Physics, Mazes, and Authors

Today in class we talked a lot about some hard-core physics topics that, as an English major, are a little out of the normal realm of discussions I usually come across in my classes. Things like Schrödinger's cat and multiple universes rarely, if ever, come up in classes based around the criticism of literature or writing poetry but then again this isn’t my average class. My first encounter in to the realm of quantum physics (I hope I’m using this term correctly) was actually in a book I had to read for BOB. (For those of you unfamiliar with BOB it stands for Battle of the Books and is a competition in Alaska for students elementary to high school where you read a number of books and are quizzed over them with questions that begin “in which book…” did something happen and are answered with the title and author.) The particular book I read was called The Last Universe by William Sleator and was a Sifi teen novel about a girl and her brother, who is confined to a wheel chair due to some unknown illness. They discover a maze with odd qualities in their back yard. The abnormality in the maze is that after each turn the world is altered slightly. What the siblings soon discover is that each turn in the maze brings them to a different universe entirely. In an attempt to find a universe where her bother is not sick the girl ventures through the maze in to various alternative universes.

To me this story, which I read back in middle school, seems to be just another coincidence relating,or connection to the topics we have been discussing in class. I was reminded of it after re-reading the quote by Northrop Frye in The Secular Scripture:

“Romance, I think, is not only central to literature as a whole, but the area where we can see most clearly that the maze without a plan and the maze not without a plan are two aspects of the same thing.”   

As I mentioned in class the quote seems to parallel (parallel universes anyone?) a discussion earlier in the semester about myth being written through an author instead of the author writing the myth. Just as the author has little intention of putting myth in his writing so the maze has no plan, but simultaneously the maze is not without a plan just as the writing produced is not without myth. 

Side Note- Mazes in themselves are a mythological reference. One only needs to recall the story of the minotaur housed in a great maze built by Daedalus (Icarus' Dad, remember him?) to see the significance.

On a slightly tangent note I think the idea of myth being written through and author brings up an interesting topic about the writer himself (or herself). If myth is really just written through an author, and an author is merely re-writing the great myths instead of producing something original (note the common use of the word original instead of the mythological one meaning to go back to the origin) then isn’t the author not all that important? Doesn’t this mean, in a sense that all authors fail at writing? The author who means to write a simple, literal, tale but actually unknowingly makes many mythological references that border on displacement did not do what they intended. But then again maybe they did. If the literal interpretation and the anagogical interpretation are linked and potentially the same thing (“The road up and the road down are the same thing.” –Hippolytus) then maybe the author did both mean to create a literally simple tale and a mythologically rich one as well. I do wonder though as a reader and potential writer the degree to which authors intentionally make mythological references and the degree which those references are made through them.