Chapter 25

1. Chapter 25 Looking Back at Heroes: the Different Versions of a Myth

2. Classifying Myths by Who the Author Is • Some myths, like the Genesis creation story, have a variety of different authors who can be identified by their writing styles and interests, but who are personally not known to us. • Other myths, like Oedipus the King, were written by one person we can identify. • Some myths, like the Mwindo epic, have been written down only recently and are still being told by the descendants of the society whose members originated them.

3. Classifying Myths by Their Function in the Community • Myths may be reworked by individuals who use them to express their personal perspectives and experiences. – Literary version of a myth • Myths may be studied by scholars under whose influence they are used to draw inferences about people and societies. – Rationalized version of a myth • Myths may become associated with a particular ritual or ceremony in the society. – Working version of a myth

4. Literary Analysis by Knox of Oedipus the King • The play is about intellectual blindness. • It expresses irony as a result of the actions and speeches of the characters. • There is an ironic interplay in Oedipus’ name between “swollen foot” and “I know.”

5. Literary Analysis by Knox of Oedipus the King, 2 • Oedipus begins by believing that he himself is godlike and doesn’t need the gods: he is self-sufficient. That is why, when he feels everything slip away from him, he accepts the rule of Chance. • “The pessimistic mood of the end of the fifth century deepened in the fourth as Greece, torn apart by incessant warfare, succumbed to the perseverance, intrigue, and raw aggressiveness of a half-savage Macedonian king.... The goddess Chance ... symbolized the century’s ‘sense of drift’” (Knox 167). Everything the Greeks had was slipping away from them, and therefore, they became followers of Chance. • In his play, Sophocles has structured the myth of Oedipus to show why he rejects this kind of self-sufficiency.

6. Other Literary Oedipuses • Pierre Corneille’s Oedipewas produced in 1659 in Paris. Corneille felt that Sophocles’ plot was too disturbing and so blunted it by adding a romantic subplot. • John Dryden’s English version (1679) also included this romantic subplot, as well as the idea that Oedipus and Jocasta were deeply attracted to one another. • Voltaire’s 1718 version tries to make Oedipus’ discovery more believable by making their marriage more recent. His hero is a king who focuses on the needs of his people and does his duty by them. • Andre Gide’s Oedipewas written in 1930. His Oedipus is a kind of existential hero, an independent spirit who seeks the truth, and his play is at the same time a parody of the play and a serious reinterpretation of it as dealing with issues of human freedom and the law. • Jean Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale,written in 1932, is also irreverent while at the same time suggesting the universal power of myth.

7. Review: Rationalization Because myths often seem illogical, repetitious, and confusing, later authors who discuss them often will “clean them up” to make them seem more logical and less confusing. This term can also be used of “repurposing” myths so that they can be used in conjunction with a particular theory.

8. Rationalized Versions of Myth: Freud • Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, saw in Oedipus a malady that he believed all men are subject to, the Oedipus complex. • He said, “It may be that we are all destined to direct our first sexual impulses towards our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers; our dreams convince us that we were [so destined].” • In this sense, then, Oedipus is not a hero because he is unlike other men, but in fact because he is typical of them. • Social scientists like Freud gather together all the known versions of the story, listing them and incorporating them in a continuous narrative, a “life of Oedipus” or a “history of Oedipus.”

9. Rationalized Versions of Myth: Rank • To Otto Rank, Freud’s follower, Sophocles’ story of Oedipus is not the most important or most interesting version of the myth. • Rank saw the story as an expression of the family romance, the story a child tells to express and rationalize his own feelings about his father. In Rank’s view, the feelings of children in families all over the world, in many time periods, are alike. • He finds this same pattern in the stories of at least fifteen heroes: Sargon, Moses, Karna, Oedipus, Paris, Telephus, Perseus, Gilgamesh, Cyrus, Tristan, Romulus, Hercules, Jesus, Siegfried, and Lohengrin. • He finds this story all over the world at different time periods; the earliest instance comes from 2800 B.C.E.

10. Rationalized Versions of Myth: Rank, 2 The saga of the hero, according to Rank, is called “the family romance” and it includes: • Descent from noble, powerful parents • Exposure in a river, in a box • Raising by lowly parents • Return to his first parents • Punishment of the first parents (See also Ch. 41 for the application of this mode of analysis to the story of Harry Potter.)

11. Rationalized Versions of Myth: Levi-Strauss • Claude Levi-Strauss believed that myth is a kind of language, and the constituent units of myth are the events that take place in a story. • Like Freud and Rank, he synthesized all the versions he could find of the myth of Oedipus. • He believed that the purpose of myth is to help us understand and overcome the contradictions in our lives. • He finds the myth expresses the conflicts that a culture experiences when it tries to reconcile different views of how human beings arose.

12. Rationalized Versions of Myth: Levi-Strauss, 2 Contradictions found in the Oedipus myth: • Overrating of kinship (Oedipus has sex with his mother) versus underrating of kinship (Oedipus murders his father). • Autochthony (Oedipus’ ancestors sprang from the earth) versusdestroying monsters (Oedipus overcomes the Sphinx).

13. Working Versions of Myth • A myth is alive insofar as it explains the meaning or importance of a ritual or set of ceremonies performed as part of a religion. Such myths are still being told, retold, and modified by members of the society that originated them. • Pausanias tells us that Oedipus’ bones were brought to Athens from Thebes and buried in a hero-shrine there. In addition, he was worshipped at sanctuaries throughout Greece. So, once, there must have been working versions of this story that we no longer have. • Example of a working version: the Mwindo epic as collected by Daniel Biebuyck (Ch. 22). • Although each version of the epic is a different story by a different bard, many individual details and plot elements are repeated from version to version. • The meaning of the story is about the same for the society that tells it. • It contains models of how a marriage should be performed, how a father should behave, what a good chief is like, and what it means to grow up.