A continual telling
I was reading Alix E. Harrow’s post on Hadestown (Hadestown is great, as a fellow member of the “I had the concept album” club I completely recommend this post, also Alix is a terrific writer, and if you’re not reading her fiction, well, let me encourage you to do so) the other day, and was particularly struck by this paragraph on myth:
maybe that’s the real genius of a myth: that we’ve sung it before, and we’ll sing it again. that we’ve told it for different reasons, in different times—that it’s been subverted, reversed, disneyfied, darkened, appropriated, translated, reinterpreted—that it’s been posted on ao3 and performed in high school gyms—and we’re still not through with it. that it runs from the past to the future like a long banister, rubbed smooth by the hands of a thousand generations. a myth is a story from the world that used to be, told in the world we live in now, for the one we dream about.
The thing that really hit home for me here was the “and we’re still not through with it.” I’ve talked in this newsletter before about retellings and re-envisionings of stories. I have absolutely engaged with retellings in my own work. And for me, part of the call to those stories was the feeling that there was still something there, still the space for me to engage, still a way for me to tell my version of things. I loved, and love the original stories. I am not through with them.
And while this is research by vibes and not at all a scientific or in any way rigorous survey, it seems to me that the stories that get retold most often are myths and fairy tales. Stories that are, in a way, built as places to see ourselves reflected, and to be caught by what we see there, like Narcissus. Sometimes the reflection itself is enough, and we don’t want or need to look beyond that. But sometimes, by staring long enough, we see what doesn’t match up – what doesn’t quite look like us, or the background that has grown worn with time and now needs mending. The mirror that has cracked enough to let a new piece of story through. The crack that means that maybe the story isn’t through with us, either.
The thing about a retelling is that it doesn’t destroy the original, it resonates with it. That resonance, for me, is one of the things that gives a retelling power – we know the original story, and so the changes stand out in relief. Telling the story new reaches back in time and extends the life of the older version. Why not just tell the original, then? Well, you tell me what the original is: sword in the stone, or lady of the lake? With stories large enough to become myths, where does original start and end? When these stories are told in 100, 500, 1000 years, tell me what their pieces will be.
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