The absurdity of mythology

and how it actually makes good sense

My students often comment that Greek Mythology is weird.

Gods and goddesses living on a mountain, marrying their brothers and sisters, flying around as fast as thought, impersonating humans for various reasons both moral and immoral, and so on.

How did anyone ever believe this stuff? they demand, banging their fists on their desks.

Back in the old days (read: 2012), I used to trot out the mythological phenomenon of the flying aircraft carrier (the “helicarrier”) from the Avengers movies with its four helicopter-like rotors and twenty jet engines. According to actual engineers, such a heavy craft would never be able to be lifted because the engines necessary for doing so would make the thing weigh so much you need more engines to lift the engines. 

And so on. 

Yet my students really enjoyed that Avengers movie—not to mention Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man being able to stop the rotors on the flying aircraft engine just by putting his weight behind it.

“Who believes this stuff?” I’d ask my students.

And yet they sat through the whole movie as if it was real life.

Of course, we all know the difference between fact and fantasy, and the Avengers isn’t a religious text, like a lot of Greek mythology.

And yet, there is a clear kinship between the two types of stories. It’s not just that the Avengers is a comic book, and that isn’t serious literature.

The Avengers is American mythology—a popular story told over and over again that reinforces its culture’s most cherished values and beliefs.

After all, it’s us Americans who believe that we can do anything, given the proper technology.

But that’s a comic book, right? It should be mythological and absurd. It’s not, shall we say, literary.

Hold that thought.

I recently was reminded of one of the classic books of the twentieth century that was also made into a movie: Stuart Little by E.B. White, first published in 1945.

Image from Wikipedia

Stuart Little is billed as a children’s book, but the author, who was part of the New York literary scene, is not your typical children’s author, and Stuart Little is not your typical children’s book (here’s a fascinating article about it by the very wonderful Professor Jill Lepore).

It is, like the Avengers, despite being quite literary, also American mythology, partly because it qualifies as a story that has been told over and over again—four million copies were printed throughout its publishing life—and it has, as I said before, been made into a movie (with two sequels, no less!).

The shared values part I will get to in good time. 

But boy, does it have a lot of stuff in it that no one could ever believe.

First of all, and this has been noticed before, the book claims that Stuart came to the Little family naturally:

When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse. The truth of the matter was, the baby looked very much like a mouse
in every way.

Huh.

Now, as he grows, Stuart gets into a number of scrapes and has a number of charming adventures, and it is presumably natural that he, a mouse, have a love interest: a bird.

The bird's name is Margalo, and she is one of those talking birds you see quite often in Manhattan. Margalo is responsible for a number of charming acts, including saving Stuart's life, but she flies the coop (the Littles' Manhattan apartment) when a pigeon writes her a note warning her that a cat is plotting to eat her.

This motivates the action of the book, which is Stuart's quest for Margalo. He obtains his transportation from his friend Dr. Carey, a dentist, who claims that Stuart will be less noticeable as an anthropomorphic animal driving a toy sports car when he activates the car's invisibility function.

Yes, indeed.

When Stuart tests out that function, hilarity ensues, but the author never explains whether Stuart himself will be invisible when he drives the car, or whether he will seem to others to be sitting in thin air being self-propelled, which would definitely be noticeable.

It's actually more astonishing that anyone in this book would think that anything strange would, in Stuart's words, "attract too much attention.”

I'm going to pass over the charming scene where Stuart takes over a one-room schoolhouse for a day, although I find it highly unusual any school district would allow such an unqualified substitute to teach children.

Then again…

But I do have to mention the two-inch tall Harriet Ames, a tiny human equally as tiny as Stuart. How does a local storekeeper explain her presence in the world?

"...All of her clothes are specially tailored for her... Yes, Harriet's quite a girl. Her people, the Ameses, are rather prominent in this town."

Harriet almost but not quite makes Stuart forget about Margalo. Clearly, she is a more suitable partner for a mouse than a bird, but their love isn't to be, mainly because Stuart can't get over the fact that his miniature canoe, in which he was going to take Harriet for a ride, has been smashed, presumably by malicious boys, though this is never confirmed.

Finally, and most incredibly for the story, Stuart Little peters out with this sentence:

But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.

In other words, Stuart never finds Margalo. Not even close. He just drives off into the sunset with the quest still unfinished.

So the question is, how did this absurd story find its way into the hearts of presumably rational Americans who would never believe in the absurdity that goes on in Greek Mythology?

Part of it has to do with whimsey and humor. We all like a funny story, and the chapter about Stuart and the toy boat on the lake in Central Park is a real gem.

But more of it concerns the universe that the book creates, one that corresponds with what we Americans believe is really true at a heart level.

The shared values part.

The most important truth is the idea that it doesn’t matter who or what you are, how different you are from everyone else, who you love, what you want to do.

In America, if you can dream it, you can do it.

Let’s say you are a mouse who has been born into a human family. Well, that’s something that we Americans can get behind. We are open-minded. There are all different types of family.

And let’s say that you are a mouse who loves a bird. That, again, is not really a problem. Love is love.

Furthermore, let’s say that you, as a two-inch tall mouse, encounter a two-inch tall girl and you want to go out with her. Well, her family is “rather prominent,” and all her clothes are tailored specially for her, so she’s pretty high class.

But that’s not an issue. We’re all equal here in the United States.

I’m being a bit disingenuous, of course. In 1945, when the book came out, there was little sense that being different was acceptable, whether it was your skin color or your sexuality or your height, weight, abilities or any number of things.

E.B. White, clever man that he was, slipped that concept into our heads by skillfully using animals and people that were no threat to us. You’re not going to object to a mouse as part of a white, middle-class Manhattan family. It’s all too incredible to worry about.

But that crucial concept remains: yes, we as Americans accept all types of people. We want to respect each other’s rights. In our heart of hearts, you can be what you want to be as long as you are doing what all Americans do: looking for love, trying to make your way in life on the open road, driving an invisible sports car (there’s that technology thing again) in the “right direction.”

I hope I have gotten my point across. I have always bristled at the idea that mythology is something that “primitive” cultures believed because they had no science, and we, enlightened creatures as we are, no longer have need of such absurdities.

I am reading a big doorstop of a book right now, The Invention of Yesterday, by Professor Tamim Amsary. Early in this book (I haven’t gotten very far along yet—it really is a doorstop) Professor Amsary argues that human civilization was made possible by a “trialectic” of factors that are braided together: environment, tools, and language.

Language, he observes, is a way for us to create a shared universe that doesn’t exist, but that is nonetheless highly useful. 

Language gave humans the power to work towards some single goal even when separated in space and time. Knit together by language, numerous humans could operate as if they were a single social organism… They could do this because they were operating within an imaginary world they shared with their whole group. The fact is, we humans don’t live directly in the physical universe. We live in a model of the world we have created collectively through language and which we maintain communally.

Mythology is absolutely part of the same phenomenon. It is a created universe of morals, values, and beliefs that bind us together as a culture, as a single social organism. It was with the ancient Greeks and all their neighbors who also told stories over and over again, and it is still with us today because we have always needed to be on the same page with each other culturally.

In fact, we need mythology more than ever.

Right now there is a huge controversy over the polarization of America—how we don’t all believe the same thing anymore.

I am naive enough to hope we’re all very similar to each other culturally, and if we’d just stop listening to the news and social media and spent some time together in the same park, eating some good barbecue, the truth of our commonalities might come into better focus.

But maybe we were always really different, and now the promise of America and its shared values is taking its toughest test of resilience in the history of the nation.

So there has never been more of a need for some story to take the country by storm and wake us up to the fact that, yes, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is what we’re all basically after, regardless of who we are.

I’m not holding my breath. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that story is out there in some author’s head right now—as we speak.

Next time: what were the values of the Greeks that their absurd stories were reinforcing? Stay tuned.

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