New text from Aditya

Myth, Meaning, Interpretation

Aditya Malik

What makes a particular story a myth? What is the meaning of a myth? How do we interpret myths? As a genre, myth belongs to a set of narrative types that include legends, epics, folk-tales, fables, riddles and so on. Invariably though, in the common imagination, myth is contrasted with narratives that have a historical content. Myth and history are two extremes of a binary spectrum that underlies the analysis of Judeo-Christian textual traditions, particularly biblical scripture. The need for this distinction arises from a particular anxiety to ascertain the ‘truth’ behind textual claims. ‘Truth’ and ‘fact’ are made identical in this context. History deals with ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ in the sense of ‘what really happened’. Myth, on the other hand, deals with the opposite spectrum of everything that is imaginative and fantastical. Not all cultures, however, draw such a clear demarcation between myth, history, legend etc. The boundaries between ‘fact’, ‘history’ and ‘imagination’ are blurred. In India, for example, the great Sanskrit epic called the Mahabharata is classified as belonging to the narrative genre of ‘itihasa’ which means ‘that which took place’. The epic, which is several times the length of the Greek Iliad and Odyssey put together, would, from a western perspective, be classified as myth or legend because of its predominantly imaginative fabric. But in the Indian context it is clearly ‘history’ as ‘that which took place’.

To call one story a myth and another history, therefore also involves the politics of labelling and representation. Who has the authority to claim this distinction when we examine and read narratives? Who has the authority to label narratives of other cultures as myth, history, legend or epic? For the sake of argument, even if we continue with the separation between myth and history, it is still not clear what myth is. Is there a specific quality to a story that makes it a myth? Do myths have a particular structure to them? Clearly, when we read certain stories we feel ourselves in the presence of something that has great depth and complexity. We feel convinced that these stories could not have been composed by a single individual or author, they seem to transcend individual authorship, speaking to a shared, collective experience of being human. These stories express our deepest dilemmas and fascinations through characters and images that we feel belong to us on some deeper level. From one perspective these stories need no interpretation – they communicate in a direct manner about the experience of being human that cannot or does not get articulated in our everyday lives. The stories that we call myths have the ability to touch us in deep ways by expressing something that accompanies us in our daily lives as a constant unarticulated, unspoken, almost silent presence. And, yet, from a scholarly perspective there is a need to understand and interpret those stories we call myths.

Claude Levi-Strauss approaches this question by posing a structural analysis to myth (Structural Anthropology, 1958). Myths according to Levi-Strauss can be laid out and understood in terms of sets of binary oppositions, for example, god-human, hunting-agriculture, wilderness-settlement, female-male, life-death, cold-hot etc. These binaries are embedded, so to speak, within the story and characters of a myth and transcend the particular context of a community, tribe or society. Levi-Strauss takes pains to understand myths on their own terms through their underlying structure rather than in sociological or psychological terms while looking for sets of universals that go beyond specific cultural or historical contexts. In other words, he is interested in a non-contextual interpretation to myth rather than looking at the meaning myths gain by being performed, for example, in rituals or by being told and transmitted in other cultural and social contexts within a particular community. Although his approach to myth is structural, Levi-Strauss develops the idea of the bricolage and bricoleur as a way of understanding how myths are created and recreated (The Savage Mind, 1962). A bricolage is an assembly of seemingly discontinuous, and, therefore, unstructured objects that are put together in an improvised but meaningful way. Someone who has the ability to put different objects into a coherent whole is a bricoleur. Levi-Strauss argues that ‘myth-makers’ are bricoleurs putting together disparate bits of meaning into a narrative whole that then provides a structure to a myth. Thus while the assembly of myth follows an improvisational sequence as opposed to a planned model, a particular myth itself coheres around a structure or pattern that is given by binary pairs.

The performance of myths and their shifting historical situatedness raises the important question of meaning and interpretation. In opposition to Levi-Strauss’s structural view that has the potential to ‘freeze’ the meaning of a myth, is the view that myth emerges in specific historical and social situations that allow its meaning to alter and transform. Older layers of meaning are, however, not lost in the new interpretation. As Hans-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method, 1960), in his critically influential work on hermeneutics points out, there is a persistence of meaning through time by a process of what he calls ‘historically effected consciousness’ (‘wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein’). New readings of a text do not completely erase preceding interpretations of a text. New interpretations are, in fact, built on preceding ones. The meaning of a myth or for that matter other texts and narratives are embedded in layers or spirals of interpretation that move up and down through a funnel of time and place or Zeitgeist. Perhaps myths resist being pinned down precisely because of their tremendous depth and complexity, allowing for ever-expanding configurations of meaning and interpretation.