What’s most striking about many post-modern stories is not their immersion in popular culture or their tendency toward meta-narrative technique and stylistic pyro-technics, it’s their recent incorporation of old-world mythological figures. Namely, the scary ones. There’s “a growing number of literary works in Russia featuring vampires as central characters,” and it’s not just Russia (Basinskii 92). Despite it’s being pop fiction, does Twilight ring any bells? but the growing population of monsters makes sense. to argue that there is no inherent significance to anything, as post-modernists tend to do, requires the dismantling of specific ideologies that claim significance: language, religion, the Aristotelian story, to name a few. but by 2010 all of the counter-arguments to these long-standing ideologies seem to have already been made, and to the post-modern artist seeking out new conversations, the old myths with their old monsters seem new again; werewolves might as well start dyeing their greys, they’re featured on book covers galore. Mary McCarthy says, “…to confront the fact that the writing of a novel has become problematic today…I mean real novels […] novels of a high order…” it is not an issue of talent. Post-modernism sabotages story as internal-combustion-machine whenever it tries to function as container-for-external-literary-agenda. but all along, like whispers in the night, there has been a discourse different from the post-modern theorist or writer as preacher, and until now it’s been relegated to genre-fiction. And into the shadows of “literary” fiction, come lurking the werewolves, the vampires, the dragons and ghosts. the post-modern writer, the pop-saturated Van Helsing of our time—not as written by Bram Stoker, not even as played by Laurence Olivier or Sir Anthony Hopkins, but firmly stamped in our minds as Hugh Jackman—has gone after the beasts with a stake. the only problem is, he’s not killed the beasts, the post-modern mish-mash that he is, has killed story. We’ll take a look at three stories, Pelevin’s the Sacred Book of the Werewolf, Sadulaev’s “why the Sky Doesn’t Fall”, and the films in Bekmambetov’s Watch series, to try to come to some understanding of how not to use mythological creatures, and to come to grips with the idea that, in the end, authors need remember to tell the stories of mankind.

I’ll digress for a moment to say that this is not a statement against the incorporations of “genre” elements—the supernatural, the mysterious or the frightening—into “literary” stories. Far from it. If anything, it’s a statement against the mis-use of “literary” experiment to the detriment of story, and against stealing from the innocent genre-books flying off the shelves like bats from their caves. the modern storyteller is:
“embarrassed by the insignificance (or lack of “significance”) of his finite world. a greater problem is that he cannot quite believe in it […] the souped-up novels that are being written today, with injections of myth and symbols to heighten or ‘deepen’ the material, are simply evasions and forms of self-flattery” (McCarthy).
The post-modern concern with the un-real of mythology is not only a challenge to our pre-conceived notions of the real, it is the post-modern insecurity and desire for a new real, realer than real. “Real” is not a concern for the western writer in exclusivity, it is the interest of all writers. but as we move through post-modernity, Myth, if used poorly, becomes only a symptom of that insecurity. an unfulfilled desire, if history is subjective and nothing is “true”, to root ourselves in something so ancient it may at least be true in spirit. McCarthy says of the definition of the novel: “the novel, to repeat, has or had many of the functions of a newspaper.” an “air of veracity is very important to the novel”(McCarthy). And we can even see this in Bekmambetov’s Watch films’ medieval frame-narrative, in Pelevin’s “Commentary by Experts”, and in Sadulaev’s story’s “book”ness, it’s consistent discussion of being “written”. but this desire to imply veracity is at most a vestigial tail, a bump on the backside of a new beast in the evolution of the novel. This fact-oriented role of the novel has shifted because of the open access to alternate sources of information available to the post-modern reader and the subsequent information-saturation in the post-modern era. This new short-coming in the realm of the real is neither the fault of the novel nor of the novelist, writing on his Ipad, researching on Wikipedia, and sharing the novel with his agent who will read it on her Kindle. while we can’t call this necessary shift in roles a flaw, we can see it clearly in the post-modernist movement, one: from relaying fact to deconstructing it; two: in its meta-narrative approach; and, finally and more to the point: in contemporary story’s current and growing obsession with Myth.

But it’s important to remember that Myth is not static. “Myths are not merely ideas or structures of thought that have survived from past ages, they are a living language that is indispensable to any popular understanding of all the phenomena of society and the world.”

Morch says specifically of Pelevin’s work that it “[…] presents itself as a conscious dialogue with mythology. This means that the author not only addresses well known myths by presenting them in a literary context, he even offers his own versions of them, and develops them further.” And finally, the use of myth not only illuminates the role of myth, it serves as a “juxtaposition of myth and reality in which the nature of both is questioned” (64). In this post-modern era we are doubtful of reality, so doubtful we seeking the super-real, the Ur-real—that which can be true without being fact—and we’ve returned to myth. Literally.

We’ve completed storytelling’s own “were-transformation” into Uroboros with the devolution of post-modern storytelling itself. the perfect example of this is when a Hu Li comments on the Sikh’s resemblance to captain Nemo. he asks for clarification: “From 20,000 Leagues under the Sea?”“no,” she says, “from the American film the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” (Pelevin 11). In post-modern society one thing is not simply a referent to another, it is a reference to a reference to itself. Pelevin’s character resembles not only a character from another narrative, but a character from a narrative inspired by another narrative. Story begets story begets story. Or rather, the opposite. the Post-Modern Story eats its own tail.

In this case, Pelevin’s own description of business as theft has perhaps more to say about story even than it does about society. “Just think about the kind of people who have managed to create such a spellbinding formation in the middle of empty space” (85). Or later, “I think it means a snake biting its own tail. when that snake’s head and tail only exist as special effects in an advertising clip, it’s no great comfort to know that the body is alive and fat. that is, maybe it is a comfort, but there’s no one to experience it” (140). And finally, and perhaps most accurately with regards to the external force that re-appropriation of myth places on these modern fictions: “I have already said that foxes use their tails to implant the illusion of this world in their own minds” (330). In this case, the ultimate illusionist, not the werefox but the writer, in the “middle of empty space” or post-modern society, implants the illusion of his world. “Expressed symbolically by the sign of the uroboros, round which my mind has been circling for so many centuries, sensing the great mystery that is concealed within it” (330).

But the great mystery, concealed within it, that ought to be the story’s unseen momentum of plot. Unseen, but sensed by the reader, it’s the unique ability each plot has to resolve itself. Instead, in the post-modern re-appropriation of myth, the only option available to the writer trying to resolve his plot is the external force of the frustrating and superficial deus ex machina. there ought to be “no gods in the novel and no machinery for them; to speak, even metaphorically, of a deus ex machina in a novel—that is, of the entrance of a providential figure from above—is to imply a shortcoming.” These stories demand that their plots not be solved by their own momentum or devices, and all three are united by a deferral to some larger power at the risk and conclusion that they do not entirely satisfy anybody.

Still, one might say that years and years from now, long after post-modernism is dead and we’re on to the next phase, people reading some of the literary greats and experimentalists “may not know how people lived in the nineties. What they breathed, what they heard, what images flitted constantly before their eyes. but they will from [reading Pelevin]. And that, you must agree, is no small achievement” (Basinskii 96).

On the opposite extreme of Pelevin, we reach the films of Timur Bekmambetov. Nightwatch and Daywatch push the myth so hard that culture is virtually absent. They could happen anywhere. while some reviews say that Timur Bekmambetov’s Watch films provide a complex and metaphorical treatment of good and evil, it couldn’t be less true. the metaphor is too obvious to hum with any resonance of its own, much as a poorly written script might as well be a blank page to the skilled actor seeking subtext, seeking meaning. This is largely in part to the films’ overly generalized use of Myth—Light is good and Dark is bad—and its utter lack of any concrete specifics related to Russian culture; either film could take place in Paris with virtually no changes to the script. As Mary McCarthy puts it, “a novel that was only a scenario would not be a novel at all.” This is because meaning in Literature, or any art for that matter, comes from the juxtaposition of two concrete and specific elements.

The tenor and the vehicle are the double-helix that form metaphor’s mutated DNA, that produce the monstrously beautiful, and the beautifully monstrous. By generalizing both tenor and vehicle in an attempt to satisfy mass consumers and genre expectations, Timur Bekmambetov’s films demonstrate the ultimate failure of Post-modern experiment, and the lack of an internal conflict is pushed to its absolute extreme. a mash-up of fast cars and fairy-tales falls flat out of the sky, especially when even the story does not function apart from its external myth and the interference of a god in its resolution.

We see a moderately more successful version of this same symptom in Sadulaev’s “why the Sky Doesn’t Fall.” Though it also suffers from a similar lack of subtlety—after all:“2000 was both the Chinese Year of the Dragon and the year of Vladimir Putins ascension to Russian presidency” (Basinskii 91). Sadulaev’s story is so much about war—an evil dragon terrorizing Chechnya—that the myth begins to supercede the country’s story. the myth, not unlike a dragon, consumes any hint of cultural context by which to understand specific human experience. the country is only saved when the myth, as embodied by the dragon, wanders “straight for the horizon, to the fairy-tale blue mountains with the shimmering white peaks.” This ending can only occur with some kind of external force upon it, virtually the same as a Deus ex machina, but in this story the external force is hidden by a literary sleight of hand: “And I hear an inner voice […]” the point of view shift from narrator to pilot makes the pilot’s decision slightly more earned by character than if we remained in the narrator’s point of view.¬¬¬ but even the pilot’s decision to change can only exist in the context of a device, a shift in point of view, a change of heart we don’t quite believe, that it’s hardly any less of a Deus ex machina.

Finally, Pelevin’s novel is perhaps the most successful of the three stories at pulling this artificial plot-construction off. the primary choice that Pelevin makes—of structured mirroring—by placing the end at the beginning in the “Commentary by Experts”, is a clever trick. but it’s just that, a trick or device. It’s a way of attempting to provide the kind of narrative momentum and inevitability of plot that we get from the Aristotelian arc. In reality, if we subtract the non-chronological introduction, the explosion of Ahu-li into the super-werewolf is just that: an explosion. It’s too sudden and violent to feel satisfying. furthermore, it happens off-screen because Pelevin’s story, rooted so heavily in the super-real of Myth, requires all kinds of devices to engage its reader, to convince us that we ought to believe; principally the use of first-person. This manipulative, rather than organic or genuine, us of first-person deprives us of witnessing the transformation into Super-Werewolf as we hope to: in Dramatic Scene. McCarthy says, “It would seem that the device of the narrator, the eye-witness “I” is more often used in novels whose material is more exotic or improbable than in the plain novel of ordinary life. In short, you are back with Defoe and his “true biographies” of great criminals who were hanged, back at the birth of the novel, before it could stand without support.” This “I” device means the whole of Pelevin’s story can not stand without support, can only be related after, or before, the fact, through a journal. Subsequently, the immediacy of the story and our investment in it is further removed. but by the finish, Pelevin has no choice, or rather, his determination to engage in the post-modern discourse of the self-aware novel has made his choice for him. Still, this is not to say that Pelevin is guilty of any flaw. He’s simply doing the best he can do with a story that cannot satisfy.

Why can’t it? because its conflict is one of external source and can only be satisfied by external influence. where gods and super-beings come down to change the course of a story, we are being told that the world works in the same way. while post-modern man does not believe in any god, isn’t this, after all, what the post-modern man believes, or is taught to? Hiroshima has convinced him that no matter how hard he works, there’s still the chance he and his wallet may get blown up. after death camps, what is there? those of us moving through post-modernity have no choice but to return to the beginning, to the old sense of awe. It’s society as Uroboros. We see this most vividly in the bleeding of genre and literary boundaries, and the presence of myth in modern story’s attempt to understand modernity’s atrocities, or even it’s day to day existence.

And so these mythic beasts, these were-creatures, run rampant. In Sadulaev’s tale, the narrator tells of a novella he wrote about two werewolves masked as children, attacked by a crusader but who nonetheless escape. the dragon is not only a dragon, it is a military-industrial were-creature. “perhaps he did have blood, but of another kind: the dark green blood of a dragon, and a cold snake’s heart.” but whereas the Watch films ultimately fail on the level of story because their metaphoric conceit is too general and too familiar (light is good, dark is bad), “why the Sky Doesn’t Fall” suffers slightly less, but still suffers for a similar problem. Its metaphoric conceit, while well-rendered in shocking and original scenes, the conceit is simply too obvious. the story suffers from its status as a kind of masked (pardon the pun) contes philosophiques. the argument bleeds through the fiction too darkly, and the biased roles (albeit tragically understandable) of the writer as Chechen and the Russian as “cold Snake” or “Dragon” is too obvious to allow for any resonance, any significance beyond what’s clearly on the page, or, to repeat, the lacking subtext.

Understand, this is not to say that incorporating mythologies is somehow faulty, just that imposing external frameworks, or any external trickery on plot, is. In some way, we’ll have to come to grips with the agency of our characters, even if they move through a world as absurd and seemingly chaotic as our post-modern one, and even if we believe we have no agency of our own. even so, story can change that belief, and should. after all, the theorists will remind us that God is not just dead, he’s dust. And a growing frustration with meta-narrative and artifice too, preaches that we can’t trust traditional story ad nauseam, and our mistrust has begun a reversal. the time is ripe for storytelling whose very structure, its dependence on character over style, will give the post-modern man some hope. when author Stephen Graham Jones discusses the Zombie in modern fiction, I think it’s safe to substitute the word “monster”: “[monster] stories have always expressed our current cultural concerns and anxieties, and, right now, that anxiety’s an apocalypse…They’re the ultimate economizing device in a story, just accelerate everything…We’re going to know your characters fast.” And what it comes down to is not any theoretical, political, or literary agenda, it comes down to character and consequently to story. plot and character ought to be inseparable. And if that means that ideologically we must believe that our lives and our own character’s effect on it are likewise inseparable, well, we’ll just have to wait to see how that story ends, but at least we, the characters, will have something to do while we’re waiting. And with so much invested—our identity, the call to action that a character-driven ideology entails, and our own coming to grips with our place in a world we’ve labeled as less than “significant”, void of “meaning”, and nothing but a “construction”—at least we know we’ve got a captive audience, desperately frightened of all the monsters, and in desperate need of our help.