Letter #49: Hit and Myth

It Ain't So, Joe

Spluke Spywalker,

Oh, all right, in the interest of familial peace, I will leave Star Wars alone. My only regret is that I somehow neglected to make a Darth Vader I-Am-Your-Father joke. A literal “Dad Joke” and Dad missed it!

But to my larger point. Here’s something weird. I happen to be reading 1967’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction by Frank Kermode. Yesterday evening, hours after my post went up, I came upon a passage in which Kermode makes exactly the same point I made using exactly the same novel: “Ulysses… studies and develops the tension between paradigm and reality, asserts the resistance of fact to fiction, human freedom and unpredictability against plot.” Bizarre, right?

This restriction on human freedom — and therefore on human diversity — is the problem I see with mythic thinking, whether it’s at the movies or in our reading of the Bible.

Our commenter Allie Iacob already knows this story, but for those without her fine taste in podcasts, I’ll tell the short version. Back in the 1980’s, I wrote a major appreciation of Joseph Campbell for The Village Voice. Not long after, there was a piece in the New York Review of Books “exposing” Campbell as an antisemite. I was so distraught to have glorified such a hateful man, I didn’t write another non-fiction piece for several years.

It was only later I realized the truth. Campbell was a political conservative. He was being canceled before any of us knew what cancellation was.

That said, Campbell did make occasional antisemitic remarks. His primary inspirations, psychiatrist C. G. Jung and philosopher Mircea Eliade, also seem to have dabbled in that particular bigotry. There’s even a book about this: The Politics of Myth by Robert Ellwood. I haven’t read it, but I did notice the phenomenon. I once asked your late grandfather, Thomas Flanagan, the brilliant scholar from whom you seem to have inherited your brain, why mythologists should share a hostility toward Jews. “Because antisemitism is mythological thinking,” he replied.

Of course that’s right. All racial bigotry is mythic thinking: plugging a racial generalization into a preset human narrative. That’s why you can blame any race for the problems of the world — white, black, Jew, gentile — and your philosophy will seem to make perfect sense. It’s also why the grimmer forms of religion, which is a species of myth, can become so unloving, so unforgiving. If you have the god without the man, you end up a Pharisee.

But in the “true myth” God is incarnate. He becomes man, loves him, forgives him. “The Sabbath was made for man not man for Sabbath,” he says. And “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

He is the one who “asserts the resistance of fact to fiction, human freedom and unpredictability against plot.”

And, by the way, I really am your father.

Darth