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the Judeo-Christian tradition. So let s say that somewhere back there in the mists of time when
storytelling was completely oral (or pictorial, if you count the cave walls), a body of myth began
establishing itself. The unanswerable question, it seems to me, is whether there was ever freestanding
myth informing our stories or whether the mythic level grows out of the stories that we tell to explain
ourselves and our world. In other words, was there some original master story for any particular myth
from which all subsequent stories pallid imitations are displacements, or does the myth take
shape by slow accretion as variant story versions are told and retold over time? I incline toward the
latter, but I don t know. In fact, I doubt anyone can know. I also doubt whether it matters. What does
matter is that there is this mythic level, the level on which archetype operates and from which we
borrow the figure of, for instance, the dying-and-reviving man (or god) or the young boy who must
undertake a long journey.
Those stories myth, archetype, religious narrative, the great body of literature are always with us.
Always in us. We can draw upon them, tap into them, add to them whenever we want. One of our great
storytellers, country singer Willie Nelson, was sitting around one day just noodling on the guitar,
improvising melodies he d never written down, never heard in quite those forms. His companion, a
nonmusician whose name I forget, asked him how he could come up with all those tunes. They re all
around us, old Willie said. You just reach up and pick them out of the air. Stories are like that, too.
That one story that has been going on forever is all around us. We as readers or writers, tellers or
listeners understand each other, we share knowledge of the structures of our myths, we comprehend
the logic of symbols, largely because we have access to the same swirl of story. We have only to reach
out into the air and pluck a piece of it.
21 - Marked for Greatness
QUASIMODO IS A HUNCHBACK. So is Richard III (Shakespeare s, not history s). Mary Shelley s
better-known creation, not Victor Frankenstein, but his monster, is a man of parts. Oedipus has
damaged feet. And Grendel well, he is another monster. All characters who are as famous for their
shape as for their behavior. Their shapes tell us something, and probably very different somethings,
about them or other people in the story.
First, the obvious but nonetheless necessary observation: in real life, when people have any physical
mark or imperfection, it means nothing thematically, metaphorically, or spiritually. Well, a scar on your
cheek might tell us something if you got it as a member of a dueling fraternity at Heidelberg, and
certain self-inflicted marks Grateful Dead tattoos for instance might say something about your
musical tastes. But by and large a short leg is just a short leg, and scoliosis is just scoliosis.
But put that scoliosis on Richard III and, voilÀ , you have something else entirely. Richard, as morally
and spiritually twisted as his back, is one of the most completely repugnant figures in all of literature.
And while it might strike us as cruel and unjust to equate physical deformity with character or moral
deformity, it seemed not only acceptable to the Elizabethans but almost inevitable. Shakespeare is
very much a product of his time in suggesting that one s proximity to or distance from God is
manifested in external signs. The Puritans, only a few years after him, saw failure in business ruined
crops, bankruptcy, financial mismanagement, even disease in one s herd as clear evidence of God s
displeasure and therefore of moral shortcomings. Evidently the story of Job didn t play in Plymouth.
Right. The Elizabethans and Jacobeans weren t politically correct. So now what? you ask. Meaning,
what about four centuries later?
Things have changed pretty dramatically in terms of equating scars or deformities with moral
shortcomings or divine displeasure, but in literature we continue to understand physical imperfection
in symbolic terms. It has to do with being different, really. Sameness doesn t present us with
metaphorical possibilities, whereas difference from the average, the typical, the expected is always
rich with possibility.
Vladimir Propp, in his landmark study of folktales back in the 1920s, Morphology of the Folktale,
separates the story of the folk quester into thirty or so separate steps. One of the initial steps is that
the hero is marked in some way. He may be scarred or lamed or wounded or painted or born with a
short leg, but he bears some mark that sets him apart. The tales Propp looks at go back hundreds of
years and have scores of variants, and while they happen to be Slavic in origin, structurally they
resemble the Germanic, Celtic, French, and Italian folktales better known in the West. Many of those
tales continue to inform our understanding of how stories are told.
You doubt? How many stories do you know in which the hero is different from everyone else in some
way, and how many times is that difference physically visible? Why does Harry Potter have a scar,
where is it, how did he get it, and what does it resemble?
Consider the ways Toni Morrison marks her characters. One quester, our old friend Milkman Dead
from Song of Solomon, bears an initial marking, one leg being shorter than the other. He spends much
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