Prolific science writer Philip Ball wrote a book called The Modern Myths, where he pointed to:
– Robinson Crusoe
– Frankenstein
– Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
– Dracula
– The War of the Worlds
– Sherlock Holmes
– Batman
It’s a good list. All of them are fictional characters whose general properties have become well known—mythical—and have escaped the confines of their original stories.
There are two ways in which I’d like to add to his list:
1. Going beyond specific characters to include more general tropes. One example that comes to mind is the future society that combines material abundance with spiritual emptiness: this is associated with Brave New World but is now a trope that’s out there on its own. Also, just about everything on tvtropes.org. The Nosy Neighbor is a modern myth, no? And Shane, and the Gay Best Friend, and the Small Town Tyrant, and many more.
2. Historical myths, which are often connected to fiction in some way but play some political role. Two notorious examples are the myth that just about everyone living in France during World War 2 was in the Resistance, and the myth of the noble slave-owning South, as expressed in The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind.
I don’t have anything systematic to offer here—Ball wrote a whole book on the topic, and this is just a short blog post—I just think there’s more to say on this topic.
It’s interesting that several of the myths arise from a broadly horror genre (Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde), or are more generally threatening (War of the Worlds). I wonder if this is to do with archaic threats holding a place in our minds and sticking in consciousness more to take on a life of their own.
As a side note, I’m not sure there are characters from War of the Worlds that everyone knows/that live in popular consciousness outside of the story?
Other myths/memes: ‘preachy vegans’?
To consider things a bit systematically, it would be interesting to know e.g., how awareness of particular characters compares with awareness of particular actual stories/books in which those characters feature or were introduced. That could provide quite a good sense of how much some characters live outside of their respective books.
Joe the plumber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_the_Plumber.
I guess he was real, not fictional. But then again, who knows?
Dale, many thanks for bringing up “Joe the Plumber” and its links; absolutely remarkable reading. Those were the good old days when the nation was only slightly nuts. Still, this was part of conversation even back then,
“Wurzelbacher also questioned Obama’s patriotism, saying ‘there’s too many questions with Barack Obama and his loyalty to our country.'”
Of course, recourse to “patriotism” is the last/first refuge of a scoundrel, or is it? As always, things are complicated/confused as can be seen here:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/06/14/scoundrel
Unfortunately, no mention whatever concerning the neologism, “Gulf of America.”
@Dale Lehman:
As mentioned above, there are also myths based on real events. Above our host mentioned the French Resistance and the noble slave owner. I immediately thought of Napoleon. He was very much a human being, but he is often portrayed as more than a mere mortal. I know that historians deal with myths all the time as they shape the narrative of history.
One of the myths about Napoleon was his height. Rather, the lack of it.
https://www.thoughtco.com/was-napoleon-bonaparte-short-1221108
“It turns out that Napoleon Bonaparte wasn’t particularly short at all. Napoleon’s height is sometimes described as being 5 foot 2 inches tall, which would definitely make him short for his era. However, there is a strong argument that this figure is wrong and that Napoleon was actually about 5 foot 6 inches tall, no shorter than the average Frenchman.”
A more general modern myth would be Ayn Rand’s objectivism, embodied in terrible prose by the protagonists of her two most famous books, Howard Roark and Dagny Taggart.
Here the modern myth is not that some individuals are what capitalist society considers “high achievers,” but rather the belief that he/she who dies with the most toys wins, a phrase that fully encompasses everything we need to know about the deplorable philosophy of Ayn Rand.
I think its interesting she had just lived through both a kind of hyper-communism and then a hyper-capitalism crash course.
Britain and Germany allowed (sent?) Trotsky and Lenin, respectively, there in the hopes they would seize power from the original revolutionaries.
After the hyper-communist techniques were tried, an attempt to better apply Marx’s original theory was next:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy
That is pretty much what we read about in Atlas Shrugged, which ended in its own economic destruction then revolution.
Ayn Rand’s objectivism has morphed into Libertarianism, which embeds several myths:
–Voluntary market transactions are inherently fair and moral, regardless of the initial starting points of the individuals in the market and how they got there. E.g. for the US, land ownership and wealth are legitimately distributed and we can ignore the displacement of Native Americans or enslavement of Africans in how that wealth was obtained.
–The world will not dissolve into a Hobbesian war of all against all, in which war lords, barrons, or mafias assert control over populations, distributing and redistributing wealth and favors based on factors unrelated to market productivity. The Hobbesian war of all against all probably also falls into the modern myth category, having been reified from its source, although the historical accuracy of the model in the absence of a state with a monopoly on violence seems well established.
–There is no community in which we live and in which we have obligations to and from one another.
I’m fairly sure its more there will always be a biggest gang, and the primary purpose of forming a government (which should be the only entity authorized to use aggression) is to stop any other (putatively even worse) gang from ordering people around.
Then that this legitimate use of force should be disconnected from the other types of community services people would like to have, since it opens up a vulnerability bad actors will try to take advantage of for their own benefit. Such as legalizing slavery and genocide.
Basically the opposite of what you wrote. That said, it may be more of an ideal rather something that is possible given the current level of technology.
I’m not sure I understand what Anoneuoid just said, but the description sounds much like the current MAGA playbook. The primary purpose of the US government, in MAGA terms, seems to be the biggest gang. It is tribal warfare in the modern era. I know we can’t escape our biological and social evolution – humans were meant to feel tribal, but I had hoped that our big brains allowed us (as a species and as individuals) to temper that with compassion and intelligence. As technology has developed, simple tribal instincts and battles remain as threats, but there are a whole variety of threats that call for more than being the biggest gang. When small gangs have biological or nuclear weapons, then bullying may not be adequate protection. When our collective actions threaten our ecological resources, then bullying may even be counterproductive. In any case, dying with the knowledge that I was part of the biggest gang will not make my life fulfilling or worthwhile.
The only Rand book I’ve read is “Anthem”, but I don’t think “who dies with the most toys wins” is any kind of summary of her outlook. Rand was into impressive qualities, not mere quantities of storebought items. So perhaps something closer to “He who dies after creating the biggest megaproject wins”.
I’ve watched the King Vidor adaptation of The Fountainhead (but not read the book), and the hero doesn’t accumulate material possessions. He works in manual labor rather than pursuing a better paid job in architecture that would require him to compromise his artistic principles. He later acts as a ghostwriter for zero pay or credit, purely so he can achieve his artistic vision. And, most bizarrely for her professed politics, he’s still supposed to be a hero for destroying the resulting building that he has zero property rights to because it was altered from his design that he never had any contractual guarantee for. It’s art-uber-alles romanticism rather than materialism.
Modern myths ; Life on other planets And leaving earth Were stuck here for eternity
The lone protagonist who kills 200+ other people without suffering any significant injury.
The cop who does not play by the rules but ends up catching the bad guy the very last minute.
The apparent sociopath who nevertheless has some kind moral code.
These are reusable with minor perturbations , apparently forever.
Moon and Mars colonies got started as fiction and now have true believers. In fact, “make this story I read when I was 14 real” is a trend in out time as rich men age.
I first encountered transhumanism and singulitarianism through a TTRPG setting inspired by anime.
Sean:
Do you remember the internet zillionaire John McAfee, who achieved some notoriety a few years back? At the time, I wrote:
A lot of older men liked the CEO of Tesla because they though he was D.D. Harriman the man who sold the moon. The evidence against this story was out there if you looked but people often prefer stories to hypotheses.
Sean:
Also it didn’t help that the news media were been pretty much portraying him as a hero for a decade.
That said, just restricting ourselves to U.S. automobile executives, Henry Ford was a hatemonger–like Elon Musk, he actively promoted easily-discredited conspiracy theories–and Ford was a culture hero too. One difference is that Ford pretty much kept his business interests and his fringe-politics interests separate, whereas Musk uses the two to reinforce each other. I guess that if a far-right authoritarian had come to power in the U.S. during Ford’s era, he might have joined his two interests and played a role closer to what Musk is doing today?
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Dr. Faustus and his deal with the devil. The phrase “Faustian bargain” appears fairly often in journalism and literature. Speaking of literature, I can think of two examples of Faustian bargains in novels off the top of my head (there must be many more): 1. Dorian Gray and the deal whereby his portrait ages, but he doesn’t 2. the bargain made by several people in “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”, whereby taking the drug Chew-Z enables one to enter a reality where many of one’s wishes are granted, at the cost of having the sinister, devil-like figure Palmer Eldritch manifest himself periodically and control what happens … I have a feeling that Andrew Gelman, a Philip K. Dick fan, will appreciate this reference. I’ve always thought “Three Stigmata” is one of the most effective modern versions of the Faustus myth. The thought of giving someone or something with Palmer Eldritch’s ominous physical characteristics the freedom to roam around in my head and in my life is terrifying.
Speaking of Faustian bargains, it could be argued that American red-state voters recently … but I suppose that as a Canadian – we’re known to be ultra-diplomatic – I should stop there.
For years, I mistakenly thought that the title of Wilde’s book was, “The Portrait of Dorian Gray,” although it is actually entitled, “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” It does not help that Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray
says, “The story revolves around a portrait of Dorian Gray painted by Basil Hallward, a friend of Dorian’s and an artist infatuated with Dorian’s beauty.” For more hair splitting, i.e., insight
https://photofocus.com/photography/a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words-but-a-portrait-is-worth-so-much-more/
“It can be said that all portraits are pictures, but not all pictures are portraits. The best way to differentiate between the two is to think about the intent behind the image. If the goal was simply to capture a moment in time, then it’s just a picture. But if the goal was to try and capture the spirit of the subject matter, then it’s a portrait.”
Given that explanation, the proper 1891 title should be, “The Portrait of Dorian Gray.” But, alas, it is not. As evidenced by the current flap over “The Gulf of America,” (re)naming something properly can generate heated discussions.
How can someone make such a list with “Batman” and not include “Superman”? Also, there’s not one woman on the entire list, and certainly “Wonder Woman” outranks “Robinson Crusoe”.
There’s definitely much which can be said, especially with many humanities graduate students looking for Ph.D topics. “Popular Culture” studies is a whole subarea in itself.
In the Batman chapter, he gives a reason for not including Superman and Wonder Woman.
I could use a few more “our machines will become sentient and attack us” stories. Those never get old.
This is so very male-centric. On the fiction side, how about Madame Bovary, Lolita, the Handmaid’s Tale or essentially any Jane Austen story. On the non-fiction side, Marie Curie and Mother Theresa have both become modern archetypes.
I would definitely add Pride and Prejudice.
Not my original thought, but I have heard it argued that H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction and the theme of cosmic horror — an insurmountably more powerful force that is functionally indifferent to the existence of mankind — is an important modern addition to the classic forms of mythology. Certainly gods have always been a theme, but those were almost always human-ish in their concerns (and even their forms) and didn’t include the nihilistic or incomprehensible dimensions of Lovecraft.