This is all very interesting, Patrick. As you know, I've been talking a lot about parallels between the cultural stats of Star Wars and Harry Potter to the journalists I've talked to. I find your comments particularly useful because I'm going to be talking about some of these themes at Prophecy.
Nevertheless, I want to quibble with you about a major difference--one that you get right in an earlier post but seem to miss here.
Harry Potter does not take place "a long time ago in a Galaxy far, far away." Rowling deliberately roots it in historical, human time; she keys it to events in our own world and makes two of the characters "crossovers" from modern Britain. In short, this has the structure of legend, not myth. It even localizes the specific mythical and folkloric elements you speak of, which is another feature of legends.
I also think that SW:ROJ is, at minimum, much more ambiguous about the wisdom of "acting alone" than Harry Potter. But, yeah, of course they follow modified hero's journeys, criticize those who would seek to triumph over death through raw power, and deal more broadly with the problem of the ethical obligations of Platonic Guardians (I have a whole bit written up about Plato and Harry Potter, which I may or may not use at Prophecy).
So, despite a few quibbles, nice post. Thanks for putting it up.
I think I'd accept that emendation. I wonder, though, whether legend isn't more properly a subset of myth than an alternative to it -- kind of myth-plus-crossover, the same category as C. S. Lewis and Stephen R. Donaldson but not Tolkien or Lloyd Alexander. (Guy Gavriel Kay is an interesting boundary-puzzle here, given his mystic tie between the parallel worlds that he explores.)
Putting this another way: I'm not completely sure what's at stake in the distinction between myth and legend. The crossover characters seem more like narrative devices, akin to the perennial "20th century human who was frozen and then unthawed millennia later" one finds in a lot of sci-fi -- their narrative function is to contrast the ways of the new world with the ways of the world familiar to the reader. But one finds such contrasts both in mythology and in science fiction.
Standard distinctions between legends and myth hinge on the former happening in recognizable time and place, while myth takes place outside of normal human time. This matters a great deal, because legends often instantiate mythic elements in historic time, and because we relate to them differently.
I don't have time to go into it right now, but there's a "double movement" in Harry Potter involving the relationship between myth, legend, and folklore that I think is pretty important to the series. But, regardless, think about the way that Potter takes familiar tropes of myths and legends and instantiates them into a world that is, in fact, supposed to be our own.
Moreover, consider the struggles that play out against great Muggle wars, early-modern European witch crazes as the cause of the wizarding world going into hiding, and so forth. Rowling locates her world in our timeline, our geography, and our concerns. This gives it the "seamless" transition you wrote about in your other post, something that Star Wars does not do.
Good comments.
I have spent more time than I should have trying to wrap my brain around the cash value of the myth/legend distinction, and I have thus far been very unsuccessful. I mean, I comprehend the distinction, and I agree that the Harry Potter sequence is legend rather than myth if we care to make that distinction, but I'm still not entirely sure what difference that distinction makes.
To me, at any rate, the location of the HP cycle with relation to historical time -- and the consequent requirement to provide a translation mechanism between our world and the wizarding world, something that Rowling handles quite nicely by restarting Harry at the Dursleys' in each novel and then getting him out of the ordinary into the extraordinary -- looks more like a technical issue than a constitutive one. That is to say, it affects certain things about the way that the story is framed and executed, but doesn't affect its basic character -- which I would still posit is basically mythological.
The seamlessness of the transition between our world and the wizarding world seems to me to be enabled not by the crossover of characters and events within the plot of the novels; instead it is a function of the conceptual continuity between lifeworlds, so to speak. People and situations in the wizarding world are basically like people and situations in our world, but with some intriguing technical and operational differences (spellcasting, curses, etc.). The same is true of Star Wars, which is what makes it mythology rather than science fiction: there are no real aliens in Star Wars, and there are no technological changes that necessitate any sort of social response that makes people in some discernible sense different than they are in our world. That's why in both fictional worlds the respective author can tell a story with global, if not universal, appeal -- because the root experiences of the fictional world correspond quite nicely to the root experiences of our own, even if in the fictional world people do magic on a regular basis. Lucas has to signal this more explicitly than Rowling does, because according to the common conventions of genre "spaceships" signal science fiction and "wizards" signal fantasy/mythology. But I'd argue that both are pretty seamlessly linked to our world, at least conceptually.
Of course, this gets tricky, because the root experiences of our world are doubtless influenced by the stories into which we emplot them, and both Star Wars and HP are among the proximate sources for those stories . . . which is a) what makes them both, to my mind, popular mythologies, and b) makes the relationship between HP and Star Wars a genetic relationship of descent, because HP updates and retrofits the mythological elements of Star Wars (whether by design or by accident I have no idea, and I don't think it matters) just as Star Wars did in its own way.
Am I overlooking something here?
"That is to say, it affects certain things about the way that the story is framed and executed, but doesn't affect its basic character -- which I would still posit is basically mythological."
I think you are really missing the point. Think about it this way (if we adopt your perspective, oh Lucas-phile):
- Monomyth
- Myth
- Legend
1) Each removal from monomyth involves localization, specialization, and adaptation. This is intrinsically significant, because it involves the order of removal of the symbolic universe in question.
2) The rubber hits the road at the question of the verisimilitude of the narrative. Star Wars lacks any verisimilitude; it takes place in a "galaxy far, far away." Harry Potter involves higher levels of verisimilitude, in that it is plotted within our own world.
Now, both are works of fiction, and hence no one (of sound mind and suitable majority) should mistake them for literal recountings of events, but as you pointed out in your last post Harry Potter's legend-like qualities provide a "seamless transition" lacking in Star Wars. This is structurally akin to a higher level of verisimilitude.
So, I suppose, this is all a bit orthogonal to your point, but I think the distinction does work for us.
Ah, that makes sense. I get it now.
I wonder if the success of HP at the present moment, and the success of the less-legendary Star Wars several decades ago, tells us anything significant about changing popular moods -- or if it's just a really big coincidence.
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