Myth Analyzed by Segal Robert A.;

Author:Segal, Robert A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2020-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

Modern heroes

Some heroes, or kinds of heroes, fit only certain periods. For example, it is hard to imagine an aristocratic hero like Don Juan surviving into the twentieth century. Other heroes do survive, either because their appeal continues or because they are protean enough to adapt to the times. Heracles, the greatest of ancient heroes, was by no means confined to the crude image of him as Rambo-like—all brawn and no brains—but on the contrary has been depicted

in one century as the great, tragic sufferer, in another as the paragon of superhuman physical prowess and bravado, in another as the ideal nobleman and courtier, in another as the incarnation of rhetoric and intelligence and wisdom, in another as the divine mediator and a model of that way of life whose reward can only be heavenly, in another as a metaphysical struggler, and in yet another as a comic, lecherous, gluttonous monster or romantic lover, and in still another as the exemplar of virtue.

(Galinsky 1972, pp. 1–2)

In the twentieth century, as in prior centuries, not only have traditional heroes been transformed, but also new heroes and new kinds of heroes have emerged. If distinctively nineteenth-century heroes were the romantic hero (Byron’s Childe Harold) and the bourgeois hero (Flaubert’s Emma Bovary), then distinctively twentieth-century heroes include the ordinary person as hero (Miller’s Willy Loman), the comic hero (Roth’s Alexander Portnoy), the schlemiel as hero (Singer’s Gimpel the Fool), and the absurd hero (Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon). Far from divine, the contemporary hero is hopelessly human—mortal, powerless, amoral. The present-day hero is often lowly even within the human community—more the outsider than the insider, more the loser than the winner, more the villain than the savior. The contemporary hero is not a once-great figure who has fallen but a figure who has never risen. Sisyphus, not Oedipus, let alone Heracles, epitomizes contemporary heroism. Yet Sisyphus is still to be commended for never giving up. Persistence replaces success; survival replaces achievement. Old-fashioned heroic virtues like courage and duty give way to new ones like irony and detachment. Today’s hero, for example, is heroic in persisting without success.8 Because contemporary heroes scarcely reach the stature of gods, their stories scarcely constitute myths.

Yet it would surely be going much too far to argue that traditional heroism has died out. Present-day heroes in sports, entertainment, business, and politics are admired for their success, not for their mere persistence, and the acclaim conferred on them often reaches the same divine plateau as in times past. At most, one can argue that alongside the traditional notion of heroism as success has arisen the notion of heroism as persistence.

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