An Australian Hero

This is a type of fairy tale, a very modem one to be sure, which engages with a point of view laid out by Walter Benjamin fifty years ago concerning the function of the fairy tale in combating the forces of mythology. In his essay on “The Storyteller,” Benjamin says that the fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest. In the figure of the fool, the tale shows us how mankind can act dumb before the myth, and the wisest thing it teaches is to meet the forces of the mythical world with courage, high spirits, and cunning—the characteristics, by and large, that Benjamin singled out as making up the hero of a Brecht play. ¹ Think of Mother Courage and of Galy Gay, let alone of the Good Soldier Schweik of whom Brecht was so fond. Of course, these are hardly heroes in either the classical or the modern sense, but then maybe our sense of “tragedy” with which the hero is so intertwined gives us too mythic a sense of evil which it is nowadays the task of the ordinary person—the Brechtian “hero”—to suffer as an everyday occurrence.