Chapter 8 THE REMODELING OF MYTH

Before moving on from the Greek myths,it is worth pausing to reflect on the many and inconsistent versions of even the most celebrated myths.Storytellers elaborated,dramatized,maybe invented new material.

But we should not be concerned that there are many versions of the Greek myths and there is no need to try to establish which are the correct versions.The myths were material,and they were re-worked at the time and have been re-worked down the ages.All types of writing are liable to be used in this way.For example,Shakespeare later re-worked Plutarch and Holinshed in his history plays to suit his propaganda purposes.And the Greek myths,like the Bible,were so well known,so deeply integrated into Western culture,that they have been put to purposes and made to mean things very different from what they originally conveyed.

We will now briefly examine three examples of how the original myth has disappeared or been transformed over time.

Prometheus

Hesiod provides the earliest development of the story of Prometheus.Here Zeus is presented as“eternally”wise and just,while Prometheus is a trickster.The theft of fire creates a rupture in the relations between gods and men and so serves to explain the misery of the human condition.Mankind is made to pay dearly for Prometheus’ attempted deception of Zeus when Zeus creates Pandora and womankind and thereby inflicts much trouble and torment on the human race.

The fullest and most interesting development of this story of Prometheus is to be found in the tragedy Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus（525 B.C.–456 B.C.）.In

contrast to Hesiod’s treatment,Aeschylus presents Zeus as a tyrant and Prometheus as the benefactor of humanity.Aeschylus has Zeus plan the extinction of mankind before Prometheus attempts any deception,thereby depriving Zeus of any convincing way of justifying his actions.Moreover he stresses the role of Prometheus’ intelligent advice in enabling the Olympians to win against the Titans：Zeus is actually obliged to Prometheus.Finally,in addition to giving humankind fire,Aeschylus presents Prometheus as teaching men the arts of civilization — writing,mathematics,agriculture,medicine,and science — thereby opening up the possibility of progress,in contrast to Hesiod’s story of decline from the golden age to the iron age.Here we should recall that Aeschylus was writing in mid-5th century Greece,when greater advances in science and philosophy were made than ever before.Prometheus was being adapted to a new age and a new set of values.

When we come to the Christian era,there are many references to Prometheus,but more striking than these is the fact the Christianity had its own version of the myth in the story of the Fall.There are all-powerful Zeus and almighty God.Mankind is guilty of theft and disobedience,as when Prometheus steals fire and Adam and Eve taste the forbidden fruit.Fire is the source of science,technology and creativity,just as the apple,coming from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,opens the eyes of Adam and Eve and makes them wise.And both Zeus and God impose severe punishment on those who have challenged their authority.And,after much suffering,Prometheus is rescued by Herakles as mankind is saved by Jesus Christ.

Later,Prometheus’ act of rebellion attracted attention particularly following the French Revolution and in the early stages of romanticism.Written between 1772 and 1774,but published significantly in 1789,Goethe wrote a poem entitled Prometheus,in which Prometheus addresses God / Zeus in a tone of accusation and defiance.^[1]In 1801 Beethoven wrote a Prometheus overture.In 1820 the poet Shelley wrote a play Prometheus Unbound,inspired by Aeschylus but having a significantly different ending,in which Zeus and Prometheus are not reconciled but Zeus is overthrown by Prometheus;there can be no compromise with or forgiveness for tyranny.^[2]

The Promethean myth could also be interpreted in a profoundly anti-religious way.As a humanities student in the University of Bonn in the 1830s Karl Marx studied Greek and Roman mythology.Like Goethe and Shelley,he presented Prometheus as the liberator of man,but the liberation was principally from ignorance and religious belief.Towards the end of the preface to his doctoral dissertation of 1841 he applauds Prometheus’ exclamation“in a word I detest all gods”as philosophy’s“own motto against all gods on earth or in heaven who do not recognize man’s self-consciousness as the highest divinity.”He praises Prometheus’ defiance when addressing Hermes,as rendered by Aeschylus —“I consider it better to be bound to this rock than to spend my life as Zeus’ messenger-boy.”And he ends by declaring Prometheus“the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar.”In Kapital,however,Prometheus serves as victim rather than liberator.He represents the proletariat“riveted to capital more firmly than the chains of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock.”^[3]

For Freud the Prometheus myth was read as explaining a different kind of liberation.From one point of view,Prometheus was the jealous son following through his Oedipal jealousy of Zeus,here regarded as his father,by stealing the gift of fire from him.Alternatively,fire represents sexual drive and Zeus is the representative of the“id”or the part of the mind controlled by animal instincts such as sex and violence.Prometheus’ theft of fire is Man obtaining control over those instincts.^[4]

So the myth of Prometheus demonstrates that myth is highly flexible.It can be refashioned to serve the purposes and address the concerns of very different authors and historical settings.It is presumably because so many myths speak to the basic human quest for self-understanding that authors use them to give legitimacy to and help them develop their own ideas.

Daedalus and Icarus

Daedalus was a highly talented Athenian architect who was banished from his native city as a result of having committed a murder.Arriving in Crete with his son Icarus,he entered the service of King Minos,for whom he built the Labyrinth at the centre of which the Minotaur was kept.The Labyrinth was so complex and intricate that no one who entered it ever found their way out（except for Theseus with the help of Ariadne）.

Daedalus knew how to fasten wings to human shoulders by means of wax.He therefore built a pair of wings for himself and his son.Before they set out for Sicily,Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too high for fear that the sun would melt the wax and destroy the wings.At first Icarus was careful,but gradually he became reckless and flew higher.The wax melted and Icarus fell to the sea and was drowned.

In the romantic period in the 19th century,Daedalus came to symbolize the classical artist,a skilled mature craftsman,while Icarus symbolized the romantic artist,a passionate rebel who defied formal aesthetic and social conventions to the point of being self-destructive.^[5]

Earlier,the myth had been used in quite another way.The fall of Icarus was the subject of a famous painting by Peter Bruegel the elder（c.1525–69）.The painting shows Icarus having fallen into the water;but the focus of the painting is not this but a man ploughing a field.It may be that Bruegel was illustrating the Flemish proverb“No plough stands still because a man dies.”The point he is making has nothing to do with the original myth,which is about human hubris.

This same message was transmitted by the poet W.H.Auden in a poem of 1938 entitled Musée des Beaux Arts.^[6]Auden meditates on the painting as follows:

About suffering they^[7]were never wrong,

The Old Masters;^[8]how well,they understood

Its human position;how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

….

In Brueghel’s Icarus,for instance：how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster;the ploughman may

Have heard the splash,^[9]the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure;the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water;and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing,a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

By highlighting the ordinary events which continue to occur despite the death of Icarus,Auden’s poem suggests that the painting depicts human beings’ indifference to the suffering of others.Once again,this has nothing to do with the original myth.

Pygmalion

Pygmalion was a sculptor from Cyprus who,after seeing and being disgusted by the prostitute Propoetides,^[10]lost all interest in women.However,he himself created an image of a woman that was so beautiful that he fell in love with it.He called her Galatea,dressed her up,embraced and kissed her,but she remained a statue.Eventually he went to the shrine of Aphrodite to ask for help.

Aphrodite responded to his prayers.When Pygmalion returned home,a flush came into the statue’s cheeks,her lips opened,she began to smile and come alive.Eventually she moved towards him.Soon they were married and had a son,Paphos.

The Pygmalion story is frequently found in western literature.Shakespeare has a version of it at the end of The Winter’s Tale.Most famous of all is Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion（1912）,which tells the story of Henry Higgins,a modern Pygmalion.^[11]Higgins is a professor of phonetics who makes a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that he can successfully make people think a Cockney flower girl,Eliza Doolittle,is a refined society lady by teaching her how to speak with an upper class accent.However,Higgins turns out to be a far more flawed character than the Pygmalion of the myth.This is because Shaw develops the story in such a way as to expose issues of class,the relation of ways of speaking to class,the relations between men and women,the propriety of manipulating another human being in order to pursue an academic experiment and the disadvantages as well as the advantages of being raised to a higher class.Higgins is shown to have treated Eliza badly and yet,when she stands up to him,he likes her the more for it.The play ends ambiguously,with Eliza leaving,possibly to marry someone other than Higgins.Meanwhile,Higgins has come to feel affection for her and appears to expect her to return to him.There is no fairy tale ending,as in the myth.^[12]The myth turns out to have been no more than a convenient peg on which Shaw is able to hang the ideas he wishes to provoke his audience into considering.

So myth is constantly re-modeled to fit the prejudices,concerns and ideologies of different ages.Sometimes,as with Prometheus,itself a particularly flexible myth,the result retains a large degree of resemblance to the original.But,as with Daedalus and Icarus and Pygmalion,the myth may be entirely transformed or become a mere tool to express something quite different from the meaning of the original.

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注释

[1]“Here I[Prometheus]sit and create human beings in my own image,a race that shall be like me,to suffer,cry,enjoy and please themselves,and to disrespect you[Zeus],like me.”Goethe also began writing a play about Prometheus in about 1773;it was unfinished and only published posthumously in 1830.

[2]Shelley wrote：“The moral interest of the fable,which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus,would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary.”In terms of heroic struggle,Shelley compares his Prometheus to Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost;both have been wronged and are driven by a spirit of rebellion but,whereas Satan is driven by ambition,envy and revenge,Prometheus’s motives are purely noble.

[3]There is a cartoon of 1843,when the Prussian censors closed down the Rheinische Zeitung which he later edited,in which Marx is depicted as Prometheus,chained to his press with the Prussian eagle preying on his liver.

[4]Other more elaborate sexual explanations are advanced by Freud in his 1932 paper“The Acquisition and Control of Fire.”

[5]In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,Stephen Daedalus imagines himself as an artist as“a hawklike man flying above the waves.”

[6]The title of the poem refers to the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels,Belgium,where the painting is kept.

[7]They = the Old Masters.

[8]The Old Masters = the great painters of the past.

[9]i.e.the splash of Icarus hitting the water.

[10]The Propoetides had angered Aphrodite（Venus）,who in revenge turned them into prostitutes.

[11]Shaw wrote the screenplay for the 1938 film and thereby became the only person ever to win both an Oscar and the Nobel Prize for Literature.In 1956,the play was turned into the Broadway musical My Fair Lady,which was made into a film in 1964.

[12]Or as in the stage / film version.