Wednesday, January 8, 2025

Homer Goes to Hollywood (winks to camera)


Image made with Ideogram

With Christopher Nolan set to direct a film adaptation of The Odyssey, online debates have reignited about whether familiarity with Homer's epics should be considered essential knowledge. As someone who works in education and studies classical receptions, I've long considered this question. The answer isn't as simple as either traditionalists or critics might suggest.


Ask any AI platform why we should study classics, and you'll get a predictable answer about foundational Western cultural references. But this perspective is deeply limited. It ignores equally rich literary traditions from Asia, Africa, India, and Indigenous cultures, while assuming all students share the same cultural background – an assumption particularly misplaced in multicultural societies like modern Australia. Our school curricula increasingly recognise this, incorporating Asian, Indigenous and Australian writers into reading lists.

Too often our teaching reduces ancient texts to simplistic frameworks. High school students learn to spot Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey pattern, treating myths as primitive attempts to explain the unexplained. This approach does a disservice to both the texts and our students. Instead, we should engage with these works as sophisticated literary and cultural artifacts that reward careful analysis.

Australian memory expert Dr. Lynne Kelly offers a compelling perspective in The Memory Code, arguing that what we call mythology is our inadequate term for "vivid stories that encode rational and practical and spiritual information of which the literal truth is impossible to differentiate from the metaphorical, a dichotomy not usually relevant to the traditional owners." These aren't simple stories – they're sophisticated memory devices encoding complex cultural knowledge.

Cambridge's Professor Dame Mary Beard deepens this understanding. In a 2008 BBC In Our Time discussion, she argued that myths weren't merely entertaining tales but served crucial societal functions. "Myth is an economical form of thinking about the world," she explained. "If you think of it as a process, a verb, to myth, you get the function of it better." More intriguingly, Beard suggests that myth itself is playfully subversive: "Myth always has the last laugh... Myth itself is asking: Do you really believe? How far are you going to go along with this story?"

The Odyssey exemplifies this complexity through its masterful use of literary devices that still inform storytelling today. Its structure mirrors its themes: the sea-tossed narrative, shuffling Odysseus on and off course, creates an experience for the audience that mirrors the hero's own journey. The epic's prologue summarises the entire story, yet manages to maintain suspense – a technique that deserves more attention than simply checking boxes on a hero's journey template.

The poem's sophisticated narrative techniques would impress any contemporary writer. It employs non-linear storytelling, unreliable narration, and complex literary devices to explore key themes of literature. Consider how the epic handles storytelling itself: Penelope and Helen weave narratives both literally and figuratively; Odysseus, disguised, weeps at hearing tales of his own exploits in Troy, compared to a captive woman crying – a striking image that explores empathy and identity. When Helen drugs her guests before recounting stories of Troy to prevent their grief, we see ancient understanding of trauma and memory.

Harvard Professor Gregory Nagy, in his MOOC The Greek Hero in 24 Hours, defines a Greek hero as "a man who is glorified in song" – and through this lens, the epic becomes fascinatingly self-referential. Odysseus creates his own heroic narrative through his homecoming, while Achilles' glory is proven by the very existence of the Iliad itself. The bard even refers to himself, asking for meat and wine – a postmodern touch millennia before postmodernism.

This sophistication extends to the poem's origins. The groundbreaking 1930s research of Albert Lord and Milman Parry revealed that oral epics weren't fixed texts but living performances, each telling unique. They discovered that bards constructed these elaborate narratives in real-time using traditional formulas. This understanding should transform how we teach these texts – not as fossilised classics to be dissected but as dynamic works that evolved through performance and interaction with audiences.

The question isn't whether ancient texts like The Odyssey should be part of a general education. Instead, we should ask how these works, alongside stories from other cultures, can teach us to think critically about narrative, memory, and human experience. As Mary Beard suggests, they help us think about "what human existence is like, why it is so difficult and why we do what we do."

This brings us back to Nolan's upcoming adaptation. The most exciting possibility isn't seeing how faithfully he'll recreate Homer's plot, but whether he'll capture the epic's playful self-awareness – its understanding that every story, even one about coming home, is also about the act of storytelling itself. In an era of competing narratives and information overload, perhaps that's the most relevant lesson The Odyssey can teach us: not just how to tell stories, but how to think about why we tell them at all.

Friday, January 5, 2024

Susan Sontag On Writing




Edited from LitHub here.

I like Sontag's approach: that it is important to be attentive and to be connected and to not be cynical.



To be a great writer:

know everything about adjectives and punctuation (rhythm)
have moral intelligence—which creates true authority in a writer.

    –from As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

On what good writers ought to do:

I’m often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: “Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.”

Needless to say, no sooner had these perky phrases fallen out of my mouth than I thought of some more recipes for writer’s virtue.

For instance: “Be serious.” By which I meant: Never be cynical. And which doesn’t preclude being funny.

And . . . if you’ll allow me one more: “Take care to be born at a time when it was likely that you would be definitively exalted and influenced by Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, and Turgenev, and Chekhov.

    –from Sontag’s “At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning”

On finding inspiration in daily life:

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead.

    –from Sontag’s 2003 commencement speech at Vassar

On the morality of the writer:

Obviously, I think of the writer of novels and stories and plays as a moral agent. . . This doesn’t entail moralizing in any direct or crude sense. Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate—and, therefore, improve—our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgement.

    –from Sontag’s “At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning”

On carving out a place in contemporary fiction:

I’m glad to be free of the kind of one-note depressiveness that is so characteristic of contemporary fiction. I don’t want to express alienation. It isn’t what I feel. I’m interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

    –from a 1992 interview with Leslie Garis

On attention:

Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. It’s all about taking in as much of what’s out there as you can, and not letting the excuses and the dreariness of some of the obligations you’ll soon be incurring narrow your lives. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

    –from Sontag’s 2003 commencement speech at Vassar

On the uses of the writer to the world:

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counter-statements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

Writers can do something to combat these clichés of our separateness, our difference—for writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences—experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted—made cynical, superficial—by this understanding.

    –from Sontag’s speech after being awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2003

On art as salvation:

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.

    –from a 1992 interview with Leslie Garis

On how to be a writer:

It’s lunacy. . . You have to be obsessed. People write me all the time, or get in touch with me about “what should I do if I want to be a writer?” I say well, do you really want to be a writer? It’s not like something you’d want to be—it’s rather something you couldn’t help but be. But you have to be obsessed.

Otherwise, of course, it’s perfectly okay to write, in the way that it’s perfectly okay to paint or play a musical instrument, and why shouldn’t people do that? I deplore the fact that only writers can write, as it were. Why can’t people have this as an art activity? . . . But to actually want to make your life being a writer, it’s an auto-slavery, obviously. You are both the slave and the task-master, and it’s a very driven thing.

    –from a 1992 talk given at the 92nd Street Y



Sunday, December 17, 2023

Reviving the Voices of Marginalised Women in Greek Myth: Uncovering Feminist Traditions in Literature

 


The women who are currently rewriting female characters in myth on the basis that women have been marginalised and silenced are themselves ignoring the long history of women’s writing.

..............

 

[And I remembered] the fate of Minyas’ daughters - Cornina*


Feminist rewritings of women from Greek myth are popular in publishing right now. 

In 1997 I wrote my Master's thesis in Classical Receptions on Christa Wolf’s 1983 novel, Cassandra. Since then, I have maintained a list of popular rewritings of Greek myth from Ovid to now. There were ten published in 2017, nine in 2018, ten in 2019, six in 2020, seventeen in 2021, twelve in 2022, and eight slated for 2023. Among the approximately two hundred I have itemised, the quality is variable. Many of these novels written by women claim to be, or are reviewed as, feminist. But are they? What criteria are we using to judge the success of a rewriting, and whether the result is feminist? These rewritings are reviewed not only in newspapers but in podcasts, on TikTok, at writers’ festivals, and Facebook groups. Readers may say they like these novels, but rarely explain the basis for their judgement. Some of the texts might be described as fan fiction. Many are for YA readers. Some are fantasy or science fiction. Some might be called historical fiction. Some of the more literary ones are written by classicists. The most famous purportedly feminist rewritings which we might call literary fiction are probably Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018), Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls (2018), and Natalie Hayne’s A Thousand Ships (2019). In recent years research students have been writing dissertations on these texts applying various frameworks, including proposed alignment with the #MeToo movement.

           Acclaimed modern writers say they owe it to the female characters to tell their story. Some claim that these are the ‘real’ stories of these fictional characters. Reviewers and interviewers say they are giving voice to marginalised characters who were silenced. But is that true? And is this new? Are the women who are currently rewriting female characters in myth on the basis that women have been marginalised and silenced, and claiming this as a new approach, ignoring the long history of women’s writing?

Voices of ancient Greek women in literature: representations and subversions in mythology and poetry

And so I’ve reset our father’s tales,

[reworked their crown with these new jewels]

as I take my lyre for my girls. - Corinna


Not all ancient Greek women or characters were marginalised. In ancient literature, particularly the plays, we hear substantially from the characters Medea, Clytemnestra, Antigone, Iphigenia, Lysistrata, and the Trojan Women. Homer’s epics show women, who are minor characters since the stories focus on the male heroes, singing laments and singing while they work and weave. (In ancient Greece, a hero was a man whose glory was immortalised through song.) There are also ancient records of women performing spells and incantations, rituals which include speech acts. Representations of women in Greek myth were variably sympathetic, mouthy, violent, distinctive, and women were not universally regarded as meek or subservient or good. Notably, no-one is presenting the stories of Myrrha (who lusted after her father and tricked him into having sex with her) or Phaedra (who lusted after her celibate stepson and falsely accused him of rape) as worthy role models for modern women. There were various representations of the same stories, since these stories are not sacred but means of exploring ideas according to the writer’s purpose and context. It was a good start. Our ideas about representations of female characters have taken a turn over the milenia.

We know some ancient women lyric poets were acclaimed in their lifetimes with statues in their honour (namely Moero, Erinna, possibly Corrina). Literary innovations were named after Telesilla (Telesillian metre) and Praxilla (Praxillian metre). Antye invented original compound adjectives. Sappho was acclaimed as a poet in her lifetime yet the legacy of Sappho as an eponym is not her poetry but her sexuality (Sapphic).

The ancient Greek women poets wrote back to Homer, applying Homeric devices to domestic situations, subverting the epic into the lyric, and deflating the grand themes of epic. Classicist, Josephine Balmer, in her 1996 book, Classical Women Poets, reports that classical women's poetry subverts masculine literary genres by frequently using revisionist myth-making and memory to build a private as well as a collective mythology. The women wrote lyrics to be sung, both at communal events and privately, including laments, hymns, and epigrams. Some named themselves in their songs.

Balmer shows the artistry of the poets, their agility at wordplay, rhythm, alliteration, and other sound effects and their subversion of Homer's epigrams and imagery, . They apply the devices of Homer, for example, to domestic issues in women’s lives, thereby subverting and deflating the grandiose and revered poetry they reference. Whereas poets like Sappho and Erinna undermine male traditions to create a parallel women's world in their works, Anyte subverts heroic norms throughout her poetry, characterising a barking dog as a Homeric warrior, or a babbling brook as an epic roaring ocean. Hedyle rewrote Homeric women monsters. Balmer’s work shows that women were doing this kind of response to the Homeric myths from the beginning of literature.  

And what about The Heroides by Ovid? His fictional letters from women deserted by Greek heroes are an early example of this text type, written c. 2-16 BCE in Latin. So, this isn’t anything new. Women were given voices in ancient literature written by men. Stories from the female characters’ point of view were represented. 

Uncovering ‘the truth’ about women in Greek myth: The ongoing struggle for representation and narrative justice

Instead of a beautiful bridal bed and sacred wedding hymns,

your mother now offers up this marble tomb, this statue;

it has your measure, the pleasure in your face, your virgin treasure -

O Thersis, we can still celebrate you, even in death. - Anyte


Although these current writers who are rewriting women from Greek myth know that the female characters are fictional, and that various versions of them were written in ancient times, they still ‘feel’ they are real. Classicist, Natalie Haynes, with an illustrator, has produced a jigsaw puzzle entitled The Real Women of Greek Myth, marketed as a means to uncover ‘the truth’ about the women of the classics. What is this ‘truth’ that is revealed?

The motivation, however, is genuine and valid. In ancient artefacts there are examples of how women were valued for being silent, unknown, invisible. There is a quote by Aristotle about the importance of face coverings for women to stop the sound of their unattractive voices. It might be argued that it is the historical privileging of Aristotle’s writings and others like him that has facilitated the ongoing marginalisation of women. According to the men who spoke, the best women went unnoticed. And, of course, traditionally the history of the western world documents the lives of men; it is a history of war and politics, realms from which women were excluded. Women’s domestic lives were not considered by men to be a worthy subject of art or literature, therefore little was recorded or passed down about women’s thoughts, ideas, feelings, aspirations, or strategies. Of the ancient women poets, most of what has survived are fragments. Part of the work of feminism is to uncover, value and reinforce the works of past women, thereby integrating women into history. It seems natural that current writers use women from Greek myth to explore possibilities in women’s lives as a corrective to the canon. Some consider this as an act of narrative justice. It is worth remembering, however, that we don’t tell quiet people to be quiet. Women were not all naturally quiet and submissive; otherwise, why tell them to be quiet? But the story that these characters were marginalised and silenced feels true, perhaps more true than the real stories of history. The consideration of how texts become extant rather than extinct is mostly by chance through accidents of history rather than a long systematic determination of value.

We’ve been through all this before.

Evaluating feminist novels: Rosalind Coward's critique and its relevance today

Lady Hera, come down to us, to your scented shrine

near heaven, look with favour on our fine-stitched fabric;

with her noble daughter Nossis for new apprentice

Theophilis wove it, the daughter of Cleocha -

daughter, mother, grandmother, united in the thread. - Nossis


When second wave writers were composing feminist novels that were women-centric, they were popular, they influenced the culture, but they were not uncritically received. In 1980 Rosalind Coward wrote an article entitled ‘This Novel Changes Lives’: Are Women's Novels Feminist Novels? A Response to Rebecca O'Rourke's Article ‘Summer Reading’ which reviewed The Women’s Room by Marilyn French. She criticised the undiscerning celebration of woman-centred novels, on the basis of several points. 

She observed that the novels were using a quasi-autobiographical structure to message consciousness raising. The novels used the trope of confessing sexual experiences and awakenings. Coward argued that these aspects, or even being women-centric, do not in themselves define the novels as feminist. To expand, women-centric novels can be romance, like Mills & Boon, or pornography; that doesn’t make them feminist. Consciousness raising by itself is never sufficient as a politics. She warns, ‘As feminists we have to be constantly alerted to what reality is being constructed, and how representations are achieving this construction. In this respect, reading a novel can be a political activity, similar to activities which have always been important to feminist politics in general.’ She argues that women do not share a universal experience because women are so diverse. ‘Feminism can never be the product of the identity of women’s experiences and interests - there is no such unity. Feminism must always be the alignment of women in a political movement with particular political aims and objectives. It is a grouping unified by its political interests, not its common experiences.’ So, the novel needs to have a political message in the interest of advancing the rights of women as a sex class rather than report a common female experience or use a women’s voice. Patricia Stubbs, in Women and Fiction (1979), declared that ‘A genuinely feminist novel must surely credit women with more forms of experience than their personal or sexual entanglements.’ 

Coward raises many good questions. To summarise: What does the novel do? How are representations of sexuality, maleness and femaleness used to construct a version of reality? How does the novel typify a class group? What ideologies are presented? Does it chart the experience of women’s oppression? Provide an insight into contemporary feminism? Is the novel propaganda? Is it preaching to an already converted audience? What, beyond sexual experience, prompts the growth of the protagonist towards knowledge, understanding, insight, wisdom? Is sexuality treated as social, historical, political? And, importantly, if these novels are part of a political movement, how do we measure their effectiveness? In O’Rourke’s article she asked if commercial publishers were cashing in on feminism. That question remains current: in a novel set in Ithaca to be published in 2023, the author admits she did not read The Odyssey; she read about the publishing market trends. 

All these questions are pertinent to how we might review the modern rewritings of women in Greek myth. The determination as to whether a novel is feminist might be an individual or shifting one. We might settle on the expectation that feminist novels share a common theme where a woman struggles to reject sex-based stereotypes and defines her life according to her own values.

Mythological poetry and the quest for meaning: examining motivations and interpretations

But I sang the glory of local heroes

hurrahed in our heroines. - Corinna


            Women who have written poems about women in Greek myth include Louise Gluck, Carol Ann Duffy, Edna St Vincent Millay, Margaret Atwood, Dorothy Parker, H.D., Alicia Ostriker, Ann Carson, Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich, Rita Dove, Sharon Olds, and A.E. Stallings.

In Writing Like a Woman, 1983, Alicia Ostriker published her essay thinking about how women poets make use of Greek myth. The book examines the poetry of H.D.(Hilda Doolittle), Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich. Her essay, I Make my Psyche From my Need, speculates as to the motivation:

When a woman rewrites an ancient myth it is not because she yearns for a heroic past (when men were men etc.)...In all likelihood she has two motives in mind, and the enjoyment of writing mythological poems has to do with the fact that two motives normally oppose each other. 

One is her intent to be taken seriously as a writer. It happens that to deal with ancient myth is to assume intellectual authority…

The other is that she wants to get at something very deep in herself, some set of feelings so intimate and strong that she is ashamed. 

The mythological poems many women are writing derive from a flash of connection. That story, that figure, that pattern of action - I am the woman. I suffered. I was there. I understand

In addition to literary ambition and the need to say something intimate about herself which she reads in the myth, the women poet may have a third motive. She intends to release an imprisoned meaning. The poem is a great key she is dangling…To ‘see’ what was present but unseen by others. This last idea is crucial. It defines my sensation, when writing poems involving myths, that I am not inventing or ‘interpreting’ but discovering…

Let’s skip over the first motive, that referring to classics endows the writer with intellectual status (that’s another essay). The sense of connection and the proposed unveiling of a hidden meaning are still relevant. 

Modern writers who rewrite women in myth say they are uncovering a truth, that there is a hidden message they are uncovering. But whose truth? Meaning resides in the one who hears/reads/sees. This claim seems overly earnest and mystical.

Texts are just texts; written stories that present situations, characters, plots and meanings. Anything can be a text—from written texts to music, visual arts, film, performance. The meaning can change according to the readers. Texts are open to various meanings according to our interpretations and cultural experiences. As attributed to Anaïs Nin, ‘We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are.’ Australian expert on ancient memory devices, Lynne Kelly, reads myths as memory devices. She says we use the word ‘mythology’ because we have no better word for ‘vivid stories that encode rational and practical and spiritual information of which the literal truth is impossible to differentiate from the metaphorical, a dichotomy not usually relevant to the traditional owners’. When we consider how a memory palace uses distinctive characters who personify concepts interacting with each other in the most surprising ways in order to make encoded information memorable, this makes perfect sense. In the 2008 podcast BBC In Our Time: The Greek Myths, Mary Beard says that the myths served a purpose for generations; they weren’t silly, so we must assume that myths did an important job. ‘Myth is an economical form of thinking about the world…If you think of it as a process, a verb, to myth, you get the function of it better.’ They help us think about what human existence is like, why it is so difficult and why we do what we do. ‘Myth is a framework for thinking about how we are.’ But there is more to consider. Myth does not just prompt us to think in different directions, it challenges how we think. ‘Myth always has the last laugh.’ She proposes that myth is always playing with you. ‘Myth itself is asking: Do you really believe? How far are you going to go along with this story?’ Again, like a memory device, a text is a tool to think with.

A reading as discovery might be Susan Hawthorne’s reading of Sappho 31, interpreting the description of physical symptoms as being about epilepsy rather than desire. Another example might be the proposal that Saul on the road to Damascus saw a meteor or lightning which blinded him and caused scales to form in his eyes, falling three days later. Or the interpretation of Darcy’s behaviour in Pride and Prejudice as being on the autism spectrum. There is no one truth to discover. These are just readings, and we all bring our various readings. We just apply what we know, and what we know can be informed by our various experiences. While we can justify them with scholarship, however, none can be proven as discovering a hidden message. Interestingly, a rewriting of the atmosphere of The Iliad as a long poem by Alice Oswald, Memorial, has been described as an excavation. Is this supposed to suggest an appropriation, a ransacking, or an archaeological dig that reveals new evidence that reshapes our thinking about something we thought we knew? The poem is like blackout poetry, with repetitions, but it works. It emphasises an aspect of The Iliad to make us consider the epic poem in a new way. Atwood is correct when she says in The Myths Series and Me in Publishers Weekly ‘... myths cannot really be translated with any accuracy from their native soil — from their own place and time. We will never know exactly what they meant to their ancient audiences.’

In 1980 Sandra M. Gilbert, co-author with Susan Gubar of The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979, gave a talk entitled Confessional Mythology at the Modern Language Association Seminar on Women and Mythology. She suggested that the position women have been traditionally allocated, that of the outsider, could allow them to ‘own only [their] own vision and therefore [they] can steal into the house of myth, see everything, and say, for the first time (and thus with the dearest freshness) what everything means to [them]’. They can see myths in new ways, which are meaningful to them. Yet this does not suppose a hidden meaning to be discovered. 

We should note that the male heroes of Greek myth were complex and violent. We don’t necessarily want to be like them: Achilles, Odysseus, Hercules, Perseus, Theseus. In fact, the point of these stories might have been to avoid being like them. They were not depicted as models of healthy relationships. Often, these heroes are dangerous to the people closest to them.

How are contemporary writers reclaiming women’s voices?

You met your fate like those great dogs of old

by the curling roots

of a coward’s bush; Loci, of Locri,

swiftest of pups - especially to bark,

into your light paws he sank harsh poison, that speckle-necked snake. - Anyte

 

Let’s look at some presentations of the female characters in novels. 

Ursula Le Guin writes in her Afterword for Lavinia (2008) that she omitted the gods from her version of the story, as the ‘Homeric use of quarrelsome deities to motivate, illuminate and interfere with human choices and emotions doesn’t work well in a novel’. She frames her story as following Virgil, with Lavinia reclaiming her voice, and that her titular character kind of took over the writing, even speaking back to Virgil in the novel. Many writers start in the same vein, with their heroines declaring their intentions to tell their own stories. It makes sense to remove the gods from the stories so you can present the psychological aspects of a character. In the ancient stories the extreme behaviour of the gods is attributed to their pettiness. The extreme behaviour of mortals is attributed to the intervention of the gods. This leaves a gap for modern authors to fill; to present a character with psychological realism. Other writers, like Kerry Greenwood in her 1995 Cassandra, start their stories with the gods interfering with human lives as a game, like an opening scene from the 1963 film Jason and The Argonauts.  

There is some discomfort around the popular rewritings of the story of Hades raping Persephone as a YA romance. Of course, people can write whatever they want. It is up to us as readers, perhaps informed readers and scholars, to critique the success of these stories. Some are disturbingly like Stockholm Syndrome. In her review of the musical, Hadestown, published online in Eidolon, 2020, classicist Miriam Kamil writes ‘What message does it send to deprive Persephone of her trauma? Does a retelling have a responsibility to include the thornier parts of the myth?’ This applies to other retellings that reframe rape as romance.

Let’s look at the approaches of the most acclaimed recent novels.

            Atwood’s Penelopiad uses various text modes to present a theatrical story which champions Penelope and the chorus of maids, but criticises and is disparaging towards Helen, never considering Helen might be caught in the same patriarchal traps that ensnare Penelope and the maids. When Atwood was presented with the suggestion that her Penelopiad was feminist, she disagreed, saying, ‘I wouldn't even call it feminist. Every time you write something from the point of view of a woman, people say that it's feminist.’ Of course, being women-centred does not make a text feminist. 

        In Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls, Briseis’ lack of power is the angle that makes her a powerful narrator. She is a rape victim in captivity, but also a whole person. Her heroism is in her survival strategies, which includes being in a community of women, viscerally described, who support each other. Interestingly, in her review for The Guardian, Emily Wilson notes some aspects of the writing as quasi-Homeric. Barker defends her use of anachronism in her Guardian article, referring firstly to Helen: ‘She’s not a historical figure at all, none of them is. Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector, Priam, Helen – none of them existed. So the rules for writing historical fiction simply don’t apply. You’re allowed anachronisms, like the English rugby songs that Achilles’s men sing after dinner. And characters from myth can step into our world – history is always then; myth is now.’ Barker also considered the role of the gods in her novel. ‘I’d have liked to leave the gods out altogether, but Thetis was a special case because it’s impossible to understand Achilles without her.’ The novel meets Stubb’s criteria for being a feminist novel; it credits women with more forms of experience than their personal or sexual entanglements. 

            In Miller’s Circe, the narrative ties in with the surrounding circles of myth, focussing on the emotional life of the titular character, which includes her growth of knowledge and her developing skills that result in independence. It shows that even immortals can struggle. It feels contemporary and relevant. As such, it likely meets the criteria proposed by Stubbs. 

            In A Thousand Ships Haynes uses the framing device of Calliope, muse of epic poetry, telling tales from the point of view of a panorama of women involved with the Trojan War, aiming to tell the story of all the women, from the beginning to the aftermath of the war, whilst providing commentary of the device itself. It shows how war impacts women, asking if these women are not equally heroic to men, the number of voices contributing, mosaic-like, to the successful outcome. Again, likely to be categorised as a feminist novel.

            Classicist, Edith Hall, notes in her 2008 book The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer's Odyssey, that the important ideas in the most recent rewritings of the female characters from the Odyssey are ‘private space, weaving and quest’. It would interesting to see how this observation might apply to rewritings of other ancient Greek mythical stories.

            Grace Dowling, in her 2022 review of Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne, criticises the work, which Saint declares as feminist, for a story that feels more politically motivated than well told. ‘..it is as though a personal or nuanced character has been traded for one of allegorical significance, so that Ariadne can stand as a typological ‘feminist’ figure, a woman who acts independently in an intensely masculine culture. Saint successfully draws attention to the misogynistic mistreatment of women in Greek myths, but Ariadne offers no new perspectives on what feminism means…’‘ This ties in with historical criticisms of women-centred novels and the dangers of writing forcibly for social justice purposes at the expense of narrative subtlety. 

Again, we’ve done this before

Over and over at this small tomb, Cleina weeps in sorrow,

a mother lamenting her daughter,

the final race which death has won. - Anyte


There is a history of women writing for social justice documented by Ellen Moers in Literary Women (1976). The Victorian women writers who wrote for social justice: Harriet Beecher Stowe (slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin), George Sand (class, women’s rights, Indiana), Elizabeth Gaskell (working class poverty, Mary Barton), Charlotte Bronte (women’s rights, Jane Eyre), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (slavery, women’s rights, child labour), and George Eliot, corresponded with and influenced each other. Moers calls this the epic age. It is a shame the women themselves did not give a name to their common interest: they could have been recorded in textbooks if they had given their movement a name. Before writing fiction George Eliot famously criticised Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, in her 1856 essay. She criticises novels as pompous, pedantic, snobbish, sentimental, and pious; heavy handed to the point of being evangelical. Three years later Eliot published her first novel, Adam Bede, a gritty story of a dairymaid, Hetty Sorrel, and then in 1860, The Mill on the Floss, again demonstrating the unfair sex-based restrictions which prove damaging to women. Eliot, in her fiction, avoided the errors she had criticised in others.

So, where does the authority lie? 

Stranger, if you should sail to Mytilene, city of fair song,

enticed by Sappho’s fragrant garland, its heady bloom,

say only this: that the land of Locri gave me life,

long-treasured by the Muses and by Her.

One more thing: My name is Nossis.

Now go. - Nossis


Myths appeal to something fundamental to human nature. Myths are important to help us process complex, nuanced topics that are difficult to articulate in varying social-cultural contexts: really, they are just tools to think with. Stories with good bones are unbreakable. Oral tradition is for everybody. These stories are refabricated, like scraps of cloth recycled into a quilt or a weaving; they are repurposed. Classics are unbreakable. Like a jazz classic, they can hold various interpretations and restylings; they inspire riffing and scatting. The song can be the voice of the women of Greek myth, as presented by a writer who feels she owes them, or owns them.

            For a 2021 Esquire article about the increased popularity of recent novels, Adrienne Westenfeld asked the writers how they use the ancient texts and why. Saint relates the stories to the #MeToo movement. ‘These attitudes, this particular brand of misogyny—you can see it three thousand years ago. Women were blamed for men’s actions. Women bore the consequences while men and gods got away scot-free. We retell the stories because they’re still so relevant to our lives.’ Haynes says ‘We need more women and more racial diversity. People just have to find the story that sings to them and tell it accordingly.’ And Miller: ‘There are no rules and there should be no rules. I love to see really strongly different adaptations, as well as adaptations that are woven into a version of the story that we already know, but turning the story over like we do embroidery, to show you the back side. Both can be wildly successful. These are such kaleidoscopic characters that you can just keep turning and turning them.’

And there are gaps to be filled because the ancient stories were epics or plays. In the epics, the bard describes or reports what happens to the characters, without reference to their thoughts or feelings. In the plays the characters interact and speak for themselves, and report off stage events. The lyrical poems and laments sung by ancient women can be first person expressions of emotion; desire, friendship, fun, memory, loss, grief. Novels as a form provide different affordances. What novels can provide is the interiority of characters; we can hear the characters' thoughts. This provides a means to show psychological insight into how women strategise or otherwise find ways to cope with their fates. Extending on this, showing these characters in novels can present imagined communities of women; how women work together to support each other and survive, which may have been offstage actions in ancient plays.

Not only do we have permission from ancient writers to continue rewriting ancient texts, because they did, but we have the example of Plato’s dialogues. The Greeks, in their stories and literature, questioned received wisdom and authority. This is the tradition we are continuing. In tracing the classical tradition, it is worth remembering that ‘traditio’ in Latin means a ‘handing over’. This bears a responsibility, but, when using myth, not one of reverent, sacred preservation. We have permission to use these stories as we see fit, and to critique them discerningly.

But there are other traditions these novels are continuing as well; that of feminist literary writings and scholarship. The current popular rewritings of women in Greek myth are continuing the work of early ancient women poets, as well as reinforcing the writings, creativity and thinking within feminist literary theory. These are components of women's history which are at risk of being forgotten, again. We can consider this another imagined community of women that we can join. Who owns the work of these real women? What do we owe them?  We need to sing the old songs by women to keep them alive. 

We’ve come to worship mother Demeter - a circle of nine,

all girls of a certain age, all dressed in our holiday best -

dressed in our best, and wearing our finest ivory jewels,

stars sawn from the shining sky,

a sight that should be seen. - Anonymous

 

*All translations by Josephine Balmer, 1996.

Saturday, October 7, 2023

How Generative AI is Like Classical Receptions

 

        Image created using Ideogram. 

In a conversation with a work colleague, we discussed analogies to how generative AI impacts how we teach students to learn and how we assess student learning outcomes. What does it mean for scholarship?

Comparisons were offered with the introduction of the calculator, or Wikipedia, or talking to a well-read friend, or an actor, or the role Leonardo DiCaprio played in Catch Me if You Can. I pondered the new problem that after two and half thousand years of literary theory, we still can't measure what it is to write as a human. We have no basis for collecting data on the distinction between human writing and writing by a bot that mimics human writing. The first attempt was based on perplexity and burstiness. These are not normally regarded as literary terms. We can collect data to determine how to write in the style of Ernest Hemingway or Agatha Christie, measuring the occurrence of adverbs, exclamation marks, and distinctive words, as well as sentence length, for example. These are distant readings; the opposite of close readings (see Ben Blatt’s 2017 Nabokov’s Favourite Colour is Mauve on statistics on the craft of writing).

My colleague said that a producer creates an artifact which is the boundary between the producer and the responder. The responder assumes a human made the product. The text. This is a boundary - the artifact stands between the writer and the reader - but the reader understands that the text was created by a human. Now the human creator is unknown. With generative AI, that boundary is blurred. We think of this as something new, but I suspect we have been here before. I suggested that the blurred boundary already exists in the field of Classics. Generative AI is like the reception of texts from ancient literature; the passed down received meaning of texts that are lost, found, fragmented, translated with bias, and compiled with bias.

I said that my analogy would be to the corpus of extant ancient literature and explained why: fragments lost and found, references from other texts, fluid oral stories transcribed into an artifact, translations retranslated, the whole provenance over millennia, all the accidents of history; yet the claim is that these texts survived due to their value and their meanings as they have been passed down through generations of scholarship. We have no autograph copies of any ancient texts. We don’t know if Homer was an actual person; we only know that hymns, epic poems, and a comedy were assigned to him, if he existed. As for the known writers in ancient history, there is no assurance that a person we identify wrote these exactly as the texts have come to us. They do have value, but as tools to think with (as does everything) and we need to check our assumptions.

This is what Chat GPT says about the reception of ancient classical texts: 

    Classical texts have been revered and preserved over centuries due to their cultural and historical significance. They often reflect the values, beliefs, and ideas of the time in which they were written. They have been studied, analysed, and interpreted by scholars, and their influence has been acknowledged and passed down through generations.

But that’s not exactly true.

The texts that have survived from ancient times did not necessarily survive because they were the best. If that were true then the Roman graffiti that survives does so because it is excellent and important, rather than because it was written on stone walls rather than papyrus. Most texts that have survived are due to accidents of history. Socio-religious or geo-political factors may play their roles in specific times and places but generally the survival of most, perhaps all, texts are purely by chance. We know about some texts that did not survive because they are recorded in texts that did survive, but, with fragments, it is difficult to identify what the text was: it could be a joke, satirical, critical, and the references are to people and characters we can only speculate about. There is no way to discern the significance. Most references are like 'the poor cat in the adage'; we don't know the adage that Lady Macbeth is referring to so we don't know the significance of the comparison. Ask Classicists what texts they most want to be found and responses might include: Homer’s lost comedy; Aristotle’s second book of Poetics which covered comedy; Euclid’s book of logical fallacies; Ovid’s Medea; the plays that beat the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in competition; and Longinus’ works on Homer. And, of course, the whole Library of Alexandria, which, if it had survived, would have altered the course of human history. Sigh.

Texts have been lost because they were deliberately destroyed but also due to fire, corruption, neglect, reuse as another text or reuse as toilet paper. Texts have been found when used as packing paper, in sealed storage containers, among debris, or written over which come to us as palimpsests. The stories of these texts’ survival are mostly an ongoing process spanning millennia. (See Josephine Balmer’s 2017 The Paths of Survival for a poetic exploration of the provenance of an ancient text.)

When you read ancient classical texts you need to adjust yourself to becoming comfortable with ‘the rest is lost’. For good translations of fragments the translator aims to replicate the source, not just translating words and mimicking the sounds, wordplay, and other literary devices, but also the gaps in the text, indicated by brackets or the layout on the page.

In 2014 US Professor of Classics, Diane Rayor, was about to publish her translations of the ‘complete’ works of Sappho when new fragments were found. She needed to re-evaluate what she thought she knew to incorporate these new pieces of the puzzle. She says that fragments offer intriguing possibilities, echoing broken conversations, trailing voices. Australian Professor of Classics, Marguerite Johnson, agrees there is a pleasure in working with fragments: ‘I really don't want them ever to be completed, filled in, finalised. Their fragmentary condition makes them special, unique, and I really can't image Sappho actually composing anything complete.’ (This quote is from personal correspondence. You can check all other references in books or online academic journals written by experts, who became experts due to scholarship).

We need to challenge assumptions and check the facts and check the sources for the facts. What do we know and how do we know it? What is the provenance? Not just in the light of generative AI, but for everything. And when we talk about bias, we need to consider the audience, purpose, and context of the producer. What was their agenda? What were they aiming to do? What do they value? What do they disregard? This is more difficult when applied to texts generated by AI.

And when we observe that history can be rewritten, texts can be rewritten, and that news reports of current events can be inaccurate, biased, and just wrong, then how do we check that we understand the events of history and the development of ideas? In my own lifetime I have witnessed how the music of the 1980s has been misrepresented; the nostalgia radio stations playing ‘the best’ music of that decade is certainly not the music that was valued at the time and was actively despised in the share houses I lived in during the 1980s.

Generative AI writes the commonly held ideas from all sources. Those sources are not consistent, not authorised, not experts, and not challenged. It is like the passed down received meaning of texts that are lost, found, fragmented, translated, and compiled with bias. It mimics human writing but is not human.

Humans bring their whole selves, influenced by all the factors that make that person an individual. We share a collective humanity. We want to engage with scholarship; we want to pursue our intellectual curiosity; we want to use texts as tools to think with; we want to share our thinking and test our thinking. We want to engage as humans, and we want students to engage as humans. And we know that people are more valuable than bots for doing this thinking together. So long as we check our sources, this is what scholarship is.

Sunday, September 24, 2023

Using double-barreled literary terms to increase sophistication of analysis



Your teachers might ask you to use evaluative adjectives for your literary terms, so that you describe an image as distinctive or a metaphor as powerful. You can include these in your writing, although it would be more accurate to use these descriptors for the effects and the impact on readers. And you should use adjectives to describe voice and tone, perspective and point of view, and describe the impacts of literary devices as subtle or blatant, for example.
 
More genuinely, you can elevate your writing by turning a literary device from a noun to an advective and using a double-barreled literary term. This adds sophistication to your writing. Your marker will be impressed.

It looks like this:
  • Alliterative parallel construction
  • Ironic foreshadowing
  • Metaphorical metonymy
  • Symbolic synecdoche
  • Ironic euphemism
  • Synesthetic oxymoron
  • Understated metaphor
  • Poetic synesthesia
  • Metaphorical paradox
  • Juxtaposed anaphora
  • Symbolic metonymy
  • Paradoxical allegory
  • Hyperbolic simile
  • Metaphorical irony
  • Allusive symbolism
  • Juxtaposed personification
  • Dissonant anaphora
  • Surreal synesthesia

Saturday, September 16, 2023

How Literary Devices Create Humour


Humour in literature can be achieved through a variety of literary devices and techniques. Here are some common literary devices that authors use to create the effect of humour:

Irony: Irony involves saying one thing while meaning another. There are several types of irony, including verbal irony (saying one thing and meaning the opposite), situational irony (when the opposite of what's expected happens), and dramatic irony (when the audience knows something the characters don't). Irony often leads to humorous situations or remarks.

Satire: Satire is a form of humour that uses sarcasm, ridicule, or exaggeration to criticise and mock people, institutions, or societal issues. Satirical works employ satire to highlight absurdities and provoke laughter while making a point.

Wordplay/Puns: Clever wordplay and puns involve using multiple meanings of words or words that sound similar but have different meanings to create humor. If a word is being used to have both a literal and figurative meaning , then it is zeugma. 

Hyperbole: Hyperbole involves extreme exaggeration to emphasise a point or create a comical effect. For example, saying "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse" is hyperbolic and meant to be humorous.

Incongruity: Incongruity humour arises from the unexpected or absurd juxtaposition of elements. It involves placing two or more incongruous ideas or situations together to create humor. The element of surprise plays a crucial role in incongruity humour.

Parody: Parody involves imitating or mimicking a style, work, or genre in a humorous way, often by exaggerating its characteristics or making it appear ridiculous. Parodies can be found in literature, films, and other forms of media.

Sarcasm: Sarcasm is a form of verbal irony that involves saying the opposite of what one means, often with a mocking or scornful tone. Sarcasm is frequently used to convey humor, although it can sometimes be biting or caustic.

Comic Timing: Just as in comedy performances, comic timing in writing involves the precise delivery of jokes or humorous elements to maximise their impact. This includes pacing, pauses, and the placement of punchlines.

Absurdity: Absurdist humour relies on creating situations or characters that are illogical, nonsensical, or completely out of the ordinary. The humor often comes from the sheer absurdity of the circumstances.

Characterisation: Well-developed, quirky, or eccentric characters can be a source of humour. Readers find humour in the idiosyncrasies, quirks, and foibles of characters in a story.

Misdirection: Authors can lead readers or characters to expect one outcome and then surprise them with something entirely different, creating humor through misdirection.

Comic Relief: Sometimes, humor is used as a break from more serious or intense elements in a story, providing relief to the reader. This is common in tragic or dramatic works. Shakespeare used this. 

These literary devices can be used individually or in combination to create humour in literature. The effectiveness of humor often depends on the context, the author's skill, and the reader's sensibilities. Humour in literature can serve various purposes, from entertaining the reader to critiquing society or human nature.

Sunday, September 10, 2023

Words to describe tone

Tone is an effect of a writer's work. However, teachers rarely share examples of how to describe tone.

 Here are links to resources that provide many words to describe tone. 

This is a site for writers that explains how tone is different from voice and from mood.

It provides 155 words in alphabetical order.  

https://www.writerswrite.co.za/155-words-to-describe-an-authors-tone/

This is another site for writers that categorises the tones (positive, negative, sad, neutral) and suggests 175 words with their definitions.

https://authority.pub/list-tone-words/

This is a teaching/tutoring site that lists 319 words in alphabetical order with their definitions. 

https://www.albert.io/blog/ultimate-list-of-tone-words/