Three worthies of the last century — Dr. Carl Jung, Professor Joseph Campbell, and Mr. Frodo Baggins (erstwhile of the Shire) — have done much to skew our reception of myth, and in so doing have obscured its vibrant afterlife in modern culture. They have packaged myth respectively as (1) the autonomous, oracular voice of the Self, “the primordial language natural to the psychic processes … a projection from the unconscious and not a conscious invention at all” (ACU 160); (2) an ancient self-help manual guided by a new-agey pursuit of one’s own “bliss”; and (3) a high-budget, stunningly naïve Manichaean romance. Each in his way has thereby (maybe unwittingly) shilled for myth, representing myth just as myth would have itself presented: as a discourse of essences, a noncontingent discourse, a discourse whose universality confirms its status as natural discourse and thus guarantees its unquestionable truth at the same time as it insists on unquestioning allegiance. For our three worthies, myth is a natural language whose purity of content and spontaneity are indices of a mode of expression that predates any compromised, cultural or political involvement.
A Barthian approach to myth — an approach guided by historical memory, semiotics, and skepticism (against which myth may be defenseless) — reminds us that myth’s ‘naturalness’ is a rhetorical device. Myth as discourse amounts to an appropriation of signs to serve as vehicles for implicit, second-order significations that thereby pass as ‘given’ or ‘natural,’ as in the packaging of consumer products and political speech. A Barthian approach also reveals how myth allows contingent values to graft themselves parasitically into the life of ordinary things, animating their shells, appropriating their forms to masquerade as natural creatures too. A peek inside Pandora’s jar and a few popular magazines will illustrate that point.
About the presenterKeith Dickson
Keith Dickson is Professor of Classics at Purdue University and concurrently Professor of Western Culture at Beijing Capital Normal University. He has authored books on Greek epic and ancient medicine, along with articles on comparative mythology and the semiotics of myth, ancient magic, comparative Greek and Near Eastern epic, ancient choral poetry, and Greco-Roman medicine.