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

beautiful souls and in that broad class of fairy tales and novellas in which frogs are converted to princes and kitchen maids are discovered to be of royal birth or, by virtue of their undeserved hardships, to have attracted the patronage of fairy godmothers: moreover, are not many stories of overcompensation based on just this principle of the gifted pariah: And what of the genre of the moral tale? Consider the story of Rudolph, that lovable Horatio Alger of the reindeer world, whose grotesque electronic nose saves Christmas by piloting Santa's sleigh through the foggy night. (334) The reader can draw their own conclusions. The fact remains that even conventional critical operations between selected intertexts are likely to produce a problematic residue of meanings and interpretive distortions: reductive categorization, redundant predictability, the misplacing of emphasis. And labeling: Captain Ahab is Satan: Updike's Peter is Prometheus; Steinbeck's Jim Casey is Jesus Christ. Gatsby is Attis; Gatsby is Phaethon. Or rather, he is Heathcliff. And so on and so forth. In these instances, like in hundreds of other demonstrated parallels, the few points of analogous traits are substantially outweighed by the undeniable differences. To use yet another intertextual example, in The Executioner's Song, as R. Schleifer has recently shown, Mailer rewrites a "fathering" text, Dreiser's An American Tragedy (227-41). The intertextual relation is sound in many respects, especially in terms of the two intertexts' thematic paradigm of crime and punishment in America but otherwise the essential difference between the works compared cannot be collapsed without violating the autonomy of the respective counterparts. How this is gauged and measured remains problematic, primarily because none of the antidotes which one is likely to conjure up offhand

—common sense, sobriety, taste, credibility, etc.

—is "objective." Analogical thinking raises apparently innocent questions that have been bothersome ever since the ancients. It is sobering to consider the fact, for instance, that there are no satisfying definitions and criteria of similarity or of partial identity that could be satisfactorily applied in criticism, not even foolproof ways of accounting for and recognizing the presence or absence of likeness. As D. Burrell stated in a study on the role of analogies in philosophical language, "there is no method for assuring proper analogous use" (242), and the claim is certainly descriptive of purposive critical strategies intent on generating 287