THE STUBBORN AFTERLIVES OF THE PROMETHEUS MYTH
By Brian Britt *** The Montréal Review, May 2024 |
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INTRODUCTION The widely-acclaimed blockbuster film Oppenheimer opens with this caption: “Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.” Based on the Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus, the film is only the most recent popular retelling of the ancient Greek myth. The essays collected here come from a faculty-student workshop at Virginia Tech in October, 2023 to exchange research and promote conversation on contemporary uses of the myth of Prometheus. Aeschylus (525-456 BCE) depicts Prometheus as a tragic lover of humans whose gift includes technical skill (technē). Modern retellings like Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (1818) identify the myth with the ambitions and risks of technology. How do contemporary retellings of the Prometheus myth respond to new technologies and social formations? The contemporary Prometheus provides an occasion to examine myth in general. Roland Barthes argues that myth “transforms history into nature” and thereby produces “depoliticized speech.” What cultural work does the myth of Prometheus do, and what does this work suggest about other myths? The essays all stand on their own, and they all respond to the prompt of the workshop summarized above. Three of the essays, by Janell Watson, Sam Beckenhauer, and Lee Vinsel, engage closely with the myth’s application to modern technologies. Against Oppenheimer and with Michel Serres, Watson identifies Prometheus more with the industrial age than the nuclear and information ages. But as Beckenhauer shows, other thinkers find the tragic version of Prometheus to be an apt frame for contemporary systems of technology. And in a call for clearer analysis and reasoning, Vinsel shows how the myth’s grip on technology studies has been loosened by social constructionist accounts of technology. The other essays, by Zhange Ni, Sophia Scarfe, Daniel Weidner, and myself, attend to the modern literary and aesthetic legacy of the myth. They show how widely the modern reception of the myth circulates, from the literary production of Goethe, Brecht, Flaubert, and Du Bois to the science fiction films of Ridley Scott and James Cameron. The central turn in modern Prometheus reception, of course, is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Sophia Scarfe’s reading of the novel demonstrates the indispensable role of feminist analysis to this reception history, a point underscored by Ni’s insightful framing of science fiction retellings as new creation myths. In different ways, all of the essays take up the questions how and to what effect the myth of Prometheus survives in contemporary life. As models of how myth operates, the afterlives of Prometheus elaborate Daniel Weidner’s claim that “Working on myth is thus always also working on modernity.”
By Lord Byron WORKING ON MODERNITY. HANS BLUMENBERG READS PROMETHEUS By Daniel Weidner OPPENHEIMER AS HERMES, GOD OF THE INFORMATION AGE By Janell Watson WHY THE MYTH OF PROMETHEUS HAUNTS TALK OF TECHNOLOGY? By Lee Vinsel FRANKEN-MYTHBUSTERS: MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN EXPOSES THE PATRIARCHAL PROMETHEUS By Sophia Scarfe UNBINDING MYTH WITH LITERATURE IN SHELLEY, FLAUBERT, AND DU BOIS By Brian Britt PROMETHEUS REDUX: ALIEN PREQUELS, CREATION MYTH, AND THE ENCHANTMENT OF TECHNOSCIENCE By Zhange Ni PROMETHEANISM, OBSOLESCENCE, AND THE POLITICS OF CONSPIRACY THEORY Samuel Beckenhauer
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