LIT 229 Module Three 1

LIT 229 Module Three 1

The Function of Form Because it resides at the deepest level of culture and our psyches, myth takes many forms as it works its way into public and private consciousness. It is instructive to mark these many forms and distinguish them from one another, but it is even more important to understand their history and cultural context. This context provides an account of their use, the unique forms they take, and the meanings we have attached to them. The Birth of Myth We touched on the orality and literacy dynamic very briefly in Module One, and it is a subject worth revisiting here as we explore the history of mythological forms. It is tempting to understand our world in terms of present technology, and most of us fall prey to this deception for reasons that will become clear. Once, a teenager asked if the world was black and white before the 1960s. She asked because everything she saw on television from that period was in black and white. We tend to use the same logic when we think about writing; that is, we project its influence backwards into history and assume that the past functioned as literate cultures do now. Scholars who work in orality and literacy studies have shown us that actually the opposite is the case. Human beings have existed in oral cultures long before and much longer than in literate cultures, and oral forms and thinking continue to influence literate cultures, even 500 years after the invention of the printing press. Myth was born in oral cultures and retains those features even now. A Book About the Absence of Books Walter J. Ong’s 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word provides a succinct and compelling account of the nature of oral cultures and the “secondary orality” afforded by new technology. In a chapter titled “Some Psychodynamics of Orality,” Ong details the profound differences of living in an oral culture, and they are worth reviewing in our study of myth’s forms. To begin, we must reflect on the nature of sound itself; specifically, it is evanescent. By the time one hears the syllable “scent,” the syllable “evan” is gone. In other words, sound has a relationship to time that writing does not. Writing can freeze time by placing words on a page, but words in an oral culture are always fleeting. As

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Ong notes:

There is no way to stop sound and have sound. I can stop a moving picture camera and hold one frame fixed on the screen. If I stop the movement of sound, I have nothing—only silence, no sound at all. All sensation takes place in time, but no other sensory field totally resists a holding action, stabilization, in quite this way. Vision can register motion, but it can also register immobility. Indeed, it favors immobility, for to examine something closely by vision, we prefer to have it quiet. We often reduce motion to a series of still shots the better to see what motion is. There is no equivalent of a still shot for sound. An oscillogram is silent. It lies outside the sound world. (32)

But what does this mean for storytelling? For one thing it means that in oral cultures, words are wedded to time; therefore, words are events. To speak is to act, and many mythologies depict this reality directly; for example, “And God said, “’Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). Because spoken words are events, they can and do affect the world. Another side of the evanescence of words in oral cultures is that because speech is fleeting, the information it carries is easily lost. People living in oral cultures must have a highly developed memory, and since all information is carried in spoken words, those words must have mnemonic qualities. Thought must take the form of rhythmic patterns that are easily repeatable and set against other patterns to form a web of memory, of information. Ong puts it this way:

Formulas help implement rhythmic discourse and also act as mnemonic aids in their own right, as set expressions circulating through the mouths and ears of all. “Red in the morning, the sailor’s warning; red in the night, the sailor’s delight.” “Divide and conquer.” “To err is human, to forgive is divine.” “Sorrow is better than laughter, because when the face is sad the heart grows wiser” (Ecclesiastes 7:3). “The clinging vine.” “The sturdy oak.” “Chase off nature and she returns at a gallop.” Fixed, often rhythmically balanced, expressions of this sort and of other sorts can be found occasionally in print, indeed can be “looked up” in books of sayings, but in oral cultures they are not occasional. They are incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Thought in any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them. (34–5)

This process describes how works such as the Bible, the Iliad, and the Odyssey can be passed down without a text—the interlocking patterns of plot, characterization, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, epithets, and other mnemonic forms hold the story in place, and that place is memory.

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Other features of oral cultures are that they are additive rather than subordinative, which is to say that there is frequent use of conjunctions to string together the mnemonic elements rather than nested clauses and phrases typical of the relatively static grammar and syntax of literacy. Redundancy is also a prominent feature of oral cultures since the medium must be oversaturated with the necessary information or it is lost. The public speaking adage “Tell them what you are going to say, say it, then tell them what you said” is drawn directly from oral dynamics. In oral cultures, words are concrete rather than abstract. For example, the language will not typically have a word like January for that time of the year when it is cold in the northern hemisphere; rather, it will be the “moon of the popping trees” to depict a particular lunar cycle when the trees are so cold that they make an unusual sound. In oral cultures, everything is grounded in lived experience. Similarly, conceptual thinking as understood in literate cultures is non-existent in oral cultures. Instead, all thought is grounded in experience. The classic syllogism in which a conclusion is drawn from two premises cannot be processed by thinkers in an oral culture, and when presented with the exercise, the following interchange might occur:

Anthropologist: “In the far north, all bears are white. Antarctica is in the far north. What color are the bears there?” Subject: “I don’t know. I’ve never been to the far north, but I’ve seen a black bear.”

One final observation from Ong for our purposes is that in oral cultures, communication cannot take place without direct human interaction. Information-sharing is grounded in the bodies of the speakers and listeners, and if those bodies are not in the same communal space, no communication can take place, and no information can be shared. Orality and the Meaning of Myth The impacts of these observations upon myth are deep and profound, and any discussion of myth’s forms must begin here where myth was born. First of all, we can note that the strangeness and distance we experience in reading ancient myths is related to the distance we are from hearing them in oral cultures. Myth’s forms are oral, but we are reading them as literature. Secondly, if we understand the oral context of the stories, we can apply it to our reading and imaginatively enter the listener’s space. While this effort will never be completely effective, it is more productive than reading a myth solely as a literate product, which will produce dissonance in varying degrees. Finally and most importantly, while the myth we are reading is lying inert on the page, it was for the most part of its life alive and functioning as the primary medium for information in its original context. People depended upon these myths to survive and live together, and both the people and the myths were in dynamic relation. In reading a myth on a page, then, we are functioning as something like a

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forensic anthropologist trying to determine the meaning of a person’s life using only his skeleton. That is not to say, however, that meaning cannot be retained or restored in a written version of a myth. We will explore how written language can embody myth in our unit on myth and literature, and Momaday’s essay addresses the issue as well. Reducing Myth to Its Essential Form: Twin Theorists Just as we can draw a line from Plato to the missionary in the Eastman story—a line made of logos, or truth—we can also draw a line between an ancient Greek and a modern German linguist when it comes to myth’s forms. Both of these theorists view myth through the lens of writing and find it to be a corruption of one kind or another. Euhemerus lived in the century after Plato and may have been the first mythographer (theorist of myth) to explain how it becomes “fable and falsehood.” In his lost book Sacred History, Euhemerus explains how the stories of gods and their power are exaggerations of historical or folkloric accounts of actual human beings and their unusual gifts and deeds. For example, he argued that Zeus was simply an especially powerful king. Through time and storytelling, an apotheosis occurs as memories fade and legends grow. Like Plato, but with more detail, Euhemerus used logos to undo muthos by showing that myth was excessive language used in regard to natural occurrences. Similarly, a German scholar named Friedrich Max Müller used his training in linguistics to demonstrate that myth was “a disease of language.” Müller uses the myth of Phoebus Apollo and Daphne to explain his theory. Daphne was a beautiful wood nymph who was being pursued by lustful Phoebus Apollo. Just as she was about to be overtaken, Daphne called out for help and was turned into a laurel tree, thereby frustrating Apollo’s desires. Müller claims that far from being a story about the gods and humans, it is instead a simple description of an everyday occurrence that has been infected by myth. He points out that the name of the god has etymological roots to the word “sun” and the name of the nymph has roots in the word “dawn,” so the “myth” is actually a description of the sun chasing away the dawn. After its mythological infection, however, it becomes the story of lustful Apollo and the shy wood nymph, complete with a concerned father and moral implications. There are a number of problems with Müller’s interpretation, but it is interesting that he has to tell a good story to debunk a good older story. His is a good story because it confirms our deep belief in the power of rationality over fantasy, of logos over muthos, which is itself Western culture’s story.

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Types of Myths Cosmic Myths: The word cosmos is Greek for order and refers to the order of the universe or cosmos. Cosmic myths, then, are about the big issues: the world and our place in it. More specifically, they concern creation, destruction, heaven, and hell. Obviously, here is where the cosmological function comes into play most profoundly but not exclusively. Myths of the Gods: Most understandings of myth—both scholarly and popular—center on “stories of the gods.” God is a necessary and common subject for myth since it reaches beyond the experience of the quotidian and into the realm of the unknown, which is often the home of the divine. Hero Myths: This is possibly our favorite type of myth because it is about us instead of the gods or the cosmos. Hero myths represent humans reaching their full potential, usually by overcoming the natural resistance of the universe, the social resistance of other humans, and the powerful resistance of the gods. Sometimes reaching that full potential even means apotheosis, or becoming divine. Place and Object Myths: This is a more general category that includes stories of the origin of sacred spaces, particular objects, and even the body itself. These myths often provide rationales and scripts for ritual actions. Related Forms To continue our birth metaphor, myth has, like Zeus, given birth to an entire family of forms that have varying degrees of similarity and relation. Here are brief explanations of these related forms and their family resemblances and differences. Fable: Unlike myth, a fable usually is didactic in nature and thus has a moral to its story. Fables also are generic in terms of details, while myths are typically specific in terms of contexts. Fables serve mainly the societal function, while myth serves all four functions. Folktales: The differences between folktales and myths are subtle but not ultimately important since they have to do mainly with arguments about terminology. The most significant difference has to do with who is telling the tale, the “folk” or an elite person, but again, this is an argument within European history more than an issue in myth studies. Sagas: The etymology is Old Norse and means simply “what is said.” The term is most precisely used to refer to Icelandic prose narratives regarding those national heroes, though

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it is sometimes loosely used to refer to other historical narratives. Epics: The term usually calls to mind Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and as such refers to long stories in poetic form that integrate myth, history, and heroes to form a compelling national narrative. Many cultures have such poems that define their national character through the actions of their heroes and heroines in founding the city or nation (e.g., The Aeneid). Legends: Legends are typically more associated with historical personalities, such as Arthur or Gawain, but they also include mythical material. For most practical purposes, this word is a synonym for myth. One could argue that legends are more historically based or at least historically focused and not be wrong, but the distinctions between them and myth quickly disappear upon close analysis. Parables: Shorter and more to the point than myths, parables are closer to didactic riddles designed to force the listener into a new awareness of a particular truth or mode of conduct. Etiologic Tales: The term refers to the assignment of causes or, for our purposes, a story about how things came to be the way they are. These stories are a type of myth, but not the only type. Their function is primarily explanatory. What It All Means It all means a lot, of course, but for our purposes you should be aware that in reading an ancient myth, you are entering another world, not just the world of that culture and language, but the world where stories are life and the forms they take and use are experiential, dynamic, and charged with meaning.

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Works Cited

Bolle, Kees W., and Richard G. A. Buxton. “Myths.” Web. 19 Mar. 2013. “Euhemerus.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2013.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euhemerus>. Leeming, David Adams. The World of Myth. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Print. Momaday, N. Scott. “The Man Made of Words.” Nothing but the Truth: An Anthology of Native American

Literature. Ed. John L. Purdy and James Ruppert. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2001. 82–95. Print.

Müller, Freidrich M. “Full Text of “Comparative Mythology: An Essay.” Archive.org, n.d. Web. 19 Mar. 2013. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. Print.