I won’t make a definitive claim as to a progenitor narrative, but I propose as some options George Orwell’s 1984, Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial. To use Ball’s terms, the irreducible kernel is a union of what may have previously been two distinct categories of narrative: dystopia and revolution. Dystopian stories are, of course, those that depict a society or civilization that may seem to be perfect, but is revealed have pernicious flaws under the surface. Revolution stories are those which pit a small band of dissidents against a large, seemingly all-powerful institution—usually the government.

Either of these alone is unlikely to qualify, under Ball’s criteria, as a modern myth; Ball claims as a requirement that these stories “could not have been told in earlier times, because their themes did not yet exist. Modern myths explore dilemmas, obsessions, and anxieties specific to the conditions of modernity.” Both dystopian and revolution narratives can—and have—been told before. Star Wars presents one of the most iconic examples of a band of rebels taking on the big bad Empire, while Les Miserables offers a very different tale of revolution. Stories like Lord of the Flies or Animal Farm have their dystopian elements born out of the fear that human nature might be wilder and more animalistic than we hoped, but they are still arguably examples of the genre. Increasingly, however, dystopia and revolution seem to go hand-in-hand. Nowadays dystopian narratives almost always find a fascist government at fault (except when it’s a corrupt and all-powerful corporation), and the plot focuses on the attempts of a band of underdogs to overthrow it. At this intersection between the two genres, the narrative begins to take on new, possibly mythic, qualities.

A cursory glance at 20^th-century literary trends seems to support this mythic turn. In this period, the number of dystopian narratives exploded, many of them with features of revolution, as well. The cultural fears from this period aren’t too hard to spot; as the Information Age has come ushered in by rapidly expanding technology, the kind of fascist governments and police states described in these stories seem more likely and, at times, nearer to home. Across news stories and entertainment media we hear speculation of governments or corporations tracking our online presence, or using our phones to monitor us. The relative strength of military forces seems insurmountable by average citizens, and confrontations at political protests have eroded our confidence that such force would never be turned against our own communities. If we’re looking for modern anxieties that give rise to narrative spaces where we can safely grapple with our fears, this seems to fit the bill. 

But Ball also claims that an important criterion for a myth is that it must not moralize—the story needs to be able to be interpreted as having any number of meanings—and at first glance this seems to be a weakness of the case for our proposed modern myth. After all, in most of the obvious examples—those mentioned above, as well as popular entries like The Hunger Games—the meaning is fairly transparent: the oppressive institution is bad and the rebels are right to fight back. But as the burgeoning genre settles in to its place in the narrative landscape, a more nuanced perspective might be emerging. Urinetown is a dystopian musical in which water has become scarce and the all-powerful but corrupt Urine Good Company has teamed up with the police state to force citizens to pay to relieve themselves. At the end of the show the citizens overthrow UGC and free themselves from its oppressive policies, only to find that they have squandered the limited water supply, and many are dying of thirst. The show closes with a dour, and potentially controversial, message; while UGC’s oppressive acts were wrong, they were also keeping the environmental crisis in check. The rebels never institute their own solution to the precipitating problem, egalitarian or otherwise, and thus their victory is ultimately hollow. It may not be inviting the diversity of interpretations Ball expects from a myth—or merely a retelling of one—just yet, but it is a step in the right direction.

I’ll certainly be interested to see how this narrative develops, if it does. A genre is not quite a myth, and this one still has some evolving to do as it crystallizes around that irreducible kernel. But even just considering it as a possible candidate has challenged me to examine a new perspective into some of the concerns of our cultural subconscious, and especially into how we are thinking about them. Like Ball, I hope others will chime in to further a discussion that is both fruitful and long overdue.