IV. MYTHOLOGY
Proceeding by collection and induction, patiently
heaping up and sorting out enormous quantities of
specific instances, folklorists have developed their
analytic tools: a taxonomy and a morphology. Synthesis
was bound to be more problematic, and not less so
because most of it has been attempted within the
speculative realm of mythography, a borderland for
many other fields rather than a discipline in its own
right. Rather than the pursuit of particulars, it has
engaged in sweeping hypotheses, such as the derivation
of all mythology from solar myths or vegetation rites
or—more subjectively—from a racial memory or a
collective unconscious. The object lesson of Mr.
Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch, who so
vainly promised to give the world A Key to All
Mythologies, has not acted as a deterrent to would-be
mythographers. Some of them have sought to incorpo-
rate the totality of mythical episodes into the life-cycle
of one syncretic hero or heroine: Robert Graves in The
White Goddess (London, 1948), Joseph Campbell in
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York, 1956).
Joyce constructed a “monomyth” of his own in
Finnegans Wake, but that remains a unique literary
contrivance. Frazer had gathered his mythological
parallels from diverse cultural contexts, and functional
anthropologists have criticized him for his eclecticism.
Yet, though his Dying God may be a blurred composite,
Frazer retained a comparative awareness of the differ-
ences between Balder and Osiris.
The incidence of themes has provided arguments pro
and contra in the long debate concerning the universals
of human nature. A secondary topic of debate, among
those who accepted the principle of universality, was
the question whether its patterns were naturally in-
herent or had been diffused through transmigration
from a common origin. Answers today would be quali-
fied by an increment of pluralism and relativism. For
example, an anthropological study of fifty differing
cultures has shown that thirty-four of them tell an
analogous tale of the Flood (Kluckhohn, 1960). A two-
thirds majority is not quite the same thing as a universal
manifestation, but it is as high a degree of penetration
as any single motif is likely to reach. In a survey
designed to illustrate the dependence of myth upon
ritual, The Hero, Lord Raglan put together a kind of
conglomerate model for a heroic career, which consists
of twenty-two crises, turning points, or motifs (e.g.,
exile and return). By this scorecard he proceeded to
reckon with a sequence of mythical heroes, ranking
them by the extent to which they fulfil his enumerated
conditions. Oedipus gets the highest grade with twenty-
one, which may lend statistical corroboration to the
primacy he was accorded by Freud. Moses and Theseus
score twenty, Dionysos and King Arthur nineteen, and
so on. The fact that Hamlet would score five confirms
a general impression that the scale is inversely relevant
to the more sophisticated figures.
Jung expectably favored the concept of a universal-
ized Heldenleben, which was recapitulated in the de-
velopment of the individual personality; each stage had
its rite of initiation, but came under the patronage of
a different hero. Folklore, on the assumption that an
act presupposed an agent or an event a protagonist,
had recognized that a motif could be viewed as char-
acteristic of a persona. Literature is full of dramatis
personae who, often by retrospective simplification,
have come to be identified with some outstanding trait,
such as the quixotry of Cervantes' knight. Falstaff has
become the exemplary glutton, Shylock the extortioner
par excellence. Romeo is the eponymous patron of
every young lover, Benedick of every married man.
A person who brings bad luck is labelled a Jonah, one
who laments a Jeremiah. Victor Hugo (1864) seems to
have had in mind this habit of typification when he
described a hero as “a myth with a human face” (un
mythe à face humaine). If a rounded characterization
can be reduced to a one-dimensional type, it is also
possible for one particular figure to typify various
things to varying men. The actions of Prometheus, his
relations with the gods and with mankind, may present
a more or less unchanging outline from Hesiod to
André Gide. But the very distance between those au-
thors suggests a vast alteration of meaning under
altered circumstances. To consider what others have
written about Prometheus—Aeschylus, Tertullian,
Calderón, Shaftesbury, Voltaire, Goethe, Shelley—is to
retraverse the history of Western thought (Trousson,
1964).
Literary variations on a given theme tend, of course,
to go beyond its more traditional versions. Yet the
elementary types, insofar as they continue to exist, are
destined to undergo renewal and change. Their poly-
valence is most strikingly evident in the rich body of
documentation surrounding the myth—which perhaps,
because it claims some historical roots, should be
termed a legend—of Faust. Here a highly elaborate
group of motifs is accumulated, recombined, and sub-
jected to displacements. As a rebel seeking forbidden
knowledge, Faust shares the Titanism of Prometheus,
not to mention the hubris of Lucifer or the curiosity
of Adam. If Faust is primarily a magus, that can be
an ambiguous role, for it embodies both the reverend
sage and the wily trickster. As the latter he has some-
thing in common with Odysseus, who was likewise a
restless wanderer, along with the Wandering Jew and
the Flying Dutchman. That restlessness, which led to
Faust's damnation in the Lutheran chapbook and
Marlowe's tragedy, furnished the very grounds for his
salvation in Goethe's philosophical drama. Changes of
the intellectual climate, between the Reformation and
the romantic movement, explain the displacement.
Faustianism, in the modern sense of endless questing,
had come to be regarded as a virtue. Hence the eternal
voyager of Tennyson's “Ulysses” stands closer to
Goethe's Faust than to his Odyssean prototype, who
ended happily in his own kingdom. The thematic
charge has been transposed from homecoming to
wanderlust.
The legend of Don Juan, almost contemporaneous
with that of Faust, has had more than five hundred
reincarnations. The title of the original play by Tirso
de Molina makes explicit how the two principal motifs
were joined together: The Trickster of Seville and the
Guest of Stone (El Burlador de Sevilla y Convivado
de Piedra). Don Juan was originally more of a practical
joker than an incarnate philanderer, and his libertinism
had as much to do with freethinking as with free love.
His unrepentant blasphemies propelled him to Faust's
destination, hell; but there are belated and romanti-
cized reinterpretations where, like Goethe's protago-
nist, he is redeemed by womanly love. Redemption of
this sort is a motif, applicable in both cases and de-
scribable in anonymous terms, whereas myth or legend
always has a proper name or at least a local habitation
which it gains from the identity of a hero or concrete
situation. Thus Jean Giraudoux's Amphitryon 38 im-
plies that it has been preceded by thirty-seven earlier
dramatizations of the same myth, whereas the motif
known as “the bed-trick”—also involving the covert
substitution of a sexual partner—is differently handled
by Boccaccio in The Decameron and by Shakespeare
in Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well.
The sad story of Pyramus and Thisbe is a myth,
whether celebrated by Ovid or burlesqued by Shake-
speare. Its motif is the lovers' tryst in the tomb, to
which Shakespeare has given such poignant treatment
in Romeo and Juliet.
Most erotic motifs are triangular, though the di-
lemmas vary from the fabliaux of cuckoldry to Paolo
and Francesca (or Tristan and Yseult). The reduplica-
tion of personae, in the external shape of twins or
mistaken identities, produces farcical situations for
reasons which Bergson has probed. Internalized within
the psyche, it takes on the somber guise of the Double
or Doppelgänger, whose shadow falls so memorably on
the pages of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Poe, Dostoevsky, and
Stevenson. Such avatars can easily be traced, since
criticism has already found them a category. But motifs
are not invariably manifested through plot and charac-
ter; they can be connected with place or time: a
haunted house, a flashback to childhood. Further ques-
tions may arise over the interrelation of motif and
theme. Croce's usage is loosely synonymous, as when
he refers to the motivi of Shakespearean drama (1920).
Critics and historians of art, who speak of motif with
regard to the choice of subject (e.g., a hillside in
Provence), use theme to indicate the manner of treat-
ment (as it would differ between Cézanne and Van
Gogh). Ernst Robert Curtius (1950) seems to follow the
artistic rather than the literary practice, taking Motiv
as the objective factor but making Thema the personal
coloration. Clearly there is wider agreement on the
more technical term. It might be a prudent compro-
mise to save “motif” for the more precise applications,
while employing “theme” as the generic conception,
the catchword for the critical approach.
