The transposition of mythical structures in "The Issa Valley" by Czesław Miłosz

Abstract

The article interprets Czesław Miłosz’s novel The Issa Valley through the prism of mythcriticism, which was introduced to the humanities by Gilbert Durand. In particular, it focuses on the palingenesis of literary mythemes and the transposition of mythical structures that can be found in various aspects of the text, including the chronotope of the novel and the construction of its characters. Moreover, The Issa Valley features mythical models of space as well as paradigms of mythical time and individual mythemes transformed by Miłosz’s artistic imagination. The author of The Issa Valley semantically inverts and demythologizes the myths of Tellus Mater, Pammetor Ge, and the Arcadia, the mythologem of childhood, and the mythologem of family home, which are all deeply rooted in tradition. Miłosz addresses each problem in an antithetical manner, avoiding simple answers. Instead, he poses questions and thus opens the text to the individual hermeneutics of symbolic tropes. Miłosz perceived the imaginary that has symbolic and mythical foundations as endowed with a redemptive potential. In myth-criticism, the symbolic modelling that takes place in the artistic imagination is closely connected with the therapeutic role of an image. It helps restore internal balance which Gilbert Durand defines as anthropological balance. And, as Ernst Cassirer posits, this balance is a manifestation of human symbolic intelligence.

Artykuł Marzeny Karwowskiej The Transposition of Mythical Structures in „The Issa Valley” by Czesław Miłosz w języku polskim dostępny w: „Prace Polonistyczne” 2019, seria LXXIV, s. 53–69 (Marzena Karwowska, Transpozycja struktur mitycznych w „Dolinie Issy” Czesława Miłosza).