Myth
John McKeane, Joanna Neilly
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The Poet-Outsider and the Passion of Christ: Interlacing Myths in the Middle Irish Preface to Cáin Adomnáin
Thomas Charles O'Donnell
doi:10.59860/wph.a7c3eea

The preface to Cáin Adomnáin is a Middle Irish narrative added to a seventh- century law designed, amongst other things, to protect women. In this essay I intend to analyse the way in which the author of the preface is using and adapting the various mythic narratives available to him, both secular and Christian, in order to create an allusively complex justification for upholding the law. This is done by means of a hagiographical narrative concerning the author of the law, Adomnán of Iona, in which he receives the law from heaven at the request of his mother. The role of Adomnán’s character has been interpreted as that of the poet-outsider or shaman and the preface has been viewed as an essentially secular narrative. I argue that this is only half of the picture and that, in fact, the author is using the secular myth in order to paint the relationship between Adomnán and his mother as that of Christ and Mary at the Passion but in such a way as to avoid the charge of blasphemy. This parallel would have been prompted by the growing popularity of the Virgin Mary in the twelfth century, an obvious model to endorse a law designed to protect women. This discussion forms part of my MPhil thesis looking at the construction of women and femininity throughout the preface to Cáin Adomnáin.

The Other Night: The Archaeology of Myth in the Writing of Mallarmé and Blanchot
Barnaby Norman
doi:10.59860/wph.a8d3331

In twentieth century Mallarmé scholarship there are two books which famously deal with ‘le drame solaire’ as a key element of Mallarmé’s literary production. The first is Gardner Davies’s Mallarmé et le drame solaire, and the second La religion de Mallarmé by Bertrand Marchal. Davies provides readings of poems by Mallarmé which stage the solar drama and is guided in these readings by his interpretation of the principle of transposition in Mallarmé’s work, which is seen for instance in ‘Théodore de Banville’, where the poet speaks of ‘La divine transposition, pour l’accomplissement de quoi existe l’homme’ which ‘va du fait à l’idéal’. According to this reading the sunset is a central motif in Mallarmé’s work because it enacts the movement of negation through which natural phenomena are destroyed in their existence and subsequently resurrected ideally in the poetic work. The poetic Absolute would correspond to the success of this transposition. In Maurice Blanchot’s readings of Mallarmé this conclusion is fundamentally put into question. The work of the negative cannot arrive at a final resolution and the work turns to an interrogation of its origin. Blanchot does not explicitly deal with ‘le drame solaire’ as a motif in Mallarmé’s work, but he does make an interpretation of the myth of Orpheus the ‘displaced centre’ of L’espace littéraire. Of interest in this essay is that this reading takes the Orpheus story as a kind of solar myth, and ‘littérature’, in the particular sense he understands this word/activity, is confronted by the other night, the night which the Orphic text contemplates as it fails to resolve itself in the calm of the first night. In this essay, I will begin by turning to La religion de Mallarmé, the second book dedicated to ‘le drame solaire’ in Mallarmé’s work, in order to suggest a proximity with Blanchot’s reading of the myth of Orpheus. By making this rapprochement I hope to suggest another perspective from which to consider both Blanchot’s writings and ‘le drame solaire’ in Mallarmé’s texts. If we see ‘le drame solaire’ as the site of the recollection of an originary trauma repressed until its resurgence in the work of Mallarmé (and if we pay attention to Blanchot’s reading of Orpheus as a solar myth) then we can use it as a means to account for Mallarmé’s significance in Blanchot’s work. From this perspective, it will be argued, we can gain a fuller understanding of Blanchot’s reading of Mallarmé as a site of passage to what he calls the ‘l’autre nuit’.

‘Those women who were fighting men’: Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères, a mythical re-vision
Catherine Burke
doi:10.59860/wph.a0590f8

‘We can analyse a society’s dreams and anxieties through the myths in which it chooses to mirror itself’. In a twentieth century devastated by war, many turned to the classical myths of antiquity for solace and guidance. In the latter half of the century, many others turned to those myths in the struggle for representation and freedom from oppression. Isobel Hurst states: ‘Reworkings of the androcentric mythology of the ancient world proved indispensable for the feminists who fought against restrictions on women’s identity in the second half of the twentieth century. Monique Wittig responds to the feminist debate of the twentieth century with her text, Les Guérillères. In this article I shall argue that Les Guérillères constitutes a feminist reworking of the patriarchal epic as epitomisied by Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. It is the Iliad, that ‘canonical text of warfare and male heroism’, which provides the main inspiration for her feminist epic. In blatant defiance of the assertion in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon that ‘it is not womanly to desire combat’, Wittig places the female centre stage. The ‘guérillères’ are the central protagonists of the work, complete with their own unique weapons, their own military procedure, and their own community. With her text, Wittig questions the status of the male-dominated perspective of the patriarchal epic. Aware that myth is instrumental in both the establishment and challenge of deep-seated ideologies and stereotypes, Wittig chooses to manipulate this duplicity and execute an attack from within. She exploits classical myth to voice the concerns and experiences of the female and to reinsert woman into male- dominated history. In this way, I shall claim that her work constitutes a gap in the patriarchal transmission and reception of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

Modernist Myths and Mothers: Jung and ‘Mythic Parallelism’ in Neil Gunn’s The Silver Darlings
Ken Keir
doi:10.59860/wph.a1684db

This paper argues that although Neil Gunn’s 1941 novel The Silver Darlings has been examined in terms of what this paper terms ‘mythic parallelism’ on numerous occasions, few critics have taken cognizance of the extent to which The Silver Darlings is in dialogue with the work of C. G. Jung. At the beginning, the paper notes the disparity between Gunn’s continuing cultural presence and the lack of scholarly attention, then moves on to argue that the latest development in Scottish literary studies is an opportunity for Gunn’s work that has been missed. The paper then goes on to argue that the crux of Gunn’s ‘mythic parallelism’ is not simply his use of myth as a patterning device for his fiction, but lies in the ways in which myth was being re-interpreted in his contemporary environment. In regard to this novel, the paper argues, the key influence is C. G. Jung. While he has been noted as an influence often, no close comparison has been undertaken between the work of Jung and Gunn; this paper then goes on to show how the ‘mythic parallelism’ of The Silver Darlings is not based on an allusion to Celtic myth as the underlying pattern, but on an evocation of the developmental theory that Jung derived from all hero myths.

Myth as Model: The Narratives of Cronus and Jacob in Sylvie Germain’s Le Livre des Nuits and Nuit-d’Ambre
Matthew Moyle
doi:10.59860/wph.a277922

In this essay, as part of a larger project on the role and status of myth in her writings, I shall examine the ways Sylvie Germain employs two mythical narratives – the narrative of the Titan Cronus from Greek mythology, and the story of Jacob’s fight with a man (usually thought to be God, or an angel) in Genesis 32, in her first two novels, Le Livre des Nuits (1985) and Nuit-d’Ambre (1987). Taking Socrates’s desire to offer censored versions of certain myths for the education of the guardians of the city (in Plato’s Republic) as a starting point, I ask whether sanitized versions of myths would provide useful models for a reader. In Germain’s novels, a character does indeed try to use the Cronus story as a model, with disastrous results. But the story of Jacob’s fight with the angel, reenacted in Nuit-d’Ambre, results in a newfound perception that accounts for that which is usually imperceptible. As such, the novels use myth to expose the absences and the gaps within mythical narratives. Such narratives cannot thus serve as models for behaviour unless one is aware of those gaps. The novels eventually redirect the striving and struggling of their characters toward an attentive seeking of that which is hidden, an attention that is also a space for an ethical relationship with another person and with the world.

The Fisher King, the Grail and the Goddess: Ted Hughes’s Aquatic Myths
Yvonne Reddick
doi:10.59860/wph.a386981

This paper presents some research for my PhD thesis on fluvial landscapes in the works of Ted Hughes and Alice Oswald. The thesis as a whole aims to explore the relationship between myths of the genius loci in the English poetic canon, and the eco-poets’ mythology of riverine landscapes in crisis. In this paper, I set out to explore the role of the Grail and Fisher King, favoured figures of T. S. Eliot, in Ted Hughes’s river-poetry. The Grail is an object of medieval legend, but this paper contends that Hughes follows the example of Jessie Weston in making it fit into a family of more ancient myths. The fertility myths which Weston views as giving rise to the Grail legend are associated with the aquatic goddess who haunts both Ted Hughes’ poetry and his critical work Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. I use a combination of methods – contextualization of Hughes’s work with reference to Modernist texts, close analysis of the poetry, and comparisons to the poet’s letters and critical works, in order to uncover the myths behind what is often a very modern, environmentally engaged text. I hypothesize that Hughes’s use of myth gives his poetry a universal, canonical tenor, with its persona as nameless Fisher King and its muse as an abstract Goddess. However, I conclude that at times his use of myth becomes self-mythologizing.

William Blake: The Arch Myth-Maker
Mark Ryan
doi:10.59860/wph.a47d728

This article seeks to explain some of the intersections between Blake's visionary ideas and mythological systems that were current in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The value of considering this subject lies in revealing some fresh insight into Blake's aesthetic theory and to respond to the thesis that either writing or art begins with the effacement of mythology or art equates with mythology. The article reveals that Blake's approach to mythology is such that myths become subsumed within myths, and that from a desire to critique the art of the mythographers from his period, Blake was able to deepen his own enquiry into his aesthetic theorization. Thus, by the time he had started composing his long poem, Jerusalem, he was aware that in order to develop a new creative system it was necessary to clear away the classical mythological remnants of the past and challenge some of the more ancient systems of belief such as Druidism, which predated most forms. As a consequence, Blake demonstrates a need to eradicate the possibility of mythical ossification at every stage of his myth. The ossification of mythology is my specific interest and I aim to explore Blake's aesthetic practices helped him to maintain the freshness of his vision over a long time period and how he learned to adjust his own perspective in opposition to the theoretical, philosophical and psychological opinions of his day. As my thesis consists in researching Jungian psychology and Blake's ideas about medical knowledge and forms of mental disturbance, I am particularly interested in the study of archetypes inherent in a variety of mythological research and stories in both Blake's day and other historical periods.