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Book Review
Methods/Theory
| Joseph Mali. Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 354. $40.00.
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| Joseph Mali's book is one that historians will ignore at their own risk. Although some may be tempted to dismiss it because of a title that sounds contradictory, and a subject (the use of myth in historiography) that is irrelevant at best (if history is assumed to be a science) or potentially disastrous (if Nazi Germany is recalled), they should resist. Mali has written a complex and highly suggestive work that not only constructs an "alternate historiography" to the one usually recognized but also provides interesting possibilities for a new "modern" practice of history and addresses difficult questions about the use of history in politics that remain relevant today. |
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The heart of the book is Mali's recovery and reinterpretation of those historians who recognized the value of myth for history. Historiography, in Mali's hands, is not the story of progress away from myth to science but rather of an initial move toward a more positivist view by Herodotus, Livy, and Niccolò Machiavelli, followed by a return to myth with Giambattista Vico and Jules Michelet. This revival culminated in the synthesis of myth and history in the work of mythistorians like Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Walter Benjamin. In closely argued intellectual biographies of these four historians, Mali expands upon a definition of mythistory outlined in the first chapter. |
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According to Mali, mythistory is the equivalent of aesthetic Modernism, which "consists in the recognition of myth as the primal 'order' in human life and history" (p. 11). Modernists achieved this recognition by abandoning progressive notions of history that assumed what was earlier in time was primitive and irrational in favor of a "mythical method" (p. 12) that viewed myths from all ages as equivalent, understandable, and useful. Mythistorians use this Modernist method for critically interpreting myths. As the collective beliefs of a group of people, myths provide historians an entry into the world views, self-images, fears, and hopes of all members of a society, commoners as well as elites. For a deterministic mythistorian like Benjamin, myths also reveal the material conditions that inspired their creation. Moreover, through an awareness of the continuity of ancient myths in modern practices, myths help contemporaries better understand themselves. In fact, according to Vico and Burckhardt, myths enable historians to approach "truth" and achieve "a primary degree of certainty" (p. 124) better than other historical facts simply because they are the product of human minds. |
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Despite all these advantages, most mythistorians, as Mali points out, are keenly aware of the abuses of myth and history for political purposes. Unfortunately, neither they, nor Mali, adequately explain why these abuses occur. Mali describes potentially or actually dangerous thinkers like Machiavelli, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the National Socialists as "neoromantics" whose "submission" (p. 227) to myth inspired them to create mythological history, rather than mythistory, or as "'aesthetic'" imperialists who "'seize the myth for themselves'" (p. 276) and reactivate it for their own political ends. But it is unclear how these figures differ from a mythistorian like Benjamin who wished to revive a myth of an egalitarian and democratic Eden to inspire left-wing political action. In the end, Mali concludes that all that needs be done to avoid the negative use of myths is to understand them, because "if myths are recognized they are neutralized" (p. 252), and for historians not to "fight against mythical tradition but ... fight over it" (p. 281) to ensure the triumph of humanistic myths. A discussion of the relationship between the historical thinking and fascist ideas of Modernists like William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Wyndam Lewis might have helped add clarity here, because it was not the types of myth they favored but their abandonment of teleological history that spared them from full engagement with National Socialism. Nevertheless, Mali's call to recognize myths certainly is better than not taking them seriously, as did many historians in Nazi Germany. |
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Mali's proposal that contemporary "historians ... should illuminate, not ... eliminate myths" (p. 8) also should be taken seriously. As Mali suggests, a new mythistory may help overcome postmodernist questioning of the possibility of historical truth, as well as support the work of the "new cultural historians" he admires. It also could direct historians of nationalism toward a more complex interpretation of "tradition" than merely as the "invention" of elites to control the masses. Finally, mythistory may be able to answer a key question of postcolonial history: can the subaltern speak? They certainly can if their myths are considered as seriously by historians as by the people who made them. |
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| Louise Blakeney Williams
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| Central Connecticut State University |
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