Nilanjana S Roy: The oldest stories ever told

SPEAKING VOLUMES

In A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong offers a key insight: "When we contemplate the dark epiphanies of the twentieth century, we see that modern anxiety is not simply the result of self-indulgent neurosis. We are facing something unprecedented. Other societies saw death as a transition to other modes of being. They did not nurture simplistic and vulgar ideas of an afterlife, but devised rites and myths that helped people to face the unspeakable. In no other culture would anybody settle down in the middle of a rite of passage or an initiation with the horror unresolved. But this is what we have to do in the absence of a viable mythology."

She argues that writers are the new priests for the 20th century; as they reach back to the old stories and find new ways to tell them, they are actually, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie to Ursula K Le Guin and Philip K Dick, the keepers of the mythological flame. "A novel... can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another," Armstrong writes. In the same series, an ambitious project where Penguin asked authors to retell some of the world's most tenacious myths, Margaret Atwood reclaims the story of Penelope in The Penelopiad while Jeanette Winterson retells Atlas's story in Weight.

It's interesting that the first two tales in the series reach for the Greek myths, not the Norse sagas, or the great religious myths or the older shamanistic myths. The series will cover that terrain, but it's worth looking at how automatic Atwood and Winterson's choices were. Neither writer had to cast about for a subject. Atwood knew that she had to retell Penelope's story: behind the image of the patient, waiting, faithful woman was a tale that had been muffled for too long.

Winterson writes: "The story of Atlas holding up the world was in my mind before the telephone call had ended." She has witnessed the "gruesome appetite" of humans for true life accounts, Reality TV, plodding documentary fiction. "[This] points to a terror of the inner life, of the sublime, of the poetic... Against all this, a writer such as myself, who believes in the power of story telling for its mythic and not its explanatory qualities, and who believes that language is much more than information, must row against the tide..."

Armstrong offers a historical perspective on myth, Atwood offers the age-old, largely untold story of the women who waited patiently while the heroes did their swashing and buckling and Winterson explores what Atlas and his burden have to tell us about "loneliness, isolation, responsibility, burden and freedom too". But it's interesting to see how close all three are to Milan Kundera's sense of the novelist's work: "A novelist examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility."

The first stop on the Western road map is, inevitably, the Greeks; Christian, Islamic and Jewish mythology, in differing degree; the Arthurian legends, masking an older, Druidical, pre-Christian mythos. But an Indian writer would face a different task: our myths are still with us. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are read, re-told, re-interpreted on a continuous basis; other epics such as the Cilapatikkam or the Rajatarangini still resound in performance.

We have our modern mythology: if you had to read one story about Partition, it would be Manto's Toba Tek Singh, one novel about post-Independence India, it would probably be Midnight's Children, one story about the invisible India, it might be Mahasweta Debi's Dopdi Mejhen, with its raped, violated, invincible Draupadi from the tribal world.

The Western writer's dilemma is how to keep mythology alive, how to read in order to make the relevant rites of passage. In cultures where the old myths are alive""Indian, Australian, Nigerian, Lankan, a score of others, the dilemma is how to recover what we had as children.

In a collection of Lankan tales retold by Canadian and Lankan writers, Scarless Face, Griffin Ondaatje sums it up: "...Many of us have put a lot of distance between ourselves and folktales or legends""we went over that ground back in childhood, got out of that forest long ago. The stories are left on the horizon, and become a kind of a landmark to an old way of seeing things. We become less ancient ourselves, in a way, and more familiar with present worlds." For our cultures, the challenge is to recover what is already there; for the West, it's a matter of recovering what has been already lost.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com