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“It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth,” writes Joeseph Campbell, the author who penned A Hero With a Thousand Faces, a book that would gain notoriety in Hollywood after George Lucas cited its influence on his film Star Wars, a perfectly appropriate modern stand-in for Homer’s tales of war and heroes on a distant beach in a distant land, long, long ago (Campbell, 3). Campbell was a professor of literature and comparative mythology at Sarah Lawrence, and his work, penned in 1949 would go on to influence and become the blueprint for storytelling for the better half of the 20th century. But his work delved deeper, sought to expand and make sense of storytelling from the time of Homer, and before, pointing to a centralized architecture in all stories, from Native American folklore, to modern Hollywood blockbusters, to ageless tales of mythology from ancient antiquity written by blind poets. It was called “the monomyth,” a classic set of rules found in all stories, no matter who created them or when. Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey takes this sort of idea, though probably not directly, and retells some of the world’s oldest and most adapted series of stories, surrounding the events of the Trojan War and Odysseus’s odyssey homeward, originally anthologized in Homer’s The Illiad and The Odyssey, respectively. Retelling these tales, so cemented in the lexicon of collective human literature, Mason’s tales recontextualize the stories, subverting expectations and exploring the idea at the forefront of the original stories: what exactly makes a hero? Is a hero brave? Selfish? Do they doubt themselves? Are they cunning? Cruel? Are they a cyclops abandoned in a cave, left to die in darkness; the fate prophesized for them by a cruel man who would be, in other stories, the hero of the tale? Does a hero lie only in the tales he tells and in the tales that are told about him? Is he in truth an old man, relieving the half-truths that haunt his aching bones in a long journey through time? Do they challenge themselves based on the stories of a witch and former lover to be tempted and tied to the mast of their ship, to have sirens sing for them in their bound state? Are all journeys simply about death? Like the death of an ancient king, carried to a series of hills behind his home, laid to rest to the crackling and whispering of fireworks. Is the home our hero seeks always that same home we seek at the end of our own long journeys? Is this why we tell stories in the first place; to explain for ourselves the bumps in the road, the confusions we can’t quite wrap our waking mind around? Do we tell stories so that we might, in some way, understand and accept the world we find ourselves in? Is that why every story is, ultimately, the same? For Mason, the answer for all of the above is multiple choice. For even the hero, who in the book’s final story visits a Troy that is more akin to Disneyland and finds what he thinks is a shield forged by the mighty smith god Hephaistos for Achilles, but is ultimately an imitation, tells himself, in those moments, a story to pacify the weight of time. Works Cited: Capmbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1949. Mason, Zachary. The Lost Books of the Odyssey. New York: Picador, 2007.
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November 2021
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