A Narrative Approach to the Identity of the Beloved Disciple. Historical Person, His Role in the Gospel, and Relationship with the Author

He demonstrated some common features of poetic imagery, peculiarities of «metaphorical» imagination oriented in some way or other to the surrounding world of nature. However, mythological reductionism brings Frye to treat literary historic forms as «masks». His genre-myth correlations are unjustifiably strict, even to the point where the evolution of literature becomes the circular movement from myth (origin myth) to myth (modernistic myth). The influence of Frazer's cyclical notion is felt here, as well as an infatuation with the myths about dying and resurrecting gods and Jung's concentration on heroic myths. This often leads him to underestimate the role of creation myths. In reality myths may develop into «art» in different ways, depending on the genre. Frye's opposition between metaphorical identity and analogous structures has many productive ramifications. Several Soviet theorists of the twenties and thirties brought new insights to the problem. They anticipated much of the «myth-ritual» approach and structural-semantic analyses, sticking at the same time to strictly historical (evolutional, diachronic) context, fo-cussing upon the world view (even in ritual analyses), stressing in every way the position of folklore as an intermediate link between myth and literature ...»