The Ontology of Mythical Entities: Part 2
Written by R. Scott Smith
In the last post we established that existence is not a necessary property for objects, and that fictional, mythical and imaginary objects have existence as much as “real” people and objects do. That said, figures that populate the Greek mythical storyworld are not exactly fictional characters in the same way that Sherlock Holmes or Wonder Woman are. Within fiction there is a certain understanding that the character is somehow a purposeful creation of something that is acknowledged not to exist in the real world. When it comes to Greek myth, it is not always clear whether a storyteller is engaging with a consciously fictitious activity or believes that a character may have been real. Nor is it clear that Greek mythical figures are “mythical” in the way that the non-existent planet Vulcan (the usual cited example) is—an object once thought to be real but is later proven false. (It is somewhat unfortunate that this category is called “mythical.”) It also does not seem right to categorize mythical figures as purely imaginary, since they are often rooted in space and time. Fortunately, there is no need to insist on putting Greek mythical figures into a particular category of unreal object for the purposes of assigning an ontologically unique identity —all that matters is that there exists a separate set of unique identifiers that allows one to distinguish one entity reliably from another.
In the case of the fictional Wonder Woman or James Bond, or the mythical Achilles, we have to make a further point: each of these have a more or less fully developed identity that might be called “biographical,” and each has agency in the storyworld. James Bond drinks martinis and drives a fast car, Wonder Woman flies an invisible jet, and Achilles kills Hector and a lot of other Trojans. They all have origin stories. Because these characters are well developed, they have what may be called a core set of identifiers that are recognizable, even if an individual instantiation may have variations (consider Eco’s idea of a “fluctuating character” at 2009: 86–89). As Reicher Maria (2010:117) puts it, “if the concept of a character is supposed to be interesting and fruitful, it is to be constructed in such a way that it is possible for one and the same character to occur in different works in different times.” For the purposes of Greek myth, I’ll call these developed biographical figures mythical characters for convenience. Yet, as we will see in future posts, not all mythical entities operate as characters, but we’ll return to that in our next posts. Instead, I’d like to focus here on the simple fact that these characters exist beyond the name itself. To illustrate this basic concept , I call attention to a short passage of Ovid’s great insult poem, the Ibis, where mythical characters are described not by name, but by details from the character’s biography (253–58):
I hope you suffer as great a wound in your poisoned leg
as did Poeantius, the heir to club-wielding Hercules.
I want you to feel as much pain as the man who drank from a deer’s teat,
receiving a wound from an armed man, aid from the unarmed,
or he who fell headlong from his horse in the Aleian field,
and whose beauty nearly brought an end to himself.
The Ibis is, as one scholar has put it well, is “a prolonged exercise of scholarly research and investigative cross-references” (Krasne 2012: 1), and it is precisely the lack of a name that gives the poem its playful (ludic) quality. It seems obvious that, even in the absence of names, mythical figures—at least the most developed characters—have identifiable properties that a stable and unique to those characters. In the first couplet, the properties of “son of Poeas,” “poisoned leg,” and “heir to club-wielding Hercules” all point to Philoctetes. Likewise, drinking from a deer’s teat and being wounded and then healed by the same person indicates Telephus. Finally, falling from a horse and landing in the Aleian field, combined with an allusion to beauty (which attracts Proitos’ wife’s attention), leads one to think of Bellerophon. In each case, a recognizable set of stable characteristics allows for readers or listeners to identify the character. Of course, part of the point here is to come up with the name itself, but the name is not, in and of itself, necessary.
One can apply this ludic, or playful, tendency to the visual arts. Consider the wall-painting now housed at the Naples Archaeological Museum (figure 2), which is difficult to interpret save for the small detail that the figure in the lower right is missing a sandal. This is unmistakably Jason; no one else is defined as “the one-sandaled man.”
Figure 1: Jason and Pelias (Naples Archaeological Museum; picture from public domain license from Wikipedia)
Figure 2: Close-up of the above.
Mythological characters with biographical agency, like fictional characters, are not merely characters in a work, but transcend any single instantiation.
My own thinking about the ontology of mythical entities was inspired in large measure by Sarah Iles Johnston, who in 2018 first applied Reicher’s “realist ontology of fictional characters” to figures in Greek myth (The Story of Myth, pp. 147–76). In particular, Johnston commented on the relationship of characters to names:
1. Characters exist outside of narrative, and the name is the vaguest and most non-specific part of the identity (see Reicher 2010: 129–30);
2. It is the name, however, that holds together the different instantiations of a character;
3. Under a name there exists a large and varied collection of ideas and opinions about that character; and
4. Continued use of a name insists that there is a single figure behind it, with certain assumptions about a core identity.
To be sure, there are objections that could be raised about such a system, and I’ll come back to some of these later, but as a rule this is a useful starting point for thinking about how mythical characters work. In her compelling book, Johnston also adopts Reicher’s ideas (2010: 122–23) about the relationship of character portrayals relative to each other, specifically regarding derivative works. Taking Faust as an example, Reicher defines a maximal character (C1) as the character that exemplifies all of the internal properties to the identity (here, in Marlowe’s Faust), whereas a sub-maximal character (C2, C3, etc.) has a recognizable subset of those properties. Although in Reicher’s example of Faust the maximal character is determined by the original work, a maximal character may be further informed by future influential treatments (Goethe’s Faust, for instance), because “characters are never completely determined” (Reicher 2010: 129). To apply this to Greek myth, a preliminary definition of a maximal character would be the composite of all previous instantiations (the “myth” of Oedipus or Ajax), while a sub-maximal character is a single instance with a clear and obvious set of shared qualities with the maximal character (Sophocles’ or Seneca’s Oedipus), undefined as that maximal character is. Each sub-maximal character, then, can have qualities not found in the maximal character (unstable points), but must have enough shared properties that the figure is recognizable as such (stable points).
As I argued in the last post, it is these stable data points that allow us to establish an ontological identity for characters. Of course, not all mythological entities are ontologically determined by properties regarding character; instead, their function can be based on relationships to other aspects of the Greek world: genealogies, geography, objects (aitiology) and places (eponymy). We’ll return to the these in our next blog posts.
Works Cited
Eco, U. “On the Ontology of Fictional Characters: A Semiotic Approach,” Sign System Studies 37 (2009) 82–97.
Johnston, S. I., The Story of Myth (Cambridge, MA 2018).
Krasne, D., “The Pedant’s Curse: Obscurity and Identity in Ovid’s Ibis,” Dictynna 9 (2012) 1–51.
Reicher, M. E., “The Ontology of Fictional Characters,” in Eder, J., F. Jannidis, R. Schneider (eds), Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media (2010) 111–32.