Showing posts sorted by relevance for query penelopiad. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query penelopiad. Sort by date Show all posts

Strophe/Antistrophe: Atwood's "Penelopiad"

I am not normally someone who achieves that most invoked of readerly cliches, the one-sitting reading. I must admit that I am not a very fast reader, and rarely have the stamina or attention span for the sort of prolonged immersion necessary to pull off this feat. Only Jane Austen, for some peculiar reason, regularly inspires these sorts of insomniac long-haul readathons. But this afternoon, my mind utterly fried from jetlag, I sat down with Margaret Atwood's "The Penelopiad," a slim volume from Canongate's new series "The Myths," and read it from beginning to end.

This is not necessarily praise, although it does speak to the straightforward readability of Atwood's lightly feminist refiguring of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" from the forgotten point of view of patient Penelope. I have enjoyed many of Atwood's other books, but I find them oddly ephemeral, eluding any attempt to fix what I admired in my memory. The problem with "The Penelopiad" is that its strategies are so familiar from other, more complex feminist and postmodern rethinkings of canonical works (like Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" or John Barth's "Chimera") that they are altogether predictable. As many critics have noted, it is hard to read "The Odyssey" without wondering what is going on in Penelope's head, but Atwood seems to have given voice to the assumptions that we all make about what Odysseus's patient wife is thinking, rather than complicating these assumptions. The prose of Penelope's remembrances is straightforward to the point of clumsiness at times, which only underscores the banality of her reactions. The seams in her fictionalization show all too often in ways that are not so much wittily self-conscious as oddly wooden, as if this narrative were patched together too quickly and never fully completed its metamorphosis from research to fiction.

There is one aspect of the novel in which these criticisms are largely untrue. A chorus of interlocutors, made up of the lady's maids whom Odysseus and Telemachus bafflingly murder at the end of "The Odyssey," regularly interrupts Penelope's rather dreary memoir to form a sort of counterreading to her tale. These interludes draw delightfully on classical traditions of the theatre: the multifaceted use of the chorus is here (as a dissenting voice, as the force of objectivity, as the representative of the social group vs. Penelope's individualism), as is the idea of the satyr play which farcically reframes the issues of the preceding tragedy, refusing them their usual solemnity.

Theirs is a demand for justice, delivered in the folk forms of the malleable oral tradition which preceded the textualizing of "The Odyssey" (these forms begin as popular songs and ballads, and ultimately morph into the dissenting, unwritten protest at a modern trial). Atwood makes this all too explicitly clear, but the choric interruptions are also a revelation about the imprecision of both myth and history, the impossibility of providing a single coherent explanation for the inconsistencies in the stories we are told and tell ourselves. (As such they form the antistrophe to Penelope's strophe, redirecting the course of the narrative as Penelope has attempted to wrest it from Odysseus's sole control, just as the Greek Chorus would switch the direction of its stage movements regularly in its chanting.) This is not to say that there are no explanations for these gaps and contradictions, just that histories must be told in dialogues and conversations: the discord of many memories is infinitely more truthful than the assured account of one voice (even if it is an ignored voice like Penelope's).


"The Penelopiad"
Margaret Atwood
(2005)
***

14) "Weight" by Jeanette Winterson

British publisher Canongate's "The Myths" is one of the most ambitious and intriguing publication projects of recent years, the sort of undertaking that I wish were more characteristic of the mainstream publishers which have such tremendous connective resources at their disposal. Canongate recruits major authors to write reflections on and retellings of major world myths (so far Ali Smith, Margaret Atwood, Karen Armstrong, Philip Pullman, and Jeanette Winterson have graced the list), and then lead a consortium of 24 publishing houses in releasing the individual "myths" simultaneously worldwide.

The first two works I have read from "The Myths" series - Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad and now Jeanette Winterson's Weight - have made intriguing choices that reveal them as representative members of the arc of the authors' whole body of work. Atwood's novella turns a critical gaze on the misogynistic injustices of Telemachus and Odysseus in Homer's work (where indeed the hostile suspicions the two men hold about Penelope's fidelity are excruciating to witness) and gives a crucial choric voice to the maids they so brutally murder at the epic's end, filled with a gendered viciousness disturbingly out of proportion to the crime committed by the girls. Sadly, for all these interesting moves, I found it to be surprisingly straightforward in its "revisions" of the myth, and not nearly as intricately written as the best of Atwood's novels.

"Weight" also seems a bit like Winterson Lite (I am going to suffer in the Underworld for that pun someday). She weaves some wonderfully surprising strands into the fabric of her tale of burdened Atlas and the repellently phallus-obsessed Hercules (who, you may remember, agrees to take on the weight of the world for Atlas - doomed to hold up the universe for all eternity - while he fetches some golden apples, only to trick poor old Atlas into taking up the world again when he returns with the fruit). Winterson's characteristic self-reflexive move (drawing attention to the ambiguities of her persona as an author) makes an appearance:

There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go one believing the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct a narrative of your own.

In a way I was lucky. I could not allow my parents to be the facts of my life. Their version of the story was one I could read but not write. I had to tell the story again.*

I am not a Freudian. I don't believe I can mind the strata of the past and drill out the fault lines. There has been too much weathering; ice ages, glacial erosion, meteor impact, plant life, dinosaurs.

The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a book, each with a record of contemporary life written on it. Unfortunately the record is far from complete. (139-140)
The traumatizing story of Laika, the first animal sent out into space (and not, crucially, brought home), also makes a strange and not wholly well-integrated appearance in the novel. I couldn't help but recall My Life as a Dog, where a Swedish film where the resonance of Laika's tale with the personal experience of isolation is set up so much less cheesily.

Altogether, the different strands don't seem to make the final step to being a coherent or at least finished whole. I don't mean this so much in the sense of narrative incompleteness, because ambiguity and instability are clearly two of Winterson's favorite strategies, but rather (as in the case of The Penelopiad) that this novella always feels like a side-project, written in the margins of the "real books" the authors have underway. They are a bit drafty (in at least two senses of the word), the sentences letting in little gusts of readerly doubt through every slight awkwardness.

Nonetheless, Jeanette Winterson's fragmentary, aphoristic style seems better suited to the project of the mythological novella, being nearer to poetry than the novel. Still in both cases I wish a ruthless editorial hand had questioned the small infelicities of style and the large jarrings of narrative obviousness. There is no reason, in the hands of these skilled and authority-questioning authors, why archetype should settle into stereotype, even for a moment.

Weight (2005)
Jeanette Winterson
March 4, 2008 (Yikes, I have fallen really behind in my reviewing.)
***1/2


* Winterson's upbringing by her fundamentalist adoptive parents (who were not what you might call comfortable with the emerging knowledge that she was a lesbian, or for that matter a voracious reader of non-Biblical literature) is the subject of her utterly fascinating novel/memoir hybrid, Oranges are not the Only Fruit. I highly recommend it.

They just walked through my door - honest! September acquisitions, Part the Third

Part the third of my new resolution to keep track of all things literary that make their way into my personal library!
In which the Mooch avalanche roars unabated,
and I make the very grave error of entering a bookstore.


Mooch Acquisitions:
  • Donald Duk by Frank Chin
    • I am not entirely sure where I heard about this book, or what created such a mammoth desire in me to own it, but it looks potentially delightful. From the description on the back, it seems to have much in common with the acclaimed by others but not entirely loved by me American Born Chinese. The unfortunately named Donald Duk, a twelve-year-old San Franciscan, comes to terms with his resentment of his Chinese family and heritage through dream conversations with an imaginary mentor, Fred Astaire.
  • Crusader's Cross by James Lee Burke
    • The first of the Dave Robicheaux mystery series, set in the Louisiana Bayou. As you might remember, I became fascinated with James Lee Burke after reading a series of interviews relating to the influence of Hurricane Katrina on his latest book.
  • Jazz by Toni Morrison
    • I have read Beloved, the first in a trilogy of novels in which Morrison is said to evoke the structure of Dante's Divine Comedy, and I own Paradise (which, as you might gather, is the third). Now, at long last (I have been putting off Paradise for several years - take that statement as you will), I have the Purgatorio section: Jazz.
  • Tamora Pierce's First Test
    • I LOVED Pierce's Alanna series when I was in middle school. I mean, I loved it with a passion for a fictional world that I fear I lost in the cynicism of my high school and adult selves. I wanted to BE Alanna, the woman knight. My fondest dream was that someone would make a movie of the series, and cast me as the heroine. Now I am afraid to return to it in case my cynical self is disappointed with it. Pierce has written prolifically beyond Alanna's "Song of the Lioness" series, while staying in the same fictional world. So perhaps I will try out less emotional frought reading territory by exploring some of her other characters. This is the first in her Protector of the Small series.
  • If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name by Heather Lende
    • An account of life in small-town Alaska by a Morning Edition contributor, I can chalk this one up to the zeal for quirky non-fiction that was born of my early love for Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals.
  • The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett
    • Although I didn't enjoy Pratchett's first Discworld novel (The Color of Magic) as much as I had hoped, I have been anticipating the arrival of this, the second in the series, with an unsettling degree of excitement. Everything about this series, it would seem, has become associated for me with an impossible ideal of fun and relaxation in reading. So I might not be able to keep from skipping it in front of some of the more serious reads in my TBR queue.
  • Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden
    • Advertised as a reinvention of the "Great War epic," which, given my current, intensive relationship with the Iliad, intrigues me immensely. At its heart this novel is apparently about the relationship between an Oji-Cree medicine woman from Ontario and her only surviving relative, who has just come back from a scarring time in the European trenches.
  • Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
    • I already own a much later volume from Maupin's "Tales of the City" cycle, but have been (I'm sure you understand) reluctant to start it before reading the earlier books. Why did I buy a book from the end of the series, you ask? Well, I think my book buying compulsion has become painfully obvious to readers of my blog in recent weeks. I have a particular interest in Maupin's work, because, like me, he had formative experiences living in DC and North Carolina, and went to UNC. Unlike me, however, he was mentored by Jesse Helms, although this mentorship did not continue into Maupin's time in gay rights activism. I can't say I really envy him the Helmsish aspect of his biography.
Bought:
  • All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot
    • Although the Herriot-inspired words "It's the sheep! They won't stop wommiting!" have been bandied about in my family since time immemorial, I have never read anything from this series or seen any part of the famous television adaptation about the adventures of a British veterinarian. And now I hang my head in shame. For some odd reason, my library includes All Things Wise and Wonderful, but not this, the first omnibus of three in the series. Apparently "wacky out-of-order series acquisition" is the theme of today's post.
  • The World since 1945: A Concise History by Keith Robbins
    • I am determined to beef up my contemporary history chops, since this is in fact the period of theatre I study. And those crazy playwrights just insist on reflecting on current events, curse 'em!
  • Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
    • A hardcover Everyman's Library edition of a novel I did not enjoy to replace the wee battered paperback version I read in college. Does that make any sense as an acquisition? I can only explain it with the feeling that it is SO classic that perhaps some day I will come to see its genius. Ah, the snobbery of the literary canon at work!
  • A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong
    • I find the Canongate Myths series, of which this is the first volume, to be a witty, ambitious idea, although I didn't particularly enjoy the first installment that I read (Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad). I have been lurking about, waiting for a cheap copy of Armstrong's introduction (which was apparently the largest simultaneous publication in history, appearing in 33 countries on a single day) to show up, and here at last I found one.
  • Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey edited by Karen Wilkin
    • Recommended by J.; I do love Gorey!
  • The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley
    • I have never read any of Paley's work, and this is one of those sad cases where the news of her recent death (in August) brought this oversight imperatively to my attention.
  • A Brief History of the Smile by Angus Trumble
    • A whimsical purchase, but I can rarely resist these strange specialist histories. And, as you can see, I have quite the weakness for books that describe themselves as "short," "concise," or "brief" histories.
  • Stigma by Erving Goffman
    • I need to read this for work, and it is always recalled from me when I get it from the library. So how could I NOT buy a copy (albeit a very marked up one) for $1.50??
  • The Unmasking of Drama: Contested Representation in Shakespeare's Tragedies by Jonathan Baldo
    • Another research related purchase.
  • The Columbia History of the Twentieth Century ed. by Richard W. Bulliet
    • Not as delightfully concise as I apparently like my history, but still a seductively useful looking tome.