Myth, Method and Tragedy

...But I love him anyhow...

...Though quite independent in his judgments, it would seem that, on any given topic, his first impulse is to consult the files, see what others have said on the matter, and prepare a succinct survey of his findings...

...From the standpoint of symbolic action and its resources, one could locate the beginnings of both magical curse and modern satire in a "natural" aptitude of language, in its powers of invective (vituperatici...

...My main objection to the typical discussion of primitive myth is that it tends to "over-naturalize" the subject...

...and he also speaks of "my confessedly unsystematic reading in more quarterlies than I know are good for me...

...Typically Weisinger writes, "Not even the King Canutes of the new criticism can stem the tides of learning which flood through contemporary literature, and, as to criticism, why, Frazer, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Jung, Lovejoy, Whitehead, Tillich and Buber are only the starting texts for beginning critics...

...Incidentally, he confides that, because of an "irrational reason," he has "an almost pathological antipathy to the Jungian mystique," in contrast with an admiring and admirable chapter on "The Hard Vision of Freud...

...All told, these are exceptionally lively pages...

...I would contend for a quite different kind of "source," in the real nature of symbolic action here and now...

...Among others one should mention such pieces as: his resistance to "The Attack on the Renaissance in Theology Today...

...These powers took one form of expression when a magical worldview prevailed, and necessarily take another insofar as the rationale behind the ritual curse is weakened, and modern libel laws alter the nature of the risks that threaten the author of the invective...

...He might well take as his motto his own formula, "There is, in art, no one source of the Nile...

...I submit that Weisinger's penetrating work on myth as "source" is similarly off center...

...I mean that "myth" would be here, not as a "survival from the past," but as an integral aspect of symbol-systems, even if all the old myths were of a sudden to be miraculously forgotten and we were to begin tomorrow with a brand new set of wholly "scientific" ones...

...And I'm far from impressed when people think themselves superior to an ignorant savage who can thrive in a wilderness...

...some reservations on "euhemerist" tendencies in "Robert Graves as Mythographer...

...Thus, of all the books Weisinger mentions, there are two quite fertile ones that he seems to have left out of account...

...In one of those impatient moments he writes, "I have come to the most distressing conclusion that the gravest danger to education lies, not outside the academic walls, but directly and deeply within them" (maybe he should here bear in mind that advertising, slanted news, and the "values" implicit in popular art are also forms of "education...

...And though he thinks of himself primarily as scholar, teacher and critic, perhaps his editorial role is also an important influence upon him—particularly as regards his tendencies to the survey approach...

...See above all, his suggestive Appendix on "The Curse...

...but primarily, in borrowing from the lore of anthropology (as he should have), he failed to "de-anthropologize" his approach at this strategic spot...

...it is a modern, scholarly reconstruction of diverse materials drawn from divergent sources, and no two experts agree as to its exact constitution...

...and for a finale, an emotional review of the Sacco-Vanzetti case (it is from Vanzetti that he gets the title for his book...

...Here is Weisinger's Roget-like windup, so far as the "pattern" is concerned: "Myth study at present has not so much the purity and integrity of an homogeneous regional cooking as it has the syncretist flavor of international cuisine: a dash of Cassirer, a dollop of Freud, a grain of Frazer, a minim of Graves, a pinch of Harrison, a smidgeon of Jung, a taste of Thompson, all intriguing flavors in themselves, excellently cooked, but, still and all, not really a style...

...Another possibility is to ask whether science as we now have it may itself be building up its own kind of Pandora's box...

...opening it is science...

...Incidentally, when he referred to my own analysis of Othello simply as "the psychoanalytic approach of Kenneth Burke" and hurried on, I wept...

...Above all, one should note Weisinger's restless concern with matters of method, regarding both scholarship and criticism...

...his data on works that view the world in terms of the "extended metaphor" of a theater ("Theatrum Mundi: Illusion as Reality"), though I wish he had also considered the "dramatistic" view according to which the nomenclature of "action" can be applied to human relations literally, a chapter on Frazer (who, he says, "created the myth of the myth...

...He has listened to so many voices, he never forgets the great babble involved in the search for "the sources of the Nile...

...And the author himself frankly explains why: "I suppose it must be transparently obvious to any one who happens to read these papers but it was not until I had brought them together and had read them one after the other that I realized how irritatingly ambivalent they are toward myth, their ostensible unifying theme...

...The sort of reader who wants to get everything settled for good and all will not be happy with this book...

...Weisinger still tends to think of myth too much in keeping with the imagery of "survival," as though it had its "source" in a primitive past...

...We'll leave that to be settled between him and Stanley Edgar Hyman, with whom he quarrels somewhat (in his chapter "Between Bennington and Bloomington") and whom he greatly admires...

...For instance, I can never bring myself to believe that, despite the material reality and technical accuracy required for a successful moonshot, scientific space travel to the moon is in essence any less looney than a poem about a dream-trip to the moon...

...But Weisinger is so strongly moral and political in his sympathies that there is much in this book which falls wholly outside the charge of mythic "over-naturalizing...

...superior" technologybred modern imbeciles can thrive only if you give them the money to shop at a supermarket, while the "scientific myth," particularly as vitiated by laxities of business enterprise, is destroying the world's ecological balance at an alarming rate...

...In other papers, however, I discover that I take altogether the opposite point of view, that myth represents but an early stage in the intellectual development of man...

...They are The Genesis of Plato's Thought, by A. D. Winspear, and Aeschylus and Athens, by George Thomson...

...That is, the notion that rituals were developed to the ends of "order" and "control" puts the major stress upon the use of magical devices to influence nature, whereas they seem to have been developed and perfected by men who were vitally concerned with the relation that such rites had to the structure of social authority...

...Though the constantly recurring themes of the book are myth and tragedy, the essays cover quite a range of related questions...

...Elliott's work (and it's a good one) hovers on the edge of this view...

...they are equally ambiguous with regard to their corollary theme, science...

...thoughts on "Dialectics as Tragedy" (he views Marxism as "capable of producing authentic tragedy," except that it lacks the necessary combination of faith and skepticism...

...Pandora's box is myth...

...Here's a quick illustration of the difference I am trying to indicate: The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art, by Robert C. Elliott is a study of the likenesses and differences between primitive magic and sophisticated, esthetic satire...

...In brief, science must unmask not only old myths, but its own...

...Weisinger's lineup tends to suggest that the world of man-made science would categorically exclude the traditional modes of "symbolic action," whereas it may be only these same modes in a new form...

...a "myth and ritual" approach to the librettos of W S. Gilbert (here Weisinger comes close to some paragraphs that might, without much forcing, be fitted into The Pooh Perplex...

...In any case his questing, in pursuing the vigorous questions with which he constantly plagues both himself and others, classes him as anything but one of those "academic nullities, the men who believe little and profess less, and know nothing except the date of their retirement...

...But its general tendency is to view modern satire as a modified survival of the primitive magical curse...

...The book has many excellent observations on this subject...

...In some of these papers, I find myself still believing in myth as a still viable and fecund form of thought...

...These works indicate superbly how to play down the mythic penchant for such terms as Freud's ErosThanatos pair...

...Indeed, in keeping with Weisinger's characteristic restlessness, you will find him not only summing up the "pattern" and applying it to his study of Shakespearean tragedy (by his way of figuring, Othello comes out on top, and the magic comedy of The Tempest does not fare well), but also (in his chapter on "Some Meanings of Myth") he comes to the conclusion that "no myth and ritual pattern as such exists or ever existed in any real sense...

...If you are going to look for originating principles in terms of a historical line, however, you might with as much justice view primitive magic as a confused early striving toward its mature fulfillment in modern satire...

...Reviewed by KENNETH BURKE Author, "Perspectives By Incongruity," "Terms for Order" The author of Tragedy and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall and editor of The Centennial Review here reprints a selection of the expert scholarly and critical papers he has published over the last decade or so in various learned journals...

...Whether you agree or disagree with this reservation, you will find many ingenious speculations on the overlaps between literature (more specifically tragedy) and the "myth and ritual pattern...

...At times he becomes impatient with this scrupulous but not always rewarding procedure...

...On the subject as so put, every civilized man should waver, and Weisinger is highly civilized...