Recovering Identity Through Myth, History and Place

Recovering Identity Through Myth, History and Place

Myth and history are necessary in explaining the world, and can be depended upon for guidance with one as reliable as the other. The idea of place, with its inherent myth and history, is an important factor in one's identity because place shapes character and events. Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, E. Anne Proulx's The Shipping News, Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, and Jack Hodgins' The Invention of the World use myth and lore to describe the obstacles which the protagonists and others must get over or confront in order to recover their perspective identities. Place anchors the novels in Canada: Fifth Business in Ontario, The Shipping News in Newfoundland, In the Skin of a Lion in Toronto, and The Invention of the World on Vancouver Island. Because they are different places, different stories develop; but since these places are in Canada, they share the Idea of North in which the dream world is as important as the real world. This paper will demonstrate this typically Canadian characteristic of myth coexisting with reality, showing that explanations of identity given by myth and the oral tradition are at least as powerful as documented history.

In order to understand how myth and history work to explain things and recover identity it is important to understand their similarities and differences. Myth and history are similar in that they both explain, instruct, give origin, and shape the world. Their differences lie in the use of the supernatural. Whereas myth deals with "supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes," and explains "aspects of the natural world," history is "A chronological record of events, as of the development of a people....A formal written account of related natural phenomena" (College Dictionary 903, 644). Myth relies on faith for belief, while recorded history relies on documentation or proof. Though they differ in these ways, myth and history are both equally reliable sources of explanation and guidance. Whereas one event may be documented to have taken place and another event may not have such proof, both happenings offer the same end: what is to be learned from the story. Northrop Frye writes in "The Koine of Myth" that there are stories that "may be asserted to have really happened, but what is important about them is not that, but that they are stories which it is particularly urgent for the community to know. They tell us about the recognized gods, the legendary history, the origins of law, class structure, kinship formations, and natural features" (Myth and Metaphor 5). If a person learns from myth to live in this world as a whole person, she has a truth at least as functional as one taken from recorded history or documented fact.

Billy Pritty in The Shipping News does not use recorded scientific methods to chart his way in the water, as one who studies history might. Rather he relies on oral tradition to keep his boat from hitting known sinkers. Enveloped in thick fog, Billy uses a rhyme from the time when people sailed without modern aides such as charts or lights:

When the Knitting Pins you is abreast,

Desperate Cove bears due west

Behind the Pins you must steer

'Til The Old Man's Shoe does appear.

The tickle lies just past the toe,

It's narrow, you must slowly go. (175)

The idea of finding one's path by way of myth or oral tradition is typically Canadian, since not all of Canada has been mapped from the ground. In many cases myth is more reliable than recorded history because its telling goes back farther in time, and thus it existed before documentation. It had power before the printing press inked history books. Further, the example of the "Gammy Bird" (a paper that prints fake advertisements and recycles wrecks to present them as new) as a spreader of information and truth proves that documented "facts" are not always to be believed.

Dunstan Ramsay in Fifth Business argues that "a serious study of any important body of human knowledge , or theory, or belief...would in the end yield some secret, some valuable permanent insight, into the nature of life and the true end of man" (Davies 169). All myths, then, may have truths in them. Padre Blazon teaches Ramsay that mythical stories and history are equally reliable forms of truth. Ramsay states that "religion and Arabian Nights were true in the same way....they were both psychologically rather than literally true, and...psychological truth was really as important in its own way as historical verification" (Davies 71). Ramsay's experience teaches him that myth acts in the same manner as history, and that one is a part of the other. He writes, "As I have grown older my bias--the oddly recurrent themes of history, which are also the themes of myth--has asserted itself" (Davies 117).

Ramsay continues in wondering, "Why do people all over the world, and at all times, want marvels that defy all verifiable facts? And are the marvels brought into being by their desire, or is their desire an assurance rising from some deep knowledge, not to be directly experienced and questioned, that the marvelous is indeed an aspect of the real?" (Davies 199). Because there is truth in myth, and history includes aspects of the marvelous, both myth and history describe events and places with equal reliability. There is, however, something more fulfilling in myth because it does not consciously keep inside the borders of an assumed reality. Because of this nonconformity, myth can be just as powerful a teacher today as it was in earlier ages. It is etched in our memories more than is history because the lesson taught through myth is more important than the recorded facts. Northrop Frye, in writing of poetry, demonstrates that documented "fact" is not as useful or important to us as language: "Each age of science stands on the shoulders of its predecessors; poetry knows nothing of progress, only of recurrence.... Poetry attempts to unite the physical environment to man through...metaphor" (The Stubborn Structure 84). Because the things that are presented as recorded facts, such as the Mongolians crossing the Bearing Strait and spilling into Canada and the US. around the time of the ice age, are often shown to be incomplete and must be built upon, they are not the most reliable source of truth. The unscientific explanations given by the language of poetry or myth are often more useful since they rely on themselves, rather