EXAMPLES OF MYTH AND MYTHIC STRUCTURE USAGE IN 21ST CENTURY PROSE AND POETRY
Rebecca A. Saxton
Critical Paper and Program Bibliography Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in Creative Writing, Pacific Lutheran University, August 2012 1
Examples of Myth and Mythic Structure Usage in 21st Century Prose and Poetry
Our lives are stories made of stories. Some stories we build consciously out of experiences with places and people in our own time. Others develop out of the roles we play in our families and communities. Still more emerge from deeper, older sources, coming to us without our awareness, embedded in the fabric of our religious and social systems: stories of the ancestors and lost worlds inhabited by fantastical creatures with supernatural powers. These latter stories are often called myths, narratives sometimes based on historical fact, but retold because of the life lessons and human behaviors on which they focus. Writers and readers alike are drawn to myth in written narratives because, as folklorist Kenneth C. Davis notes, “...myths [are] a very human way to explain everything” (23). Myth, in this paper, includes many types of stories, such as legends, folktales, family stories, parables, fables, and even contemporary movies.
Fiction writers, poets, and memoirists use myths and mythic structures for a variety of purposes: to reflect the theme they are addressing in their narrative, to create metaphors for their experiences and events, to engage in larger conversations about social conventions and taboos, and to offer new interpretations to well-known myths. By examining work by writers actively using myth and mythic structures, we can better understand the enduring qualities of myth and how the myth itself can change through engagement with different literary genres. 2
Origin of Myth: The Human Imagination
As noted above, myths often begin as stories meant to explain an event that cannot be verified by fact. Stories begin in the human imagination and often reflect an aspect of an individual’s life experience. In his essay “Tommy Two,” Mark Spragg writes about his relationship with a ranch cat that routinely accompanied him while he helped to gather horses for the day. Tommy Two is a creature Spragg feels comfortable with: he often reads to the cat about the adventures of pirates such as Blackbeard and William
Kidd. In the essay, Spragg explains,“I tell him we are buccaneers. Cocaptains. I tell him to keep his powder dry. He curls in his sleep and flexes his feet” (174). Theirs is a gentle relationship built on shared hardships, and Spragg first uses the myth of pirate compatriots to show this relationship, then extends the myth to create a new myth when
Tommy Two dies. Rather than dwell on the loss of a beloved companion, Spragg latches on to the fact that no one really knows how Tommy Two died. Spragg denies the story of the cat’s death and instead weaves a story based on the kind of future he had wanted to share with the cat:
Before I sleep I see him hitching to the Gulf of Mexico. The picture is
clear. There is no mistake. He lounges in the well of a convertible's
downed top, the wind catching in the cup of his one good ear. I see him
signed aboard a cargo ship, respected by its crew, mousing out its hold for
work. On moonlit nights I see him sleeping on the open deck. He's nestled
in the lap of a drunken sailor. An old man and an old cat. They rise and
fall against the sea. The cat bows his neck and grinds the scarred fist of his
forehead into the heel of the old man's hand. I smile with my eyes still 3
closed. I can see the hand. It is calloused, and broad, and smells of fish
and sun and rum and salt. (177)
By creating a story based on his understanding of pirate adventures, Spragg gives himself a chance to resolve his relationship with Tommy Two in a satisfactory way.
Spragg could have imagined several ways that Tommy Two could have died, but instead uses his imagination to create an alternate universe where the cat lives and thrives. In addition, Spragg could have chosen to keep the story to himself as something private, and the story would have remained just a personal story celebrating his beloved cat’s life. By retelling this story to a wider audience and offering it as a possible template for managing grief, Spragg elevates the story of Tommy Two to a mythic level.
Use of Myth in Memoir
Marjorie Sandor, in her essay “On Leaving Florida,” uses the established myth of
Eden to explain and rationalize her actions and emotions as she begins a relationship with her new home in Florida: "My rush to connect this new place with my childhood home turned out to be rather like the last fruit of Eden: irresistible, a bad idea, and the necessary beginning of my education" (112). By invoking the image of Eden, Sandor characterizes her mistake (rushing to connect) in biblical terms and, by extension, implies that her connection to Florida is as successful for her as it is for Eve eating the forbidden fruit.
Not satisfied with simply rehashing the myth’s themes of seduction and betrayal, Sandor extends the myth with her humorous viewpoint and analytical observations. Sandor does not view Eve’s act so much as sin but as educational, implying that the act of tasting the fruit creates life experience. In the same way, Sandor’s haste to connect with Florida 4 educates her in ways she does not anticipate. She describes her experience as beginning before she arrives: “So the seduction began. When I stepped off the plane in Gainesville, it was mid-January and seventy degrees, the air itself some rare form of bliss” (109).
Sandor’s Florida “education” begins with a misperception of what her life in
Florida will be like. Sandor writes, “Back in Boston, we prepared for our new life as if we were going on an exotic adventure-vacation…We were, I see now, simply an updated version of the naïve American settler…” (109–110). She implies another set of myths held by many settlers that romanticized the adventures of settling a new land, establishing territory, and surviving adversity with little more than a barrel full of hardtack and a few nails. Interestingly, she leaves this myth unexplored, favoring the previously established biblical myth. Sandor reinforces the Eden metaphor later in the essay when she writes,
“Maybe it was inevitable. Within a year or two it was the violent sky that we began to see, a god grown too big in our minds. We had no rituals and nothing to sacrifice—only the futile modern lyric of complaint” (118). Like Eve, Sandor realizes she has bitten off more than she can chew and the results are apocalyptic. She flees Florida realizing that her dreams are just dreams she cannot bring to fruition, yet she is transformed by the experience: “I’ll swear I smell the delicate orange, though I might be dreaming of that other grove I lost…This Florida, the Florida I am leaving, won’t leave me. It is the lush green vine of memory…” (122). Nostalgic for an imagined experience, Sandor evocatively circles back to the mythic imagery of Eden.
While myths such as Eve and Eden usually concern themselves with the origins or destiny of a cultural group, Davis makes the distinction that “legends are really an early form of history—stories about historical figures, usually humans, not gods, that are 5 handed down from earlier times” (28). Sandor uses the legend of Solomon and the Two
Mothers to describe how her family negotiates the difficult events associated with her divorce. In the original tale, two mothers come to King Solomon to settle the matter of to whom a child belongs. They both claim the child for different reasons, the first saying that the other mother should give up her child because the first has lost her own in death.
The second mother claims that the first cannot blame her for the death and that she should keep her own child. Instead of favoring one mother over the other, Solomon suggests that the child should be cut in half to satisfy both. The first mother agrees, but the second mother relinquishes her claim in order to save the child (I Kings 3.16-28). Sandor takes the Solomon tale in her essay “Solomon’s Blanket” to show the emotional tearing following a divorce in a tangible way:
“The Solomonic sheep blankie,” said my husband, with a sober, warning
look, when I handed him his half. He was right, of course, and I knew it.
The spiritual cost of leaving was unknowable….Our daughter herself is
the baby of Solomon’s challenge, in that story in which two women vie for
possession of a newborn and the King calls for a knife to divide the living
child in two….There is nothing more true: she is divided between us, the
separated halves of our influence, our selves carried in herself. (167–168)
As in the Eve myth, Sandor claims the Solomon legend for her own. She does not relinquish her daughter to her husband to keep the child whole; instead, she watches her child successfully negotiate two households, becoming a messenger between mother and father, all the while keeping her beloved blanket in two places. Sandor recognizes the impossibility of tearing the child from her life or the life of her husband. All their lives 6 are mixed in the body of the child and it is left to the child to create a new life from the old one that has died.
Use of Legends in Memoir
In her memoir Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German
Village, Mimi Schwartz uses more recent legends about the Goodness of Benheim as the starting point to unravel the mystery of her father's homeland. The legends are stories of altruistic acts, some common decency and others done at great risk, performed by
Christians to help the Jews of Benheim during the Holocaust. Schwartz begins her memoir talking about her childhood as one filled with her father's admonitions of good behavior, lectures that ironically distance her from her father’s village instead of strengthening her connection to it:
All I knew were some faded stories that I’d been allergic to as a kid in
Queens, born in 1940, three years after my family arrived in New York’s
harbor. I’m an American, I’d mutter when ever my father started with his
In Benheim this, In Benheim that…usually when he thought my sister and
I didn’t behave nicely….Not my world, I kept thinking, until forty years
later, in midlife, I saw an old Benheim Torah that was 1,800 miles from its
Schwarzwald home. (5)
Although Schwartz's memory of childhood is filled with stories of decency and loyalty among the Benheim villagers, the people in the stories seem as distant to her as any Grimm's fairytale. That is, until the day she sees the Torah for herself: evidence of the village's existence and its special history. If the Benheim Torah could be seen, she 7 realizes, what else about her father's village could be verified? Her questioning thoughts are reinforced when she asks the caretaker of the Benheim Torah about the legends she once heard about the kindness of Benheim Christians:
I had no tape recorder, took no notes (didn’t know then that I was starting
a quest), but I still hear the old man saying “Ja, the Christians of Benheim
rescued the Torah for us during Kristallnacht.”…I bowed my head to
honor the dead, but kept thinking about the Torah’s rescue, the story I
didn’t expect. Was it true—or an old man’s wishful memory? (6)
In this way, Schwartz comes to understand that the legends of her family are more meaningful to her than the simple accounts of brutality in Nazi Germany. Schwartz searches the memories of past and current residents of Benheim, traveling to Germany to visit the village and to cross-check details in the legends with records still kept by historians. Her journey of discovery centers around the ways in which retold legends enliven historic fact; Michael Wood notes,
Listening to such tales (of Alexander the Great) it often seemed to me that
among the ordinary people the legend had become more important than
the history. The continued retelling of the story in the folk tradition had
produced its own narrative, accumulating fabulous detail over many
centuries; ending up far more wonderful than mere historical fact, but still
in some mysterious way reflecting a kind of crystallized essence of the
original story. (7)
As she searches for answers, she finds that her own story is woven into the legends that have been passed down: "...I have been assured that ‘You look just like your 8 aunt Kaethe!’ ‘A definite Lowengart!’” (Schwartz 19). Perhaps the stories are as real as she is; however, as she explores her questions of truth, the questions themselves change from, “Were Benheim Christians as kind as her father wanted her to believe?” to “How could neighbors turn on neighbors during the rise of the Nazi regime?” The answers are hard won as she teases legend away from verifiable fact, and Schwartz learns that human memory is colored by self-perception. It is these perceptions, she finds, that create the legends that she has heard, the bits of history layered by personal experience and retrospection. At the end of the memoir, Schwartz tries to reconcile her original question about the fabled goodness of Benheim villagers:
Rhina, in northern Germany, was a similar size, and had the same high
percentage of Jews (30–50 percent depending on the year); yet the Nazis
won over the village soul. In Benheim, you can’t say that so easily. I’ve
made a list….The policeman saved two Torahs. The shoemaker kept
fixing Jewish shoes and shared his ration cards….Carpenters who fixed
the Jewish windows after Kristallnacht were sent to the Front and didn’t
come back. Small acts of defiance. Nothing anyone bragged about….For
decency is often such a solitary act; it’s evil that draws a noisy crowd.
(234–236)
Schwartz realizes that she has encountered ordinary heroes with lives as complicated and fraught with second-thoughts as any other human would experience. The acts of the neighbors of Benheim were not heroic in an epic sense, but in ways which
Schwartz can imagine facing herself. In understanding them, she understands that life in
Benheim during the Nazi regime was not as clear cut as she had hoped. The human face 9 of legend makes a richer reality than she originally thinks. Through her journey to
Benheim, she becomes part of the community. Ultimately, her opinions about the
Goodness of Benheim change because she interacts with the community within the context of the legends—a far more visceral level than “historical fact” provides.
Use of Fable in Memoir
Fables differ from legends and myths because of their particular focus and brevity. According to one scholar, “fables are simple, usually brief, fictitious stories, typically teaching a moral, or making a cautionary point, or, in some cases, satirizing human behavior” (Davis 31). In his essay “The Circusmaster,” Spragg relates the story of how he is charged with the task of taking the old, drunken cook from the ranch to a campsite several miles away. The journey is torturous for the fourteen-year-old boy as he is forced to listen to story after story of the cook’s exploits. Spragg attempts to distance himself from the distasteful job by trying not to be curious about the cook’s age. In order to do this, however, he finds he must lie to the cook about his curiosity. Telling the lie reminds Spragg of one of his mother’s fables:
My mother has told me that lies work into the joints of a boy's bones.
She's said they resemble petrified peach pits, but much smaller, that they
gather like seeds. She said that lying is the primary cause of arthritis. That
liars cripple early and painfully. Before my mother had taken on the task
of my personal enlightenment she had been a nurse. I'm stuck in a
descending spiral. Every day I think about girls in a way that requires lies.
(92) 10
Spragg extends the fable from the single lie he tells the cook to the lies he must tell himself and others about his growing interest in girls. He sees that lies are his stock and trade for the moment and there is a sense of fatalistic danger about this realization.
He cannot stop lying because to tell the truth is too painful, too uncertain, yet there is the threat of permanent debilitating pain as in the fable. Embarrassed by his own fantasies about girls and the ease with which the cook shares his exploits, Spragg must endure the day-long journey made more dangerous by the possibility of an early blizzard or a disaster caused by the cook’s drunkenness. The passage gives the readers a sense of the hopelessness Spragg feels as an adolescent trying to understand his changing circumstances. This point of view, in which the reader and the author know something the character does not, is especially powerful.
Use of Parable in Memoir
Similar to a fable, a parable, according to Merriam-Webster, is “usually a short fictitious story that illustrates a moral attitude or religious principle.” Whereas fables derive their moral lessons from physical consequences, like lies becoming arthritis, parables derive their morality from a specific religious belief system. Parables appear in Sandor’s work and serve to give the reader a glimpse into Jewish life and history. In her essay “Waiting for a Miracle: A Jew Goes Fishing,” Sandor seeks to understand why, contrary to her
Jewish heritage which seemed to eschew the hobby, she appears to be compulsively drawn to fishing. Sandor recognizes this irony, saying, “Of course I knew the old stereotype. How many Jewish sportsmen can you name, let alone fishermen and hunters of wild beasts? ” (85). Her search sends her to a skeptical librarian who grudgingly 11 searches for information, and to their surprise, supplies several books connecting Jews and fishing.
In parable after parable, smart little fish rise up and advise the fisherman to catch them later, when they're nice and fat:
“For then there will be a festival in your house,” and so on.
Jewish philosophy in a nutshell: Worry now; later, much
later, we'll party…Then it happened. Sitting there
surrounded by books, oppressed by the faint but tenacious
smell of leeks and Jewish destiny, I came upon a little fish
fable that concluded with one of my Ashkenzi
grandmother's favorite sayings: “Eat,” she used to say. “Eat
or be eaten. ” (92)
By connecting her compulsion to fish with the parables of the Jewish culture,
Sandor deepens the connection between herself and her heritage. In Sandor’s parables, fishing goes from a simple pastime that she learned from her brothers, and doggedly pursues even though she feels unsuccessful to an act that connects her to her heritage.
In her book The Florist's Daughter, Patricia Hampl uses a parable to characterize her father's passion for flowers. Decorating for special events is of particular importance to her father, and he is respected for creating unique arrangements for even the most common of events. Hampl uses a particular incident to characterize his relationship to flowers and special events:
During one benighted period, St. Luke's had a timorous pastor who told
my father he'd better cut back on the Christmas decorations.... Too much? 12
What on earth could that mean? What about John, chapter 12? Then Mary
bought a pound of very costly perfume, pure oil of nard, and anointed
Jesus' feet and wiped them with her hair, till the house was filled with
fragrance. It was Judas, we recalled, who protested against this
indulgence. (62–63)
Hampl shows the reader that the pastor's decision is difficult for her father to understand because her father not only relies on the business created by floral decoration, but also believes that when it comes to decorating the church, the florist and the parish should spare no expense. The biblical passage chosen shows the weight of the pastor's decision and works on several levels. The sense of betrayal puts the father in the role of
Christ and the pastor in the role of Judas. The situation involves a parish that bases its actions on the precepts of the Bible. The biblical passage itself concerns Christ, the central figure of Christmas, and aligns the decorating of the church with the giving of expensive gifts. The flowers are an outpouring of her father's love for the event and for the parish, like the nard is an outpouring of Mary's love for Christ. The judgment of the pastor comes at the end when it is obvious to all that at best the pastor is as misguided as
Judas is for criticizing Mary. The undertone is that of betrayal; her father feels betrayed by the pastor's stinginess and Hampl implies that no good could come of such a decision.
In contrast to Sandor’s use of the parable to work out a personal understanding of her
Jewish heritage, Hampl uses a parable to express and justify her father’s passion for flowers within a religious setting.
Use of Folktale in Memoir 13
Writers can also include another type of myth known as folktales in their narratives. Davis notes that folktales are handed down orally and “generally tell of the customs, superstitions, and beliefs of ordinary people” (32). In his essay “Adopting
Bear,” Spragg illustrates the oral retelling of a folktale and the impact of that folktale on his friendship. The scene begins with Spragg waiting for dawn with his friend Claude:
Because it is too early to get up and go to work I tell Claude about the
book I have read. It is about the Blackfeet Indians. I tell him about a
Blackfeet bear knife. I explain that the knife has a double-edged blade and
the jaw of a bear for its handle.... I tell him the bear knife indicated the
power of the man who owned it, and that if another man, a warrior, asked
to purchase the knife, and it was agreed upon, the two men would purify
themselves in a sweat lodge, and then sit together naked in the lodge of the
man who owned the knife.... Then the man who owned the knife would
crawl around this lodge four times. He'd growl like a bear and paw the air
and snap his jaws. Then he'd stand up and hold the knife by its point and
throw it as hard as he could at the man who wanted it.... If the man caught
the knife it was his. Its power too. (184)
The retelling of the folktale relates to the overall subject of the essay: how Spragg handles his fear of bears. Spragg dreams of bears and imagines what it would be like to be killed by a bear.
His fear is not paralyzing, however, because later he goes with another man to pursue a bear wounded by one of the more inexperienced members of a hunting party.
Their tracking leads them to discover that the bear is not ready to die and in fact turns to 14 face his pursuers, Spragg and the other man. Wisely, the two return to camp and a shaken
Spragg talks with Claude about how his brush with danger made him feel more alive. The inclusion of the Blackfeet folktale could be seen as simple entertainment, a way to pass the time, but in fact, Spragg's experience points back to the folktale, a very real warning.
Two men face danger in the form of a bear, and like the throwing of the knife in the folktale, Spragg feels what it is like to be in mortal danger. The power that comes through that experience changes his perception of life and connects him more strongly with his friend Claude, a Vietnam Vet. Claude and Spragg share their experience in the following conversation:
"Do you feel alive?"
"Very alive."
"Like you don't want to quit?"
"Yes."
"I know the feeling." (194)
The pair experiences the power of survival and forge a bond that carries through to the end of the essay. Spragg illustrates through his essay that myths, especially folktales, derive their power by creating and reinforcing a sense of community between the storyteller and the audience. “Sharing real life stories was an essential element in forging …communities. It brought individuals a greater intimacy with each other and, simultaneously, a stronger sense of self,” notes Jack Maguire in his book The Power of
Personal Storytelling: Spinning Tales to Connect with Other (xiii). 15
Use of Culturally Specific Folktales and Folklore
Memoirists from non-mainstream cultures may use folktales and folklore specific to their culture to enliven their narratives and give the reader a chance to see into what makes a narrative from a particular group unique. In her book Family Folktales: Write Your Own
Family Stories, Gonzalez notes,
Folktales are generally shorter pieces of writing that express a unique or
personalized version of a universal theme...Childhood recall, in particular,
is an immediate link to our ancestry because it serves as proof that we do
belong to a specific family or community group. (2–3)
Gonzalez’s definition of folktale emphasizes stories told about and within a specific community, rather than a folktale that is completely fictional and metaphoric in structure. Evangeline V. Buell, in her book Twenty-five Chickens and a Pig for a Bride, writes about growing up Filipina in California during the 1930s and later becoming an activist in the 60s. Realizing that many outside of the Filipino community may be unfamiliar with the Filipino community, Buell includes folktales and folklore in her book, especially when describing her childhood. Buell writes about the grandpas, or Manongs, unmarried Filipinos who worked the fields of California, in a folktale manner:
The grandpas loved reminiscing about the Philippines and held the
children's attention with stories about their adventures. One evening, while
Grandma Roberta was still preparing dinner, one grandpa said, “Oh, how
your Grandpa Stokes loved to make homemade gin.... Everyone in the
village knew him because he made good booze. ” Another raved about the
culinary talent of my late grandmother Maria. “Maria used homemade rice 16
noodles for the most delicious pancit. ”...the grandpas only stopped their
storytelling when they heard Grandma Roberta calling, “Dinner is served!
” (20)
By calling the men “grandpas,” Buell signals the reader that her relationship to these men is familial even though she is not blood-related to them. As a young child, she is expected to treat them with the same respect as she would treat her own grandfather.
The relationships are affectionate, though, as shown by her gentle assessment of their chatter. The grandpas’ talk about the Philippines, another expectation of their relationship; they talk about her origins in a land far across an ocean, and she is delighted to know more about her culture through them, describing their stories as “adventures.”
The story also shows that communities in the Philippines were based on mutual care and shared experiences. Even though Grandpa Stokes is not Filipino, they accept him as part of the community, in part by his willingness to share his best gin.
The passage continues, showing that the grandpas had equal appreciation for how well Buell’s grandmother cooked and Grandpa Stokes made his gin. By including their comments about both her ancestors, Buell accomplishes two things. First, she shows that the grandpas perceived the worth of each ancestor as equal—the cooking and the gin- making were actions that served the community, and they did it well. Second, Buell shows that she has learned the Filipino view that the sexes are equal in Filipino culture.
Buell also uses folklore to bring cultural richness to her narrative. The American
Folklore Society defines folklore in the following way:
…a traditional art, literature, knowledge, and practice that is disseminated
largely through oral communication and behavioral example. Every group 17
with a sense of its own identity shares, as a central part of that identity,
folk traditions—the things that people traditionally believe...
do...know...make...and say. (American Folklore Society).
Buell writes about how she learned to prepare traditional Filipino foods from her grandmother, saying,
Grandma had taught us how to prepare rice, Asian style, using our fingers
to measure the water. “Point your middle finger above the rice in the pot
and measure the water to the second knuckle line of that finger, regardless
of the size of pot or amount of rice. Let it boil, then turn the flame down,
cover the pot and let it steam slowly. ” It was a fail-proof method, and I
cooked rice perfectly each time. I felt so proud of my accomplishment that
I could hardly wait to serve it. (45)
Buell’s use of dialogue reinforces the sense of tradition being orally passed on to a new generation. Mastery of rice cooking comes easily to Buell because of her grandmother’s willingness to share her knowledge and Buell’s willingness to be taught.
By reading this scene, the reader gains this knowledge, thus becoming part of the oral tradition through the narrative, as it’s clear that Buell is not only proud of learning how to cook rice well, but also is proud to pass on this knowledge to her readers.
In addition to showing the reader cultural traditions about family and food, Buell illustrates traditions of courtship and marriage through her narrative. Although Buell and the Manongs are living in California during the following incident, Manong Tommy still holds to a Filipino tradition regarding the proper way to court a young woman: 18
Manong Tommy was a family friend, who had visited our home on several
occasions with the other Manongs from the farms in Stockton. He had
been very kind to me and my sister, as we were growing up. But we had
not seen him in a while. He seemed very nervous, which is most unlike
him. It seemed odd for him to be all dressed up so early in the morning....
Suddenly, fortified by summoned up courage, Manong Tommy stood up,
faced my Dad, and said emphatically in English, “Your daughter
Evangeline will be 18 and I beg you for her hand in marriage. I offer you
as a symbol of my love for her twenty-five chickens and a pig for her
birthday party to seal our engagement.” (81–82)
In the Philippines, as Buell illustrates, a man asks for a woman’s hand in marriage by speaking to her father. The suitor presents himself as an upstanding man, well-dressed, capable, and patient. He has obviously been watching Buell grow up and has decided that the best time to propose would be just prior to her debut at age 18. Traditionally, it is the man who must show that he is able to care for the daughter, and Tommy does this by having a bounty of food in his car. Buell writes the passage carefully to show not only her and her father’s surprise, but also Tommy’s earnest desire to marry Buell. He does not bring a bride price, but a tangible symbol of his love. He is hopeful that by following
Filipino tradition he will gain the object of his affection.
Unfortunately for Tommy, Buell’s father refuses angrily and throws Tommy out of the house. Following tradition and protocol does not always mean success, especially so far away from the Philippines. Buell includes this incident not only for its humor, but to show how important traditional practices are to Filipinos and how quickly practices are 19 abandoned due to immigration. Buell’s book is a charming history of Filipinos in
California and illustrates the challenges and triumphs of a people often overlooked in accounts of the period and place.
Uses of Mythic Structure in Poetry and Prose
The structures of myth can provide writers with a method to shape the unwieldy materials of experience and explore universal themes. In The Writer's Journey: Mythic
Structure for Writers, Christopher Vogler notes, “All stories consist of a few common structural elements found universally in myths, fairytales, dreams and movies. They are known collectively as The Hero's Journey” (Vogler xxvii). He defines the Hero's Journey as having 12 parts:
1. Heroes are introduced in the ORDINARY WORLD,
where
2. they receive the CALL TO ADVENTURE
3. they are RELUCTANT at first or REFUSE THE
CALL, but
4. are encouraged by a MENTOR to
5. CROSS THE FIRST THRESHOLD and enter the
Special World, where
6. they encounter TESTS, ALLIES, and ENEMIES.
7. They APPROACH THE INMOST CAVE, crossing
the second threshold 20
8. where they endure the ORDEAL
9. They take possession of the their REWARD and
10. are pursued on THE ROAD BACK to the Ordinary
World.
11. They cross the third threshold, experience a
RESURRECTION, and are transformed by the
experience.
12. They RETURN WITH THE ELIXIR, a boon or
treasure to benefit the Ordinary World. (19)
Writers from different genres provide examples of how mythic structures can emphasize or deemphasize parts of the journey depending on their artistic purpose and form. The prose poem “Diwata” by Barbara Jane Reyes takes the form of a traditional myth and begins, “There once lived a strange deity who was only strange because few strove to know her” (14). The poem is constructed of eight parts and tells the story of a diwata, a non-human creature, whose life is changed after encountering Lawin, the hawk of legendary times. Reyes takes the basic Lawin myth from the Philippines and retells the story with Lawin's wife as the central figure. By changing the myth’s point of view,
Reyes changes how a contemporary reader may perceive the myth and provides the possibility of new interpretations, including ones more applicable to modern feminist concerns of passivity versus self-determination.
In part one, Reyes introduces the diwata as the younger sister of thunder and lightning, twins created from the cleaving of a single child, and sets the stage for the sequence in the Ordinary World. Part two does not immediately move into the Call to 21
Adventure, but instead reinforces the supernatural world that the diwata inhabits: “And their sister, these trance diwata whose light remains contained. Witness she is, and weaver” (15). In her ordinary world, the diwata is an observer, a witness, and a recorder of events via her weaving.
Part three continues to expand the reader's awareness of the ordinary world as extra-ordinary: “Before this time, sky was high as a tent. Children poked clouds with bamboo sticks" (16). Reyes calls the reader to the adventure of the myth while suspending the diwata's Call to Adventure until Part four, where it is hinted that life has changed for the diwata: “There is no secret in fire, the diwata told her years later, after they had wed, after the ocean's floor's black mud bubbled to the surface, birthing islands”
(17).
Reyes shifts a portion of the order of the Hero's Journey by situating the Call to
Adventure scene after the three of Vogler’s parts of the journey: Cross of the First
Threshold; Tests, Allies, and Enemies; and Approach of the Inmost cave. The poem implies the crossing of the first threshold with the following lines: “But the earth diver remembers it this way: mighty Lawin drops her upon the back of the eldest tortoise...he took her there, he gave her a child” (17). Then while characterizing Lawin as test, ally, and enemy all at once, the Inmost Cave is revealed to be her womb. Later in Part five, the reader hears the diwata's voice for the first time without context or commentary: “He took me, from my hole in the clouds.... When mighty Lawin came with his sugared words, I leaned farther over the edge than I should have” (18). The Call to Adventure, then, is revealed after the consequences of the diwata’s action of leaning too far. The
Ordeal comes through in Part six where the reader hears of how painful it is for her to 22 raise the child of a hawk: “ The child tore at his mother's breast for he was born with talons and a tendency towards treetops” (19). The diwata's ordeal does not center only on her child, but on other losses as well: “ A season ago, hunter's arrows felled mighty
Lawin. After this she lived alone. She dreamed.... How she never returned to her father's realm” (19).
In part seven, Reyes weaves in the tale of a diwata who is captured by a human male, a different diwata than the wife of Lawin, but the text seems to bring the two into one:“ Because he is a hunter, he lures her to his village home. Because she is diwata, she feigns capture” (20). The Reward of the Hero's journey is the diwata’s ability to choose her new husband and her Road Back is through the development of a relationship with a community: “ The old ones say she uses human hair to bind mother of pearl shells to boars’ teeth, and human skulls to doorposts” (20). The diwata’s final transformation comes in part eight where her voice is heard once more, separate from the structure of the previous mythic commentary: “ I am the tree, and thinking me naked, he blankets me in a dress of my own skin...this death shroud for the living, though he believes himself to be kind-hearted in this gesture” (21). The internal change is physical, emotional, and spiritual, as shown by the husband’s misinterpretation of the diwata’s needs and the diwata’s ability to perceive her own change and make her own choices. The diwata is
Resurrected into a different iteration of her earlier being emerging as a tree spirit mentioned in Part seven. The diwata's elixir is wisdom: “ But when he comes to me, mute, clothed in the scent of the dying, and seeks passage through my thickets—tell me, would you not also allow him entrance? ” (21). By taking the structure of myth and 23 interacting with it, Reyes creates a re-visioned myth about an ancient creature who becomes more human with each encounter retold.
Marianne Villanueva structured her short story “ Isa” in a pattern that also follows the Hero's Journey structure, but whereas Reyes examines the experience of an individual on the Hero’s Journey, Villanueva examines the experience of a community on the journey. The story begins, “ Daughter, our islands are disappearing. Once, there were two: two proud pieces of rock rearing high above the waves” (246). With these opening sentences, Villanueva introduces the Ordinary World and later in the paragraph, the
Ordinary Hero: “ Surrounded by such abundance, we seldom knew hunger, or sickness.
You and your sisters were born on these islands..." (246). Although the story is a mother's lament to her daughter, the use of “ we” and “ and your sisters” implies the journey of an entire community. The reader knows that something has transformed the community because of the narrator's plea to her daughter “ Remember the name of the fishes and birds. Remember the beings of the sea, the beings of the air” (246). Knowledge has been lost or could be lost in the immediate future.
The tension of the story, though, is in not knowing what has changed the community. We wonder what the Call to Adventure could have been, what could have caused a whole people to forget and abandon their home. At first it seems to have something to do with the rising of the sea, Pangarap, which forces the creation of sea walls out of coral. Their attempts to keep the sea from swallowing the islands of Isa and
Dalawa are unsuccessful: “ As children we had felt the water lapping our toes. Now it washed around our ankles. And strange things were being borne in by the tides: strange glinting things that broke if pressed too hard; and pieces of clothing that might have 24 belonged to a woman, so delicate was the stitching on the waists and hems” (248). Early in the same paragraph, Villanueva inserts Refusing the Call again from the community perspective: “We realized that we had seen it happening but in our fear had refused to believe it” (248). The community’s Hero’s Journey proceeds out of unwanted circumstance without the benefit of a mentor’s wisdom. It is possible that Villaneuva merged the Call to Adventure with the First Threshold since the community finds themselves in a new and unrecognizable world. In this new world, a man emerges from the belly of a silver bird and the narrator is uncertain if he is an ally or an enemy: “…the news (of others far away) made us happy and afraid at the same time, and for many many nights we did not know sleep” (249).
In “Isa” Villanueva shifts the Ordeal portion of the Hero’s Journey from positive to negative; community members begin to feel strange feelings and illness befalls many:
“Soon, several of us fell prey to a strange sickness…. We had lived with each other so long that any emotional disturbance suffered by one of us infected the whole” (249). The
Road Back for this community, unfortunately, is a road away from the world they remember. The narrator mother gives the daughter an amulet which, in Vogler’s steps, could be considered an Elixir, but because the journey has torn the community apart, the amulet is at best a charm against forgetting: “Tell yourself every day, upon first waking, who you are and where you come from. You are our daughter, our life” (250). By using and shifting the Hero’s Journey form, Villanueva creates a piece of fiction which poignantly describes the fate of Filipino communities and the members who leave the country to work overseas, taken away in the bellies of silver birds. 25
Like the narrator in “Isa,” Maxine Hong Kingston is a mother worried about her child encountering an alien world. Her essay “Strange Sightings” begins with the following lines: “According to mystical people, spiritual forces converge at Hawai’i, as do ocean currents and winds…If ancestors and immortals travel on supernatural errands between China and the Americas, they must rest here in transit, nothing but ocean for thousands of miles around” (53). Instead of creating a mythic cycle like Villanueva and
Reyes, however, Kingston focuses on preventing her son from answering the call to adventure in the Other World: “Hoping to help our son become a fearless down-to-earth person, we have raised Joseph secularly. We explain things to him logically” (53–54). As
Joseph grows older, it is evident that he is able to perceive the Real and Other World at the same time. The narrator explains, “One night I heard him walking about, and in the morning he said he had seen a light come up over the top of the wall…What he saw in the living room was one window lit up and a man standing in it…We lived on the second floor” (55). The Ordeal for Kingston and her son is the quest to find something to keep him from seeing the spirits in and around their home: “Without mentioning it, he bought five pounds of rock salt with his own money and sprinkled it all over the house;
Hawaiians do that to stop hauntings” (56).
Finally Kingston receives an Elixir that will free her son from his visions: “We asked our friend from Thailand what to do and she gave us a medallion of a saint for him to wear around his neck and also a little stone Buddha that Thais wear in a gold box….
Joseph has had no more disturbances” (57). Represented by Kingston’s family and community who have been disturbed by her son’s actions, The Ordinary World benefits with a return to normalcy as the boy sees a shaft of sunlight coming through the skylight 26 in the room as nothing supernatural. The change, however, lies uneasily on Kingston’s conscience. She explains, “In a way it’s a shame to have him put his powers away, fold his wings, but those abilities are not needed in America in the twentieth century” (57).
Kingston’s essay illustrates the central theme of the Hero’s Journey as Vogler notes, “ At heart, despite its infinite variety, the hero's story is always a journey. It may be an outward journey to an actual place...[or]...an inward journey, one of the mind, the heart, the spirit...the hero grows and changes, making a journey from one way of being to the next” (7).
Using Mythic Structure to Access Multiple Perspectives
Mythic stories can be read on both personal and communal levels, and writers can use mythic structure to access multiple perspectives. In the introduction of his book, The
Hero with an African Face, Clyde Ford notes,
Properly read, myths bring us into accord with the eternal mysteries of
being, help us manage the inevitable passages of our lives, and give us
templates for our relationship with the societies in which we live and for
the relationship of these societies to the earth we share with all life. When
trauma confronts us, individually or collectively, myths are a way of
reestablishing harmony in the wake of chaos. (viii–ix)
When authors write about traumatic experiences, they often turn to myths in order to give shape and order to their own emotional conflicts and experience. Myths can help a writer explore how tragedy has shaped her own evolving identity, much as the Hero’s
Journey has shown. In her book An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, 27
Elizabeth McCracken describes how the stillborn death of her first child affected her life by contrasting her worldview before and after the tragic event. Using short fragments,
McCracken gives the reader a glimpse into how a mother can survive such a tragedy – a mother does not just get over the loss of a child over night or over time. McCracken takes the reader through the process of grieving and the loss of innocence. In one short passage, she touches on four myths in quick succession to describe her process of grieving:
For about a week I got the opening line of a Auden poem that I'd
memorized in high school stuck in my head: About suffering they were
never wrong, the Old Masters.... The poem describes the Breughel
painting The Fall of Icarus, in which (as Auden explains) life goes on
despite the tiny white legs kicking up in the corner of a harbor, Icarus
sunk. My high school English teacher had explained that the myth was
about hubris, ignoring the good advice of your wise father, but for me that
summer the painting, the poem, everything was about lost boys and the
parent who'd failed them. One of the BBC channels was showing Steven
Spielberg movies, mother after mother failing to protect her son: AI is bad,
Empire of the Sun is worse, and E.T. the worst of all: I sobbed on the sofa
at the end of it. (96)
McCracken first takes the myth of Icarus, the son whose father had warned him about flying too close to the sun with his wax wings. McCracken focuses on the father's perspective, instead of the traditional interpretation of human arrogance. By writing, “ everything is about lost boys and the parent who'd failed them, ” McCracken gives the reader an understanding about her obsession. She blames herself for her son’s death and 28 the reader senses that she doesn't feel she did enough to prevent the inevitable tragedy.
The reader, then, is also invited to re-examine the Icarus myth from a parent’s point of view, an unexpected viewpoint since many interpretations of the myth focus on the son’s death as a matter of the son’s arrogance rather than the father’s failure to protect.
McCracken also writes about “ mother after mother failing to protect her son ” to reinforce this feeling of self-blame. Readers familiar with the myths created by the movies understand that McCracken's self-blame is complex. Through the movie AI,
McCracken evokes a sense that a mother cares for a child even if he is an imagined child.
Through the movie Empire of the Sun, McCracken shows that she understands that her story can't have a happy ending and that her absent son will never be found again.
Finally, with the movie E.T. McCracken is dissolved into tears after seeing a mother totally unaware of the danger facing her son. Also, the resurrection of the alien at the end of the movie likely makes the reality of her son's death all the more real and hopeless.
At one point, McCracken subverts an old European tale to show how difficult it is for others to understand what the grieving process is like. Rather than trying only to show how difficult grieving can be, McCracken shows how her views on grief changed over time.
I've done it myself, when meeting the grief-struck. It's as though the sad
news is Rumpelstiltskin in reverse. To mention it by name is to conjure it
up, not the grief but the experience itself: the mother's suicide, the
brother's overdose, the multiple miscarriages. The sadder the news, the
less likely people are to mention it. The moment I lost my innocence about
such things, I saw how careless I'd been myself. (94) 29
She understands the fears non-grievers have about talking about tragedy. They do not wish to call the tragedy (what McCracken calls “ Rumpelstiltskin, ” a malevolent creature who tries to steal a son from his mother) into their midst. The tragedy becomes an unsaid thing, but McCracken does not stop there with her description of grief-from- the-outside. By saying, “ The moment I lost my innocence about such things, I saw how careless I'd been myself,” McCracken makes herself complicit in this societal norm of silence and the writing is not simply accusatory. How can we learn how to be supportive of people who are grieving, McCracken seems to ask, if we avoid the possibility out of fear? Tragedy, then, is not a mythical thing for McCracken, it is real and concrete, but her passage shows that she understands both sides now, and the myth underscores her understanding.
At the end of her book, McCracken invokes myth again to show how her magical thinking had changed after the birth of her second child. She has been transformed not just by the tragedy of her first son's death but the survival of her second son. The living son healed some of the innocence she had lost. “ He has cured me, mostly of blame and what might have been, all that fairly-tale bargaining: what would you do differently and what if” (184). She has come to a resolution that she did all she could and that she could not have prevented the death of her son. But she also lets the reader know that she still knows that a certain magical thinking exists for her:
I know my fairy tales. Those bargains are dangerous; you ask for what you
want, and then your words get twisted. Terrible things happen. It's never
so easy as a wish. Sometimes I think I'm ready. Whoever shows up, some
cerulean fairy, some adenoidal troll, the magic goddamn galoshes, I will 30
have a knife to its neck in a second. I will say: All my children, healthy,
normal, nothing else. No? You won't do it? Then leave me alone. (184)
Her uncompromising anger and refusal to gloss over her pain help her reinvent the ending of several classic myths where capricious spirits trick the living out of their luck. McCracken shows that she has gained strength from her experiences and a determination to do what she can to protect her family, even from her own self-defeating thoughts.
Hampl, again in The Florist’s Daughter, observes a similar silencing in her own family and relates to the reader a family folktale to illustrate how grief is retold and reframed depending on the family member. At the beginning of her book, Hampl describes one of her favorite relatives, a woman both kind and skittish. She explains her aunt's behavior through the retelling of a family tale. In the process, Hampl reveals how family stories evolve into multiple versions and how the retellings can shape a family’s culture and an individual’s perception of herself:
Aunt Lillian, one of my father's older sisters, had been attacked one night.
Right at the side of their house near West Seventh. Attacked and almost
raped. Almost, but saved in the nick of time. No harm done. My
grandmother, the Czech peasant, came charging out of the house and
stopped it before the worst could happen. (25)
Hampl continues her chapter using this family folktale as one of many to characterize her family's ability to survive and thrive despite tragedy. The message she was given through the telling of the tale is that bad things had happened to her family but 31 nothing devastating, yet the stories also hint that there may have been traumas hidden by what has not been retold.
Toward the end of her book, Hampl relates that the version of the story she had been told was incomplete. During an apparently typical retelling of the story, she remarks to her brother how fortunate it was that their Aunt Lillian had escaped tragedy:
Wasn't it amazing, I remarked to my brother, how lucky that was—Nana
saving Aunt Lillian from the rapist... “ Who told you that? She wasn't
almost raped. She was raped. Some guy in the neighborhood. ” The
fantasias of the kitchen table.... The duplicitous double account, keeping
two books—one story for the boy (he can take the truth), one for the girl
(she must be protected). (198)
Hampl relates to the reader her understanding of how families create family folktales in order to survive. She then goes on to reframe her understanding of her aunt's relationship with her uncle with this new version of the story. The aunt's actions, like her dislike of sex, are no longer quaint but a survivor's reactions to a violent past. By writing,
“ The fantasias of the kitchen table.... The duplicitous double account... ” she brings into question all the stories she has retold over the course of the book. The effectiveness of these two retellings is in Hampl's narrative technique. During both scenes, Hampl takes care to use dialogue to slow the scenes down and to show that the stories were related and repeated verbally as part of the family's folklore.
Hampl and McCracken both put myths to good use to show the effects of tragedy and how tragedy can be survived and how individuals can heal. In addition, both show that dialogue best illustrates the impact of family folktales by giving the reader the sense 32 of an oral history being passed on. Retelling family myths, such as Hampl’s story of rape, gives readers a more complex view of tragedy, while older myths can be reshaped by the writer's needs as in McCracken’s use of Rumpelstiltskin.
Conclusion
Prose writers and poets use many types of myths and mythic structure to enhance a reader’s experience with their narratives. Spragg uses his imagination to create personal myths that provide a more comforting future for his favorite cat and a different past for himself to cover his feelings about girls. Sandor uses parables and legends to explore her changing relationships and the emotional conflicts that emerge and are resolved. On the other hand, Schwartz’s opinions on the legend of the Goodness of Benheim evolve because of her interaction with the stories through her visits and interviews. Reyes,
Villanueva, and Kingston use the Hero’s Journey to illustrate, then deconstruct, stereotypes associated with certain myths from their respective heritages. McCracken and
Hampl both use and retell folktales and stories from movies to describe their encounters with tragedy and create metaphoric links between their emotional states and their experiences. Finally, Buell aptly illustrates how community folktales are passed orally from one generation to the next, with each generation adding to the myth through the recalling and retelling of the stories. Although most myths cannot be attributed to a single author but are instead held communally, authors often interact with myths in their writing to show the impact of myths on the individual. By touching on myths creatively, the memoirist is able to create a sense of universality out of the particular details of their lives. 33
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