.