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The Golden Compass |
An Examination of the Role of Science Fiction in the Reclamation of Mythic Tradition - By Matthew Uselton - [muselton@vt.edu] Many Westerners are bombarded with iconic symbols of myth from youth causing the most familiar icons of sacrifice, heroism, etc, to lose their potency. The shock of hearing the story of Christ’s sacrifice is lost amongst the constant bombardment of images of the cross and the repetitious allegorical representations in the media. In other words, the Western public has become acclimated to many of the mythic symbols of the culture, and exists in a desensitized state. For O’Flaherty it is imperative that the Western people reconnect with their mythological roots. At risk is the fundamental shaping and reinforcement of cultural values and the internal sense of history and place. O’Flaherty believes that one of the best methods of recovering the icons and symbols of the Western mythos is to experience them in unfamiliar settings. This defamiliarization, in her opinion, occurs when we are engaged with myths from outside the Western culture. To illustrate this point, O’Flaherty turns to the story of the Rabbi of Cracow as told by Heinrich Zimmer. In the story, the Rabbi has the same dream three nights in a row. In this dream, the Rabbi is told to go to Prague and to look under a certain bridge to find his fortune. Upon arriving the Rabbi finds the bridge heavily guarded, yet he comes each day to see if there is a chance for him look for the treasure. Finally one of the guards approaches the Rabbi. The Rabbi tells the guard about his dream, to which the guard replies with laughter. The guard tells the Rabbi that he is foolish to follow his dreams and relates that he has had a dream about a treasure being in the house of a Rabbi in Cracow, but that he is not running off to chase some fool dream. The Rabbi thanks the guard and returns home, where he finds a treasure buried in a neglected corner of his house. O’Flaherty believes that this story illustrates the way in which our own cultural treasures often lie in a neglected corner, unexamined because of proximity and familiarity. “The visionary power of foreign myths may help us to achieve a literal re-vision of our own scriptures in other ways, as well, to revalue parts of them that have fallen by the wayside or have been too hastily jettisoned.” (O’Flaherty 136) Therefore it takes a journey outside of the familiar to discover or to be shown by another our own neglected corners filled with treasure. One of the difficulties of O’Flaherty’s method of exploring other religious myths is that the ‘otherness’ of the myths is so unfamiliar that the reader often gets lost. The confusion comes in several ways, including the casting off of familiar suppositions about tradition and adopting patterns from another culture in order to understand and interpret their mythos. In other words, the readers must step out of their own cultural skins and place themselves in a new and sometimes completely different cultural setting before the images and meanings of the texts can even be accessed, let alone interpreted. So before one can begin to experience Christian symbols and similarities in the Mahabarhata, one must first step outside of the western predilections brought to the text, assume or begin to learn a new set of cultural symbols, and then experience the text. The interesting thing is that after that is accomplished, the reader must reverse the process, eventually stepping back into his/her own culture. For just at the Rabbi had to first journey away from the familiar and then return to the familiar in order to discover the treasure, so must we be able to journey back and forth, a constant movement of re-experience, in order to fully illuminate the cultural gems lying grubby in our mental earth. Often there is a tremendous amount of research involved in order to step from one mythos into another. The step often involves accumulating vast amounts of knowledge of cultural practices, religious tendencies, and comparative dissimilarities before one can maneuver comfortably within another culture’s mythos. The outside research is necessary because many of the texts are written for a culture already familiar with the traits and suppositions in which it functions. This rather daunting task of scholarship often deters people from seeking the treasure, just as the guard refused to travel to Cracow on grounds of practicality. So what is to be done to help revive the awareness of Western mythology and re-energize the symbols of the culture? Casey Fredericks in his book, The Future of Eternity posits that the answer to the rejuvenation of the Western cultural mythos lies not in the otherness of unfamiliar religious texts and folk tales, but in the modern works of science fiction and fantasy. The goal of the book is “to account for the impact of mythology on modern science fiction and to study how the oldest form of the human imagination serves as an inspiration for the newest.” (3) Fredericks explores the notion of estrangement in science fiction in the second chapter of his book. This notion of estrangement is the same as O’Flaherty’s “otherness” in the sense that estrangement is the process by which a reader is taken out of the familiar cultural settings and placed into surroundings that range from slightly altered to the bizarre. The reader is mentally stripped of cultural tags and suppositions as he is immersed into the new surroundings. The concept of estrangement also involves the recognition of the subject, but it is still somewhat unfamiliar, and through a process of re-experiencing a recognized subject in unfamiliar terms the reader’s understanding is enriched. For Fredericks, the process of reading science fiction is different from the reading of religious texts in that science fiction demands that the reader lay aside, or suspend, disbelief in order to engage with the text. “For a time the familiar seems unfamiliar, but that estrangement allows us to experience it anew and in greater depth.” (48) This suspension of disbelief reduces the tendency of the reader to make evaluative judgments about a text based upon cultural comparisons, therefore aiding the reader in shedding his cultural skin. Fredericks writes, “[with myth] we open up intellectually to the new possibilities, even new impossibilities, and for a time abandon our awareness of normal human limitations” (48) Another aspect of science fiction that is important to Fredericks is the manner in which it is created. Because sci-fi is often a creation process, involving place, people, traditions, etc, the author often includes explanations of origins and culture in the work. In other words, all the cultural research that might be required in understanding texts and practices is included in the text itself. This self-contained approach to experiencing otherness is ideal for a Western culture that is tending toward a pre-packaged mentality. The writer creates the initial text with some conscious and unconscious elements of myth integrated into the narrative. The writer is not necessarily bound by the myth, in so far as he still has the right to adapt and modify the narrative in any way he sees fit. When the text is re-created in the mind of the reader, the ideas, thoughts, and structures of myth trigger a recognition response. This response causes the reader to create anticipations and expectations about the text, as well as being drawn further into the world of the text. As the reader is coaxed further into the text, he is actively participating in a prefiguration ritual, i.e. creating and drawing conclusions based upon elements presented and the knowledge brought to the text by the reader. Prefiguration is a concept that deals with the idea that the outcome is predicted by the clues given in writings beforehand. This idea originated in religious studies, where they look to clues given in the Old Testament to the arrival of Christ. In the books of prophecy, there are veiled indicators of the arrival of Christ, as well as his life and eventual death. Prefigurative elements are important because they generate responses within readers that lead them towards an interaction with the text that goes beyond a simple reading. Prefigurative moments also generate a sense of gaps in the story that force the reader to individually draw conclusions and attempt to fill in those gaps with pre-existing knowledge. Wolfgang Iser in his essay “A Phenomenological Approach to Reading” thoroughly explores the methods by which a reader interacts with the text. These gaps have a different effect on the process of anticipation and retrospection, and thus on the “gestalt” of the virtual dimension, for they may be filled in different ways. For this reason, one text is potentially capable of several different realizations, and no reading can ever exhaust the full potential, of each individual reader will fill in the gaps on his own way, thereby excluding the various other possibilities; as he reads, he will make his own decision as to how the gap is to be filled. ...With “traditional” texts this process was more or less unconscious, but modern texts frequently exploit it quite deliberately. They are often so fragmentary that one’s attention is almost exclusively occupied with the search for connections between the fragments; the object of this is not to complicate the “spectrum” of connections, so much as to make us aware of the nature of our own capacity for providing links. In such cases, the text refers back directly to our own preconceptions-which are revealed by the act of interpretation that is a basic element of the reading process. (959)
Fredericks notes that most authors of sci-fi are notorious lovers of myth and will often incorporate mythic structures into their narratives. First, myth is a nice structural device because of all the prefigurative responses generated by the reader’s encountering them in a text. Myth is also readily available and since the iconic principles are already evidenced in society and education in general, there is a pretty good chance that the reader will be able to access some of the symbolic representations in the narrative. Because “the mind can adapt to a new set of ‘conditions’ no matter how implausible and function within the setting” the reader assimilates the mythic structures, not as individual components, but as a contiguous portion of the narrative. Thus the myth is experienced, not as a strange anomaly in the narrative, but as part of the story. Subsequently, it is through this incorporation and assimilation that the myths imbedded in the narrative often surprise the reader when, waiting like the guard in Prague, they point the reader back to his own dusty corner to re-discover a hidden treasure. Therefore, the reader is able to carry the metaphorical baggage of the mythical meaning, when encountered in its new form, back into the world at large and makes those meaningful cultural connections. "It ran easily: the heaving surface of the field did not seem to trouble it. Then his own land reeled downwards and backwards and a great wall of water pushed its way up between the two countries...The creature was still running. The width of water between the two islands was about thirty feet, and the creature was less than a hundred yards away from his. He knew now that it was not merely man-like, but a man-a green man on an orange field, green like the beautifully coloured green beetle in an English garden..."(Lewis 53)
But Ransom is in for another surprise, as it turns out not to be a green man, but a green woman that he has seen running on the other island. Ransom makes contact with the strange Lady and comes to understand that she is seeking her husband. Through conversation, Ransom learns that she is the first Lady and her husband is the first Man, and they have been separated.
"Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would. I’d spend all my life without ever going to China, but it wouldn’t matter, because there was all the rest of the world to visit. The talk then turns to the notions of good and evil.
“When I first saw you, in your Oxford,” Lyra said, “You said one of the reasons you became a scientist was that you wouldn’t have to think about good and evil.” Lyra and Will, after listening to Mary’s story the night before, travel off into the woods for a picnic.
Will and Lyra followed the stream into the wood, walking carefully, saying little, until they were in the very center. Pullman has presented a moment from the Eden myth, the verdant surroundings, the use of the red fruit, the offering of that fruit to Will by Lyra. Each of these details resonates with the original myth, recalling in the mind of the reader the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. This scenario has another parallel as well, the offering of marzipan to Mary Malone on the night she left the church. That story, the one of Mary rediscovering love, is the one that the children are remembering, not the story of Adam and Eve.
She could see from his eyes that he knew at once what she meant, and that he was too joyful to speak. Her fingers were still at his lips, and he felt them tremble, and he put his own hand up to hold hers there, and then neither of them could look; they were confused; they were brimming with happiness. This is the long awaited moment of Lyra repeating Eve’s choice, the tempter has played her part, the fruit has been exchanged, and now is time for the transgression. However, Pullman does not have the children discovering shame or their nakedness or even that there is good and evil in the world, rather Will and Lyra discover love.
“...I love you, Will, I love you-“
The discovery of love by Will and Lyra seems somewhat anti-climactic, particularly when viewed in light of those who would kill Lyra to prevent her from repeating the transgression of Eve. Yet Lyra is guilty of nothing more than discovering her first love and experiencing that love. Pullman has taken the negative expectations of other characters and turned the actuality of the act into something that is not only viewed as natural, but also good. Lyra is not participating in some vile rebirth of evil into the world. She is falling in love.
Works Cited
Fredericks, Casey. The Future of Eternity: Mythologies of Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Lewis, Clive Staples. Perelandra. New York. First Scribner Paperback Fiction. 1996.
O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. Other People’s Myths: The Cave of Echoes. Chicago. The
Pullman, Philip. The Amber Spyglass. (His Dark Materials; Book 3) New York. Alfred A.
Richter, David. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Second | An Examination of the Role of Science Fiction in the Reclamation of Mythic Tradition by Matthew Uselton [muselton@vt.edu] Posted with the author's permission. Last modified on June 14th, 2002. | |||||
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