Vilnius pedagogical university faculty of foreign languages department of english philology

Motif-patterns are more complex because they refer the reader not only to the archetypal patterns in the novel’s plot when it is actualized, but because they are represented in such a way as to generate in the reader patterns of hypothesis, conjectures and illusions concerning what is going to happen to the fictive characters. (Mythology in the Modern Novel, p. 118-119)

It is also worth mentioning that if mythology appeared in the literary forms in earlier times, it was not organized in a motif-pattern. There are, for example, Virgilian overtones to Fielding’s Amelia, but they do nothing more than any classical epithet in the heroic epic. (Mythology in the Modern Novel, p. 14) At the same time, modern novelists use myths mainly to comment on part of the modern plot, they employ mythology for an analogy or a contrast.

Still, it remains vague why contemporary novelists turn to ancient mythology. In his influential essay “Freud and the Future” Mann wrote:


[…] The ego of antiquity […] received much from the past and by repeating it gave it presentness again. The Spanish scholar Ortega y Gasset puts it that the man of antiquity, before he did anything, took a step backwards, like the bullfighter who leaps back to deliver the mortal thrust. He searched the past for a pattern into which he might slip as into a diving- bell, and being thus at once disguised and protected might rush upon his present problem. […] Life, then – at any rate, significant life – was in ancient times the reconstitution of the myth in flesh and blood; it referred to and appealed to the myth; only through it, through reference to the past, could it approve itself as genuine and significant. The myth is the legitimization of life; only through and in it does life find self=awareness, sanction, consecration. (Quoted by White, p. 20)

Consequently, contemporary writers return to mythologies of the past due to the fact that they find in myths the necessary power and source which help them to face the present problems. Besides, the theory of the depth-psychology influenced the novelists of the twentieth century as well. Moreover, myths appear to be embodiment of timeless and global values that is why they seem to be a universal method of solving the main problems and contradictions of our times. Myth is a topical issue in the twentieth century literature and criticism because it helps to explain the particularity of archaic thinking, the so called fundamental principles of the mentality of a modern man. Myths enable writers to rise and solve global problems of existence. For some authors myths are a means of shifting to macro-

historical scale, escaping beyond social, spatial and temporal boundaries of personal and public behaviour.
One more reason for using myth in a contemporary novel is that mythology frequently plays a structural function. Some of the writers (Joyce, Mann and others), turn to mythological motifs as a kind of system due to the fact that it helps to organize the material of fiction. The feeling that a mythological pattern offers a particular network for further development of the work is encouraged by novels which present an extended mythological motif-pattern, such as Ulysses, Doctor Faustus or The Centaur. T. S. Eliot was the first to remark on this subject: