Johnny Quest

[David Casseres]

Mittelwerk sez

>mythologies are not mythic.  they dramatize the failed attempt of a given
>culture to rescue the contents of myth without doing irrevocable damage to
>the symbols which contain those contents (in mythic form).
>
>the first slothrop, odysseus, plunders and cartographs the mythic realm,
>kills all the magic monsters (remnants, already, of older myth), and is bored
>off his ass.  he lapses into stoicism along with the rest of antiquity--which
>is form his cunning takes in the freshly repressed world that no longer has
>any use for him.
>
>in the boring grail cycle,  the contents are already fetishes, and the quest
>is already reactionary.   this is the historical Christian  attempt (which
>becomes synonomous with the meaning Christianity) to rescue Christ from
>ever-encroaching reification.  The principle by which the knights fail is
>authoritarian:  they are not fit, they are insufficiently righteous.  the
>grail is demoted to hollow idol.
>
>slothrop is pointedly, not after anything.  everyone wants him because he is
>physiognomically connected to the other side of the equal sign--the point at
>which absolute scientific determinism swings full circle and meets the mythic
>core of meaning.  everyone wants their piece before the world is closed off,
>once and for all; before--as with 'brenschluss'--all the variables connect
>and the world becomes subject to a fate worse than myth, which is, a world
>without myth whatsoever.  in this case, it's the symbol itself that does the
>damage, and , as Blicero knew, the saving . . . . 

Thank you, this is very good.  Only I'm not sure how the Grail quest attempts "to rescue Christ from ever-encroaching reification"; tell us a little more.

Also, don't we *always* see the hero (if he survives like Odysseus, Theseus, Jason, etc.) finding that heroism is a hard act to follow and he doesn't know what to do with the rest of his life?  This is what Barth went after in his masterpiece, _Chimaera_.

Or is it that Odysseus, like Slothrop, differs from the mythic heroes precisely in not being after anything?  Odysseus was "heroically" Going Home, thus closing the Homeric era, reversing the whole idea of a quest and spawning an entire archetypal story-genre about the return to the ordinary post-brenschluss freefalling world -- right on down to our current procession of Vietnam-veteran movies.  Slothrop isn't even doing that, as you point out.  What *is* he doing?  He's really just trying to stay alive and get laid and get high, except in those moments when his conditioning takes over and he actually feels curious about that schwarzgerät.  He's really a perfect antihero for our time, neither positively questing like a Jason nor negatively heading for the barn like an Odysseus -- just trying to survive at the zero....



Cheers,
David