Mythological Intertext in Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande

Abstract

The post structural paradigm of research in the human sciences allows us to consider the structure and semantics of literary texts from an approach open to other semiotic systems. It is well known that the mythological substratum plays an important role in the formation of literary conceptualization. The intertextual analysis offers the opportunity of considering the text as an object of dynamic study, taking into consideration the diachronic principle. In contemporary studies, analysis of the mythological intertext is generally limited to the inventory of structures with a mythical connotation without revealing their historical semantics. But, through the diachronic reconstruction of the Greco-Roman image of the world over several periods of mythopoeic proto conceptualization we can discover the structures and the semantic potential of the mythological intertext. After that, we proceed to the mythopoeic intertextual analysis of Pelléas and Mélisande, the most famous drama written by Maurice Maeterlinck, a Nobel Prize winner. We discover that a wide system of mythemes, archaic binary oppositions and mythical complexes take part in the formation of semantic and structural isotopies generating the peculiarities of the image of the world in the hypertext. This conceptualization breaks with the ideas of the aesthetic platform of tragic optimism developed by Maeterlinck through the neutralization of the Hades mythical complex by the signs of solar symbolism which implies a constant renewal of the human soul in the cosmic cycle of nature.