The Modern Construction of Myth

13 Myth as Necessary Fiction

[ 13 ] Myth as Necessary Fiction Myth has indeed been subject to a process analogous to that undergone by its diacritical partner, ideology. When the romantic inventors of the concept desiderate a new mythus, they have in mind a story capable of transforming the social and intellectual disarray of the modern West into a coherent whole. These pioneers spend little time worrying the issue of authenticity, largely because they assume (as Carlyle does, for example, in Sartor Resartus) that as long as such shaping myths succeed in sustaining their historical communities, they possess, by definition, “the mandate of Heaven.” They are local, temporarily realized manifestations of eternal truths. When the cosmos comes to be perceived as less than benign, however, and our unbefriended species begins to understand itself as the value-creating animal, the significance of “myth” is radicalized; its fictive nature presses into the foreground, and the basis of its perennial authenticity recedes to the vanishing point. “Value-creating animal” is Nietzschean diction. His representations of truth as necessary error and humankind as inveterate makers and breakers of idols are the classic statements of this perceived situation. They mark the bold beginning of a twentieth-century trend toward regarding the foundational assumptions of all cultures as the kind of fictions properly signified as “myth.” This conception of myth differs from its romantic parent and agrees with its ideological sibling in assuming that such fictions are without transcendental sanction. But it differs from its sibling in viewing neutrally, or even positively, Myth as Necessary Fiction 305 their necessary fictivity. Like the ideological, this conception, which I call the constitutive, gathers force in the turn-of-the-century shift toward affective and structural explanation. Whereas the ideological conception of myth is developed largely by social thinkers, the constitutive is taken up most strikingly by philosophers and poets. The most obvious philosophical strain descends from Nietzsche, through William James’s pragmatic “will to believe” to relatively recent social constructivism . Another strain, more aesthetic in cast, descends from Kant, especially from the third Critique, through the turn-of-the-century neo-Kantian movement and Croce’s aesthetics. We’ve met a version of it in Frye’s Anatomy, not merely in his notion that literary expression is “hypothetical,” but, more radically, in his suave but startling implication that most of our cultural monuments in history, philosophy, and the human sciences are also instances of the type of prose fiction he calls “anatomy.” We might trace a third strain (if it isn’t too close to the neo-Kantian) working through Cassirer’s idea of myth as one of humanity’s fundamental modes of symbolic form. According to Cassirer’s admirer, Wilbur Urban, for example, “myth” signifies, in its broad sense, all knowledge that retains its valuing function. Yet a fourth strain, particularly important to the theorists considered in this chapter, derives from existentialist phenomenology, especially in the key established by Heidegger’s work after his “turn.” Perhaps the most striking formulations of the constitutive view of myth have been the work of poets. W. B. Yeats is a prime exhibit. As discussed in chapter 6, Yeats’s career-long search for a viable mythology culminates in the metahistorical system laid out in A Vision. He derives this matter from automatic writings that certain “communicators” “dictated” to his wife, and the many strong poems rooted in them make A Vision important reading for students of his later work. But Yeats is elusive about the nature of his belief in these messages. He tells us in his introduction to the revised edition of A Vision that the communicators, when asked, said they did not want him to proselytize for their revelations, that they came to bring him “metaphors for poetry,” and, later, that he regards the system as “stylistic arrangements of experience” that have helped him “to hold in a single thought reality and justice” (Yeats 1966, 8, 25). The crucial point here isn’t the precise degree of Yeats’s belief, but his pragmatic commitment to a construction he knows to be objectively dubious. His example was influential during the forties and fifties in establishing in literary circles the notion that possession of some comparable “myth” was the life-blood of great creative work. This assumption, disseminated through American New Criticism especially by Cleanth Brooks specifically in reference to Yeats, represents a modulation toward the subjective of T. S. Eliot’s earlier dictum that any sustained production of great poetry is the work of an...