Mythological and Archetypal Approaches

In The Masks of God, Joseph Campbell recounts a curious phenomenon of animal behavior. Newly hatched chickens, bits of eggshells still clinging to their tails, will dart for cover when a hawk flies overhead; yet they remain unaffected by other birds. Furthermore, a wooden model of a hawk, drawn forward along a wire above their coop, will send them scurrying (if the model is pulled backward, however, there is no response). "Whence;' Campbell asks, "this abrupt seizure by an image to which there is no counterpart in the chicken's world? Living gulls and ducks, herons and pigeons, leave it cold; but the work of art strikes some very deep chord!" (31; our italics). Campbell's hinted analogy, though only roughly approximate, will serve nonetheless as an instructive introduction to the mythological approach to literature. For it is with the relationship of literary art to "some very deep chord" in human nature that mythological criticism deals. The myth critic is concerned to seek out those mysterious elements that inform certain literary works and that elicit, with almost uncanny force, dramatic and near-universal human reactions. The myth critic wishes to discover how certain works of literature, usually those that have becom~,_.Qr promise to become, "classics:' image a kind of reality to which readers respond-while other works, seemingly as well constructed, and even some forms of reality, leave them cold. Speaking figuratively, the myth critic studies in depth the "wooden hawks" of great literature: the so-called archetypes or archetypal pat{terns that the writer has drawn forward along the tensed structural wires of his or "'her masterpiece and that vibrate in such a way that a sympathetic resonance is set " off deep within the reader. c_ An obviously close connection exists betw-een mythological criticism and 'Ahe psychological approach discussed in Chapter 6: both are concerned with motives that underlie human behavior. (See Chapter 4 for our discussion of 1.!I,lteTru·y Darwinism-how humans respond to certain images in an evolutionary