Untrue

Early on in “On the Myth of Racial Democracy,” Joshua Lund comments on the faulty manner in which the “orthodox” critics of Casa-grande e senzala have used the term myth to, as I understood it, generally discredit the model of Brazilian race relations Gilberto Freyre proposes in his text. For these critics “myth,” Lund argues, “…becomes a way of saying something like ‘not truth.’” He then goes on to say that, “This approach, however, rests on a naïve notion of the complex sociological and psychological workings of myth, which, as Roland Barthes has proposed, is not a  ‘lie’ at all, but rather a kind of representational ‘inflexion’ that works by converting ‘history into nature’ (143). First, I’d like to know to what extent is this seemingly essentialist portrait of Freyre’s critics true? I’ve not been exposed to their writings, so I wonder if someone who has (hi professor) could (at her convenience) provide a second opinion. Now, if these critics really did hold this essentialist notion of mythology as non-truth, then I’m quite fond of Lunds argument, or rather his use of Barthe’s argument, that mythology, something “untrue”, brings about its own truths. Lund navigates the uncertain middle ground between different essentialist positions, where myth is false and history is unassailable. Similar to Lund’s thoughts on mythology, there is a reference in the piece to the ability of literature, something similarly “false,” to reflect worldly truth, and also, more significantly, produce its own “true” system of rules and meaning. Here the distinction of literature as something separate from the “real world” becomes troubled, much in the way that Lund troubles any essential notion of Freyre’s critics and of Freyre's assertions in Casa-grande e senzala.