Page 21 JanuaryFebruary 2010

and breadth of the collateral damage is immense and,

sadly, ongoing.
But Falcos title is as misleading as it is un-
wieldy, for the true hero of the novel isnt Grant, but
Avery, who doesnt need to be rescued by anyone.
She is open-minded, adventurous, and resilientin
other words, a survivor. She is precisely the kind
of heroine we need in times of ordinary violence.
Falcos superbly engaging novel is a primer in the
art of picking up the pieces.
Jim Ruland is the author of the short story collec-
tion Big Lonesome and the host of Vermin on the
Mount, an irreverent reading series in the heart of
Los Angeless Chinatown.
Ruland continued from previous page
the novel braiding their lives together as he unravels
their secrets. The characters are drawn in a way that
makes them easily recognizable: college students,
small-town Virginians, New York City artists, each
group more vacuous than the next. Falcos character-
ization sometimes comes in just south of stereotype
and west of clich, but this familiarity facilitates a
sense of intimacy: these are characters we can believe
without necessarily believing in. Falcos genius is
that the reader is wrong to the exact extent that the
characters think they know themselves.
While it may be a bit redundant to say that
these are fawed people, the fact that they are bad at
what they do makes them more sympathetic. Their
art isnt any good. Their marriages are broken and
betrayed. Even Grant, a small-time hood, is a terrible
gangster-in-the-making. Falco investigates what
makes them tick and then deepens our understand-
ing by showing them from multiple points of view.
What we think we know is challenged by the differing
viewpoints, thereby making a seemingly banal, yet
straight-forward, set of problems anything but.
One of the few missteps Falco makes concerns
the title. Saint John of the Five Boroughs is Grants
stage name during his unsuccessful stint as a per-
formance artist, but it suggests this is a New York
City novel when the scope is so much broader than
that. Although a school shooting or a soldiers death
devastates the immediate family, countless clusters
of people related by blood, marriage, and community
are also affected. We are all close to someone who is
close to someone who was over there and the depth
Eliades religious beliefs in the sacred story, in
which Eliades sacredness in objects, space, and
time create a mythological meaning of the story,
this critic lacks references to the mainstream phe-
nomenology of religion; e.g., Friedrich Heiler in
his Erscheinungsformen und Wesen der Religion
(1961) adds three more categories of the sacred:
the sacred activity (heilige Handlung), the sacred
word (heiliges Wort), and the sacred man (heiliger
Mensch). These references could have been included
easily into Mardernesss argument.
This book is a pleasant companion to
follow the restless ramifcation of the
interpretation of old and new myths.
Cultural and extramythical readings are real-
ized in inside/outside extramyths, such as in the Tro-
jan horse story. The huge wooden horse was placed
outside the city as an obscure gift-offering during the
war with the Greeks. The Trojans surmise an incor-
rect mythical signifcation for this cryptic horse, an
error that leads to their demise. Other extramyths
taken as myths are provided by the curious stories
of Alvarezs Butterfies to experience the signifcance
of the politically active Mirabel sisters in the his-
tory of the Dominican dictator Trujillo, as well as
the myth of the communist ideal comrade and the
Chinese homeland myth in Mins Red Azalea.
Warming up in these familiar corners, the
unfamiliar mythological reading is reached. The
deciphered myth is the special reading by the
persuasion of the critical reader that interprets
myth and may question it, distrust it, or discredit
it. The two-boxes system of meaning and content
is extended into a three-boxes schedule, adding
the remythicization of the reader. Myth will be
clarifed by the mythological interpretation of the
sign-user. Barthess mythology of the Eiffel Tower
functions as a myth of Parisian majesty. The form
is, in Barthess words, a utterly useless monument,
but its shape is named as a rocket, stem, derrick,
phallus, lighting rod or insect. The Tower means
everything. This hypercorrect term, remythicisa-
tion, was shaped perhaps in order to underline the
difference from the everyday use of mythifcation
and mythicization, meaning that a non-mythic
element may turn to a mythical one (as seen with
astronauts or winning horse race mares).
The concise eight-page conclusion is a moment
a myth iS a myth
Vilmos Voigt
HOW TO READ A MYTH
William Marderness
Humanity Books
http://www.prometheusbooks.com
152 pages; cloth, $26.95
Myth is a heroic, ritual, or romantic story
which has come down from the past. The original
has been lost or forgotten, and myth exists in the
truth and untruth of its versions in time and space.
Reading this book about myth, the critic feared that
William Marderness would cut out all the substance
and use the term myth away from the description
of the French anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss.
According to Lvi-Strausss bon mot,
there is no true version of a myth;
every version of myths has the same
importance. However, Marderness
spans the break between the myth
versions at this point, stressing that
the real connection of the mythical
versions appears to see that all inter-
pretations or personifcationsin the
authors words, the reading of the
mythhave the same importance
and relevance.
Myth presents itself as a
rich concept with basically a lack of
precise determination. The infnite
numbers of books, articles, or theories
about myth and mythology seem to
start from the viewpoint of what the author thinks
about myth. Mardernesss reading of the myth is
a combination of structural linguistics, semiotics,
comparative literature, and religion. How to Read a
Myth is a small book (almost the size of an overcoat
pocket-sized publication); the task of defning and
arguing the wide comprehensiveness of the con-
cept of myth will become a hazardous occupation.
Beyond the limits of similarities and differences from
the classicsFerdinand de Saussure and Roland
Barthesand some modern handbooks, such as Eric
Csapos Theories of Mythology (2005), Mardernesss
historical argumentation of the factual basis of myth
occupies only some pages of this book. The series
(Philosophy and Literary Theory) in which the
book appears seems to be another barrier before the
innocent reader. Often, myth is used to designate
fanciful collections of platitudes of old myths and
about the true or false nature of the religious or
everyday myth in the social or political reality. The
critic did not applaud and thought that the book was
doomeduntil when he really read the book, and
How to Read a Myth received the critics rave.
After the advisories of the cryptic abbreviations
and the didactic introduction, the reader tries to get
over the fxities of the frightening terms and fgures
(grouped in two boxes): Sd1, Sd2, Sr1, and Sr2, that
are connected with single and two double-headed
arrows, arranging the notions of Signifcation,
Meaning, Concept, Form, and other terms.
The persuasive reader (no more innocent reader)
reaches this question: is myth an ordinary narrative
or, better, a sign? In Roland Barthess Mytholo-
gies (1957), the signifer (the mystical Sr1) and the
signifed (Sd1) create together a meaning of the
sign, that in turn creates the double complexity of
Form (Sr2) and Concept (Sd2). (The
two-level construction of mean-
ing, form, and concept comes
originally from Louis Hjelmslevs
linguistic Prolegomena to a Theory
of Language [1943] and is extended
and amplifed in Barthess Mytholo-
gies to describe cultural phenomena
in French language.) For Marder-
ness, the myth has turned into a
language-text, complexifying the
mythical narrative with the important
third factor, evolving the mythical
reading in retelling the history of
the biblical stories, the epic poem of
Virgils Aeneid, and two American
novels: Anchee Mins Red Azalea
(1994) and Julia Alvarezs In the Time of the But-
terfies (1994).
Is a myth true or false? The author lists four
ways of reading mythical stories depending on the
meaning and a form:
In mythical reading, the language-object
functions ambiguously as a meaning and
a form. In cultural reading, focus falls on
the form. In extramythical reading, the
language-object functions ambiguously
as a meaning and form, but the form is
indefnite. In mythological reading, focus
falls on the meaning.
Mythical reading fows from philosophical and lin-
guistic reasoning. Illustrated by Ferdinand Saussures
clever statements of structural linguistics and Mircea
Voigt continued on next page
Page 22 American Book Review
of old and new myths.
One fnal warning: Marderness gives details,
not stories; he explains motifs and does not deal with
a concept of religion or cultural phenomena in entire
narratives of a mythical nature. But, it will be noted,
Mardernesss problem is to explain examples, the
kind of things that we experience in the world and
how we fnd, construct, and reconstruct the vague
and unspecifc myths with ambiguous meanings.
After some hesitationwas this book made for
philosophers of language, semioticians, or adepts
of the history of comparative religion?this critic
classifed How to Read a Myth as belonging to mod-
ern linguistic poetics.
Vilmos Voigt is a Hungarian folklorist, working on
comparative literature, comparative religion, and
semiotics. He works at Etvs Lornd University,
Budapest (Hungary) and is the founding chairman of
Hungarian Society of Semiotics. Some of his papers
in English were collected into the book Suggestions
Towards a Theory of Folklore (1999).
Voigt continued from previous page
of closure. Yet the summary contains not a formaliza-
tion of the chapters, but instead further interpretative
remarks concerning the texts analysed. Here, we
learn that in the movie Death in the West (1983), the
Marlboro Man, originally a tobacco advertisement
cowboy symbolizing health, virility, and indepen-
dence, now appears in a deciphered and remythicizied
version in the company of sick cowboys who testify
to their smoking-related illnesses. The Marlboro
Man now discourages smoking. How complicated
mythicization and remythicization can become will
become clear after the following sentence, when
The remythicized Marlboro Man (a cowboy as a
sick smoker) is in turn deciphered by Philip Morris
executives, who uphold the Marlboro Man as their
image of a healthy, virile, independent person.
Carefully selected notes, an important (and
not-too-large) bibliography, and a detailed thematic
index close How to Read a Myth. The reader who
reaches the end of the book has already detected a
sonata-like composition of the whole book and will
realize that recurrent themes (analytically presented
in the index) are in fact Leitmotivs encoded into
the text of How to Read a Myth. Abraham from the
Old Testament (fve times), the Aeneid (fve times),
Communion and Eucharist (together eleven times),
Last Supper (fve times), Marlboro Man (ten times)
were myths mentioned again and again in the book,
but in each case, further details accumulate strong
elements to the interpretations of myths.
And then, the innocent reader (designating
the frst response to a work of literature) may shift
his perspective and reread the book in a critical
spiritnot in order to learn more on biblical lore or
about modern US notions, practices, stories of what
myth may represent. Although no easy resolution of
the problem of the research history of language-in-
myth or how signs are interpreted are forthcoming in
How to Read a Myth, Mardernesss ancillary research
maintains that a recognition of the nature of what
has happened to the reader is the frst step towards
a solution of what reading all kinds of myths are
all about. And he does clearly and forcefully show
that he has good suggestions for analysing cultural
mythology. This book is a pleasant companion to
follow the restless ramifcation of the interpretation
of this soul search. Christianity never rises to the
same level of transcendence in his book that Flannery
OConnor tries to instill (some may say impose) in so
many of her stories. Instead, religion is sprinkled into
the characters everyday lives, very often mixed in
withor even confused withthe mundane. In one
of the most poignant stories of the collection, The
Redfsh, the character of that nickname discovers
Bible citations spray-painted on the side of a trailer
Genesis 9:11, Psalm 23:4as he and his girlfriend
fee Hurricane Katrina. Redfsh admits that he didnt
know [the passages], and the more we learn about
his life and his tumultuous past, the more we see him
as someone from whom religion has long been con-
cealed. Hes a man who brawls, escapes death, gets
incarcerated for the wrong crime, and whoreleased
from jailstumbles back into a world that continues
to cheat him. Add to this the foods of Katrina, and
Redfsh almost seems like a modern-day Job. In the
rising waters, he faces his most diffcult test yet: he
must decide whether to save his girlfriends mother
by force, or to let her perish by her own stubbornness,
in what she considers Gods safety net.
WaiSt deeP
Jonathan Liebson
THE SOUTHERN CROSS
Skip Horack
Foreword by Antonya Nelson
Mariner Books
http://www.houghtonmiffinbooks.com/mariner
208 pages; paper, $13.95
In her choice of The Southern Cross as last
years Bread Loaf Writers Conference Bakeless
Prize in fction, Antonya Nelson praises the author
for his restraintwhat she calls a simultaneous
sense of abundance and tantalizing withholding
in his writing. This difficult duality is apparent
throughout Skip Horacks story collection, start-
ing with the opening line of his very frst story. In
Caught Fox, a divorced father pays a visit to his
mentally challenged son on Easter, and on his drive
to meet him, the narrator, running late, begins, Im
rounding the bend at Johnsons Corner when I see
Reverend Lyle has a girl waist deep in the concrete
pool behind the church. The sentence ambles along
at a hurried clip, quickly compiling information as
it goes, yet the reader cannot help slowing down
midway through. Were snagged by the sight of the
girl waist deep in the pool, an image too sensual
and too suggestiveto be overlooked. Christians
or Southerners may recognize sooner that this is a
baptism, but to them the scene will be no less disori-
enting. It is thanks to Horacks minimalist details that
the description seems so provocative. In kinship with
Lucas (the father), the reader feels like a sudden and
accidental voyeur: he perceives the religious foating
dangerously alongside the sexual, and he naturally
wants a closer look.
That seed of sexuality, even down to the girls
submissive posture, prefgures Lucass own submis-
sion later in the story. He allows himself to be wooed
by a young cheerleader, and in the process, he leaves
his son temporarily unchaperoned, a behavior that
exposes him for his poor parenting and that results in
his feeling guilty. In these sentiments, he has lots of
company. He is like so many of the other protagonists
in Horacks book, a collection of luckless neer-
do-wells whose desire for repentance tends to get
watered down by the very impulses that frst land
them in trouble. Its a diverse group of characters the
author has assembled. They include an ex-con, a PhD
student, a dockworker, a rabbit seller, and an elderly
woman moved into a retirement community, to name
just a few. From their individual circumstances,
they exhibit a common desire to ponder their life
choicesto step back momentarily from themselves
and consider how they might attain a higher moral-
ity. Morality exists on a sliding scale, of course, and
instead of the author overseeing the results, it is the
characters themselves who take stock of their own
behavior, and of whether they approach or fall short
of the virtues they seek.
The reader perceives the religious
foating dangerously alongside the
sexual, and he or she naturally wants
a closer look.
That a book called The Southern Cross would
concern itself with sin and redemption should come
as no surprise. Fortunately, where the title offers a
more-than-subtle nod to these themes, the stories
themselves are much less heavy in their portrayal.
Horack succeeds because in serious situations hes
able to use religion in a way thats either humorous
or playfully askew. Beyond the aforementioned
baptism, we see this in such stories as Chores,
where a roadside church sign advertises its weekly
sermon by stating, Our Church Is Prayer Condi-
tioned; or in The Final Conner, when the main
characters girlfriend points out that the shrimp he
uses for bait arent kosherbut the trout are; or
in The Rapture, where a Bible thumper, zealously
lecturing a pole dancer about her date with the devil,
gets a hard-on.
The title of the above story, along with such
titles as Borderlands and The High Place I Go,
are representative of the symbolic terrain these char-
acters must pass throughor at least set foot inin
hopes of discovering their better selves. To his credit,
Horack consistently and deftly undercuts the gravity
Liebson continued on next page