A Myth is a Myth

"Myth" is a heroic, ritual, or romantic story which has come down from the past. The original has been lost or forgotten, and myth exists in the truth and untruth of its versions in time and space. Reading this book about myth, the critic feared that William Marderness would cut out all the substance and use the term "myth" away from the description of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. According to Lévi-Strauss's bon mot, there is no "true version" of a myth; every version of myths has the same importance. However, Marderness spans the break between the myth versions at this point, stressing that the real connection of the mythical versions appears to see that all interpretations or personifications—in the author's words, the "reading of the myth"—have the "same" importance and relevance.

"Myth" presents itself as a rich concept with basically a lack of precise determination. The infinite numbers of books, articles, or theories about myth and mythology seem to start from the viewpoint of what the author thinks about myth. Marderness's reading of the myth is a combination of structural linguistics, semiotics, comparative literature, and religion. How to Read a Myth is a small book (almost the size of an overcoat pocket-sized publication); the task of defining and arguing the wide comprehensiveness of the concept of myth will become a hazardous occupation. Beyond the limits of similarities and differences from the classics—Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes—and some modern handbooks, such as Eric Csapo's Theories of Mythology (2005), Marderness's historical argumentation of the factual basis of myth occupies only some pages of this book. The series ("Philosophy and Literary Theory") in which the book appears seems to be another barrier before the innocent reader. Often, myth is used to designate fanciful collections of platitudes of old myths and about the true or false nature of the religious or everyday myth in the social or political reality. The critic did not applaud and thought that the book was doomed—until when he really "read" the book, and How to Read a Myth received the critic's rave.

After the advisories of the cryptic abbreviations and the didactic introduction, the reader tries to get over the fixities of the frightening terms and figures (grouped in two boxes): Sd1, Sd2, Sr1, and Sr2, that are connected with single and two double-headed "arrows," arranging the notions of "Signification," "Meaning," "Concept," "Form," and other terms. The persuasive reader (no more innocent reader) reaches this question: is myth an ordinary narrative or, better, a sign? In Roland Barthes's Mythologies (1957), the signifier (the mystical Sr1) and the signified (Sd1) create together a "meaning" of the sign, that in turn creates the double complexity of Form (Sr2) and Concept (Sd2). (The two-level construction of "meaning," "form," and "concept" comes originally from Louis Hjelmslev's linguistic Prolegomena to a Theory of Language [1943] and is extended and amplified in Barthes's Mythologies to describe cultural phenomena in French language.) For Marderness, the myth has turned into a "language-text," complexifying the mythical narrative with the important third factor, evolving the "mythical reading" in retelling the history of the biblical stories, the epic poem of Virgil's Aeneid, and two American novels: Anchee Min's Red Azalea (1994) and Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies (1994).

Is a myth true or false? The author lists four ways of "reading" mythical stories depending on the meaning and a form:

In mythical reading, the language-object functions ambiguously as a meaning and a form. In cultural reading, focus falls on the form. In extramythical reading, the language-object functions ambiguously as a meaning and form, but the form is indefinite. In mythological reading, focus falls on the meaning.

Mythical reading flows from philosophical and linguistic reasoning. Illustrated by Ferdinand Saussure's clever statements of structural linguistics and Mircea Eliade's religious "beliefs" in the sacred story, in which Eliade's "sacredness" in objects, space...