The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

146 Monody
See M. Bradbury and J. Macfarlane
(eds), Modernism (1976); D. Lodge,
The Modes of Modern Writing (1977);
P. Childs, Modernism (2000); J. Goldman,
Modernism, 1910–45 (2004).
Monody See ELEGY.
Motif See FORM, THEME.
MSB
Myth Myths are stories of unascertainable
origin or authorship accompanying
or helping to explain religious beliefs.
Often (though not necessarily) their subject
is the exploits of a god or hero, which
may be of a fabulous or superhuman
nature, and which may have instituted a
change in the workings of the universe or
in the conditions of social life. Critics
value myth positively because of its
apparent spontaneity and collectivity,
expressing some lastingly and generally
satisfying account of human experience.
Equally attractive is the apparent universality
and timelessness of myth. The
tantalizing recurrence of mythic heroes
and their exploits, or of natural or animal
motifs (the moon or water or serpents or
horses) have activated many ‘Keys to All
Mythologies’, of which Frazer’s and
Jung’s gained most favour with literary
critics. The work of Northrop Frye, for
instance, reflected the influence of
Frazer’s attempt to explain myths by
reference to rituals designed to ensure the
continuing fertility of animal and vegetable
life; Frye assigned all myths to an
appropriate place in the cycle of seasons,
with their alternation of barrenness,
growth and fruitfulness. Their ubiquitous
hero is the corn-god, who passes through
stages of growth, decline and death in
harmony with the turning year. Literature
derives from myth, and literary history
recapitulates the process, as it moves
through a seasonal cycle in which
appropriate modes and genres are
dominant – comedy belongs to summer,
tragedy to autumn, and so on.
Frazer’s beliefs that ‘primitive’
societies have literal faith in the efficacy
of magic, or adopt totems because they
regard themselves as blood relations of
the totemic animal, or are ignorant of
the connection between sexual relations
and birth (wittily exploded by Edmund
Leach), are checked by ethnographic
work. Frazer’s ethnocentrism is paralleled
by Frye’s; his cyclical system to contain
all myths and all literary works as a
simultaneous order of the mind projects
proclivities for autonomy and timelessness
derived from SYMBOLISM or perhaps,
in their enthusiastic embrace of universal
identical duplication, from the optimism
of capitalist technology.
The work of Lévi-Strauss and its
approach to mythic universals is more
fruitful than Jung’s theories in accounting
for differences as well as for similarities;
STRUCTURALISM does not seek a constant
significance for the same motif, but rather
a variable meaning dependent on its
relation to other symbolic elements
within a mythology.
The assumption operating here is that
myth is a language designed to communicate
thought, amenable to a reconverted
form of linguistic analysis; the properties
common to all myths are not to be sought
at the level of content but at the level of
a structure necessary to all forms of
communication. Mythic thought is about
insoluble paradoxes of experience, which
appear as ‘gaps’ the elements of a mythic
message are so arranged as to attempt
to mediate the gaps. The essential gap
is between nature and culture – nature
felt as an undifferentiated continuity
and culture as the institution of difference
upon which communication (which
utilizes it to construct binary pairs)