The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction Since 1960 by Kathryn Hume;

Author:Kathryn Hume;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

5

Situational Myth

Posthuman Metamorphoses

McIntyre, McCaffrey, Simmons, Doctorow, Piercy, Stross, Rucker, Tidhar

Let me summarize a few distinctions among myth, mythology, mythic worlds, and their invented equivalents. Myths are inherited stories about cultural heroes, gods, and demi-gods, and they are often originally associated with a religion no longer extant in the culture that is deploying them artistically. Myths are cultural artifacts, and knowledge of them provides cultural capital—proof of high-culture learning as well as satisfying and puzzling stories. For the Western world, the primary myths are Greco-Roman and, for unbelievers or relaxed believers, Judeo-Christian, but education has supplied us with at least casual acquaintance with North Germanic, Celtic, Egyptian, Hindu, Slavic, Native American, and other mythologies. As Asia and Africa grow in global influence, some of their cultures’ myths will presumably enter common knowledge. Some myths may still be religious truth in their own culture or among fervent believers, but from the viewpoint of artists employing them as “myth” rather than doctrine, they circulate as story for whatever effect the writer hopes to achieve with them.

A mythology is a network of related stories that has coalesced from individual mythic stories. This body of stories is open to development by a variety of writers of different eras. Homer (whoever he or they may have been) gave us the Trojan War and the Odyssey. Virgil combined the war with Mediterranean wanderings, attached them to Aeneas, and developed the story with the founding of Rome in mind. Medieval writers took obscure characters such as Troilus and gave them major roles, and justified new viewpoints by inventing Dares and Dictys as sources for new siege of Troy stories. In literary usage, mythology is highly collaborative in the sense that writers feel free to add to and alter the received stories. We see this in the independent developments in Iceland and Germany of the Völsungasaga and the Niebelungenlied. Wagner’s additions are just one more such contribution to the branching tree of story.

Mythic worlds are the most difficult to define. Most obviously, they add nonmaterial dimensions to the material world. In keeping with this sense of Greco-Roman myth and influenced by Christian myth, mythic worlds often have postmortem dimensions, and may have explicit beginnings and violent endings. These could be called situational myth since creation and apocalypse are situations found in some mythologies, and they frequently recur as literary situations. These worlds encourage larger-than-merely-human actors and actions. Witnessing creation from a quasi-human perspective as an event that is limited in time rather than spread over billions of years certainly goes beyond normal human possibility. We get such mythic creation in Kathy Acker, Neil Gaiman, and Italo Calvino. Apocalypses flourish in genre fiction, be they nuclear, ecological, plague-driven, or extraterrestrial, and the chief question in readers’ minds will be to wonder whether all land-based terrestrial life will be destroyed, as in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, or whether some plucky small band of humans will survive and try to build a new civilization.

But what of invented mythology? And how do

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