Classics in Contemporary Culture

Myths Retold: Series Under Way

As already announced in coverage of Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad (but as I've only just realized), that book was the first of a series conceived by Karen Armstrong and to be published by Canongate; and the series itself is now getting more press.  Beside's Atwood's book, already published are:  Weight, by Jeanette Winterson (Heracles and Atlas), and A Short History of Myth, by Karen Armstrong.  On deck are:  Lion's Honey, by David Grossman (Samson); Helmet of Horror, by Victor Pelevin (Theseus and the Minotaur); as well as offerings from Donna Tartt, A.S. Byatt, Alexander McCall Smith,  Chinua Achebe, Milton Hatoum, Su Tong, Natsuo Kirino.  Now for the "more press":  Laura Miller in Salon.com has an article entitled "Why Myths Still Matter," which concludes as follows:

Today, our standards of literary excellence are intimately entwined with the idea of originality and individual expression. Myths, on the other hand, are communal. They are also stories first and foremost, and contemporary literary critics do not hold story in particularly high regard, when they regard it at all. Like depictions of sex, story is seen as appealing to people on the crudest level, to the lowest common denominator. A book that has nothing else to offer can still thrill hordes of unsophisticated readers with pure, page-turning plot.

The seminal modernist works that still define our idea of literary genius often referred to myth without actually partaking of it. Mythic fragments float through T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," but there are no stories in the poem. James Joyce's "Ulysses" is not the epic tale of a man's 10-year journey home from a foreign war; instead, the novel aims to elevate a day in the life of an ordinary fellow to the grandeur of a hero's adventures. When such works succeed, they succeed in a modern fashion, as unique, form-breaking innovations, but not as myth.

As exhilarating as the modernist experiment has been, it eventually collided with what appears to be a fact of human nature, the reality that our minds are built of stories. To stick with the metaphor above, a steady diet of books without stories turns out to be as appealing as a life without sex; some people take to it, but not many. At the same time, an explosion of media has immersed the average citizen in a cloud of competing voices, and those voices have learned that stories capture people's attention. In a culture where nearly everyone -- politicians, TV producers, journalists, advertisers -- talks obsessively about the power of stories, the very artists most associated with the telling of tales, novelists, seem the least comfortable doing it.

So the "Myths" series is very welcome. It reminds us that not every talented writer can or should aspire to the model of the novelist as iconoclastic Great Man. (It's no coincidence that some of highest-profile contributors to the series are women.) Both Atwood and Winterson weave less prestigious modes of storytelling -- gossip and memoir -- into their new versions of Greek myths. The best novels have always had at least a dash of both. And perhaps the best myths have, too. But underneath it all there is still the "something of great moment" that Lewis wrote about, a something that eludes definition. Perhaps Winterson puts it best when she writes, "These are the stories we tell ourselves to make ourselves come true."

Further:  Telegraph (UK); Herald (Scotland); NY Newsday ; Korea Herald (subscription); Business Standard (India); Ha'aretz (Israel); Evansville Courier & Press (subscription); Philadelphia's City Paper; and the Guardian (review by Mary Beard), in a review article that goes beyond the series to treat Bettany Hughes'  Helen of Troy:  Goddess, Princess, Whore; Nigel Spivey's Songs on Bronze:  The Greek Myths Retold, and mentions much more.  I'll close with a quote from Beard:

There is, in fact, hardly a modern poet, playwright or novelist who has not engaged with, or meddled in, Greek myth - whether in the form of translations, adaptations or subversions, by writing sequels and prequels to the canonical tales, or presenting the stories from a different angle (often recently, as in Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife, from the point of view of the neglected women in the tale, Mrs Icarus, Mrs Midas and so on). In this sense, Canongate's new series, The Myths, which has commissioned "some of the world's finest writers" to rework a myth of their choice, is not quite so innovative as its publicity implies. Most of the writers had been (re)working along these lines already. That said, the two volumes that launch the series, by Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood (alongside A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong, to set the theoretical scene), make an impressive opening.

Iceland: Small Is (Potentially) Big

How is it that Iceland has so much money passing through its hands?  Easy:  They're just like ancient Athens.  Or Rome.  More seriously, small size fosters intercommunication and innovation:

[Iceland's President] Grímsson puts forward an endearing explanation. 'When we look at renaissance Florence, renaissance Venice and even classical Rome and classical Athens, they were all about the same size as Iceland is now. It is an important lesson of history that small creative communities can do extraordinary things.'

Imperial Democracy Redux

In the Malta Independent, Robert Cachia writes:

Let us see if this sounds familiar: Two thousand five hundred years ago, the Athenians and their allies started invading a number of Aegean states under the pretext of destroying tyranny to bestow a democracy. They thought people would accept them with open arms but nothing of the sort happened. Rings a bell?

In the middle of the fifth century BC, Athens was the undisputed power in the eastern Mediterranean. Before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, this is how the Corinthians described the Athenians: “To describe their character in one word one might say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and give none to

others!” Athenians were indeed busybodies and had a finger in many commercial enterprises from as far away as the Po basin in northern Italy to the Ukrainian wheat fields in the east. Their coinage, the famous attic owl drachma, was international currency and their fleet patrolled the Mediterranean as if it was their sea. Democratic Athens was a new shining light in a sea of barbarism and despotism. Philosophers and thinkers sang its praises while people all over the Aegean imitated and recreated its revolutionary institutions.

Yet for all the love and euphoria it managed to polarise, Athens became the most hated and feared of the Greek city-states. It was not just her enemies but her own allies who eventually turned against her. The reasons were various but the underlying bone of contention was then only too obvious: Athens was simply using democracy as a front to spread her empire. Many democratic parties all over the Aegean slowly and painfully came to realise that their initial honeymoon with Athenian-style radical democracy had degenerated into a unilateral submission to the whims and wishes of the Athenian Assembly.

Education

At one Corvallis (Oregon [?]) middle school, they're getting into antiquity.

Their students have been dressing up in togas to match their temporary identities as Helenes, citizens of city-states in ancient Greece.

Spieth uses a microphone to amplify her voice so that students in the combined double-class can hear her. To maintain Spartan-like order, Boedtker deducts points from groups that don’t keep their tables neatly organized.

On the other hand, even the Hellenic News of America manages to post this gaffe:

Perciles delivers his famous funeral oration, setting forth the highest ideals of the civilization of classical Athens.

Two Theatres Return to their Root

Last Planet Theatre (in San Francisco) has just finished a run of an adaptation of Racine's Phedre, reviewed at sfweekly.com:

Playwright Matthew Maguire's modernized version of Racine's neoclassical tragedy Phèdre is set in the aftermath of an acrimonious business merger. The drama tells the story of Faye, the wife of a high-powered CEO, whose illicit desire for her stepson leads to all-round misery and destruction. Maguire's text sweats and grunts with seedy descriptions of intercourse, scenes in which characters dry-hump chairs, and slatherings of pseudo-orgasmic poetry. Yet for a play about sex, it's curiously sexless. There's just not much passion -- at least of the sexual variety -- in a corporate takeover. Half the play reads like a soap opera; the other half like the ersatz "poetry" one creates out of little magnetized words on fridge doors. I admire Last Planet for its boldness and intelligence; if any local company has demonstrated an understanding of human desire, it's this one.

And Perth Theatre (Australia) has Ted Hughes' adaptation of Racine on its 2006 lineup.

More Greeks on Stage

A new play just about to finish up its run at Brown University is called The Greeks/The Murders, and apparently is inspired by numerous tragedies, revolving around the story of Helen and the House of Atreus:

The curtain rises on a group of Trojan and Greek women standing on a bare stage. Because the past is prologue to their present, they ask what caused the Trojan War. Was it the mother goddess who arose naked from Chaos and separated the earth from the sky as she danced? Or did the discord arise from Helen, the Greek woman abducted by the Trojan Paris? Was it she who caused the Greek ships with their sterns adorned in gold to plunder Troy? As these questions resonate with the audience, a battle sound is heard, and the stage becomes the ruined city of Troy.

This is how the fascinating play "The Greeks/The Murders," which debuted at the Stuart Theater Thursday night, literally sets the stage for an exploration of the conflicts that arise from the destructive nature of humanity. Using the Trojan War and its tragic aftermath as an analytical lens, the play powerfully addresses universally acknowledged and timeless issues relating to justice, revenge, human tragedy and the existence of evil. In doing so, it inspires contemplation and cathartic emotion in the best tradition of classical Greek theater.

Oh, I see:  it's an adaptation of another play, simply called The Greeks, by John Barton and Kenneth Cavander...

Back to Ithaca

Hillel Halkin (Commentary) writes about a trip to Ithaca that was strangely evocative...Here's part from the beginning:

But the Ionian islands meant Ithaca, and Ithaca meant The Odyssey, and The Odyssey is a book I have cherished. Several years ago I made a list of the things I most wanted to do before I died. One of them was learning Greek to read The Odyssey in the language Homer wrote it in. Poetry, not just as language heightened, but as language transformed, its particles fused into rare new elements, begins with Homer. The winedark sea! The rosyfingered dawn! No book has lovelier phrasing. How could I have been so foolish in college as to major in English, which I needed no instruction to read, when I could have been studying Greek? How not sail to Ithaca now?

And here's the sort of goofy, sort of poignant end of the piece:

Nor did I encounter any ghosts on Ithaca. It was just a small, pleasantly undeveloped Greek island, and while something in me was fulfilled by being there, I did not learn much about The Odyssey that I couldn’t as well have learned from books. But then again, I had only read, or re-read, the books that I did because I went to Ithaca.

It was fitting, then, that the only ghost that did appear was a book’s. It was the ghost of the same book I had lost when I was little. For years, this was a blank in my memory. Apart from having lost it, I couldn’t remember a thing about it. And then, as I was writing this essay, a small part of it came back to me.

It was a Donald Duck book. That is, Donald Duck was its main character; I can’t recall even now who else of his comic-book entourage was with him. But I know he was on a sea voyage and crossed the Equator, because the book had a chapter—I presume it was my favorite, since it alone has surfaced in my memory—in which he had to go through the traditional equatorial ceremony of being judged by King Neptune and sentenced to a symbolic dunking. There was, I’m quite sure of it, a colorful illustration of the captain gotten up as Neptune with a trident, prodding a reluctant Donald in full dinner dress off the diving board of the ship’s swimming pool

Now the odd thing, which must be what stirred this memory from its depths, is that Neptune, the Roman god of the seas, is the Greek Poseidon, Odysseus’ nemesis. Poseidon thwarts Odysseus’ return to Ithaca because Odysseus has blinded his son, the one-eyed Cyclops, who prays to him for vengeance. Consequently, as Homer has Zeus say, “From that time forth Poseidon, the earth-shaker, does not indeed slay Odysseus, but beats him off from his native land.”

So I had to go to Ithaca, it would seem, to find a fragment of a children’s book lost sixty years before. Things turn up where you least expect them to.

Thyestean Morsel

Based on a play by Hugo Claus (based on a play by Seneca), an opera (music by Jan Van Vlijmen) has appeared at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie (Brussels)--I'm not sure from the article when the run ends/ended--named (of course) Thyeste:

Incest, parricide, uxoricide, blood feuding: the Greeks certainly knew how to do gory. Thyestes is their Titus Andronicus: a tale of grim brutality to outdo that of Agamemnon or Electra. There's nothing quite like serving up your brother his children for supper.

Thyeste, La Monnaie's latest juicy operatic morsel, is based on a play by the Belgian writer Hugo Claus, who took it from Seneca. His libretto is set to music by the Dutch composer Jan Van Vlijmen, a Serialist of the Birtwistle generation, who died only last year.

Despite a tingling first tableau featuring what looks like a bloody headless corpse that materialises into a Fury (the formidable contralto Helena Rasker), the start of Gerardjan Rijnders' staging wasn't wholly gripping. Tantalus - sire of the Atreid family - hovers to remind us that the rot was there from the start. To avoid the inevitable choral black, Rien Bekkers comes up with florid designer gear seemingly inspired by Ikea's curtain department. The choir sings superbly, even if some moves are weak and the choral music ponderous.

                                        

War and Classics noch einmal

A new production of the Trojan Women at Duke University calls forth these comments from Peter Burian:

“Given this context, we can only marvel at Euripides' daring and wonder what the reaction of contemporary Athenians must have been to so bleak a vision of conquest,” Burian added. “The Trojan Women dramatizes not the Greek victory, but Troy's fall, seen, with all her men gone, from the point of view of the women about to be sent into slavery. And at the center of it all is Hecuba, the old queen, on stage from beginning to end, absorbing blow after blow, loss after loss of everyone and everything she loves, of every remaining hope.

“What's Hecuba to us? She is the quintessential victim of the folly of war, who fights victimization with every means she has, until she has none left. She is every mother of a fallen soldier, a daughter raped, a child killed in cold blood. Yesterday, we saw Hecuba in the streets of Chile and Rwanda. We see her today in the streets of Baghdad and Mosul. When will we not have to see her again?”

On which (anti-war tendencies in Peloponnesian-War-era Athenian drama), see also Victor Davis Hanson, excerpted at the National Review:

While the totality of postbellum thought never became therapeutic, much less pacifist or utopian, the Peloponnesian War at least introduced into Western philosophy the comprehensive idea that war was not always noble or patriotic but often nonsensical, suicidal, and perhaps intrinsically wrong, especially when it lasted twenty-seven years, not a few hours on a summer day. Homer, of course, had questioned the morality and logic of motives and sacrifices of unthinking warriors in the Iliad, but Achilles did not doubt the nobility and heroism inherent in armed conflict.

Also, a reader wrote to me asking for something more substantial than the previous post, and suggesting a mention of Jonathan Shay (author of Achilles in Vietnam, now also adapted as a film by Charles Berkowitz)...and it just so happens that Dr. Shay recently gave a lecture at the University of Illinois, entitled "From Troy to Baghdad: Can modern officers learn from Homer's epics?"

In the lecture, Shay discussed the lack of stability, ethical leadership and adequate training in the United States military.

He also drew parallels between the modern military and the heroes of Homeric literature, and described the lessons the literature taught current military leaders. For example, "The Iliad," he said, emphasized the "importance of the moral structure of an army."

Anti-War Classics

Current American military endeavors have prompted revivals and adaptations of Greek-themed plays, according to this article reviewing the latest in Berkeley:

Hopefully the war on Iraq won't last as long [as the Trojan War], because Berkeley theater companies will soon run out of variations on Homer's Iliad and related classics to use as antiwar messages. To a list that includes Lysistrata, all three parts of The Oresteia, Iphigenia at Aulis, Troilus and Cressida, There Will Be No Trojan War, and even, to a lesser extent, Phaedra, The Persians, and Ariel, which retold the Iphigenia story, add now the balanced, heartbreaking Achilles and Patroclus from CentralWorks. While it's been an unspeakable war, it's been a great few years for audiences plumbing the Greek depths.

But there are other things to think about than war:

And as if to address last week's complaint about there not being enough interesting gay or bisexual characters in East Bay theater, this play also features hot boy-on-boy action as it asks whether The Iliad's Achilles and Patroclus were more than just friends. Homer subtly suggested it, Plato took it for granted, but high school teachers are generally quick to insist that the relationship was strictly camaraderie. In Gary Graves' collaborative CentralWorks show, the two are at least bi, and there's a woman in there too. For a too-brief period, the three have a wonderful time while the soldiers back at camp are scandalized and calling on the gods to put the wheels back on a stalled-out war.

Briseis is all the hottie you'd expect; bundled with the palace and the olive groves, you can see why a man -- or men -- would be inspired to leave behind their Myrmidons for her. But sultry Jessica Camacho doesn't play Briseis as either slut or slave. Her explanation of why she's siding with Achilles over her freshly murdered husband rings true as she accuses Mynes of gambling, whoring, and letting the fields rot.

The article closes thus, overestimating classicists' ability to abstain from pedantry:

This is gloves-off stuff, hard words, hard sounds, hard lighting. It follows Homer enough to satisfy the scholarly, while addressing certain questions anew. This is not your high school Homer, all rosy-fingered dawn and wine-dark sea. Intensely realized, funny, and very sad by turns, Achilles and Patroclus is a complex, modern love story.