Myth Is Just Memory Photographed Twice

I want to propose a heresy to anyone who still believes myth belongs to a vanished, pre-photographic age: myth was never a story we told about the past. It was always a photograph we did not yet have the chemistry to fix — an image so urgently needed by a community that it was developed, instead, in language, passed from mouth to mouth the way a print is passed from hand to hand, degrading a little at every reproduction, gaining in the process not less truth but a different, more durable kind.

Roland Barthes, in La Chambre claire, arrived at what he called the noeme of photography — its irreducible essential claim — in three syllables that I have never stopped turning over since I first read them: "ça-a-été", "it-has-been" (Barthes, La Chambre claire, 1980). Every photograph, Barthes insists, certifies not likeness but occurrence: this configuration of light was, once, physically arranged exactly so, in front of a lens, at an unrepeatable instant. Myth makes precisely the same claim, in a different register, and I think this is why the two have always been closer companions than we admit. When a culture tells the story of its founding, its flood, its first crime and first forgiveness, it is not asserting metaphor. It is asserting ça-a-été — this happened, once, in illo tempore, in that other time that ordinary time keeps circling back to touch — with the same stubborn, unphotographable insistence that a family album asserts about a wedding no living witness now remembers firsthand.

The historian of religion Mircea Eliade spent much of his career describing how archaic societies experience ritual not as commemoration of a past event but as literal, repeated re-entry into the "strong time" of the original mythic act — what he termed the illud tempus, that sacred first time made perpetually present through rite (Eliade, Le Mythe de l'éternel retour, 1949). I do not think it is a coincidence that this is exactly how a photograph behaves in the hand of someone grieving. The image of the dead mother is not a symbol of her. It is, phenomenologically, a doorway back into the illud tempus of her actual presence, reopened every time the photograph is held up to the light. We do not remember through photographs. We are briefly returned, the way ritual briefly returns the celebrant to the founding day.

What changes, then, between a myth and a photograph, if the underlying operation is the same act of freezing an occurrence into a form that can be re-entered indefinitely? I think only this: myth was memory with no single author, refined by a thousand retellings until every inessential detail had been worn away by the friction of repetition, leaving only what mattered enough to survive the telling. Photography is memory with a single, violent author — one instant, one decision, no revision permitted afterward, the friction of retelling replaced by the absolute stillness of the negative. Myth is memory sculpted slowly by an entire people. Photography is memory struck once, like a coin, and never restruck. Perhaps this is why myths comfort and photographs so often wound: the myth has already forgiven the story everything the retelling could not bear to keep, while the photograph, taken only once, has forgiven nothing at all. It simply insists, coldly and forever: ça-a-été. This happened. Deal with it.

Bibliography

• Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie, Éditions du Seuil/Gallimard/Le Seuil, 1980.
• Mircea Eliade, Le Mythe de l'éternel retour: Archétypes et répétition, Gallimard, 1949.

— Luca