The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I."
(Friedrich Nietzsche The Gay Science, 125)
The function of myth is to express dramatically the ideology under which a society lives: not only to animate its conscience, the values it recognises and the ideals it pursues from generation to generation, but above all to express its very being and structure, the elements, the connections, the balances, the tensions which constitute it; to justify and reinforce the rules and traditional practices without which everything within a society would disintegrate. Some myths are drawn from authentic events and actions in a more or less stylized fashion, embellished and established as examples to imitate; others are literary fictions incarnating vital concepts of the ideology in certain personages and translating this concept into the connections between various figures.
The Vampire legend operates mythically, that is, as a series of narratives that serve to explain why the world is the way it is. In this sense Myths also exist to provide solutions for eternal questions; – the creation of the world, the relationship between men and women and beasts, the notion of the other. The myth provides solutions to these problems by positing an initial pair of binary oppositions such as life and death, nature and culture. This initially irreconcilable opposition is mediated by the introduction of a third term, which in some way partially inherits the nature of each opposed term. The third term, however, invokes its own opposed term, but this new binary opposition is not as completely intractable as the first. The process repeats, each new opposition being a little closer together than the previous one, until a set of oppositions that can provide some kind of cultural modus vivendi is reached. The vampire legend clearly illustrates this process...more here
No comments:
Post a Comment