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odd_buttons) wrote2004-11-21 08:44 am
odd_buttons) wrote2004-11-21 08:44 am
Myth
The following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Myth
Myths address the deepest and oldest questions of humankind -- why we exist, how we came to be, and what will happen to us.
Greek, Roman, Norse, and biblical myths were once our cultural heritage. Children's versions of the stories of gods and goddesses were read at bedtime and appeared in the school curriculum. You could expect your readers to know of Leda, Loki, Lazarus, and the Laocoön. Writers made references to myths because a name like Hercules could conjure up a whole cycle of adventures. Today, readers tend not to know much about mythology and references to mythological figures may be recognizable to only a few.
But fiction's attempts to answer life's ultimate mysteries haven't gone away, and the pleasure of embedding -- through the mention of a name or place -- the most profound and enduring stories in the history of humankind is too rich to abandon. Someone will know what you're doing.
Just keep in mind that the story is what makes the mythical allusions work. Allusions by themselves can't give the story life. James Joyce's Ulysses is, first, vividly about his Dublin characters. It gains a marvelous resonance by echoing the characters and events of Homer's Odyssey. But if we weren't persuaded by the work's immediate vitality and rich texture, we wouldn't be much interested in its intellectual substructure. If you retell the story of Prometheus, you can't rely on the allusion to give fire to your work. You have to set your own fire.
See Allusion, Archetype, Motif, Theme.
Myth
Myths address the deepest and oldest questions of humankind -- why we exist, how we came to be, and what will happen to us.
Greek, Roman, Norse, and biblical myths were once our cultural heritage. Children's versions of the stories of gods and goddesses were read at bedtime and appeared in the school curriculum. You could expect your readers to know of Leda, Loki, Lazarus, and the Laocoön. Writers made references to myths because a name like Hercules could conjure up a whole cycle of adventures. Today, readers tend not to know much about mythology and references to mythological figures may be recognizable to only a few.
But fiction's attempts to answer life's ultimate mysteries haven't gone away, and the pleasure of embedding -- through the mention of a name or place -- the most profound and enduring stories in the history of humankind is too rich to abandon. Someone will know what you're doing.
Just keep in mind that the story is what makes the mythical allusions work. Allusions by themselves can't give the story life. James Joyce's Ulysses is, first, vividly about his Dublin characters. It gains a marvelous resonance by echoing the characters and events of Homer's Odyssey. But if we weren't persuaded by the work's immediate vitality and rich texture, we wouldn't be much interested in its intellectual substructure. If you retell the story of Prometheus, you can't rely on the allusion to give fire to your work. You have to set your own fire.
See Allusion, Archetype, Motif, Theme.