Myth congeniality

I recently got interested in myth and mythology; I'm not exactly sure how. I think it started when I read The Da Vinci Code, which has to do with, among other things, the Holy Grail, which got me to thinking about the Arthurian legend. Then I watched a bunch of old-school "Star Trek," which is real archetypal.

And then I reviewed a couple of locally written plays, Oriphice and G�tterdrama-rama, which draw heavily on classical mythology. The latter play is especially thoughtful: seven Madison playwrights take a Greek myth and, in a one-act, fiddle with it in some way: spoof it, for example, or translate it to a modern setting. The playlets made me think about those myths, for the first time, as stories that aren't just ripping yarns but also have interesting things to say about human life, ancient and modern: a one-act about the labors of Hercules suggested that he suffered from that most contemporary of diseases, workaholism. And so on.

Inevitably, Arthur and the Greeks brought me to Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers' The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), which, for all its coffee-table kitsch reputation, is a pretty fascinating read. I actually looked up Campbell as I was writing one of the play reviews: even though I knew virtually nothing about him, I knew enough to know that pop mythology equals Joseph Campbell, and I was trying to come up with a quote for the review. I planned to launch the essay with a Campbell quote, wittily demolish the quote, and then proceed with reviewing. I had this notion that Campbell was just some loony guy who said silly things, but the more read by him and about him--under deadline pressure, of course--the more interested I became. The closest I got to an epigram is something that, it turns out, he says in The Power of Myth: "The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth." But for all its chiasmic pithiness, I decided this actually is kind of an intense thought and ended up filing a review that did not mock Joseph Campbell.

And later I checked out The Power of Myth. What I enjoyed most in the book is an exchange Moyers and Campbell have about two giants of 1980s consumer culture. (The book is structured as a conversation between Moyers and Campbell.) Moyers describes a picture he saw somewhere:

MOYERS: The photograph showed the new Rambo doll that has been created and is being sold by the same company that produces the Cabbage Patch dolls. In the foreground is the image of a sweet, lovable Cabbage Patch Doll, and behind it, the brute force, Rambo.

CAMPBELL: Those are two mythic figures. The image that comes to my mind now is of Picasso's Minotauromachy, an engraving that shows a great monster bull approaching. The philosopher is climbing up a ladder in terror to get away. In the bullring there is a horse, which has been killed, and on the sacrificed horse lies a female matador who has also been killed. The only creature facing this terrific monster is a little girl with a flower. Those are the two figures you have just spoken of--the simple, innocent, childlike one, and the terrific threat. You see the problems of the modern day [16-17].

I'm still not sure I see the problems of the modern day, but I love this kind of textual analysis of the weird stuff late capitalism throws up all around us.

Getting back to the Arthurian legend, I realized that most of my direct knowledge of it comes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and then I got to wondering just where all those stories come from. Was there a real Arthur? Apparently there was, depending on which secondary source you read, but I guess the point of myth and mythology is that it doesn't matter whether the stuff really happened. I'm about to dig into Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur.

Which brings me to one last bit of legend. I decided to glance at Junker drummer Thomas Crofts' dissertation, which he deposited last spring before merrily making his way to Oklahoma. The diss is about Malory, and I thought its bibliography might be good to peruse. So I downloaded the 30 megabyte PDF file from the Internet, fired up Adobe Acrobat, and flipped to the acknowledgements page, where I read these words from Thomas:

The Junkers--Matthew Stratton, David Junker, Kenneth Burns, Edwin Larson, Matt McNeil and Bob Hemauer--then, now, and always, have kept it country: family-style: fiat musica rustica.

I've been acknowledged in a dissertation! I've never felt so honored. Thomas is my King Arthur and Hercules all in one.