Mythic form and mythic function: Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Pegana and Time and the Gods
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1992Author
Waldron, Peter J.
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Lord Dunsany, an Irish peer and prolific author of
fantasy who lived from 1878 to 1957, wrote in the midst of
the Irish Literary Renaissance. Compared to such
contemporaries as Yeats and Synge, however, Dunsany has
received relatively little critical attention. Much of the
Dunsany criticism that does exist over-subordinates the
content of Dunsany's work to its beautifully ringing style.
This emphasis produces criticism that tends either to praise
his writing as merely lyrical and charming or to condemn it
as mere escapist fancy devoid of any deeper meaning. But the
mythological themes of Dunsany's early short stories
demonstrate both high style and a strong, underlying message
of human self-empowerment; they merit closer attention.
Because Dunsany is little known, in my Introduction I provide a brief biographical sketch. In Chapter One I
summarize Joseph Campbell's theories on myth to provide a
context for my analysis of Dunsany's short stories. Campbell
identifies four basic functions of myth: 1) the
cosmological, which enables humanity to form a universal
scheme; 2) the metaphysical, which helps humanity cope with
the often harsh realities of such a scheme; 3) the
sociological, which establishes an unimpeachable social
order; and 4) the psychological, which provides the means to transform subconscious dream images into an understandable
form. In this way, according to Campbell, myth has always
served as an interpreter of reality; therefore, a myth system
can reveal much about the world-view of the group or
individual that holds it.
In Chapter Two, I apply Campbell's theories to Dunsany's
world-view as revealed in his first volume of short stories,
The Gods of Pegana (1905). The stories in The Gods of
Peoana, a set of interdependent fragments, read much like
myths both in style and in content; each story represents a
passage from the "bible" of Pegana's world. By performing
the functions of mythology, especially the creative
psychological function, the stories in The Gods of Pegana
become mythological themselves, and thus provide insight into
Dunsany's own world-view. Reading the stories as myth
reveals that for Dunsany, even in a universe that seems
entirely under the sway of fate and chance, humanity can at
least partially control its own destiny. In this chapter, I demonstrate how Dunsany associates this control with the
creative power of myth.
In Chapter Three I turn to Dunsany's second volume of
short stories, Time and the Gods (1908). In Time and the
Gods, Dunsany returns to the world of Pegana and to his theme
of mythic self-empowerment. But the stories in Time and the
Gods are more fully developed than those in The Gods of
Pegana and the message more emphatic. In The Gods of Pegana.
Dunsany offers a prophetic message of empowerment that his characters mostly ignore; in Time and the Gods the prophecy
begins to be realized, and some of the characters gain a kind
of spiritual control over their tyrannical gods. I compare
the two volumes and discuss the progression of Dunsany's
theme from The Gods of Peoana to Time and the Gods. A
failure to recognize this humanist theme in Dunsany's work,
along with an unwillingness to acknowledge fundamental
similiarities between Dunsany and contemporaries like Yeats,
has kept previous criticism from placing Dunsany in the
literary context his work merits. In my concluding remarks,
I summarize Dunsany's mythological world-view as it appears
in these first two volumes of short stories, and classify it
as essentially Romantic.