In a myth of the Akimel O'odham (Pima) of the American southwest, the god Buzzard creates a whole miniature world, with a sun, moon and stars, just like our world. Each myth is like this miniature cosmos of Buzzard's, containing a whole world of meanings in infinite recession.
Because myths are a fusion of the creative, spiritual and social impulses of mankind they are very potent, and even in our shallow culture of celebrity and consumption they remain a source of inspiration for many artists. Philip Larkin was memorably dismissive of this artistic reliance on what he called øthe myth-kittyÓ; he thought it a symptom of imaginative bankruptcy. Observed reality should be enough. Yet one only needs to look at the work of his contemporary Ted Hughes to see how that world of observed reality may be fractured, transformed and made new by myth. Without his profound internalisation of myth ¨ from cultures as diverse as the San Bushmen and the Netsilik Eskimos ¨ Hughes's poetry would be robbed of its propulsive force.
As Michael Ayrton wrote in The Midas Consequence, øWe live by myth and inhabit it and it inhabits us. What is strange is how we remake it.Ó
In partnership with 33 publishing houses across the world, Canongate have commissioned new myth-based fictions from major authors to explore this truth, in a series entitled The Myths. The first two titles are The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood and The Weight by Jeanette Winterson, accompanied by Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth, which stands as an introduction to the whole ambitious concept. Future authors will include Chinua Achebe, Donna Tartt, A. S. Byatt and Natsuo Kirino.
Both Atwood and Winterson rise to the challenge. In The Penelopiad, Atwood re-imagines the homecoming of Odysseus through the memories of Penelope, who speaks to us from beyond the grave. A counterpointing chorus of Penelope's maids, hanged for sleeping with the suitors, gives the book an interesting structure and emotional depth, but it is the sections in Penelope's voice that are the most readable and vivid. This is not a work of art on the scale of Kazantzakis's epic sequel to The Odyssey, one of the most ambitious and powerful twentieth-century attempts to define the nature of godhead, but it is a telling rebuke to that work's insistent masculinity.
As soon as Atwood's Penelope begins to speak, Samuel Butler's eccentric theory that The Odyssey was in fact written by a woman is blown out of the water. The women's voices in The Odyssey are muted, but here they speak out in way which enlarges our understanding of the original work.
Jeanette Winterson's The Weight explores the story of Atlas in a more personal way. This is a book that is intelligent, passionate, involved. Winterson uses myth as Alan Garner does, as a refracting glass for her own concerns. For Winterson, myth is a playground of the self, and she allows herself a great deal of creative freedom in this book. The narrative tone, for instance, veers wildly about, depending on what immediate effect she is seeking. A descriptive of the mating of the earth and the sea is hauntingly sensuous; passages of dialogue between Atlas and Heracles are tongue-in-cheek low comedy; the final scenes in which Atlas finds a reason to set down his burden are achingly tender.
If the forthcoming volumes in the series keep up this standard, it will be a major publishing achievement. It is a shame, then, that the introductory essay by Karen Armstrong is so vague and unfocussed. Strongly influenced by the great historian of religions Mircea Eliade, and by Joseph Campbell's Jungian histories of myth such as the four-volume The Masks of God, Armstrong's brisk account of the nature and development of world mythology seems rather old-fashioned and second-hand. Her idea of myth is all about the search for universal archetypes, regardless of cultural context. This is not as useful an introduction to the subject as K. K. Ruthven's Myth in the old Critical Idiom series, and anyone seeking a more balanced overview would be well advised to locate a copy of Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth, edited by Alan Dundes.
This weakness in the introductory volume is matched by a kind of cultural timidity in the titles announced so far. The next two volumes are Lion's Honey: The Myth of Samson by David Grossman and The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur by Victor Pelevin. It would be encouraging to hope that future additions to the series might step out of the comfort zone of the classical and Biblical myths into the war zone between myth and history.
Neil Gaiman has explored what happened to the Viking gods left adrift in North America after the Vinland settlements were abandoned in his witty American Gods. A contributor to The Myths might find a similarly rich vein in, for instance, the stories of the West African gods who hitched a ride to the New World in the stinking holds of the slave ships. Or now that the Orinoco delta is being plundered for oil, threatening the eco-niche in which the Warao of Venezuela have developed their unique mythology, is it not time for someone to give a voice to Dauarani, the mother of the forest, or to Hahuba, the Snake of Being, who lies curled around the thin flat disc of the Warao's world, her breath the rhythm of the tides?
Examples like this of myths that stand at such a sharp angle to our western reality that if you reach out to grasp them you stand a real chance of cutting yourself could be multiplied many times. If Canongate can find the mythtellers to do them justice, then The Myths will be not just a publishing success but a creative triumph. All they need to do is bear in mind the words of Maya Deren in Divine Horsemen (later reissued as The Voodoo Gods); øMyth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter.Ó
Or as Jeanette Winterson puts it in The Weight, øThese are the stories we tell ourselves to make ourselves come true.Ó
Karen Armstrong
A Short History of Myth
Canongate
ISBN: 184195644 9.
Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
Canongate
ISBN: 1841956457
Jeanette Winterson
The Weight
Canongate
ISBN: 1841956716
(all hardbacks at £12 each)
Neil Philip is the author of Mythology of the World (Kingfisher 2004), the Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness Guide to Mythology (2000) and many other works on myths, legends and fairy tales.