Myth  Scapes

Essays  in  Rhetorical  Analysis

John S. Nelson

Poroi, 2, 1, August, 2003

What is myth today?  . . . a type of speech. . . .
we can always sketch its rhetorical forms [as]
. . . a set of . . . insistent figures.¹
                                                — Roland Barthes

A myth scape is an evocative essay on how we embody myths in our lives, our news, or our learning.  An essay is an experiment or exploration in writing.  Therefore a myth scape is a short composition that probes the rhetoric of symbols and stories implicated by some object.  The topic for a myth scape comes from familiar experiences that deserve surprising perspectives, playful explications, provocative insights.  The analysis taps springs of myth as ancient as Greek or Asian arts, as recent as commercial or political ads, as timeless as divine or devilish acts.

For inspiration, consult the “mythologies” by Roland Barthes.  These were published as newspaper essays in France then later collected and translated into English as Mythologies and The Eiffel Tower.²  The topics are diverse but lurk in the everyday; the turns are estranging yet explanatory:  “Toys,” “Power and ‘Cool’,” “Operation Margarine,” “Dining Car,” “The Face of Garbo,” “Soap-Powders and Detergents,” “The Brain of Einstein,” “Wine and Milk,” “Plastic,” and (most famously) “The World of Wrestling.”

What is wonderful about these essays is their rhetorical eye for the archetypal characters and scenes woven into familiar objects, along with their rhetorical ear for the political overtones and undertones of those meanings.  The collateral theory of myth that Barthes proposed in “Myth Today” is largely irrelevant to his specific insights in the brief essays.  That theory is brilliant but dubious, a frequent French combination.  Especially objectionable is the Barthes assumption that myths always must naturalize and falsify their “real” referents.  Fortunately, few of his rhetorical devices depend on this modernist epistemology.  Instead of debunking one illusion after another, his essays fit beautifully into the more encompassing and self-critical conception of a myth as a symbolic story, able to construct as well as conceal our realities.

One good way to approach a myth scape, then, is to follow the lead of Barthes.  Far better than his theory of myth, the Barthes “mythologies” resist the temptation to caricature objects of our vernacular cultures as deceptive, reductive, or massifying.  They make the myth essay a form for trying ideas, sketching arguments, and testing connections.  A myth scape shares a rhetorical insight into mythic elements of our situations.  It develops the insight just enough to display the telling details and play out some startling ties.  Barthes shows again how short can be incisive.

How short?  Perhaps 500 to 3,000 words.  Myth scapes are intense – but breezy.  Every word tells, making the flow fast and refreshing.  Myth scapes are quick provocations on targets diverse, seemingly mundane, yet somehow always daring.  Their targets come from the routines and diversions that construct the landscapes for our more pervasive or prominent endeavors.

What targets?  Why not the American turn to trucks and SUVs?  How about our sense of delis, anime, PDAs, pocket parks, news-you-can-use, or food shows?  What of television crawls, terror alerts, remote controls, fitness machines, or solidarity ribbons?  Once I asked students in a graduate seminar to write myth scapes.  Their targets were telling:  Diet Coke, engagement rings, national anthems, movie series, footnotes, celebrities, cheerleaders, self-perpetuating choices, plaques, juries of peers, remodeling, credit cards, hospital admission desks, file cabinets, coat hangers, even erasers.  Each of their myth scapes displayed its target as a busy intersection of symbols and stories.  Let us do the same for communication innovations, jewelry, encyclopedias, shoes, salutes, menus, the myriad textures of everyday life.  A myth scape treats each object as a complex of signs and tales ready to unfold before us.

Mythically the remote control epitomizes the tele-world of modern communications.  It provides technological command at a distance:  another magical moment of advanced electronics for transforming our everyday lives.  Yet this object almost immediately implicates the story of the Sorceror’s Apprentice.  Remotes proliferate – for TVs, VCRs, CD players, DVD players, room lights, sound systems, temperature settings, video games, and more.  These call forth the “universal remotes” that get lost under the cushions of couch potatoes.  Make those remotes-to-replace-most-remotes beep for location, and confusion ensues with cell phones.  Enhance their functions, and control pads explode with unintelligible options on buttons too small to push or too numerous to parse.  Increase their size and visibility, only to produce an object too large for some to handle.  Generate a remote control that feels just right, and turn television viewing into channel surfing.  Then the postmodern sampling of moments and surfaces that testifies to facile control leaves no program truly engaging, and drives everyone other than the controller from the room.  As always in the West, the perplexity becomes:  Who controls the controller?

Along the way, a myth scape should make an argument.  It need not cover every aspect of the target for analysis.  Instead it should provoke readers by specifying an intriguing position and providing a colorful defense for it:  The remote control makes control remote. Solidarity ribbons are to democracies what military decorations are to republics.  In moving from ancient republics to modern democracies, rhetorical ethos shrinks from political character to official credibility to career credentials to personal credit cards.  Exercise machines replace action with motion.  And so on.  Myth scapes are exercises in observation and imagination.  Seldom do they concentrate on scholarly research.  They focus instead on plumbing myths that flow around and through us.

The analysis is rhetorical.  Ever attentive to audiences, myth scapes trace the figures, themes, and strategies that run throughout images, bodies, gadgets, events, videos, characters, texts, and other objects from our vernacular cultures.  A myth scape delimits its objects sharply, to keep the analysis concise.  It justifies its choices by the implications it finds, and it shows how the target tries – however boldly or obliquely – to sway us through its symbols and stories.  The aim is not to reduce the objects to epiphenomena of class conflicts, modes of production, rational choices, biological desires, or other magical keys to history.  The purpose is to probe the targets as figural networks in order to track how they engage our lives.

As a form of writing, the myth analysis may be as old as myth and writing themselves.  Ample passages in Hesiod and Plato provide direct, self-conscious analysis of myths – even as some of their passages formulate further myths.  In fact, new myths often arise as modes of analysis for previous myths.  But the modern prejudice against myth can blind us to the many ways that myths analyze and criticize other myths.  Scholars have been mistakenly inclined to limit myth analysis to prosaic, quasi-scientific dissections almost bound to kill or dismember the myths they target.  Then analysis becomes debunking.  The manifold foci and devices of myth analysis narrow to techniques of unmasking.  The resulting interpretations rarely attend in detail to the fresh dynamics of myth found in Barthes, and they almost never enter intentionally into effective mythmaking.  Nevertheless the rhetorical analysis of myths has persisted in pockets scattered across the arts, the humanities, even the sciences and professions.  These trace how particular texts or other objects operate as symbolic stories to spur meanings and other effects.

© John S. Nelson, 2003.

Notes

¹     Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” Mythologies, Annette Lavers, tr., New York, Hill and Wang, (1957), 1972, pp. 107-159, on pp. 109 and 150.

²     See above and Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower, and Other Mythologies, Richard Howard, tr., New York, Hill and Wang, 1979.