Some scholars have proposed that the number of stories we can tell each other is finite, surprisingly small in fact, and the task of a creative writer is to retell old stories in original ways, or in ways that will prove coherent and meaningful, perhaps even essential, to new audiences. They point to basic similarities that obtain among stories from different times and different cultures as a compelling justification for their belief.

Some scholars note the presence of story elements—sometimes called archetypes—that are so widespread among the world of story they seem universal. Some even claim to perceive the outlines of ancient story types from which hundreds or even thousands of other stories have developed: if these types are not quite ‘the Big Bang’ of stories, then they may at least merit the status of supernovas from whose glorious expiration vast galaxies of story have spun free. In his poem, "To Juan at the Winter Solstice," Robert Graves asserts "There is one story and one story only/ That will prove worth your telling." For Graves, this "one story" is the personification of the yearly cycle, the passage from spring to spring made by the Goddess’s chosen lover-hero. The meta-story (or perhaps we might insert the term ‘meta-myth’) for Northrop Frye concerns a "golden age . . . [and] how that world was lost, and how we some day may be able to get it back again."

In my own work I have found both Graves and Frye enormously helpful, and it is Graves’s translation of "Cupid and Psyche" that forms the home base of our exploration of myth and legend in children’s literature.

"In Search of Cupid and Psyche" will look closely at the characters, plots and sub-plots, settings and structures within the second century story of Cupid and Psyche and follow their various transformations within a broad compass of children’s literature. We will also look at relevant Greek, Middle Eastern and African mythologies, standard critical analyses of the Cupid and Psyche story, and modern interpretations of myth and mythic criticism to better enable us to consider the production of meaning in children’s texts, how mythic elements function within a story to compel us to believe the story is "worth" the author’s telling, to question the ways that we as readers unconsciously react to story and what makes an ancient Roman love story so crucial to children’s literature.
 
 

After reading Graves’s translation of the relevant chapters of Apuleius’s The Transformations of Lucius, or The Golden Ass, we will be reading retellings and adaptations of "Cupid and Psyche." While the retellings are apparently straightforward recreations of the story, the adaptations are deceptive: the myth is implicit rather than explicit. Adaptations include fairy tale and folktale, as well as retellings of fairy tale and folktale, colonial American children’s literature intended for the instruction of Puritan children, postcolonial African children’s literature and contemporary YA novels. While the assigned texts assume priority in our discussions, students will be expected to adapt our discussions of these materials, and the critical/analytical material, to their own critical examinations of other children’s literary texts as well.
 
 

To intelligently discuss myth and legend in children’s literature, we will need to have a collective understanding of what we mean when we use the term myth. With this in mind, I have made several essays available I have found insightful and lucid, such as Bryan S. Rennie’s discussion of "Myth and Mythology" in his Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), and chapter 1 of Mircea Eliade’s Myth and Reality, trans Willard R. Trask. (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), and suggested other readings in mythology (see chapter1.html). The following are some additional meditations that should also be helpful.

In the Western world, myths have traditionally been tales of pagan (i.e. non-Judeo-Christian) religions. We speak of Egyptian and Greek myths and sometimes of Hindu and Buddhist myths, but until recently even atheists have rarely spoken of Jewish or Christian myths. Yet if "myth" has always implied falsehood, if we have not believed in Zeus or the Golden Fleece, we have accepted the mythical tales of cultures we value—especially Greco-Roman culture—as somehow important and worth teaching our children. One of the assumptions of this book is that Greco-Roman myths (and those of other cultures) are not only worth teaching but are essential to our education.

The English word "myth" is derived from the Greek mythos, meaning word or story. Human beings have traditionally used stoires to describe or explain things they could not explain otherwise. Ancient myths were stories by means of which our forebears were able to assimilate the mysteries that occurred around and within them. In this sense, myth is related to metaphor, in which an object or event is compared to an apparently dissimilar object or event in such a way as to make its otherwise inexplicable essence clear: Thus, when Yeats speaks of "Two girls in silk kimonos, both / Beautiful, one a gazelle," the girl in the poem is, in fact, not a gazelle; but something true about her grace and her presence is conveyed when the image of a gazelle is substituted in our minds. In the same way, something of the sense of loss and death we may feel in winter is conveyed by the story of the abduction of Persephone. In short, both s story and as extended metaphor, myth is the direct ancestor of what we think of today as literature. The meaning of myths, like the meaning of any literature, is, as Northrop Frye has said, "inside them, in the implications of their incidents" (Fables of Identity, p. 32).—page 3-5.
 

1. If superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men, the hero is a divine being, and the story about him will be a myth in the common sense of a story about a god. Such stories have an important place in literature, but are as a rule found outside the normal literary categories.
2. If superior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvellous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established. Here we have moved from myth, properly so called, into legend, folk tale, märchen, and their literary affiliates and derivatives.
3. If superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment, the hero is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature. This is the hero of the high mimetic mode, of most epic and tragedy, and is primarily the kind of hero that Aristotle had in mind.
4. If superior neither to other men nor to his environment, the hero is one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity and demand from the poet the same canons of probability that find in our own experience. This gives us the hero of the low mimetic mode, of most comedy and of realistic fiction. "High" and "low" have no connotations of comparative value, but are purely diagrammatic, as they are when they refer to biblical critics or Anglicans. On this level the difficulty in retaining the word "hero," which has a more limited meaning among the preceding modes, occasionally strikes an author. Thackeray thus feels obliged to call Vanity Fair a novel without a hero.
5. If inferior in power of intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode. This is still true when the reader feels that he is or might be in the same situation as the situation is being judged by the norms of a greater freedom.

Something of the same progression may be traced in Classical literature too, in a greatly foreshortened form. Where a religion is mythological and polytheistic, where there are promiscuous incarnations, deified heroes and kings of divine descent, where the same adjective "godlike" can be applied either to Zeus or to Achilles, it is hardly possible to separate the mythical, romantic, and high mimetic strands completely. Where the religion is theological, and insists on a sharp division between divine and human natures, romance becomes more clearly isolated, as it does in the legends of Christian chivalry and sanctity, in the Arabian Nights of Mohammedanism, in the stories of the judges and thaumaturgic prophets of Israel. Similarly, the inability of the Classical world to shake off the divine leader in its later period has much to do with the abortive development of low mimetic and ironic modes that god barely started with Roman satire. At the same time the establishing of the high mimetic mode, the developing of a literary tradition with a consistent sense of an order of nature in it, is one of the great feats of Greek civilization. Oriental fiction does not, so far as I know, get very far away from mythical and romantic formulas

We shall here deal chiefly with the five epochs of Western literature, as given above, using Classical parallels only incidentally. In each mode a distinction will be useful between naïve and sophisticated literature. The word naïve I take from Schiller’s essay on naïve and sentimental poetry: I mean by it, however, primitive or popular, whereas in Schiller it means something more like Classical. The word sentimental also means something else in English, but we do not have enough genuine critical terms to dispense with it. In quotation marks, therefore, "sentimental" refers to a later recreation of an earlier mode. Thus romanticism is a "sentimental" form of romance, and the fairy tale, for the most part, a "sentimental" for of folk tale. Also there is a general distinction between fictions in which the hero becomes isolated from his society, and fictions in which he is incorporated into it. This distinction is expressed by the words "tragic" and "comic" when they refer to aspects of plot in general and not simply to forms of drama..—page33-35

One of the most uncompromising rejections of early Greek mythology was made by Socrates. Myths frightened or offended him; he preferred to turn his back on them and discipline his mind to think scientifically: ‘to investigate the reason of the being of everything—of everything as it is, not as it appears, and to reject all opinions of which no account can be given.’

Here is a typical passage from Plato’s Phaedrus, (Cary’s translation):
 
 

All the problems that Socrates mentions have been faced in this book and solved to my own satisfaction at least; but though ‘a very curious and painstaking person’ I cannot agree that I am any less happy than Socrates was, or that I have more leisure than he had, or that an understanding of the language of myth is irrelevant to self-knowledge. I deduce from the petulant tone of his phrase ‘vulgar cleverness’ that he had spent a long time worrying about the Chimaera, the horse-centaurs and the rest, but that the ‘reasons of their being’ had eluded him because he was no poet and mistrusted poets, and because, as he admitted to Phaedrus, he was a confirmed townsman who seldom visited the countryside ‘fields and trees will not teach me anything, but men do.’ The study of mythology, as I shall show, is based squarely on tree-lore and season observation of life in the fields.—page 9-11.