Interrogating Myth: Ariadne

Abstract

Three decades ago attempts to define myth were a fashionable pursuit. They represented a series of points of intersection between two main intellectual currents. The one has its origins in Nietzsche’s reception of Wagner’s operas and is fully articulated in his Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. It posits myth as a qualitatively different form of discourse from other narratives or dramas. Mythical discourse is elevated above the superficial status of other fictions, is located closer to the essence of human experience, and becomes, in this perspective, the language of a lost paradise from which humanity has been exiled by too much rationality. Nietzsche at first believed that the qualitative loss of mythical dis - course since antiquity had been recouped by Wagner’s music-drama, After personal differ -
ences with the composer, he repudiated this conviction. But with Nietzsche’s disowning of Wagner the concept of myth as a positively charged mode of thinking and narrating did not go away. The later Nietzsche was to attempt, through the language of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the concept of the Eternal Return, his own re-creation of a mythical dis - course in the qualitatively higher sense.