Myth and Mythic Criticism

Functions and Types of Myths

There are two broad types of myth—universal and cultural—which serve a number of different but related functions. Universal myths transcend cultural and historical conditions and speak to the elemental nature of the human experience. This elemental nature refers to such experiences as birth, growth, developmental maturation, the possibility of procreation, death, and the search for meaning. Although many myths are universal, they are always inflected through cultural myths—stories specific to a society at a given point in time. Even if universal elements dominate the telling of a myth, any interpretation is always grounded in the particular sociohistorical moment out of which it arises and to which it speaks. Psychologist Carl Jung, whose writing on the collective unconsciousness is central to many mythological critics in the communication field, elucidates two types of dreams, the personal and the archetypal or mythic dream. The personal dream arises from the personal unconscious, consisting of repressed memories and experiences, including the shadow, while the mythic dream emerges from the collective unconscious, which is made up of archaic or primordial material that has existed since earliest times and is shared by all. These archetypes are usually expressed through cultural artifacts such as films, dreams, speeches, music, and art.

Myths are traditionally conservative in the sense that they conserve a collective memory for the culture and carry it forward in diverse telling and retelling of the myth, all with different local permutations of meaning. Myths speak to a collective past that is neither true nor false but more or less functional for the culture. In this sense, as ideological, they can be viewed as regressive if they tell a past that conserves understandings of a culture that are no longer functional for the culture. A good example is the film Gone With the Wind, a clearly racist and conservative construction of an ideal mythic Old South that may have helped to justify the institution of slavery for 1930s audiences. But myths, as teleological, also speak to the future and the possibility of a culture's evolution to a more perfect state of being and consciousness. [Page 670]This message, for example, is most apparent in utopic (ideal) and dystopic (nonsupportive or dysfunctional) visions of society in such sci-fi films as The Matrix, E.T., and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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