Myth In Literature

Chinua Achebe, Tony Morrison and Ben Okri, along with many other writers wrote in their own typical style about the culture, beliefs, dogmas and rituals of African people. The attitudes stated toward society and the natural world seems consistent with an African cosmology. Differently from Achebe and Morrison, Okri presents a world wavering between order and disorder, an ambiguous and mysterious world of which human beings are but a part and over which they have little control. Whatsoever differences may exist between Okri and his two well-known countrymen Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka in their subjects or style, he shares with these two writers both the wonder and the comic bemusement with which they face the human condition.

The term myth

Emile Durkheim and E. B. Taylor, political theorists i.e. Georges Sorel and Max Muller, and structuralists i.e. Claude Levi-Strauss and African philosophers i.e. Wole Soyinka, Isidore Okewho but what unites their views is the idea that a myth is a story.

According to the dictionary of literary terms by J.A. Cuddon; ‘It is a term of complex history and meaning. Homer used the word muthos to mean narrative and conversation, but not a fiction’. He further writes, a myth is a story which is not “true” and which includes ‘as a rule’ supernatural beings – or at any rate supra-human beings. Myth is always concerned with making and creation. Myth explains how something can exist. Myth embodies just feelings and concept – hence the Promethean or superhuman character, or the idea of Diana, or the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Numerous myths or quasi–myths are primitive explanations of the national order and cosmic forces. Classical writers had ‘ready-made’ mythology. Others have not been so prosperous and some have felt a great need to discover or somehow contrive a mythology which shall be vehicle of their beliefs. Poets, especially, have continued to fall back on the Greek myths and, to lesser extent, upon Germanic and Scandinavian myths, and in some cases, upon Chines, Indian, Egyptian and Latin American

Eliot in his book ‘Traditions and Individual Talent’ invokes that a writer must have a sense of old traditions and writes according to his understanding. So in Okri’s work it is quite obvious that he does not separate African myth and cultural beliefs. In all the stories of this book (Incidents at the Shrine) there a combination of African myths, cultural values, religious dogmas, realities and magical realism. In the story, The Dream-vender’s August, the protagonist has the ability to see whatever is going to happen in future through dreams. He through his papers and pamphlets provides solutions to the problems of people but his own problems are still exists and he goes to a herbalist for the treatment of his impotency. He guides the people how they can earn more and more money but he, being very poor, is starving for