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 actual nature of the text in question is often too strong to resist. It is especially so in the case of large, all-emcompassing paradigms and monomythic abstractions such as the quest-myth. More than three decades ago, G. Hough complained of the one-dimensional practice in myth criticism of seeing characters and events as symbolizations of archaic, otherwise inarticulate responses to certain archetypal situations. [...] Characters in fictional works cease to be "just representations of nature" and become embodiments of a few mythical constants. Any young man who dies becomes a dying god, related to Attis, Adonis and Osiris. Any girl who is carried off and comes back again becomes Persephone; and any heroine who is badly treated by one character and rescued by another becomes Andromeda. Anybody who goes looking for anything becomes a participant in the "quest-myth." (142-43) In a review of John Vickery's Myth and Literature T. H. Gaster talks about the crucial error of assuming that there are certain basic situations which belong primarily to the realm of myth and ritual, so that when they appear in literature they must be thence derived. [...] Are we to say, for example, that a trip on the subway during the rush hour consciously imitates the archetypal myth of the journey to the netherworld or the perilous ordeal of the initiant? Or is a rape in Central Park an enactment of the Sacred Marriage? No; all that the mytho-critics are really saying, when you boil it down, is that myth, ritual, and literature deal with the same kinds of human situations. Which is scarcely worth saying. (28-29) In other words, one should be aware of the fact that the system may "leak." Very often, however, especially in myth critical studies, it is precisely the potential leakage that is creatively exploited. Because analogies are adaptable to diverse contexts and because arbitrary and determined features can be equally absorbed in these operations, normative applications can often create distortions, down to the point where analogy even becomes indistinguishable from anomaly

, a case of obvious deviation from type. And it should be borne in mind that besides being external and elusive, analogies are suggestive and optive, rather than probative, and that paradigms do not create uniform, repeatable instances of anything (Curtis viii). 285