Repossessing Mythology

  Mytho-Literature

Mythology lives on as the contemporary literary culture reworks, repackages and gives birth to the old in avant garde avatars.  It has become a specialized genre of writing in itself the world over. ‘Myth was there at the beginning of literature, and it is at the end of literature too.’ Myths are tales of ethereal beauty and the grotesque. They are custodians of our heritage and way of life. They house our thoughts, beliefs, social structures, secrets of creation, political hierarchies, and remote control our living in contemporary times.  Myths are iconic, legendary and have been buttressed and sanctified over centuries. Better stories have never been told. If a work of art makes a mark today, it is nothing but a repackaged myth set to modern conventions. Picasso when led to view the Paleolithic cave paintings felt that mankind has created nothing new.  Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is still an astounding piece of art because of its raw appeal, stark shapes, and basic form. No one has ever created stronger narratives or stronger characters than those the myths present to us.  Therefore, James Joyce set out to write the masterpiece Ulysses, (the Roman translation of Odysseus is Ulysses) a pastiche of the Odyssey . So, since it is a cliché that no new tales can ever really be told, authors return to the old ones, and see what a contemporary sensibility, psychology and language might make of them?  The Great Indian Novel by Shahi Tharoor is an example per se.

The reconstruction is being done from varied angles. Writers like Amish Tripathi and Krishna Udayasankar have used legends to probe and rediscover our assumptions. They seek history in mythology, by fleshing out Gods in human forms and reinterpret their stories and circumstance to appeal to our sensibilities of human trial and error. Defamilairization is a tool used by writers to give us an overworked myth from the perspective of unknown and unconventional angles. A fine example would be the big and tiny people in Gulliver’s Travels or Tom Thumb. The practice revokes the tale breaking it of all held conventions and we see it in a new light. Others have questioned and rebelled against established iconic legends like the question of whether the sacrifice of Sita was greater than Urmilla (Lakshman’s wife) in the epic  Ramayana. Similarly, Margaret Atwood in The Penelopiad reworks the Odyssey and gives space and voice to Penelope and the hanged handmaidens to tell their story and circumstances which tradition and history barred them from doing.  Panchali in Govinda by Udaysankar is married to the eldest Pandava brother only.  She questions her identity and role, and her quest is justice and individuation of women. Colm Tóibín, shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker prize, is a plaintive monologue by Mother Mary who recounts certain episodes in the life of her son, shor n  of the celestial powers that myth has empowered her with through the centuries. She pines for a comfortable home with her husband and son and wishes to be delivered of the cross that her child is ‘Son of God’ , she is a pained  mother  reliving the stings and arrows of atrocious misfortune that flesh is heir to. Myths are demythologized to unearth the history of mankind and on the other hand, they are also big literary forms to house the contemporary and let us see the present in a vivid defamiliarizing light.

 

The love affair of humanity with mythology shall continue and souls like Gandhi and Mother Teresa shall be sanctified as Gods after a few centuries. Humans will then demythologize them and rework their stories to arrive at the truth that existed then(now).

The Goa Art/Lit fest opened this week , and many a session  during the festival is based on mythology in everyday life with writers like Krishna Udayasankar and Pratibha Ray – Lets meet  there  and carry on the discussion……