Mythomania

Tales of Our Times, From Apple to Isis

Peter Conrad

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780500773543
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Despite our cultures proclaimed respect for scientific reason, we live in a society that is no less bedazzled-and bedevilled-by myth than those of our remote ancestors. Roland Barthes first examined the mythical resonances of consumer products in the 1950s. Far from being demystified, consumerism has since morphed into a universal religion, its compulsory ritual of shopping essential to our economic survival. Myth has also invaded the political realm, as terrorists brandish black flags and recite theological mantras as they martyr themselves.

Peter Conrads exhilarating book exposes the absurdity and occasional insanity of our godforsaken, demon-haunted contemporary culture. Conrad casts his brilliant beam upon subjects from The Queen to the Kardashians, via Banksy, Nandos, vaping, the vogue of the cronut, the mushroom-like rise of Dubai, the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, the growth of the Pacific garbage patch... In Judge Judy, he shows us a matronly Roman goddess dispensing justice with a fly swatter. In the metamorphosis of Caitlyn Jenner from Olympic athlete and paterfamilias into idealized female form, he sees parallels to the deeds of the residents of Mount Olympus themselves. Finally, after surveying advances in biomedical engineering and artificial intelligence, he asks whether we might be on the brink of a post-human world.

Before geography positioned us in space and history kept track of time, myths gave us our bearings, and made us feel at home in the world.

Existence is random, chancy and perilous; we need a sense of purpose, a destiny and a destination. Myths are the stories we tell ourselves to resolve contradictions that we find intolerable. We dislike the idea that we happened into being accidentally in a universe that is the product of a random explosion. We therefore invent a creator who designed nature to serve us and allotted us a privileged place in it. Surely we are not just blundering between one oblivion and another? No, we would rather see life as a journey, perhaps even a pilgrimage or a quest. The necessity of dying predictably outrages us. It’s a simple matter to overleap that obstacle by imagining an afterlife.

We protect these deluding, comforting tales from scrutiny by treating them as wisdom handed down from on high. At best, however, they are supreme fictions, exercises in rationalizing a world that remains unreasonable.

The first myths were symptoms of fear. Our remotest ancestors kept watch on the sky and guessed at its moods. Weather issued verdicts that were usually critical: a lashing downpour, dyspeptic thunder, angry lightning bolts. Disasters had to be astrological, the result – as the word itself proclaims – of a disagreeable or ill-disposed star. Only if some higher power were appeased would the winter end.

Eventually human beings crept out of the woods and looked around with clearer eyes. Now, after uncountable millennia, we live in culture not nature, in an environment we have fabricated. We may have outgrown our cowering reverence for the gods who determined nature’s unforgiving rules, but we are more than ever at the mercy of myths, which tug at us subliminally. We are no longer so alert for signs from above, but signals at ground level still do their elementary job of telling us to stop or go, to turn this way or that, and we follow their orders because they trigger ancient, ingrained connections. Green equals bucolic calm, red warns of danger; perhaps when the colours change at the street corner we dimly recall a paradise garden and an inferno. Science, technology and contemporary atheism have not yet entirely enlightened our fantastical, traumatized minds.

Biblical fables cast a lingering shadow. The first myth revived and reinterpreted in this book is that of Eden, although the garden now sprouts inside a slim silver case. The last is Armageddon, which for many people today has become a longed-for consummation, not a terrifying last judgement. In between comes a man who saw himself as a Messiah from another planet and explained that he had descended to earth as a healer. Somewhere else in the book, Messiah is the name given to a spacecraft that carries a team of human beings in the opposite direction: they are sent into deep space to dispose of a comet that threatens our earth. Do we still need a saviour, now that we have astronauts to perform such tasks?

Science at its most advanced continues to operate under the aegis of myth (and that aegis is itself mythological, because the word refers to the protective shield held up by Zeus or Athena). One cosmologist hopes to understand what God was thinking as the universe was combustibly created; another worries about the wisdom of experimentally re-enacting the moment when subatomic particles first exploded into life. Luckily a so-called symbologist, who has revised the Bible’s account of Christ’s sex life and located the whereabouts of the Holy Grail, is on hand to prevent a nuclear disaster. This book contains a glimpse of heaven, located on the upper floors of a high-rise building, and a brief descent into a foul, grease-choked hell beneath city streets.

At the same time, in their own mythological realm, the Olympian deities here enjoy the latest of many revivals. Aphrodite squirms into a gladiatrix costume, flaunts a feather boa, and struts in kinky high heels; the Adonis with whom she copulates is all the more attractive because he happens to be a corporate tycoon. A more matronly Roman goddess dispenses justice with a fly swatter. Two putative presidents of the United States behave like elected gods, in one case single-handedly routing a gang of terrorists, in the other vanquishing a horde of alien invaders. The residents of Mount Olympus were adept at metamorphosis: to prove the point, a paterfamilias who was once an Olympic athlete shows off a new female physique in the kind of slinky dress that is known as a goddess gown.

At the edges of this playground will be found a glamorous clan of blood-drinkers, a litter of pampered pet dogs with the egos of operatic divas, and some saurians cloned from the DNA of transgendered bullfrogs. Neo-pagans invent new vices, which can be indulged without Christian guilt. One is the auto-erotic addiction to snapping photographic self-portraits, and another goes by the name of ‘autophilia’, which is not a kind of self-love but a lust for fast, expensive cars. Commodities offer magical transmutations to those who use or consume them. People who once smoked cigarettes vaporize or atomize instead; people who once ate stodgy donuts now bite into laminated pastries that dissolve into metaphors on the tongue.

This collection of myths advances with scary speed from Genesis to Revelation, from prehistoric carnivores to post-biological robots. We have accelerated evolution, which leaves us wondering whether our species can develop any further. And where else can we go, now that we have almost used up our fragile planetary habitat? The earliest myths guessed at what had happened before human history began; contemporary myths make urgent efforts to imagine what will happen when human history ends, as it soon may do.

*

What we look for in moments of doubt is a sign – some indication of where we are, and an explanation of how we got there. With luck there might be an arrow, like an index finger directing us higher or at least pointing us ahead.

Testing the principle on the roof of my house in London, I see a jagged frieze of peaks that send out mixed signals. Half a dozen churches poke their spires upwards from streets nearby, and I can glimpse the pseudo-medieval pinnacles of the Palace of Westminster; these look stunted when compared with the chimneys of the gutted power station at Battersea, which might be the stiff legs of a gigantic quadruped lying dead on its back. Nearby, a plantation of construction cranes hauls new skyscrapers out of the earth, and beside the river stands a pipe-shaped residential tower into which a helicopter crashed one foggy morning a while ago. To the east, the tallest building in the city, with planes of sharp glass not quite joining at its summit, grazes the clouds. On a rooftop ledge across the way, a neighbour has arranged a palisade of plastic cones, scavenged from the streets where they direct traffic around roadworks: they resemble missiles, ready to be launched – at what? Not, I hope, at the queue of planes that screech overhead as they turn west towards the airport; perhaps at the colony of squawking crows that leave their perches in a churchyard at the end of the street to rip open garbage bags and sort through the contents. Sooty chicken bones occasionally tumble down my chimney, souvenirs of the scavenged meals the crows enjoy up above. In the world we have only too successfully remade, creatures forget their natural appetites and turn into consumers of culture, or of what it leaves behind. I once surprised a fox daintily snacking on a chocolate bar in my back garden.

In a poem about the correspondences between earth and sky, Baudelaire called nature a temple, supported by ‘living pillars’ that babble enigmatic words and cluster into ‘forests of symbols’. Culture, as the view from my roof suggests, is unconsecrated, a mess of lowly urges and loftier strivings, with primitive monsters – those meat-eating crows, Jurassic predators on a mercifully smaller scale – and engineered marvels side by side. Baudelaire refers to green prairies, a heady pharmacopoeia of amber, musk and incense, and ‘the expansion of infinite things’ in an obligingly empty personal universe. By the time he wrote the poem in 1857, industrialism had altered that pristine, fragrant scenery, cutting people off from the land and the solar or seasonal routines that were tracked by the first myths. Most of us now live in cities, which are mazes of manufactured stage sets. Subtle, sneaky messages are addressed to us on all sides, as if by Baudelaire’s vocal pillars, but with no religious authority to lend them credence. How can we interpret this artificial wilderness?

In 1853 Dickens began his novel Bleak House with an act of dislocation – the opposite of myth’s initial promise to orientate us. The setting is at once up-to-date and primeval, recognizable but alarmingly strange. The streets around the Law Courts in central London are bogged down in squelching mud on a foggy November day, so it looks ‘as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’. The wonder-working agency is metaphor, which alters what it describes and either exceeds or supersedes nature by crossbreeding an elephant with a lizard. As Dickens’ allusion to Genesis hints, God’s creation is here revised. People on bridges across the Thames peep ‘over the parapets into a nether sky of fog … as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds’: a second metaphor has made the sky collapse into that trough of murk. The unsettling jokes compress time and invert space, and in doing so suggest that myth can estrange us from the world as well as rooting us in it.

G. K. Chesterton gave a similarly mystified account of Times Square on his first visit to New York in 1921. ‘What a glorious garden of wonders this would be,’ he remarked, ‘to anyone who was lucky enough to be unable to read.’ Illiterate Adam would not have known that the galaxy of signs recommended commodities that ranged from pork to pianos and remedies for gout; he could imagine that he was staring at ‘the flaming sword or the purple and peacock plumage of the seraphim’. Dickens used myth to confound history, undoing God’s separation of land and water and returning nature to its chaotic, inchoate state. Chesterton, soon to be converted to Catholicism, relied on myth to chastize history. He regretted that Times Square vulgarized ‘the two most vivid and mystical gifts of God, colour and fire’; he wanted to resurrect Eden, the original garden of wonders, but he recognized that its modern equivalent was an emporium stuffed with charismatic merchandise, and he said he would not have been surprised to see insignia for Paradise Tooth Paste and Seventh Heaven Cigars shining in the night sky above Broadway.

A few years later, dismayed by contemporary scepticism, Chesterton decided that ‘Mythology is a lost art’, and added ‘What are called the Gods might almost alternatively be called the Day-Dreams.’ He was wrong: the modern world whose disbelief he deplored retrieved those atavistic, amoral stories, and rather than dwindling into daydreams, the gods who rampaged through them became nightmares. In The Golden Bough, a study of fertility and sacrifice in ancient religions published between 1890 and 1915, J. G. Frazer described the succession of ceremonial murders that regulated nature and ensured its annual reincarnation. In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot adapted Frazer’s anthropology to his own rootless society with its sexual desiccation. At once savage and sophisticated, Lulu in Frank Wedekind’s play – the source for Alban Berg’s opera and G. W. Pabst’s film – is an ‘Erdgeist’, an earth spirit whose feckless promiscuity mimes the way that nature springs back to life after its demise in winter. Stravinsky invented a pagan vegetation rite that is danced to the death in his ballet Le Sacre du printemps, then had second thoughts about this violence and pleaded that the revels of Dionysus must ‘submit to the law – Apollo demands it’. It was a vain hope: the deity responsible for our desires and appetites has never deferred to his luminous colleague. Myth, whenever it reappears, is evidence of compulsions that remain incurable.

*

In the affluent, contentedly secular society of the mid-twentieth century, the meaning of myth underwent a change. The word once referred to stories that told hallowed truths, which as believers we took on trust. Now, in common usage, it refers to a tissue of more or less amusing lies, like the urban legends about albino alligators splashing in the Manhattan sewers or the pirate’s treasure buried somewhere on the little island that is the Statue of Liberty’s podium. The lost art was recovered by the writers of advertising copy, who had a sly awareness of its fictionality. Ancient myths were theological; although their contemporary equivalents are commercial, the products they tout still pretend to purvey spiritual benefits.

Irritated by this symbolic imposture, Roland Barthes in 1954 began a series of essays analysing popular fads and newsy novelties, which were published in a French magazine under the heading ‘Mythology of the Month’ – a profane equivalent of the sententious editorials that newspapers used to call ‘Thought for the Day’. The column’s title was a deliberate tease. Traditionally, myths are eternal, as far as can be from the topicality of journalism. In Barthes’ essays, collected in his book Mythologies, first published in 1957, there were no freakish mutants like Dickens’ waddling lizard, no flaming omens like those at which Chesterton blinked. Instead, combining impish humour and high-minded gravity, Barthes examined ephemera such as children’s toys, travel brochures, restaurant menus, and the sage advice dispensed by agony aunts, our modern seers or Norns.

Among his subjects was the sighting of flying saucers, a hallucination provoked by a genuine dread: those hurtling discs deputized for the atomic bombs that might soon be bandied back and forth between America and Russia. ‘It is in the sky that the Terror exists,’ said Barthes, implicitly contrasting this with the Terror of the French revolutionaries, which raged at ground level. He called off our quest for supernatural correspondences by declaring that ‘the sky is henceforth without metaphor’. It had become the source of death, as nuclear suns exploded.

During the Cold War, Barthes’ warning was timely, and the beings who once lived above the clouds decamped in a hurry. He reported on this undignified descent in an essay about a select group of pretenders to European thrones who had made common cause for a summer cruise around the Greek islands. Slumming while on holiday, the would-be kings shaved themselves without being lathered by flunkeys, and their consorts strolled the decks wearing cotton-print dresses bought at a chain store. A ‘mythological heaven’, Barthes said, had crash-landed, depositing its occupants in ‘ordinary life’.

In passing, Barthes noticed that the classical gods had modern imitators. He mistrusted ‘the Olympus of elevated feelings’ at which idealistic politicians directed their ‘ascensional’ gaze in flattering campaign portraits, though he was impressed by the ‘Olympian snaps of the fingers’ with which gangsters in Hollywood films cued bursts of gunfire, like Zeus whipping up storms. As well as noting pagan prototypes, Barthes glanced sideways at Christianity when he described a streamlined car as the modern equivalent of a Gothic cathedral. He joked that the new Citroën – called the D. S., a designation that identified it as a ‘Déesse’ – had apparently ‘fallen from the sky’, like those monarchs in mufti on the Greek yacht. Yet in being made available to potential buyers, the automotive goddess was desanctified. Barthes observed customers stroking her doors, palpating her upholstery, fondling her leather cushions, in effect ravishing her. The result, he said, was a new kind of ‘exorcism’ – a reversal of the Church’s procedure, because instead of expelling an evil spirit it degraded a deity. In popular culture, myths are trampled, soiled, despoiled.

But the demotic revels on board the Greek yacht demonstrated that ordinary life also had its rites, ceremonies and associated dress codes; the topics Barthes dealt with uncovered the hidden mythical content of daily reality. In the 1950s, for the first time in human history, a modicum or even surfeit of comfort seemed to be within reach of everyone – or at least of those who lived on the right side of the Iron Curtain. Air travel was propelling middle-class travellers into the arena of the gods. On the ground, newfangled detergents promised not only to cleanse but to purge and purify kitchens and bathrooms, fighting a holy war against germs. Plastic, another of Barthes’ subjects, had begun its lightweight, flexible refabrication of the world: polypropylene and polystyrene were both invented in 1954, and given Greek names that might have belonged, Barthes joked, to shepherds in a classical pastoral. The synthetic protoplasm suggested to Barthes that ‘the whole world can be plasticized’, which implies it was being reshaped along American lines; myth, which submits the stories it tells to ‘infinite transformation’, was just such an experiment in plasticity.

The mundane nature of Barthes’ subjects – including a drearily utilitarian display of office furniture, designed to exemplify the sacred idea of organization – did not bother him. Content mattered less than form, which endowed material objects with significance and thereby sustained ‘social appearances’. ‘Every object in the world,’ Barthes insisted, ‘can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state’, like detergents that sing their own praises in cheery jingles. Of course, that passage from silence to speech depended on the ventriloquism of Barthes himself, who gave dictation to the loquacious household products rather than transcribing their confidences, and he acknowledged that he might have been stretching a point. Taking the part of a dubious reader, he asked ‘Everything, then, can be a myth?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I believe this.’

Perhaps he did, although he did not believe in the myths themselves. He shared the equivocal attitude of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who introduced his account of Amazonian folklore in The Raw and the Cooked by advising that ‘it would not be wrong to consider this book itself as a myth: it is, as it were, about the myth of mythology’. Lévi-Strauss added that ‘the mythologist … cannot believe in myths because it is his task to take them to pieces’. Dealing with mass-produced articles that were closer to home than Lévi-Strauss’s exotic legends, Barthes set himself the same task. The bourgeoisie, he argued, had ‘elaborated a universalist religion guaranteed by God, or by nature, or last of all b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• About the author
• Other titles of interest
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Sky Signs
• 2 A Newer Testament
• 3 In the Pantheon
• 4 Forms and their Content
• 5 The Human Thing
• 6 Wars in Heaven
• Index
• Copyright