The Modern Construction of Myth (review)

Where does myth come from? What is it for? Why should we care? Before the middle of the eighteenth century, acceptable answers might run, respectively: from writers; for coating otherwise difficult truths; and, grown-ups don't. Turn on your local public broadcasting station during a fund drive and you may find reruns of Joseph Campbell convincing Bill Moyers that the "power of myth" comes from the depths of the psyche and the dawn of humankind, is for our very survival, and matters because it fulfills the self. Nor was the late guru alone in thinking such lofty thoughts. That myth is somehow vitally important few authors and intellectuals of the twentieth century disputed—it was a far fetch from the simple moralizing fables of the Enlightenment. What happened in the interval?

Von Hendy would sum up with one word the transformation in Western thought that led to the spectacular elevation of myth: Romanticism. Put thus baldly, the thesis sounds familiar to students of Blake, Hölderlin, and company. But the argument here is far more sophisticated than the usual schematic about emerging nationalism, retreat from industrialization, discovery of folk traditions, and their impact on nineteenth-century verse. Von Hendy ambitiously makes the claim that not only high art but virtually every form of modern critical discourse—philosophy, theology, the history of religion, literary study, and the protoforms of anthropology, sociology, and psychology—took shape in the struggle to define and evaluate the mythic. The effects outlasted the Romantic period and lingered well into the 1980s. To demonstrate this, Von Hendy traces with vigor and erudition, through thirteen dense chapters (a mythic number), the tangled genealogies of the concept and the study of myth, from Bacon and Vico to Paul Ricoeur and Hazard Adams. It is a splendid explication of three centuries' worth of theorizing, lucidly and at times brilliantly presented. The book is filled with rich close readings (Von Hendy teaches English literature at Boston College) and boasts a scope and drive unparalleled in this field. It would not be out of place as the backbone text for any number of graduate seminars, whether in classics, comparative literature, English, or cultural studies—a chapter a week, with additional reading from the key primary texts Von Hendy discusses, in chronological order. His meticulous attention to the fine grain of each work, coupled with a constant sense of the interconnections, makes this book not only the best account available of the rise of myth but also a compact education in intellectual history.

The book's structure is pleasingly fuguelike—one senses that Von Hendy's own tastes run to the baroque and even the Scholastic—and the argument is best absorbed by pausing after chapters 3, 6, 8, and 10, with a threefold rising finale (chapters 11, 12, and 13 each sound their own bold chords). The tale begins with a linguistic shift in the 1760s, away from "fable"—by which writers meant either a wise ancient story, demanding allegorical interpretation, or "the kind of foolish, idle, and often scabrous tale that demands face-saving by the mythologist if it is to avoid giving offense" (2). As Von Hendy has it, the shift involves flipflops in respectability, the former kind of fable losing out (thanks to the rise of scientific explanations) while the latter sort—the barbarous and archaic—exerts a new fascination, perhaps precisely because it cannot be explained. Myth, an ancient Greek term but not in vernacular use before the eighteenth century, comes to displace fable, bringing along the added signification of religious importance. Philologists might wish for more detail here, for a single text that overtly provides the alleged overtones. But the drift is plain enough: the new usage of myth resembles the tendencies of late antique Neoplatonism (itself revalorized in the eighteenth century), in which the Greek myths that so scandalized Plato were rehabilitated through the magic of...