The Modern Construction of Myth

2 The Invention of Myth

[ 2 ] The Invention of Myth Belief in myth as a solution to the crisis expressed in the poetry of religious nostalgia presumes the presence within modern persons of some inalienable faculty for producing it. The confidence that tips the balance from longing for this power to affirmation of its presence arises in the larger context of what we know as the romantic movement, that profound revision of a network of related concepts such as “ego,” “author,” “artist,” “art,” and “literature.” This movement appears as an effort, in certain respects reactionary, in others radical, to legitimate modernity by asserting , in defiance of certain Enlightenment thought and of Kant, that humankind can indeed attain transcendental knowledge of things as they really are. This claim is based upon exaltation of the autonomous ego and its “original genius.” It is also based upon the allegedly authoritative witness of the products of this genius, such as “Literature.” Until the end of the eighteenth century, “literature,” like “learning,” was a quality a person was said to possess. The romantic hypostatizing of “Literature” as an objective entity, a super-genre, in the sense still familiar today, indicates a felt need to establish a special category of writing distinguished from ordinary rhetorical performance by features that confer upon it a cachet of authority. The specific sub-genre that eventually comes to be designated as “myth” is the very template of “Literature,” a type of narrative that conveys insight so inexhaustible in its significance that it transcends its mere local occasion and historical situation. 26 The Modern Construction of Myth A L L E G O R I E S O F FA B L E : B L A K E A N D N OVA L I S Even as Schiller, Wordsworth, and Hölderlin mourn what they feel as irretrievable loss, artists and thinkers around them in what I have called the phase of “vision,” are beginning not only to affirm the mythopoeic power of the race as its permanent possession, but also to construct narratives that are both instances of that power and allegorical accounts of how it overcomes the orphaning “dissociation of sensibility.” Narratives of this sort I call “allegories of fable.”1 All three of Blake’s “epics,” the unengraved The Four Zoas (1795) and Milton and Jerusalem, whose engravings were launched by 1804, are instances of this genre; each represents in plot and characters the psychological dynamics by which a creative artist overcomes his divided self and inaugurates an apocalyptic moment of renewal.2 Of these three, The Four Zoas expresses this allegory most directly. Blake’s Zoas are both the “four living creatures” of the biblical visions of Ezekiel and John and “[t]he Antediluvians who are our Energies . . . the Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains” (Blake 1965, 39). It is as if the giganti of Vico (whose work Blake did not know), lived on, trapped in the diminished minds of the descendants for whom they framed the phenomenal world. The Zoas represent specific “Energies”: Tharmas, our “common” or unifying sense of taste and touch; Luvah, our passion and sexuality; Urizen, our rational intellect; and Urthona, our imaginative power. As long as these powers are integrated in the corporate human, Albion, he dwells in a state of unified sensibility, but as the poem opens, these Energies have already begun to fall into disorganization and discord: first Tharmas, then Luvah, then Urizen. Just as it is unclear when this ruin commences (it may be, as among some Gnostics, identical with Creation), it is unclear whether the collapse of the Zoas causes the fall of Albion, or vice versa; both are the same condition considered under different aspects. As the Zoas disintegrate, their Vehicular Forms, Emanations, and Spectres split off. “Vehicular Forms” are the contracted avatars of the Zoas in the fallen world, the two important ones in Blake’s major prophetic poems being Urthona’s appearance as Los, the spirit of poetry and prophecy, and Luvah’s as Orc, the spirit of passion in rebellion, rather analogous to Freudian libido. The “Emanations,” somewhat analogous to the Jungian concept of the “anima,” are the female halves of the Zoas with whom the Zoas must be reunited in order not to be merely raging masculine abstractions, missing half their “humanity.” The Spectres are analogous to the Jungian archetype of the Shadow, projections of the worst or most feared aspects of the self. In...