Myths & Humanity & America's Future

 I have seen the name Northrop Frye without knowing anything about him. He does have an eye-catcher of a name - Northrop. Therefore when I saw his name connected with Alan Jacobs' Yesterday’s Men, i followed the link over to Harper's Bazaar. This is what I learned about him:

Frye, in his magnum opus, Anatomy of Criticism, had conceived of myth, archetype, ritual, and symbol as forming a cathedral-like structure in which every literary work finds its place, much as every redeemed soul finds its place in the mystical rose at the end of Dante’s Commedia. By linking this symbol in Virgil to that symbol in Percy Shelley, this echo of ancient ritual in Shakespeare to another one in George Eliot, Frye sought to create a taxonomy of the literary imagination—a project satisfying to the tidy-minded and the spiritually hungry alike.

But I was left thinking more about humanity and myths.

Should we regret the passing of the mythical method, of mythology in its etymological sense of discourse about myths and mythmaking? Perhaps the question is misleading: mythmaking is alive and well—if by that we mean the creation and sharing of stories that are meant to orient us, morally and emotionally, to our world and are resistant to restatement in straightforward conceptual terms. But taken differently, the question reveals just how the decline of myth criticism has tended to render our own myths invisible to us as myths. They may appear to us, but they do so in false guises, as science perhaps, or as politics, or as administrative procedure.

Today, none of our regnant myths produces a sense of what Barthes contemptuously called “the human ‘community’ ”—they are not in the business of universality, of grounding and justifying humanism, of making a family of man. Such endeavors can seem—like Maya Angelou’s poem “Human Family”: “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike”—fit chiefly for greeting cards and Pinterest boards.

And yet. Though the study of myth emerged from the discovery of cultural diversity, the mythical method of the twentieth century arose from a desperate hope to bridge the chasms of hatred and fear that separate humans from one another. Fact and argument alone cannot build forbearance and charity across racial and cultural and sexual boundaries; this requires image and event, the visualizable and the narratable, picture and story. One can see that the attempt failed while admitting and even embracing its nobility.

Have we lost the knack or the appetite for such stories? For tales of wounds that do not heal, kings who sacrifice themselves for the good of the people, slaves who are really princes, peasants whose generosity is known to the gods—and gods who die and are born again? Perhaps. But it was not so long ago that some of our best writers were drawn to them. A knack lost may yet be regained. 

The original essay does not mention Trump, or modern politics sliding toward dictators. Trump and his ilk spin myths the way they spin the truth. I am still awaiting someone to explain how America is no longer great, or how it was great. The acronym MAGA is enough to instill images of a lost Eden. We are not done with myths. Against villains, we need to raise up heroes. 

What would the heroes of democracy look like? What are their myths? I want to point everyone toward Ross Lockridge, Jr's Raintree County, only behind that novel is Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Great Stone Face". Is an unostentatious integrity enough?

sch 6/21