Mything the Point
By David Corbett | November 13, 2018 |
“Myth is the garment of mystery.”
– Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers
Last week, Donald Maass posted one of his predictably fascinating and eminently useful posts on the subject of awe in fiction, and how to create “marker moments” within a story that, well, let me use his own words to state the matter:
Marker moments are not plot points. They are emotional points, though events and emotions inevitably entwine. The point is to create places on the page wherein there are shifts in inner perception, understanding, certainty, security, or any other internal state. When a marker moment occurs it’s as if an anchor has pulled up from the sea floor in a storm, or conversely like when a steel piton is driven into a cliff face during a rock climb. Characters—and readers–become in those moments unmoored or newly secure.
He used the metaphor of a cathedral to illustrate that feeling cannot be conjured from structural elements alone. The overwhelming sense awe we feel when entering Notre Dame or Chartres or any other great cathedral (and even some of the humbler but still awe-inspiring chapels one can encounter if one looks) cannot be attributed to the stone or the stained glass or the buttresses from which it is built. Again, let’s allow Don to state the matter for himself:
What is therefore important and worth working on…is not only the plot architecture but also what cannot be built out of stone: the many moments of recognition, understanding and empathy that for readers sum up to a profound and transforming experience of awe.
Don also provided a number of cues that can lead us to just such moments, some of which I think are ingenious, such as (to name only a handful–my favorites):
- Self-doubt becomes unbearable when…
- My protagonist’s greatest fear comes true when…
- The greatest betrayal is…
- What my protagonist denies and resists is…
- The harshest self-truth to accept is…
- The antagonist is right about…
There is much I consider both wise and practical in all of this—I especially believe that, by focusing on moments, we naturally envision scenes, and I have long contended that the most dramatically effective way to explore character, both through backstory and in the present-day dramatic arc of the novel, is by focusing on scenes, not narrative exposition or, worse, explanation.
I would add that the moments I typically search for are moments of helplessness or sudden, unexpected emotion or action when the character’s response goes beyond what their normal, day-to-day persona would have predicted. On the one hand, I look for moments of great fear, shame (loss of respect), guilt (harming others), betrayal, loss, sorrow, death; on the other I look for moments of sudden courage, pride, forgiveness, trust, and connection or love.
But the one thing this sort of analysis glances past is how do we ourselves as living, sentient beings come to feel awe? It is one thing to say we should conjure it in our stories. But how are we going to do that if we lack any means of knowing how to find it in our lives?
Worse, what if we resort to a mere device in the mistaken belief it will somehow magically conjure awe?
Few of us have magisterial cathedrals in our neighborhoods. Even if we do, there’s no guarantee we can translate what we feel when we pass through those doors onto the page.
One way that writers have tried to conjure this sense of awe in their storytelling is by turning to myth. This has become particularly true in the wake of the writings of C.G. Jung, with an additional nudge from Joseph Campbell, especially in his seminal The Hero With a Thousand Faces. That book in particular became a virtual bible for a great many writers, and it combined with the works of Jung have generated a virtual cottage industry of follow-up commentary.
Call it The Myth Biz.
Let’s be honest with ourselves—have we experienced any great outpouring of awe that we can attribute directly to this emphasis on the mythic? Or have we in fact experienced something quite different, a trivialization of myth—worse, a Disney-fication of myth.
Call it The Myth Biz.
The question came to mind twice recently, once upon watching a film I happen to love, and the other upon reading a recent novel I admire.
The film was John Huston’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana. It is a searing and darkly comic examination of a man of God (Richard Burton) struggling with his human appetites, even as he realizes they are destroying him, and the two women he turns to in order to save himself.
For purposes of this discussion, however, what continues to fascinate me is how, in his portrayal of the two main women characters, Maxine Faulk (Ava Gardner) and Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr), Williams very deftly introduces what might be seen as real-world stand-ins for the goddesses Aphrodite and Athena, respectively.
Maxine is truly a woman of lusty appetite but also a woman of great heart and down-to-earth common sense. Hannah travels the world flat broke, drawing sketches while her dying uncle recites his poems; she is much more the aesthete, and has had only two encounters in her entire life that might even suggest the erotic. But she too is a woman of love—a lover of truth, and dignity, and understanding, and kindness.
There is no obvious attempt to point toward the goddesses these characters represent, and I am not even sure Williams had them in mind when he wrote the play. But their mythic power resonates in every line, elevating the story to something far beyond the story’s events. They convey what it means to be human, standing naked before the truth of their lives, in a way that is all too rare.
The takeaway—mythic power isn’t created by slapping a label on your characters or by dressing them up in mythological drag. It’s created by owning and forming an intuitive bond with the deepest longings and struggles of their lives. Do that, and the myth stuff will take care of itself. If using a mythic character or archetype helps point the way, fine; but don’t mistake the signpost with the journey.
Mythic power isn’t created by slapping a label on your characters or by dressing them up in mythological drag.
The other impetus for this post was a recent novel by the Irish writer Emer Martin titled The Cruelty Men. (“A bible of fucked-up Irishness.” –Irvine Welsh). The title refers to uniformed shills for the Catholic Church who roamed the Irish countryside looking for orphans or families with more children than they could feed, and taking such youngsters away to the “industrial schools” where they became slave labor for the Church, and were brutalized in the bargain.
Unlike Williams, Martin makes no attempt to disguise the mythic influence for her story. It is the classic Celtic story “The Children of Lir.”
Briefly, the four children of the tale, through no fault of their own (blame lies with the father, Lir) are subjected to a curse—they are transformed into swans, and must remain in that state for 900 years. Every 300 years, their circumstances become even more harrowing and unbearable, but the oldest sister, Fionnula, watches over her siblings and ensures they survive. Finally, as the 900th year arrives, they are once again transformed back into human shape—first as the children they were, but then they rapidly age into the 900-year-old beings they are and crumble to dust and die.
(Note: I always use this tale as a counter-example whenever someone brings up Joseph Campbell’s relatively cheery monomyth, which bears far greater resemblance to the redemptive story of Christ than the far darker myths and folktales, such as this one, that aren’t that hard to find if one looks.)
Though Martin’s inspiration for The Cruelty Men is clear, she does far more than merely stick human beings into their mythic counterparts like dolls in new clothes.
She did extensive, truly impressive research into the plight of Irish children during the time frame of the story (circa 1935-1970), as well as the roles of Church and government in the brutal scheme, the indifference of the Irish middle class, and life as it was truly lived for the poor and dispossessed. She creates an Irish family, especially its children, who live and breathe and suffer on the page. It’s this devotion to truth, the authority of her details, and her creation of such heartbreaking characters—not her mythic analogy—that creates the books capacity to inspire awe.
Why is it that so many other stories that far more conspicuously lean on myth fall short of conjuring this sort of reaction?
I opened this post with a quote from Thomas Mann: “Myth is the garment of mystery.” What I love about this is its recognition that the importance of myth lies invisibly, mysteriously beyond what we can see. Athena is not the myth—she is merely the representation of an ineffable presence and force that lies beyond our comprehension.
The original name for Yahweh contains no vowels, precisely so the name cannot be spoken—a way to show how the divine cannot be described. Similarly, Lao Tzu cautions in the Tao te Ching: “The tao that can be spoken is not the true tao.” Or as the Buddhist aphorism puts it, “If ever you encounter the Buddha, kill him.”
What all of these efforts attempt to convey is that whenever we try to represent directly the mysterious aspect of what it means to be human, we will fail. That is why it is a mystery, in the greatest sense of the word. We can only suggest it through indirection, which the majestic space inside a cathedral—or the narrative space within a story—strives to do.
What will inevitably fail is trying to conjure some sense of the divine by dragging out hand-me-down mythic characters, slapping the archetypal label of Hero or Trickster or Magician on them, and hoping by some authorial hocus-pocus or crafty mechanics they will somehow spring to life.
In one of the books by Joseph Campbell that doesn’t get cited often enough—Creative Mythology: The Masks of God—he explains that the ancient myths belonged to their time and their culture and cannot be translated neatly to ours. (Boy, does that get overlooked.)
This paragraph from the book merits quotation in full:
In modernity, “each individual is the center of a mythology of his own, of which his own intelligible character is the Incarnate God…whom his empirically questing consciousness is to find… [L]ike it or not, the pathless way is the only way now before us.”
I do not have a handy, ten-step, guaranteed-to-work-or-your-money-back technique for getting at this. Indeed, as the preceding few paragraphs suggest, any technique trying to do so is bound to fail.
Like it or not, the pathless way is the only way now before us.
Rather, we have to open ourselves to the terrifying mystery of life and death—”an experience of order, horror, beauty, or even exhilaration,” per Campbell—and be willing to feel that terror, that joy, that awe that comes from the utter mysterious truth that we are really here, and both “we” and “here” are fated to vanish. We will never perceive or understand that existence perfectly, but will always be, in no small way, wandering a labyrinth at twilight.
The Catholic Mass begins with this exchange between priest and server, taken from Psalm 43:
I will go to the altar of God/To God, the joy of my youth
Equating the divine with the innocent, boundless joy we knew as infants is one way to point us in the right direction. But so too is this from Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, when Karin explains what happened when she realized God was hiding in her closet:
The door opened, but God was a spider. He came up to me and I saw his face. It was a terrible stoney face. He scrambled up and tried to penetrate me, but I defended myself. All along I saw his eyes. They were cold and calm. When he couldn’t penetrate me he continued up my chest, up into my face and onto the wall.
To conjure awe, we must open ourselves to the inexpressible, whether it elicits within us horror or happiness, and humbly admit our inability to capture exactly what we experience. The best we can hope for is to point the way for our readers, much as the figures of myth and folktales point the way for us.
The prompts Don listed in his post last week and the techniques I suggest are merely means to an end. Responding to them with mere information, devoid of raw experience, will only create what there is far too much of already: stories based on other stories.
Campbell is right, the pathless way is the only way. And remember, should you encounter Buddha on your journey, kill him.
What myths or folktales have you used for inspiration of guidance in your stories? How did that work out? If the effort was successful, why do you think that was? If it didn’t work out, what do you think you missed? What stories or novels by others that have employed myth in some way have impressed you?
David Corbett (he/him) is the author of seven novels: The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar, Do They Know I’m Running?, The Mercy of the Night, The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday, and The Truth Against the World. He has also published the story collection Thirteen Confessions and the novella The Devil Prayed and Darkness Fell.
David’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in a broad array of magazines and anthologies, with pieces twice selected for Best American Mystery Stories.
His non-fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Narrative, Zyzzyva, MovieMaker, The Writer, and Writer’s Digest.
He has taught both online and in classroom settings through the UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, Book Passage, LitReactor, 826 Valencia, The Grotto in San Francisco, and at numerous writing conferences across the US, Canada, and Mexico. In January 2013 Penguin published his textbook on the craft of characterization, The Art of Character (“A writer’s bible that will lead to your character’s soul.” —Elizabeth Brundage), and Writer’s Digest published his follow-up, The Compass of Character, in October 2019.
What a brilliant post, David. As a writer of historical fiction, I experience awe as a researcher/reader regularly. How can one read about the French Revolution and not feel complete horror and awe at the power of change and fear gone awry? Or at the sheer magnitude of progressive change in psychology, women’s rights, the class structure, and warfare that came about as the result of the first world war? I find myself in awe, also, while reading about the way an artist or a scientist has developed an entirely new method, so outside of the thinking of the day as to change history forever. It’s almost unimaginable. *Almost* This is precisely the sort of thing I try to capture on the page through my characters and voice. You said it so beautifully here:
“To conjure awe, we must open ourselves to the inexpressible, whether it elicits within us horror or happiness, and humbly admit our inability to capture exactly what we experience.”
In terms of myth itself, I see it constantly littered throughout films and novels (Oh, Brother, Where art Thou? comes immediately to mind), but I can’t say I’ve used them per se, as a direction for my readers. At least not consciously. It’s an interesting thought, and one I will ponder as I work through draft two of my WIP. In fact, my character comes to America because of the mythical land of plenty and streets of gold, so this could be something I extrapolate on…
Thanks for another great post.
You are more than welcome, Heather, and thanks for the kind words.
I think you raise an invaluable point — to conjure awe, do we really need to look back at the mythy heights of Olympus (or any other realm of the gods), or does our own history as mortal beings provide more than enough inspiration? I’ve dne a great deal of historical research as well for the last book, and those moments of eye-opening revelation are as frequent as they are unavoidable.
On a much quieter note, I studied mathematics, and I know just enough about the subject to be constantly dumbstruck by the amazing discoveries that have changed the face of science and technology and human understanding throughout history. (Euclid continues to blow my mind, every bit as much as his inheritors.)
As for applying myth — it sounds like you’re doing just fine already. If we seek to stick myth in somewhere after-the-fact, we almost always “myth the point.” The more unconscious or invisible the mythic element, as in Night of the Iguana, the better in my view, unless it’s the actual trigger or starting point for your imagination, which I think could be very much the case with Emer Martin’s The Cruelty Men (which I really, truly could not recommend more highly — especially to lovers of historical fiction).
Thanks so much for chiming in.
Great post, David.
I believe mythology is at the root of many, if not all, human experiences. IT IS OUR BACKSTORY.
Hugs,
Dee
Award-winning author of A Keeper’s Truth (which happens to be heavily riddled with ancient mythology).
I agree, but I would add that, like most backstory, it is best revealed through behavior, not belabored through explanation.
As I noted, Emer Martin’s novel is heavily reliant on the old Irish stories. I’m not arguing against the use of myth — I’m arguing against its trivialization. Mere mention of a mythic underpinning to a story does little more than add a couple of words.
David-
I loved reading this post today- I’m fascinated by myth and archetypes myself, and am going to look for Joseph Campbell’s Creative Mythology, I’ve read his other work but not this one.
As a beginning poet, I’ve been having fun with persona poems, more specifically writing from the perspective of biblical characters, such as Sarah of old Testament fame. For me, these characters resonate because I know Torah stories from synagogue, but the poems don’t come alive unless there’s something in there that triggers my own life (e.g. Sarah fighting with her mother-in-law, the challenge of pregnancy at 99, although that’s clearly not a personal experience of mine, thank goodness).
But, when I can tap into my own life through these characters, the writing opens up and it’s incredibly fun.
Thanks for a thought-provoking start to my morning!
I love Juliette Marillier’s use of Irish Folklore to create very human stories. For me, myths and heroes serve as mirrors into the hunan psyche. A teacher once told me that it was a mistake to imagine that the gods and goddesses were meant to be worshipped. Rather, he said, they were to be studied for their very human foibles and traits. That one statement changed everything for me. I employ Irish folklore in my YA series because I love its depth and richness. It teaches me about honor, endurance and beauty in the face of impermanence. In short, I’m awed by the wisdom buried there. Thank you for such a marvelous post! BTW, is that you in the pic??
That is an excellent observation, Susan, and pretty much nails the point I was hoping to make. The examples I used — The Night f the Iguana and The Cruelty Men — succeed precisely because they see how the mythic is mirrored in our lives, and how it is revealed through our actions. It isn’t a label slapped on to conjure “meaning,” but is embedded within the tissue of the story itself. I don’t know Juliette Marillier’s work, but your description suggests she sees myth in just that way.
P.S. Yep, that’s me in the pic.
That’s a great picture David! What a contrast to the mental image of you as a little boy reciting the prayers at the foot of the Altar.
Loved this essay and the examples you chose. As a writer, so much of it happens unconsciously. It’s only during revision, we can step back a bit and ask what is the story *really* about. I thought I was writing a book about sisters, their complex relationship, but what I was really wrestling with was “Are you your brother’s keeper?”
Thanks, Vijaya. I have had that same experience — only upon finishing the book did I see what I was struggling to understand.
I think you’re right that we cannot conjure up mythic awe on demand in our work. Often I feel that I have so many other balls to keep in the air just to get a scene written that I don’t think about the myth part. I do think about it when coming up with the original concept, but it seems to slip away during the nitty gritty act of drafting. Then, if I’m lucky, a hint of it returns during the editing process as I figure out which elements to heighten or see new and powerful possibilities I didn’t know were there.
Last night I came across one of the mythic marker moments in a middle grade mystery I was reading (Sammy Keyes and the Runaway Elf by Wendelin Van Draanen). Sammy goes to visit Mrs. Graybill, an old woman who is about to die. The dying woman has been calling for Sammy all day, even though they had long been enemies. The author describes Mrs. Graybill’s glassy eyes, cold and rough hand, and her agitation as she begs for Sammy’s forgiveness. Sammy remembers all the “little snapshots” of their life together added to her new understanding of why Mrs. Graybill acted as she did and then grants the forgiveness. Sammy sits holding Mrs. Graybill’s hand, watching her lie there in her dirty pink robe “her chest going up and down, up and down,” and then Mrs. Graybill dies.
Wow. Thanks, S.K. I mention in The Art of Character how exceptional forgiveness is, and how hard it is to get right on the page, because nothing seems so strong as a righteous grudge (says the Irishman).
I actually think seeing the mythic at the outset then losing it during the immersion in the factual details of the story is the way to go. That very much resembles what I saw in both The Night of the Iguana and The Cruelty Men. Myths point us toward an insight. It’s our job to reveal that insight anew in the truth of our characters story world.
First of all, that is an awesome picture of you. Your new author photo?
Paralleling myth in fiction (as opposed to slapping mythic labels on characters) can be way to create a resonant experience in readers. What happens, I believe, is that the reader brain makes an association–ding–and there is a feeling of a connection made and greater meaning apprehended. (Symbols work similarly.) And what is that if not a shot of awe?
The key point (as I discuss in The Emotional Craft of Fiction) is that the feeling happens in the reader. The writer’s job is to create the conditions. It’s an inexact process, art more than science. As you say…
“To conjure awe, we must open ourselves to the inexpressible, whether it elicits within us horror or happiness, and humbly admit our inability to capture exactly what we experience. The best we can hope for is to point the way for our readers, much as the figures of myth and folktales point the way for us.”
Precisely. BTW, speaking of ding…something else that you wrote resonates strongly with me…
“…the moments I typically search for are moments of helplessness or sudden, unexpected emotion or action when the character’s response goes beyond what their normal, day-to-day persona would have predicted.”
…that helpfully anticipates my post for next month, in which I’ll switch metaphors from cathedrals to catastrophe, specifically what we can learn from a branch of mathematics called “catastrophe theory”.
Good post and discussion, always a pleasure, pal.
Thanks, Don. To paraphrase an old saw from mathematics, if I managed to see the matter clearly, it was because I stood on the shoulders of giants.
Thanks for the impetus last week, and already very much looking forward to the post next month.
I am late reading, David, because I have just been contending, not on the page, but in real life, with the mythology of fire. In moments the power of wind and dry earth blasted into our southern California neighborhood and we were told to evacuate. Panic. I packed my computer and my novel notes first. Then some things that would help me remember my mother and of course photos, though my husband is saying, “Don’t worry, they are all in the THE CLOUD.” Ah, mythology, the swirling clouds, the stories of death, eroticism, greed and survival–the stories of the Greek and Roman gods who were as human in many ways as we are. Not much in essence changes. But after 24 hours, we return and our house is still here–but you don’t forget. You are listening to wind, sniffing for fire, turning to those you love for solace. In some ways, earth and its stories never ever change.
Wow, Beth — so glad to hear you and your family are all safe and your home is intact. When we left Northern California on Sunday the smoke was thick over the whole bay area, even though the fires were over 100 miles away. And yes, that experience returns you to an awareness of the fundamental forces of nature, which care not a whit for human wants and longings, but carry on capriciously as they deem fit. Reminds you just how fragile life can be.
“The original name for Yahweh contains no vowels, precisely so the name cannot be spoken—a way to show how the divine cannot be described.”
An interesting idea, although I understand Hebrew was originally written without vowels, and as the practice of not saying the name of God grew up (to ensure you didn’t misuse it) people lost touch with what the vowels were, since they were neither spoken nor written.
It is ironic, though, that this hesitancy to use the name of God lest you misuse it (even extending to Bibles saying LORD instead of Yahweh) has resulted in many people following a God whose name they do not know.
Perhaps we need another Paul to proclaim once more the God worshipped as Unknown.
I will sheepishly admit that most of what I know about this comes from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges titled “Death and the Compass,” which I read years ago, and in which (to quote Wiki): “a rabbi is killed in his hotel room on the third of December. Lönnrot, the protagonist and a a renowned detective, is assigned to the case. Based on a cryptic message left on the rabbi’s typewriter—”The first letter of the name has been uttered”—the detective determines that the murder was not accidental. He connects this with the Tetragrammaton, the unspeakable four-letter name of God.” So apologies for any misunderstanding.
Sounds like a fascinating story! Cryptic word-related clues are just my cup of tea (despite being rubbish at cryptic crosswords).
I am reminded of one of the many and various verses of Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen:
You say I took the Name in vain
But I don’t even know the Name
And if I did, well, really, what’s that to ya?
There’s a blaze of light in every word;
It doesn’t matter which you heard,
The holy or the broken Hallelujah…
Thank you for your analysis of my novel, The Cruelty Men. I have always been fascinated by folk tales as they can be Myth’s trickier shadow. They were stories passed down through Oral tradition and so outside of the power of church and state. They are the history of our dreams, in them we can see the workings of ancient minds.
Hi, Emer:
So nice of you to check in. I hope I’m not being tedious blasting on about how much I love the book.
You raise an interesting distinction between myth and folktale, the former having the imprimatur of official sanction, the latter being oral and far more subversive and close to the people. It’s that same distinction that gives us the picador and the picaresque novel, populated by rogues and scoundrels, because the chivalric knights and fair maidens were the stories the nobility told each other, while the people sought more honest fare.
Have a lovely Thanksgiving, and I hope we get a chance to connect in the bay area after Thanksgiving (I’m back east dealing with dusty stuff till 11/28).
Interesting discussion. I’m writing what I call a sci-fi fairytale. It’s set in an alternate universe, and the religions and myths are like ours but different. It has been challenging to create these for my fictional world. They have to feel possible or real, but I don’t want them to be just copies with a few superficial changes. They have to feel as if the people in that universe believe in them and would believe in them.
As part of the backstory for this, I’ve written (rewritten?) Bible stories but this fictional world needs myths and beliefs based on having humans on many other planets. So, what does it mean to have a god up in the heavens when up in the heavens you know are populated planets? I’ve had to consider how the religion would have developed in such a place. And some characters act based on these belief systems.
Just like our own I want them to be awe-inspiring and flawed systems. I don’t know if I’m pulling it off, but thanks for the reminder about the other Campbell book, Creative Mythology. I think I have that one somewhere in this house.
Hi, Marta:
That sounds like a fascinating concept. I wonder if, by having both a vision of a unitary deity and yet also multiple worlds populated by that deity’s creation, what sorts of internecine religious battles might exist — are the various races in contact? Do they worship the same “god”? If so, do their rituals differ? If not, how do the various cults conflict? All of that sounds rich in potential.
Campbell’s The Masks of God is a doorstop, so beware: it’s a long slog. But it moves beyond the search for a monomyth to instead focus on the individual’s “pathless” search to full self-realization. It’s very much in the Jungian mode, and interesting, to say the least. My main two takeaways, as noted above:
1. The myths of one time, place, and culture cannot be translated to another without serious change/misinterpretation/degradation.
2. The meaning of all myth is the individual’s search for his soul.
I’m not sure Point 2 is absolutely right, because it’s been a while since I read the book closely, and paleolithic people, who were the original myth-makers, were more communal and less individualistic than we are.
In any event, happy writing! The project sounds fascinating.
Well, it turns out I do not that have particular Campbell book. I have others.
I’m slightly worried that I could spend way too long on this aspect of the world building, but these religious/spiritual beliefs propel a number of characters. I’ve spent time writing histories and splits. It really is challenging. I’ve worked on the origin stories and their beliefs on the afterlife–and how there have been splits in certain systems because of these things. Much of it won’t even be in the story directly, but I have to know it if I’m going to be clear why one character devotes her life to her faith and why another character decides it all must be destroyed–to give just two examples. And I’m working hard to avoid stereotypes from this universe while I do it.
Thanks for the questions you posed. It helps me when people ask questions. Makes me think.
I love this post, David. And I love stories based on myth and legend, especially when they are subtle. One of my favorites is _Anil’s Ghost_ by Michael Ondaatje. I see the legend of Antigone in this story of Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist, returning to her native country of Sri Lanka to help investigate the disappearances and killings that occurred during the civil war.
In my memoir of my time on welfare, I used imagery from a different fairy tale in each chapter–not much, just a taste. This was partly to echo the theme and concerns of that chapter, partly to reinforce how young my children were (these were the stories we were reading), and also to tie the book together in an understated way. As you make clear in your post, the reference must be an organic part of the story.
Hi, Barbara:
Always nice to hear from you. Glad you enjoyed the post.
Your examples bring up a key point. The use of myth in fiction works best when the author is writing from the perspective of seeing how the details of the present-day experience of the characters reveals a deeper a truth, a truth reflected in the old tales or myths. It is not as though suddenly daily life becomes meaningful because we can slap a mythic label on it, but rather that this resonance with the ancient story reveals the echoes of its urgency through time. This will only work if the author devotes herself to the unique details of the present-day story, and doesn’t instead manufacture them to fit the myth. The truth will be revealed both in the convergence of the present-day story with the myth and its divergence from the myth, for no other reason that this will force the reader to interpret the story in his or her own way, which is how myth returns to life.