MYTHOGRAPHY: Preface
This post marks the first in a series on myths. I want to begin with some questions and a loose outline of where I’m headed, both within this series and after.
Hermes, from the D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths
Why am I writing about myths (with both emphases: why am I writing about myths and why am I writing about myths)?
I’m writing about myths because they are a long-standing interest in my reading and a practical concern in two projects that I’m working on—but also because poetry, feminism (specifically feminism’s investment in/articulation through myth and ritual) and my own process of becoming as a trans woman converged in my young adulthood in ways that still influence my writing and thinking. I have spoken about this in Avren Keating’s interview with me on the Waves Breaking podcast, and I have a forthcoming piece solicited by Yosefa Raz “Notes On Female Visionary Poetry: Trans Women Poets Writing Themselves Into Existence” in which I discuss this confluence at greater length. Suffice to say for the moment that myth is a personal almost existential question.
What is a myth?
My off-the-cuff personal definition would be a narrative, traditional or invented, whose intent is to preserve/transmit/explain some knowledge that is important in its context. But rather than science writing or even realist fiction, myths generally have recourse to the supernatural or spiritual. I’m not really an expert, so here’s folklorist Mary Magoulick’s distillation of many other people’s definitions is as follows, “Myths are symbolic tales of the distant past (often primordial times) that concern cosmogony and cosmology (the origin and nature of the universe), may be connected to belief systems or rituals, and may serve to direct social action and values.” I’m also interested in her characteristics of myth:
1. A story that is or was considered a true explanation of the natural world (and how it came to be).
2. Characters are often non-human – e.g. gods, goddesses, supernatural beings, first people.
3. Setting is a previous proto-world (somewhat like this one but also different).
4. Plot may involve interplay between worlds (this world and previous or original world).
5. Depicts events that bend or break natural laws (reflective of connection to previous world).
6. Cosmogonic/metaphysical explanation of universe (formative of worldview).
7. Functional: “Charter for social action” – conveys how to live: assumptions, values, core meanings of individuals, families, communities.
8. Evokes the presence of Mystery, the Unknown (has a “sacred” tinge).
9. Reflective and formative of basic structures (dualities: light/dark, good/bad, being/nothingness, raw/cooked, etc.) that we must reconcile. Dualities often mediated by characters in myths.
10. Common theme: language helps order the world (cosmos); thus includes many lists, names, etc.
11. Metaphoric, narrative consideration/explanation of “ontology” (study of being). Myths seek to answer, “Why are we here?” “Who are we?” “What is our purpose?” etc. – life’s fundamental questions.
12. Sometimes: the narrative aspect of a significant ritual (core narrative of most important religious practices of society; fundamentally connected to belief system; sometimes the source of rituals)
I want to test contemporary and near-contemporary mythic writing—my own included—against definitions like these. Ditto the contemporary epic and Bakhtin’s writing on the epic.
What is the relationship of myth to epic poetry?
Epic poetry has ancient, pre-literary roots. My first introduction to epic was Homer, and The Odyssey and The Iliad feature heroes, gods, and magical transformations, like Circe’s transformation of Odysseus’s crew into swine. Some of these characters and stories I had already encountered as myths, told or read to me before I could read, before I found my way to them embedded within the framework of the epic on the page. Epic precedes other generic distinctions, containing both what we would call history and what we would call mythology. You can obviously write a non-mythological materialist epic—remember when I was reading Lucretius? (I swear I’m going to reprise that series at some point)—but part of why I’m drawn to epic as writer and reader is its mythological element.
What can myths do that other literary modes can’t (I’m calling it a mode rather than a genre because scruples)? Specifically, what do I think myth can do within POETRY and for TRANS women.
While myths don’t have the same explanatory power, they remain psychologically powerful. The mythic was for me first about connection (with my parents) and then about escape (from going to a boy’s school, from alienation, from pain, from boredom, etc.). Later, myths would be a vehicle for me to transform. They remain a resource for personal transformation and communication. Myths’ ability to go beyond the real is useful way to articulate experiences that might otherwise be incommunicable or insufficiently communicable. I’m interested in the way feminist writers have used myth and continue to use it to tell different stories and rewrite cultural scripts. I’m especially invested in the emerging canon of trans literature that uses the structure of myth to articulate the otherwise inarticulable.
What do I like about what others do with myths?
This is something I’ll address as this series goes one but: intervene at the level of the grammar of the symbolic realm. Change myths, change the culture. Maintain or create connections between literature and ritual. The latter will be explored further in my second blog series, tentatively called “Practical Magic,” in which I delve into some of my personal ritual practices.
What am I trying to do with myths?
I’m currently writing an epic poem and an autobiographical novel (which may end up being braided together as a single composite work), but I’m also interested in the work of etiology and definition, though not like an academic scholar. More like a public scholar and an aspiring practitioner of the form who wants to know what she’s getting into and leave some un-paywalled signposts on the trail for others. Who are my mythographers? The usual suspects: Marina Warner, Jack Zipes, Wendy Doniger is a new one—although now this handy dandy guide created by Mary Magoulick will no doubt send me down a rabbit hole involving anthropological writers on myth, like Levi-Strauss and Malinowski.
What texts will I be writing about in this series?
a) A partial list includes: Karthika Naïr’s Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, Wendy Doniger’s The Implied Spider, Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig, always Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette, Anne Waldman’s Iovis might make an appearance, Marina Warner and Jack Zipes might show up…
Loose outline of series
Start with Karthika Naïr’s Until the Lions
Trace my history w/Mahabharata, which transitions into talking about
Comparative mythology, through Wendy Doniger’s The Implied Spider
From Naïr to other feminist epics, tracing back to the first for me, which was
Notley’s Descent of Alette, which inspired a long standing dream of writing a trans woman’s epic, which I have recently begun to fulfill though
the book of bella
but I am also writing an an autofictional novel
Conversations with friends making me realize I need to learn more about the relationship of novel and epic so I turn to
Bakhtin, ending (?) with a conversation with his “Epic and Novel”
But I reserve the right to swerve and take on other texts that I find, like Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s “After the Long Poem”
Loose outline of “practical magic” series
1. Second part: magic in practice
2. Catholicism
3. Childhood magic, like The Egypt Game
4. Being forbidden from doing magic with a classmate (also mixed in w/parental anxieties about my nascent queerness?)
5. Book dragon / book magic
6. Hermeticism in poetry: gnostic stuff, etc.
7. Initiation into divination
8. Confluence of feminism, neopaganism, gender stuff
9. Dark Goddess: theater ritual
10. “Why can’t you just PLAY at being a queer trans anarchist witch, instead of actually having to BE one?”
11. Rachel Pollack
12. Magic with Britt
That’s all for now! See you next time to talk about Karthika Naïr’s Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata!
