[27] Marx: '. . .we must pay attention to this history, since ideology boils down to either an erroneous conception of this history, or to a complete abstraction from it' (The German Ideology).
[28] Marx: '. . .what makes them representative of the petit-bourgeois class, is that their minds, their consciousnesses do not extend beyond the limits which this class has set to its activities' (The Eighteenth Brumaire). And Gorki: 'the petit-bourgeois is the man who has preferred himself to all else.'
[29] It is not only from the public that one becomes estranged; it is sometimes also from the very object of the myth. In order to demystify Poetic Childhood, for instance, I have had, so to speak, to lack confidence in Minou Drouet the child. I have had to ignore, in her, under the enormous myth with which she is cumbered, something like a tender, open, possibility. It is never a good thing to speak against a little girl.
[30] Even here, in these mythologies, I have used trickery: finding it painful constantly to work on the evaporation of reality, I have started to make it excessively dense, and to discover in it a surprising compactness which I savoured with delight, and I have given a few examples of 'substantial psycho-analysis' about some mythical objects.