Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship.

• Author: Beckman, Gary
• Position: Review

Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship. By BRUCE LINCOLN. Chicago: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 1999. Pp. xvi + 298. $59 (cloth); $24 (paper).

Bruce Lincoln is one of America's foremost practitioners of comparative mythology. (1) In this volume of essays, several of which have been published previously or delivered as lectures over the course of the 1990s, he signals a change in direction for his research: "...more recently, my interests have changed, and no longer does the attempt to reconstruct protomyths or protocivilizations strike me as a particularly interesting or worthy endeavor" (p. 190). He goes further--beyond questions of interest or value, the enterprise may well have been completely misguided: "...we recognize that the existence of a language family does not necessarily imply the existence of a protolanguage. Still less does the existence of a protolanguage imply or necessitate the existence of a protopeople, protomyths, protoideology, or protohomeland" (p. 216).

What brought about this revaluation? The answer seems to be, unpleasant bedfellows: Lincoln came to realize that the social opinions and political allegiances of many practitioners of his chosen discipline were both anathema to him as a Jew and a progressive and not without influence on their analyses and reconstructions of myth (pp. xii-xiv). Thus, his observation that "...misrepresentation of culture as nature is an ideological move characteristic of myth, as is the projection of the narrator's ideals, desires, and favored ranking of categories into a fictive prehistory that purportedly establishes how things are and must be" (p. 149) applies as well to fascist fellow-traveler Georges Dumezil (pp. 123-27) (2) as to Plutarch (chapter 8).

The unifying theme of Theorizing Myth is an exploration of ideologically-conditioned interpretation of individual myths and myth as a phenomenon from antiquity through modern times. Part I Sets the stage by tracing the changing meaning of Greek mythos. The term had the sense of "authoritative discourse" in early poets like Hesiod and Homer, but in the prose works of Plato and later philosophers it came to designate propagandistic tales intended to guide the behavior of children and others incapable of participating in the discourse of the elite (pp. 37-42).

Part II critiques the work of the most influential early modern students and fashioners of myth, including W. Jones, J...