5 - Managing Monsters and Mermaids in the Basement

Summary

It may seem surprising that a writer whose work draws on mythology to such an extent as does Warner's should take so long to offer her own definitive statement on the nature of myth. What she might reply, with some justification, is that her writing from The Dragon Empress to Indigo is exploratory rather than illustrative: that is, it is a way of discovering the mythic dimension of culture rather than a demonstration of what she already understands myth to be. However, in 1994 Warner was invited to deliver the Reith Lectures on BBC Radio 4, and she took the opportunity to take stock of the current state of mythography. Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time (1994) is about the process by which received narratives may acquire new significance through retelling, with the proviso that both versions are open to critical rereading.

In her foreword to the published lectures, Warner acknowledges again her debt to Roland Barthes, and in particular to his volume of essays Mythologies, first published in 1957:

Barthes's fundamental principle is that myths are not eternal verities, but historical compounds, which successfully conceal their own contingency, changes and transitoriness so that the story they tell looks as if it cannot be told otherwise, that things were always like that and always will be. Barthes's study almost amounts to an expose´ of myth, as he reveals how it works to conceal political motives and secretly circulate ideology through society. (MMM xiii–xiv)

This is a judicious summary of the theorist's achievement; but implicit in it is a critique. For the trouble with Barthes's approach is that, while it is useful for searching out the lies which the powerful tell in order to persuade the powerless that society cannot be changed, it is not much use to the serious mythographer. That is, it still amounts to a sophisticated variant on the assumption that the word ‘myth’ connotes falsity (as in such everyday sayings as ‘Freedom is just a myth’). .