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We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature. We now understand why, in the eyes of the myth consumer, the intention, the adhomination of the concept can remain manifest without, however, appearing to have an interest in the matter: what causes mythical speech to be uttered is perfectly explicit, but it is immediately frozen into something natural; it is not read as a motive but as a reason. [...]
[...] Myth can reach everything, corrupt everything, and even the very act of refusing oneself to it. So that the more the language object resists at first, the greater its final prostitution; whoever here resists completely yields completely [...] Myth, on the contrary, is a lgnauge which does not want to die: it wrests from the meanings which give it sustenance an insidious, degraded survival, it provokes in them an artifical reprieve in which it settles comfortably, it turns them into speaking corpses.
reminds me of DFW's thoughts on irony
[...] the bourgeoisie has obliterated its name in passing from reality to representation, from economic man to mental man. It comes to an agreement with the facts, but does not compromise about values, it makes its status undergo a real exnominating operation: the bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named. Bourgeois, petit bourgeois, capitalism, proletariat are the locus of an unceasing hemorrhage: meaning flows out of them until their very name becomes unnecessary.
It is therefore by penetrating the intermediate classes that the bourgeois ideology can most surely lose its name. Petit bourgeois norms are the residue of bourgeois culture, they are bourgeois truths which have become degraded, impoverished, commercialized, slightly archaic, or, shall we say, out of date? The political alliance of the bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie has for more than a century determined the history of France; it has rarely been broken, and each time only temporarily (1848, 1871, 1936). This alliance got closer as time passed, it gradually became a symbiosis; transient awakenings might happen, but the common ideology was never questioned again. The same "natural" varnish covers up all "national" representations: the big wedding of the bourgeoisie, which originates in a class ritual (the display and consumption of wealth), can bear no relation to the economic status of the lower middle class: but through the press, the news, and literature, it slowly becomes the very norm as dreamed, though not actually lived, of the petit bourgeois couple. The bourgeoisie is constantly absorbing into its ideology a whole section of humanity which does not have its basic status and cannot live up to except in imagination, that is, at the cost of an immobilization and an impoverishment of consciousness. By spreading its representations over a whole catalog of collective images for petit bourgeois use, the bourgeoisie countenances the illusory lack of differentiation of the social classes: it is as from the moment when a typist earning twenty pounds a month recognizes herself in the big wedding of the bourgeoisie that bourgeois exnomination achieves its full effect.
savage
[...] If I state the fact of French imperiality without explaining it, I am very near to finding that it is natural and goes without saying: I am reassured. In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.
This imperfection, if that is the word for it, comes from the nature of the "Left": whatever the imprecision of the term, the Left always defines itself in relation to the oppressed, whether proletarian or colonized. Now the speech of the oppressed can only be poor, monotonous, immediate: his destitution is the very yardstick of his language: he has only one, always the same, that of his actions; metalanguage is a luxury, he cannot yet have access to it. The speech of the oppressed is real, like that of the woodcutter; it is a transitive type of speech: it is quasi-unable to lie; lying is a richness, a lie presupposes property, truths, and forms to spare. This essential barrenness produces rare, threadbare myths: either transient or clumsily indiscreet; by their very being, they label themselves as myths, and point to their masks. [...]
The petit bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. [...] This is because the Other is a scandal who threatens the petit bourgeois's essence.
For the very end of myths is to immobilize the world: they must suggest and mimic a universal order which has fixated once and for all the hierarchy of possessions. Thus, every day and everywhere, man is stopped by myths, referred by them to this motionless prototype which lives in his place, stifles him in the manner of a huge internal parasite, and assigns to his activity the narrow limits within which he is allowed to suffer without upsetting the world: bourgeois pseudophysis is in the fullest sense a prohibition for man against inventing himself. Myths are nothing but this ceaseless, untiring solicitation, this insidious and inflexible demand that all men recognize themselves in this image, eternal yet bearing a date, which was built of them one day as if for all time. For Nature, in which they are locked up under the pretext of being eternalized, is nothing but a Usage. And it is this Usage, however, lofty, that they must take in hand and transform.
[...] I've published one slim volume of verse and some essays, but so has every other semiliterate writer in Cambridge. It's like owning a herd of cattle in my home state of Texas, publishing a book is.
[...] Do I remember Puff the Magic Dragon, he wants to know. Do I? On my fun scale, it ranks with the Nuremberg Trials. [...]