Myth: A New Symposium (review)

Myth: A New Symposium documents the proceedings of a 1999 conference held at Indiana University to assess the study of myth since the publication of Myth: A Symposium, which first appeared in the Journal of American Folklore (86/4 [1955]).

The original contributions are an odd mix. Philosopher David Bidney rejects Ernst Cassirer's view that myth constitutes an autonomous form of knowledge and insists that myth be subject to scientific scrutiny. Richard Dorson delightfully presents the quarter-century debate on myth between F. Max Müller and Andrew Lang. The grandest essay is, of course, Claude Lévi-Strauss's celebrated programmatic essay on structuralism. Bizarrely, there are overlapping essays by the fanatical myth-ritualists Lord Raglan and Stanley Edgar Hyman. Philosopher Philip Wheelwright reprises his stalwart view that myth symbolically expresses ultimate reality. Stith Thompson characteristically -dismisses virtually all theories of myth for generalizing, but confidently espouses a literalist rendition of myths like Bidney's and rejects as ethnocentric any divide between myths and folktales.

The new symposium is composed of fifteen contributions, with almost an equal number of folklorists and literary scholars. As in the first symposium, no contributions from sociology, psychology, religious studies, or—this time—even philosophy are to be found. Although the symposium never claims to be comprehensive, it amazes me that theorists such as Walter Burkert, René Girard, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell go altogether unmentioned and that Roland Barthes and Northrop Frye are barely mentioned. The contributors should "get out" more.

In the first of three essays on their predecessors, William Hansen deems out-of-date Thompson's equation of the origin of myth with its meaning thereafter. But by the origin of myth, theorists mean recurrent, not historical, origin: not the time and place of origin but the need that gives rise to myth whenever and wherever it appears. Hansen links Thompson's focus on origin with the myth-ritualist theory, but that theory, of all theories, allows for transformation—notably, of myth into literature.

John McDowell imaginatively matches up Wheelwright's essay with Lévi-Strauss's as kindred linguistically rooted theories. But Wheelwright's "semantic" approach, unlike Lévi-Strauss's, comes less from linguistics than from New Criticism, and Wheelwright writes to argue that domains dismissed as emotive by logical positivism are, in fact, cognitive. I cannot fathom how folklorists are in a position to assess Wheelwright's philosophical claims.

Gregory Schrempp cleverly parallels Bidney's advocacy of science over myth with Bidney's criticism of fellow social scientific theorizing as mythic rather than scientific. The opposition that Bidney draws between closed myth and open science, in fact, mimics Karl Popper's, although neither Bidney nor Schrempp mentions Popper.

In the section "Myth and Ethnography," Lúcia Sá praises late-nineteenth-century German ethnographers of South America for not imposing their homegrown evolutionism on the myths of their subjects. Jonathan Hill credits the Arawakan Wakuénai, of Venezuela, with theorizing about their own trickster myths and not simply telling them. Similarly, Barre Toelken shows Native American tribes reflecting on their own myths, not mindlessly retelling them, thereby rebutting Bidney's assumption that adherents are hopelessly uncritical about their own myths.

In "Myth and Historical Context," John Lindow argues that the god Odin in the Edda of Snorri Sturluson is a "historically plausible" figure—a variation on euhemerism. Lindow aims to narrow the divide between myth and history. That divide is found most unabashedly in the unmentioned Lord Raglan's Hero, in which heroes are mythical because they are nonhistorical. Joseph Nagy combines a tame Lévi-Straussian analysis of certain motifs in myths of Irish saints with the argument that adherents themselves shift folkloristic genres and accommodate changing situations. Gordon Brotherston enlists one Aztec and one Carib myth to assert that both contain much actual history, in which case the conventional divide between myth and...