"The Golden Pot" of E.T.A. Hoffmann as a reintegrating myth

Strona wydawcy: https://www.wuj.pl

Does the myth of myths exsist? The question above is the central issue of my text. The analysis of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novel The Golden Pot, which is carried out with the use of various hermeneutics ( systems of interpretation) is meant to allow discerning the text as a reintegrating myth. Hoffmann plays with this superior myth. He travesties its particular elements, uses stylization, literary allusion, irony, and plays with the romantic myths of the spiritual biography of the hero, of the concept of genesis and imagination. He then creates a separate, autonomous myth. The Golden Pot is a novel both mythic and mythologizing, as I try to prove in the context of the great systems of interpretation - those which cope with the reintegrating myth. Drawing such pararells is possible due to the symbolic language the author used. Because of this language, the text comes down to a primeval story, apt for being interpreted in various ways. In subsequnt chapters I look on Hoffmann’s novel through various exegeses of the superior myth, which are present in the Western culture: the gnostic model, Freudian psychoanalysis, as well as the Jungian and Bachelardian one, Rudolf Otto’s model, theory of the grotesque, magical thinking and participation mystique, and also the alchemical perspective. But none of them serves as a final word, the only valid way of interpretation. What I try to prove is that the specific character of the analysed text exceeds all its allegorical interpretations. The intended aim of my work was to outline the semantic field of The Golden Pot, to show the potential of its meaning both as a story and as a myth. I was also interested in how the reintegrating myth manifested itself on many levels of Hoffmann’s work as well as in various hermeneutics. I then go back to the myth of myths, to the question which still forces culture to producing narrations.