Minor Mythologies as Popular Literature

Rezensionen / Stimmen

"In his clear, acute and surprisingly passionate new book, Richard Pine makes the case for the importance of reading popular fiction not as mere escapism but as contemporary manifestations of myth. The stories that we tell ourselves, he says, are a way of making sense of the world and of human experience. Those which reach the largest audiences deserve better than critical neglect, and cry out instead for detailed, sympathetic examination. Arguably, all stories, viewed from the correct perspective, are the same story - that which Pine identifies as "the quest", an aspect of Joseph Campbell's familiar hero's journey. From the earliest surviving narratives to the present day, near-identical tropes and scenarios recur: "myth is the method of means by which the imagination of man makes sense of the perceived facts of his existence". There is in this much comfort but also, at least in Pine's reading, something more: a quality of the ritualistic, profoundly cathartic. "The storyteller", he writes, "is not unlike the tribal shaman ... through the ritual of storytelling he translates the sacred secrets into accessible and comprehensible signals." To forge his argument, Pine draws on numerous examples, from the past century or so of mainstream entertainment, moving from Allan Quatermain to Professor Challenger and Father Brown by way of A. J. Raffles and Bulldog Drummond. He is especially good on James Bond - "an idea, rather than a person ... more of an enigma than his two-dimensional character permits" - and on Hercule Poirot, whose perhaps repetitive adventures, "whether they are formulaic or not ... obey the course of human emotions". Mostly, this is vivid and eloquent work, a sonorous and still necessary rallying cry."Jonathan Barnes, Times Literary Supplement, 2019