Mythology for the Literal-Minded

It came to my attention this week, quite by accident, that author Mark Haddon included a piece in his collection The Pier Falls and Other Stories that retells the myth of Ariadne and Theseus. Neither is named, but the plot parallels the events of the myth closely enough (on a literal level, at least) that anyone familiar with the story will recognize what is meant. I'll be honest in saying that I didn't like the story, nor the one that preceded it, which was not myth-based, though it seemed to bear an odd kind of kinship to "The Island," the story I'm writing about. Both deal with horrific loss of life near the sea.

I sometimes feel that it's worth staying with an unpleasant book or sitting through an unpleasant movie, depending on what I perceive the artist's intent to be. I watched Munich, for instance, even though I found it difficult, because the theme was compelling. The question of just where the dividing line is between terrorists and anti-terrorists is a very real and important one, and it was brought home to me in a way I'll never forget in that film. It was worth sticking it out for the lesson it taught me.

Likewise, Mr. Haddon may well have a purpose in mind with his book, and if so, I may have gleaned it from the first two stories, though it's probably unfair to characterize the whole book without having read it all the way through. I guess what I'm saying is that if Mr. Haddon's purpose is to reveal the coarser side of human nature and the unfortunate tendency many people have of being drawn to the grisly and horrific events that befall others simply for the thrill of it, then I get what he's saying and thank him for his efforts, but I won't be reading any further. It may be that the rest of the book deals with other themes, but when I started on the third story and still found myself in carnival sideshow territory, I felt it was time to call it a day and go on to something else.

It's probably obvious to anyone who's read my book that I look at the story of Ariadne, Theseus, and the labyrinth as very symbolic and, underneath it all, life-affirming. My way of looking at it is not the only way, of course. Mr. Haddon's version is a horror story that nevertheless stays pretty close to the actual outline of the myth; the devil is in the details. His story even begins as quasi-realistic, as if Ariadne and Theseus might have been actual people--Ariadne a spoiled but sheltered princess who makes a fatal error in betraying her people for a man she's besotted with and Theseus a calculating and manipulative brute.

Mr. Haddon's way of dealing with the Dionysus part of the myth is not one I had seen before and conjures up the destructive aspect of the god. This side of Dionysus certainly appears elsewhere in mythology but not in the context of this myth, at least not to my knowledge, so it seemed to me a bit like mixing bad apples and worse oranges, though of course one has the creative license to do just that in a story of one's own telling. Ariadne's marriage to Dionysus in the classical version of the myth is a much more benign event than Mr. Haddon makes of it and supports the idea that Ariadne herself was viewed, at an earlier period of Greek history, as a powerful goddess. In some versions of the myth she, a goddess, was already married to Dionysus when she decided to help Theseus, so that perhaps the marriage on Naxos in later versions is a way of linking Ariadne, now a mortal, back to her original husband.

I discussed in my book some of the thinking about Ariadne's role in the myth, which centers on the idea that the labyrinth may originally have had a powerful religious meaning. I tend to see Ariadne as a positive figure guarding the secrets of life itself, the labyrinth in this sense becoming a symbol for birth, and even more than that, for becoming human. In that regard, her pairing with Dionysus makes sense, because he, too, is deeply connected with life in his associations with wine and the life cycle of the grape.

Whereas Demeter oversees agriculture in general, Dionysus's connection with the vine speaks of something that, paradoxical as it seems, is in some ways even more nuanced and refined. I'm talking about the life cycle of the grape and of how many things have to go just right in order for the winemaker to produce a fine wine. Dionysus presides over all of this, not just the growing of the grapes. The wine distills some of the essence of everything that goes into its making, the soil, the water, the sunlight, the container it's placed in, and, in no small amount, the soul of the winemaker, whose care of the vines has a great deal to do with how the wine turns out. Every vintage is unique, just as every person is.

By the way, I'm indebted to the movie Sideways for revealing to me so evocatively this nurturing aspect of Dionysus. That the main character, Miles, has a difficult relationship with wine, the very thing he loves and appreciates so well, is both a sad irony and a reminder that Dionysus does indeed have two sides, though bookish Miles is in some ways really more an Apollo kind of guy. Miles's boorish friend Jack, who has no appreciation for the subtle beauties of wine, embodies the dark side of Dionysus much better than Miles does. Miles's love interest, Maya, combines characteristics of both Demeter and Aphrodite, which really makes her the Ariadne to Miles's Dionysus.

All of this is just to say that in my reading of the labyrinth myth, Ariadne and Dionysus are both nurturing figures, and there is some support for this in scholarship. I was honestly rather shocked by Mr. Haddon's story, and even though I think most people realize there are many ways to read a myth, I want to point out, in this era of sensationalism and over-emoting that takes place everywhere from The Weather Channel to the nightly news, that the most shocking interpretation of a story isn't necessarily the best one and definitely isn't the only one. You can look at life through the eyes of love as a rich adventure filled with beauty and interest (despite its many serious problems) or you can look at it as a carnival sideshow, with one freakish event screaming for your attention until another one even worse comes along to take its place. I recommend that you not be that guy. (You know the one I mean.)

I don't know whether to thank Mr. Haddon for a lesson in the dangers of literal-minded mythology or to wash his mouth out with soap, but I rather suspect he had a reason for telling the story the way he did. As an example of literature as shock therapy, I'm not sure I've ever seen its equal. It's like a literary hairshirt. A tiny dab of that may be edifying, but more than that is going overboard. Whether he even expects you to finish the book or not is a question I'm not sure I can answer.

Getting Down With Alice

Author Gregory Maguire can usually be relied upon to spin entertaining novels with his clever, offbeat versions of fairy tales and children's stories written for grown-up children.  He has outdone himself with his novel After Alice, which I cached in a recent visit to the public library (yes, we're still in literary form this week at Wordplay). Mr. Maguire leaps fearlessly into Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, managing not only to land in the right "neck of the woods" (located near the tops of the trees, as one particularly harried bird in the story is careful to explain) but also bringing some wry modern humor with him.

I had a sense, while reading this story, that I was almost as perplexed as Ada, Alice's friend, who, in this telling, has stumbled down the rabbit hole after her, losing a jar of marmalade in the process (so that's where it came from). The novel is full of what appear to be in-jokes, allusions to things that you feel you ought to be able to figure out if you only think about them hard enough. However, like the mysterious key that remains stubbornly out of Ada's reach, this strange and surreal underworld doesn't give up its secrets easily. That you are having an underworld experience is the one thing that is clear; even Ada, who compares Wonderland to a Doré illustration she has seen of Dante's Inferno, soon realizes that.

Of course, you know that Wordplay always has your best interests at heart--and that is why we read After Alice twice in our resolution to be responsible and give you an accurate account of it. My assessment at this point is that while I got the gist of it, it has more in it than any one person can fully unravel, so I invite you to read it for yourself and see what you make of it. I feel sure you'll be entertained. If parts of it seem oddly familiar to you, I won't question that, because I had a similar experience. It wasn't merely the fact that I had read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland previously but also a feeling that, yes, something like that happened to me one time, too, and yes, that character reminds me of someone--even though the characters in this novel have the fluid identities of people in a dream, seeming to shift and reappear in multiple guises. Even the Jabberwock has a hidden identity.

While the geography of After Alice is firmly in Lewis Carroll territory, with many characters from both Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass making an appearance, Mr. Maguire brings a number of tangential characters fully into the story and introduces new ones. Ada, not Alice, is the focus of this story, and Alice's sister Lydia becomes a flesh-and-blood character in the upper world, carrying on a somewhat less-than-thorough search, along with Ada's governess, the highly strung Miss Armstrong, for the missing children. A visiting American has brought with him a freed slave boy, Siam, who makes his own way into Wonderland through the looking-glass in a closed-off parlor.

By turns, this underworld journey is topical, surreal, disturbing, amusing, and sometimes touching. Siam's worldly-wise outlook and American dialect introduce a New World rawness into the somewhat grim rectitude of Victorian Oxford, and some of the denizens of Wonderland express themselves in surprisingly modern though not always fully straightforward quips. "I stole a glance at her," says the March Hare. "So shoot me." And how about this from Humpty Dumpty: "I adore salt. Salt completes me." Ada is repeatedly admonished, "Don't look up," and, while frequently the recipient of advice, is also warned not to take it.

Crippled by a back brace and socially awkward, Ada is perhaps the only character who seems to gain by her underworld experience, which becomes somewhat of a hero's journey (though unacknowledged by anyone else). In Wonderland, she loses her brace and becomes surprisingly sure-footed amongst all the hucksters and dangerous characters she meets, though at the outset she would seem to be no match for them. By the end of the story, I was eager to find out what would happen when Ada returned to the upper world and was sorry when the novel ended, as I would have loved to follow her subsequent career. The final page definitely came too soon in this case.

Kings, queens, duchesses, knights, and other courtiers abound here, including Queen Victoria herself, who somehow makes her way to Wonderland in a bathing machine. Charles Darwin is a guest of Alice's father, Mr. Clowd, a failed scholar, and they discuss evolution and theology over light refreshments, oblivious to the three children who have gone missing in the neighborhood. The book Lydia was reading, "with no pictures or conversation," is revealed to be an essay on A Midsummer Night's Dream. Miss Armstrong has the hots for her employer but transfers her affections rather easily to the interesting American, Mr. Winter. The story begins and ends by a river.

That may seem like a disjointed way to summarize the novel, but the story itself flies about with great flapping wings, changing direction unexpectedly, which is only natural in a story in which the "surreal" and the "real" are tangled up so closely. Mr. Darwin poses a scientific question to Mr. Winter that you will have to answer for yourself, which may or may not sufficiently explain the reason for this novel but will in any case leave you feeling quite thoughtful.

True story: I once had dinner in a chocolate bar in St. Louis. Yes, there is such a thing--they even had chocolate martinis. When I visited the ladies' room, I had to descend a stairwell that was decorated with an Alice in Wonderland theme. On another occasion, while attending a conference in Southern California, I stayed at an Alice in Wonderland themed inn in which my room was named after the Queen of Hearts. It was a bit more room than I needed, but the inn's atmosphere was suitably whimsical and certainly carried out the theme. While either or both experience may have some bearing on why I related so much to Mr. Maguire's story, they don't explain it entirely. At least, I don't think they do.

What I Found on the Shelves

Lately, I've had pretty good luck finding interesting books at the library, so this week's post will be a literary one. Popular culture is a bit of a minefield these days, in my opinion, and the simple wish to be entertained can result in being subjected to all kinds of schlock. The trick, of course, is to try and be discerning, as we have all been taught since we were little children--though I don't recall discernment being nearly so difficult an art when I was small. The reason is simple: the age of innocence has flown the coop on us.

It's been a few years since I reviewed anything by author Tracy Chevalier, but some of you may remember my review of her book The Last Runaway, the story of a young Quaker woman starting a new life in the wilds of rural Ohio in 1850. That book painted a vivid picture of the dangers of everyday life on the frontier, when a simple wagon trip through the woods--at a distance that would be as nothing in the age of interstate highways--was a frankly hazardous undertaking. Ms. Chevalier returns to 19th-century Ohio for At the Edge of the Orchard, a novel about a family working the land in the perilous Black Swamp of the state's northwest region. In actual fact, this book provides an even more harrowing portrait of frontier life than the author's previous book.

The Goodenough family is dysfunctional, which adds another layer to the nearly insurmountable difficulties they already face in making a living from the land. A dark tragedy leads to the breakup of the family and to the beginning of years of wandering for youngest son Robert. Although Robert travels widely and sees many wonders, even ending up in California in time for the Gold Rush, the story is not so much Mark Twain adventure as it is Aeschylus Greek tragedy. 

The Fates do indeed seem to pursue the members of this family; rarely, while reading the book, do you shake off a sense of being haunted. Although there are humorous episodes and characters (Robert's cigar-smoking landlady, Mrs. Bienenstock, is everything a Barbary Coast landlady should be), the novel imparts a feeling almost of claustrophobia. Rather than Manifest Destiny and a feeling of endless possibility, the horizons have shrunk; you get the sense that no matter how far Robert roams, he will never escape the events he is running from. The novel offers a darker view of this period of western expansion than you get from many tales of Western adventure, darker in plot as well as in tone. While it looks like 19th-century America, it feels like Greece in the Bronze Age, as if the House of Atreus had somehow crossed the sea and fetched up on foreign shores. America does not seem so much exceptional as it seems doomed to repeat the cycle of the past.

As it happens, I followed this book up with another one with a California setting, María Dueñas's The Heart Has Its Reasons. I greatly enjoyed Ms. Dueñas's The Time In Between, a novel about a Spanish dressmaker who gets involved in the resistance during World War II, and I was curious to see what she would do with a strong female character in a contemporary setting. The Heart Has Its Reasons is the story of a woman who, after the breakup of her marriage, flees her university job in Spain for a stint as a visiting professor at a Northern California college. The ingredients for a great story--a woman making a new start, a picturesque setting, and an academic mystery entangled with personal tragedy--are all there, but I was thrown off by something in the storytelling itself, an awkwardness that was absent from Ms. Dueñas's previous book.

I at first wondered if something had been lost in the translation, since the style seemed little like what I remembered from the previous novel, not that every book by an author needs to sound exactly the same--though you don't expect one to be assured in tone and the next to be a little off-center. While I enjoyed the story and was intrigued enough to keep reading, I was distracted by a certain roughness in the prose. There is a scene early on in which the main character is looking at photos of the long-dead professor whose papers she is organizing when, for unexplained reasons, lickety-split, she is suddenly outside in need of fresh air. Wait . . . how did that happen?

It is as if some bridge between the two scenes, a connection supplying the reasons for Professor Perea's sudden exodus, is missing. I found it surprising that a writer as accomplished as Ms. Dueñas would write a scene that way, but whether the explanation is typographical, translational, or purposeful I cannot say. Did the character undergo a fugue state? Did she step into a wormhole? Later in the novel, there is a confrontation between Professor Perea and another academic in which she seems to overreact to the revelation that he's behind the fellowship that brought her to America. I didn't think the news quite warranted throwing him out of her apartment, much less her life, and it also seems inconsistent with her previous behavior--yet another example of something that doesn't quite fit in the story.

Overall, I did enjoy the book, though, and was reminded occasionally of my own experiences in California, both as a visitor and as a student. Ms. Dueñas certainly has the setting down to a T, and she knows the world of academia to boot. It's just that the storytelling itself seemed to raise mysteries, almost in the manner of a poem whose letters and lines are placed in an unexpected way on the page, pointing to something beyond what's in the words themselves, if I am not imagining it.

This is the beauty of browsing: I had been looking for some time for a book set in the Gold Rush era of California history, which seems to me a fascinating time, and I found one by luck just by poking around in the shelves. I'm also interested in the history of California missions, which plays such a critical role in Ms. Dueñas's book, and I came across that one by accident as well. Serendipitous finds like that are always fun, even if you don't quite get what you're expecting. NoveList is a wondrous thing . . . but there's nothing like finding a book yourself.

The Death of Tom Petty

While I wish I had the ability to say something useful in the wake of this week's violence in Las Vegas, I don't know what it would be. Sometimes it's better to let more information emerge before jumping into the fray, beyond condemning the bloodshed, as any rational person must. I'm turned off by commentators who start putting forward theories about an event before all the facts are known, and rather than be one, I prefer to let the investigators do their work.

I found my attention drawn to a different event, the death of rocker Tom Petty, the day after the attack, possibly because it was less overwhelming (except to his family and friends, of course) but nonetheless unexpected. I read reports that he thought his recently completed tour would probably be his last, and though I might be reading too much into it, I wonder if he had had any presentiment of what was going to happen. It wouldn't be the first time someone had succumbed right after completing an exhausting task; I'm remembering my own father, whose health seemed to fall apart not long after he retired. Still, I admit to finding the timing of Mr. Petty's death to be a little strange.

I listened to Mr. Petty's records a lot in the early '80s but never saw him live. I followed his career loosely, at a distance, and one or two of his songs pass the Wordplay "Turn Up the Volume" test (it's a very select group). In recent years, I've noticed that his song "I Won't Back Down" (from the Full Moon Fever album, which I don't have) seemed to be getting a fair amount of airplay--or perhaps it's more accurate to say that, out of a multitude of songs that I hear on the radio and elsewhere, this one seemed to rise above many others and stamp itself on my consciousness in a rather insistent way. It's the right song at the right time, I guess you might say.

I will admit to occasionally having a mildly transgressive thought, and I have a recurring fantasy involving this very song. I imagine myself somehow getting access to the public address system on Capitol Hill long enough to play a song that could be heard from one end of the building to the other. This would be the song I would play, on behalf of, well, let's see, the oppressed, the unchampioned, the forgotten, the ill-used, and the otherwise everyday people everywhere trying to keep going while the politicians play their Washington games. (I've also had similar fantasies about the B-52s' "Love Shack"--don't ask me why. It just feels like it would be a fun thing to do.)

On a personal note, I was at a blues festival several years ago in Southern California, walking through a crowd after hearing John Fogerty perform, when I thought I spotted Mr. Petty. He stopped in the crowd a short distance ahead of me and gave me a sweet smile. I'm almost certain it was Tom, and although he didn't say or do anything else, in my memory I can almost see him putting his finger to his lips, as if to say, "Ssshhh, you've spotted me--but don't say anything!" I wondered about it afterward, as I almost had the impression that it wasn't quite a chance encounter, though I can't really say why I think that. It was just something in his face, though it was dark, and I could be mistaken, of course. I had certainly never met him before.

So I think it was really that incident, along with the fact that he was one of my favorite rockers in my college years, that has had me feeling sad and thoughtful over the last few days. Though I'm often shocked to hear about someone's untimely passing, this death touched me in a way that many others haven't. I felt an almost personal sense of loss that surprised me at first but doesn't now that I've thought about it. When someone has touched you with his or her artistry and has been part of the soundtrack of your life for decades, as Mr. Petty has been in mine, it means something when he goes.

I looked at the videos of two of my favorite Tom Petty songs and was impressed with a sort of mythic sense that permeates both of them, especially "Runnin' Down a Dream" (also from Full Moon Fever). Students of Native American mythology may notice sequences reminiscent of Navajo and Lakota folklore; King Kong is in there, too. I was also reminded of such disparate elements as Madeleine L'Engle, a story I once wrote about children who fly into outer space by means of their bed, and an episode in the film Black Orpheus involving a spiral staircase. There is a feeling of magic, mystery, and something slightly out of reach in this video, a vision that, though I never would have imagined it just from hearing the song by itself, matches it perfectly. I especially like the part where the cartoon Tom scratches his head. (The animation in the video was reportedly inspired by Winsor McCay's comic strip Little Nemo.)

The persona Mr. Petty adopts in this video for "Runnin' Down a Dream" and in the video for "I Won't Back Down" (which features some familiar faces) is one and the same. He appears at the beginning and end as a type of storyteller/magician who has something he really wants to show you but won't explain. The blending of mythic/imaginative elements and a certain sly "world as we know it" allusive quality is priceless. Both songs (co-written by Mr. Petty) are definitely enshrined in the "Turn Up the Volume" pantheon of the Great American Songbook; in fact, be careful--either or both could cause you to drive too fast.

I guess it's mean to say it, but I particularly hope, if you don't like either or both of them, that you have trouble avoiding them in the coming weeks. Take it as a sign. And by the way, I never said I wasn't mean.