Some Musings on Myth in Fiction
On a recent episode of the 538 political podcast, a guest expert on conspiracy theories posited that although nobody wants to admit they believe in a conspiracy theory, most people have at least one that they consider plausible. That got me thinking about the role of myth in SFF, and what different interpretations characters might bring to those myths.
I'm gonna talk elliptically here about a novel, since my review is less than glowing—and I only really review books I unambiguously enjoyed.
I just finished slim, hard-hitting action fantasy book, the first in a trilogy. I enjoyed a lot of it, and I've already purchased the second book in the series, but I'm not going to talk too much about that. The book follows a teenage girl in a dark medieval fantasy world, as her village comes under the scrutiny of a militant religious order intent on stamping out witchcraft.
The reason? It's not that magic is considered categorically sinful in this world, but simply that it's immediately dangerous. The world's myths are all about saints who stopped the dangerous magic of the past, and the current order is intent on preventing similar problems—even if it means occasionally razing a whole village.
Some of this (a religious order suppressing the use of magic) is likely familiar to readers of fantasy. And I admit, it can be one of the more worn tropes. But this same novel also traffics in one of my favorite tropes, one that (for me) almost never grows old, and is fundamental to a lot of the greatest fantasy stories: the indeterminacy of myth.
Through much of this book, a major conflict for our heroine is whether or not she really believes in the order's cosmological view. If indeed using magic can be as dangerous as they say, than at least some of the order's brutality is justified. If not, then the order is simply exploiting people's fears to commit the occasional genocide and prevent people from utilizing a potential tool of resistance. As the novel goes on, our heroine is not sure exactly what she believes.
This is actually reflective of how people interacted with myth for a lot of human history—viewing them more as theories that might be open to multiple beliefs than historical fact. It might be tempting to believe that the ancients believed every surviving myth as literal truth, but that simply wasn't always the case. In Raza Aslan's book on the life of Jesus Christ, Zealot, he describes how many of the popular myths in the Middle East were not meant to convey literal truth—and their audience would have known this. This left the stories open to interpretation and lively debate.
When the veracity or importance of a myth is in dispute in a work of fantasy, of course, the audience cannot know whose side to take, at least at first—and that's half the fun. And when some hint of an answer falls into the audience's lap, it takes on huge importance for the world. If it can be done subtly, it makes the world feel fuller, more real; our own world is full of stories that we tell each other, and when a secondary world is similarly crowded with stories, and those stories are by no means settled, it builds that world's verisimilitude. Ask anybody who killed JFK and you won't necessarily learn much about the real events of his assassination, but you'll learn a lot about the person you're talking to.
In Watership Down, for example, stories about such figures as El-ahrairah and the Black Rabbit of Inlé tell us a lot about the world—and the storytellerss values. The mythic rabbits are clever tricksters because the heroes telling those tales need to be clever tricksters themselves, to survive.
In Heather Alexandria's essay on the videogame The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, she writes that what makes the game a "masterpiece" is the way it allows the player character to actually answer some of the questions about the game's central myth (namely the matter of whether or not they are the literal reincarnation of the legendary hero, Lord Nerevar, or...any number of other things. It's complicated. You should play Morrowind.) She writes, "In a single moment, the game’s narrative becomes infinitely more complex. The writing leverages intense metaphysical concepts that cast further doubt about the story..."
Good fiction, too, can give the reader a chance to decide parts of the story—not in a "choose you own adventure way," but perhaps in terms of theme, and what the story is "really" about. Some kind of indeterminacy is crucial for a complex story, even if that indeterminacy is as simple as the question of whether or not our protagonist will meet their goals. In-world myths give the fantasy genre another tool in the toolkit when it comes to creating this kind of delightful uncertainty.
So I have to admit my surprise when the novel I was reading clears up a lot of the questions about magic in its world in this, the first book of a trilogy. That's not a knock on the book; it was genuinely surprising, and shocking, and I was turning pages pretty quickly by the time I got to the end.
But it did leave me thinking not just about the questions I want my own readers to explore, but how and when they should be answered, if at all. I couldn't help but wonder if, in some ways, the most fantastical part of the book was simply the way its heroine quickly arrives at concrete answers about the cosmos—something few of us ever do, at least in this life.
