EXAMPLES of MYTH and MYTHIC STRUCTURE USAGE in 21ST CENTURY PROSE and POETRY Rebecca A. Saxton Critical Paper and Program Biblio

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.

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