Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth
Brian Attebery
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0199316074
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Myth is oral, collective, sacred, and timeless. Fantasy is a modern literary mode and a popular entertainment. Yet the two have always been inextricably intertwined. Stories about Stories examines fantasy as an arena in which different ways of understanding myth compete and new relationships with myth are worked out. The book offers a comprehensive history of the modern fantastic as well as an argument about its nature and importance. Specific chapters cover the origins of fantasy in the Romantic search for localized myths, fantasy versions of the Modernist turn toward the primitive, the post-Tolkienian exploration of world mythologies, post-colonial reactions to the exploitation of indigenous sacred narratives by Western writers, fantasies based in Christian belief alongside fundamentalist attempts to stamp out the form, and the emergence of ever-more sophisticated structures such as metafiction through which to explore mythic constructions of reality.
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those who deliberately ignore the existence of mythic traditions other than their own can assert, as fundamentalists of all faiths do, that theirs is the sole path to the sacred. A cognitive majority generally seeks to impose its way of understanding the world on minorities and outsiders, or at least to hush them up—hence the efforts of Christian commentators to make fantasy literature forswear all “pagan” myths and to enforce a particular interpretation and use of Christian ones. Writers of
Widow Chian, whose daughters-in-law teach Greenpearl not only the art of silkmaking but also an unusual form of writing: Many women south of the central Yangzi, we discovered, know a written language not used by men [. . . .] in form, the words resemble the oldest Chinese writing, not the Soghdian or Indic scripts I’d seen along the Silk Road. Spring-gauze once whispered to me that she’d heard some of them had been preserved long ago when an emperor forbade any written symbols save those he
rightness. The skeptical reader will not do the work for him; the mystical payoff must be earned. Though moments of rapture are necessarily private, what can be shared is the mythic pattern that creates a space for such a vision, and, for the fullest degree of sharing, that mythic pattern cannot be a sectarian one. To turn Christian beliefs into fantasy requires the freedom to play with elements of the narrative, something not possible with official doctrines and fixed scriptures. Both Eliot and
was aware of the degree to which his imaginative creation reflected present-day realities. In a 1944 letter to his son, stationed overseas during World War II, Tolkien acknowledged: I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: the millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days—quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be
testimony. There is more to the story than the story. Other nodes take off into narratives of white settlement, of Aboriginal history, of traditions from Aboriginal groups other than Wirrun’s, of slowly changing racial attitudes, and of resistance to any such changes. Some of them the reader may regret not following up. One of them Wrightson actually did follow up, writing a 1989 novel about the forlorn and dangerous spirit named Balyet, whom Wirrun meets only briefly. When Wrightson came back
