Mythical Construction of National Identities.

    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 19^th Century in Europe we obtain a few relevant examples to give an answer to this question. In the 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 20^th 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 20^th Century it implied the proposal of a political pathway with a difficult exit.^[11]

       The mythopoetics of European national identities in the 20^th 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)

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[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.