Our Ned: The Makeup of Myth

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MYTH AND FICTIONDEFINITIONS OF MYTH, FROM ACCOUNTS OF CREATION TO RELIGIOUS CREEDS, FROM Freud's Oedipus complex to today's media legends, are as diverse as their makers. They do have common denominator, however; all of them tell madeup story, as indicated in title of this essay, and also in popular use of word to mean lie. Peter Carey challenges that usage directly by calling his novel True His ton) of Kelly Gang. purpose of this paper is to examine truthfulness of with specific reference to Carey's mythopoeic fiction. Since Carey's narrative voice is that of Kelly himself, I focus particularly hero, or man-myth.Fictions about Ned Kelly include Douglas Stewart's 1943 Ned Kelly, musicals (The Long Drop, recorded in Benalla Town Flail in 1964), symposium in Wangaratta in 1965, and Centenary Festival held at Winton in 1980. There have been artworks by Albert Tucker and Sydney Nolan and steady flow of books, from Max Brown's biography Australian Son, in 1945, through Carey's True History in 2000, to recent publication of Ned Kelly by Peter Fitzsimons. Together, they evidence Kelly's wellestablished place in collective Australian imagination and role of fiction in, to cite Jung, on (Segal 179). word dreaming connotes subjectivity of and sense in which its fictions may be true; in this article it triggers comparison of Kelly and Julian Assange and speculation how may evolve in culture dependent communications of mass media.As far as we know, myths are first made up by human beings and we have been making them up ever since. Through word of mouth or click of mouse, are how we make sense of our world, or worlds. Not all stories, of course, are memorable enough to be mythologized; that is, stored in our collective consciousness for generations. Mythologist Eric Csapo in his Theories of Myth11 defines such narratives as stories generally considered to be socially important (Csapo 9), told and retold for that reason.As our consciousness has evolved, so too has myth; social scientists, psychologists, historians, and philosophers have interpreted their own as well as past cul- tures through mythic narrative. The Myth of Sisyphus, for example, is an ancient Greek legend about king who defied gods; story is retold by atheist Albert Camus in essay of same name. Camus re-imagines Sisyphus's story in order to address one truly serious philosophical problem of suicide and whether life is or is not worth (Camus 11). Sisyphus becomes absurd hero, completely aware of absurdity of his existence-pushing rock to top of hill for it to roll straight back down, only to be pushed straight back up again-yet remaining convinced that the struggle itself towards heights is enough to fill man's heart. One imagine Sisyphus happy (Camus 111). Such transgenerational evolution of confirms that we do and must imagine, and that significant function of is to exercise our compulsion to tell as a narrative mode of understanding.1 hero, or man-myth, becomes living metaphor that evolves to represent our evolving consciousness.SUBJECTIVITY AND MYTHUnlike preachers of religious with their intimations of immortality ( Wordsworth 112), and unlike challengers of science, where visionary gleam (Wordsworth 114) has to be quantifiable, writers of mythopoeic fiction are concerned to recreate total human experience, what William Butler Yeats called the fury and mire of human veins (Heaney 94). To describe work of fiction as having quality of myth is to acknowledge some intuitively recognizable representation of what it means to be human. How does fiction attain such quality? When, I propose, fictioneer creates correlative, an individual mythic figure with whom we may identify and to whom we may project our own subjective aspirations. …