Ernst Cassirer discusses how mythical thinking has seen the individual personality, but it gives an account of mythical thought itself, its application is intended by the author to be quite general; and the analogy with our own generally accepted ideas about the whole mode of apprehension of the artist, in contrast maybe with the technologist is so plain that it needs no elaboration . The second part of Cassirer's account of mythical thought which is sometimes linked with literature is alike but distinct from it. It is his account of how that kind of thinking does not analyze and separate, but naturally apprehends its material in the form of organically unified wholes:
. . . for the mythical imagination there is no separation of a total complex into its elements, but . . . only a single undivided totality is represented -- a totality in which there has been no 'dissociation' of separate factors, particularly of the factors of objective perception and subjective feeling. The really important thing about the myth is its character of a retrospective, ever-present, live actuality. It is to a native neither a fictitious story, nor an account of a dead past; it is a statement of a bigger reality still partially alive. It is alive in that its precedent, its law, its moral, still rules the social life of the natives. It is clear that myth functions especially where there is a sociological strain. . . . We can certainly discard all explanatory as well as all symbolic interpretations of these myths . . . .
No one can understand English literature unless he knows something about classical myths, for our writers from the Middle Ages to the present have used and still use classical myths in their stories and poems. Handbooks of mythology are nothing new; but today, when small Latin and less Greek are taught in our schools and when very few people are able to interpret references to classical myths from their own knowledge. In the last hundred years a number of books have been written, but they do not fully meet the needs of a reader of English literature because they focus on the myths themselves and pay little or no attention to the symbolic use of the myths in English literature. First, it is necessary to retell the myths and to retain, as far as is possible in a brief summary, the elements of individual character and concrete situation that give them life. These stories have lasted a long time because they are interesting, and we have tried to keep them that way. Any handbook about myths must retell the myths. The reader wants to be able to find without difficulty a particular character or situation (for example, Procrustes or the stratagem of the wooden horse) and also to see this character or situation in its proper context. A mere dictionary method chops the definition of a myth into fragments, and of the method of extended narrative, which gives the texture of the myth but makes the reader search the index for a particular character or situation. The second part of the problem is that some books try show the relation of the myths to English literature. We should be concerned with the symbolic value of the myth in English literature as we are with the myth itself. It is nearly impossible to show all references to classical myths in English literature. Relating myths to English literature is needed to show literary usage rather than trying to tell a classic story. When a myth has variant forms, we are apt to give the versions used by English and American writers and to ignore the other versions .
It is easy to refute the old-fashioned theories of myth, such as that it is garbled history, or is the product of savage speculation, but since the purpose of this paper is to explain what a myth is, it is perhaps only necessary to say that in the view of many modern students it is simply a narrative associated with a rite.
The essential truth of the myth lies in the fact that it embodies a situation of profound emotional significance, a situation, moreover, which is in its nature recurrent, and which calls for the repetition of the ritual which deals with the situation and satisfies the need evoked by it .
Some readers may say that this is not at all what they mean by myths. What they mean are highly imaginative stories about the miraculous rescue of a princess from a monster, or the vengeance of the gods on a king who has incurred their wrath; how could such stories be supposed to confer life? Anyone who makes this objection has obviously limited his study of mythology to those myths which the classical writers abstracted from their religious context and used as a basis for poetry and romance. Myths in their proper context are seen differently, as will appear presently .
Those who regard myths as the products of the imagination have not considered how the imagination works. Nobody can possibly imagine anything which has not been suggested to him by something which he has seen, heard, or read. Poets and novelists, by selecting from and combining ideas which have reached them in various ways, produce what are called works of the imagination, but those who formulated or recorded the myths could not have acted in this way. For the myths were so sacred that they could have been altered or added to only by those who believed themselves inspired, and even then to a very limited extent .
Works Cited
Aster, Misha. “ Chekhov in Love”, Three Farces. 8 November 2000
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