I think I was wrong about Buffy's death and resurrection. She embraces the world after her journey through death, rather than preaching disengagement from the world. I wonder if that marks the difference between religious and secular 'myth'? Campbell wants to embrace the infinite void that is the godhead, while Jewett and Lawrence are very much concerned about the 'here and now.' Worth thinking about.
That divergence marks two distinct reading practises, the literal and the mythic or abstract. Our official institutions teach abstract readings, both educational and religious (except those peculiar religions that preach literal readings, but we'll level them aside). When I say we're "taught to read literally" I dodn't mean by the official institutions but by the genre expectations of our age.
Realism has been the dominant mode of storytelling since (off the top of my head) the 19th century. The mode itself strongly pushes the reader towards literal readings because, after all, the narrative supposedly occurs within the real world; therefore the tools of navigating the real world would be the most effective in understanding such a story.
The wrinkle, of course, is that realism isn't the same as reality. It has its own set of narrative standards that pretend to be real (and I'm thinking here of Todorov on 'verisimilitude'). Either way, the reader thinks that those narrative standards are real, and because of a couple of generations of total media saturation, we've actually started treating real life by the same standards with which we treat realist narrative, but that's a claim that would require verification.
Either way, the way to read realism is the way of common sense, often confused with but not quite the same as logic, whereas the way to read myth and fantasy is the way of symbol and metaphor. Those two areas overlap a lot, but they're not the same thing. Campbell argues that we've lost our sense of symbol and metaphor. Jewett and Lawrence, however, argue that we're simply not aware of our dominant metaphors, and that we employ them on an unconscious level and convinced ourselves that our symbols are the things they represent, a narrative/psychological form of idolatry.
The really weird part, to me, is when that sense of literal reading, with its rigid assumptions that are not consciously perceived, is turned towards fantasy literature. There's a lot of popular fantasy that, despite non-realist elements (magic, super-science, psionics, etc.) is written within the realist emotional/psychological mode to appeal to the audience's expectations of that mode. The success or failure of those kinds of novels is, as with any artistic endevour, based on execution. Sometimes it really works; the new Battlestar Galactica does it beautifully. Sometimes it falls flat on its face, as in any number of anachronistic pseudo-medieval fantasy novels I could name.
What we seem to have lost in our age, outside of our official institutions (education, religion) is the ability to self-consciously read abstractly, using metaphors and symbols that don't behave according to logic, looking at how narratives represent the world, as opposed to simply trying to be a little piece of the world. To try to read fantasy as a piece of the world would render it nonsensical.
Posted by orion at May 13, 2006 4:04 PM