Journey to the West,
one of the ‘four great novels of the Chinese canon’, is most often attributed
to Wu Chengen. Author and title
requisite for fiction these days, most take for granted that indeed, he is the
one who penned the story. Wu is, in
fact, the person who collected, collated, fit, polished, and presented in
finished form the myriad pieces of the magnificent tale of Sun Wukong, Sanzang, and
their quest for the holy sutras. The
original story having undergone thousands of iterations by street corner
storytellers, the result is a narrative that holds its history in episodic rather
than escalating form.
But this simple transition in the evolution of storytelling
in China, from oral to written tradition, is but one minor—and late—step in the
history of storytelling as a whole.
Before street corner storytellers were bards, and before bards, shamans,
and before shamans simple gossip over the campfire—thousands and thousands of
years of human culture and existence covered in this simple statement. Tracing story and myth all the way back to its
roots, another observation can be made in the manner in the evolution of stories:
humanity’s subservience, or lack thereof, to nature. From the Paleolithic to the Mesolithic,
Neolithic to the Bronze, Iron to the Information Age, humanity, an idea in this
context identified by the West, has shifted its stance on the power of the
Earth and its inherent forces. Where
once gods inhabited every rock and shadow, it was whittled down to a pantheon,
and from the pantheon, distilled into one ruling god, and from one god to the
belief mankind holds its fate in its own hands.
Science fiction the mode of discourse which most obviously represents
the latter, we are left with scraps and tatters of what remains of the
former. Enter Sean Kane’s Wisdom of the Mythtellers (1998).
