The Function of Myth and Mythology

"In the end, stories are what's left of us; we are no more than the few tales that persist,” ponders our dying protagonist. In the midst of the various histories, family trees, multi-cultures and religions etc merging together in a cacophony of reality, Moor claims that he seeks to find his own truth; “for the truth about myself to struggle out, at last, from under my parents’ stifling power” and against all such embittered and raging forces. 

Yet this claim works against his own attempts as, in the midst of all these forces he only adds to the inordinate count by taking up the role of story-teller and concocting his own version of the past and present. This version is marred not just by a plethora of different aforementioned elements but also takes a turn for the fantastical as it defines the world with reference to works in such a genre like Dante’s Inferno and theology (Hindu gods and goddesses); it is seen in how his childhood bedroom  walls were marked by various fantastical and fictitious characters; his mother’s fictitious paintings; his own comparisons of his mother as the goddess Kali, his father as Prophet Abraham and himself as the sacrificed son Isaac, “O Abraham! How readily you sacrificed your son on the altar of your wrath!” and so on. Moor’s blend of East and West  resulted in a reproduction of the world that is, if we borrow from Rushdie, “imaginatively true” (“Imaginary Homelands”) -- a mix of history and myth that converts reality into a tale and leaves open the possibility for endings that need not fixate on any determined order  of reality.

The taxi-driver, who takes Moor to Miranda’s castle, yells "May you stay lost in this infernal maze, in this village of the damned, for a thousand nights and a night."  This recalls the Arabian Nights and evokes the idea of Moor playing the role of Scheherazade, who in order to live must keep spinning tales until she is empty of them. It is Moor’s aim to find beneath the palimpsest of these varying facts and fictions, his truth that, as we discover at the end, is an attempt to seek out peace of soul and peace with one’s home. Here we find Rushdie’s own voice tie in. “My India” he claims, “was just that, ‘My India’, a version and no more than one version of all...millions of possible versions” where his particular India was one in which “I was willing to admit I belonged.”  The subversion and hybridity of everything in the text leads to a state wherein one becomes lost and cannot find his way home. Yet here this apparently bitter novel’s use of myth and mythology are what come to provide hope in an otherwise hopeless text. For while these tales are being spun, our protagonist can go on—he as Scheherazade can continue to build something that proffers him another day to keep going. It is this use of mythology that is our narrator’s truth—his “India” to which he belongs and by which he can reconstruct a past and present that intermingle with fiction to allow for a more positive future; more positive than what would otherwise be conveyed without the use of fantasy and free-play.

These bring new meaning to the text and serve as a forged path and a reminder that when all is lost, we can make our own paths out of darkness in a self-determined route to truth again, until we arrive where we belong. "In the end, stories are what's left of us; we are no more than the few tales that persist” is now no longer viewed with bitterness but as a dependence on those essential myths to keep us alive. Herein lies the brilliance of myth and mythology as functions for our exilic narrator’s enduring search for truth and peace against all odds.