Sean Kane admits in the introduction to "Wisdom of the Mythtellers" that "I am aware that I am an individual shaped by modernity, an outsider to myth" (p. 15). That is how this class is making me feel.
It is difficult to really grasp myth in the age we're living in, centuries outside the time of oral traditions. Kane condemns literacy as "inactive reading", on the grounds that it is pathetic compared to the mythtelling tradition, where telling involved action, telling is doing something. I just can't bring myself to accept this sort of condemnation. The way that Kane refutes literature echoes my feelings about the media today. Whenever I watch movies, I do so with a sense of guilt (with a few exceptions, of course) because I think: "I should be reading". Mindless movie watching seems so bad for me and my mind because I'm not intellectually challenged the way that I am when I read. Watching movies and TV is isolative and easy and presents me with no intellectual challenge... and I can't imagine somebody truly feeling the same sort of resentment towards reading. If reading is inactive and unengaging (how can reading be unengaging?), then what our we subjecting ourselves to when we put on the television?
Kane explains that storytelling and myth require a kind of performance that engages both the reader and the teller. Reading and writing stories, by contrast, is done on an individual basis. But I, reading alone, still find myself intellectually engaged. I just wonder, if reading and literacy are second to storytelling, what can we call the multimedia entertainment that is taking over? Is it the same, effectively, as reading? We can't possible equate watching a movie with reading a book can we? Just because they are done individually?
We said in class today something that was a little daring, something I never thought about but is an interesting way to look at things: To literalize is to materialize. Like Citizen Kane's house in the movie, which was a literal memory theatre, a collection of all his life's memorobilia. Literature takes something that was oral, and thus invisible, and makes material out of it. We can't deny it. And I think that is something I really dislike about the media and hollywood, it is the culture of a very materialistic society. A very literal society. But I can't say that I dislike literature or its values- I am a literature major for crying out loud! I love literature, and I'm getting worried here that we're putting it in the same category as film, television and technology. Are we?
some of us may connect the term "Myth" with myths of the greek gods- "today they lend their names and aura to makes of cars" (p. 32 Kane). Oh well, at least that's a "starting-point" for an exploration of myth time.
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