Theorizing About Myth. - book review

Theorizing About Myth. By Robert A. Segal. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. 178 pp. 45.00 [pounds sterling]/$50.00 (hbk), 16.00 [pounds sterling]/$16.95 (pbk). ISBN 1-55849-194-5 (hbk), 1-55849-191-0 (pbk)

The Modern Construction of Myth. By Andrew Von Hendy. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002. 386 pp. $39.95/30.50 [pounds sterling] (hbk). ISBN 1-800-842-6796

The ten essays in Professor Segal's volume on mythology were written over the past fifteen years in order to explore what he calls the "distinctiveness" of many of the leading theories of myth. Several of these essays first appeared as critical introductions to recent editions of the work of influential writers on mythology such as Carl Jung and Jessie Weston. The essays are presented in chronological order; not as they were written, but as they reflect the development of modern mythological theory from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. While each of the essays can, and originally did, stand alone, the history of modern thinking on the subject links the entire series. The main theories discussed are those of Edward Tylor, William Robertson Smith, James Frazer, the neo-Frazerians Jessie Weston and Lord Raglan, Jane Harrison, S. H. Hooke, Mircea Eliade, Rudolf Bultmann, Hans Jonas, Sigmund Freud and his disciples Otto Rank and Bruno Bettelheim, Carl Jung, Claude Levi-Strauss, Joseph Campbell and Hans Blumenberg. As these essays are historical and comparative in their approach, and Professor Segal is well up on his subject, so there is also a splendid cast of supporting characters, among them Bronislaw Malinowski, Rene Girard, Walter Burkert, and Marcel Detienne.

The breadth of material covered is impressive and, while the author makes it clear that these essays are not intended to offer a comprehensive critique on any of the theories, the depth with which he treats material is impressive as well. It is also a very approachable introduction to the subject, although the essays assume that readers will be familiar with the players and the general context in which they developed their theories. Professor Segal considers, by turns, the attitudes to the origin, function and significance of myth and stresses, on several occasions, that interest in myth is always linked to a wider network of cultural, psychological and religious concerns. Not the least of the strengths here is that the author recognises the breadth of his subject, but manages to keep the material under control, which makes this book an excellent starting point for the study of myth.

A number of essays are especially relevant for folklore studies. The chapter on Tylor, for example, is an excellent summary of Tylor's theory taken as a whole, not just the savage survival aspect with which folklore studies is so often concerned. Two chapters trace the development of the myth-ritual theory as set forth by William Robertson Smith and as developed, most famously, by Frazer, furthered in the work of A. M. Hocart, E. O. James and Clyde Kluckhohn and applied to Arthurian Grail literature by Jessie Weston. In the chapters on Jung's attitude to mythology and on the romantic values that lie at the heart of Joseph Campbell's work, Segal gives readers a balanced, if not entirely supportive, perspective on their work. In fact, all the essays have something to offer folklorists, as they do to anyone interested in the history of myth scholarship.

Von Hendy's book covers much the same ground as Segal's collected essays: namely the development of mythic theories. However, this is an integrated history of myth theory and has a wider scope, covering literature and political thinking, religion and philosophy, as well as social scientific aspects like anthropology, psychology and folklore. Two things are immediately striking about the work. It is not, despite its title, a deconstruction of myth, but rather an examination of how ideas about myth developed from the late eighteenth century until the present, and it is extremely well organised and easy to follow. In the vast field of mythic theory, Von Hendy identifies four categories, in effect definitions of myth. These are the romantic view of myth as transcendental truth, Grimm's "folkloristic" view of myth as ancient wisdom, Marx's ideological attitude to myth as untruth and Nietzsche's "constitutive" view of myth as foundation belief. These taxonomic categories inform and organise his material and provide reference points for analysis. The first chapter deals with the emergence of myth as a modern concept and how it superseded the earlier interest in allegory. There are excellent sections on Bernard Fontenelle and Giambattista Vico. The second chapter deals with the romantic provenance of mythic thought and how this has affected disciplines such as classics and religious studies, as well as the effect of romanticism on popular modern mythographers such as Eliade and Campbell. Considerable emphasis is placed on the influence of romantic myth on literary culture especially in the nineteenth century, but Von Hendy also looks at new interpretations of myth in the work of philosophers such as Marx, Engels and Nietzsche. The fourth chapter, "Myth as an Aspect of Primitive Religion," is one of several relevant to folklore studies. It charts the rise of social sciences and the interest in small-scale societies (i.e. primitives remote in space and time) that scholars connected with the Folklore Society did so much to foster. Interestingly, Von Hendy brings this debate full-circle in chapters nine to eleven with a detailed consideration of "folkloristic myth" in social studies and classical studies throughout the twentieth century. Chapters five to eight look at the emergence of structural and expressive theories of myth at the turn of the century within the field of depth psychology and modernist literary criticism. The final two chapters, "Myth and Ideology" and "Myth as Necessary Fiction," contain names that one would expect to find in a book entitled the "construction of myth": writers like Sorel, Mannheim, Derrida, Lacan and Barthes, the Frankfurt School and Blumenberg. The plethora of thinkers covered in the last two chapters underlines a point made by Von Hendy in his concluding remarks; namely, the intense interest in myth in the early part of the twentieth century after a gradual rise to prominence in the preceding two centuries.