>>FEATURE
THE PENELOPIAD:
The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus
Margaret Atwood
Knopf Canada, 216 pp.
When Margaret Atwood appears in the Palliser Hotel lobby she is instantly recognizable, a white-maned version of the book-jacket icon I've grown up with over 30 years of reading her work. But here's something the author photos rarely show you – the writer's shoes. Atwood's today are spectacular red-leather rounded things, like a pair of coracles or fishing dories that buoy her across the carpet. They are witty shoes. (Fluevogs, I conjecture, making a mental note to inquire.)
First though, there must be tea ("anything but Earl Grey") and a few words on how Atwood came to participate in The Myths Series, which she calls "the biggest simultaneous publication of anything – in the most countries, the most languages, all at once – that has ever taken place." On October 22, 32 publishers launched the first three titles, by Atwood, Jeannette Winterson and Karen Armstrong. Pre-launch control was tight, which is why you could not read this story last week. Nothing in print before October 22, decreed the publishers (I had to sign a form).
Did Atwood really join in because, as her acknowledgments suggest, Jamie Byng of Edinburgh's Cannongate Books "leapt out from behind a gorse bush" to arm-twist her into it?
"It was more or less like that, minus the gorse bush," she says. In place of the bush, I should "picture a potted plant like that one over there." At the time of this leaping-out, which Atwood emphasizes was years back, Byng was not yet the publisher of Booker Prize winners The Life of Pi and Vernon God Little. He had launched clever projects, like The Pocket Canon (not a small camera, but rather republished books of the Bible with commentary by authors like Doris Lessing and Will Self). Atwood saw Byng as "a promising young publisher. And having cut my teeth with promising young publishers and worked with them, I was susceptible to that sort of palaver."
But Atwood’s helpful intentions paved a road straight to nowhere. "So I said I would do this," she recalls, "and then of course I couldn't do it. I just couldn’t do it. I tried it for years and years with different myths and none of them worked." In frustration Atwood finally asked her agent, "Do you think Jamie would awfully mind if I just forget about the whole thing? He can get other authors who can do this better than me." Byng replied that, "actually he would mind quite a lot." Atwood adopts an accent and bears down on the words "quite a lot" to convey just how sternly she was held to her promise.
"So I thought I would give it another try," she says, "and I tried a different myth, which was this one, and it went quite fast once I hit on the right one." The result is The Penelopiad, a retelling of the story of Odysseus’s wife Penelope and her 12 murdered maids.
Reading The Penelopiad now, this seems an obvious choice for the author of, for instance, The Handmaid's Tale. But what this really shows is how far she has made the story her own. Here Penelope’s slave girls, raised like "animal young" and disposed of at will, get a chance to speak as a Greek chorus that alternates with chapters of Penelope’s posthumous narrative.
In Atwood’s hand the chorus becomes the chorus line, as the previously silenced maids now sing in multiple genres. This version of Homer’s story strikes all kinds of contemporary notes: Penelope’s suitors are beer-swilling "lads" in today’s sense. Her narcissistic cousin, Helen of Troy, could be played by Paris Hilton. And when the Greek gods snarfle up blood sacrifices, the gore is worthy of CSI. As Atwood points out, "The Odyssey is a very visceral book. There’s lots of entrails, blood, gore, fighting, skulls being split open, spears going through, lots of guck and goo. I mean the maids have to clean up all the guck and goo and brains that were literally being spilled all over the palace floor," when Odysseus returns and slaughters Penelope’s hundred-odd malingering suitors.
Their cleanup complete, the 12 pretty maids get strung up for being "faithless." Penelope, asleep when the killing’s done, is still complicit here, as Atwood shows her employing the girls as spies. What else could she do? She had an estate to run. She had to survive in an impossible situation. Odysseus, though, never seems to be called to account in Homer’s version. In the Penelopiad, he’s eternally haunted by a dozen dangling ghosts.
The killing of the maids, Atwood says, is "one of those questionable moments, like the Book of Job is a questionable moment in the Bible." These moments have made generations of readers re-examine the mythic stories that serve, in Atwood’s terms, as the "foundation stones of a cultural system." In this foundation story, "tainted" young girls are killed as a form of "domestic cleansing" that expunges the final witnesses to whatever really went on while the suitors were around. In her closing lines, Atwood writes: "It was an act of grudging, it was an act of spite, it was an honour killing." In context, it’s impossible to read those lines without sensing a vigorous anger beneath the playful re-imagining in The Penelopiad.
(And those shoes? Damn, I forgot to ask!) |
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