Choose any one of the required readings this module and discuss the story in terms of your understanding of Leslie...

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The Many Lives of Myth Myth began in orality and found a new medium in secondary orality, but between those two lives, myth lived and continues to live in literature. Here the advantages of writing come into play as myths are recorded, enhanced, and reimagined in the written word. In fact, it is difficult to explore any literary tradition today without reference to its mythological roots, and a cursory look at the table of contents of any literary anthology will reveal a trove of mythological references and allusions. Myth and Western Literature Western culture’s most influential literary works are mythologies, or collections of myths, that were dominant narratives in oral cultures and continued to influence literate and literary culture to the present. Homer’s epics the Iliad and the Odyssey are foundational documents for the Western literary tradition, and in fact there is a sense that nothing new happens after them for centuries. Literary criticism and interpretation were based on direct comparisons to Homer’s works until Shakespeare, and the touchstone for the value of new writing was the two epics. Since the myths were the repositories of knowledge for the oral cultures, writing them down was of primary importance, and passing them down through writing became a cultural duty. Cut loose from the mnemonic demands of time and storytelling, however, writing afforded the opportunity for reflection, revision, and reimagining of those foundational works. Virgil would do it with his Aeneid in 20 BCE, and Joyce would do it with his Ulysses in 1922 CE. With time and a visible written work in front of them, authors could now introduce style as a part of the telling, and literary tropes, elements, and conventions were added to the oral forms and eventually supplanted many of them. The move from myth to literature involves, therefore, the development of stylistics and what we might today call craft, which in turn shifts the focus from mythological functions to aesthetic functions. To be sure, both were and are at work, but the difference between myth and literature is subtle in this way. For example, we can revisit our first module in which we discussed how mythology has become hidden in contemporary Western culture, receding into the background behind the more obvious functions of cultural productions.

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Myth and Non-Western Literature The unwieldy phrase “non-Western literature” is employed here to recognize literature that has a more recent and direct connection to oral cultures or to cultures of the East. One of the common elements of these literatures is that they were not affected by Plato’s shift from muthos to logos and thus had more latitude to employ both their mythologies and literatures without the charges of fable and falsehood being levied against them. Accordingly, there is a vibrant and robust mythological presence in Native American literature, Asian literature, African literature, and other non-Western cultures. For example, Maxine Hong Kingston deftly weaves Chinese mythology into contemporary Chinese-American existence in her profound novel The Woman Warrior. Equally compelling and integrated is Chinua Achebe’s now classic novel of African mythology, Things Fall Apart. One feature common to these literatures is that there is almost always an engagement with Western mythology in the form of Christianity, capitalism, colonialism, or all three. Kingston’s characters are compelled to navigate the borderlands between Chinese mythologies and cultural values and the American counterparts. Achebe’s protagonist Okonkwo depicts the often tragic consequences of this delicate and dangerous cultural negotiation. Leslie Marmon Silko Perhaps no contemporary author is so candid about or so successful at integrating mythology into her writing than Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Born in 1948 in Laguna Pueblo just west of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Silko originally began law school but dropped out to become a writer because she thought that was the better way to achieve justice in the world. Drawing upon her childhood memories and stories from her family and culture, Silko writes mythology on the page, integrating it with contemporary life on and off the pueblo. She sees her work as continuing the oral tradition in print by using white space, line breaks, and other visual elements to mark the pauses, dramatic and otherwise, in ritual and casual storytelling. Silko is, in the fullest sense of the word, an animator and conveyor of myth on the page and in the present. Storyteller Published in 1981, Silko’s Storyteller is a collection of short stories, poems, tales, and photographs that is sometimes categorized as autobiography, and for good reason. It begins with her memory of a tall Hopi basket filled with her father’s photographs, and these evoke a narration that connects her ancestors, both recent and remote, to time and land. Throughout the book, we are privy to both Laguna gossip and mythology in their native forms and in Silko’s creative work. Despite Silko’s name as the author, Storyteller also illustrates that the

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nature of storytelling is communal rather than individual, and as such she has no story she calls her own. Instead, she sees all her work as the product of land, time, and myth, of stepping into a mythological identity. In a 1976 interview, she explains:

In a sense you are told who you are, or who know who you are by the stories that are told about you. I see now that the ideas and dreams and fears and wonderful and terrible things that I expected might happen around the river were just part of an identity that the stories had made for it. By going to the river, I was stepping into that identity. (Evers 30)

Even so, Silko considers herself an inadequate vehicle for oral storytelling because she does not have the nimbleness in that setting to play one story off another. That is to say, she is a writer, someone who prefers to use the technological advantages of writing—especially the time it affords—to draw out connections and relationships. In another interview, Silko notes:

When I say “storytelling,” I don’t just mean sitting down and telling a once-upon-a-time kind of story. I mean a whole way of seeing yourself, the people around you, your life, the place of life in the bigger context, not just in terms of nature and location, but in terms of what has gone on before, what’s happened to other people. (Barnes 49–50)

Storyteller is Silko’s unique and multi-genre expression of contemporary literature connecting to ancient mythology and engaging all of its functions in the present (Salyer 1–3). Yellow Woman “Yellow Woman” and the related stories in Storyteller are Silko’s retelling of the ancient and provocative Pueblo legend of Kochininako. Franz Boas, the anthropologist who with his protégée Elsie Clews Parsons provides much of the ethnographic data on the Pueblos, sees some common elements among these stories. They almost always concern an abduction or seduction of a woman who happens to be at the river drawing water. The woman usually offers a reason she cannot go with the man, and that reason usually has to do with domestic duties. The man, by means of threats or other persuasion, compels the woman to accompany him to his mountain home. As in many journey myths, the woman who is entering this new world is given tasks to perform to save her life. After winning her place there, she has a sexual encounter with the man and in some cases becomes pregnant with the heroic twins of Pueblo mythology. The man can take many forms, including Sun Man, Whirlwind Man, Cliff Dweller, or Buffalo Man (Boas 218–262).

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For Silko, these stories are mythological in the deepest sense, affecting her sense of identity and the contours and possibilities of its nature. Far from the museum-like impression of Boas’s ethnographic record, these stories are alive for Silko. They are real.

The river [the Rio Puerco in Laguna] was a place to meet boyfriends and lovers and so forth. I used to wander around down there and try to imagine walking around the bend and just happening to stumble upon some beautiful man. Later on I realized that these kinds of things that I was doing when I was fifteen are exactly the kinds of things out of which stories like the Yellow Woman story [originate]. I finally put the two together: the adolescent longings and the old stories, that plus the stories around Laguna at the time about people who did, in fact, just in recent times use the river as a meeting place. (Evers 29)

The moment when Silko “finally put the two together”—the adolescent longings and the old stories—is the moment of mythology, a living and profound connection between the past and present, an individual and a culture, and the everyday and the sacred. To live in this moment of in-between is to be disoriented by experience then reoriented by myth. In fact, these are the very issues the Yellow Woman character in the short story must confront. Is she in fact Yellow Woman, or just another married woman? Is she living out the stories of her ancestors, or has she just been abducted or seduced? Is this a sacred experience, or a profane one? The story demonstrates, among other things, that being held by a living mythology is a religious experience in the etymological sense: an encounter that produces awe or fear, disorientation, and ultimately reconnection to mythic functions that provide identity and orientation (Salyer 76–78).

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Works Cited

Barnes, Kim. “A Leslie Marmon Silko Interview.” Women Writers: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Melody Graulich.

New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Print. Boas, Franz. Keresan Texts. New York: AMS Press, 1974. Print. Evers, Larry, and Denny Carr. “A Conversation With Leslie Marmon Silko.” Sun Tracks: An American Indian

Literary Magazine 3.30 (1976): 28–33. Print. Salyer, Gregory. Leslie Marmon Silko. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997. Print. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Storyteller. New York: Arcarde Pub, 1981. Print.