Myth seems to rely heavily on its context and indeed Barthes says that “the political insignificance of the [lion] myth comes from its situation” (145). Can myth only exist and be effective in the closed system of a group with a common history? Barthes seems to express that mythic addresses are effective because they appeal to the collective conscious of a group. Still, even different groups within nations might view history differently. In relying on the abstractness of myth to naturalize a concept, doesn’t the speaker run the risk of having the myth misinterpreted? Can that be prevented? Furthermore, the myth would seem to take a different meaning as time passed and the understanding that a myth is in fact a myth would further change its meaning. Professor Chung raised the question in lecture: do mythic addresses always meet their mark? I would answer no, as it seems inevitable that individuals outside the target audience would encounter and misinterpret the myth or that as time passed the myth would take a different, unintended meaning. Similar to Saussure’s comment that “as soon as [language] fulfils its purpose and becomes the property of the community, it is no longer under control (76), so to does the creator of a myth lose control of that myth’s meaning once it is in the public domain. It is clearly unintended and contrary to the aim of the myth, but it is inevitable. Myth then seems to run into the problem of having to rely on context and yet having that context ultimately allow the myth to be misinterpreted.
1 comment:
Tracy,
I think you pose an interesting question, because you are right, just like Saussure states that the individual loses control over a specific signal if it becomes taken into the community’s collective consciousness of the language, it seems too that myth would be subject to alteration by different communities/audiences.
Perhaps the difference is that the very power of the myth as Barthes describes it is that it is not recognized as such; it is accepted as truth or nature, thus robbing the community of the knowledge of the very existence of the myth. This is what makes the myth so “crippling,” as Isabel puts it, because how can one change something one isn’t even aware of?
Were the general public conscious of the fact that such a myth is actually a distortion of the truth, then Michael’s point would be completely valid – the “oppressed” would have as much control as those in power, as they could simply counteract that myth with their own recreation thereof.
It seems, thus, that it is basically inescapable to be influenced by myth, and it seems that the idea of 1st order language, as kishdawg brought up, is also flawed, because it does seem inevitable that in the process of communication, it, too, would be distorted and thus lose its honesty, even if it were without our knowledge. As Barthes states on page 144, there are “strong myths and weak myths,” and perhaps we have to settle simply on trying to counteract the strongest mistruths and accept the fact that weak myths will always be a reality in terms of our communication. Otherwise, wouldn’t language be only exactly what Saussure denies it to be in the very first sentence of his “General Principles” – a naming-process?
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