The paradoxical function of ironic mythic intertexts in Joyce, Faulkner, Fowles and Robbe-Grillet
Date
1986
Authors
Moynagh, Maureen Anne
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Abstract
This thesis is concerned with the function of mythic intertexts in four twentieth century novels, specifically James Joyce's Ulysses, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, John Fowles's The Magus, and Alain Robbe-Grillet's Les Gommes. In these works the mythic intertext employed by the author leads the reader to anticipate an analogy between text and intertext which will help in the interpretation of the text. Because the myth is used ironically, however, it does not serve to establish the meaning of the text; it instead provides an empty frame which encompasses the freeplay of language and structure within the texts. Myth thus functions paradoxically in the works: it is affirmed as a means of "making sense" of the texts and denied when the reader discovers that it fails as an interpretive tool.
Essentially an intertextual study, this paper makes use of the theories of Bakhtin, Barthes and Derrida. The paradoxical articulation of myth is facilitated by the intertextual use of myth and by the dialogic discourse of the novel as a genre. The fact that myth is an intertext in these works is important because the intertext leads the reader to a point of reference or standard outside of the text. This then allows the freeplay of the signifier within the text. The ironic presentation of a mythic intertext and the dialogic capacity of novelistic discourse deny the absolute status of myth, thus opening up the possibility for a re-ordering of experience according to new relations, principles, conceptions.
Each author uses the mythic intertext differently, if to similar ends. In Joyce the myth functions as an encompassing framework which permits the freeplay of the signifier within the text. This freeplay frustrates the reader's search for an authoritative voice. In Faulkner, the mythic order is affirmed in the narrators' attempts to instill the quality of myth in their own narratives, yet the individual discourses contradict one another and the absence of a controlling authorial voice prevents the reader from being able to identify with one textual voice over the others. In Fowles the myth is affirmed by the structure of the novel which imitates the quest myth, yet myth is also used to disorient the protagonist in a way which will undermine established conventions, the ways in which he has ordered his world. Finally, the most radical denial of absolute meaning is to be found in Robbe-Grillet, who deliberately frustrates the reader's attempts to derive significance from the relation of mythic parallels to the text , and who inverts the very structure of the myth as well.
This decentering of the mythic inter texts effected by the paradoxical presentation facilitates the introduction of freeplay into the text . The further absolute meaning is banished from the text , the greater the freedom of the signifier . The articulation of the paradoxical function of myths in these texts is therefore a measure of each author's post-modernist tendencies . The paradox is a metaphor for the liberation of language from received literary orthodoxies , from absolute meaning of any kind.