The mythical imagination, through its logos spermaticos, survives through its narrative metamorphoses, rewriting itself with each story. Our study aims to highlight Mircea Eliade’s ideas concerning the creative relationship between myth and literature, between myth and art in general. The first part is devoted to the theoretical aspect through which the researcher shows how the narrative scenarios of myth develop in literature (short stories, tales, novels) in new forms resulting from a generative structure of the imagination that constitutes the human psyche. Literature, and art in general, acquire renewed significance as forms of “adaptation narratives” that generate new meanings, becoming a new act of culture and converting magical properties into ethical and aesthetic dimensions. The second part illustrates these ideas through the literary creations of the writer Mircea Eliade. It focuses on the myth of eternal youth in the short story Youth Without Youth, through which the author expresses his desire to find an original formula that would unify the plausibility of science fiction imagery with the mythological elements of fantasy literature in general, in order to reconstruct an archaic theme: the mystery of obtaining immortality. Here, as in other literary texts, he draws on his erudition in the fields of Indian culture, linguistics, philosophy, mythology, and scientific fields such as biology, medicine, physics, etc. The third part illustrates the leap from one artistic creation to another through the 2007 film adaptation of his short story Youth Without Youth by the great American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. Our analysis attempts to highlight the continuity between the short story and the film in terms of the mythical narrative, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the creative discontinuity through the synchrony and diachrony of cinematic images in the filmmaker’s artistic vision.
BUȘE Ionel (Tue,) studied this question.