Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Zsolt K. Virágos: The Twilight Zone of Myth-and-Literature Studies: Analogy, Anomaly, and Intertextuality
The problem of generating knowledge indirectly through analogy, together with the complex issues of reception and the recipient's freedom to be guided by his or her own preference models of interpretation is one of the twilight zones of literary aesthetic, riddled with parameters and paradoxes that are likely to be both subjectivized and epistemologically "soft." The complex of likeness, criteria of similarity, partial identity, and the nature of conditioning by the historically changing dynamic in the acceptance of paradigmatic readings was interestingly described in the preface of E. M. Moseley's study of the Christ archetype: I was particularly interested in the Christ archetype in a series of novels quite dissimilar on the surface but basically alike in what they had to say. As I deliberately considered these similarities which I had more or less intuitively discovered, I came to realize that the important point was not so much how these works were alike as how they were different while being alike. My main interest became the variations on the same pattern, variations which I soon related to the changing climate of opinion almost from decade to decade. It is amazing that attitudes and emphases change so rapidly in our time! (vii-viii) One of the ramifications that is essential to perceive at this point is that in myth-and-literature transactions it is highly questionable to accept the dubious structuralist or poststructuralist premise that there is "nothing outside the text." The epistemological rationale for intertextual linkage is not an impersonal unfolding and recombination of a priori and dormant correspondences. Their appearance in the text is a concentrated manifestation of what they represent in the first place, thus it is impossible to abolish the reality behind the text. Doing so, to paraphrase Colin Falck's relevant statement, would be rather like talking about a ballgame without ever actually mentioning the ball. 3 This is one "The linguistic theories of Saussure and his successors are undeniably based on a correct recognition that 'correspondence,' or 'thing-and-name,' theories of linguistic meaning are philosophically indefensible. But these structuralist and post-structuralist theories seem themselves no less undeniably to be false in so far as they claim that linguistic meanings are a matter only of the relationships which hold between linguistic terms themselves, and that there is therefore, in some (admittedly rather special or arcane) philosophical sense, 'nothing outside the text.' The structuralist or post-structuralist tradition of linguistic —and therefore also literary —meaning in effect abolishes reality. To try to talk about literature in the language of structuralist or post-structuralist theory can seem rather 283
