Nationalism will most likely derive its strength from a strong and simple myth. It is a myth of a people bound together by earth and blood, who through their special character and virtue have risen from former troubles to take their rightful place in the world. It is not learned history; it is living myth. It simplifies the multifaceted, overlooks the inconvenient, and places a specific group in a heroic, by and large errorless, position. But if mythology can be employed to construct such nationalist mythologies, perhaps it can be employed to deconstruct them as well. There is emerging a quiet and powerful form of cultural resistance, in which artists, writers, and film-makers use the very language of myth—its archetypes, its gods, its heroic drama of scale—to contradict the blunt story of nationalism and to reveal it to be the thin cloth that it is.
A nationalist tale always demands an unblemished start and a straight-line, heroic journey toward the present. It requires impeccable heroes and blemish-free virtuous triumphs. Step back from the manipulative deployment of ancient myth as a wonderously powerful instrument of deconstruction. Mythologies, in their unsanitized, unpurified domains, aren't typically squeaky-clean or morally straightforward. They're replete with chaos, betrayal, bloodied genes, and gods whose very human weaknesses one can all but see in them. By the mere act of rescuing these dirty, old tales and setting them in the here and now, artists can reflect the tidy national myth on itself and reveal all that it has opted to leave out.
One of the most powerful methods is to resist the myth of the homogeneous, untainted population. Nationalist myths are customarily set against some historical homogeneous Volk whose origins have not been sullied. But prehistoric mythologies are full of cross-cultural contact, migrations, and hybrid beings. Take a national founding myth and retell it in the voice of a monster, an outsider, or an overlooked god. For instance, one might speak of the "barbarians" conquered by the national hero, but in doing so, give voice, culture, and humanity which is withheld by the national legend from them. This also obliterates the "us versus them" formula. It proves that the "pure" national identity always was an illusion, born of a history of conquest and assimilation and encounter with many other cultures. Myth is made into one of mixture and richness, rather than purity.
Finally, mythology is particularly well-positioned to reverse the ideal hero ideal. Nationalist mythologies have clean leaders and unblemished soldiers. But merely contrast the early Greek heroes: Achilles was hot-headed and proud, Odysseus was a schemer, and Heracles killed his family in rage. They are not strict sorts of virtue, but imperfect, multifaceted people. The modern novelist or director can borrow from these archetypes in order to denounce political leaders today. In describing a model modern leader with a character flawfully imperfect, as in Oedipus or Agamemnon, the artist is indicating that the mythic strength of the leader is a fatal hubris, and that his course will not be to glory but to some inevitable, tragic fall as mapped in the ancient play. This employs the legitimacy of the old tale in warning against the seduction of the new.
It also works by introducing marginalized characters from the mythic past of a culture. There are witches, lepers, overthrown gods, and monsters in every major mythology. These characters are demonized in the mainstream culture because they embody chaos, femininity, nature, or some other mode of existence that upsets the established order. A feminist reinterpretation of myth, say, would re-tell the mythology of Medusa or Circe—women conventionally represented as monstrous threats to masculine heroes—in their own voices. Medusa is no longer the creature to be eliminated, but a battered woman victimized by the gods, who uses her strength as an instrument of self-protection against an aggressive, patriarchal world. By speaking for these "monsters," the artist actually undermines the very heroes-and-villains dichotomy on which nationalist ideologies depend. It implies that national identity is based upon silencing and demonizing some voices within its own cultural universe. The strength of this ploy is that it invokes shared cultural terminology.
The historian or the politician could rebut a nationalist case with facts and statistics, yet they are eschewed as it's an outsider's or an elite's argument. But if an artist adapts My Own Culture's own myths of origin—the moneyed gods and the city names god, the myths one studied in school by everybody—the argument is much more difficult to ridicule. It is a call on the symbolism of the culture itself. It begins, "You say you respect these stories, but you've forgotten what they're about. You've made our rich, nuanced, and cautionary myths into simplistic propaganda." It's so strong a cognitive dissonance that it becomes a public opinion, its national story in a new, critical way. We can see it happening everywhere on the planet. In their countries, which were once colonized, authors are turning to indigenous mythologies as a way of displacing the history of their homelands from the discovery era by European colonists.
By integrating accounts of prehistoric native gods and creatures into contemporary existence, they claim possession of a civilization older by several centuries and far more documented than the colonial apparatus. They shatter the illusion of the "civilizing" mission by demonstrating the presence of a rich, sophisticated worldview before the arrival of the colonizers. Multicultural cultures in European artists are actively constructing the naturally syncretic and international character of classical mythology—how Greek concepts pervaded Rome and farther afield—assert that their civilization has ever been a product of interchanging rather than isolating. They borrow the myth of the labyrinth to comment on the intricacy of immigration policy, or the image of the migrant god Dionysus to speak about the artistic genius of the foreigner. Lastly, borrowing from mythology to deconstruct nationalism is an act to restore the actual intricacy of a culture. It is a voice that the country's heritage is too immense, too alien, and too gloriously contradictory to be pounded into nationalism's strict, militaristic shape.
The old myths were never meant to be easy answers; they were meant to struggle with questions of human life: the meaning of justice, the peril of power, the ache of loss, and goodness and evil. To go back to this original spirit is not to slay a people's stories. They're rescuing them from being reduced to political slogan-making. They are remembering the rich, unsettling, and long-lasting truth in these stories and employing it to remind us that a single story, no matter how loudly bellowed, can ever hold the large and intricate reality of people. The best tool in the war of stories is frequently a previous, wiser, and more intricate story.