|
Mythology on the Move
by Michael Sinding
As a case study of archetypes in rhetoric and argument, I'll consider the myth that Frye explores so brilliantly and thoroughly in The Modern Century, the myth of progress, and its demonic “alienation of progress” version, which captures a “type of consciousness” characteristic of the modern world. That world's defining effort to study itself in order to control its own future, creates an antagonism between two mental attitudes, actively seeking to join in this effort, and passively wanting to escape or reject it (8-9). Two related social consequences are the “speeding up of process” such that changes that once took centuries now take years, making it difficult to gauge their importance; and the constant communication of those changes. This produces a “panic of change. The variety of things that occur in the world, combined with the relentless continuity of their appearance day after day, impress us with the sense of a process going by a little too fast for our minds to focus on anything in it” (10). The “medieval legend of the Wild Hunt, in which souls of the dead had to keep marching to nowhere all day and all night at top speed” or crumble to dust if they dropped out, provides a parable of such consciousness: “obsessed by a compulsion to keep up, reduced to despair by the steadily increasing speed of the total movement” (11).
[Distillate © HA&L + Michael Sinding {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]
|