Georges Sorel
The view of myth as itself ideology is to be found classically in Reflections on Violence, by the French syndicalist Georges Sorel (1847–1922). For Sorel, myth is eternal, not merely primitive, and, antithetically to Malinowski, serves not to bolster society but to topple it. Sorel asserts that the only way to establish the socialist ideal is through revolution, which requires both violence and myth. By ‘violence’ he means forceful action but not mere bloodshed. The key ‘violent’ action is a strike by all workers. By ‘myth’ he means a guiding ideology, one that preaches an imminent end to present society, advocates a fight to the death with the ruling class, makes rebels heroes, declares the certainty of victory, and espouses a moral standard for the future society:
Myth
In the course of this study one thing has always been present in my mind . . . – that men who are participating in a great social movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph. These constructions . . . I propose to call myths; the syndicalist ‘general strike’ and Marx’s catastrophic revolution are such myths. . . . Catholics have never been discouraged even in the hardest trials, because they have always pictured the history of the Church as a series of battles between Satan and the hierarchy supported by Christ; every new difficulty which arises is only an episode in a war which must finally end in the victory of Catholicism.
(Sorel, Reflections on Violence, pp. 41–2)
Oliver Cromwell’s vowed determination to remove King Charles I of England would typify myth for Sorel.
Sorel asserts that both violence and myth are indispensable for revolution and are therefore justified. He spurns any neutral, scientific analysis of myth, including a Marxist one. He turns Marxism itself into a myth, for commitment to it goads followers to revolution. Sorel is like Malinowski in his indifference to the truth
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of myth. For both, what matters is that myth works when believed to be true. And for Sorel, the ultimate truth of myth – the success of a revolution – is unknowable in advance anyway.
For Malinowski, myth is like ideology in justifying submission to society. For Sorel, myth is ideology in justifying rejection of society. Sorel’s theory is wholly inapplicable to the case of Adonis, who acts alone, is more passive victim than active agent, and is hardly motivated by any ideology. Sorel’s theory clearly fits today’s terrorists, whose myth justifies 9/11 as the first stage in the defeat of the reigning international power, the demonized America. Yet how much Sorel’s theory actually illuminates any myth beyond labelling it as such, it is not easy to see.
René Girard
René Girard, whose take on Frazer’s myth-ritualism was considered in Chapter 5, transforms not merely the relationship between myth and ritual but also the origin and function of both. The two arise to secure not food but peace. The scapegoat, whether king or commoner, is sacrificed to end not winter but violence, which is the problem rather than, as for Sorel, the solution. Myth and ritual are ways of coping not with nature but with human nature – with human aggression.
In Violence and the Sacred Girard, like Raglan and Rank, cites Oedipus as the best example of his theory. Far from causing the plague besetting Thebes during his reign as king, Oedipus, according to Girard, is in fact an innocent victim. Either there never was a plague, or the plague was not the cause of the upheaval. Or the plague is a metaphor for violence, which has spread across society like a contagion. The violence among Thebans is evinced in the tension among the principals of Sophocles’ play: Oedipus, Creon, and Teiresias. The only way to end the violence and thereby preserve society is by making a scapegoat of a vulnerable member of society. Even though the king, Oedipus is doubly stigmatized
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and thereby doubly vulnerable. He is an outsider: he is not yet known to be a Theban and has won the throne not by heredity but by the toppling of the Sphinx. And he is a cripple – the result of the piercing of his tendons at birth. The myth, concocted only after Oedipus’ downfall, serves to absolve the community by blaming him: he has killed his father and married his mother, and it is for his parricide and his incest that Thebes now endures plague. Or so argues Sophocles’ Teiresias:
Myth
If we take Tiresias’s reply literally, the terrible charges of patricide and incest that he has just leveled at Oedipus did not stem from any supernatural source of information [and so do not represent the ‘truth’]. The accusation is simply an act of reprisal arising from the hostile exchange of a tragic debate. Oedipus unintentionally initiates the process by forcing Tiresias to speak. He accuses Tiresias of having had a part in the murder of [Oedipus’ father] Laius; he prods Tiresias into reprisal, into hurling the accusation back at him. . . . [For each] to accuse the other of Laius’ murder is to attribute to him sole responsibility for the sacrificial crisis; but as we have seen, everybody shares equal responsibility, because everybody participates in the destruction of a cultural order.
(Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 71)
In actuality, according to Girard, Thebans simply decide to accept Teiresias’ and Creon’s opinions rather than Oedipus’ over who is responsible for the breakdown in society. Only the subsequent myth turns the victors’ opinions into the truth:
The Thebans – religious believers – sought a cure for their ills in a formal acceptance of the myth, in making it the indisputable version of the events that had recently convulsed the city and in making it the charter for a new cultural order – by convincing themselves, in short, that all their miseries were due exclusively to the plague. Such an attitude requires absolute faith in the guilt of the surrogate victim.
(Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 83)
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That collective violence rather than the individual Oedipus is the real cause of the problem is borne out by events thereafter. True, the plague ends, but it is soon followed by a fight for the throne among Creon; Oedipus’ son Polynices; and his other son, Eteocles. According to Girard, Sophocles challenges the myth, but never explicitly, so that the play has regularly has been taken, by Harrison and Murray included, as the dramatized version of the myth rather than as, for the more perceptive Girard, a challenge to the myth.
But the myth, which continues with Oedipus at Colonus, does more than blame Oedipus for Theban woes. It proceeds to turn him into a hero. Even as king, Oedipus is heroic in deeming it his duty to end the plague that has befallen his subjects, in vowing to discover who the culprit is, and in insisting on being banished once he discovers that he himself is the culprit.
Yet for Girard the real hero is not the fallen, self-sacrificing Oedipus, as for Raglan, but the elevated one. Even as culprit, Oedipus has the power to save Thebes: just as his presence caused the plague, so his departure ends it. He is a hero even while a criminal. He already has the god-like power both to bring plague and to end it.
But by the time of Oedipus at Colonus Oedipus’ stature has grown. Having arrived, after years of wandering, at Colonus, near Athens, he is now beckoned to return to Thebes. Just as the welfare of Thebes once depended on Oedipus’ exile, so now it depends on his return. Oedipus refuses, for we learn that he had wanted to remain at Thebes following the events in Oedipus the King but
had eventually been forcibly exiled by Creon and others. Now Creon is prepared to seize him and bring him back to Thebes. King Theseus offers Oedipus asylum. In return, Oedipus declares that his burial spot in Athens will protect Athens against Thebes. In short, Oedipus, having in Oedipus as King begun as a divine-like King of Thebes, in Oedipus at Colonus ends as a divine-like benefactor
of Athens.
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Myth
Adonis
Ancient Greeks linked psychological immaturity to political immaturity: Adonis’ failure to become an adult would have meant his failure to become a citizen. Adonis would have been suited for precisely that form of government which involves no responsibility and assumes political infancy: tyranny. Adonis’ submission to mother-like gods fits a matriarchal society. Having experienced only smothering females, he projects those qualities onto all females and thereby submits unquestioningly to them.
The family constitutes the link between personality and the polis, the city-state run by male citizens. The opposition that Herodotus draws between the polis of Greece, in which even the ruler is subject to the law, and the tyranny of the East, in which the ruler is above the law, holds for family life as well.
To demonstrate the tyranny of Eastern potentates, Herodotus catalogues their violations of familial mores. King Candaules of Sardis orders Gyges, his bodyguard, to look secretly at the Queen as she disrobes. She then forces Gyges to kill her husband (Herodotus 1.8–13). Solon tells King Croesus of Lydia that the happiest man he has known was an obscure Athenian who had fine sons and lived to see them raise children in turn. Croesus himself has two sons,
one deaf and dumb, the other killed – like Adonis, while hunting boar – by a friend who had accidentally killed his brother and been banished by his father for it (Herodotus 1.29–33). King Astyages of Media orders Cyrus, his grandson, to be killed at birth to prevent his usurpation of the throne. In revenge for Harpagus’ failure to carry out the deed, Astyages serves him up his son. Cyrus subsequently does topple, though not kill, his grandfather (Herodotus 1.117–19). King Cambyses of Persia, Cyrus’ son and successor, marries two of his sisters, murders one of them, and murders his brother as well. He goes insane and dies childless (Herodotus 3.31–32). And so on through, worst of all, King Xerxes of Persia.
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