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For
almost any reader, movie-goer or parent—and for that matter,
anyone who was ever a child!—the world of myths, legends and
fairytales is of perennial interest. We are surrounded by
examples of their influence, from the Star Wars
movies to the Book of Virtues-type story collections
of William Bennett, from
Disneyland to the psychotherapist’s couch. Yet few of us, if pressed,
could give more than the vaguest explanation of what these
earliest literary genres really are. But they are worth
seeking explanations for, because every other literary form
rests on their foundation, and full understanding vastly
deepens our reading pleasure.
The
common-sense understanding of these terms, as given in
dictionary definitions, ironically captures the essence of a
longstanding academic debate: under “myth” we have: “A
traditional story originating in a preliterate society,
dealing with supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes that
serve as primordial types in a primitive view of the world.”
Under “fairytale,” we read: “A fanciful tale of legendary
deeds and creatures, usually intended for children.”
Finally, under “legend” we see: “An unverified popular story
handed down from earlier times,” as well as “A romanticized
or popularized myth of modern times.”
Notice
the high degree of circularity in the definitions. The
definition of ‘fairytale’ refers to legends; the definition
of ‘legend’ refers back to myth; and the definition of
‘myth’ distinguishes that story type not so much by content
or form, but primarily by its origin and use. Two
discoveries by anthropologist Franz Boas (related in his
Tsimshian Mythology, 1916) are of special importance in
explaining this bizarre triad. The first is his observation
that virtually all cultures—including, for example, the
Trobriand Islanders in the South Pacific—make an explicit
tripartite distinction between serious, entertaining, and
semi-historical oral tales, with separate terms
corresponding to myths, fairytales, and legends. The second
is that this distinction applies primarily to the manner of
presentation, not the content. “The facts that are brought
out most clearly from a careful analysis of the myths and
folktales of an area like the northwest coast of America,”
said Boas, “are that the contents of folktales and myths are
largely the same, that the data show a continual flow of
material from mythology to folktale and vice versa, and that
neither group can claim priority.” The enduring distinction
Boas saw lay in how the material was handled, not in the
material as such. A hero might seek a beautiful bride in
myth, in legend, and in fairytale, but the metaphysics and
the aesthetics of the three stories (as well as their
resolutions) would be utterly different.
The
academic consensus is that these story genres form a
continuum, an interdependent system in which each genre
itself conveys a meaning separate from the story content.
The debate, then, is over which genre should be considered
pre-eminent, defining the basic character of traditional
oral literature.
Here we
shall make the case for legend. Why legend? The fairytale is
pragmatic, empirical, and entirely subjective; the myth is
by turns dutiful, transcendental, mysterious and
rationalistic, presenting intrinsic, ‘higher’ truths; but
the legend strives to be, in the best sense of the word,
objective. It presents a concrete instance of a general
truth or moral ideal, a blueprint, and then exalts it: an
inductive generalization embodied by a ‘real’ individual.
The content of a legend can vary widely—after all,
one can make a legend out of Timur Lenk or Genghis Khan as
easily as Odysseus. Which legends we exalt depends
necessarily on our view of what is good and true. However,
the legendary method of storytelling is inherently
superior to either myth or fairytale forms, and has proven
itself superior by giving a foundation to everything from
epic poetry to fourteenth-century romances to Shakespeare to
the modern novel and adventure movies. Tragedy finds its
roots in myth, and comedy finds complementary roots in
fairytales; but legends are the true precursor to drama,
with all that this implies.
To see
this relationship among the forms, we begin one level below
myths, legends, and fairytales, with the proto-stories of
the Melanesians.
The
simplest works of the Melanesian storytellers are apt to
remind one of the chatter of three-year-olds playing in a
sandbox. There is a narrative, some semblance of characters
and plot, but it is hallucinatory and disjointed, arbitrary
in the extreme. In one story, a buffalo and a crocodile call
upon domestic objects floating in a river to settle a
dispute between them (and are refused); in another, an egg,
a snake, a centipede, an ant, and a piece of dung set out on
a head-hunting expedition. In still another, a tapa-beater
(a domestic article) transforms itself into the form of a
particular woman and deceives another woman into travelling
with it; for which deception it is eventually thrown into a
fire and burned up.
Susanne
K. Langer tackled this mysteriously primitive outlook in her
essay “Life-Symbols: The Roots Of Myth,” from her book
Philosophy in a New Key (1941):
In these stories we have certainly a very low stage of
human imagination; one cannot call them “myths,” let alone
“religious myths.” For the leaf-plate which refused to
arbitrate a quarrel (it was peeved, by the way, because it
had been thrown out when it was still perfectly good), the
equally unobliging mortar and mat, the piece of dung that
went head-hunting… are not “persons” in disguise; despite
their humanoid activities they are just domestic articles.
For
Langer, “the psychological basis of this remarkable form of
nonsense lies in the fact that the story is a fabrication
out of subjective symbols, not out of observed folkways and
nature-ways.” There is invariably some thread of logic to
the story that brings it above the level of random dreaming,
but basically such stories are “formulated and told and
re-told as a means of self-expression.” To put it
another way, whatever the motive of the teller or the broad
psychological value of self-expression, the story of the
leaf-mat or the tapa-beater is clearly focused on
rearranging concretes, the free play of storytelling. No
great chain of abstractions stands above it, structuring the
action; the concretes are merely being tried out in this
arrangement, to see what amusement and pleasure that might
bring. It is not so much induction and abstraction, but
imagination (the vital precursor to induction) that is
being exercised. This extremely simple form is like the
one-celled organism of literature’s biological chain of
development. From it eventually spring myths, fairytales,
and legends.
“As the
story goes abroad,” says Langer, “it meets with more
rigorous demands for significance.” It develops a range of
sub-genres, each with conventions and techniques; the
primitive ghost story, the bold trickster story, and finally
the fully developed fairytale. Its power and interest grows
as it leaves behind the purely localized subject matter of
crocodiles and cannibals and exchanges them for clever and
lucky low-born heroes, kings, witches, and dragons. There is
a developed structure of ideas—storytelling rules—that
governs its retelling and that gives it somewhat greater
reach and significance. But if no new impulse comes to
transform it, the core story remains in the fairytale mode;
it never becomes myth.
So what
is it that turns the primitive workings of the early
imagination into myth-making?
There are
two impulses, moral and cognitive. Langer declares that
morally speaking “the fairytale is irresponsible; it is
frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes…” In
a typical fairytale, a hero may lie or cheat, but remains a
hero. His enemies may be clearly superior in prowess or
social status, and his efforts may fall far short of the
hearer’s supposed moral ideals. In fact, most classic
fairytales cast the hero as a youngest son or unwanted
daughter, an outcast with no social standing and few
noteworthy virtues, just a distinguishing mark or two, like
Cinderella or Goldilocks. All that matters is that the hero
be sympathetic in some rudimentary way to the listener, the
adventures interesting, and her (or his) desires eventually
fulfilled—by whatever means necessary. So myth involves an
added dimension of moral closure, a sense of broader
commitment—not in the form of a trite morality play, but in
events charged with moral meaning.
The
second impulse is similar. Fairytales avoid universals in
cognition just as they do in morality. Their strictly local
content springs from the specifically biological
self-centeredness and subjectivism of the immature
individual, i.e., concern with one’s own body, security
within one’s family or home or neighborhood, and the
challenge of growth. A kind of playful, diverting
subjectivity, a biologically mandated style, governs
the choice of what attributes to attach to entities, which
is why fairytales so often feature monsters possessing
unlikely combinations of fangs, wings, and fur. But the
mythic impulse is toward not what could be but what
must be, behind the appearances of everyday
reality—taking us from three bears in the woods to the
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Given its
driving impulses, myth’s content cannot be described as
subjective—that is, it is rarely or hardly local, empirical
or concrete, not a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and even though
it comes partly from dreams and imagination (just as
fairytales do) it is ultimately not personal. The content of
myth is instead an elliptical and symbolic presentation of
global, general, or, we might say, intrinsic truth.
Myth, says Langer, “whether literally believed or not, is
taken with religious seriousness, either as historic fact or
as a ‘mystic’ truth. Its typical theme is tragic, not
utopian; and its personages tend to fuse into stable
personalities of a supernatural character.”
This sets the hero of myth strikingly apart from the
fairytale hero. No matter how closely the Prince Charming of
Snow White’s story resembles the gentleman who awakens
Sleeping Beauty, the two characters do not become
identified… Fairy stories bear no relation to each other.
Myths, on the other hand, become more and more closely woven
into one fabric, they form cycles, their dramatis personae
tend to be intimately connected if not identified.
To put it
another way, myths tend to systematize and rationalize the
contents of our universe, and in doing so they go beyond
what is objectively true to create somewhat oppressive
metaphoric universals. Freedom and gratification no longer
govern the process. In a myth, an abstraction is frequently
embodied not in several instances that are separate, but as
if its whole causal power was in just one concrete. Wind is
a god, the ocean is a god, there is a god in the volcano.
Myths are underconcretized; they allow us to
experience the universe as if one element, its abstract
structure, governed everything else. Myth is a world of
Platonic Ideals that live and act as if they were real.
Fairytales and myths are complementary. Fairytales tend to
imagine how things might be different, to be empirical and
unintegrated, to create personally satisfying images of
concretes, to let the cut and thrust of real life surprise
and gratify in a way that abstractions and oppressive
generalities never do. Nothing ever happens quite the same
way to two different people in fairytales. Accident,
coincidence, improvisation and luck are in control, not
causal laws, and the hero of the tale must be their master.
In myth, it is living archetypes that must be met,
respected, and sometimes fought—not only abstractions
embodied as landslides and hurricanes and killer whales and
tigers, but space and time and love and hate, the reality of
numbers and the unchanging fixity of what is. The
human hero’s personal qualities blend and blur. He is not
the unsung younger child or the humble tailor, but the
embodiment of humanity and such virtue as humanity has, and
he usually loses or dies in the end. The Hawaiian myth-hero
may steal successfully from the volcano god, may toss
eggshells on the sea and so make islands, may do all kinds
of wondrous things, but sooner or later some Ideal or other
will finish him. The awesome mystery, cruelty, and splendor
of the cosmic Other is the point of the story, and not
the hero—much less his long nose or mysterious
parentage, or her cruel stepsisters.
People in
myths may be admirable, but they are not as a rule pleasant
company. They are certainly not the person next door, unless
you live next door to the brazen hinges of the gates of
Hell. Consider Sisyphus and Prometheus, the one forever
rolling a rock up a hill and forever seeing it roll back
down, the other everlastingly chained to a rock and having
his liver torn out by vultures—or consider the Flood legends
present in virtually every culture. After reading enough
such stories, it becomes clear that it is the rocks and seas
and deities, and not the persons, who set the terms and win
the day. Rocks, like truths, do not suffer. They do not have
personal weaknesses or desires or needs to frustrate, and in
the realm of myth, that is a distinct advantage. The gods
themselves, to the extent that they are humanized, tend to
suffer and face frustration in similar measure, rather than
freedom and gratification; for such is the titanic scope of
their world that no one—not even a god—fully measures up.
This
semi-dichotomy between myth and fairytale serves an
important purpose. It sets us in our place (literally) by
demonstrating that while the concretes of a life can be
rearranged to attain happiness, the governing laws of the
universe cannot. When pitted against a specific ogre or the
task of swimming a specific river, we may hope to succeed.
If we seek to abolish monsters or physical obstacles as
such, we know what fate awaits us.
But then
what of legend? According to many it represents a kind of
detour, dealing with wish-fulfillment truths, or stories
that begin with the wish-fulfillment context of the
fairytale, yet seek to account in an almost mythical manner
for some real event or fact of human existence. Langer
explains:
This widely represented fictional character is a hybrid of
subjective and objective thinking; he is derived from the
hero of folktale, representing an individual psyche, and
consequently retains many of that personage’s traits. But
the symbolic character of the other beings in the fairytale
has infected him, too, with a certain supernaturalism; he is
more than an individual wrestling with powers of society… He
is half god, half giant-killer… He is born of high
parentage, but kidnapped, or exposed and rescued, or
magically enslaved, in his infancy. Unlike the dream-subject
of fairytale, however, his deeds only begin with his escape
from thraldom; they go on to benefit mankind.
Instead
of dealing with the tragic fate of Everyman, or with
freewheeling fantasies of Any Man, legends deal with an
historically real, concrete individual, This Man, who
brings into being some general truth that endures to the
present. His most representative feats are those that
establish a human truth, like the discovery of fire or the
making of the first boat, founding a nation or building a
temple, or giving birth to some favored line of heroic
descendants.
In
conveying the status of legend in relation to these two
other forms, several irresistable metaphors come to mind. In
terms of the attention paid to it by the Platonist, Kantian,
and post-Kantian academics, legend is a neglected stepchild.
Even Langer (more generous than many writers) calls it a
“transitional form” on the way from the frivolity of
fairytales to the solemnity of myth, a sterile hybrid, and
regards it as falling between two cognitive stools. Yet in
terms of what the hero accomplishes, and its significance
for literature, legend represents the golden mean—like the
porridge or chair or bed that is “just right” for
Goldilocks. The tasks of legend are not meant to be neither
trivial nor impossible. The legendary hero succeeds and
survives in a challenge that is serious—and even more
important, the hero is an individual, something no
fairytale protagonist or mythic culture-icon can ever be. He
is not Adam or Jack, or the Wind or the Water, but Heracles
or Daedalus or Odysseus. He does not have the exceedingly
simple motives of the tailor who slew seven at one blow, nor
are his motives rendered irrelevant by inhuman powers, like
Oedipus moving inexorably to tragedy. He pursues his own
goal.
It
becomes clear, then, if fairytales may be said to belong to
childhood, and myths to represent the sad wisdom of age,
that legends are the only truly adult story form. And
if art is the means of envisaging our highest human
possibilities, then legend approaches most closely the
prototypical literary art, the root of great literature. So
we say: Hail the legend!—the first home of man and woman at
their best.
Dean Brooks is a freelance writer and was for
two years the Associate Editor of
Art Ideas.
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