ABSTRACT
When Walter Benjamin set about trying to characterize the great oral stories of yore, he did so by highlighting their refusal to provide the sort of psychological motivations and explanations that most readers of literature today anticipate. But he also shrewdly noted why this was the case: “There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis.” 1 The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was somewhat more scathing in his critique of the deficiency of the psychological in the ancient world—a world that, to him, seemed “a mere body without any inner recesses and secrets.” 2 Only during the Renaissance, in his eyes, would discovery arise of “the inner world in all its vast extension, the me ipsum [I myself], the consciousness, the subjective.” 3
