The Modern Construction of Myth

Introduction

I N T RO D U C T I O N The essay that follows is an attempt to write a critical and interdisciplinary history of the concept of “myth” since its invention, or, perhaps more properly, reinvention, in the eighteenth century. My assumption that the modern construction of “myth” arises only in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries itself demands an explanation, which is forthcoming in the first three chapters. Some comparably fundamental assumptions can perhaps be got at by comment on my title. Anyone familiar with the multiplicity of definitions of “myth” may wonder why I speak of “construction” in the singular rather than employing the plural “constructions.” I do so because this expresses my ambition to show that the broadest distinguishable significations of “myth,” the types of theories that I call the ideological, the folkloristic, and the constitutive, all stem from and stand in relation to a fourth, a romantic or transcendental original. “Construction” signifies both the process of building and the product. It also plies between the senses of “something built” and “interpretation” or “construal,” as in “How can you put that construction on her words?” The ambiguities seem both rich and relevant. Myth as a concept has been subject to endless idiosyncratic definition, but the broadest categories of such constructions cluster in sets of family resemblances in the Wittgensteinian sense, of relationships that can be illuminated by being brought within the compass of a genealogical sketch. I have tried to derive these broadest of categories as inductively as possible, observing the Occam’s razor of evolutionary taxonomy, the rule that to be considered a separate species, a plant or animal must be both a sufficiently radical departure from its ancestor and sufficiently differentiated from its congeners. Of course the results are anything but scientific. In the conclusion I express my reservations about whether the most valid number of primary categories is really four; it may be as few as three or as many as five or six. But my discrimination of four major conceptions of what myth is and does will have served its heuristic purpose if it contributes to clarifying the principal lines of development in the construction of the concept. This taxonomic interest does not reign alone as an organizing principle of the essay; it shares this role with two others—diachronic and axiological. The shape of the work is actually a series of compromises among the three. To take the diachronic first, genealogy entails by definition a diachronic dimension as well as a xii Introduction taxonomical method. I have struggled to observe throughout my account a generally chronological framework. This proved to be at least a relatively manageable matter through the first four chapters, which carry the story to the end of the nineteenth century. The first chapter, “From Fable to Myth,” focuses on some crucial moments in the development of the concept during the eighteenth century, while the second, “The Invention of Myth,” examines its defining formulations in the work of two generations of German and English poets and philosophers. I regard this insistence on the romantic origins of myth (and their persistent presence to this day) as one of the principal features of my essay. To some readers this emphasis may seem to be beating on an open door, especially since the publication a generation ago of The Rise of Modern Mythology (Feldman and Richardson 1972). But I have found awareness of the concept’s romantic roots to be very uneven across the scholarly generations and various disciplines. The pioneering historical study of myth in English, for instance, The Quest for Myth (Chase 1949), conspicuously leaps in its account of the origins of the concept from the mid-eighteenth century to the midnineteenth , ignoring the romantic movement altogether. Yet it argues at the same time for the identification of myth with literature, which is, of course, one of the key assumptions popularized by myth’s romantic inventors. Chase is far from alone in exemplifying Santayana’s dictum that those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it. Two of the most popular mythographers of the twentieth century, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell, similarly ignore romanticism altogether in their historical accounts of myth, yet both of them revert, utterly without self-consciousness as far as one can see, to versions of the central romantic claim that myth is the vehicle of insight into a timeless realm of transcendental values. While the masters of depth psychology, Freud and Jung...