Abstract
Cultural stereotypes are often explained with recourse to Roland Barthes’ structuralist concept of myth as expounded in his Mythologies (1958). For Barthes, myth is a sign system that repeats the structure of language on a secondary level of signification. Just as a (linguistic) sign — in Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist theory of the sign which Barthes draws on — is made up of a signifier and a signified, myths are made up of signs as the signifiers on the level of myth, and ‘concepts’, or cultural connotations as the signified on the level of myth. In combination, the sign and the ‘concept’ create what Barthes calls the ‘signification’ of the ‘myth of the everyday’. People can look at a sign, for example, a Latin sentence in a grammar class, the photograph of a black soldier saluting the French flag on the cover of the magazine Paris Match, to mention just two of Barthes’ examples, and subconsciously take in the wider political implications that the sign carries without actually denoting them — like medicine on a sugarlump. If, after looking at the neat young black soldier saluting the flag, people have a half-conscious idea that the French Empire is a good thing after all, the myth of the everyday has done its work. The trajectory of this process, which justifies the usage of a secularized concept of myth, is a move from history to nature, a naturalization of ideological formations; it is the task of the cultural critic to unravel these myths and expose their political content.
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Notes
Incidentally, this notion of myth best known through Barthes is far from anachronistic; in fact it had already been developed by William Empson in his influential study Some Versions of Pastoral (1935). Thinking about depictions of ‘the Worker’ in the 1930s in the context of ‘plebeian literature’, he sees him as a ‘mythical cult-figure’, not only in ‘proletarian propaganda’, but also in a conservative discourse. Empson analyses the government’s use of an image of a Cockney type worker as a political symbol which creates an ‘obscure magical feeling’. See William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral [1935] (London: Hogarth, 1986), 15–16.
Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-End: a Social History of Great Britain 1918–1939 (London: Faber, 1940), 198.
Ivan Strenski, Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History: Cassirer, Eliade, Lévi-Strauss and Malinowski (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), 1.
Robert Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 45. Ackerman refers to Edward Burnett Tylor, whose Primitive Culture appeared in 1871 and William Robertson Smith who studied Semitic antiquity.
See Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912),
with Murray’s ‘Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy’, Ancient Art and Ritual (London: Williams & Norgate, 1914);
Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912),
Euripides and His Age (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1913), ‘Hamlet and Orestes’ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1914), Francis Macdonald Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy (London: Arnold, 1912),
The Origin of Attic Comedy (London: Arnold, 1914); Arthur Bernard Cook, Zeus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914).
Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920)
represents the first application of the method to more recent material, namely the Grail legend. For an introduction to the topic see Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School (2002).
Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School (2002), 101.
Steven F. Walker, Jung and the Jungians on Myth (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1995),
See also Robert H. Hopcke, A Guided Tour of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Boston: Shambhala, 1989)
and Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Jung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Important archetypal images are Ego, Shadow, Persona, Anima/Animus, Self, Mother, Father, Puer/Divine child (puer aeternus), Kore/Maiden, Hero, Wise Old Man, Trickster.
Walker, Jung and the Jungians on Myth (1995), 19.
Adams quotes James Hillman, Revisioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), xi.
Right up until World War Two, at least in intellectual circles, there had been regular and lively exchange between European thinkers and artists. As Aleida Assmann notes, T. S. Eliot thought back in 1947 to the Criterion-years and the subsequent breakup of European exchange. ‘The blight fell first upon our friends in Italy. And after 1933 contributions from Germany became more and more difficult to find. Some of our friends died; some disappeared; some merely became silent. Some went abroad, cut off from their own cultural roots. […] And, from much of the German writing that I saw in the 30’s, by authors previously unknown to me, I formed the opinion that the newer German writers had less and less to say to Europe[.]’ T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber, 1948),
Appendix: The Unity of European Culture, 116f., quoted from Aleida Assmann, Arbeit am nationalen Gedächtnis: Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Bildungsidee (Frankfurt: Campus, 1993), 96. This European dialogue has been taken up again and should be continued.
Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School (2002), 18.
Jennifer Shacker, National Dreams: the Remaking of Fairy-Tales in Nineteenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 2–3.
Strenski, Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History (1987), 51–2.
Petteri Pietikäinen, C. G. Jung and the Psychology of Symbolic Forms (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1999), 166–7.
Alex Potts, ‘“.Constable Country” between the Wars’, in: Samuel (ed.), Patriotism (1989),
Vol. III: 160–86; 173. Potts quotes Christopher Hussey, The Fairy Land of England (London: Country Life, 1924), 80.
H. V. Morton, In Search of England [1927] ed. and introd. by Simon Jenkins and with illustrations by Peter Bailey (London: The Folio Society, 2002), 299.
Ebbatson, An Imaginary England (2005), 1.
Ebbatson quotes Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: the Last Four Years (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), 154.
Matless, Landscape and Englishness (1998), 105.
On the philosophy and life of Ernst Cassirer see Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton (eds), Philosophy and History: Essays presented to Ernst Cassirer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936);
Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: a Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942);
Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (Evanston: The Library of Living Philosophers, 1949);
Toni Cassirer, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981);
Michael John Krois, Cassirer — Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987);
Strenski, Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History; H. J. Braun, H. Holzhey and E. W. Orth (eds), Über Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988);
Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989);
Heinz Paetzold, Die Realität der Symbolischen Formen. Die Kulturphilosophie Ernst Cassirers im Kontext (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994);
Heinz Paetzold, Ernst Cassirer — von Marburg nach New York: eine philosophische Biographie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995);
William Schultz, Cassirer and Langer on Myth (New York and London: Garland, 2000).
Ernst Cassirer, ‘Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften’, in: Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, ed. Fritz Saxl, Vorträge 1921–22, I (Leipzig: Teubner, 1923),
11–39; 15, my translation. See also Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms [subsequently PSF], Vol. I: Language, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953),
107; original Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen [subsequently Philosophie], Vol. I, Die Sprache [1923] (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956), 43.
For a later summary of the philosophy of symbolic forms, see Cassirer, An Essay on Man: an Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944).
For a helpful account of Warburg’s work see Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004).
Cassirer, PSF, Vol II, Mythical Thought (1955), 64.
Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), 3.
For a critique of Cassirer’s concept of myth as expounded in this book, see Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. with an introduction by Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1985). Original: Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979).
Potts, “Constable Country”’, 180. Potts quotes Herbert Read (ed.), Unitl: the Modern Movement in English Painting, Architecture and Sculpture (1934).
See also Sam Smiles, ‘Equivalents for the Megaliths: Prehistory and English Culture, 1920–50’, in: Corbett, Holt and Russell (eds), The Geographies of Englishness (2002), 199–223.
Grimble, Landscape, Writing and the ‘Condition of England’ (2004), 13.
Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove, ‘Introduction: Iconography and Landscape’, in: Cosgrove and Daniels (eds), The Iconography of Landscape (1988), 1–10;
In the same volume, Brian Osborne quotes a classic study by Donald Meinig, who states that ‘[e]very mature nation has its symbolic landscapes. They are part of the iconography of nationhood, part of the shared ideas and memories and feelings which bind a people together.’ See D. W. Meinig, ‘Symbolic Landscapes: Some Idealizations of American Communities’, in: Donald William Meinig (ed.), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 164,
quoted from Brian S. Osborne, ‘The Iconography of Nationhood in Canadian Art’, in: Cosgrove and Daniels (eds), The Iconography of Landscape (1988), 162–78; 162.
Sir Ernest Barker (ed.), The Character of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), v. The volume treats ‘Land and People’, ‘The Individual and the Community’, ‘Religion’, ‘Government’, ‘Law’, ‘The Organization of Industry’, ‘The Human Side of Industry’, ‘Commerce and Finance’, ‘Childhood and Education’, ‘Universities and Scholarship’, ‘Science’, ‘The English Language’, ‘Literature’, ‘Thought’, ‘Humour’, ‘The Press’, ‘The Visual Arts’, ‘The Making of Books’, ‘Music’ ‘Outdoor Life’, ‘Town Life’, ‘Recreation and Games’, ‘Homes and Habits’, ‘The Englishman Abroad’, ‘England and the Sea’, ‘The English at War’ and ‘An Attempt at Perspective’.
Jacquetta and Christopher Hawkes, ‘Land and People’, in: Barker (ed.), The Character of England (1947), 1–28; 3.
Sir Ernest Barker, ‘An Attempt at Perspective’, in: Barker (ed.), The Character of England (1947), 550–75; 553. Subsequent page numbers will be given in the main text.
The symbolic form of Englishness was also the centrepiece of the ‘Projection of Britain’ to postwar Germany. On British cultural politics in Germany after the war see Gabriele Clemens’ important study Britische Kulturpolitik in Deutschland 1945–1949 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1997).
Jacquetta Hawkes, A Land (London: The Cresset Press, 1951), 1. Further page numbers will be given in the main text.
William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ [1798], in: William Wordsworth, The Oxford Authors, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 131–5, 1.
82; 106–10. Hawkes quotes line 81. For an analysis of the specific relation between perception, memory and creation in Wordsworth’s work, see Aleida Assmann, ‘Wordsworth und die Wunde der Zeit’, in: A. Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (München: Beck, 1999), 89–113.
See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: the Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’ [1922], in: Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), 49–74; 64.
E. M. Forster, Howard’s End [1910] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 165.
See Taylor, A Dream of England (1994), for a discussion of tourism and the development of photography.
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© 2010 Ina Habermann
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Habermann, I. (2010). Myth: Ideologies, Symbolic Forms and the ‘Mythical Present’. In: Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277496_2
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