User:Ruben/RWRM/3 - Annotation

Myth and Identity

Author: Jerome S. Bruner
Link: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20026501

Following text is an annotation by summarising each page.

Annotations

"How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

Myth is an external reality and the resonance of the internal struggles of man. As externalisation the myth fulfils the human need to convert inner stimmuli into seemingly outer events, so it's easier to cope with them: "It is now [...] the picture that needs this line here, and not the painter's whim."

The significance of externalisation is twofold: it is the basis for communication as "the vagueness [of the interior world] is eliminated" and it makes possible the containment of impulse in beauty (this is where a "work of art begins.").

The art form of myth is in the drama that offers society explanations for why the world is as it is and teaches men how to deal with it. "Its power is that it lives on the feather line between fantasy an reality."

"And if it is the case that art as a mode of knowing has precisely the function of connecting through metaphor what before had no apparent kinship, then in the present case the art form of the myth connects the daemonic world of impulse with the world of reason by a verisimilitude that conforms to each."

There is a paradox in the myth as externalisation and as an pedagogical image; here the dramatic form is relevant. As Freud describes ones personality as a cast of identities, myth can become a tutor: the "power of entering vividly into the feelings of both parties in a conflict is ... the characteristic gift [of myth]."

"It is here that personality imitates myth in as deep a sense as myth is an externalisation of the vicissitudes of personality."

So the myth provides a moral compass to guide one in its internal struggle with his multiple identities.

But myth can also function as a "criterion for the self-critic." From the early myths two types of plot arise: the ideology of innocence (ie. happy childhood, man as child of God) and that of cleverness (ie. Odysseus, or the Renaissance Man/Homo Universalis). Both extremities are present so both are satisfied. It is "the manner in which man has striven for competence and longed for innocence [that] has reflected the controlling myths of the community." People live by these prevailing myths so "Life then produces myth and finally imitates it."

As we are no longer "a mythologically instructed community" men are struggling to find a "satisfactory and challenging mythic image as aspiration". Even temporary myths represent the search for a new myth, more suitable for our times. And in this state "even the attempted myth must be a model for imitating."

Bruner suggests that current society is more internalised because "between the death of one myth and the birth of its replacement there must be a reinternalization, even to the pointe of a culte de moi."

He finishes by the final thought that the modern novel, being more subjective since the 19th century, might be "the response to the internal anguish that can find no external constraint in the form of myth, a form of internal map."

Notes

It was interesting to see that the final paragraph of the text summarises it way better than I did:

Let me conclude by reiterating the general line of my thesis. It is simple enough. The first premise is that the externalization of inner impulse

in the form of myth provides the basis for a sharing of inner experience and makes possible the work of art that has as its objective to contain and cleanse the terror from impulse. The myth as a work of art has as its principal form the of shape drama. So too the human personality: its patternings of impulse express themselves as identities in an internal drama. The myths that are the treasure of an instructed community provide the models and the programs in terms of which the growth of the internal cast of identities is molded and enspirited. And finally, when the myths no longer fit the internal plights of those who require them, the transition to newly created myths may take the form of a chaotic voyage into the interior, the certitudes of externalization replaced by the anguish of the internal voyage.