Realms of Myth

Last Week, Story Euphoria contemplated one of the greatest powers of story: the power to illuminate truth. Truth is different from fact. Truth is understood on a more intuitive level than the cerebral cortex can make sense of, and it resists definition by language. Truth is why humanity has the arts at all and why we started telling stories—in a struggle to understand, and to chart the strange roads we all must travel through life and into death. Stories are the signposts of the spirit. And from the first moment a cold, bright-eyed hominid painted the first antelope stampeding on a cave wall, we have been driven to tell stories.

The oldest stories we know of, preserved in tribal memory or graven in clay tablets, are myths—stories of symbol and the world of the unseen. And one of the oldest of these is what remains of an ancient Sumerian myth about the great goddess, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, who heard a call and went on a journey into the underworld, the place from which no traveler returns, the land of the dead. Her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, commanded that, as Inanna passed through each gate into the Great Below, she be stripped one by one of her items of power (which can be interpreted each as a me, or tablet of knowledge of civilization): her crown, the lapis beads from round her neck, her breastplate called “Come, man, come!”, and so on until Inanna entered the throne room completely naked. As the Wolkstein and Kramer translation of the epic continues:

Then Ereshkigal fastened on Inanna the eye of death.
She spoke against her the word of wrath.
She uttered against her the cry of guilt.
She struck her.
Inanna was turned into a corpse,
A piece of rotting meat,
And was hung from a hook on the wall.

Inanna has undergone the most profound transformation we know of on this earth, and she will return from it with powers obtained from Ereshkigal and the underworld. This is a prototypical story of rebirth, of loss and regeneration into something better balanced within the dualities of light and dark: the evolution towards wisdom. This journey echoes time and again throughout mythology and religion the world over.

The renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell theorizes that this journey and return theme is part of the monomyth shared by all cultures, more commonly known as the Hero’s Journey, an element of story which Story Euphoria has visited before. Often heroes embark on these journeys to acquire knowledge of some kind—to help their tribe, or to serve a cause greater than themselves, which is what makes them heroes. Heroes are sacrificed to their greater purpose.

Examples of this cycle are everywhere, and once you are aware of the pattern, you will see it in everything from old fairy tales to modern television shows, but one excellent example can be found in the figure of Odin from Norse mythology. Odin is a journeying hero figure who, like Inanna, possesses powers connected with war and creation, but above all, with knowledge and wisdom. The two ravens who sit on his shoulders and bring him news of the worlds are called Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory, and Odin is responsible for bringing poetry to mankind, which in Norse culture is synonymous with knowledge, history and spiritual power.

Odin’s doings are often motivated from what seems to be an obsession with Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, when their mythic world and almost everything in it is destroyed. Specifically, Odin is obsessed with increasing knowledge and wisdom as his ideal weapons against adversity, as a means of aiding the Gods of Asgard and the Men of Midgard, and he does not balk at painful and gruesome sacrifices to achieve his goals. You can listen to one journey Odin makes as this week’s Story Euphoria podcast presents two myths of Odin—of how he left to seek the Well of Wisdom, and of the sacrifice he made to drink from it.

Whatever subconscious meaning you may find in these myths, one thing is clear: Odin and eventually all the Gods and Giants must travel the archetypal hero’s journey to achieve revelation and an elevated state of being—Ragnarök, after all, is not only the end of what was before but is also the beginning of a better world: the world we live in now. Odin—as a warrior and a wanderer—takes this journey many times in his relentless pursuit of understanding. There is the moment where, in order to possess the knowledge of runic writing, he hung himself from the world tree with his own spear plunged through him, as Odin himself declares in the section of the Hávamál poem called the Rúnatal:

I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run.

No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn,
downwards I peered;
I took up the runes, screaming I took them,
then I fell back from there.

The image of Odin on Yggdrasil has been compared to the image of Christ on the cross, both of which might also be compared to the Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree, where he decided to meditate until he died or found enlightenment. Certainly, on the mythic level, these moments tell of a similar journey: the hero must travel through death, symbolic or actual, and be willingly stripped of all material assumptions and assertions in the ultimate transformation of self from the finite thing who does not know to the cosmic hero who has obtained the answer, to the benefit of the world he left behind.

The Transformation Imperative

This week, the Story Euphoria podcast reaches the end of a four-episode celebration of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, witnessing one of the most famous and profound character transformations in popular culture: the hard-bitten and selfish Scrooge reclaims a child-like sense of joy and wonder. Because this transformation is “the point” of the story, the novella could be considered a transformation story.

Of course, the argument can be made that all stories are transformation stories. Students of the literary arts are often told that the characters in their stories must change in the course of the telling. Dynamic characters, we are informed, are much more desirable than static ones. Perhaps minor characters can be static, but hero protagonists must change for a story to be successful.

But is this really true?

Let’s imagine a story where the central character doesn’t change: Frank is unhappily married at the beginning of the story and sees himself as the victim of all the forces in his life—his wife, his job, his ungrateful children. During the course of the novel, his wife leaves him, his son evades a narcotics arrest by burning the garage down, he looses his daughter to an aggressive cancer, he wins a trip to Tahiti but also loses his job. However, at the end of all this, Frank’s outlook is the same. He still sees himself as the victim of these events and is passively dragged through them by his dedicated author.

Reading this, we might be frustrated by Frank and give up on reading his story—that is the risk his author runs. However, can we really say, despite the pains the author has taken to make it so, that Frank is completely unchanged? Maybe the first line of the book is Frank coming back from work, saying, “I’m home.” At the end of the book, he gets back from Tahiti, suntanned, parking his car out in the snow because the garage is yet to be replaced. When he walks in and says, “I’m home,” to the empty house, the very context of all that has happened has completely changed the impact of the words. Frank may be stubbornly entrenched in his self-pity, but he is in a different place at the end of the story than he was at the beginning, and this embodies his own transformation on a subtle level, if not on the grandiose level of Scrooge. We, the readers, can’t help but read him differently than we did at the beginning, no matter how hard the author tries to keep him the same. So, Frank has changed.

My example of Frank may be poor, so let’s look at an example from the literary cannon. Critics have suggested that the heroine of the epic Gone with the Wind is a static character, and that Melanie, as a very dynamic character, is the true heroine. But the book is not written with Melanie as the centerpiece, the vortex around which the other characters and events revolve. From beginning to end, we are emphatically concerned with Scarlet and her point of view. Yet the critics do have a point: after all she goes through—ravaged by the austerities of the Civil War, widowed, punished by the death of her child, et cetera—up to the last page of the book she is still using her same old wiles to snare her man.

Yet, enough has changed in her life and the lives of the other characters that, despite her resilience of spirit (which indeed, is a prominent theme of the story), Scarlet is in a different place. The focus of her affection has, perhaps sincerely, changed from Ashley Wilkes to Rhett Butler. Rhett famously refuses her, and by virtue of leaving the story at this juncture it is easy for the reader to imagine that Scarlet’s infatuation for him is not only sincere now, but is going to grow more tenacious, as it did for the unobtainable Ashley. And if her feelings have changed, then Scarlet herself has surely changed, even if she is also the “same old” Scarlet.

In short, the events of the book have made it impossible for her not to change. All supports her old character relied upon, other than Rhett, are dead or in other ways removed from her, and Rhett himself abandons her on the last few pages. With a change as big as this in all things against which she could be identified, the old Scarlet can no longer exist. It may have taken over 1,000 pages of narrative to do it, but she has no hope at the end but to change, and that change is the tragic taste the last page leaves in the back of the mouth.

To expand the Scarlet Principle to stories at large, just consider what is necessary for a story to be a story. It’s like the old newspaperman’s adage: “Dog Bites Man” is not a story, but “Man Bites Dog” is. A story happens whenever something out of the ordinary happens, something that only happens once in the lives of the characters who figure within it. Anything else is just a character sketch or a situation from which there is no outcome. In other words, the very nature of a story mandates that the principle characters journey through events remarkable enough to trouble an author to write about them. Characters cannot go through such events without being at a different place, physically or emotionally, than they were at the beginning. Being in a different place is just another way of saying that the characters have transformed.

So rather than asking if characters must change for a story to be successful, perhaps it is more useful to ask whether the story takes its characters from one place to another—that is, if anything happens in the story. Likewise, if the characters in a story do honestly feel static throughout (really static, not like Frank or Scarlet), then it is a sign that the story hasn’t become a story yet. Once it blossoms, there is no choice for characters but to change, as surely as the tide is pulled by the moon, for change is the by-product of story.