The Story of Myth by Sarah Iles Johnston

Reviewed by: The Story of Myth by Sarah Iles Johnston Phillip Zapkin Sarah Iles Johnston. The Story of Myth. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. x, 374. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-674-18507-4. Scholars of myth have long sought a comprehensive system for determining what myths "really mean." This has involved linking myths to religious rituals, [End Page 114] reducing them to core moral lessons, mining them for psychoanalytic archetypes, etc. In The Story of Myth, Sarah Iles Johnston seeks to supplement these approaches because, despite revealing important insights, none of these methodologies can adequately account for every myth—there are always stories that don't fit the paradigm. Johnston argues that many of the problems previous scholars of myth have encountered can be bypassed by examining (Greek) myths within their larger cultural context—rather than trying to reduce myths to core elements, she treats them within a broad field of meaning, arguing that it is only by seeing myth within this broad field that we can grasp why myths were (and remain) so powerful. To really understand mythology, Johnston argues, we must understand how (and how pervasively) people in ancient Greece encountered myth, and how the dense network of relationships between mythical figures created a coherent story world that listeners were enjoined to identify with. It is, therefore, a mistake to treat myths as either individual stories or as obvious fictions, if we want to understand how they fit into the Greek consciousness. In Johnston's words, "the narration of myths in ancient Greece conditioned listeners to open themselves to realities that could not be perceived by normal means—to the idea that gods and heroes were present amongst them" (67). Chapter 3, "Narrating Myths," draws on contemporary theories of reading, belief, engagement, and ideology to show how the pervasiveness of myth in ancient Greek cultures formed cognitive links between the world the Greeks inhabited and the world(s) of mythology. Chapters 4 through 7 build on this to establish that the dense networks of interconnections (between gods, heroes, monsters, metamorphoses, and real or imagined geographic spaces) contributed to making the mythical world real for listeners both by making the story world comprehensive and by establishing points of connection with the world listeners lived in. The referential network meant that all myths worked to reinforce the reality of every other myth. Johnston's work largely reacts against the ritualist approach to mythography, which she surveys in the second chapter, "Ritual's Handmaid." The ritualist approach and its various offshoots tend to strip individual myths of their literary/artistic features in an attempt to locate a core idea/archetype, which can then be identified as common across cultures. It is, in other words, a fundamentally comparative approach, beginning from the assumption that all myths can be reduced to a certain number of ur-myths, which then get distorted as individual cultures or storytellers add details and make changes. However, Johnston argues against this approach, instead seeking to understand how myths functioned and made meaning in their (Greek) context. She puts together a compelling argument that, rather than telescoping down by paring away details, we should telescope out by looking at how individual myths fit into the whole network of myths, narratives, representations, etc. One potentially troubling issue with the book is the title. As Johnston acknowledges (and as I've tried to hint), the book's subject is not myth as a whole but Greek myth in particular, so the title might more appropriately be The Story of Greek Myth. Johnston does discuss other mythological traditions (mainly from the ancient Near East) to provide comparisons with Greek myth, but this book does not seek to deliver a unified theory of transcultural mythology—a point Johnston makes clear early on (8). Despite this, scholars of myth, classicists, ancient historians, narratologists, and specialists in reception studies will all find this a productive text. Given the major influence of the ritualist tradition in the study of mythology, Johnston's argument is sure to challenge many readers' [End Page 115] thinking about the subject; but by providing an alternative methodology, this book should help create a more complex

Archaeology · Archetype · Art · Context (archaeology) · Epistemology · Greek mythology · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Mythology · Narrative · Sociology · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Philosophy