Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

STUDIES - Zsolt Virágos: Some Observations on Myth and Practical' Pragmatism in American Culture

imize past and present phenomena, or serve as projective devices with reference to future events. Thus the primary function of myth is to make sense of the world of actuality by creating its own mythic quasi-reality for group consumption in ways that have been variously identified as supernatural, unhistorical, ahistorical, unobservable, mistaken, irrational, etc. Thus, to put it as briefly as possible, my definition of myth here will be this: justification for whatever reason. For our immediate purposes it is useful at this point to take a brief look at what I would loosely call the anatomy of myth, i.e., to isolate the main functional aspects and ingredients, as well as those epistemologically incompatible but structurally interlocking constituent elements that myth as a larger entity incorporates and fuses.

1 Suffice it to offer at this point just a mere list: the component of factual reality, the element of falsehood, the socalled "rooted-in-reality" aspect, the pragmatic aspect, the aspect of obviousness, emotional and volitional aspects, myth's ideological dimension, group acceptance, group cohesion, and what I would label as the so-called "time index". Two of the above elements require comment here. First, the pragmatic aspect Perhaps the most intriguing quality inherent in virtually every vital cultural myth is the dimension of pragmatic utility. This simply means that myths are made, designed as it were, to claim truth in response to a special kind of sense-making need and purpose. What is actually operative in this mechanism is the unique, and often puzzling, power of myth to reconcile what could be described as "the factually false" with "the psychologically true"

. Thus, in spite of its ultimate falsehood, myth can be useful, it can have "operational validity," which, of course, serves as a potent reason for group acceptance. This sense-making purpose of myth is both a voluntaristic and an arbitrary drive, a characteristic quality that together with the above-mentioned persistence of psychological truth, is bound to prompt a look at our other item selected for brief consideration, at what I have identified above as "emotional and volitional aspects". In terms of how the psychological truth of myth is incorporated in the belief-system 1 For a detailed discussion of this idea see my "Versions of Myth in American Culture and Literature," Hungarian Studies in English 17 (1984): 49—84. 138