Introducing "Myth" PDF

1 Introducing "Myth" Whenever someone discloses something, one may ask: What is this supposed to hide? From what does it divert our gaze? What prejudice is it meant to evoke? And further: How far does the subtlety of this distortion extend?...

1 Introducing "Myth" Whenever someone discloses something, one may ask: What is this supposed to hide? From what does it divert our gaze? What prejudice is it meant to evoke? And further: How far does the subtlety of this distortion extend? And where does he go astray by it? F. Nietzsche, Morgenrote, § 523 Definition is never the innocent first step in a process of empirical discovery that it is sometimes made to seem: it is rather always the final precipitate of an already elaborate theory. To begin with a definition is therefore in an important sense to begin at the end, and to urge acceptance of a position before presenting the arguments or the evidence. If I begin with a discussion of the problems of defining myth, it is to urge suspicion. In this chapter I look with particular care at a definition which has become standard and perhaps even represents a general common-sense consensus. I will show how it predisposes the reader to adopting a methodological perspective akin to that of comparatism, which will be studied in Chapter 2. In the end I will offer my own definition, which is no less loaded, and akin to the ideological perspective studied in Chapter 6. Since this book is about other people's theories, it is not at all necessary to accept this definition either. Awareness of my definition does, however, allow the reader to understand why this book is shaped in the way that it is. I argue, namely, that theories of myth themselves to a large degree constitute mythologies. But much depends on what we mean by "myth." Let us begin with a couple of cautionary tales about definition. In a famous article reviewing various definitions of myth, Stith Thompson (1965) alludes to an East Indian folktale about three blind men. An elephant wandered down the road and stopped beside them. Sensing that some great beast had come into their midst, the blind men touched the elephant to discover its nature. The first blind man felt the trunk and said "It is like a water pipe." The second blind man felt the ear and said to the first "Clearly this beast is like a fan." The third felt the side of the animal and said "Idiots! You are both wrong. This beast is like a throne." Among the many definitions of myth the most common weakness is selectivity. There are many myths in the world: privileging myths of a certain type as "real" myths will shape the material to fit many a predetermined theory. For example, Jane Harrison, who argued that myths are connected with rites, urged that "it would be convenient if the use of the word myth could be confined to such sequences, such stories as are involved in rites" (1963b: 331), and Joseph Fontenrose formulates a similar view (1959: 434): "It is undeniable that myths are closely attached to rituals. In fact, if a story has not been associated with cult or ritual, explicitly or implicitly, it is better not to call it myth, but legend or folktale." Such definitions tempt circularity. If the theory says that all myths are based on ritual, then the definition excludes from study everything that is not ritual. After a preliminary sorting, the mythologist is pleased to observe that what all his myths have in common is that they are based on ritual. Second anecdote. There is an ancient story about Plato's school, which, like the later Greek philosophical schools, had a mania for defining things. Diogenes the Cynic attended one of the lectures at which Plato was applauded for defining "Man" as "an animal, biped and featherless." Diogenes left the room to return a little later, holding up a plucked chicken, announcing "Here is Plato's Man!" So Plato amended his definition, adding the words "having broad nails." If the first anecdote is a caution against saying too little, this is one against saying too much. Above all, one must beware of definitions that are mere compilations of empirical and often trivial distinctions (usually drawn, as in this case, to "pin down" a predetermined category concept). As with Plato's definition, every challenge and change in perspective will require further supplements. If Diogenes brought in a prairie dog the definition would have been expanded with "and not excessively hairy." But what if such empirical research is wrong in assuming that the objects are simply out there waiting to be collected and studied? Then such discriminations are not only trivial, they are arbitrary. At the very least, since myth is a human product, some account must be given of the attitudes and needs of the creators as well as the attitudes and needs of the observer. It may appear that the safest solution to the problem of definition is to see how the term "myth" is actually used. But by whom? Ordinary usage would apply the term to a story that is considered false ("a purely fictitious narrative," according to the Oxford English Dictionary); but most experts will say that in the society for which the myth is a myth its quality as myth usually depends upon its being received as true ("myth is `true' for those who use it," according to Leach 1982: 6). The quality of the object assumed by the observer is diametrically opposed to the quality assumed by the participant. From what has already been said, some attention will have to be paid to both of these responses. Let us examine a classic and much-cited attempt by an anthropologist to come up with a definition of myth based on the conceptualization of myth by the mythmakers themselves. The study is by William Bascom (1965), and is based on the recorded observations of folklorists and anthropologists studying myth in nonliterate and traditional societies. From this data he concludes that myths are "[verbal] prose narratives which, in the society in which they are told, are considered to be truthful accounts of what happened in the remote past" (1965: 4). By prose narrative, Bascom meant a form of oral recitation of a tale. Myths are apparently not myths when they are written down, but only when they are told by word of mouth. Narrative also means that it has some form of a story, with a beginning, middle, and end, and some form of continuity of theme, character, or narrative purpose. Prose narratives also include legends and folktales (even jokes and anecdotes, which Bascom thinks subtypes of legends and folktales). Legends are defined as "prose narratives which, like myths, are regarded as true by the narrator and his audience, but they are set in a period considered less remote, when the world was much as it is today." In opposition to myths and legends, "folktales are prose narratives which are regarded as fiction." The main criteria for all three, then, is that they be prose and orally delivered. Myths Legends Thought true + + World like today - + Folktales - + If thought true, then myth or legend. If thought untrue, then folktale. If true and referring to a remote time when the world was unlike it is today, then myth, but if true and referring to a less remote time when the world was more or less as it is today, then legend. This short definition is a good one, and we will make some use of it later, but I suspect it has some of the faults of the kind of partial vision which the tale of the blind men and the elephant cautions us against. Bascom himself feels this definition is too broad, and so gives a number of further more specific criteria which distinguish myth, legend, and folktale. These list a potentially unlimited series of empirical distinctions based on the observation of already predetermined categories - the sort of thing for which the anecdote about Diogenes and the chicken is a caution (Bascom 1965: 4-5): Myths are the embodiment of dogma; they are usually sacred; and they are often associated with theology and ritual. Their main characters are not usually human beings, but they often have human attributes; they are animals, deities, or culture heroes, whose actions are set in an earlier world such as the sky or underworld. Myths account for the origin of the world, of mankind, of death, or for characteristics of birds, animals, geographical features, and the phenomena of nature. They may recount the activities of the deities, their love affairs, their family relationships, their friendships and enmities, their victories and defeats. They may purport to "explain" details of ceremonial paraphernalia or ritual, or why tabus must be observed.... Legends are more often secular than sacred, and their principal characters are human. They tell of migrations, wars and victories, deeds of past heroes, chiefs, and kings, and the succession in ruling dynasties. In this they are often the counterpart in verbal tradition of written history, and they also include local tales of buried treasure, ghosts, fairies, and saints.  Folktales may be set in any time and any place, and in this sense they are almost timeless and placeless.... Fairies, ogres, and even deities may appear, but folktales usually recount the adventures of animal or human characters. For brevity's sake I have edited the number of these empirical distinctions, but the style is clear. How does Bascom arrive at these definitions? Let us take the true/false distinction which is the discriminator between myth and legend on the one hand and folktale on the other. For this Bascom points out that a very large number of cultures have the separate words "myth," "legend," and "folktale." For example, the Trobriand Islanders have Liliu (myths), Libwogwo (legends), and Kukwanebu (folktales). Yet even in cultures where there exist no explicit vocabulary distinctions, Bascom claims that implicit conceptual distinctions can be demonstrated by differences in the style and formal structure of the narratives. Some societies use conventional opening and closing formulae to distinguish folktales from myths, legends, and other forms of discourse. These verbal formulae may warn the listener that what is going to be said is not to be taken as truth. Ashanti narrators begin tales by saying "We do not really mean, we do not really mean..." and end with "This is my story, which I have related; if it be sweet, if it not be sweet; some you may take as true and the rest you may praise me for." In the same way a European folktale begins and ends with tags marking it out as fiction: "Once upon a time..." or "And they lived happily ever after" require the listener to receive the story as fiction. Even extratextual associated behavior can show the distinction. The different tales may be told at different times of day. The Marshall and Trobriand Islanders, the Fulani, and the Yoruba all have taboos against telling folktales before dark, but serious stories (myths and legends) may be told at any time of day. Should they tell a folktale during the day, the Fulani believe that they risk the loss of a close relative, and the Marshalls that the narrator's and listeners' heads will swell up as "big as a house." The Yoruba only fear that telling a folktale during the day will cause the narrator to lose his way in the story. Even the time of year appropriate to the tales can mark the distinction. The Trobriand restrict the telling of folktales to the month of November, between the planting and fishing seasons; legends may be told at any time, but especially during the period of trading voyages; myths are normally told during the preparation for rituals performed at different times during the year. There are also other kinds of constraints upon the narrators and listeners which are said to mark the distinction between the categories of tale. In Hawaii no listener may pass in front of the teller of a myth. Among the Inuit a storyteller must recite myths verbatim after a canonical oral text, but is allowed to display virtuosity by introducing variations into a folktale. Families in the Trobriand Islands regard folktales as private property, and fathers teach them to their sons in the privacy of the bedroom after the rest of the family has retired, but myths and legends are public. So what is wrong with Bascom's definition? It appears objective, based on the observation of the facts - and facts of reception: the concepts of the mythmakers and mythhearers themselves. But is it? If we consider the possibility that some of the data are distorted by the lens of the observer, by his intellectual milieu, his institutional allegiances, and his professional habits, we may be struck by a number of coincidences. Bascom was a modem Western anthropologist of a comparatist persuasion with a professional interest in folklore. Anthropologists in the 1960s were almost exclusively interested in nonliterate and "traditional" societies. Surprisingly, or not, Bascom finds that myths are oral traditional tales. Conveniently, myths can only be found in those places where, as a professional anthropologist, Bascom is uniquely equipped to look for them. As a specialist in an ancient culture, I confess that I have serious difficulties with Bascom's insistence on orality and prose, since nearly all ancient cultures have transmitted their mythology primarily in written form, verse, and visual icons. Any definition of myth that excludes the contents of the Iliad, the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, the Hittite Song of Ullikummi, or the Vedic scriptures of India to me seems unpersuasive. Notwithstanding minor discipline chauvinism, Bascom betrays his intellectual and cultural vantage point in fundamental ways. Folklorists have habitually distinguished between myth, legend, and folktale since the time of the first collections of folklore by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, who began to record traditional tales in Germany, and simultaneously created the science of folklore, in the early nineteenth century. Yet it is noteworthy that neither English nor any other European language traditionally made this distinction before this time. The English term "folktale" (inspired by the Grimms' conception of Marchen) betrays the origin of the concept in German nationalism, with its lionization of the German Volk, as does the English term "folklore" (cf. folksong, folk- custom, etc.). Given the historical contingency and, indeed, the very short life span even in European tongues of this tripartite classification of oral traditional narrative genres, it would be remarkable to find that this system of classification is otherwise a human universal. The comparatist in Bascom comes out in the style of the argument, but also the working assumptions that support that style. He introduces a proposition and backs it by listing illustrative examples from different cultural contexts. The more massive the lists and the more disparate the cultures the better, as if the argument could succeed by progressing phalanx upon phalanx and crushing the readers' resistance by the sheer weight and breadth of its examples; the diversity of the examples, as one hopscotches over history and the globe, predisposes the reader to believe that the propositions they illustrate must be universal or at least somehow normal. It is true that Bascom lists exceptions. In the matter of vocabulary distinctions, for example, he notes that the Ponapeans and Hawaiians of the Pacific, like the Dakota and Kiowa of North America, only distinguish "folktales" from "myth-legend." The Winnebago only distinguish two categories of narrative, both of which are true. Others, like the Wind River Shoshoni, have only one word for all narratives. The list of exceptions, too, is a stylistic feature of comparatist argument. It serves to give an impression of exhaustive thoroughness. Nearly always, however, the list of positive examples far exceeds the number of exceptions, and this is nearly always because the list of positive examples includes everything known to the writer and the list of exceptions includes only a few cases, selected from a potential list which could be at least as long as the first (he does not, for example, mention that Greek knows no distinction between myth, legend, and folktale). Rhetorically, exceptions are paraded, like freaks in a circus, to prove a general rule. But one cannot begin an argument by listing all the words for myth and legend when one has set out to establish the equality of these concepts in the first place. In casting his net far and wide to produce a definition which will suit all cultures or at least all known myth-producing cultures, Bascom ends up tangled in his own cultural assumptions. In applying a wide variety of different criteria, an anthropologist may succeed in forcing the distinctions made by other cultures into familiar pigeonholes, but when one empties one of these pigeonholes and compares the contents one with another, the genre-concepts labeled "myth" differ radically from one another in shape and size. And even when you look at some of the specific criteria used, you begin to wonder whether the concepts anthropologists translate as "true" or "sacred" really mean the same thing to a Trobriand Islander, a Winnebago, and a nineteenth-century German. It is very unlikely that a mythmaker would share the modern Westerner's true/false distinction. There are cultures (e.g., the Winnebago, according to Bascom) that only know true narratives. Our own concept of false narrative depends on our concept of true account, and the opposition false/ true narrative is shaped by such other oppositions as myth/science, legend/ history, myth or legend/literature. Westerners invented the concepts of science, history, and literature partly to distinguish our own cultural thought and expression from that of mythmaking societies. How, then, could these distinctions be the same for us and them? Myth-producing societies are excluded from knowing these distinctions by the comparatist's own definition. The problem of the equatability of concepts across cultures is one too rarely confronted by comparatists. In its classic formulation the method assumes that all myth-producing cultures are simple and primitive, closer to the common stock, as yet undifferentiated, and hence have a good deal in common. It is very possible, however, that all cultures, even the ones we regard as basic, have very little in common, so that in the end any definition of myth based on real consensus will be so dilute as to be uninformative, or will have to exclude some kinds of myth or the myths of some cultures in order to make more interesting statements.  Bascom's definition ends up telling us at least as much about Bascom as it does about myths. He is a comparatist and an empiricist and, as such, he displays an essentialist bias toward categorization. The essentialist assumes that categories exist in the mind because the objects placed in these categories all have a certain number of traits in common, and that the art of definition simply consists in detecting what all members of a given category share. But concept categories do not work this way; if they did, defining myth would hardly be a problem. As it is, "myth" does not lend itself to a clear definition of any sort and particularly not one based on form or content. But this claim introduces two problems which are best kept apart. One is the problem of understanding cultural categories. The other is the problem of using formal or content criteria for a definition of myth. Let us look at these separately in turn. We could attempt to impose a rigid "scientific" definition upon "myth," listing a number of essential constitutive characteristics, such as "related to ritual" or "the main characters must be gods." Any story which did not meet these criteria could then be called "legend," "folktale," "anecdote," or whatever. But it is an arbitrary and Procrustean method of dealing with the problem. It is also out of line with much current thinking about the way verbal and conceptual categories work. A more helpful model, which has been urged for genre concepts in literary studies generally, is a looser sort of classification system which goes back to the so-called theory of family resemblances, first formulated by Ludwig Wittgenstein. As an illustration of the difficulty of linguistic definitions in general, Wittgenstein chose the concept of "games" (1958, §§ 65-77): What are games? These phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all - but they are related to one another in many different ways.... We see a complex network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing.... I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc., etc., overlap and criss-cross in the same way. And I shall say: "Games" form a family. Certain activities are declared games by reason of their similarity with some other already existing member or members of the category "games." There is a certain element of the culturally arbitrary in placing new members into the category. Moreover, the category is defined by a set of dominant but ever-changing archetypes: for us video games, for our parents Monopoly, for ancient Greeks bashing quails on the head. We speak of something being a myth or legend because it reminds us in some way of stories that our culture has canonized as typical of that genre. For this reason it is impossible to insist, for cultural products at least, if not for natural products, on essential criteria. It is in any case impossible to find universals in myths, though there is no reason why we might not find meaningful cross-cultural patterns, and even norms, in the classification of narrative genres. There is, moreover, no reason why genre distinctions should be conscious or universal in order to be useful or meaningful to us. Even if we are sure that the culture we study made very different distinctions between tale-types, our own classification of myth, legend, and folktale might be useful to us, so long as we are aware of the fact that the distinction is ours. For all that, I think Bascom's study has positive value beyond demonstrating that the intellectual predispositions of the observer can become enshrined in an object of study by the constitutive act of definition. His observation of certain cross-cultural tendencies in the classification of narrative shows not where the boundaries of narrative genres are drawn, so much as why they are drawn, if they are drawn at all. His primary criterion stresses not content, but reception, and points to not an essentialist but a functional definition of myth. To say that in any culture some stories are felt to be in some sense more important or more serious than others is sufficiently banal to stand as a universal proposition. Bascom's data show that when distinctions between types of tales are drawn, they are drawn because different weight is attached to the tales. Though the meaning of true and untrue, sacred and secular, divine and human, will differ vastly from one culture to the next, the distinctions are distinctions of value and, if there is need, that distinction can be expressed in the language or behavior which accompanies the narration. Myth might be more usefully defined as a narrative which is considered socially important, and is told in such a way as to allow the entire social collective to share a sense of this importance; legend is less important or important for only part of that society; folktale is even less important. But precisely where to draw the lines between myth, legend, and folktale is necessarily relative, hazy, and variable. A focus on social importance can account for the gradations of contents or contexts found in myth, legend, and folklore. The fact that some stories are meant to be received as true is only a sign of their social importance. Hence the truth criteria. Gods are normally more important than heroes, heroes more important than ordinary men, and ordinary men more important than animals. Hence the gradations of character-types in tales. More important stories are surrounded by greater ceremony and surrounded by more taboos. Hence the rules about not passing in front of the narrator, or not claiming a myth as your personal property. But it is not just importance which lies behind the complex storygradations described by the anthropologists. That this importance is "social" also has consequences for the different forms these tales may take. The way we know something is of social importance is through use: if it is important a story will be repeated or alluded to frequently in social discourse. Many modern definitions insist that a myth or legend must be "a traditional tale." This can lead to all kinds of problems and artificial exclusions. Popular usage allows people or events to become "legends in their own time," and this need not be just a figure of speech. There can be myths about recent events, contemporary personalities, new inventions. To insist that a myth or legend be a traditional tale is to confuse a symptom of their function of transmitting something of collective importance for part of their essence. Myth is a function of social ideology - Bruce Lincoln (1999: xii) would define it as "ideology in narrative form" - and we should not insist on certain contents and contexts but rather use these as evidence for the existence of the mythic function.