The Power of Myth

[ellenkushner]

Because of my fantasy writing and my work on Sound & Spirit http://www.wgbh.org/spirit, I am sometimes asked to speak on the use and meaning of myth, ancient and modern.

The question I have come to dread is, "What are our modern myths?" and the variant, "What myths are we creating today?"

I believe strongly that myths and their power come precisely from the fact that no one makes them: they grow out of something that exists already in the psyche of the times, that cannot find expression and support until it is already well established.

So I was very pleased to find this, in a review of the new "Lost Boys" movie, in the Nov. 22, 2004 issue of the New Yorker, by Anthony Lane:

"[I]n Peter Pan, Barrie achieved the rarest alchemy of all, the one that no writer can plan or predict: he invented a myth. The idea of Peter seems to have been flying around forever, a constant of humanity, and all that Barrie had to do was reach up and pluck the boy out of the air."

There ya go. That's the stuff.

Comments

[janni.livejournal.com]

I occasionally have to remind myself that Peter Pan is a consciously created story, which I suppose is a sign that something has, indeed, been tapped into.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Some of these thoughts were occasioned by the Mythic Journeys conference, which I went to in Atlanta in June - they are a terrific new organization fueled by people of conviction and compassion; I urge you to visit their website if you have any interest in the state of myth in our world:

http://www.mythicjourneys.org/mi_home.php

There I met a great guy named Brad Pilcher, who interviewed me (and Jane Yolen) for an online zine with the delightful name of JEWSWEEK. The article came out very well, particularly considering that neither Jane nor I would give him the "modern myths" quote I think he was hoping for.

Here's the link, with a warning: I have found it sometimes crashes my Explorer when I go there, if I don't wait long enough for it to load completely. Caveat Clickor.

http://www.jewsweek.com/bin/en.jsp?enDispWho=Article%5El1314&enPage=BlankPage&enDisplay=view&enDispWhat=object&enVersion=0&enZone=Stories&

or you can try going to www.jewsweek.com
and searching for "Ellen Kushner"

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I don't quite buy the idea that Barrie created a myth. I think he transformed a very old one, gave it new form. But the central idea of Peter seems to me, anyway, to show up in some trickster myths, reformed as Puck for a time, discarded, and then redefined again as Peter Pan.

The one that has really caught my eye is the grip of what I think of as the Persephone myth, that is, the female who goes up against the (male) dark power. Beauty taming the beast. All this TV stuff about girls and vampires seems to derive directly out of it, from what I can tell, with a pitstop for some cosmetic work 200 years ago via Byron.

(I also think Jane Austen's otherwise brilliant Mansfield Park just sidestepped being the novel of the 19th century, if she'd gone with the beauty-tames-the-beast (rake) theme she began with, via Fanny and Henry. But she had another story to tell, and forced the emotional flow of the story into calmer waters at the very end. But that's another discussion, I guess.

[ebess.livejournal.com]

Excellent, excellent comments. I never thought of the girly-witchy-vampire stuff that's such a part of pop culture these days in that way. So true!

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

I agree re. Barrie. I think what Lane - and certainly I - wanted to say was that by reaching up and plucking Peter out of the air, he gave local habitation and a name to something that did, in fact, already exist.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Yes. I loved the Lane article--same length as the one in this month's Smithsonian but far more intensely aware on all levels.

I was trying to cudgel my brains for various pan and puck images that flicker through the literature of the past four or five centuries--wasn't there one in Boccaccio? Certainly in some of the contes--and realizing that so many elements are still there in Peter Pan: the pipes, the flying, the careless charisma that draws both men and girls (I use both terms deliberately) but whereas the older ones sometimes preside over baccanaliae, or however it's spellt, Peter Pan was, in this new form, not pan-sexual, but a-sexual. Yet he has exactly the same attraction for the men and the girls as he ever did, and so he can still gleefully play havoc with their lives, only now giving lip-service to 'playing' by the public school rules. Notice how he torments Captain Hook about bad form.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Peter never torments Hook about bad form - that's Barrie. Peter just naturally has good form, and it drives Hook nuts because he knows it!

(Can you tell I've read this book one or two times...? Like, actually, since I was 3? Beware of Formative Influences!)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I must go back and reread it. I could have sworn I remembered Peter taunting Hook for bad form.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Two more are Superman and Sherlock Holmes. I suspect Buffy will wind up there; we'll see how much staying power she has.

More Myths

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

Frankenstein, and the Mad Scientist. In Shelly's original, Victor Frankenstein isn't mad, just somewhat arrogant, to say nothing of being a terrible mother. Look at how the story has transmogrified and grown. In the popular mind, the name "Frankenstein" now means at least as much the monster as its creator. The Mad Scientist has grown, too, bigger than Victor, showing up in all sorts of places.

The Matter of Roswell. UFOs, flying saucers, a crashed saucer in New Mexico, the government cover-up, the Men in Black, Area 51, abductions. It's the source material for lots of pop culture (Close Encounters, Independence Day, Men in Black, The X Files etc.) If you asked ten different people on ten different streets in ten different US cities, I bet you'd get similar (perhaps sketchy) stories.

(I've heard it claimed that Sherlock Holmes and Mister Spock are avatars of the same archetype.)

[sistercoyote.livejournal.com]

On a related note, this link appeared in Neil Gaiman's blog today:

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/issues/1997-06-05/feature.html

[touch-of-ink.livejournal.com]

When I saw that link in his blog today, I casually clicked on it, thinking "myths! I love myths"!

I cried so much while reading that article that I scared my son.

YOU WANNA CRY?

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the Neil Blog link yet, but:

Get the CD PETER AND WENDY
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/B000003U9N/002-6730372-2286438?%5Fencoding=UTF8
(sorry for the Amazon link, but it's a lot clearer than the record label's, which is http://www.alula.com/PeterWendy.htm for purists) and listen all the way through!

I saw the original production, which is tremendously faithful to the *adult* sensibilities of Barrie's book - when they got to the final line

"..it's Jane's child, now, who waves from the window, in thrall to the breath of the night sky, where her child is flying, gay and innocent and heartless."

it was as if someone had socked me in the stomach - I doubled over, unexpectedly sobbing as if my heart would break (as Barrie might say). Yeah, said the writer (Liza Lorwin) afterwards, it takes a lot of people that way.

Now that fiddler/composer Johnny Cunningham is gone, god rest him, I doubt there will be a revival. But the CD is very effective: they've left enough of the spoken text in that it makes an entire narrative experience - it's not just songs. And the music is purely gorgeous.

Re: YOU WANNA CRY?

[touch-of-ink.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I want to cry, but I have to admit this does sound wonderful :)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

The hospital who has the copyright on Peter Pan is still looking for someone to write them a sequel before the copyright runs out and stops bringing in any money.

Somehow, I doubt they're going to get one, or at any rate not one that becomes immortal in the same way.

Unless someone else manages to tap a zeitgeist at precisely the right time. There may be one out there lurking. What was the most recent thing to truly become known as a myth from popular culture?

[touch-of-ink.livejournal.com]

"Live long and prosper".
The whole concept of "red shirts".
"May the Force be with you"