JOHN HOLLOWAY

CERTAIN points ought perhaps to be made as preliminaries to this paper. In
the first place, it would be possible to express its views in exaggerated or
caricatured forms, and these exaggerated or caricatured forms would be
incorrect in substance and harmful, perhaps very much so, in tendency. I hope
it will be borne in mind that the same is true of caricatures of all points of
view. Again, several important points which many will wish to stress when
speaking of works of literary art may appear to be omitted in or even precluded
by what is said here. This appearance is deceptive; a place can perfectly well
be found for them, and if I omit to do so it will be through lack of space alone.
On the other hand, I am examining the degree to which there may be parallels
between works of the literary imagination and myth or ritual, for the purpose
of forming a clearer view of what lies at the heart of, what is the great first
thing about, a high and significant proportion of those works; and in one
respect what will be said here seems radically different from what is usually
said, in that it puts the essence of the literary work in something different
from what is usually seen as its essence.

Ernst Cassirer Philosophy of Symbolic Forms ( 1925) is undoubtedly one of
the major works of philosophical synthesis in our time. For those whose chief
concern is the literary work of art, to read the second volume, Mythical Thought,
is a disconcerting and suggestive experience. Cassirer's field of interest in this
part of his book might be described as the mythologies -- pantheons, creation
stories and all that goes with these -- of classical, Indian and (with help from the
anthropologists) primitive cultures; and above all with what may be inferred
of the cast of mind which could create these and see the world through them.
He is thinking in general terms, and is at no point concerned with particular
versions of this material such as are to be found in early or primitive works of
literature. Yet for all this, time after time, his account of what he calls 'mythical
thought' comes close to what we know as the kind of thinking carried out by
the creative writer. The student of literature who reads this volume finds his
basic ideas about the literary art presented, one by one, in -- as it were -- a
fresh projection.

I shall confirm this, briefly and incompletely, by extracting three points
only from Cassirer's extended discussion. First, Cassirer's idea of the essentially
tentative, exploratory and creative nature of mythical thinking (throughout
these quotations, the italics are mine):

Myth . . . does not start from a finished conception of the I or the soul,
from a finished picture of objective reality and change, but must achieve

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