Chapter 25

Looking Back at Heroes: the

Different Versions of a Myth
 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.
 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
 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.”
 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.
 Other Literary Oedipuses
• Pierre Corneille’s Oedipe was 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 Oedipe was 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.
 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.
 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.”
 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.
 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.)
 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.
 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) versus destroying
monsters (Oedipus overcomes the
Sphinx).
 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.