Beyond Belief: The Transformative Power of Mythic Fiction

BEYOND BELIEF:
The Transformative Power of Mythic Fiction
Lisa Connors
Critical Paper
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA (Master of Fine Arts)
in Creative Writing, Pacific Lutheran University, August 2017

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Beyond Belief: The Transformative Power of Mythic Fiction
All that is certain is that we live in a period of mythic confusion that may provide the
occasion for a new growth of myth, myth more suitable for our times.
– Jerome Bruner
INTRODUCTION
I can’t see her face anymore. Did I ever? What I remember most is being seen by
her—seen as prey—and then suddenly (having risen to my full height of five feet and
change, screamed HIYAAA into the few feet of air between her face and mine), I became
a threat not worth the effort. The hyena turned and ran. What I remember is the thrum of
blood in my head and the wash of loneliness and grief rolling out of me toward the place
she had stood. The plea that didn’t leave my lips: “Come back.” In that moment I knew
exactly who and what I was for the first time in my forty-two years.
The sun came up pink over the acacia scrub in that African bush and the ranger
rose from her sleeping bag on the ground with her gun slung on her back, made coffee
over the fire that we had tended through the night in pairs; my watch partner, Kathy,
came up behind me, offered a hot mug and brushed my shoulders with the words “Hyena
Woman” like the blade of a sword, knighted me for protecting the group from the hunter
that had circled our camp (but Kathy had named me, confirmed me as my religion never,
ever had); and then I went home to America, to Michigan, and a two-story colonial
hemmed in by a neat grid of sidewalks and streets—I can’t see her face anymore. I know
that I did.
Another night watch, this time alone; this time over my father’s body (hollowed
out by the cancer, his skin a shrunken husk), listening to that rattle coming out of his

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throat—sounds like storm winds sifting through dry August cornstalks, like untethered tin
gutters shuddering against the roof’s ledge—and me scraping through websites on dying
trying to find something to believe about him and me.
Six months later I started to write a myth called The Ash Girl about a girl born in
Africa named Asmeret (meaning she who unifies, in her native language). She is part
human, part goddess and muck and animal—part hyena. When I write into this other life,
this alternate narrative, I am Hyena Woman again. The one who takes only what she
needs, with no regrets or remorse, and plays with her kin in the cool misted valley while
the sun pinks. The one who is true to her nature as an integral part of the whole—until the
little alarm bell dings on my phone, recalling me to make chocolate chip pancakes for my
daughter and earn a paycheck training managers to communicate more effectively with
their employees. Asmeret whispers from the book, “Come back.”
What if I believed I was Hyena Woman when I wasn’t writing? What if we each
believed, truly knew, that we are human and animal and goddess and muck—would we
take only what we need from this Earth and give back our lives to whatever force of
nature demanded it, fighting perhaps, but without fear or regret? What if the shape of the
universe and our role in it is not at all what we think? What if the most pressing problems
in western culture (and, by our extensive influence, the global community) are rooted in
dominant myths that no longer serve humanity’s best interests? What if adopting new,
more unifying myths could move us toward a better future we cannot yet see?
In this paper I make the case for the power of what I call mythic fiction to evoke
“What If” questions that can transform our beliefs about who and what we are and our
relationship to the planet. I use as examples several novels that repurpose the forms,

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symbols, and structures of myths and fairytales to create the conditions for our beliefs to
change, our worldviews to expand, and our ways of thinking and acting to grow
increasingly inclusive of all life. Understanding how these new myths are crafted will
help me shape The Ash Girl into a work of mythic fiction that so thoroughly engages
readers they hardly notice the transformation that is occurring, much like writing it is
quietly transforming something in me.
I grew up without myth. Or at least I suffered what Harvard psychologist Jerome
Bruner calls “myth confusion” (On Knowing 41). I joined the burgeoning ranks of folks
who live in melting pot communities and families that lack consistent, collective stories
to make sense of life and death. My parents had forsaken religion and dispatched their
immigrant ancestors’ national identities and traditions to the curb to lighten their load in
pursuit of the American Dream. They moved our family to a rural Michigan town when
my kindergarten year was halfway done. That move marked me forever as an outsider—
our name not emblazoned on the grain mill or hardware store or inked in the dusty
homesteading ledgers shelved at the library/historical society, which later became (more
successfully) LuLu’s Diner. I tried to be Lutheran when I was fifteen. Got myself
baptized and confirmed on the same day, walked out the doors of First Redeemer, and
never went back. So what myths to believe? The ancient Greeks? The Native Americans?
The Nordic or Celtic myths of my recent ancestors? The African myths that lurk in my
DNA according to the cells scraped from inside my cheek that I sent on a stick to the
Human Genome Project? Some New Age brew of Wicca and Zen Buddhism? (My
teenage daughter tells her friends I am a Buddhist; apparently it’s just easier.) Bruner
might say I lack what Joseph Campbell calls a “mythologically instructed community” to

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provide me with a “corpus of images and identities . . . to which growth might aspire—a
range of metaphoric identities” (qtd. in On Knowing 36). I am myth confused, and I am
not the only one.
America, Bruner says, is myth confused in another way. He believes America
indeed has a dominant myth—one that is problematic:
In the American culture, there is a deep problem generated by the
confusion that has befallen the myth of the happy man . . . There still
lingers the Christian conception that happiness is the natural state of
man . . . and that it is something we have done or failed to do as
individuals that creates a rather Protestantized and private unhappiness.
(On Knowing 38-39)
In a phone interview, social scientist and writer Margaret Wheatley said the problematic,
dominant, American myth is called “Progress . . . the story of the ever-upward trending
line . . . Progress of the kind that ignores, or willfully intends to defy, nature’s cycles and
limits . . . truths emphasized in ancient mythology.” Bruner and Wheatley don’t
romanticize ancient cultures or call for a nostalgic resurrection of the old myths; rather
they call us to investigate our own deeply held beliefs, expand our worldview, and act in
the interest of the whole—or at least stop trying to dominate the planet. I join those who
believe modern western culture spreads like a global plague and that our particular brand
of myth confusion may cause not only the demise of our species but also the destruction
of the global ecosystem. So what to do about it? Campbell says in The Power of Myth,
“We need (new) myths . . . that will identify the individual not with his local group but
with the planet” (24).

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“Myth” is a term easily misunderstood in the age of science. “Myth” often refers
to a story, idea, or theory that is false. While I agree that the ancient myths won’t serve us
well today, I suggest we embrace Campbell’s meaning of “myth.” He says there are three
orders of myth that serve three different functions. The first is the “mystical function,”
giving humans an experience of awe. “Myth opens the world to dimensions of mystery,
to the realization of the mystery that underlies all forms” (Campbell 31). These myths are
embodied in spiritual encounters and sacred rituals that give humans a transcendent
experience. The second function of myth is cosmological, Campbell says, “showing you
what the shape of the universe is, but showing it in such a way that the mystery again
comes through.” The third function of myth is sociological, “supporting and validating
the social order,” which includes instructions about how to live in right relationship to
both our neighbors and the larger world (Campbell 31).
The cosmological and sociological functions of myth are fulfilled not through
sacred rituals, but through stories. These mythic stories are filled with metaphors and
symbols that point to unknowable mysteries, teach life lessons, and guide us on our paths
of individual and collective development in an ever-changing world. (Yes, the stories that
make up the major religions are myths by definition. Regional and local myths are more
often called fairytales or folktales.) The old myths and tales were shared within
communities through generations of storytellers who re-shaped them to help people know
how to live in community with one another and in right relationship to the evolving
biosphere.
The ancient myths no longer fit. The current dominant myths, “Progress” and
“Happy Man” among them, cage many of us behind invisible bars. Inside, our worldview

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is limited, we clutch too hard to unexamined beliefs, and we think and act without
enough regard for the needs of others and all. Where will the new myths come from—the
ones that will help transform our beliefs and actions? I believe mythic fiction is an
emerging story form that serves this purpose.
Mythic fiction includes those literary works that repurpose the language, structure,
characters, metaphors, and symbols of the old myths and fairytales. Mythic fiction offers
alternative narratives and explanations for how things are, how they came to be, and what
is possible when we surrender our certainty about what writer J.R.R. Tolkien calls our
“Primary World”—the world we live in and perceive with our senses (350). Tolkien also
coined the term “Secondary Belief” in his essay “On Fairy Stories,” to describe the
reader’s state of mind when the author successfully “makes a Secondary World which
your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is true: it accords with the laws of that
world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.” Fairytales, Tolkien
proposes, “may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds.”
By this he means disrupting the truth you hold about the Primary World while you
inhabit the Secondary World of the story (351, 372).
In my experience, as both a reader and writer of mythic fiction, the form has the
power not only to summon Secondary Belief in the world of the book, but to cause the
reader to question the beliefs they hold in the Primary World. I will examine four works
of mythic fiction in which the authors have successfully crafted stories that can open our
hoards of truth, expand our worldview, and transform our thinking and actions, moving
us on our own pathway of human development. I will explore three craft moves these
authors make that are useful to me as a writer of new myths:

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I. Contracting: Construct the threshold to Secondary Belief.
II. Pathmaking: Entice readers down the path with wise guides and breadcrumbs.
III. Rattle and Ache: Write endings that sing against bones.
I. CONTRACTING
The Threshold to Secondary Belief
When readers open a book they arrive at a threshold between the world they live
in (the Primary World) and the world of the book (the Secondary World). In mythic
fiction this moment is critical given the assumptions and expectations of most general
fiction readers: myths are irrelevant, commercial fiction is escapist entertainment, and
fairytales have been sanitized and relegated to the bookshelves of children. Literature is
both entertainment and art that can and has shaped the dominant myths; however, most
fiction readers don’t pick up a book with their personal development in mind.
Theorists offer psychological frameworks (or models) we can use to help us
understand what it means to develop as humans and build thresholds that invite readers
into transformative space. The frameworks of Abram Maslow, Carol Gilligan, Richard
Barrett, and Suzanne Cook-Greuter are summarized in The Transformative Workplace by
Carole and David Schwinn into three ways of being: Selfness, Otherness, and Wholeness.
In Selfness, the Schwinns write, “we are most concerned about biological, safety and
survival issues, as well as seeing to our need for recognition and self-esteem.” When an
individual’s capacity for sustained Selfness is reached, Otherness becomes available,
which includes “an increased valuing of other people . . . and a concern for meeting the
needs and expectations of others, as well as our own”; and when Otherness is a sustained

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way of being, Wholeness becomes available. Wholeness is “an expansion (of thinking
and action) . . . that includes an awareness and concern for all living things” (Schwinn
and Schwinn 5). I call the movement through these ways of being the “Pathway to
Wholeness.”
These theorists also agree that an individual can only move on this pathway one
step at a time. To leverage the power of mythic fiction to move readers from Selfness to
Otherness to Wholeness, writers must meet them where they are when they open the
book. Writers must establish credibility with the readers and motivate them to engage
intensely with the work to increase the potential that readers will have a transformative
(versus escapist or purely entertaining) experience.
Of course the writer can only do so much. Wayne C. Booth proposed in The
Rhetoric of Fiction that responsibility for engagement lies on both sides—reader and
writer: “even the greatest of literature is radically dependent on the concurrence of beliefs
of authors and readers.” Booth is not suggesting that a reader should share with the author
the same religious doctrine (as was once the case when Christian morality was the
dominant public convention), moral standards, or even values to engage in the work. He
explains: “The reader who does not value sensibility as highly as Virginia Woolf will fail
to enjoy much of her work unless he is persuaded by it, as he reads, to shift his judgment.”
Recognizing the power of fiction to influence judgment, Booth offers a call of his own to
readers and writers of fiction: for writers to be more “dogmatic”—to take a stand; and for
readers to think and feel empathetically as they read—to open themselves to be changed
by the experience (140, 144). The threshold, or entry point into a new myth, offers an

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opportunity to bind author and reader in a social contract that makes it possible for
readers both to enjoy the novel and take the next step on their development path.
Two books that in my estimation are successful examples of mythic fiction take
on the challenge of contracting. Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin seeks to engage readers
in the belief that concepts of heaven and hell are personal, mutable states we experience
out of time and through place. In this novel, New York City becomes the ultimate
manifestation of the entire universe (unified Primary and Secondary Worlds). Tale invites
readers to question the dominant western myth of humans bound by life and death, time
and space, separate from the eternal universe. Salman Rushdie’s novel Two Years Eight
Months and Twenty-Eight Nights imagines a future Earth completely at peace. Rushdie
only hints at this future state; the story takes place in present times in the United States.
Two Years is part social commentary on the American War on Terror and global warming,
and part fairytale; Rushdie proposes that fairytale creatures, jinni, are behind real
catastrophic events (social, political, and meteorological). One could emerge from the
world of this book wondering if the events of our time are the work of a jinni war, and if
a handful of us, perhaps me, perhaps you, are part jinni too and will rise up to rebalance
the world. But to take these journeys, readers must first suspend disbelief in the premises
of these books and consider, at least temporarily, New York City as Heaven and Hell on
Earth and the existence of jinni. Both Tale and Two Years have thresholds that ask
readers to leave certainty on the stoop and suspend disbelief in the fantastical elements of
the works.
Writers of mythic fiction who wish to entice modern readers to suspend disbelief
and consider alternatives (settings, characters, beings, values) that fall outside their

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Primary Beliefs face another significant challenge. In our culture we have lost our myth-
minds. Well, not lost entirely, but we might say myth-mind is on the endangered list.
What I mean is we often fail to recognize the metaphors and symbols in myths and
fairytales as referential, externalized representations of the relationship between humans,
nature, and the divine. We lack a common key to the meanings of those metaphors and
symbols, with the possible exception of those metaphors appropriated by popular media.
Today an ogre is an ogre and, thanks to the movie Shrek, an ogre is a green, snarky
cartoon character rather than code for man’s terror of the uncontrollable, unknowable
forces that can devour life.
Myth-mind is endangered in part because we have lost our community-centered
oral storytelling tradition. Storytellers were an integral part of the community, connected
to listeners through familial and tribal bonds. The fantastical elements of their stories
(those meaning-filled metaphors and symbols) carried the authority of their shared gods,
ancestors, and elders. A storyteller’s physical presence allowed for heightened theatrics
that added emotional weight to the events of the story. Writers of mythic fiction can
employ narrators who have the presence and authority of the old village storyteller to
construct thresholds that help readers suspend disbelief.
Rushdie makes a narrator for Two Years who resonates with modern readers and
who has a palpable, yet unintrusive, presence throughout the story. The narrator is both
unnamed and lacks a physical description, yet Rushdie immediately positions the
storyteller in time and space:
Some ancient stories said, slanderously, that the jinn lived among us
here on Earth . . . This is the story of a jinnia . . . who loved a mortal man

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long ago, in the twelfth century, as we would say, and of her many
descendants, and of her return . . . and of the time of crisis, the time out of
joint which we call the time of the strangenesses . . . and yes, we have
lived another thousand years since those days, but we are all forever
changed by that time. Whether for better or for worse, that is for our future
to decide. (3-5)
Rushdie establishes important connections between the narrator and reader here.
They are both humans and both, perhaps, intrigued and skeptical that fantasy creatures
live here on Earth. Rushdie cannot make a storyteller who is of the same people, beliefs,
and gods of his readers—our culture is too diverse—but he can give the narrator the
authority of time and retrospection by situating it one thousand years in the future.
Further, Rushdie connects reader and narrator by drawing an ancestral line between the
storyteller and the people alive in our country in the late 1900s. While this future position
grants the narrator a certain authority of the story’s truth, it also provides needed distance
for a reader to engage in the story and have insights about their own role in the problems
of our times without feeling defensive.
Another challenge, therefore, is to subtly engage readers in self-reflection about
their beliefs, qualities, and contributions to the world. Relatable characters that embody
problematic beliefs and actions offer readers this opportunity. Rushdie’s main character,
Mr. Geronimo, is a likeable, hard-working man who wakes up one morning to find he is
floating ever so slightly off the ground. Mr. Geronimo also thinks and acts in
recognizable ways that are both blameless and at the root of the crisis in the world of the
book (a thinly veiled reflection of the crisis of our Primary World):

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Mr. Geronimo’s life up to this point had been a journey of a type that was
no longer uncommon in our ancestor’s peripatetic world, in which people
easily became detached from places, beliefs, communities, countries,
languages, and from even more important things, such as honor, morality,
good judgment, and truth; in which, we may say, they splintered away from
the authentic narratives of their life stories and spent the rest of their days
trying to discover, or forge, new, synthetic narratives of their own.
(Rushdie 26)
The use of pronouns in this passage puts the right distance between the reader and
the honor-deficient masses of which the narrator speaks. The first person plural form
creates the illusion that the reader is the listener in this cleansed future: “in our ancestors’
peripatetic world . . . we may say . . . they splintered away.” In the same paragraph
Rushdie builds a strong, if subconscious, bond between the reader and Mr. Geronimo,
who is on “a journey of a type that was no longer uncommon . . . trying to discover, or
forge, new synthetic narratives of their own.” The modern archetype of Mr. Geronimo
resonates across a culture where loss of identity and belonging are commonplace. When
Mr. Geronimo realizes he has become detached from the Earth, we have already,
figuratively, walked in his shoes and may be more likely to examine the ways we are also
like (and unlike) Mr. Geronimo: subject to nature’s laws and yet unaware of what the full
scope of those laws might be, pawns in political and religious warfare, prone to the
polarizing impact of mass media, and a descendant of a jinn princess with latent powers
of creation and destruction. By the end of the book, Mr. Geronimo will have transformed

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his own identity from that of a mere mortal, powerless against the mysterious forces of
his culture and universe, to that of a half-jinn who shifts the world narrative to Peace.
Myths were once understood to be explanations of phenomena and the
relationship between all humans and nature. The stories were instructional, cautionary,
and likely taken both seriously and impersonally. In modern myths this impersonal
resonance can be tricky to achieve. Too much direct finger pointing about their role in
today’s crises can trigger a reader’s defenses (or inflated ego), deterring the self-
examination of problematic beliefs, and diminishing the power of self-discovered
questions and insights.
Helprin’s new myth, Winter’s Tale, is less about crisis and problems and more
about vast possibilities, but the challenges of contracting with the reader are the same—
suspending disbelief, building a bond between narrator and reader, and disturbing beliefs
about the Primary World. Helprin begins constructing the threshold of Tale in the front
matter and prologue to quickly greet the reader who ventures to open the cover of this
748-page volume. A quotation precedes the title page: “I have been to another world, and
come back. Listen to me.” Without attribution, the reader likely assumes this beseeching
voice to belong to the author himself, or perhaps a narrator with a high stake in the
reader’s attention. A reader who already believes in other worlds is ready to fully engage.
If the reader scoffs, yet turns the page, a contract also has been made; the writer takes a
bold position and the reader prepares to consider the writer’s stance.
Given the mythic nature of the work, and the sheer size, Helprin is smart to make
an additional move to align the reader and narrator before the first scene. His prologue
does this work, in part with a narrator who possesses an exhilarating aptitude for

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language and in part with a promise to the reader to reveal “a deeply moving plan” that is
obscured by a “whitened mass . . . a blinding white web of ceaseless sounds” (Helprin
prologue). In essence the narrator asks the reader: Do you believe there is an important
plan hidden beyond the chaos we perceive? Do you trust me to show you what the plan is
(and use your time well)? Perhaps. Perhaps not. In case these questions are not motive
enough for the reader to continue, Helprin makes one more attempt to bind the narrator
and reader on a journey that is hard to resist: Don’t trust me? Follow me anyway. At the
end of the prologue of Tale the whitened mass breaks and we see:
. . . a lake of air as smooth and clear as a mirror, the deep round eye of a
white hurricane.
At the bottom of this lake lies the city. From our great height it seems
small and distant, but the activity within it is apparent, for even when the
city appears to be no bigger than a beetle, it is alive. We are falling now,
and our swift unobserved descent will bring us to life that is blooming in
the quiet of another time. As we float down in utter silence, into a frame
again unfreezing, we are confronted by a tableau of winter colors. These
are very strong, and they call us in. (Prologue)
This excerpt represents narrative that transcends credulity and resonates in the
reader. The passage reads like music, not necessarily easy to believe or comprehend with
the analytical left-brain, but taking possession of an innate sensibility to receive musical
rhythms into our bodies and flow with them. As Campbell said in a talk quoted in
Reflections on the Art of Living:

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the first function of art is exactly that which I have already named as the
first function of mythology; to transport the mind in experience past the
guardians—desire and fear—of the paradisal gate to the tree within of
illuminated life . . . (Forms of art including) verbalizations of metaphysics,
lyric poetry . . . function evocatively, not referentially; like the beat of a
shaman’s drum. (qtd. in Osbon 243-245)
When writers of mythic fiction use images and language that bypass the conscious,
meaning-making function in the reader’s brain and leaves them, at least for a moment,
feeling wholly alive and in tune with the universe, they could be said to have made art
that evoked Wholeness.
The thresholds of Two Years and Tale are paved with presuppositions about the
world of the book, making important information available to readers as they cross
between the Primary and Secondary Worlds. I have been told again and again, “just get to
the story, and dispense with the introductory blah blah blah.” With the new myths, I
disagree. By creating the conditions for readers to suspend disbelief, build bonds with the
narrator, and adopt an empathetic and self-reflective stance in relationship to characters
that will be models for transforming problematic beliefs in the Secondary World, authors
of mythic fiction increase the likelihood that readers will engage in new ways of thinking
and acting in the Primary World. Carefully constructing a threshold to the book that
addresses the challenges of contracting between the writer (who takes a stand) and reader
(who engages fully) is an essential craft element in mythic fiction.
Once readers are through the door (wary or feeling strangely at home), the next
challenge for the author is to pull them inside a hell of a good story. I step into Two Years

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in the year 1195 in Arab Spain where a Jewish philosopher has been sent to live among a
community of exiled Jews. He soon marries a jinn princess who bears him a “multiplicity
of children” in two years, eight months and twenty-eight days and nights, each of whom
“inherited her most distinctive feature: they had no earlobes” (Rushdie 6). (At this I reach
up and touch my own earlobes. Are they quite smaller than your average earlobes, I
think?) In Tale, floating just above the silent, frozen tableau of winter colors, I am
watching a white horse: “The horse had escaped from his master’s small clapboard stable
in Brooklyn.” I watch as he trots through the snow, across the Brooklyn Bridge toward
Manhattan: “The horse was crazy, but, still, he was able to worry about what he had done”
(Helprin 3). I am worried for him. What price will he pay for his run at freedom? I love
this horse, and this horse loves Manhattan, and within eight pages we are running
together—practically flying—through those city streets, like bats out of hell, with Peter
Lake on our back, escaping—escaping the Short Tail Gang led by Pearly Soames,
certainly an agent of the Devil himself. Who am I now? What am I? Where are we going?
II. PATHMAKING
Wise Guides and Breadcrumbs
Mythic fiction—intentionally, by design—takes the reader on a ride through these
big questions. Like the hero’s journey we are intimately familiar with, the new myths
feature characters (with us breathing their breath and occupying their skin) seeking their
lost, true self; however, more than that, the new myths hope to carry the characters (and
readers) as far down the Pathway to Wholeness as possible. After readers cross over the
threshold into the world of the book, with their beliefs about the Primary World held

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lightly (we hope), authors of mythic fiction have the opportunity to engage what Booth
calls the “intellectual interest” of the reader by greeting them where they are (Americans
for the most part seem stuck somewhere between Selfness and Otherness), and enticing
them forward (as the great myths and fairytales do) on their own path of human
development with bread crumbs, magical clues, wise guides, and terrors to slay with
swords drawn from stone (Booth 125).
Booth’s intellectual interest refers to the human curiosity about “the true reasons,
the true origins, the true motives, or the truth about life itself” (125). Harvard
psychologist Howard Gardner named this particular aspect of intelligence “Existential
Intelligence,” which “reflects the human proclivity for pondering big questions, like who
are we, where do we come from, what's going to happen to us? From childhood humans
ask these questions, and across cultures we create art, science, philosophy and religion to
help us answer these questions” (Gardner). Mythic fiction appeals to this existential,
intellectual interest, leading us to Secondary Worlds full of alternative narratives burbling
out of the collective unconscious—that Jungian river of all stories—whispering “What if?”
in our ears, over and over.
Helprin and Rushdie each challenge us with huge questions about the truth of who
we are and the shape of the universe from the first pages of their books. In contrast,
Kazuo Ishiguro starts his novel The Buried Giant by engaging readers on the
development path at Selfness (the concern for Self—one’s own survival and safety) while
planting seeds of “What if?” to help usher readers toward Otherness (an expanded
worldview that includes concern for Others). I am in awe of the stealthy assault
Ishiguro’s story has launched in my head. I looked at the picture on the cover (an ink

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study of an ancient, twisted tree), noted the author’s reputation (Booker Prize winner),
and read this quotation by Neil Gaiman from The New York Times Book Review: “An
exceptional novel . . . does what important books do: It remains in the mind long after it
has been read, refusing to leave.” Honestly, The Buried Giant had me at the title and
gnarly, cool tree but Gaiman’s testimonial sealed my decision. I was pleased to add this
novel to my growing library of new myths that disrupt problematic, inculcated beliefs by
posing alternative, even fantastic, histories and narratives that conjure the magical
question “What if?”
The story Ishiguro tells is deceptively simple, but the resonance of the questions
that arise and their implications to our lives are astonishing. First Ishiguro sets the stage
by calling on our culture’s collective memory to create a Secondary World for the reader
to occupy. Giant is set in a post-Arthurian English countryside. The Arthurian legends
still have enough pop culture cachet to provide a setting familiar enough for the reader to
easily co-create, and fantastical enough (given the Arthurian wizards and dragons) to
disrupt notions of reality. In “Two Modes of Thought,” an essay on literature and myth,
Jerome Bruner notes the opportunity for fiction writers to “subjunctivize reality”—to
craft a story with elements that induce a reader to engage carefully with the work and
make their own meaning—creating what Bruner calls a reader’s “virtual text.” Bruner
says that “writing in the subjunctive mood is to be trafficking in human possibilities
rather than in settled certainties.” Writers of mythic fiction craft stories with presupposed
settings to guide readers into the work, introduce “strange” elements that thrust readers
out of ingrained thought patterns, and offer a multitude of metaphors and phrases

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freighted with layers of potential meaning that readers can use to make the stories their
own (Actual Minds ch. 2).
Traffic in human possibilities, Ishiguro does. Before introducing the main
characters Ishiguro places un-Shrek-like ogres in the forest outside their village. These
ogres, though terrible, are “everyday hazards” with which villagers have learned to live;
“every so often, an ogre might carry off a child . . . The people of the day had to be
philosophical about such outrages” (Ishiguro 1-2). These ogres are freighted with
meaning to help readers dust off their myth-mind and start making the virtual text. For
me, the ogres immediately represent Other—those beings unlike us who have the
potential (realized at times) to threaten our way of life (and, on another level, the shadow
aspect of Self we all possess that threatens all life when we pursue our desires without
regard for the whole). The villagers have accepted these dark forces and gotten on with
their days. Admittedly, comprehending the layers of Ishiguro’s ogres might be a stretch
for the general reader on pages one and two. Ishiguro, I believe, recognizes the need to
move slowly on the development pathway. He doesn’t expect readers to dwell on the
ogres. The story really begins with Axl and Beatrice.
Ishiguro draws an intimate portrait of an elderly couple—Axl and Beatrice, sweet
in their devotion to one another—who are losing their minds. When we meet Axl and
Beatrice they are functioning solely in the realm of Self—struggling with aging and loss
of identity. Their worldview is limited by their diminished memories, and the memory
loss of their entire community: The good folks of the land have become forgetful, unable
to recall events even from the day before. Axl and Beatrice hypothesize (in brief
moments of clear thinking) that perhaps the cause of the forgetting is a thick mist that has

20
settled over the countryside. The pair is plagued by nagging remnants of memory and
free-floating emotions, more jarring for the vagueness of their source; terror, pain, grief,
and remorse poke insistent holes in their otherwise peaceful lives. We can empathize with
their memory loss, and so we are jarred too. Questions nag at the reader: what might be
the cause of their anguish, and of the forgetting itself? What are the graces of memory
loss and what are the costs? As dementia, including the terrible form called Alzheimer’s,
seems to be on us like a plague—who among us isn’t troubled by Axl and Beatrice’s
plight? (Or outright terrified, like I am on days when memory falters?)
Novels in the realism tradition often create a state of empathy for the difficulties
of survival in our times and culture; they hold up a mirror in which we see ourselves in
the characters and don’t feel so alone—literary support groups. The new myths seek to do
more—to enlarge the questions, provoke self-reflection, and seed collective
conversations that expand beyond support and empathy to action: “What might be
possible now?” “How might we?” Re-telling and expanding well-known myths, updating
archetypical characters, and introducing fantasy elements into the narrative help engage
the reader in the Secondary World of the book while posing important questions relevant
to the Primary World. To this end, Ishiguro doesn’t leave Axl and Beatrice bemoaning
their fate; instead he creates a condition that bothers them so much they leave all that they
know in search of what they have lost—a classic hero’s journey, with a strange twist. In
this Secondary World, only those couples that can provide evidence of their lifelong love
are allowed to live together on the island of the afterlife. While Axl and Beatrice hope to
find their lost son (a traditional, cross-cultural metaphor representing loss of eternal life
on Earth through progeny), their most devastating distress comes from the memory-

21
stealing mist that will prevent them from providing the right answers to the Boatman who
ferries couples to the island.
By amplifying problems we experience today (increasing memory loss), and
proposing alternative narratives about the relationship between the human and spiritual
realms (proof of love required at a gate of eternal life), Ishiguro creates the conditions for
“What if” questions to break our contracts with truth. These questions surfaced in me as I
read and became a part of my virtual text:
What if nearly everyone that you live among, including you and your most
beloved, lost nearly all of his/her memory? What if those memories were the evidence you
needed to prove yourself worthy of spending eternity with those you love?
In the first chapter, Ishiguro works to reawaken our sleepy myth-minds by
populating the classic quest story with archetypical characters he has modernized—the
“hero” is an elderly couple with memory loss—and he layers new (and potentially
shocking) meaning into the ancient symbols, dropping them into the text like seeds as he
goes and letting them grow. Mist has a range of meaning in world mythology—distorted
perception, a truth-obscuring veil, and a transitory space between the Primary and
Secondary worlds. In Giant, folks come to agreement that the mist is the cause of the
rampant forgetting. The source is the breath of a dragon that is under a spell cast by
Merlin the Magician on behalf of King Arthur. Ishiguro could let this layer of mist-
meaning carry the story (and it would serve); however, he plants in Beatrice’s mind
another potential explanation for the memory loss—a theory that upsets her and stuck
with me for weeks. Ivor, a character of some authority, describes the alternative story to
Beatrice and Axl as he heard it from a stranger:

22
he ventured something I dismissed at the time, but have since much
pondered. The stranger thought it might be God himself forgotten much
from our pasts, events of the same day. And if a thing is not in God’s mind,
then what chance of it remaining in those of mortal men? (Ishiguro 64)
The matter is quickly dropped but Beatrice brings it up a few days later: “Perhaps God’s
so deeply ashamed of us, of something we did, that he’s wishing himself to forget.”
Beatrice both speaks the unspeakable shadow of Self, and distances her conscious Self:
“But it’s surely not anything you and I ever did, for he’s always loved us well” (76).
Ishiguro doesn’t mention this idea again, allowing the course of events to keep the
question alive and unresolved in the Secondary World of the book (and now, in this paper,
the question lives in the Primary World). While Beatrice is focused on Self at this point
in their quest, her contemplation raises questions in my myth-confused mind about
memory loss and God as Other and Self:
What if God’s memory loss is the cause of ours? What if God is forgetting human
history on purpose? What if forgetting is an agent of peace?
Our diminished myth-mind still presents an obstacle to effectively absorbing the
multiplicity of meanings in the story; however, Bruner offers this insight into the capacity
of modern readers to find their own way:
As our readers read, as they begin to construct a virtual text of their own,
it is as if they are embarking on a journey without maps—and yet, they
possess a stock of maps that might give hints, and besides they know a lot
about journeys and mapmaking. . . In time, the new journey becomes the
thing in itself . . . the virtual text becomes a story of its own, its very

23
strangeness only a contrast with the reader’s sense of the ordinary. (Actual
Minds ch. 2)
Axl and Beatrice are on a journey without maps along their own Pathway to
Wholeness. They soon come upon Other in the character of Wistan, a young warrior who
is on a secret mission of vengeance. Ishiguro repurposes and complicates the mythic
archetype of the opposing warrior to better fit our dilemma today; Wistan is a devout
Saxon (devoted to both his birthplace and the religious doctrine to which the Saxons
subscribe) who was raised and trained by the enemy Britons (Axl and Beatrice’s people).
While he lived among them, the Britons denied young Wistan membership in their tribe,
causing him shame—the psychological wound he is driven to rectify. Axl and Beatrice
are wary of the warrior, but their countries are at peace thanks to the forgetting mist
having wiped all memories of war and its atrocities (almost) clean. Ishiguro infuses
Wistan’s character and his relationship with Beatrice and Axl with the conflicts, angst,
and folly of choosing allegiance to ideas and places over people. In our melting pot world,
the most dangerous Other sometimes speaks our language fluently and lives next door.
Wistan joins forces with Axl and Beatrice to find the dragon who breathes the
forgetting mist. The warrior grows fond of the couple (and they of him) despite Wistan’s
fragmented flashbacks that suggest Axl may be the one who rejected him as a child.
Wistan’s flashbacks are cracks in the Secondary Beliefs of the book; his memories slip
through the veil of mist, disturbing the peace between former enemies. The complicated
relationship between Wistan and the couple raises question in the Primary World: What
allows people of vastly different views to live in peace, even in love? What lies at the
heart of war? Who among us isn’t conflicted when liking a person and detesting their

24
beliefs? Who among us isn’t nursing wounds of rejection and ill treatment in our
communities and families? More “What if?” questions arise in the virtual text:
What if we were able to set aside, to accept, difference and meet one another only
as human? What if all wounds were healed, the scars disappeared as if by magic? What
if you were handed the sword to slay the dragon that breathed forgetting mist?
Beatrice and Axl partner with Wistan in this very endeavor. Against a series of
obstacles they venture forth to slay the dragon. Self continues to motivate the elderly
couple on their journey. They act out of fear that they will never find the truth about their
lost son and will fail to recall their own memories in time to pass the Boatman’s truelove
test before he ferries them to the island at the end of their quest. And yet they begin to
include Other on their path: The couple voices concern about the violence that may come
over the land when memories of war return (although it doesn’t change their course of
action) and embraces Wistan—orphaned by war—as another lost son in the world. Self
also motivates Wistan. He is committed to his identity as a Saxon and determined to
avenge his boyhood betrayal by the Britons, yet he is concerned with the fate of Beatrice
and Axl. The warrior actively suppresses the memories that will condemn Axl to death
under Wistan’s secret vow of revenge. Once they reach their destination Wistan insists
the couple leave the area before he slays the dragon in her pit, perhaps regretting what he
will have to do to Axl when his memory is fully restored.
While Ishiguro assists these characters with wise guides and magical clues on the
Pathway to Wholeness, one might ask if they make it all the way. I don’t think so. The
characters lack a worldview in which they see themselves in the dragon, which represents
the Earth in English mythology. She is under the spell of a king and a magician (the

25
power humans wield), and is nearly dead already. Wistan sees the dragon’s weakened
condition as relevant only to the ease of his task. He cuts off her head with one swift
stroke. While I would be sorely tempted to spell out the What If questions if I were this
book’s author, Ishiguro relies on the reader to formulate these transformative questions in
the virtual text, or not:
What if our decisions were made not in self-interest, nor in the interest of our
ideas or tribe, but in the interest of the planet’s health and full power? What becomes
possible when we untether the dragon from our will? How might we move to this place of
understanding and intention, staying the sword that finally cuts off her head?
Perhaps these questions need to reside in your body and heart somewhere before
you start reading. Perhaps Ishiguro has cracked the code of disturbance and resonance
with his new myth; I hope so.
While we are living in the Secondary Worlds these authors have made—
Manhattan as can be known from behind the white wall, America in the time of the
strangenesses from the viewpoint of a historian one thousand years in the future, an
English countryside veiled with forgetting mist—we can suspend our own beliefs about
who and what we are in the world and consider alternative narratives because the stories
are great and cunningly crafted.
III. RATTLE AND ACHE
Endings That Sing Against Your Bones
The question remains, what does it take to shift a reader’s way of being toward
Wholeness after they have read the last words of the book? I believe part of the answer

26
must lie in those last words themselves; the best endings are like a chorus singing against
your bones. Ishiguro sounded last notes that vibrate. He authored an ending that rattled
me, left me aching to see beyond the bars of my cage, moved me to open the door and
release my hoards of certainty.
The dragon has been slain. The mist has lifted as Axl and Beatrice make their way
to the island. They have recalled the fate of their lost son, death by plague, and so it is
time to grieve and move on. They meet the Boatman (Death), a trickster who leads
couples to believe their memories of true love will keep them together for eternity.
Beatrice and Axl answer his questions to verify their love, and while the couple’s
memories have returned and they answer to his satisfaction, the Boatman will only carry
one of them to the island at a time. He promises Beatrice he will ferry Axl to the island
right after her and she believes him, although she has been told of his deceits by the
wraiths of women who lost their husbands in just such a way.
Axl argues with Death, commanding he ferry the couple together, calling him out
on his lies, but cannot dissuade him from his plan. Axl promises Beatrice he will make
peace with the Boatman and join her soon on the other side.
The Boatman is the final narrator of The Buried Giant. He overhears the parting
words of the beloveds as Axl settles Beatrice into her boat:
“Farewell then Axl.”
“Farewell, my one true love.”
I hear him coming through the water. Does he intend a word for me?
He spoke of mending our friendship. Yet when I turn he does not look my
way, only to the land and the low sun on the cove. And neither do I search

27
for his eye. He wades on past me, not glancing back. Wait for me on the
shore, friend, I say quietly, but he does not hear and he wades on.
(Ishiguro 317)
The words of Death disturb and confuse me. I cannot leave them behind in the
pages of the book. I work the sentences over in my mind, trying to discern some hidden
truth. But as myths of the second order do, the metaphor only points in the direction of
the unknowable mysteries of life and death. Once again, I am left with my own virtual
text:
What if we understood that when we walk on the land, any land, we are never
alone? What if we held the Earth as our true love, as much as our countrymen and family
and beloveds and Self? What if we loved and trusted the Boatman? How might we be
different? What would be possible that is not possible now?
In The Buried Giant (among ogres, wraiths, dragons, and spells) there are no
giants. No body or bones buried beneath a gnarled old tree. Only an invitation, an
invocation, to look deeper; to reconstitute our myth-mind and let it lead us to the big
questions, and to the answers we have always known, but forgotten. And there is
beauty—that quality of myth that evokes awe and bliss—the space where myth meets
poetry.
My favorite ending appears in a fourth work of mythic fiction, Margaret
Atwood’s The Penelopiad. Her story rings with poetic and social justice. Atwood retells
The Odyssey with new narrators who call into question the beleaguered roles of women in
the Greek myths that still influence social norms today. In the introduction, Atwood
describes the inspiration for her choice: “I’ve chosen to give the telling of the story to

28
Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids . . . I’ve always been haunted by the hanged
maids; and, in The Penelopiad, so is Penelope herself” (xv). What might be the ripple
effect of re-telling one of the oldest, most influential myths from the perspective of the
long-suffering wife and the twelve women who, without inquiry, trial, or opportunity to
beg for mercy were forced to carry scores of dead bodies from the great hall, muck out
the mire, and submit to their own hanging? Homer writes in The Odyssey, “So now in
turn each woman thrust her head into a noose and swung, yanked high in air, to perish
there most piteously. Their feet danced for a little, but not long” (424).
Atwood refuses to let Homer’s words be the last on the subject. Atwood couldn’t
save the hanged maids from their fate—some aspects of the ancient myths must be kept
sacred—but she offers this: The maids are bitter and angry and vengeful, as they should
be for they were innocent of the charges brought by Odysseus’ nursemaid. Atwood lets
the handmaids put Odysseus on trial—a courtesy Homer never extended to them—and
she gives them the last words in the re-telling of one of the world’s most famous,
enduring stories. Atwood prepares us to hear these words in a way that invites an
experience of Wholeness. In the first chapter of The Penelopiad she suggests how to
listen for the meaning of her myth and the voice of the maids:
I have no mouth through which I can speak. I can’t make myself
understood, not in your world, the world of bodies, of tongues and fingers;
and most of the time I have no listeners, not on your side of the river.
Those of you who may catch the odd whisper, the odd squeak, so easily
mistake my words for breezes rustling the dry reeds, for bats at twilight,
for bad dreams. (4)

29
Listen closely to the river, reeds, breezes, and your own dreams, Atwood suggests.
In this way we might experience the voices from the world we cannot perceive in our
usual ways. If we listen differently, the mysteries will tell us what we need to know.
The closing words of Atwood’s new myth might be heard as a chorus sung by the
hanged maids in the world beyond the veil, or as the tittering of birds. May they ring
forever in the ears of those who have wrongly judged and dismissed others, even yours,
even mine:
xxix
Envoi
we had no voice
we had no name
we had no choice
we had one face
one face the same
we took the blame
it was not fair
but now we’re here
we’re all here too
the same as you
and now we follow
you, we find you
now, we call
to you to you
too wit too woo
too wit too woo
too woo
The Maids sprout feathers, and fly away as owls. (196)

30
EPILOGUE
Beyond One Story at a Time: Writers as Mythmakers
Follow your bliss.
– Joseph Campbell
The morning after my encounter with the hyena in Africa, I woke up just before
sunrise to a sepia-colored, watery world. I could hear a lion’s roar behind me in a stand of
trees. I walked as if in a dream to the edge of camp and gazed out over the veld. A family
of hyenas chased one another, tumbling like puppies, close enough that I could count
them (five in all), yet far enough away that I couldn’t hear their yips and growls. I could
not sense where I stood in the picture. It was as if this moment were a painting that
existed for eternity and I was a brushstroke of landscape. Writing the myth of The Ash
Girl is a ritual for me—on my best days the work returns me to my place in that eternal
moment.
I can’t expect that readers of The Ash Girl will have a sacred, transcendent
experience, but I believe it is possible to disturb a reader’s sense of reality enough—to
create a world that is real and strange and beautiful enough—to cause “What if”
questions to echo through their minds; to resonate past the pages long enough to cause a
permanent shift beyond their current beliefs; and to expand the possibility that readers
will take one more concrete step on their own Pathways to Wholeness, helping to restore
our shared home to a sustainable system—what poet and writer Gary Snyder called “an
imperfect assembly of all beings” (22).
Every writer has the potential to shape-shift culture by amplifying a narrative,
helping a new dominant story to emerge. In this way all writers are mythmakers, shaping

31
minds one story at a time. I believe that with this monumental gift comes a commensurate
responsibility to choose topics that move readers toward Wholeness and de-authorize, not
promote, problem-saturated narratives such as Happy Man, Progress at Any Cost,
Voiceless Servant Class, and thousands of others that keep societies stuck at Self and
Other on their collective path.
Please don’t mistake my call to mythic arms as a call for the narratives of Utopia
or Perfect Peace. Myth and fantasy are not about absolutes, but about the mystery of the
world and the need for human vigilance against the imbalance between dark and light. I
imagine leagues of writers, like super-heroes, flying or time traveling or swimming under
the seas, or running super-Flash fast to wherever a new story is needed. Gathering folks
in circles, asking questions—listening: What is your story? What can you imagine in the
world of your dreams? Who or what would you be? Tell me that story.
What I ask of writers is this: Teach people what you know about making myth—
tell it huge; be audacious; make yourself a goddess or an animal; transform yourself in
the muck; use your words, your imagination, be a magician: Abracadabra—say it and it
is so. Live into their new story alongside them. Tell them: Imagine your way forward and
then do the hard work to make the new story come true before the story of Progress
closes our book. And if they cannot imagine, imagine for them. Write them a new myth;
write hundreds; write canons that mark the way on the path. Don’t be afraid to use ogres
and dragons for these are ancient symbols our bodies can recall. (Who among us who
watched Daenerys Targaryen climb on the back of her dragon in the Game of Thrones
didn’t feel a palpable vibration from that Secondary World—a glorious coming home in
our souls!)

32
Tell them “What if?” is the question that opens the door of our cages. Turn every
book club into a mind storm of “What if” questions, co-authoring a virtual text. For
Rushdie’s book it might sound something like this:
What if the increasing hurricanes and storms and the recklessness of politicians
and businessmen and the strange ways the millennial generation occupies space and the
religious fanatical plague and the jealousy between lovers that turns ugly and then
homicidal and the vampire-like thirst of the popular media and the heroic acts of
thousands of individuals trying to intervene were all caused by a slit that had opened
between our Primary World and the world of the jinn? What if I knew or imagined that
the jinn were here, but soon would be gone, defeated by the very power that created
them? What if I looked in the mirror and seeing no earlobes (the telltale sign of the
people descended from the good Jinn Princess, Dunia) felt more powerful than before?
And what if, knowing that Dunia (who became the evil Jinn Queen) almost destroyed our
world, I tended my power more carefully and turned it a bit more toward good?
Those are a lot of instructions for writers as mythmakers. (“A lot of questions!”
one early reader of this paper noted in the margins.) It feels daunting at times, this work
of making a Pathway to Wholeness out of words. But then I recall a phrase Joseph
Campbell often repeated that has guided my thinking and actions for more than a decade:
“Follow your bliss.” These words led me to Africa. These words beg me to write The Ash
Girl. What I think he meant is this: when you find that thing that gives you a sense of
being fully awake to your life—vivacious and thrumming in tune with the vibrations of
the universe—that is it; that is your bliss. Indulge in it selfishly. Offer your vivacious,
vibrating self to the world despite the ogres and traitorous warriors. When you follow

33
your bliss you are moving on your Pathway to Wholeness and transforming the problem
story. I believe each of our pathways is marked with our bliss and that all of those
pathways converge into one. Follow Your Bliss is my myth of Wholeness. What is yours?

34
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. The Penelopiad. Canongate, 2005.
Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed., U of Chicago P, 1983.
Bruner, Jerome. On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand. 2nd ed., Belknap Press, 1979.
---. “Two Modes of Thought.” Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Kindle ed., Harvard UP,
1986.
Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. Edited by Betty Sue Flowers, Doubleday, 1988.
Gardner, Howard, PhD. “Online Chat with Howard Gardner.” Thirteen: Media with
Impact, www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/mi/chat-trans1.html. Accessed
6 Sept. 2016.
Helprin, Mark. Winter’s Tale. Harcourt, 1983.
Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Buried Giant. 2015. Vintage International, 2016.
Osbon, Diane, editor. Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion.
HarperCollins, 1991.
Rushdie, Salman. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. Random House,
2015.
Schwinn, Carole and David. The Transformative Workplace: Growing People, Purpose
Prosperity and Peace. Transformations Press, 2015.
Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. Counterpoint, 1990.
Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy Stories.” Tales From the Perilous Realm. Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 2012, 315-385.
Wheatley, Margaret. Personal Interview. 16 Oct. 2014.

Beyond Belief: The Transformative Power of Mythic Fiction

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