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Theory
and Pedagogy for Instructors: Teaching and Learning Creative Writing |
"Section" |
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The
Heart of the Muses: Teaching Narrative
Writing Using Mythic/Archetypal Literary Criticism
All "Theory for Instructors" pages such as this are introductory essays for instructors learning to apply theory to pedagogy. This page applies the educational theory of myth criticism--using mythic images and stories to interpret literature--to the act of creating literature: that is, it suggests using mythic meanings to develop creative writing.
(Note: An earlier version of this essay appeared in a 2001 issue of Minnesota English Journal. A yet earlier version was presented in the Creative Writing Section of the 1993 Midwest Modern Language Association.)
I was speaking to a class several years ago in a course about world
literature when a keen moment of understanding struck me.
My students and I had been exploring various methods of literary
criticism, a new one every two weeks, and at the moment in question I was
lecturing on the theory and use of mythic/archetypal criticism.
Suddenly a revelation came, so intense that I hesitated in my speech and
almost was unable to continue. I am, I thought, talking about
my own writing and self. Mythic/archetypal
criticism, I realized in that instant, wasn't just another theory with which to
play; rather, it was an accurate representation of and guide to my own
creative/narrative writing.
What
a teaching moment, I thought, and proceeded to try to explain to my
students--and to myself--what I was envisioning.
I have no idea whether they understood me that first time.
However, I understood myself--the self who writes creatively--better at
that moment than ever before. Since
that time I have developed myself both as a creative and narrative writer, and
as a teacher of creative and narrative writing, because of that moment of
insight and all it entails. This
essay is my paean and guide to learning and to teaching others how to write
mythically. In addition, I have
learned that myth criticism--because of its powerful analyses of personal
evocation--has the ability to offer helpful tools to postmodern pedagogies
involving the writing and reading of cultural
and personal narratives.
Myth
Criticism's Jungian Foundations
Let me begin by defining myth criticism.
Myth criticism is criticism of literature using archetypal and/or
mythological identification. The two
sources are archetypal criticism and mythic criticism.
The first, archetypal criticism, was developed from the work of Carl
Jung, the less libidinous and almost as famous disciple of Sigmund Freud; Jung's
concerns were with archetypes, the collective unconscious, and our various
selves or forms of self, conscious and unconscious.
The second, mythological criticism, first developed from the
anthropological world survey of myth by Sir James Frazier called The
Golden Bough and from other like-minded anthropologists, and more recent
work with mythology by such mythologists as Joseph Campbell.
Mythologists and Jungian psychologists alike believe that there are basic
symbols and realities for human existence through all major cultures and
historical periods in the history of the world.
In other words, no matter when or where humans have existed, they have
had essentially the same kinds of cultural symbols:
for example, sun father, moon love goddess, earth mother, several kinds
of heroes and heroines, animal symbols, and the like.
Archetypal literary criticism is the study of such symbols in literature.
Northrop Frye, usually identified as the leading proponent of archetypal
criticism in this country, calls an archetype "a typical or recurring image
. . . , a symbol which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify
and integrate our literary experience" (99).
Frye's aim, as
Myth critics and other critics of the 1940s and 1950s were, in fact,
among the first to use the social sciences such as anthropology and psychology,
and to apply what they found equally to the canon of literature and to popular
culture. This use of the behavioral
sciences, and of finding literary standards in popular culture and even
advertising, was a trend "lamented by many," as Graff says it, for
such a use of criticism was felt to "undermine canonical hierarchies of
culture," leading to many of the present day revisions of the canon (351).
This should come as no surprise, however, to creative writers.
Those of us who are in the business of actually creating literature,
whether our creations are literary or popular, know that what we do is done
also, to some extent, in all levels of creative communication; and furthermore,
that the behavioral sciences can indeed shed some light on how and why we write
as we do.
That is, in brief, myth criticism. Let's
now talk about how I have discovered myth criticism in my own creative
writing--and how I have rediscovered my writing through myth criticism.
Mundane
and Mythic Writing
My own creative writing over the years has been a mixture of academic,
literary, and popular (magazine) fiction, and I have had some fifteen or twenty
short pieces published, from literary journals to radio readings and
large-circulation mass magazines. Knowing
what would be successful, whether for my writing teachers, my editors, or my
family and friends, often used to be a mystery to me.
I would write what I thought was a brilliant story, only to have an
editor, mentor, or (worst of all) my spouse show utter disregard for my seeming
brilliance, and at other times I would write what I considered playful practice
and, to my surprise, receive high praise indeed.
Gradually, however, like a great beast slouching toward publishing
houses, I grew to recognize how and why some writing I pursue is excellent and
some is not. This gnosis about the
quality of my writing began, over the years, with my observation that my stories
people liked best seemed to have a certain universality about them, or should I
say their particularities were universal, such that a large number of people
could successfully relate to them.
Of course, once I began to discover this, I tried consciously to make
some pieces universal. Once, for
example, I tried to create what I thought was a modern version of the Oedipus
myth. I thought I had excellent
tragic heroes and heroines and a carefully honed plot, only to have my wife
explain with kind but devastating reasoning how the story and characters were so
stilted that no one in his or her right mind would want to read or listen to
them. She was absolutely right. I
had to learn the hard way that universality, however important, still had to be
combined with believability, that almost magical quality of having a story so
real that everyone believes it.
Northrop Frye suggests, in fact, that what we as writers might call
"meaningful fictions" (and I might add to this category of Frye's
another--that of well written nonfiction narratives) are stories that are half
way between complete myth and complete reality (137).
In other words, in Frye's view the process of writing stories is an event
in which we abstract toward ultimates, yet also secure the real, so that our
stories are both universal in an almost magical way and realistic in an earthy,
logical way in order for people to identify with them.
For example, says Frye, "in a myth we can have a sun-god or a
tree-god; in a romance, we may have a person who is significantly associated
with the sun or trees. . . . To make
[a narrative] plausible, symmetrical, and morally acceptable . . . , a good deal
of displacement is necessary." The
"displacement" he means is the shifting of a story from the realm of
complete fiction to more realistic fiction or universal nonfiction.
He gives as an example "the dragon-killing legend of the St. George
and Perseus family" in which "a country under an old feeble king is
terrorized by a dragon who eventually demands the king's daughter, but is slain
by the hero. This," says Frye,
"seems to be a romantic analogy . . . of a myth of a waste land restored to
life by a fertility god."
Once I had located these two qualities, universality and reality, in one
place, I began in a halting way to produce magazine stories that sold with some
regularity. In some ways the story
lines were formulaic: tragic--family
faces personal catastrophe, finds in their depths the way to solve it, and comes
out sadder but wiser in the end; or humorous--good but awkward man chases smart
woman, smart woman chases him back without him realizing it, and both fall in
love. However, in spite of their at
times formulaic quality, as long as I was able to write the stories in a way
that felt real to me and to readers, the formulaic quality became a way of
tapping universality, and I believe this universality helped them be published.
Part of my discovery process became more conscious when the course
I taught about world literature and literary criticism--the one mentioned above
in which I had my revelation about myth criticism--helped me understand why some
of my works were more publishable than others.
I had studied mythology and Jungian psychology many years earlier, but I
had never seriously applied either to my writings, except to make them the
impetus for some journal writing and for trying to write a few modern myths.
As I revisited and taught archetypal and myth criticism in my world
literature course, I came to realize quite specifically that readers, whether
literary or popular, want archetypal characters and situations with which they
can identify. They want earthy
heroes and heroines, people who are like the sun or the moon; they want
villainous snakes, beasts, and flames; they want great mothers and sky fathers.
As a result, in my creative writing since that course, increasingly I
find myself moving in small turnings to the creative expression of mythic states
of being as I create characters and situations in my narratives.
Each turning is cautious, for I find it much too easy to create a
cardboard plot structure and flat characters.
The key, I have discovered, is to ignore much of intellect and turn to
something other instead. Explaining
this "other" is, however, no easy matter.
Myth criticism, having helped guide me increasingly to this
"other," also has provided a framework for explaining it.
Writing
the Mystery
In simplest terms, what I have turned to as a writer attempting the
archetypal and mythic, is the use of feeling as a guide, rather than intellect.
I feel my archetypes, not just think them.
For example, one of my best and most recent stories is about a drowned
man whom children discover on their town's beach.
Because, one can suppose, of the neglect of their busy parents, the
children turn this man from the sea into a someone special who merely is
sleeping. They spend hours with him,
trying so hard to make him comfortable and special for the moment when he will
awake that he becomes a hero to them, even as they finally return him to the sea
on what they perceive as his continuing travel to a heroic destination. The
initial idea was wild (and, I should add, borrowed from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's
short story "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World"); however, I
carefully made the execution of the details as uniquely new and realistic as
possible.
A
year later, I wrote a story about the heroism my mother showed in the way she
died--in this instance a true story, but one incorporating all the same elements
of magic and realism as had the fiction of the man from the sea.
In both of these narrative, the combination of careful, accurate details,
mythic values or meanings, and my use of my feeling or intuition as a guide in
writing created stories that readers told me are powerful, moving tales that
have are difficult to stop reading and yet have powerful universal themes.
I
believe that succeeding in this type of writing--mythic and realistic at
once--may involve what Northrop Frye calls the ability to "stand back"
(140). He suggests that interpreting
literature is like viewing a painting. If
one stands very close, all one can see is the paint strokes and lines--little or
no content (which is, he says, what the methodology called new criticism does).
However, "the further back we go, the more conscious we are of the
organizing design. . . . In
the criticism of literature, too, we often have to 'stand back' from the poem to
see its archetypal organization." Using
Frye's idea of standing back, we thus can say that good narrative writing (like
good painting) needs attention to both macrocosm and microcosm: to archetypal
symbols--the more broadly drawn strokes of character, plot, and setting; and to
specific, close-up brush strokes of paint and line that fill in the details of
character, plot, and setting.
Another element of myth criticism that I now sometimes teach in narrative
writing is a part of Jungian psychology: the idea of a collective unconscious.
Jung believed that we all have within us, mostly in a region normally
unavailable to consciousness, all the basic archetypes of humanity--a common
well of being or well of knowing that, as Jung hinted in some of his writings,
might even be a psychic connection among us all.
Wilfred L. Guerin et al. comment on the Jungian collective unconscious in
an excellent chapter about archetypal criticism in their Handbook
of Critical Approaches to Literature. In
this chapter, they offer Jung's own description of the collective unconscious
from his The Structure and Dynamics of the
Psyche:
If
it were possible to personify the unconscious, we might think of it as a
collective human being combining the characteristics of both sexes, transcending
youth and age, birth and death, and . . . practically immortal.
If such a being existed, . . . it would be a dreamer of age-old dreams
and, owing to its immeasurable experience, an incomparable prognosticator.
It would have lived countless times over again the life of the
individual, the family, the tribe, and the nation, and it would possess a living
sense of the rhythm of growth, flowering, and decay.
(qtd. in Guerin et al. 166-7)
For me in recent years, writing has become an ever more mysterious
process. I approach it with
increasing reverence: the longer I am a writer, the less I feel confidence in
simple explanations of how I write or
how I use the elements of fiction. I
have, however, come to trust the unconscious--the mystery, the heart of the
power--into which I throw myself headlong when I produce my best writing.
I don't always know where I am going when I throw myself into this body
of the Muses; I only know, when I arrive, that I am There.
I believe that such faith in the mystery is comparable to throwing
oneself into the collective unconscious as Jung describes it, and descriptions
of Jung's definition of the collective unconscious may even help developing
writers trust the geography into which they are plunging, might even help them
aim more surely for that dark, sparkling center of self and beyond.
It is the source of the best creativity and the deepest revelations of
self and other.
Aspects
of the Self
One final idea of Jung's--that we have several different selves or forms
of self--also bears mention. One of
these selves, according to Jung, is the "shadow," a second is the
"persona," and a third is the "anima/animus."
As Jung defines it, the shadow is a darker layer of human selfhood that
in our mundane or surface portions of our lives we deny or avoid expressing.
According to Jung in Psychological
Reflections, "The shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still
drags behind him"; or as he says in Two
Essays on Analytical Psychology, it is the devil as shadow within us, the
"dangerous aspect of the unrecognized dark half of the personality" (qtd.
in Guerin et al. 170). This is a
part within us in which we sometimes find ourselves as creative narrators.
To touch this part of ourselves with our writing often is to feel
endangered, for it is the geography within us that we did not know existed or,
perhaps, would rather not know--a part we may fear.
However, we need to explore this self if we wish to accomplish some of
our most revelatory narratives. And
my own experience with it, both as a creative writer and as a teacher of
narrative writing, is that if one "writes through" the shadow
experiences--if one does not stop writing part way through but continues onward
to the other side of the shadow experience--the particular location of its
geography in which he or she may find herself at the time--then that writer will
arrive on the other side safe, secure, and more whole than before.
The
persona is another of the Jungian selves. It
is the public or outward self that one shows to the world.
Writers in particular are aware of this self and the need to descend
below or climb behind it to produce good narrative writing.
What may help some writers is the knowledge that this public self or
persona can be used as a separate character.
In addition, writers must remember that all three-dimensional characters
(is both fiction and nonfiction) possess both a personal and a private self.
A third self that Jung discusses is the anima/animus.
The anima/animus, said Jung in The
Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, is the "soul-image,"
the spirit of a man's elan vital, his
life force or vital energy. The
anima/animus, says Jung, is the "living thing in man, that which lives of
itself and causes life" (qtd. in Guerin et al. 170).
In addition--a point especially interesting for narrative writers who
enjoy exploring gender differences--the anima in a male usually is female, and
the animus in a female usually is male. In
other words, according to Jung, the "soul" energy or vital life force
in us tends to develop or spring from the side of self within us that represents
our opposite sex. As Guerin et al.
point out, we tend, for example, to fall in love with people who mirror the best
qualities within our own anima/animus. According to Guerin et al., "as the
old German proverb puts it, 'Every man has his own Eve within him'" (170).
A psychologically functional person, according to Jung, is able to allow
portions of the anima/animus come forth. In
my own experience as a published writer, discovering the narrative voice of my
own anima has helped. I wrote a
series of four published Christmas stories, each for one or more magazines, in
which the fictional narrator was a mother and wife.
I drew for these stories from my own experiences as a farm and small-town
person and as a single father of three young children.
The voice came to me almost as if magic: that kind of gift writers
treasure when they find it, a fully developed character born like Athena from
the forehead of Zeus, a character I did not have to build element by element,
description by description. As I
wrote from this voice over a period of several years, I gradually came to
recognize her as a female side of me, neither more nor less wise, but different,
and I came to treasure her insights and her deep feeling, feelings that I myself
was struggling to express outwardly. She
helped me learn to do so better, and indeed my ability to develop a panoply of
characters has blossomed within me since that time. Likewise, I believe, other
writers who are willing to explore their opposite-gender voices can learn to
pass beyond their own cultural and biological representations of self to deeper
and broader understanding and integration of self and other, and of one's own
and others' cultures.
Postmodern
Narratives of Self and Culture
One of my authorial intentions in creating this paper has been to avoid
limiting myself to a careful, parenthetically noted academic discussion, and
rather to allow this paper to flower as a personal statement of my own
experiences with mythic/archetypal criticism, my story writing, and my teaching
of narrative writing. In other
words, I have attempted as an author, even while recognizing academic standards,
to write this essay from a location near my creative center.
In so doing, I am representing narrative, the personal, and the self as
being important in writing.
This overarching sense of self that I am encouraging in both one's own
writing and the analysis of other people's writings is a very important element
of what sometimes is referred to as the personal-story, personal-essay, or
personal-narrative movement. Telling
our personal narratives and understanding more deeply the narratives of others
is one of the methods used in some writing and other classrooms to awaken each
student to a deeper sense of self, one's culture, and the selves and cultures of
others. What I am suggesting in this
essay concerning creative writing and the teaching of it also applies to
personal-story or personal-narrative writing: after all, is it not myths, good
and bad, that we seek to discover in ourselves and others when we wish to
understand our differing selves and cultures more deeply?
To the extent that I can understand my own various selves and cultural
archetypes and those of others, to that extent I can reach beyond my mere self
to a more whole understanding of the world.
Through writing my self can I understand my self, and with caring
guidance can then better hear the narratives of other selves.
In this manner, myth criticism has a universality that applies not just
to an old system of literary criticism and not only to fiction writing, but also
to narrative discovery of self, cultural archetypes, and the creation and
appreciation of our own and others' cultures.
In writing about self, students usually construct myths that locate them
more deeply in the regions they believe they occupy--or wish to occupy--in life.
As Thomas Newkirk argues in his book The
Performance of Self in Student Writing that students writing personal
narratives attempt not so much to reconstruct reality as they do "a self
that works, that will be taken seriously" (16).
As they rebuild, says Newkirk, our job as writing teachers is not to
discount their conventional myths about themselves, but rather to help them find
what is positive within their conventional myths so that they can build deeper
and more inclusive ones. His book
offers practical methods toward accomplishing this.
In addition, it is perhaps worthwhile to note that in discussing and
practicing mythic/archetypal writing, we are locating ourselves somewhere in the
territory of postmodernism. Jacques
Derrida's oft quoted statement "There is nothing outside of the text"
(158) means simply that the textual meaning does not exist in reality: any text
we read does not perfectly recreate reality but rather interprets it.
Mythic/archetypal writing agrees: as we write, we create meaning by
selectively choosing parts of reality that lie within not only our personal
focus, but also within the belief systems, the emotions, and the overall whole
in which we ourselves exist and that we are trying to convey.
To put it more bluntly, we create myths--half real, half interpretive--as
we write. And whereas Derrida's
emphasis in postmodern reading is to deconstruct
old myths, tearing them apart into
their constituent elements to show limitations, opposites, and biases, the
emphasis in mythic/archetypal writing
is to construct new myths, over and against the old ones when necessary, myths that
are more accurate--not from better mirroring of detail but rather from better (re)mythologizing
of our and others' deepest selves. All
writing in this sense is a mythologizing process.
As Jean Reynolds explains in her well written introductory guide to
"Deconstruction in the Composition Classroom," "All experience is
shaped by language. Psychologist
James Hillman says that we don't even know our personal histories until we begin
to tell them. A 'true' story will
vary as different narrators emphasize certain details, omit others, and select
varying starting and ending points for the tale . . ." (257).
Mythic criticism and postmodernism argue that when we write, not only are
we involved in, as Ann Berthoff so succinctly describes it, "the making of
meaning," but also we are participating in the making of meaningful myth:
we mythologize ourselves and others--ideally in ever more meaningful ways.
Conclusion
I believe that as writers creating our deepest, most meaningful stories,
we can come to our brilliances (and our failures) through a variety of paths.
One of these paths of discovery for me is my myth criticism.
Before myth criticism became personal to me, I described the writing
mystery, this headlong flight into the center of the creative vortex, in several
ways excellent but less useful to me. Sometimes I referred to this mystery as a
process-oriented, expressive writing event; at others, as Natalie Goldberg's Zen
concept of "writing down the bones"; or as a friend of mine, author
Bill Meissner, more poignantly refers to it, "learning to breathe
underwater." Now, though, I
also can speak of it as my personal dance with the heart of my other selves--a
swirling waltz, if you will, deep behind my public persona and far within
the chaotic, awesome, boundless gene pool of Jung's collective, archetypal
unconscious.
And so it becomes, when I am writing, just me and my shadow, dancing in
the reconstructed light of the moon. I
welcome all who would seek--and teach--this heart of the Muses with me.
Works
Cited
Berthoff, Ann E. The
Making of Meaning.
Derrida, Jacques. Of
Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Frazier, James. The
Golden Bough. Abr. Ed.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy
of Criticism, Four Essays.
Goldberg, Natalie. Writing
Down the Bones.
Graff, Gerald.
"The Scholar in Society."
Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and
Literatures. Ed. Joseph Gibaldi.
Guerin, Wilfred L.,
et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches
to Literature, 3rd ed.
Marquez, Gabriel
Garcia. "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World." Leaf Storm and Other
Stories. Trans. Gregory
Raaabassa.
Meissner,
William. Learning To Breathe Underwater.
Newkirk,
Thomas. The Performance of Self in Student
Writing.
Reynolds, Jean.
"Deconstruction in the Composition Classroom." Teaching English in the Two-Year
College
26
(1999): 254-261.
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