Homo Mutato: Modern Mythology and the Construct of "Creation"

Apologies to anyone reading this who might be in the mood for the condensed, professionalized, or deeply analytic. Some days, the nuts and bolts of everyday life are all-consuming, and a good thing, too, because they're slipping and creaking, and more than often need a tune-up, or at least an attempt at critical prognosis.  But sometimes - especially when you're on the cusp or something new, exhilarating, reorienting - the immediate blurs a bit, and you tug on a wide-angle lens. If all goes to plan - which, in fairness, it may well not - this post is going to be a little bit meditative, and more than a little bit freewheeling. It'll probably try to say too much, cover too much ground, make sweeping symbolic pronouncements. I'd blame it on the hazy summer thunderstorms, or on that nefarious Youtube bot that sent me into a sentimental West Wing spiral, but when I decided to sink into reading commencement speeches, I really did myself in. I appreciate those of you who indulge me. Your regularly scheduled rants will doubtless be back tomorrow.

This whole trajectory of thought came from an unlikely point of origin: a Slate article exploring a controversial reinvigoration of characters from the Watchmen canon by DC Comincs, and discussing more broadly the instances of original creators - like those of Superman and the Avengers - being ripped of by exploitative business deals, and seeing their characters torn from their control, catapulted into interpretation, reimagining, and collective memory. These accounts tell a story that is clearly one of unequal deals, of predatory partnerships, and I definitely don't want to applaud that, since they clearly were and felt victimized by the comic companies actions.  But what interests me isn't so much the mechanics of how it came to be, but rather the phenomenon of comic heroes - Spiderman, Superman, Wolverine, Xavier, The Hulk, Batman, Rorscharch - being moved into a space where, although they were legally controlled by one business interest or another, their detachment from a sole creator gave them the status of a sort of public mythology, a set of archetypes and backgrounds placed in varying situations, subjects of rampant fan fiction, often without one single "correct" canon in the public eye. They weren't That Guy's characters, they were comic characters, and even if one business technically owned them, creatively, they were paper dolls, and everyone licensed to sell their stories, and quite a few who weren't, got to move them into new positions, put them in new situations, drag out of them new truths or dimensions. In some ways, Doctor Who exists under similar rules. Not many people, even relatively ardent fans that I've met, could likely name the original architect of "Who". I know I can't, and while not yet an Old Who devotee, I'm passionately attached to the new series. The point being, in contrast to Star Trek, which, while reimagined, was always Roddenberry's story, his playground, Doctor Who was the story of a culture, a country, a time, a network: a character so flexible he could be a part of any number of different individuals' stories.

This is not a new thing, this phenomenon of characters living in the private domain, as half-sketched, partially realized archetypes ready to be swept up into some new adventure, some new variation, before being set back on the shelves until the next iterator came along. Going back to the Greeks, the Romans, to traditions of the Saints, characters were often the outgrowths of myths, stories and people and ideas that seemed to have grown up with a harvest, or blown in on a wind, rather than expertly and singularly crafted by one individual. They were collectively owned, and this pantheon of heroes and gods, of ideas to which we all had access but which no one in particular possessed, were brought to life in the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Aeneid. They were referenced by poets from the Renaissance to the Romantic Era, they are reinterpreted to the present day. Their tradition lives on in the hundreds of thousands of fan fiction authors, who openly disdain the idea of characters being off-limits. Throughout this procession, stories weren't woven from scratch, from genius and a pen. They were told and inculcated, and then an aspect was changed, a ending rewritten, an underlying trait explored in an unorthodox way.

You don't find typically find stories being pulled out of minds abandoned on a desert island with a dictionary, fertilized by singular human genius alone. As any English professor worth their salt would tell you, you don't find stories in an airless chamber, you find them within a historical and cultural texture, drawn from latent ideas, reimagined, reinterpreted, then passed on.

Some historians of literary history have argued that the idea of a character belonging to a lone creator, cordoned off from the shared creative well, is, in the scope of time, a relatively new invention, ushered in around the time of the Novel as a form, and, I think around the time individualism and liberal (in the classical sense) rights-based politics started to take hold. As we began to shift from focusing on communities as a whole to focusing on individuals stories as being divorced from and distinct from their communities, we started telling ourselves that this wasn't just another story, this was OUR story. Yes, we may have picked up that archetype somewhere, we might have pulled that personality, magpie-like, from a friend, who himself constructed it to fit an idea, we may have taken a traditional form and turned it's on its head, twisted a knob, stretched out a few things. But We. Made. It. Completely. End of discussion.

Believe me, as an agnostic woman with serious concerns about heteronormativity and repressive gender norms, I have plenty of praise to heap on liberal norms, and their recognition of those who deviate from the group will. But I nonetheless think the shift is interesting, and I think that it's important to remember that society is, as Weber said, a cage of our own creation. Very little of this is hard-wired. If we decide to say, against all historical evidence, that stories can be created by individuals, and aren't, in fact, iterations of shared consciousness, reimagined in any number of endlessly creative ways, that's fine. But I think we should remember it's a construct, and that we believe what it's convenient for our society to believe, just as earlier, more communally-focused societies did. Who knows? Maybe there's one Greek guy who's been fuming over his work being ripped away from him for thousands of years, and is now the anti-patron demon of Internet Pirates. Maybe individual ownership is The Truth, and myth was a deviation from that. The point is that what we see as irrevocably normal, in this or in any arena, should be held to some scrutiny.

In the end though, I don't really mean for this article to be an evisceration of current copyright norms, or  a public exaltation revealing to the world how much I geek out over Joseph Campbell. In the end, the reason this idea feels so powerful to me is that it points me to questioning a fundamental (I think) misconception: that we are the creators of our own reality. Creating has come to mean creating something totally new. Even though we know, on some level, that's not logically possible, even if we look to the literal roots of each word. Creation is something not initially attempted by humans: there was one Creator, the idea of humans Creating anything new in a literal sense was preposterous. Humans don't create. We build. We look around for spare pieces of wood and construct a lean-to. Find scraps of stone and build a spear. We combine, we reconfigure, we twist, turn, rotate, repurpose, on both a literal level and a symbolic one.

In the larger scheme of evolutionary biology, the metaphor of mutation strikes me as potent. Maybe we're not homo narrans, or homo econimus after all, maybe we're the mutating animal. Maybe we're the one (or one of the few) creatures able not to just live in its environment, and accept the traditions passed down, not to just be acted UPON by mutation and gradual change, but to ourselves BE an agent of mutation, doing what before, only the slow process of nature had done, intelligently recombining the raw materials around us to create words, stories, computers, civilizations. Creation is solitary, singular. Evolution is collaborative and dynamic, a much more powerful metaphor for the way we live human life, day to day. As I've said, I'm not much for transcendental gods, particularly the anthropomorphic and proselytizing variety, but I think myths can be valuable as truth beyond literal truth, and one line that's always struck me is that (in the Christian tradition), we as humans are created in God's image. Maybe that was true, but just not in the way the Hebrews or early Christians would have thought. Maybe evolution and mutation is and has always been the driving force of the universe, the "God," that both made and runs the watch. As animals able to take the engine of productive mutation and run with it, maybe we truly are made in the image of that abstract force: mutation and evolution and constant reimagination made manifest.


Wishing you starlight and lightning strikes,
Cody


Arabic Word of the Day: مُنافِق Munaafiq - Hypocrite. From the word "nafak" referring to the escape tunnel built in the burrows of certain species of rats. Some interpret the link as referencing the rat leaving through a back door, and thus shirking on some obligation. Some interpret its metaphor differently: as a tunnel which seems solid to the observer, is in fact hollow, a representation of being internally hollow despite outward convictions.

Quote of the Day: "Sometimes I long for a convent cell, with the sublime wisdom of centuries set out on bookshelves all along the wall and a view across the cornfield - there must be corn fields, and they must wave in the breeze - and there I would immerse myself in the wisdom of the ages and in myself. Then I might perhaps find peace and clarity. But that would be no great feat. It is right here, in this very place, in the here and the now, that I must find them" - Etty Hillesum