The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960

Kathryn Hume

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501359880
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Literature
• Sous-sujet: Folklore & Mythic Literary Criticism

Why do contemporary writers use myths from ancient Greece and Rome, Pharaonic Egypt, the Viking north, Africa's west coast, and Hebrew and Christian traditions? What do these stories from premodern cultures have to offer us? The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960 examines how myth has shaped writings by Kathy Acker, Margaret Atwood, William S. Burroughs, A. S. Byatt, Neil Gaiman, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jeanette Winterson, and others, and contrasts such canonical texts with fantasy, speculative fiction, post-singularity fiction, pornography, horror, and graphic narratives. These artistic practices produce a feeling of meaning that doesn't need to be defined in scientific or materialist terms. Myth provides a sense of rightness, a recognition of matching a pattern, a feeling of something missing, a feeling of connection. It not only allows poetic density but also manipulates our moral judgments, or at least stimulates us to exercise them. Working across genres, populations, and critical perspectives, Kathryn Hume elicits an understanding of the current uses of mythology in fiction.

1

Multiple Selves and Egyptian Mythology

Mailer, Burroughs, Reed, Zelazny

Imagine that you awaken to find yourself in a tomb, dead and cheaply mummified, and not even in your own tomb, but stored in your great grandfather’s tomb along with his embalmed remains and his eerily talkative spirit. That is the situation for Norman Mailer’s nominal focal figure, a young ancient Egyptian named Menenhetet II. We know we are in a mythological landscape if the dead can speak. Unfortunately for Menenhetet II and his ghoulishly sentient great grandfather, Menenhetet I, they are not truly in the land of the dead, at least not the blessed dead in the Western Lands ruled over by Osiris. Menenhetet I has made forays into the fearsome Duad, but has not yet dared the worst that it offers, and Menenhetet II has yet to try his luck in that realm of torments and traps that will weed out the undeserving souls and allow only a tiny fraction to win through to Osiris’s realm. Neither one seems a likely candidate for success, but combined? Menenhetet I thinks that strategy holds promise. How, though, do you combine souls? This solution would not occur within the realm of the Abrahamic religions, so this different way of thinking is one gift that Egyptian mythology has to offer contemporary writers. What if humans have multiple souls?

Our having more than one soul helpfully embodies a problem facing postmodern writers. For more than a century, we have been dismantling the unitary self. In Christian terms, the soul is unitary—all of it goes to Heaven or Hell, not just its parts. In atheist terms, all of a person dies and is no more. In Catholic thought, even the body will rise on Judgment day and be rejoined to the soul, so the self is a very unified concept in that tradition. In practical terms, we have inhabited a body that pretty much lived as a being separable from other beings, and that made us feel unitary. That cohesion, though, is changing. Recent prosthetic and electronic devices have caused us to absorb inanimate objects into the body and to wonder if some form of our mind could survive death electronically. Freud identified an unconscious as well as a consciousness, and named parts of our mental self that we cannot sense directly. Even those who doubt the validity of ego and id, thanatos and eros, mostly accept that we have some kind of unconscious that is not readily accessible, which means we have the self we think we know, but also another that we do not. Studies of rationality suggest that a great deal of what we think is actually decided at an unconscious level.

Possible selves have multiplied in the hands of recent philosophers and theorists. The contributions of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault have so undercut any core being that we are left with a congeries of selves, each called into being by various cultural demands made upon it. The dutiful child and teen rebel can exist within the same being, and they may struggle for dominance, or may preside at different times, and both may seem insignificant compared to the Twitter addict or soccer fanatic. We are called into existence as citizens of particular countries and particular political ideologies, as members of a religion, as sexual beings, as gendered beings, as professionals, as part of a family, as members of a class, and as members of cultural and linguistic groups. Those groups may be defined by particular tastes in music and film, by formality or informality of grammar or by dialect, by clothes, and by the kinds of communication technologies preferred. The postmodern person consists of these multiple, competing interests. Add to this the attacks on reason as a rationalization for instinctual decisions, and we have little cause to see ourselves as unified and reasonable beings. To call the self fragmented would imply an original wholeness; instead, we are simply a multiplicity that coexists, sometimes comfortably, sometimes not.

This sense of the multiple self suggests mythology to some writers. A pantheon, after all, can be seen as a multiple self. One member represents erotic attitudes, another warlike aggression, another discordant quarrelsomeness, another the drive to power, another domesticity, and the like. If a reader wishes to allegorize myths, then that reader can say that Hippolytus neglected Aphrodite (his erotic element) with his chastity, and the goddess, thus slighted, avenged herself on him through Phaedra’s forbidden love. Hippolytus failed to achieve balance among these divinely sponsored forces within himself, and so came to grief. While this is a crude and not much respected way of interpreting mythic stories, it does treat the multiplicity of gods as parts of the self, or it projects the self as a batch of clashing gods.

This potential for exploring a multiple self is what seems to have drawn both Mailer and William S. Burroughs to Egyptian mythology. The other attraction is the focus on death. Most nonreligious people are comfortable enough with the Big Bang substituting for creation in seven days. Further, they accept that even if the distant beginnings are mysterious and the earth may or may not have been intelligently designed, the earth has evolved to its current state. How our world began stirs no fears and mostly just curiosity. What comes after death, though, is different. That is immediate and affects every one of us personally. The second chapter will look at what other writers do with other mythologies to deal with death. The current one will explore in two directions: one will be the advantages offered by Egyptian mythology, as explored by Mailer, Burroughs, Ishmael Reed, and Roger Zelazny; the other, the problems of thinking of humans in terms of multiple selves and souls. Other mythologies—South Asian, East Asian, Polynesian, Inuit, and many others—may well provide tools for exploring other problems, but the publicity achieved by Mailer and Burroughs in the American literary scene make Egyptian myth a useful example of how recent writers have appropriated non-Western myth.

Mailer’s Excremental Journey

Ancient Egyptians believed that most humans had seven souls each (the Pharaoh, double that number). Scholars disagree on the exact tally, but that is the number that Mailer fixed upon in Ancient Evenings (1983). According to him, our component selves include the Ren (our secret name), the Ba (closest to Western notions of the soul, portrayed as human-headed bird), the Ka (our double), Sekhem (our vital spark or power), Khu (the light in the mind and a kind of angel), the Kaibit (shadow and memory), and the Sekhu (the bodily remains). They exist in differing fashions. The Ren, Sekhem, and Khu leave immediately on death; they are immortal but not individual, so they go back to be in some fashion reused. What is left must strive to survive the Duad. The Duad is a long series of nasty landscapes involving lakes of fire, boiling steam, rivers of excrement, pain, and judgment. The soul that fails may be eaten by a crocodile, or perish in the heat or other torments. Because surviving the Duad depends on the person’s remaining souls working together, Menenhetet I thinks that between them, he and his great grandson can create a combination of souls with a chance of success. To this end, he forces the younger ghost to fellate him and ingest his ghostly sperm, which brings with it memory, knowledge, and something of Menenhetet I’s superior mental abilities and priestly knowledge of how the land of the dead should be negotiated. Indeed, he has already made some forays into the Duad, but has not yet dared to wager his chance of immortality on an all-out attempt.

Mailer worships a heroic outlook, and in the past, heroism has certainly felt to be located within a reasonably coherent individual—heroic committees are not often celebrated in saga or memorialized in statues. Even in stories that figure the hero and his two brothers, or the hero and his twelve companions, the hero is the one who matters. The whole concept of a hero really seems to inhere in a unified being, not some congeries of selves. The hero may waver or be torn, but once he decides on an action, he is one again and must stand the consequences. The hero monomyth is the pattern for an individual to become an adult, and it does assume a being with enough of a core that he can be seen to grow and mature. I thought at first that Mailer’s recourse to multiple souls betokened uneasiness with this postmodern development, as if it could undermine the heroism he deems so necessary. Further reading convinced me that the cosmological images and concepts of the soul are not just metaphor for him, but involve belief. They provide him with a logic by which life makes sense. Far from feeling undermined by the multiplicity of selves, Mailer found a way to make it serve his ends.

Mailer is unusual in having an individual cosmological theory.¹ His vision is based on the notion that God is an intense, struggling, dedicated artist whose best creations are his boldest and most daring. Many of his creations are failures, from animals that have gone extinct to cowardly humans. Very important to Mailer is the idea that God is as flawed as man is, and he must struggle against a Satan who is associated with slickness, technology, plastic, and totalitarianism. This Satan wins strength when any human makes a cowardly choice or, even worse, avoids having to make choices. Unlike some other dualistic visions of past religions, Mailer does not assume that the good will win; for him, the outcome hangs in the balance. Whenever humans make choices, they strengthen one side of the theomachy or the other. To this basic vision of the world as a struggle involving God, Satan, and humanity, Mailer adds the possibility of reincarnation, and he broadens the notion of soul, such that the food we eat may have qualities of soul associated with it that then affect our souls. Eating the meat of a brave animal (which may have been human in some previous life) passes some of that bravery to us, and part of its soul may augment ours in our struggle. Mailer has elaborate theories about what happens to that food as we digest it, and about our bodily wastes. He has always paid an unusual degree of attention to smells in his fiction, and one aspect of bravery is to absorb and work through bad smells, not cover them over or avoid them. We grow from absorbing and accepting, not from evading such matters, whether this involves the stench of our own shit or someone else’s. We lose something by taking the easy way out, whether flush toilets for odor or antibiotics for infections. Our bodies struggle bravely with disease, for instance, and benefit from defeating disease, but do not learn or benefit spiritually from being saved by antibiotics. When we tamp our lives down and repress all of our more honest impulses in favor of cowardly conformity, we open ourselves to cancer.²

These are only a few of the elements in Mailer’s vision, but they indicate why heroic striving is so important to his characters, and also why he found ancient Egypt an interesting challenge. He was trying to imagine a non-Judeo-Christian world and its mentality. Mailer’s personal vision is not entirely consistent; it was a theory always in progress, changing to meet new inspirations. What he seems to have been most pleased about was the way it gave meaning to life by making our decisions cosmically important, and it explained the existence of evil, since a flawed god and a powerful adversary easily explain why dreadful things can happen. An all-good and omnipotent god’s permitting disasters can only be bypassed by calling the solution a mystery.³

Given his serious investment in the concept of the soul and even his suggestion that one absorbs other souls from food and benefits or is damaged by such merging, the Egyptian worldview has obvious attractions. The Egyptian multiple souls were not exactly what he had envisioned, but they did offer a rival system enough like his own thoughts to deserve investigation and to suggest a kind of validation for his own projected system.

Once he sets up multiple souls in the novel as a way to parse the individual, Mailer promptly considers another multiplication of the self: reincarnation. Reincarnation may or may not have been part of Egyptian belief; we owe that suggestion to Herodotus (The Histories, Book II, 123), who elaborates on how Egyptians believed that a human soul had to pass through 3,000 years of life as a variety of animals before winning human form again. Mailer suggests something close to that interval when Ramses II’s battle-lion, Hera-Ra, dies from eating the rotting hands of the enemy after the Battle of Kadesh, and Menenhetet I telepathically shares Hera-Ra’s dying vision of great cities with “thousands of windows and great towers [that] . . . went to vast heights.”⁴ Given Mailer’s admiration for the bravery and romping good humor of this lion on the battlefield, one senses his feeling that the lion glimpses a future rebirth as a New Yorker, probably as Mailer himself.

His chief exemplar of rebirth, however, is Menenhetet I. He learned from a Jew the trick of dying while ejaculating and begetting his own next incarnation, so he has lived four lives and can remember them in some detail. He was trying for a fifth, but the woman was unwilling and aborted him, so he is now facing the Duad as his fourth incarnation, as Menenhetet II’s great grandfather. Most of the long book consists of Menenhetet I’s account of his four lives, told during the Night of the Pig to his immediate family and the Pharaoh. His most important, or most vividly rendered, life was his first as Ramses II’s charioteer at the Battle of Kadesh, and it remains vivid for its resentment. As an underling, the charioteer had no choice but to permit the Pharaoh to rape him and make him play the woman more than once, but he feels that he was unjustly deprived of spiritual power through this yielding to male force. His power was stolen, even as the Pharaoh lied about his charioteer’s behavior in battle. That resentment clings to the ghost. He has to some extent balanced his loss by raping others, but that does not restore his anal virginity, as it were, and this may be one thing that undermines his confidence in his ability to survive the Duad’s trials. He has also been a high priest and a government functionary in other lives, always relatively high in power but never of the first rank. This sense of never quite making it haunts him, and perhaps his great grandson’s youthful brashness is what makes him think they should somehow combine their souls. He supplies the esoteric knowledge from his priestly training and can offer a grim determination that is unlikely to be tricked by beautiful distractions. His descendant offers the unshadowed outlook and untested assurance that may keep them from being undermined by doubts.

Mailer’s Duad is a second chance—a great gift from his viewpoint. Life offered t he first. Mailer has always argued that a man must chose the more difficult path, must not shy away from unpleasantness, and must never compromise or figure that just this once he will take the easy way out. Every bad decision degrades the world and all that inhabit it as well as reducing the soul of the person who made the craven decision. In many religions, once someone has died, that is the end of choice and change. You are weighed and assigned to whatever fate is appropriate. Both the Egyptian and the Tibetan concept of death make further choices possible. If one has done poorly in life, one might still improve one’s status after death when the deadly consequences are totally clear and one is no longer blinded by earthly illusions. With reincarnation, Mailer adds another way in which some individuals might gradually improve and do better. Also, by going through many lives, one puts off any final reckoning. Mailer’s version of Egyptian mythology is thus quite generous in the chances it offers, even if the Duad lets few souls through; they are given more than one opportunity to build their qualifications.

What does Mailer gain by extending the struggle into an afterlife? For one thing, the Egyptian Duad was an unpleasant place that had more than a little in common with the digestive tract. The various dangerous beings there live in boiling lakes and swamps and miasmas of fecal smells. Mailer has always been our laureate of stench, and both the Nile and the Duad let him indulge his scatological sensibilities. His emphasis on male on male rape or other unwilling sexual contact is a similarly anal anxiety. The phallus may be a source of power that increases one’s energy at all levels, bodily and spiritual, but the anus seems to be a point of attack and a place that a man can lose power. When we see how Mailer presents gods, we will see that same anal concern with power. He has set the implicit struggle that lies behind this book in a rather anal realm, a realm in which horrible smells are real, and thriving on them is a form of taking power, whereas beautiful smells are to be distrusted as false. Menenhetet II complains of the stench at one point, and Menenhetet I offers to smell like perfume and sweet grass, and for a moment the atmosphere becomes lovely and the older spirit becomes a solemn priest telling a solemn myth, but that purity becomes unsustainable (44–46). The story, we are told, quickly becomes scandalous, sacrilegious, and obscene. Prettiness and sweetness do not have the fundamental (in both senses) strength of the unpleasant in Mailer’s imagination.

Mailer’s choice of the Egyptian world, both mortal and postmortem, lets him push many boundaries. The Egyptians at the upper-class level practiced incest, so Menenhetet II is at one point his mother’s lover, thus living out rather than repressing the desire articulated by Freud. Whether the Egyptians were as enthusiastic as Mailer about incest and male on male rape is unlikely to be known at this distance, but the latter act epitomizes for Mailer the uneasy way that males must measure themselves. If war offers an opening for testing courage, fine, but for everyday spiritual agon, the opponents are other men, so Mailer has found a mythic (and probably unhistorical) landscape in which he can make his metaphors literal.

Mailer’s mythological landscape in the realm of the dead lets him explore fears of death and possible answers that might assuage those fears. He also introduces tales of the gods, though, so what ends do those serve? In particular, he traces the story of Set’s murder of Osiris, Horus’s struggle to avenge this on Set, and Isis’s letting Set slip away. None of these gods is the intensely involved artist-creator that Ma...