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Refigurations from Ancient Greek Myth

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Refigurations from Ancient Greek Myth Myth, Creativity and Repressions in Modern Literature: Refigurations from Ancient Greek Myth LORNA HARDWICK Abstract The persistence of ancient Greek myth in the arts and cultural politics has, paradoxically, been energised by the capacity of myth to inspire and accommodate change. The malleability of mythological narratives has been a rich source of creativityand also an index of changes in horizons of imagination and understanding. This both permits and nuances the notion of ‘Return’ in cultural history. The essay explores distinctive features of these processes through selected modern case studies that map how myth can be adapted in different literary and performance genres, including new media. The first example compares and contrasts approaches by Margaret Atwood and Derek Walcott to the hanging of the maids in Homer’s Odyssey. The second case study analyses the nexus between myth and history in Tony Harrison’s film poem The Gaze of the Gorgon. The third example discusses the adaption of the Heracles story in Greek myth and tragedy for a modern radio and live theatre work by Simon Armitage. Aesthetic and socio-political forces interact, revealing how the re-imagination that is part of the formation of cultural memory can repress and erase as well as adapting. Thus the continuing Return to the Greek narratives not only renews their cultural force but also transforms it. Keywords Adaptation. Memory. Myth. Repression. Re-imagining. 1. Myth and its histories In both ancient and more modern cultures myth has had a central role in the creative arts and in ways of thinking about the world. Greek and Roman myth has functioned as an ever-present but malleable and even protean source of narratives and iconic figures, as a touchstone for comparisons, allegories and analogies, and as a nexus between the distant and the familiar and between perspectives on the past and the present. This sustainabilityof myth has been assured and enhanced by its plasticity, which ensures that refigurations of myth are crucial to the notion of ‘Return’ that is the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol.40.2 : 2017 core concept in this collection of essays. The persistence and changes carried by myth both mark cultural horizons and map their shifts. Myth acts as a conduit, moving across and between the borders of fiction, imagination, religious practices and social norms. In Greek and Roman antiquity itself, myth was reworked and used in a variety of different ways. Creative engagement with myth spanned literature and visual culture as well as takinga central role in religion and highlighting threads in philosophy, science and politics. Different versions of particular myths moved in and out of prominence. Refigurations of myth signalled shifts and conflicts in ways of looking at the world. Research data on myth in antiquity provides an infrastructure that also sheds light on modern receptions. In this discussion I use the term “myth” flexibly to include not only the genealogies of the Greek and Roman gods and the narratives associated with them but also the non-historical stories that formed the major part of oral culture’s deployment of myth, for example in the Epic Cycle and the Homeric poems. An essential resource is the online Dictionary of Classical Mythology, edited by Rosemary Wright and hosted by the University of Patras.1 This dictionary includes alternative versions of myths in Greek and Roman sources. In her Preface to the Dictionary Wright comments that: Different versions of the narratives and genealogies in this material are endemic to the study of the subject, since variations were preserved in the tradition of oral culture and then adapted to the interests of family and city propaganda, the literary contexts of drama and poetry, the evolution of ritual and the expansion of knowledge of the physical and human aspects of the inhabited world…. and not only do we have the narratives preserved but also the ancient attempts to probe and interpret them through allegory, personification and euhemerism (an ancient form of reductionism), linked often with a healthy scepticism. (Wright 2012) Sensitivity to the deployment and adaptation of myth in modern contexts involves “reading” modern sources which in their turn read ancient authors who were themselves reading myth.2 I will explore this multi-layered dynamic through three short case studies. These examples represent different responses in different genres and media but I bring them into contact with each other through a linking theme – how they select from different aspects and alternative versions of the ancient myths and how as a result they shed light on issues of repression and on diverse ways of engaging with themes that are “difficult” or contentious. 2. Repression, erasure and reimagining: Margaret Atwood, Derek Walcott and the twentieth-century toposof the serving maids in Homer’s Odyssey Repression of aspects of the ancient myths and of the narratives they generate has increasingly been a focus of recent research and provides one way into identifying and analysing shifts in cultural perspectives. A good example of a controversial trope that sheds light on such discussions is the hanging of the maids by Telemachus in Homer’s Odyssey 20. 436-479.They were killed after they had been forced to clean the 12 house that was bloodied with the bodies of the suitors who had clustered round Penelope during Odysseus’ absence. The suitors abused the conventions of xenia (hospitality), gorging themselves on food and wine and misusing the slaves as servants and as sex objects. The suitors were slaughtered by Odysseus on his return to Ithaca and the female slaves paid with their lives for their (enforced) relationships with the suitors: [Telemachus says:] “I refuse to grant these girls a clean death, since they poured down shame on me and Mother, when they lay beside the suitors”…. the narrative then continues with a simile: “as doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly home to their nests, but someone sets a trap - they crash into a net, a bitter bedtime: just so the girls, their heads all in a row, were strung up with the noose around their necks to make their death an agony. They gasped, feet twitching for a while, but not for long”. (Hom. Od.20. 462-474. Translated by Wilson 2017, 494) In the twentieth century this episode in Homer attained the status of a topos in feminist consciousness.3 Derek Walcott’s Stage Version of the Odyssey (1993) adapted that episode, possibly because of its association with the sexual slavery embedded in slave histories in the USA and Caribbean, and instead focused on Penelope’s outrage when the slaughter of the suitors turns the house into “an abattoir” (Walcott 1998, 153, Act 11 scene vi). Walcott portrayed Penelope as forbidding the hanging of her maid, his treatment of the episode brings together the histories of slavery and of gender.4 Walcott’s revision involved partial repression of the Homeric episode. That decision may result from his view that attacking a tradition merely lends it authority and thus perpetuates it: In the New World servitude to the muse of history has produced a literature of recrimination and despair, a literature of revenge written by the descendants of slaves or a literature of remorse written by the descendants of masters…The tough aesthetic of the new World neither explains nor forgives history. It refuses to recognise it as a creative or culpable force. (Walcott 1998, 35)5 Other late twentieth-century responses to the Homeric topos of the hanging of the maids range from complete erasure, as in Peter Oswald’s dramatization of the Odyssey (Oswald 1998) which omits both the slaughter of the suitors and the hanging of the maids, to Margaret Atwood’s creation of an alternative narrative in The Penelopiad (Atwood 2007). This alternative narrative retained the hanging but explored through song and dance the maids’ perspectives on the suitors and Penelope, as well 13 as Penelope’s eventual sense of guilt. In allowing herself to be sent back to the upper room she had been silently complicit in the killing of the maids, a killing of which Odysseus’ trusted serving woman Eurycleia had been a leading proponent.6 In the final scenes of Atwood’s play the maids call on the Furies to bring them justice: O Angry Ones, O Furies, you are our last hope! We implore you to inflict punishment and exact vengeance on our behalf! Be our defenders, we who had none in life! (Atwood 2007, Scene 30, 78) Atwood’s play-text engages with the challenge of giving a voice to those who were disregarded and left no trace in the sources. Her dramatisation of the maids as invokers of the Furies as agents of vengeance presents the other side of the coin of Walcott’s distrust of literatures of revenge. In this discussion I take the issues surrounding repression one step further to probe the interactions between re- imaginings, triggers of readers’ and spectators’ awareness and understanding of both the world(s) of antiquity and their own. Atwood’s “Author’s Introduction” to the published text of The Penelopeiad opens with a comment on her creative dramatization that is also a challenge to the reader/spectator: “the play you hold in your hands is an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo” (Atwood 2007, v). Echo as a mythological figure who resurfaces in modern literature does not offer a pale imitation, rather can answer back and initiate and explore other reverberations. The echoes invoked by Atwood can also be read as foreshadowings, soundings that shape in the future how the past is heard.
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