A memorable image in Robert Musil's Man without Qualities likens the impact of a certain character to that of a powdery avalanche. The effect of reading Marina Warner's magisterial works of cultural history is somewhat similar: the cool temperature, the graceful touch, the sensation of resistance being gently annihilated under an accumulation of brilliant particularity.[*] Resistance, if you have any, is likely to focus on the idea - central to her work - that myth evolves in the context of actual human history, and can only be properly understood in relation to that history. 'When history falls away from a subject,' she writes in From the Beast to the Blonde, 'we are left with Otherness, and all its power to compact enmity, recharge it and recirculate it. An archetype is a hollow thing, but a dangerous one, a figure or image which through usage has been uncoupled from the circumstances which brought it into being, and goes on spreading false consciousness.'

LRB 21 August 2003 | PDF Download