NARRATIVE AND MYTHOLOGY

The teaching of history is where the importance of narrative arises. We can call this narrative, big “M” Mythology, as its importance to a culture, is primarily tied up in how a people sees itself and the world around it. Big “M” Mythology is differentiated from small “m” mythology, by the way that a story is told and what a audience takes away from the story. You can take local folklore from out of its cultural context and tell it as a story and it will remain merely a story to most. If however you take a story in your local context, it can become a symbol of the values of a culture. If and American compares one of the Grimm brother’s Germanic fairy tales or Japanese creation myths for the average listener the take-aways may be about the same unless you understand more deeply the cultural dialog in which they take place. On the other hand the myth of George Washington and the Cherry Tree, John Henry, and Paul Bunyan exist in a larger mythos of American literature which is more viscerally understood. This mythology tells us about what we value. As such it is the wider collection and common themes of these stories that form big “M” Mythologies. If to be clear this does not always mean that the elements of a historical Mythos are false, but the ways that they are used and emphasized demonstrate and reinforce the perspective of an author or a culture. In American culture themes of honesty, hard work and roguish independence are pervasive. There is also much dialogue about fighting back against a mechanized industrial reality, as demonstrated by the deaths of John Henry’s and Paul Bunyan’s contests with mechanized industry. We understand these stories because we can place them in context of a wider historical framework such as the revolutionary war or westward expansion, or the industrial revolution. These stories made in and for these times take on new life and become shorthand for the American experience during moments of history and color our perception of the times that we from which we are temporally separated.

The issue that we encounter is that this can also happen in how history is presented. A narrative about the story of history of a people is made to support existing mores. There is a common conundrum with older forms of histories that the ruler of a contemporary regime would sponsor a history of the land and the previous ruler or dynasty would be smeared to make the contemporary system reflecting the spirit of the age was always going to be a better system than those that strayed from “the way things ought to be”. The Byzantine Iconoclasm is a prime example that I hope to explore in a future post. The histories and writings of people deemed to be “icon-breakers” were destroyed, and the Iconophiles whose ideology won out had the last say in the general perception of the historical period. This makes objective historical criticism so important as it can often be the case that the truth of a matter that we have been raised to believe can often be different than we expect it to be.

How we react to this change of perspective is important. For example, if we learn that chivalry was never really a thing in the way that it was invoked in the 19 century we can scoff at the foolishness of the narrative’s falsehood, or we can contemplate what function the evolution of the idea played, where it fails and where it succeeds, it may be possible to use this narrative to learn something important by positive or negative example. Being kind, honorable, and strong are good virtues, but women are not helpless damsels in distress and do not want to have their agency removed. The idea is well meaning but needs an updated perspective. It should be noted that a synthesis like this is not always possible. The road to Hell is indeed often paved with good intentions, and probably propaganda, other times it is arrived at deliberately. There is a line that we all must draw when we make moral judgments on the character of a person place or time. Some of these will be trivial, and others will be more complicated.