At 08:13 PM 2/19/01 +1100, you wrote:

Hi Geraldine

>Would it be more helpful to speak of the anti-heroic rather than
>anti-mythic? Especially in the context of the epic.

By 'anti-hero' do you mean 'hero-less' or a 'negative' hero? The hero quest
is by far the world's most prominent and significant myth and if you take
heroes - that is, human-psyche protagonists - out of mythology you won't be
left with too much to wrok with. I know it all sounds macho and ignorant
of, say, nature myths or collective social myths, but I can't imagine
'anit-heroic' and 'anti-mythical' as seperate idioms. By hero-myth I mean a
protagonist's journey through symbolic stages of development. I'm not
talking about Rambo killing scores of extras with fake bullets in a
Hollywood action flick. I am, in fact, refering to religious figures like
Innana, Athena, Jesus, Mary, Moses, Mohammed; fairytale characters like
Cinderella, Little Red Ridinghood, Jack (of the beanstalk fame); literary
ones like Orwell's Winston Smith or Attwood's Offered; even historical ones
like Alexander, Ceasar, Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I, etc. I take it by
'anti-hero' you don't mean 'tragic' heroes like the 'nagative' characters
that Robert de Niro and Al Pacino play in most of their films, 'cos they
too undertake journeys and as a result develop their personality (which is
what heroes, either good or bad, do - Jung's definition). With tragic
heroes, the thing is that we recognise their movement as downward instead
of upward. But really that's all too subjective. To some people, I'm sure,
Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain were martyrs rather than a lossers.


>I guess we should
>consider the figure of the anti-hero but doesn't that substitution transform
>the form (that wasn't elegant)?

Again, I assume you're not talking about tragic Hamlet-type characters.
There is one work of narrative poetry which comes to my mind; 'The Ash
Range' by Laurie Duggan. It doesn't have any consistant humans characters
in it, but what DOES go through the heroic rites-of-passage in this book is
the setting itself, the Gipsland region in Victoria.

>I've read many contemporary poems/and even novels that partake of the mythic
>but the heroic mode only seems to thrive in Hollywood.

I'm not exactly sure what the heroic mode is according to your definition.
My (Jungian) definition doens't involve too much cinematic melodrama. I
recently read A.S. Byatt's 'Posession' and there is a very clear path for
the story's hero-quest in action there - too clear that I found the book
very boring. In some contemporary poems the obssession with landscape
(especially in Australia) has led the land and mountains and lakes to take
up heroic characteristics. A hero, again, isn't a tough guy in gym-shorts
who has a cape and flies over some evil city beating up bad-guys. the hero
is (excuse my Jungian jargon) someone who assimilates their shadow.
Hollywood has of course exploited this myth, but so have all the other
artists in the world. What you say is very interesting, 'cos someone
(Christopher Vogler) has actually sat down and written a best-seller which
is basically a recepie book for Hollywood writers and producers who want to
use the hero-myth to make money. This book was used when they made 'the
Lion King', 'Pulp Fiction' and many other recent films (quiet possibly
Gladiator and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon).

Ali

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