Does History fulfil today the social function of identity creation which
in the past was accomplished by mythology (religious mythology included), as
Lévi-Strauss[1]
thought? If we observe the relationship between political identity and literary
and artistic myths of the 19th Century in Europe we obtain a few
relevant examples to give an answer to this question. In the 19th
Century, with the upsurge of European Nationalisms, history covered to a great
extent the gap left by Christian mythology after its collapse due to the
subsequent development of positive science and the triumph of the Industrial
Revolution. The revitalization of the great national poems and the writing of
new ones along the 19th Century in most of Europe, shows a
relatively recent example of exclusively endomorphic mythologization, in which
new national identities are invented through a process of linguistic fusion of
elements of pre-Christian mythology with historical science. We observe how
communities without national political identity and without territory, like
Finland, resort to the compilation of popular legends to create with them myths
about the origins, which are inserted without solution of continuity inside the
historical thinking of the epoch, and are manipulated with political ends. This
mythology, as it happens in the case of Lönnrot’s Kalevala, did not need to be read or understood in order to perform
its function as original referent to the community. The Kalevala, written in a Karelian dialect which was not understood by
the majority of Finns, functioned as a symbol of mythological identity stronger
than Bible itself, whose myths,
linked to the Middle East, were of little use to construct a different identity
to the Swedish or the Russian. In a Christian Europe, the specific difference in
national identities could only be given by pre-Christian myths, and for these
to have ontoepistemological credibility and be something more than simple tales
of barbaric hoaxes, it was necessary that a philosophy of mythology such as the
Schellingian, would elevate them to signs of a wider meta-historical scope.
Even so, as the remains of these mythologies were found buried into popular
culture, where they had survived thanks to a Christianism prone to syncretism
by way of the saints’ figures, it was necessary to create a new concept of
community, of a trans-political content, applicable to the idealized primitive
communities from which the myths purportedly were derived as well as to the
medieval and modern communities, a concept that could function as the kernel of
an historical identity that, in fact, was weakly based on a common literature
or a political union.
The problem of Kalevala’s language, in another
dimension, was applicable to Germanic myths, because the further the regression
in time the bigger the discontinuity of the language, not to mention the
problems which the complete disappearance of literature itself from an
historical given moment supposed, in which, nonetheless, the group’s identity was
persistently maintained based on principles of metaphysical essentiality of the
race. German identity, as the Finnish, appealed to myths, and consequently to
language, to the basic way of thinking of a human group which allegedly had
maintained a continuity of identity, even though to the German the Christian
identity and Latin were superimposed. Such kernel of identity, theoretically facilitated
by Hegel’s concept of people (Volk), grounded
in turn on that of the absolute Geist,[2] finds
a simpler and more usable definition for political praxis in the variation that
Wagner makes of it. Starting from the substantiality that the Hegelian absolute
spirit bestows to the human community, Wagner will hypostatize a Germanic linguistic
community which has lived on under different historical configurations
maintaining an essential identity, designed by the concept of Volk. The Volk is a human group that acts through a common collective desire
whose actions are always right and appropriate to the necessity of the moment,
a group to whom it corresponds the authorship of myths, or more precisely, of
the substance out of which the individual poet, who communions with the Volk, will
create the myths.[3]
Popular myths then express eternal truths -Wagner[4] will say-
a principle which is generally assumed by all the poets and musicians that work
with Volk elements in the European 19th
Century to fuse myth, history and nation, be it in the mystical chants of
mother Russia of Mussorski’s Boris Godunov, or in the Wagnerian sacramental
dramas where the poet presents the myth as a way of knowing through feeling, a
superior form of knowledge than that of historical knowledge.[5] From
this approach it is derived that history should retreat in the face of the immediate truth that the myth entails,
an epistemology of emotion in which the myth provides history with the elements
that this one lacks in order to be a complete mythology, since the popular tale
is also included into an operatic ritual. In a first step, mythology becomes
history, it is retrieved from the popular heritage in a process of reinvention,
to be inserted in the historical chain as original link, not in an absolute
sense, but as the origin of an specific people, to later, mythologize history
by way of endomorphic representations of these myths about the origin,
projected over historical time, and especially, over the present. Bourgeois art
takes charge of carrying out the process with the historical novel, as well as through
opera and theatre.[6]
The mythologization of
history and the historization of myth is not, however, a new process of 19th
Century nationalisms. Since the beginnings of theatre in Athens, drama had
worked as a ritual in which the identity of the city was mythologized and
recreated in a more or less critical manner, dealing with stories of a distant
past.[7]
Shakespearian theatre itself mythologizes in its time the story of the kings of
England inventing the Elizabethan identity, no less than it will be done later
by the theatre of the Maoist revolution in China with the revolutionary dramas,
whose characters are revolutionary soldiers, peasants and workers.[8] That
which is characteristic of the European 19th Century are the processes
of refounding the identity for those countries that already have one, and of creating
a new one for those which have not yet achieved it, that may fit into the new
political framework defined by colonialism. Therefore, for instance, Tennyson
reuses the Arthurian myths in England as a whole purported symbol of both
British tradition and the human epic. With a Christianism of pantheistic trait -synthesizing
Celtic and Roman traditions- Tennyson proposes Arthur as the symbol of the
human soul in its vital fight to maintain ethical ideals and aspirations, with
an alleged universal validity.[9] The
poems of Tennyson’s Arthurian cycle, which enjoyed a great diffusion and
prestige in the aristocratic and bourgeois society of Great Britain, more than
an allegory of the human being, as its author intends, show the idealization
that Britain’s ruling class had of itself as an elite which directs the fate of
the world, a self-legitimation of their right to dominate based on the belief
that their moral values are the ideal values of the whole humanity. In Great
Britain, the concept of Volk is
unthinkable, since it contradicts the political structure of the nation itself,
formed by several people that could claim their own separate identity.
Without the conceptual
tapestry of German idealism, the construction of the concept of Volk (or an equivalent one) is not such
a simple thing, as it is proven by the difficulties that the formation of the
Irish identity has had. As it was seen in the performances of the Irish national
theatre founded at the beginning of the 20th Century,[10] it
was easier to elaborate a magical identity from old popular legends than to
establish a modern one with differential traits, over which, to begin with,
there was not any consensus beyond a shared emotion of difference in relation
to the English. And it was even more
complicated to establish a relation of continuity between the old myths and the
modern identity. Yeats had done it by linking the myths of the Faeries to rural Ireland, which in an
industrial moment as the beginnings of the 20th Century it implied
the proposal of a political pathway with a difficult exit.[11]
The mythopoetics of European national identities in
the 20th Century, just as we observe in these examples, justifies
Leví-Strauss’ affirmation that history has inherited the social functions of
myths, and it shows something more: that in the reflective process of
historicity, the relationship between myth and vital experience is more complex than
the one which distinguishes between history as the sphere of the real and myth
as the sphere of the imaginary.
(This is a frgament of Chapter 3.2 Historical Consciousness and Mythologization. Part I of Mythopoetics. p.p.98-102 of the Spanish Edition)
[1] See Claude Lévi-Strauss. When Myth
Becomes History. In Myth and Meaning.
Routledge. London and New York 2009. p.36.
[2] The Volk to Hegel is the real susbstance of
the absolute spirit, from which the citizen is its consciousness. Cf. G.W.F.
Hegel. Fenomenología del Espíritu. Translated
into Spanish by Wenceslao Roces. Fondo de Cultura Económica. Madrid. 1982.
p.262-263.
[3] Cf. Richard
Wagner. On Music and Drama. The Greek Ideal. Trans. H. Ashton Ellis. University of Nebraska
Press. Lincoln and London. 1992. p.p.83-92.
[4] Ibid.
[5] The essence of
drama, Wagner will say, is to know through feeling. Richard Wagner. Ibid. p.p.
188-189.
[6] Apart from
Wagner’s Works, European opera (when it is something more than operetta) places
on stage the historical dramas of Schiller or Pushkin (with the melodramatic
taste of the epoch), and in the cases where there is not an invention of a Volk identity, as in the Italian opera,
political allegories are constructed in which the fight for freedom and independence
is expressed, being these concepts understood from a nineteenth-century bourgeois
and nationalist point of view.
[7] In particular,
Euripides develops a critic of Athens through the tragedies of Trojan topic,
composed in a time when the city is in an imperial expansion.
[8]The Red Lantern, is one of the most notable examples of a model
opera, where the ethical patterns to adopt by the citizens are represented and
a new identity is redefined. The plot and characters which appeared in the
traditional Chinese opera were changed. In The
Red Lantern, a railway worker who joins in the decade of the 30s the
underground communist movement, is recruited to fight in the war against Japan.
[9]
Cf. F.E.L.
Priestley. Tennyson’s Idylls. In Tennyson’s
Poetry. W.W. Norton and Company. New York. 1971. p.p.634-648.
[10] The Abbey
Theatre of Dublin, founded in 1904 and which served as the ritual stage of the
Irish nationalism.
[11] Unlike what
happens in the German case, the continuity of identity between the old Ireland
and the modern is only achieved as an explicit belief, just as it is laid down
in relation to the people of Faery, the
other people, or the faeries, the people from yonder times, the ancient Ireland
of the druids which only presents itself to the one who believes in it. See
William Butler Yeats. Mythologies. Specially the Celtic Twilight, in the tratment of the
ideas if belief and non-belief in the
supernatural world. Collier Books. Macmillan Publishing Company. New York.
1969. And the poem of Yeats. To Ireland
in the Coming Times. The Collected Poems. Scribner Paperback Poetry. New York.
1996.p.50-51.
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