Sean Kane's voices of the Mythtellers

Sean Kane says that oral myth is a patchwork of different people's voices coming together to form the song of community. The written tradition, on the other hand, is "conveyed within a relatively narrow acoustic band" primarily because it's created by one author. I would debate this, especially when it comes to serials or comic books--these are often interpreted by a wide range of authors who add their particular voice. Cultural figures like Superman or Batman have gone through many deviations over the years; and one can take a character like Harry Potter, originally created by one author, and say many, many people have used their own voice to portray him, especially across different medias.

For a wider view, there have been eight films produced from Rowling's books, artwork by thousands of artists, and maybe most importantly, the fan fiction littered across the web. Sites like fanfiction.net and MuggleNet allow users to log on and create their own stories using their favorite pop culture properties. There is a wide range of romances (be they between Hermione and Harry, or Harry and Hagrid), rewritings of established books, and further sequels. Harry is not the singular point of one woman's imagination anymore, he is a lightning rod of our collective dreams and fears. He can be anything to anyone and his books are not "delimited by the individual who writes alone and silently" (Wisdom of the Mythtellers, 188). Walter Ong's 'secondary orality' lets the online community continue Harry's adventures, though they may be apocryphal. We can compare this to the 'authoritative' canon of the Bible, which tried to squash the writings of the Gnostics and other sects at the first Council of Nicaea (325 BCE).

The internet, in its own perverse way, is the voice of humanity--it is so alien, so intangible and logical, but it is also more 'human' than any one person could be. It is our collective emotions, prejudices, logos, and mythos; it is everything great about us, but also everything wrong with us.



"The storyteller," according to Kane, "is simply the one who speaks the myth on behalf of the listeners" (WotMT 189). Grant Morrison, in his book about super heroes, Super Gods, says characters like Superman and Batman didn't exist in a "close continua with beginnings, middles, and ends; the fictional 'universe' [of DC and Marvel] ran on certain repeating rules but could essentially change and develop beyond the intention of its creators. It was an evolving, learning, cybernetic system that could reproduce itself into the future using new generations of creators who would be attracted like worker bees to serve and renew the universe" (117). His emphasis, not mine. He goes onto to compare the characters to something like twelve-bar blues or a chord progression. Different writers could "play very different music. This meant interesting work could be done by writers and artists who knew what they were getting into and were happy to add their own little square to a vast patchwork quilt of stories that would outlast their lives" (118).

Myths, memes, and serials are similar to 'mind babies' or tulpas by Tibetan masters ('thought-beings'). They can possess an age, live past their creators, and become something bigger than any one man or woman. In the South Park three-parter, Imaginationland, Kyle and Eric debate whether imaginal characters are actually real. Eric, of course, does it for his own perverted reasons, but in the end, Kyle is forced into a conclusion:

It's all real. Think about it. Haven't Luke Skywalker and Santa Claus affected your lives more than most real people in this room? I mean, whether Jesus is real or not, he--he's had a bigger impact on the world than any of us have. And the same can be said for Bugs Bunny and--and Superman and Harry Potter. They've changed my life--changed the way I act on the earth. Doesn't that make them kind of real? They might be imaginary but, but they're more important than most of us here. And they're all gonna be around here long after we're dead. So, in a way, those things are more realer than any of us.

The characters we create and adore are like the gods of old. They descend from the astral spheres and inhabit you, speak through you, become you. The voices inside your head are not your own, but the gods' divine thoughts. Kane relates that myth-telling, like all communication, is a performance. We dance with each other without realizing it. In this way, we are God pretending to be human, a rabbit, a bush because in the end, it is all a performance. The people of the Paleolithic knew this very well.



Kane compares old myths to a conch shell. They have been retold so many times that they spiral with the passage of time. Repeated stories develop a sort of richness because each voice adds a texture or echo. Right now we can see this in "The Hunger Games" film, where outspoken fans complain that something was left out or not done right. For a disgusting example, racist tweeters raged about the African American roles of Rue, Cinna, and Thresh not being what they imagined. This is a new story with clear echoes of past Dystopian tales like "Battle Royale" and "Mad Max". However, as the years progress and more movies, fan fiction, and art are created from Suzanne Collins' works, the tale will only become richer.

I know I have talked about super heroes a lot, but they are such great examples. Superman, an American icon with decades of stories told in various media behind him, is a superbly rich character because of this. Each new story has baggage and depth.

Kane describes how myths were told in hunter-gatherer cultures. "Beyond community," he says, "but not far beyond it, there is nature. For the oral societies that lived by hunting and fishing, nature was the very source of voices. It was like a huge, infinitely resonant drum. From it came the startling noises--the thunder and howling winds imitated in the sounding of rattles and drums of village celebration, noises meant to catch the spirit world" (Kane 190-91). The tales' tellings thus became a recreation of the music of nature--each drum beat mimicked a bird's call or an elephant's stomp, and the "energy of the singer invoke[d] energies in nature, which gather until the whole drum song hangs in a tumultuous and chancy kind of order, much like improvisational jazz" (191).

Both Morrison and Kane used the metaphor of riffing to explain different speakers' and writers' interpretation of the same story. Kane calls this a polyphony, or "an echo in human expression of a world in which everything has intelligence, everything has personality, everything has a voice" (191). On the other hand is vulgar homophony, or human speech, cut off from the sounds of nature. It is the difference between Saturn and the Mother. One cuts up reality ('consciousness-eaters') the other is an untamed wholeness, taking in both good and evil unbiasedly. Agriculture, according to Kane, is when man started to feel he could own things and thus started competing with nature instead of being in harmony with it.