Is it true that myth, as a product of human beings, is born, grows, reproduces, and dies? We could study any one of these stages of development. Myths are undoubtedly born, grow, and reproduce. In this conference, we seek to analyze whether—in our age (the 20th and 21st centuries)—they die or they are adapted. In other words, we want to define the conditions of adapting myths and of their evolution, and to discern whether their crises could bring about their resurgence, or death.

 

Various circumstances explain how myths enter into a crisis.

 

Occasionally, a sociocultural environment changes until it demands an adjustment in the overall context of its myths. In this way, the angel, traditional in Western culture, continues to be a messenger and ally of humans, but its Christian qualities are substituted for others more adapted to our age: today’s angels are sexualized beings, in full harmony with the New Age phenomenon, and particularly associated with an aesthetic dimension.

 

We could say something similar, for instance, of the myth of the Holy Grail, the eucharistic chalice par excellence: when faced with the current crisis of a sacrament giving immortality in the afterlife, the sacred vessel becomes the guarantor of a purely earthly immortality, as a remedy against physical wounds, as an excuse for seeking out a lost father (Steven Spielberg, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 1989) or even for obtaining the UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism (David Lodge, Small World: An Academic Romance, 1984).

 

Myths can also enter into a crisis caused by a substantial change in their historical situation. Take the example of the Comendatore in the Don Juan myth: today, there are no comendatores. Added to this problem is that a moving statue, a prime attraction in the 17th century, would lose credibility today. Max Frisch (Don Juan, oder die Liebe der Geometrie, 1953), Henry de Montherlant (La Mort qui fait le trottoir. Don Juan, 1956), or Heinz Weinmann (Don Juan 2003. Éros et Sida, 1993) resolve, each in his own way, the problem of the Comendatore in 20th-century literature. This myth is, furthermore, eminently dramaturgical; it would be useful to study how it fared in the crisis that theater underwent upon the advent of film.

 

Crisis could even be an inherent aspect of the system of myth. This is seen in the myth par excellence of human creation, Pygmalion. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this sculptor witnesses, astonished, the softening of his statue until it adopts the flexible form of a woman. In Bernard Shaw’s play (Pygmalion, 1913), Professor Higgins does not manage to instruct the flower girl Eliza Doolittle without passing through the crisis of love. The different film versions (Pygmalion, 1938, dir. Anthony Asquith with Leslie Howard; the musical My Fair Lady, 1964, dir. George Cukor, and Simone, 2002, dir. Andrew Niccol) overemphasize the impossibility of this love. To a large extent, Ovid’s myth has been forgotten; the myth has been adapted to a contemporary conceptualization of love.

 

Another myth closely related to the Pygmalion myth is Frankenstein, the physician who manufactures men. It emerged in literature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). In our time, it has undergone dozens of film adaptations, in many of which there is a protagonist who is made prisoner of his destiny: the monster cannot survive his creator (e.g., Frankenstein, 1994, dir. Kenneth Branagh).

Other, more contemporary myths, like cyborgs or androids, face similar paradoxes: their lack of viability makes them enter, sooner or later, into a crisis (e.g. Michael Jackson).

 

Ultimately, crises can affect a certain group of myths within a certain system of myths. The Germanics did not believe in the eternity of the world nor, in fact, in the immortality of their own gods. Like men, their gods were subject to an endless struggle against astute and envious enemies. The “twilight of the gods” thus assumes a catastrophe that Freyr, Thor, Loki, and Tyr do not escape. Others replace them. In this case, the crisis is not exactly literary; instead, the death and rebirth of the gods create literature, and so are fully literary devices. Nonetheless, this dynamics in Germanic myths brings with it a series of implications about its manifestations in today’s culture, so far-removed from the concept of eternity.

 

Beyond the issue of myths in crisis, there is another: the crisis of myth. This is particularly noteworthy in the 20th and 21st centuries, when myths no longer provide the primary motives for the plot, as in the classical period, nor their notional equivalents, as in Romanticism. A crowning example: corresponding to Claude Simon’s idea, the Nouveau Roman rejects the mythic dimension in order to destroy the foundations of the traditional novel. Myths, in theory, disappear. It is worth specifying, however, that the Nouveau Roman allows myth simultaneously to reappear as “hidden” and veiled through devices such as geometric forms or the conjunctions of opposites. For confirmation of this, we only have to think about the remaking of the Oedipus myth in Les Gommes by Alain Robbe-Grillet (1953), or of Theseus and the labyrinth in Crete in Michel Butor’s L’Emploi du temps (1956).

 

These are only some examples of the question concerning “myths in crisis, the crisis of myth.”  Each proposal may broach the subject with complete intellectual and methodological freedom. All that is asked is that entries respect the chronological period (20th and 21st centuries), the discipline (literature, visual arts, and performance), and myth as the central theme of each paper.