EclecticLip

We came back from Toy Story 3 today — a great movie, with a dense, well-plotted storyline.  (It’s amazing what happens when you invest your money in the writers, instead of star actors!  A lesson HBO clearly learned, long ago…)  Haven’t seen the latest Shrek instalment, but that’s not material to the current web post.

One of the wonderful things about ancient mythology is how storytellers would (often) amalgamate past traditions into their current narratives.  The most obvious example in the West, is how the writers of the Christian Gospel of Matthew linked everything they recorded Jesus doing, to passages the Hebrew Bible — what Christians refer to as the “Old Testament”.  (Out of respect for the Jewish tradition, I’ll be referring to them as the Hebrew Bible.)  Virgil also meshed his Aeneid to Homer’s Iliad, by linking Aeneas to Troy.

In the East, the Ashtavakra Gita linked itself to the Ramayana by adopting as its eponymous protagonist, a relatively minor character from that epic.  Doubtless, there are innumerable other examples.

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Now, the Toy Story and Shrek franchises are really interesting in that they also build on pre-existing platforms; namely, classic toys and fairy tales respectively.  As such, they’re almost like modern “remixes” of earlier cultural traditions.  And like other “adaptive refreshings” of cultural traditions, they’re doing it in today’s dominant genre, the movie.

(images from Wikipedia)

Joseph Campbell identified the hero’s journey (or in his words, the monomyth) in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, about sixty years ago.  One would presume other students of mythology came to much the same conclusion at some point in the past few millenia, but didn’t have the good fortune to live in an era of cheap communications media where their ideas could get widely recognized.

In a sentence, the hero undergoes a three-fold adventure of departure - initiation - return.  The formula was closely followed by the Star Wars and Matrix franchises, and virtually every TV or movie writer I’ve spoken to has brought the hero’s journey up in conversation, unprompted.

Which got me wondering what the heroine’s journey is: most of the above stories are targeted to men.  There’s no Wikipedia entry for the topic, yet.

When I think of the literature-targeted-to-women that I’ve read, the books by Jane Austen jump foremost to mind.  But whereas heroes from Gilgamesh onwards have tried to grow into their destined roles…  Jane Austen’s heroines (at least from Pride and Prejudice and Emma) found husbands.

When speaking with a female writer friend recently, she pointed out that Harlequin Romances are pretty much the world’s best-selling fiction genre; they sell 130 million books per year.  Harlequin the company (a Canadian one, no less!) has six imprints for its female readers, and the Harlequin brand itself includes:

• Harlequin Romance (the flagship line)
• Harlequin American Romance (for small-town readers)
• …and Harlequin NASCAR.  Yes, that’s not a typo.

Whatever the archetypal heroine’s journey is, I’m sure it’s captured somewhere in the Harlequin literary formulae.  And if there are cultures around the world with strongly different heroine mythology-types… once suspects that Harlequin’s cultural juggernaut will supercede those other traditions within decades of entering that particular literary market.

In Greek mythology, Daedalus is the one who created the labyrinth on Crete which held the Minotaur.  For his work — no good deed goes unpunished, after all — he was imprisoned by the king, Minos.  So he made wings for himself and his son Icarus, and they escaped the island of Crete.

Big D’s other son Iapyx doesn’t seem to’ve made the trip, which I suppose makes the Icarus legend the mythological forebear of “Home Alone“.
In the legend, despite his father’s warnings, Icarus got carried away with his newfound ability…  and flew too close to the sun, melting the wax on his wings, causing the feathers to fall off, and leading him to fall to his death in the sea.

Whereas Daedalus is an archetypal craftsman / inventor, Icarus seems symbolic of youth — impetuous and unheedful of the warnings of wisdom.

It seems an eerily parallel to where we stand today on global warming. In the developed world, our standards of living have soared to levels inconceivable a century ago.  (Jules Verne possibly excepted.)  And just as Icarus’ new freedom drunkened him into ignoring Daedalus’ warnings… as societies, we’ve lent deaf ears to our scientists’ escalating alarm.