Postmodernist Mythopoeia

Andrew Heather  Graeme MacDonald 
 3 
 
And from Haruki Murakami’s Dance, Dance, Dance: 
 
“Excuse me,” I began, “but I heard that two girls were tragically attacked by an 
alligator at the swim club last night. Do you know if there’s any truth to that story?”
3
 
 
Each of the authors makes explicit reference to the same section of Pynchon’s V that 
Michael Bell isolates for his study of mythopoeia in postmodernism: 
 
Geronimo stopped singing and told Profane how it was. Did he remember the baby 
alligators? Last year, or maybe the year before, kids all over Nueva York bought 
these little alligators for pets. Macy’s was selling them for fifty cents, every child, it 
seemed, had to have one. But soon the children grew bored with them. Some set them 
loose in the streets, but most flushed them down the toilets. And these had grown and 
reproduced, had fed off rats and sewage, so that now they moved big, blind, albino, 
all over the sewer system. Down there, God knew how many there were. Some had 
turned cannibal because in their neighbourhood the rats had all been eaten, or had 
fled in terror.
4
 
 
 Furthermore each of the novels incorporates the theme of predestination and 
supernatural ability. Particularly in Haruki Murakami and Palahniuk, the existence of 
a supernatural realm is insistent and foregrounded. Seemingly as a reaction to the 
traumatic state of contemporary life Palahniuk, Gibson and Haruki Murakami all 
depicts characters who use verbal ticks as a form of self defence ‘spell’. This 
argument will attempt to analyse these convergences of interest by suggesting that 
each of our authors is not only concerned directly with mythopoeia, but that each uses 
it as a basis for social change. There is an urgency to be found in these texts 
responding to developments in advanced capitalism not covered in Bell’s work. If the 
crisis of modernism was that worldviews had become relative, there is a feeling in 
these novels that contemporary society homogenises and normalises to such a 
pervasive extent that the contingency of our horizon is being effaced. With reference 
to Barthes we will show that the stranglehold of capitalist values is being strengthened 
by erasure of the contingency of those values. My central contention is that a subtle 
                                                 
3
 Haruki Murakami, Dance, Dance, Dance (London: Vintage, 2003a), pp. 97-8. 
4
 Thomas Pynchon, V (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 43.  
Andrew Heather  Graeme MacDonald 
 4 
development in literary postmodernism has taken place. Though in the past 
postmodernism has been accused of being neo-conservative formal play without 
reference or relevance to social reality, I believe the contemporary fiction we are 
considering shows quite the opposite features. These authors attempt through their 
work to re-emphasise myth, to demonstrate active and heterogenous mythopoeia. 
Each of the texts, as if responding to imminent apocalypse, takes on a conscious 
political activism and attempts to combat the sedimentation of occidental capitalist 
values through the creation of counter-mythologies. 
 
BELL 
 
In order to support this claim we must first outline the general position Bell takes up 
as regards modernist mythopoeia.  
 
The word ‘myth’ inhabits a twilight zone between literature, philosophy and 
anthropology. It means both a supremely significant foundational story and a 
falsehood. We therefore use it rationally; one person’s belief is another myth.
5
 
 
Stated as a proposition, this is simply the fact that fully conscious citizens of the 
twentieth century are aware that their deepest commitments and beliefs are part of a 
world view, whether individual or collective, which cannot be transcendentally 
grounded or privileged over other possible world views. The interest lies not in the 
proposition, but in how it is lived, individually and collectively. (Bell, 1997, p. 1) 
 
Bell’s interest is in the outlook that sees the world in mythic terms and he argues the 
point that much modernist literature has an underlying metaphysic of mythopoeia. 
Bell explores Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus in which Zeitblom, as a teacher, 
recognises the importance of giving his pupils a horizon, a boundary and a 
foundation. The narrator asserts though that in order for the character and the 
capacities to be effectively sustained, the relativity of this worldview must remain 
‘unrecognised’. For Bell the fragmentation of the modern world emphasised the 
relativity of one’s worldview. It left beliefs more arbitrary and created a certain level 
                                                 
5
 Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 
p. 1. 
Andrew Heather  Graeme MacDonald 
 5 
of self-consciousness whereby the individual or collective worldview is recognised as 
contingent, but must be lived with conviction. Zeitblom himself is evidence of the 
double thought: he wants to give his students a stable worldview free from 
contingency he himself cannot possess. Bell is also careful to note the relevance of 
modernist literature to the pragmatics of inhabiting a belief. He posits that modernist 
literature and its mythopoeic model, were important to the creation of the truth values 
of the era. It engaged with a modern understanding of conviction by inhabiting a 
protean zone between ideology and narrative. Bell also paraphrases Richard Rorty in 
order to show how myth is implemented, in modernist terms: 
 
In his account of moral convictions as ultimately ungroundable, contingent and to be 
held in a spirit of irony, Rorty effectively expresses the intellectual structure of 
modernist mythopoeia, but his way of doing so reinforces the pertinence of the term 
‘myth’ in mediating between the philosophical realm on the one hand and the poetic 
or pragmatic realms on the other. For modernist mythopoeia is a way of combining 
radical relativity with the apodictic nature of conviction. (Bell, 1997, p. 4) 
 
Bell’s theme, he believed, was belated at the time of its publication but I believe its 
relevance is such that a follow-up study is more than merited. What significance does 
the theme of mythopoeia have when used as a lens through which to view bleeding 
edge contemporary texts? Does postmodernism engage with mythopoeia as 
modernism did? What changes are made to the theory or use of mythopoeia? What 
light is cast on contemporary fiction by viewing it in these terms? These are some of 
the questions that prompted the present argument. In the belief that narrative fiction, 
‘is the genre most evidently concerned with the creation of collective worlds’ (Bell, 
1997, p. 5) it will attempt to begin to sketch a sense of a composite contemporary 
mythopoeic sensibility, if any, and the transformations it has undergone. By way of 
Barthes and Foucault it will explore the idea that a hyper real, media-image-oriented 
postmodernity significantly affects the mass political horizon and will explore the 
possibility that manufactured consent is effectively unifying the world views of late 
capitalist societies. 
 
An interesting way to begin to explore and outline the developments that have to be 
considered when continuing Bell’s theme would be to look at his response to 
Andrew Heather  Graeme MacDonald 
 6 
MacIntyre. Bell appreciates MacIntyre’s attempt to invoke narrative as a sufficient 
means of dealing with the grounding of (then) moral life, but notes in rebuttal that 
values prior to narrative, inherent in language, are necessary to its creation. We must 
heed this warning and look at how postmodernist mythopoeia deals with relative 
beliefs as they are held pragmatically. We find that significant force is exerted on our 
beliefs by society’s having moved deeper and deeper into a system of advanced 
capitalism. The values pre-existent in the language, in the form of the novel, in the 
author’s sphere of experience, in the frame of reference of the reader, the market into 
which the novel is released, etc, are such that they severely problematise Bell’s 
opening proposition. To look at its wording again: 
 
Stated as a proposition, this is simply the fact that fully conscious citizens of the 
twentieth century are aware that their deepest commitments and beliefs are part of a 
world view, whether individual or collective, which cannot be transcendentally 
grounded or privileged over other possible world views. (Bell, 1997, p. 1) 
 
My italics here allude to the idea that in a very real sense the concept of a fully 
conscious citizen of the twenty-first century citizen is becoming an increasingly 
difficult myth to slip past the reader. Much contemporary intellectual thought about 
power/knowledge and contemporary literature, including the authors we are studying, 
is concerned explicitly with the restriction of awareness, normalisation, 
homogenisation, indoctrination and the elimination of history that is dangerously 
corrosive of ‘full consciousness’. The signs are not restricted to intellectual life: 
current Western foreign policy and public voting habits/opinion polls are arguably 
showing a mass trend away from seeing western late capitalism and democracy as 
contingent. There is an increasing sense that the tolerance of other worldviews that is 
necessary to seeing one’s own as contingent is on the wane. A central tenet of 
contemporary postmodernism, I will argue, is the prominence of myth in Barthes’ 
sense of the term. That is to say I believe the novels we are studying identify the very 
real danger that contemporary advanced capitalism is awash with conservative 
messages, beliefs and values that work to propagate the eternal dominance of 
advanced capitalist consumerism, by removing all trace of their political content. 
Barthes’ contention, that we will later look at in greater depth, is that right-wing and 
conservative political values are made myth by the complete obfuscation and eventual 
Andrew Heather  Graeme MacDonald 
 7 
invisibility of all political intent. Messages, beliefs, or values that conserve the status 
quo are passed off as eternal values: without history and with unconquerable ubiquity. 
This mythical facet of postmodernity creates a mass worldview lived with complete 
conviction, but – and here is the crucial change – its contingency and relativity are in 
the process of being eliminated. Postmodernity, Barthes suggests, attempts to erase 
every trace that late capitalist societies could ever have been any other way than they 
are now. Their alterity is never a possibility; their domination will be eternal. 
 
An important passage from Bell that outlines the basis of his investigation comes 
from his reading of Nietzsche. He responds to Nietzsche’s ‘universal law’ in Untimely 
Meditations that suggests every human to function effectively needs a ‘horizon’ in 
which to live. It guides what can properly be seen and thought and while it can be 
shifting, Bell believes, one can be conscious of having a world view but not of the 
world view itself. What Nietzsche radically proposes is a reflexive awareness that life 
consists of a horizon sustained and inhabited by the subject. The kind of oxymoronic 
double consciousness required to maintain a self-conscious mythopoeia is similar to 
that demanded by Nietzsche’s ‘superhistorical detachment,’ which involves a 
somewhat impersonal vantage point or a position of awareness that views the passions 
and turns of history from ‘outside.’ This idea refutes claims for scientific objectivity 
as myth, in the Barthesian sense, and instead promotes an imaginative approach that 
views history as a work of art. This alert relativity is an core idea for Bell: 
 
This double consciousness of sustaining, while acting within, a world view is the 
essential posture of modernist mythopoeia whose transformations can be seen in the 
voluminous literature of the twentieth century which has continued to explore the 
problematics of history under the sign of myth. (Bell, 1997, p. 34) 
 
We must question then what is the relevance of contemporary literature as regards this 
idea of self-conscious mythopoeia. What, if anything, has changed in the ‘posture’ 
displayed by postmodernism? The self and its creation in the novels we are 
considering is often in a state of extreme crisis. A mythopoeic approach to 
understanding the self was evident in modernism: