Thursday, January 7, 2010

MYTH & memory

Violence Unveiled by Gil Bailie: Chapter 2 starting on page 33.

MYTH
When the chorus in Agamemnon says, “The rest I did not see, nor do I speak of it,” it virtually defines myth. The root of the Greek word for myth, muthos, is mu, which means to close or keep secret. Muo means to close one’s eyes or mouth, to mute the voice or to remain mute. Myth remembers discretely and selectively. Myth closes its eyes to certain events and closes its mouth. The agencies for the muting and transmuting of the remembered past are the Muses, and the term muse is derived from the same root as the word myth. In Greek mythology the Muses are the daughters of Memory (Mnemosyne). The Muses make it possible to remember the past fondly or heroically, but they do so with fog filters. (The Latin verb mutare means to change.) The Muses bring into being music and museums, but not, in the first instance, for purely aesthetic or merely archival purposes. The cultural archive and anthems that the Muses preserve represent the mythological remembrance of things past. The poet Hesiod says of the Muses that “they are all of one mind.” As widely varying as the Muses’ artistic interests may be, beneath this variety, and behind it, lies something about which they are “all of one mind.” The Muses inspire poetry, epic, sacred music, tragedy, comedy, erotic verse, and history, but all these are permutations of the past events which, if Hesiod is to be trusted, they memorialize with one purpose. That purpose is buried in the etymology of their name. The Muses make culture possible by providing it with its myth — an enchanting story of its founding violence. But most myths contain at least faint traces of the violence they otherwise mask. By paying more careful attention to these traces, things mythologically remembered can be recollected with greater clarity.
In the New Testament, mythos is juxtaposed both to Logos — the revelation of that about which myth refuses to speak — and to aletheia — the Greek word for truth. Aletheia comes from the root, letho, which is the verb “to forget.” The prefix a is the negative. The literal meaning, then, of the Greek word for truth, aletheia, is “to stop forgetting.” It is etymologically the opposite of myth. The gospels tell of a perfectly typical story of victimization with astonishing insight into the role religious zeal and mob psychology played in it. Most importantly, and contrary to all myth, the story is told from the point of view of the victim and not that of the righteous community of persecutors. Thus the passion story breaks decisively with the silence and circumspection of the mythological thought. The Gospel truth gradually makes it impossible for us to keep forgetting what myth exists to help us forget. It thereby sets up a struggle between the impulse to sacralize, justify, or romanticize the violence that generates and regenerates conventional culture and the impulse to reveal that violence and strip away its mythic justifications. Fundamentally, human history is a struggle between myth and Gospel. Literature, as it has developed in Western culture, is neither myth (muthos) nor truth (aletheia), it is the textual arena in which the two struggle for the upper hand. What myth conceals, what literature alternately conceals and reveals, and what the Gospel decisively reveals are the social dynamics that produce what Girard calls “the essential complicity between violence and human culture.”
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Myth — and the primitive religious cosmology it narrates — mutes the victim’s voice. It fills the eyes and nose with incense, and the ears with incantations. When the myth is firmly in place, even those closest to the victims, the ones most likely to resist the myth’s intoxications, concur in the ritual. While the myth holds sway, those under its spell are unwilling or unable to recognize what they are doing. “The rest I did not see,” they say, “nor do I speak of it.” In return for making conventional culture possible, myth silences the victim’s voice and veils the victim’s face. In his book on crowd behavior, for example, Gustave Le Bon says this of the Jacobin ideologues of the French Revolution:
Dogmatic and logical to a man, and their brains full of vague generalities, they busied themselves with the application of fixed principles without concerning themselves with events. It has been said of them, with reason, that they went through the Revolution without witnessing it.

This is what myth and the associated structures of what Girard calls the primitive sacred do. They make it possible to participate in, observe, or recollect certain violent events without having to actually witness them in any morally significant sense.

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