TRTR Almost heroically, (Or actually boringly) I post more on The Hero post

[Paul Mackin]

On 6/24/2011 10:36 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> and Joe Campbell brought the mythic meanings of the hero alive in our time in
> his work and re hero there is always that
> tough critic of society, Brecht, who famously said "Pity the country that needs
> heroes" and from the wikipedia article on
> The Hero from which the paragraph below is taken---which ARGUES in a scholarly
> article almost EXACTLY what Gaddis
>
> does on page 247(!!)......and from which article I learn that in the
> aforementioned Lord Raglan's book that he used Napolean to talk
>
> about non-mythic heroes which then reminded me of Pynchon's anti-charisma
> remarks.
Don't recall the remarks but I suppose anti charisma would mean 
routinized.  As societies develop, the need for charismatic authority 
decreases.  Heroes are traditionally charismatic, but protagonists less so.

Brecht's line about unhappy the land that needs heroes might also apply 
to places that still require charisma.

But in a different way.

P


> Pick it all up, someone.....
>   
> It has been suggested in an article by Roma Chatterji"[11] that the hero or more
> generally protagonist is first and foremost a symbolic representation of the
> person who is experiencing the story while reading, listening or watching; thus
> the relevance of the hero to the individual relies a great deal on how much
> similarity there is between the two. The most compelling[citation needed] reason
> for the hero-as-self interpretation of stories and myths is the human inability
> to view the world from any perspective but a personal one. The almost universal
> notion of the hero or protagonist and its resulting hero identification allows
> us to experience stories in the only[citation needed] way we know how: as
> ourselves.
>