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Apr. 3rd, 2007 09:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynWell, I'm awake. And more awake than usual for this time of day, because the deli on my way to the train station sells Jolt Blue and Jolt Ultra. (Also JOlt Cola, but ehn, I don't like the taste.)
I've been rereading Mary Renault's The King Must Die ever since I got out of 300 on Sunday. Almost literally- it's a couple of blocks from the theatre where I saw 300 to the bookstore where I bought The King Must Die in lieu of Thucydides (they were out of stock, bah), and I started reading on the train home. I had forgotten, I think, just how strongly this book and The Bull From The Sea impressed me when I was younger. The Bull From The Sea was the one I read first, mostly because I found it first, but oh- it doesn't really matter, I don't think. The two books together are the story of Theseus, told as a historical memoir from Theseus' own point of view. I already knew Theseus' myth backwards and forwards from reading it in all kinds of other sources. Reading a retelling out of order is no great crime. You already know the bones of the story, so what you are there for is how the story is told.
Considering what my English teachers said about Greek drama, I think the ancient Greeks themselves would approve of that. It's not as if they didn't know the story of Oedipus when they went to the theatre to see Sophocles' rendition of the tale. The difference lies in the how.
And oh, the how! I think I reread The Bull From The Sea a good four or five times before I had to give it back to the library- this back in eighth grade, or possibly freshling year of high school. There was something about Mary Renault's style that made me sit up and pay real attention. I read Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon around the same time, though honestly I can't remember which one I read first and which second. I think the Bradley, but by now I've forgotten- anyway, hearing the story told by someone in it, who shaped the words the way Renault does, kept me coming back to the Theseus story long after I'd finished with Avalon. Not that I didn't reread Bradley, you understand, but ultimately I wound up putting that one aside and looking for other versions of Arthur. I think I've actually owned at least two, maybe three, copies of The Bull From The Sea.
Renault's language is just gorgeous- and the concepts, philosophical and social, that she puts forward in the books always resonated for me. The underlying sacrificial structure of royal power rang bells as loud as Aslan's invocation of the Deeper Magic from before the dawn of Time. More so than anything Bradley put forth in The Mists of Avalon, because I never felt as if Renault were pushing an agenda. Bradley had pretty powerful overtones of RAAAR CHRISTIANITY BAD, PATRIARCHY BAD, in a way that had never really been part of the Arthur myth before and still seemed kind of weird to me at the time of the reading. The King Must Die was set long before Christianity existed, so that wasn't there- but you could see the similar philosophical structures of the ancient world in the things her characters believed and said. There was a scene with a character 'captured from up-country cattle herders in the hills beyond Jericho', showing how poorly he fit into the environment of the Cretan bull-ring, but that didn't feel like the author making mock of anybody. It was simply the narrator-voice not being part of the same world as this fellow who said that only the Sky Father was real and that the Goddess was only a doll made by human hands.
I'm aware that Bradley's brand of old-time religion was thinly-veiled Wicca. I didn't know that at the time I read her book, because I didn't find out what Wicca was until I got to college five years later (I read The Mists of Avalon in eighth grade). Renault's world was chock full of old-time religion, but it was the worship of the Greek gods, and not the pretty marble statue sort of worship either. The books of myths they sell to kids at book fairs make it sound as if Greek religion was terribly neat, with twelve big-time Gods and Goddesses and a scattering of eentsy-teensy lesser gods and half-gods. I didn't realise, until I read Renault, that it was never really like that- that it was scattered and patchy and different from place to place, that ancient Greek religion wasn't organized with central human structures and universally recognized deific structures the way the religion I had grown up with was. It was a hundred different living religions at the time, and the very neat lines of 'and there was Artemis and the Romans later called her Diana and she had these attributes' were just not how it worked when she was originally worshipped. Or any of the others, for that matter. Artemis is just the first to come to mind.
I think, looking at the book now, that Renault's use of language influenced a lot of my own writing later on. God knows I can't think of any other author who uses semicolons the way she does, but looking at the stuff I write before I edit it down, I can see the similarities. Between that and the baseline concepts that run close to her story's bones, I really think Renault underlies my serious writing the way Ghostbusters underlies my sense of humour- and that I could have done a lot worse for novels and styles to absorb.
I've been rereading Mary Renault's The King Must Die ever since I got out of 300 on Sunday. Almost literally- it's a couple of blocks from the theatre where I saw 300 to the bookstore where I bought The King Must Die in lieu of Thucydides (they were out of stock, bah), and I started reading on the train home. I had forgotten, I think, just how strongly this book and The Bull From The Sea impressed me when I was younger. The Bull From The Sea was the one I read first, mostly because I found it first, but oh- it doesn't really matter, I don't think. The two books together are the story of Theseus, told as a historical memoir from Theseus' own point of view. I already knew Theseus' myth backwards and forwards from reading it in all kinds of other sources. Reading a retelling out of order is no great crime. You already know the bones of the story, so what you are there for is how the story is told.
Considering what my English teachers said about Greek drama, I think the ancient Greeks themselves would approve of that. It's not as if they didn't know the story of Oedipus when they went to the theatre to see Sophocles' rendition of the tale. The difference lies in the how.
And oh, the how! I think I reread The Bull From The Sea a good four or five times before I had to give it back to the library- this back in eighth grade, or possibly freshling year of high school. There was something about Mary Renault's style that made me sit up and pay real attention. I read Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon around the same time, though honestly I can't remember which one I read first and which second. I think the Bradley, but by now I've forgotten- anyway, hearing the story told by someone in it, who shaped the words the way Renault does, kept me coming back to the Theseus story long after I'd finished with Avalon. Not that I didn't reread Bradley, you understand, but ultimately I wound up putting that one aside and looking for other versions of Arthur. I think I've actually owned at least two, maybe three, copies of The Bull From The Sea.
Renault's language is just gorgeous- and the concepts, philosophical and social, that she puts forward in the books always resonated for me. The underlying sacrificial structure of royal power rang bells as loud as Aslan's invocation of the Deeper Magic from before the dawn of Time. More so than anything Bradley put forth in The Mists of Avalon, because I never felt as if Renault were pushing an agenda. Bradley had pretty powerful overtones of RAAAR CHRISTIANITY BAD, PATRIARCHY BAD, in a way that had never really been part of the Arthur myth before and still seemed kind of weird to me at the time of the reading. The King Must Die was set long before Christianity existed, so that wasn't there- but you could see the similar philosophical structures of the ancient world in the things her characters believed and said. There was a scene with a character 'captured from up-country cattle herders in the hills beyond Jericho', showing how poorly he fit into the environment of the Cretan bull-ring, but that didn't feel like the author making mock of anybody. It was simply the narrator-voice not being part of the same world as this fellow who said that only the Sky Father was real and that the Goddess was only a doll made by human hands.
I'm aware that Bradley's brand of old-time religion was thinly-veiled Wicca. I didn't know that at the time I read her book, because I didn't find out what Wicca was until I got to college five years later (I read The Mists of Avalon in eighth grade). Renault's world was chock full of old-time religion, but it was the worship of the Greek gods, and not the pretty marble statue sort of worship either. The books of myths they sell to kids at book fairs make it sound as if Greek religion was terribly neat, with twelve big-time Gods and Goddesses and a scattering of eentsy-teensy lesser gods and half-gods. I didn't realise, until I read Renault, that it was never really like that- that it was scattered and patchy and different from place to place, that ancient Greek religion wasn't organized with central human structures and universally recognized deific structures the way the religion I had grown up with was. It was a hundred different living religions at the time, and the very neat lines of 'and there was Artemis and the Romans later called her Diana and she had these attributes' were just not how it worked when she was originally worshipped. Or any of the others, for that matter. Artemis is just the first to come to mind.
I think, looking at the book now, that Renault's use of language influenced a lot of my own writing later on. God knows I can't think of any other author who uses semicolons the way she does, but looking at the stuff I write before I edit it down, I can see the similarities. Between that and the baseline concepts that run close to her story's bones, I really think Renault underlies my serious writing the way Ghostbusters underlies my sense of humour- and that I could have done a lot worse for novels and styles to absorb.
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no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 02:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 02:30 pm (UTC)I wasn't aware she'd written anything modern-set. It's probably better that way.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 02:50 pm (UTC)*heads off to Amazon to add to wish list*
Did you ever read anything by Rosemary Sutcliffe? The Eagle of the Ninth -- about a Roman legion that disappears in Britain -- fascinated me at that age.
I didn't meet Bradley till much, much later.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 02:56 pm (UTC)I was directed at Bradley by a Dominican sister who had previously given me Dune to read when I was ten years old. She said she thought I'd like The Mists of Avalon, and that the Darkover books weren't bad either, though she mostly recommended the Free Amazons books to me. Mom read Avalon first, so it was a while before I was allowed to read it. It was a pretty standard policy in our house- if I was going to read something that might have a lot of sex or violence in it, Mom read it first to see whether she felt comfortable that I'd be able to handle it, which is how I wound up reading Clan of the Cave Bear at age nine but didn't wind up reading any of the later Auel books until I was old enough to learn how to sneak books into and out of the house.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 07:58 pm (UTC)The present-day ones kind of suffer from pervasive Anglicanism, is all I can call it- delicate moral scruples all over the place; whereas her ancient Greeks just screw happily, unencumbered by any moral scruples at all.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-04 01:27 pm (UTC)There is a very wide streak of radical feminism throughout her work. She doesn't bother to hide it.
Speaking as a male reader who finds radical feminism to be a bit of an overreaction, I still enjoyed her stories - with one exception. Mists of Avalon. I found it dry, preachy, overlong, and just one massive diatribe after another.
Have you read any of Patricia Kenneally-Morrison's "Celts in Space" series? The more recently written ones are just as preachy, but first few she wrote are some rather nice adventures - and the King Arthur trilogy is all kinds of fun.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-04 01:37 pm (UTC)(The other annoying thing about her work was the underlying message of You Cannot Truly Understand Yourself Until You've Had At Least One Homosexual Experience. Fine, whatever, you want to write about characters with alternative sexualities or who experimented- that's great- but you sort of went way out of your way to arrange that session between the male leads in Two To Conquer, given that one of them is supposed to be the Terran-born exact duplicate of the other. Is that supposed to be twincest, ordinary incest with your brother from another mother, or masturbation?)
I don't think I"ve read anything at all by Kenneally-Morrison, though.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-05 02:10 am (UTC)And I think most of what I love about it is the grounding of the myth in what feels like a real world. Every aspect of it, from the bull-dance to the Minotaur to Ariadne becoming the bride of Dionysus, makes sense in the context she's presented. And the differing levels of sophistication in the various cultures, primitive all the way to decadent, and the practice of religion in each of them.