The mythology of fundamental social transformation: Christa Wolf's 'Medea' (1996) in the tradition of her 'Kassandra' (1983)

A mythology of fundamental social transformation implies two meanings: (1) the impossibility of fundamental social transformation and (2) a new mythology aimed at addressing social concerns on a universal scale. Christa Wolf's Medea (1996) and her Kassandra (1983) are unique among novels in that they maintain a delicate balance between these two opposites while constructing the illusion that they paradoxically constitute the same event, i.e. the concurrent rejection and transformation of ancient mythology to make it serve as a mirror of the feminist imagination grappling with Pilate's question (What is truth?), and the idea of the unrealized, perhaps unrealizable, utopia. It is the truth as oxymoron that emerges as the backdrop for the mythological setting of Christa Wolf's two efforts in remythologization, whose foundations are ambiguous and include two seemingly incompatible ideas: the possibility and the simultaneous impossibility of fundamental social transformation along any political lines. Wolf underscores in these novels the dilemma of modern times when no resolution seems possible between the leftist theories propounded by modern Marxist political economists and the rightist serendipity which free market advocates perennially cultivate. What energizes Wolfs remythologizing projects is her feminism. Nowadays feminism represents one of the mainstays in the platforms of both political orientations. Wolf in Medea as in Kassandra surreptitiously champions the feminist doctrine of Engels as set forth in Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Swats [The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State] (1884) in order to breach the gulf between the systemic opposites and to serve as a force for a passive advocacy. It is this genre of advocacy rooted in myth, Marxism, and history that calls into question the shortcomings of both the capitalist and the communist systems with an eloquence and an energy that are attracting the attention of readers around the world. I analyze the nature of this potency and show how it represents another culmination for the German novel in the continually progressive trajectory that has charted its history.