In the Mirror of the Past : Of Fantasy and History [1 ed.] 9781443867672, 9781443845281

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In the Mirror of the Past

In the Mirror of the Past: Of Fantasy and History

Edited by

Bogdan Trocha, Aleksander Rzyman and Tomasz Ratajczak

In the Mirror of the Past: Of Fantasy and History, Edited by Bogdan Trocha, Aleksander Rzyman and Tomasz Ratajczak This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by Bogdan Trocha, Aleksander Rzyman and Tomasz Ratajczak and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4528-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4528-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editors ....................................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 “Make it Old”: The Other Mythic Method .................................................. 3 Brian Attebery David Gemmell’s Intertextual Treatment of the Ancient Greek History in his Lion of Macedon and Dark Prince Novel Duo ................................ 21 Aleksander Rzyman Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Earthsea’ Cycle: Paralleling Contemporary Theory with an Eye to the Past .................................................................. 31 Jesse Hudson “Healing Fiction?”: Marcin Ciszewski’s ‘Major’ Trilogy as a Compensational Journey from History to HISTORY......................... 45 Marek Oziewicz Andrea Hairston’s Redwood & Wildfire: Conjuring Impossibility Specialists.................................................................................................. 59 Monty Vierra Mythic Cycle vs. Linear History in Fantasy: The Limitations of the Eternal Return in Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry and Ysabel.................... 69 Terri Doughty The Loneliness of the Greek Hero............................................................. 83 Bogdan Trocha

EDITORS

Bogdan Trocha Specialist in literature and philosophy. Graduated from the Papal Academy of Theology in Cracow and the Pedagogical University in Zielona Góra. In 1999 received PhD in philosophy, in 2010 – post-doctorate degree in literature. Based at the Department of Polish Studies at the University of Zielona Góra, lectures in philosophy and popular literature – also a visiting lecturer at the University of Szczecin, the Adam Mickiewicz University of PoznaĔ, and the High School of Pedagogy and Journalism in PoznaĔ. Head of Centre for Mythopoetics and Philosophy of Literature at the University of Zielona Góra. Author of the monograph Degradacja mitu w literaturze fantasy.

Aleksander Rzyman Graduated from the Department of English Studies at the University of Wrocáaw. Based at the English Division of the Department of Modern Philologies at the University of Zielona Góra, teaches literary and specialist translation and also grammatical-lexical issues in English. Since 1995 a certified court translator.

Tomasz Ratajczak Holds a PhD in Polish studies, specialises in history of literature and history of popular and non-literary books, also in internet-and-literature related issues. Based at the Department of Polish Studies at the University of Zielona Góra. Head of Centre for Literary Studies and Auxiliary Sciences.

INTRODUCTION

This collection contains seven essays by researchers at universities in Canada, U.S.A., and Poland: Terri Doughty of the Vancouver Island University, Brian Attebery of the Idaho State University, Jesse Hudson and Marek Oziewicz of Uniwersytet Wrocáawski, Bogdan Trocha and Aleksander Rzyman of Uniwersytet Zielonogórski, and Monty Vierra of Karkonoska PaĔstwowa Szkoáa WyĪsza w Jeleniej Górze. The authors’ focus is fantasy’s reference to the past as a way of seeking solutions to modern problems. Brian Attebery discusses works by E. R. Eddison, H. Mirrlees, Ch. Williams, and J. R. R. Tolkien in which myths are part of a larger entity and not a mere collection of autonomous elements. Such approach allows those writers to make up worlds which, unlike those of Eliot or Joyce, have a structure which is laced with hope rather than apocalypse and at the same time make ironic and critical allusions to the world we live in. Marek Oziewicz’s case for “healing” fiction is based on an analysis of Major trilogy by M. Ciszewski in light of the theories by C. G. Jung, J. Hillman, and M. Eliade. This literary triptych is an example of a compensatory journey from “historical” history to “imagined” history which helps the Polish reader break free from the throes of a collective trauma of the lost defensive war of 1939 and the failed uprisings in the Warsaw’s Ghetto in 1943 and in Warsaw in 1944. Terri Doughty, too, refers to M. Eliade’s theories – those dealing with metahistory – in her study of Fionavar Tapestry trilogy by G. G. Kay in which the protagonists happen to live both “inside” and “outside” history. By experiencing an eternal return to childhood, in order to get to know themselves and their place in the universe, each of them becomes an embodiment of a mythical or archetypal figure, thus gaining a vantage point from which to see their lives’ sense in a wider perspective. Aleksander Rzyman tracks down the interplay of historiography and fantasy in D. Gemmell’s The Lion of Macedon and Dark Prince which draw heavily on historians’ accounts of the ancient Greece. The discussion focuses on the intertextual treatment of historical data due to which Gemmell’s ‘Greek’ duology takes pride of place amongst the many fantasy novels which merely pretend to have anything to do with history.

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Monty Vierra’s interest centres around an alternative history of the turn of the XX century found in A. Hairston’s Redwood and Wildfire which resurrects the migration of the black people from the American south to the booming Chicago, a theme so neglected by American history books. Hairston “physically” restores the history and, by doing so, gives back to a whole social group a place in history it deserves. Jesse Hudson sees Earthsea cycle by U. Le Guin as a bridge between then and now: the positive aspects of the past affect and intertwine with the present. Although it takes place in some quasi-medieval times, the cycle is an example of a story which deals with the problems always present in man’s life. Bogdan Trocha’s reflection concerns the mythopoetic speculation found in Heros powinien byü jeden by Ukrainian writers D. Gromov and O. Ladyzhenskyi (better known under their pen name Henry Lion Oldi), who pose questions about the nature of human memory and imagination. B. Trocha views the questions from the perspective of the metaphysical reflection on the sense of human existence. As he notes, suspension of disbelief is supplemented here with the hermeneutic ‘food for thought’ in the form of mythical and religious symbolism, with the resulting up-todateness of myth in the modern world. Tomasz Ratajczak

“MAKE IT OLD”: THE OTHER MYTHIC METHOD BRIAN ATTEBERY

For several years now I have been rethinking the relationship between fantasy and myth—not so much individual myths as myth as a cultural practice and as what we might call “equipment to think with.” I am focusing on the generation of writers that included J .R. R. Tolkien. The question is what changed in their version of fantasy as compared to the previous century and how those changes relate to the concept of Modernism—the usual framework for looking at the period 1910-1950 or so. Underlying this question is the assumption that simply living through an era together is enough to make it worth examining people as a group, even if some of those people, like Tolkien, loathed what was going on in the literary world of their day. I’m looking at early twentieth century fantasy as not an anachronistic alternative to Modernism but as one of its important manifestations. Fantasy is usually seen as a residual component of the era (to borrow Raymond Williams’s vocabulary), while the aggressive modernism of a Stravinsky, a Picasso, or an Ezra Pound—with his slogan “Make it new”—is seen as emergent. Both, though, belong to the same era, partaking fully in its cultural convulsions. Tolkien and his fellow fantasists could not escape modernity. They too lived through the Great War, confronted the same horrors as the Modernists, made in their daily lives the same adjustments to new ideas and devices. If we define the modern not as a style but as a condition, everyone living through the 1910s and 20s shared that condition, just as everyone who lived through the turn of the millennium shares a set of experiences that define postmodernity. We are all postmodern, whether or not we consider ourselves Postmodernists. Fredric Jameson, drawing on Williams’s work, defines postmodernism as a “conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate features” (Postmodernism 4). Modernism similarly includes a range of features, including two versions of the return to myth.

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The idea that links Pound’s era with Tolkien’s, the Lost Generation with the Inklings, can be found in T. S. Eliot’s 1923 review of Ulysses, where he identified something that he called “the mythical method”: In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him... a way of controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history... Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art ... . (177-78)

Everything Eliot says in his description of Ulysses applies as well not only to his own work but to texts like The Lord of the Rings. Everything, that is, except for the phrase: “instead of narrative method.” The principal difference between the Modernists’ mythic method and that of fantasy is that the latter constructs apparently seamless narratives that put the mythic on the same plane as modern sensibility. Instead of Tolkien, I’ve picked two other writers about the same age: Charles Williams and Hope Mirrlees. In each case, I am looking at a work of fantasy in conjunction with a modernist poem and a theoretical model. I pair up Williams’s 1930 novel War in Heaven (1930) with Eliot’s The Waste Land and with Eliot’s “mythical method,” and Mirrlees’s Lud-inthe-Mist (1926) with her own poem “Paris” and also with the myth theories of her partner Jane Harrison. Imagine that “The Waste Land” were not a densely allusive and cryptically fragmented poem but a novel. Such a novel would juxtapose the Holy Grail and sterile urban life. There would be charlatans masquerading as prophets, like Eliot’s Madame Sosostris. Characters would undergo spiritual crises and transformations. There would be sinister Easterners and scenes of sexual degradation. Visions of hell would be counterpointed with moments of redemption. The desired and forbidden other (Eliot’s Phlebas the Phoenician) would be expelled. Novelistic discourse could fill in the gaps left in Eliot’s poem with realistic settings, dramatic scenes, internal monologs, and a plot. It would not matter too much what sort of plot: the function would be to carry readers along and perhaps distract our attention while the symbols did their work. The novel could be a romance, an adventure, or perhaps a detective story. War in Heaven starts with a dead body found incongruously under the desk of a London publisher. Detectives are called in, suspects identified,

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clues gathered. The scene shifts from London to the Agatha Christie-esque village of Fardles, where another crime is committed: someone knocks the Archdeacon over the head and makes off with the communion chalice. The murder mystery opening gives way to something more mystical when the chalice is revealed to be the Holy Grail, or Graal. Both crimes in this case are the work of the retired publisher Gregory Persimmons. Persimmons is a would-be mage who wants the Graal as an object of power. He seeks out a character called “the Greek,” who, like Eliot’s Mr. Eugenides, is a decadent Easterner and a seller of shady merchandise. The Greek’s chemist’s shop is a black magic store in disguise. Instead of an illicit weekend at the Metropole, he offers an ointment that provides both magical and sexual release. As Gregory works his way toward damnation, the Greek is supplemented by an even more sinister tutelary figure, the Jew. Where the Greek offers sensuality and power, Manassah the Jew offers only destruction. He seeks to destroy the Graal rather than make use of it: “To destroy this is to ruin another of their houses, and another step towards the hour when we shall breathe against the heavens and they shall fall. The only use in anything for us is that it may be destroyed.” (144)

This is all too close to Eliot’s vision in “Gerontion” (1920), conceived of as a preface to “The Waste Land.” In that poem, a bitter old man meditates on the downfall of European civilization, abetted by Jews: My house is a decayed house And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. (Lines 7-11)

Christian myth is difficult to disentangle from such antisemitism. It shows up in Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale” and it shows up in present-day versions of the same blood libel. The myth authorizes us to blame corruption and violence and decay on some outsider group. Williams, like Eliot, often creates villains who are or appear Jewish. The narrative logic of Williams’s story, unlike Eliot’s poem, does not lead toward inevitable ruin. Against the cabal of Jew, Greek, and black magician, another coalition forms. The Archdeacon, a poetry-writing Duke, and the Persimmons’s employee Mornington are explicitly compared to the three Grail knights, Bors, Percivale, and Galahad. As these three ally against the three black magicians, the murder mystery plot returns in the form of an odd sort of caper, complete with a car chase. The Graal is stolen, stolen back again, and hidden in plain sight like the McGuffin in a

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Hitchcock film, and in the meantime the forces are engaged in a metaphysical struggle between being and nothingness. The Graal has a different significance to each character. To Persimmons, it is power; to Manasseh, destruction; to the Duke a restored Catholic church; to the Archdeacon, the consummation of his religious vocation; to Mornington, a vision of myth channeled through literature: as he says, “Malory— Tennyson—Chrétien de Troyes—Miss Jessie Weston. Romance to Reality, or whatever she called it” (121). It is Mornington’s immersion in the literature of the Grail that overcomes his doubts had about the supernatural intruding on ordinary English reality. Some such rationale is necessary in this second mythic method. Whereas poetry can leave its mythic basis on the figurative level, a unifying conceit for all of Eliot’s observations and allusions, fantasy has to bring the impossible into the narrative “reality.” Magic in a poem can be like background music in a movie: pervasive, unexplained, guiding the viewer’s emotional response without being noticed by the characters. Magic in a fantasy is like diegetic music: if there is a string quartet playing on the soundtrack, the camera must at some point pan over to four players (usually actors miming badly) on the set. Williams makes use of a number of fictional techniques to anchor the magic in his fictional reality. One is borrowing a plot from a popular formula, the detective story. Another is the adoption of multiple points of view. He freely shifts narrative focus among his characters, letting their perceptions guide the narrator’s attention and vocabulary. A third technique is letting the characters themselves puzzle out the symbolic level of events and objects. What does a seemingly random murder mean? What is the value of a religious relic? How are names significant? A fourth is the pairing of black and white magics. Evil rituals are elaborate, coercive, and self-indulgent. By contrast, anything simple, cooperative, and self-denying becomes not only good but magically effective: the Archdeacon’s prayers counteract an evil spell. Confronted by black magic, simple virtue becomes a magical force. The payoff for accepting the intrusion of myth into the modern world is a kind of poetic-metaphysical language intended to represent spiritual vision. Here is a sample, representing the Archdeacon’s thoughts: “Faster and faster all things moved through that narrow channel he had before seen and now himself seemed to be entering and beyond it they issued again into similar but different existence—themselves still, yet infused and made one in a undreamed perfection” (254). This sort of prose was the despair of Williams’s Inkling friends, but one sympathetic reader explained its difficulty in terms of the limits of language itself: “What he had to say

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was beyond his resources, and probably beyond the resources of language, to say once for all through any one medium of expression.” This reader was T. S. Eliot, in an introduction to Williams’s All Hallows’ Eve (xi.). Eliot and Williams were friends, colleagues (Williams was Eliot’s publisher at Faber and Faber), fellow Christian mystics, and in a sense coworkers. Says Eliot: My play Murder in the Cathedral was produced at the Canterbury Festival in 1935; Williams’s Cranmer was the play for the following year, and I went down . . . to see the first performance. (Eliot, “Introduction” x).

Hence it is not surprising that Williams might wish to translate poetry’s mythic method into narrative terms. Like “The Waste Land,” his novel uses the Grail story to tell us how to cope with modernity. That coping strategy has four components. First, the contemporary world must be organized somehow, and myth offers a structure where history seems to offer only struggle and accident. Even if, for Eliot, myth itself has shattered, he still suggests that the fragments can be gathered up against ruination. For Williams, myth is not broken, but lurks half-forgotten in places like Fardles. Second, the mythic structure offers a way to isolate and expel aspects of the self that cannot be acknowledged but only abjected (to use Julia Kristeva’s term). These may be projected onto various sorts of outsiders: for Eliot, the merchant, the Jew and the homosexual, and for Williams, the merchant, the Jew and the power-seeker. Of Williams’s villains, the one who is truly abject, the thing that must be brought down because it is desired, is the mage Gregory Persimmons. Williams himself desired mastery over mystical things: he was drawn to the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley and groups like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Persimmons might be a portrait of Crowley or of Williams himself. In each of Williams’s novels, a similar mage figure must be defeated and humiliated, but he reappears in the next, since Williams’s own inner mage has not gone away. The third component of the mythic method is its ability to validate moments of glory. Eliot said of Williams, “He knew, and could put into words, states of consciousness which many people have once or twice in a life-time” (xvii). One reason Williams could put such states into words is that he had a literary model that allowed him to do so. In a fairy tale, heroes may undergo terrible trials and evil beings might thrive temporarily, but good will triumph in the end in what Tolkien called eucatastrophe, the good reversal. For Williams, triumph consisted not of marriage and half a kingdom, as in traditional tales, but in moments of mystical union with

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God. The mythic pattern converges with and underscores his own experience. But mystical visions cannot truly be communicated, only pointed toward. Moments of rapture are necessarily private; what can be shared is the mythic pattern that creates a space for such a vision. Turning Christian beliefs into fantasy requires the freedom to treat them as myths rather than as doctrines and scriptures. Williams found this freedom by approaching Christian themes through stories associated with Christian belief but not governed by official teachings. This is the fourth component of Williams’s mythic method: play. He gains license to play by working not directly with core Christian beliefs but with those beliefs filtered through half-pagan offshoots, such as the Grail and the legends of Prester John. These are theologically safer than stories about the Hebrew prophets or Jesus’s miracles, in that they have no scriptural justification or correct doctrinal spin. They are also accessible to a non-Christian readership, which is free to read them metaphorically, looking for psychological rather than theological validity. Williams encodes literal and metaphoric readings into the text. By employing the novel’s capacity to shift among varying points of view, he can affirm orthodoxy through one character, while another tries to explain everything in materialistic terms. As Eliot says, In reading All Hallow’s Eve, we can, if we like, believe that the methods of the magician Simon for controlling mysterious forces could all be used with success by anyone with suitable natural gifts and special training. We can, on the other hand, find the machinery of the story no more credible than that of any popular tale of vampires, werewolves, or demonic possession. (Introduction xv)

By playing freely with mythic motifs while asserting their continuing relevance, says Eliot, Williams’s stories can “make you partake of a kind of experience that he has had, rather than to make you accept some dogmatic belief.” Fantasy’s mythic method thus makes the modern world possible, not only for art but for vision. Not all modern fantasists found that vision in Christian doctrine, as Williams did, but all found myths to be powerful tools for investigating the self, morality, and transcendence. My second example is closer to Tolkien in that it involves a secondaryworld fantasy, as opposed to Williams’s urban, “real-world” version of the genre. The novel Lud-in-the-Mist, published in 1926, demonstrates how myth’s powerful play can emerge from pagan, rather than Christian traditions. The author of that novel, Hope Mirrlees, was as closely connected to major figures within Modernism as Williams was to Eliot,

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and those biographical links point toward the historical relevance of the other mythic method. Our clearest portrait of Mirrlees was drawn by Virginia Woolf. An entry in Woolf’s diary describes Mirrlees as “over-dressed, over elaborate, scented, extravagant, yet with thick nose, thick ankles; a little unrefined” (cited in Carpentier 172). In a 1919 letter Woolf complains that Last weekend... we had a young lady who changed her dress every night for dinner—which Leonard and I cooked, the servants being on holiday... Moreover, she knows Greek and Russian better than I do French; is Jane Harrison’s favourite pupil, and has written a very obscure, indecent and brilliant poem, which we are going to print. (Quoted in Boyde 2)

Woolf is clearly irked by the affected stylishness and perhaps jealous of the success of her younger guest. In addition, she and Mirrlees were rivals for the attention of their mutual mentor, the Cambridge don and classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison. The poem that Leonard Woolf was preparing to publish (immediately after publishing T. S. Eliot’s Poems) was called “Paris.” It is a montage of the city as it recovers from war, experimental in typography and daring in its choice of detail—hence Woolf’s “obscure, indecent and brilliant.” Its techniques presage many of Eliot’s choices in “The Waste Land.,” including the inclusion of explanatory (or diversionary) footnotes. The poem’s first lines suggest the brash obscurity of an Ezra Pound: I want a holophrase NORD-SUD ZIG-ZAG LION-NOIR CACAO-BLOOKER Black-figured vases in Etruscan tombs (3)

The obscurity decreases, however, with a footnote that explains “NordSud” as a line of the Paris underground, and “Zig-Zag,” “Lion-Noir,” and “Cacao-Blooker” as posters on the walls of Metro stations. The Etruscan vases represent traces of the past beneath the surface of the present, a theme throughout the poem. Most importantly, the word holophrase is glossed in the work of Jane Harrison. A holophrase is a single word that carries the meaning of an entire sentence, a phenomenon that Harrison associates with a pre-Modern, unalienated state: The Fuegians have a word, or rather holophrase, which means ‘looking-ateach-other,-hoping-that-either-will-offer-to-do-something-which-both-parties-

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Brian Attebery desire-but-are-unwilling-to-do.’ This holophrase contains no nouns and no separate verbs, it simply expresses a tense relation—not unknown to some of us, and applicable to any and every one. [...] As civilization advances, the holophrase, overcharged, disintegrates, and, bit by bit, object, subject and verb, and the other ‘Parts of Speech’ are abstracted from the stream of warm conscious human activity in which they were once submerged. (Themis 474).

Mirrlees therefore starts her poem with a sort of plea to the Muses: she wants a primitive, undivided poetic language to convey her kaleidoscopic vision of Paris past and present. Part of that vision is mythic: it includes not only the Eiffel Tower and cafés and war memorials but also Etruscan vases and nymphs and fertility gods. More importantly, Paris holds Stories. . . . The lost romance Penned by some Ovid, an unwilling thrall In Fairyland, No one knows its name. (17)

Mirrlees was to find that lost Ovidian romance—and a holophrase of sorts—in her only major fantasy. Lud-in-the-Mist, Mirlees’s third novel, was nearly forgotten until when it was republished in 1970, the wake of the Tolkien boom. Nothing about the book proclaims it as Modernist. It is set in an imaginary country called Dorimare: quaint, charming, and bordered by Fairyland. The main character is a middle-aged burgher named Nathaniel Chanticleer. At the beginning of the book, Nathaniel is mostly concerned with his duties as Mayor of the town of Lud-in-the-Mist and with the quality of his Moongrass cheeses. Yet there is an underlying unease in both Nathaniel and the country, and a deeper theme signaled in the epigraph from Harrison: The Sirens stand, as it would seem, to the ancient and the modern, for the impulses in life as yet immoralised, imperious longings, ecstasies, whether of love or art, or philosophy, magical voices calling to a man from his “Land of Heart’s Desire,” and to which if he hearken it may be that he will return no more—voices, too, which, whether a man sail by or stay to hearken, still sing on. (Xiii)

This epigraph not only suggests a mythic dimension to the story but also connects it with Harrison’s belief in the present-day relevance of myths. Harrison is not so well known today, but she was a major myth scholar on the order of James Frazer. She said, by the way, that she envied Frazer’s gift for titles. In place of The Golden Bough, she offered the

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world a Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, which might explain his greater visibility—or maybe it was the fact that she was a woman scholar. Like Eliot, Harrison believed that modern art needed myth. Although it must include, “among other and deeper forms of life, the haste and hurry of the modern street, the whirr of motor cars and aeroplanes” (Ancient Art 236-37), it must also look back to the rituals that once grounded us in the cycles of nature, allayed our fears of the dead, and offered glimpses of mystery. Harrison’s star pupil Mirrlees found a way to suggest modern alienation and ancient ritual without depicting either directly. Instead, she constructed a halfway point, the imaginary land of Dorimare, and then gradually revealed connections forward and backward. Present-day Dorimare is a practical and prosperous realm, lacking religion or artistic ambition. It has been ruled by the middle class since the overthrow, two centuries ago, of the infamous Duke Aubrey, a cruel and capricious ruler but also a poet and priest of sorts: For three days a bloody battle raged in the streets of Lud-in-the-Mist, in which fell all the nobles of Dorimare. As for Duke Aubrey, he vanished—some said to Fairyland, where he was living to this day. During those three days of bloodshed all the priests had vanished also. So Dorimare lost simultaneously its Duke and its cult. (11)

Yet neither Fairyland nor the Duke is completely gone. Both live on in the practices and sayings of country folk: He was a living reality to the country people: so much that, when leakages were found in the vats, or when a horse was discovered in the morning with his coat stained and furrowed with sweat, some rogue of a farm-hand could often escape punishment by swearing that Duke Aubrey had been the culprit. (18-19)

If bourgeois secularism is the dominant culture of Lud-in-the-Mist, fairy lore is its residual culture. It is connected with the very phenomena Raymond Williams specifically identifies as residual: monarchy, country life, and religion—that last with an ironic twist, since fairy faith fills the niche occupied in our world by the church. The story describes an upheaval by which the residual becomes emergent, with the reluctant cooperation of the unlikeliest of heroes. Nathaniel, like other members of his class, detests the idea of Fairyland. Fairy fruit is contraband, anything magical or mystical is considered obscene, and “Son of a Fairy” is a deadly insult (14). Yet fairy influences pervade Dorimarean culture. A few years before the book takes place, an anonymous tract called Traces of

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Fairy in the Inhabitants Customs, Art, Vegetation and Language of Dorimare point out the prevalence of red hair (indicating fairy ancestry) and archaic oaths like “by the Sun, Moon and Stars, by the Golden Apples of the West; by the Harvest of Souls” (15). More importantly, the tract said that “all artistic types, all ritual acts, must be modelled on realities; and Fairyland is the place where what we look on as symbols and figures actually exist and occur” (15). Dorimare’s fairy lore—adapted from English traditional songs, tales, dances, foods, customs, and beliefs—helps validate the story’s magical component. Nathaniel and his friends find all this lore old-fashioned, countrified, and embarrassing: they are too modern to take much stock in it. The rural culture turns out to be even older than it appears. Unnoticed among the farms and villages are ruined castles. Nonsense songs document forgotten rituals. A simple country dance was once “danced in the moonlight when Lud-in-the-Mist was nothing but a beech wood between two rivers” (77). Farmsteads are guarded by ancient stone figures called herms. A herm is a column topped by a male head, phallic in shape and often with an erect phallus of its own. The herm in the story is characterized as “the spirit of the farm” (210). A character named Portunus, whom Nathaniel takes for simple-minded, is often found dancing in front of this herm. But Portunus is not simple-minded, but one of the Silent People— the dead—and both he and the herm point toward Mirrlees’s use of myth. Harrison discusses herms in conjunction with Greek deities: “in art Hermes and Dionysos appear, as they were worshipped in cultus, as herms; the symbol of both gods as gods of fertility is naturally the phallos.” Gods are missing from Lud-in-the-Mist. Their place is taken by the fairies and by Duke Aubrey (Aubrey equals Oberon). The herm marks an older time when the gods were known and worshipped not as Olympian figures, distant and beautiful, but as the cultic gods Harrison sees as the original basis for Greek religion. They are local, dark, and dangerous. The purpose of ritual is not to please them but to ward them off: To our surprise, when the actual rites are examined, we shall find that they have little or nothing to do with the particular Olympian to whom they are supposed to be addressed; that they are rites not in the main of burntsacrifice, of joy and feasting and agonistic contests, but rites of a gloomy underworld character, connected mainly with purification and the worship of ghosts. (Prolegomena 10-11)

The gods Harrison describes are not distinguished from spirits of the dead. The same rituals that keep the gods away also fend off angry ghosts.

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A single word, ker, was used for both the dead and godlike beings, as well as, according to Harrison, “Ghost, bacillus, disease, death-angel, deathfate, fate, bogey, magician” (Prolegomena 212). In Lud-in-the-Mist, all of these meanings belong to the inhabitants of Fairyland. The country people, indeed, did not always clearly distinguish between the Fairies and the dead. They called them both the “Silent People”; and the Milky Way they thought was the path along which the dead were carried to Fairyland. (12-13)

And some of the dead return, especially those who, like Portunus, want revenge upon their murderers. Harrison describes a particular variety of ker that doubles as a Fury: “The Erinys primarily is the Ker of a human being unrighteously slain. Erinys is not death; it is the outraged soul of the dead man crying for vengeance . . . (Prolegomena 214). Nathaniel Chanticleer comes into contact with these mythic forces through the actions of a physician named Endymion Leer. Leer was involved in the death of Portunus; it is he who arranges to have Nathaniel’s son eat the addictive fairy fruit. He is also the author of the anonymous pamphlet about Dorimare’s suppressed fairy past. When Nathaniel’s daughter dances off with the other enchanted pupils of Miss Crabapple’s Academy and Ranulph is sent over the border to Fairyland, Nathaniel must face the fact that his secure life has been an illusion; that Duke Aubrey and the Silent People not only exist but have the power of life and death over Dorimare. It is Leer, their agent, who plots the overturning of order in Lud-in-the-Mist and the downfall of Mayor Chanticleer. But Nathaniel is not to be counted out so easily. Like Dorimare itself, his prosaic surface hides mythic depths. Since childhood, he has been troubled by what he calls the Note, which he first heard in his family’s attic: Master Nathaniel seized one of the old instruments, a sort of lute ending in the carving of a cock’s head, its strings rotted by damp and antiquity, and, crying out, “Let’s see if this old fellow has a croak left in him!” plucked roughly at its strings. They gave out one note, so plangent, blood-freezing and alluring, that for a few seconds the company stood as if petrified. (5)

The sound of this note changes Nathaniel’s life and haunts his dreams: It was as if the note were a living substance, and subject to the law of chemical changes—that is to say, as that law works in dreams. For instance, he might dream that his old nurse was baking an apple on the fire

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Brian Attebery in her own cosy room, and as he watched it simmer and sizzle she would look at him with a strange smile, a smile such as he had never seen on her face in waking hours, and say, “But, of course, you know it isn’t really the apple. It’s the Note.” (5-6)

Nathaniel’s reaction to this unsettling experience is to bury himself in the mundane, but he cannot ultimately escape the Note. It returns to his life in the form of his son’s illness, his daughter’s abduction, even the country tune he hears Leer singing to Ranulph on his sickbed. The Note is fairy fruit in another form, and the Fairies are not to be denied, but the Note suggests something more. The cock-headed lute is himself, Chanticleer; he is the Note’s herald. It is this streak of the dreamer and the melancholic, paradoxically, that allows Nathaniel to rouse himself, to solve an ancient murder case (like Williams’s War in Heaven, Mirrlees’s book combines fairy tale and detective story), and ultimately to travel to Fairyland in search of his children. He becomes an unlikely Orpheus bringing a loved one back from the dead and reinventing Dorimare’s religion. Nathaniel ends up as an agent of Fairyland, replacing Endymion Leer. In place of Leer’s intoxicating physic, he employs the Law to negotiate with the dangerous gods, restraining the Dionysiac side of Duke Aubrey and bringing out the Apollonian. In the book’s climax, Nathaniel ventures to Fairyland to rescue first the troupe of schoolgirls-turned-Maenad and then the captive Ranulph. As Nathaniel crosses the border, the narrative grows opaque, scenes shift and transform as in dreams, and it is hard to figure out exactly how he effects the rescue. It is clear, however, that the power he invokes against the Silent People is the Law. In an earlier scene, Nathaniel himself refers to the Law as the cure for the Fairies’ perfidy: “the homeopathic antidote that our forefathers discovered to illusion” (156). When he sees his daughter and the other Crabapple pupils in a Fairy slave market, he cries foul: “They cannot be sold until they have crossed over into Fairyland—I say they cannot be sold.” All round him he heard awed whispers, “It is Chanticleer—Chanticleer the dreamer, who has never tasted fruit.” Then he found himself giving a learned dissertation on the law of property, as observed in the Elfin Marches. The crowd listened to him in respectful silence. Even Willy Wisp was listening, and the Crabapple Blossoms gazed at him with inexpressible gratitude... “Chanticleer and the Law! Chanticleer and the Law!” shouted the crowd. (248-49)

But what has the Law to do with life, death, myth, and magic? Again, the answer can be found in Harrison. She was always interested in the

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difference between the depiction of gods in literature and their ritual importance, and she was particularly interested in the cultic goddess Themis, or Justice, who barely registers in Homer. For Harrison, Themis represents the social function of myth, and thus her worship is an advance over the more ancient rites of fear and propitiation. It is through Themis, cognate with the English word Doom, that the terrible mysteries of life and death are brought into harmony with human needs: The thing greater than man... that makes for righteousness,’ is... not the mystery of the universe... but the pressure of that unknown ever incumbent force, herd instinct, the social conscience. The mysterious dominant figure is not Physis, but Themis. (Themis 490)

If Endymion Leer is a physician, a follower of Physis or Nature, Nathaniel is a lawyer, priest of Themis. By calling on the Law, Nathaniel dissolves the Fairy assembly and sends his daughter home. When he returns to Lud-in-the-Mist, he enacts a new regime that acknowledges Fairyland. New laws allow the importation of fairy fruit, but in moderation, as homeopathic cure rather than addictive drug. The worship of Dionysos is tempered with Apollonian sobriety; both are seen as necessary parts of the social compact. Calling on human Law on the very borders of Fairyland is a bold and perilous act, but it brings the two aspects of Dorimare and of Nathaniel himself back into a balance that neither has had for some time. All of this points out the mythic dimension underlying Mirrlees’s fairy tale, but it doesn’t show how Lud-in-the-Mist relates to the contemporary world. How is this novel a Modernist text? As in The Lord of the Rings, the story’s images, events, and characters all have analogues in the real, historical world. The symbol of fairy fruit, for instance, manages to convey not only poetic inspiration and Romantic longing, but also youthful rebellion, sexual license, and the cocaine craze of the 1920s. The trial of Endymion Leer suggests any number of tabloid-fodder murder cases. Unrest among the working classes of Lud-in-the-Mist brings echoes of bolshevism and anarchy. The unsettled postwar literary scene is transcribed into the complex relationship between Dorimare’s dominant middle class and its residual and emergent subcultures. But the modern world and Modernist sensibility are most clearly represented in Nathaniel himself and in the winds from Fairyland that sweep away his beliefs and way of life. The opening of Lud-in-the-Mist resembles a Dutch genre painting, with jolly burghers sitting in front of their substantial houses, but that appearance is deceptive. Everything Nathaniel fears—that life is uncertain and chaotic, that the reassuring

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epitaphs in the graveyard are lies, that even death is not a release from change—turns out to be precisely true. Nathaniel brings the modern world into Lud-in-the-Mist. He resembles one of Virginia Woolf’s characters in crisis—perhaps Septimus Smith quietly going mad in Mrs Dallaway. The Waste Land is there in Nathaniel’s thoughts: With which familiar object—quill, pipe, pack of cards—would he be occupied, on which regularly recurrent action—the pulling on or off of his nightcap, the weekly auditing of his accounts—would he be engaged when IT, the hidden menace, sprang out at him? And he would gaze in terror at his furniture, his walls, his pictures—what strange scene might they one day witness, what awful experience might he one day have in their presence? (6)

As Nathaniel rides into the Elfin Marches, the narrative becomes a sort of Modernist poem filled with disturbing imagery of silent crowds, a solitary child trapped on a merry-go-round, human souls advertised as carnival attractions, a house full of “creatures made of red lacquer” (250). Fairyland resembles Eliot’s image of the “Unreal City” where “I had not thought death had undone so many.” Yet when these surrealistic scenes lead him at length to Duke Aubrey, their source, the meeting is a moment of tender vision: At these words the uplands became bathed in a gentle light... And everything—ships, spires, houses—was small and bright and delicate, yet real. It was not unlike Dorimare, or, rather, the transfigured Dorimare he had once seen from the Fields of Grammary. (254)

The four components of Williams’s mythic method likewise operate in Mirrlees’s novel. Lud-in-the-Mist uses myth to organize and interpret the contemporary world. Instead of the half-Christian, half-pagan myths of the Grail and the Priest-King, she employs a combination of English fairy tradition and archaic ritual as interpreted by Harrison. Christianity is absent, but suggested by the residual and re-emergent social roles played by fairy beliefs and folk rituals. Part of myth’s organizing power is its ability to isolate and expel the dangerous and disturbing. Mirrlees makes use of this power in a way quite different from Williams’s. One character is indeed unmasked, humiliated, and ultimately killed: Endymion Leer, the foreigner, the poisoner, the hypocrite. Yet Leer is also the true priest and agent of Duke Aubrey. He is Nathaniel’s double and predecessor: the other thoroughly Modern point of view in the novel. In the process of bringing him down, Nathaniel also brings back the previously exiled Silent People and their forbidden fruit.

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Abjection, for Mirrlees, is part of an ongoing cycle along with rediscovery and restoration. The difference between this and Williams’s version is Mirrlees’s choice of myth: Christian myth is moralized, black and white; classical myths and fairy lore are not. Leer kills but he also does good; fairy fruit is both poison and cure; Duke Aubrey is both cruel and tender. And existential angst is also epiphany. On the first pages of the novel, as the narrator lovingly details Dorimare’s charms, she drops a hint about the interconnectedness of terror and transcendence in the description of the Chanticleer gardens: To the imaginative, it is always something of an adventure to walk down a pleached alley. You enter boldly enough, but very soon you find yourself wishing you had stayed outside—it is not air that you are breathing, but silence, the almost palpable silence of trees. And is the only exit that small round hole in the distance? Why, you will never be able to squeeze through that! You must turn back... too late! The spacious portal by which you entered has in its turn shrunk to a small round hole. (3)

So the most familiar of scenes can transform without warning into Fairyland. This is exactly what Nathaniel most fears—and most badly needs. He combines Williams’s opposing figures, the mage and the priest. In the mythic system underlying this novel, the Grail can be approached by either route: dark magic or light, occult ritual or spiritual discipline. The result will be the same. Nathaniel finds this a rather bitter lesson. The mythic method makes the modern world possible for art, but it does not make it comfortable. The fourth component of Modernist fantasy is play. Authorized by Harrison’s theories, Mirrlees playfully tosses together classical Greek myth and English folk tradition, the remnants of ancient rituals of fear and propitiation. By setting up the cult of Duke Aubrey as Dorimare’s suppressed religious past, she puts Christianity into the same category of rationalized primitive ritual, thereby freeing us to tinker with Christian myth. Mirrlees also sports with levels of reality, making history a mask for myth and letting magic leak into the daylight world. She invites us to extend the game into our own reality. As we share Nathaniel’s experiences, we too begin to question appearances and to doubt common sense. We sense hidden forces at work, or at play, in the world. Fantasy is a game, and a game is a form of ritual. As we play the game, we venture, into the ancient world of gods and sacrifices, but we retain the prerogative of changing the rules: for instance, introducing a power such as the Law to alter the game’s outcome. Williams and Mirrlees offer two versions of fantasy’s mythic method, one of which gradually transforms the known world into a battleground for

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competing visions of the divine while the other constructs an imaginary realm as a ludic—or Luddic—space where observed reality and symbol interact on the same plane. Other fantasies from the first half of the twentieth century use one technique or the other, or sometimes a combination: the patterns show up in stories by G. K. Chesterton, Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell, E. R. Eddison and C. S. Lewis. All bring to the world of myth and magic a contemporary sensibility and skepticism that asks what myth has to offer here and now. For Jane Harrison, myth was something to do, rather than something to believe. Hence a myth enacted was a living myth, still potent against darkness and despair. Hope Mirrlees put this idea into a form that was pleasingly old-fashioned, yet conceptually innovative and attuned to a modern consciousness. This version of the mythic method makes it new by making it old. For Mirrlees, Williams, Tolkien, and others of their generation, fantasy became a way of living out, rather than simply retelling myths. By challenging perilous enchantments and negotiating fairy-tale laws, their characters forge new relationships with the oldest mysteries. That may be why fantasy has emerged, in our postmodern world, as one of the most popular, and perhaps most powerful, forms of cultural expression.

Bibliography Boyde, M. 2009, “The poet and the ghosts are walking the streets: Hope Mirrlees—life and poetry.” Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation 35: 1/2 Carpentier, M.C. 1998, Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf, Vol. 12 in the Library of Anthropology Series, Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Eliot, T. S. 2003, Introduction: All Hallows Eve, Charles Williams, rpt. Vancouver, BC: Regent —. 1975, “Ulysses, Order and Myth”, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode, New York: Harcourt —. “The Waste Land” Gauntlett E. 2010, “Charles Williams and Magic”, Newsletter of the Charles Williams Society 25 (2008), reprint online by The Charles Williams Society Harrison, J.E. 1951, Ancient Art and Ritual, London and New York: Oxford University Press —. 1903, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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—. 1912, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Hemingway, E. A Moveable Feast Jameson, F. 1991, Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press Julius, A. 1995, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Lindop, G. 2009, “Charles Williams and His Contemporaries”, Charles Williams and His Contemporaries, ed. Suzanne Bray and Richard Sturch, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Mirrlees, H. 1970, rpt. Lud-in-the-Mist, New York: Ballantine —. 1919, Paris: A Poem Richmond: Hogarth, “Hope Mirrlees on the Web” Moorman, C. 1960, Arthurian Triptych: Mythic Materials in Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and T. S. Eliot. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press Mortimer, P. 2005, “Tolkien and Modernism”, Tolkien Studies 2, Project Muse Oziewicz, M. 2008, One Earth, One People: The Mythopoeic Fantasy Series of Ursula K. Le Guin, Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L’Engle and Orson Scott Card, Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy 6, Jefferson, NC: McFarland Perloff, M. 1981, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, Princeton University Press Phillips, K.J. 1991, “Jane Harrison and Modernism”, Journal of Modern Literature 17:4 Pound, E. 1934, Make It New Shippey, T. 2000, J. R. R. Tolkien Author of the Century, Boston: Houghton Swanwick, M. 2009, Hope-in-the-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees, Montclair, NJ: Temporary Culture/Henry Wessells Tolkien, J.R.R. 1981, Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter with Christopher Tolkien,Boston: Houghton Williams, C. 2003, All Hallows Eve, rpt. Vancouver, BC: Regent ___. 1967, War in Heaven, rpt. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967 Williams, R. 1977, Marxism and Literature, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press Woolf, V. “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.”

DAVID GEMMELL’S INTERTEXTUAL TREATMENT OF THE ANCIENT GREEK HISTORY IN HIS LION OF MACEDON AND DARK PRINCE NOVEL DUO ALEKSANDER RZYMAN

Introduction David Gemmell is best known for his bestselling fantasy fiction, but he also dabbled in something closer on what is defined as historical fantasy (Pustowaruk 2009: 182) or “New Histories, stories set in alternate versions of Primary history” (Waggoner 1978: 117) or historical fiction (‘David Gemmell’ entry in Wikipedia). This paper’s focus is on his ‘Greek” series, comprising just two novels: Lion of Macedon and Dark Prince (his other historical series is made up of three novels whose plots revolve around the ancient city of Troy). Arguably, the ‘Greek’ series belongs in a more ‘proper’ historical fiction, since the historical times—spanning the period of 389-323 B.C.—with their personages, events, and even topography which this series draws upon are far better documented than those of the ‘Troy’ series, set in the second half of the second millennium B.C., where legend and myth take over the scarce generally accepted historical knowledge. Assuming that the average reader likes to have a closer look at a book before reading, it may be proposed that the reader quickly finds the ‘Greek’ books to be somewhat peculiar as they offer not only maps of Greece and Middle East in the plot-related ancient times, but—lo and behold—a proper academic bibliography, containing works by renowned contemporary historians, such as N. G. L. Hammond, Chester G. Starr, as well as ancient Greek historians and philosophers, such as Aristotle, Plutarch, Flavius Arrian, Xenophon. The obvious question arises about the purpose of such a bibliography. Although the author does not give any clue, this bibliography seems to serve as an invitation for the reader to

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discover the scope of historical intertextuality in these works of otherwise literary fiction.

Historical Personages, Events, and Topography In order to find out about the degree of the saturation of David Gemmell’s ‘Greek’ duology with historical data, one has to consult history books and compare a historian’s description of that particular period in the ancient Greek history with the one given by Gemmell as part of the plot. Such a comparison finds the ‘Greek’ duo studded with real historical personages, tribes, and events, complete with topography and horsemanship. The historical figures that appear in the novels are: Xenophon— historian and soldier, Cyrus the Younger and his brother Artaxerxes II— heirs to the Persian throne, Parmenion—Macedonian general in the service of Philip II and Alexander the Great, Agesilaus II—king of Sparta, Epaminondas—Theban general and statesman, Cleombrotos—king of Sparta, Pelopidas—Theban general and statesman, commander of the Sacred Band made up of select Theban warriors, Perdiccas III—king of Macedon, Philip II—king of Macedon, Amyntas—father of Philip II, Ptolemy of Aloros—king regent of Macedon, Attalus—courtier and general in the service of Philip II, Bardyllis—long-lived Illyrian king, Audata—Illyrian princess, daughter of Bardyllis, married by Philip II, Aeschines—Athenian statesman and orator, Antipater—Macedonian general in the service of Philip II and Alexander the Great, after Alexander’s death regent of all his empire, Argeus—Macedonian commander of Athenian mercenaries, pretender to the throne of Macedon, Nicanor—son of Parmenion, officer in the service of Alexander the Great, Philotas—son of Parmenion, general in the service of Alexander the Great, Coenus— general in the service of Alexander the Great, Olympias—princess of Epirus, wife of Philip II and mother of Alexander the Great, Aristotle— philosopher and tutor of Alexander the Great, Alexander the Great—son of Philip II and Olympias, Demosthenes—Athenian orator and statesman, Grabos—Illyrian king after Bardyllis, Onomarchos—Phocian commander, Ptolemy I Soter—general in the service of Alexander the Great, Nearchus —officer in the army of Alexander the Great, Craterus—general in the service of Alexander the Great, Pausanias—aristocrat, member of Philip II’s bodyguards and his murderer, Cleopatra Eurydice of Macedon—the last wife of Philip II, Hephaestion—nobleman and general in the service of Alexander the Great, Arridaios—feebleminded son of Philip II, Alexander the Great’s step-brother, Cleitus the Black—officer in the army of

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Alexander the Great, Darius III—king of Persia, Memnon of Rhodes— commander of Greek mercenaries under Darius III. The documented historical events are: the battle of Cunaxa (401 B.C.), the takeover by the Thebans of Cadmea, fort in Thebes, occupied by a Spartan garrison, (379 B.C.), the battle of Leuctra (371 B.C.) where the Thebans defeated the Spartans, the death of Perdiccas in a battle with the Illyrians under the command of king Bardylis (359 B.C.), the battle of Methone (359 B.C.) where Philip II defeated Athenian mercenaries – his first important victory—and where an arrow hit his right eye, Philip II’s victories over the Paionians and the Illyrians (358 B.C.), Philip II’s encounter with Olympias on the island of Samothrace (358 B.C.), conquest of Amphipolis by Philip II (357 B.C.), Onomarchos’s victory over Philip II (353 B.C.), the battle of Crocus Field (352 B.C.)—defeat of Onomarchos by Philip II and death of Onomarchos, humiliation of Pausanias by Attalus, the battle of Cheronea (338 B.C.) where Philip II defeated the Athenians and Thebans, with Alexander as the commander of his cavalry which crushed the Sacred Band, the questioning by drunk Attalus of Alexander the Great’s right to succeed Philip II (337 B.C.), the assassination of Philip II by Pausanias (336 B.C.), the murder of Cleopatra, Philip II’s wife, and her baby child (336 B.C.), Attalus killed on Alexander the Great’s orders (336 B.C.), the defeat of the Triballians and Paionians by Alexander the Great (335 B.C.), the destruction of Thebes by Alexander the Great (335 B.C.), Alexander the Great saved by Cleitus at the battle of the Granicus (334 B.C.), the battle of Issus (333 B.C.), Cleitus killed with a spear by Alexander the Great in a row (328 B.C.), the wedding of Alexander the Great and Roxana (328 B.C.), the execution of Philotas and assassination of Parmenion—on Alexander the Great’s orders (330 B.C.) (Hammond 1973, 530-702; Flavius Arrian 2004, 5-42). This is an imposing array of historical data—bearing in mind that the plot itself covers a mere 66 years of the ancient Greece’s history (with one reference to an earlier event). Naturally, all the names of tribes and geographical locations, including the descriptions of the topography of battlefields are non-fictional. With so much documented evidence from that period, Gemmell’s duology could easily go for a cross between history book and historical fiction. Paraphrasing Hayden White’s observation on what historians do when they write down ‘history’ (White 2009: 35), one could argue that for Gemmell, as a writer, it would have been enough to “fill in the gaps” between the above-mentioned events to come up with a satisfying, finished work of mainstream historical fiction – only fantasising along the way a little bit more than it becomes an academic historian.

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David Gemmell, of course, does fill in the gaps in the available historical evidence. However, he does not stop there and takes another step: he introduces purely fantastic elements into the story.

The Fantastic Although the story is set in the ancient Greece, most of the fantastic events, characters and creatures that feature in it are not taken directly from the Greek mythology (as, perhaps, might be expected). They can be divided into three categories: 1) real historical personages endowed (by Gemmell, of course) with supernatural powers, 2) fictional characters endowed with supernatural powers, 3) fairy-tale and mythical creatures and characters (by definition endowed with other-than-human powers). The following is an overview of the main characters in the three categories. 1) Alexander. From early childhood he is able to see (on some occasions) into the near future and, more important for the story, he has a touch that kills smaller animals and hurts people. He can also communicate telepathically with people and animals. 2) Aristotle. This name is generally known to refer to the famous philosopher (and Alexander the Great’s tutor), but in the story there appears a namesake magus, of great supernatural powers, such as leaving his physical body and entering other dimensions or other people’s minds to read their life stories, thoughts, and possible futures, capable of changing his outer form into an animal and playing other magical tricks. So, basically it is a fictional character, a magician—yet there is something strongly intertextual about his name. Tamis. A powerful seeress, who learnt her trade from mythical Cassandra, of supernatural abilities similar to those of Aristotle. Derae. Taught her seeress’ abilities by Tamis, whose successor she becomes. Cassandra. The everlasting ancient Trojan priestess appears in the story as a mentor for Tamis and Derae. Phaedra. Parmenion’s wife who would have made a good sorceress had she not entered a close relationship with a man, which deprived her of her emergent magical powers. Aida. Evil sorceress, extremely powerful—similarly to Aristotle or Tamis—but serves Cadmilos. Gea, White Lady, Helm. Human beings with supernatural powers.

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3) Cadmilos a.k.a. God of Darkness or God of Chaos. The eternal evil god who can only thrive by entering souls of people who then— under his influence—commit atrocities on which he sort of feeds. He is so powerful that in fact he cannot be defeated in combat. Kamiron/Chiron. Centaur and magus. Equivalent of Aristotle in the parallel world. Philippos. King of Makedon. Philip’s counterpart in the parallel world. His extraordinary paranormal abilities allow him to spy (i.e., see, eavesdrop, read others’ thoughts) on other people no matter where they are—unless they are protected by magic. And, as if that were not enough, he is killproof and megalomaniac. Vores. Flying, squamate monsters, with venomous talons whose mere scratch kills. Gorgon. Sylvan male equivalent of its female namesake. Practically invincible, due to his physical properties poses a death risk to any creature—human or otherwise. Brontes, Steropes, Arges. Three brothers, bearing resemblance to mythical creatures such as cyclops, minotaur, and lion-headed beast, respectively. Kyaris/Kytin. Centaur. Euclistes. Monster hitman, of quasi-mythical origin. This mob of fantastic characters is set in a fantastic context: a parallel Greece—similar, yet different with regard to its geographical features— where humans, non-human creatures, and proper monsters live side by side, complete with portals and ubiquitous magic (which is gradually dying out at the hand of man). In other words, there is a proper alternate world in the story, with portals or portal-like space-time warps as its gateways in the primary world (Clute 1999: 738). This otherworld is at first only indirectly hinted at in Lion of Macedon and eventually entered by the protagonists in Dark Prince.

Gemmell’s ‘Historical’ Intertextuality In literature, intertextuality is a concept that, in general, has one piece of literary writing borrow—overtly or otherwise, but always with the presumption that the reader will find out (as he is expected to and which makes intertextuality distinct from plagiarism)—from other piece of literary writing (or any other art or even reality as some definitions of intertextuality would have it). Such a ‘loan’ thus appears in a new context, but—to the observant reader—it is burdened with its original semantics, so

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the reader is confronted by the interplay of the two contexts (often referred to as ‘textual dialogue’) which brings about the new meaning or deepens the meaning of the ‘lender’ writing (Culler 1991: 1383-1386). Researchers have come up with a number of categories of intertextuality (see, for example, the elaborate discussion of intertextuality in Genette) of which the broad category of text1-text2 relationship (where text1 is the earlier piece of writing) seems the closest to what one finds in Gemmell’s ‘Greek’ duology. Within this category a further distinction can be made between an overt (e.g. with quotation marks) or semi-overt (i.e. without quotation marks) quotation and a covert quotation (e.g. allusion, parody, paraphrase, etc.). However, the way Gemmell employs other writings for the purposes of his own creation seems a novel one, for he draws on historical writings rather than literary ones and although he does not embrace the borrowings with quotation marks, he does provide the reader with an exhaustive bibliography of history and history-related books, mostly by academic writers. In this way, he subverts the usual “find-here-what-you-have-read-somewhere-else” intertextual trick, where “somewhere else” means “in other work of literary fiction”. In fact, for intertextuality to be both acceptable and successful it has to work on the principle of borrowing memorable passages or sentences or characters or events from other literary works. Quite unsurprisingly, there is no definition of a memorable passage etc., but this is what really makes intertextuality so much worthwhile: the writer has to make guesses at the reader’s familiarity with the already existing writings. It is important now to realise that history books and the like are not (supposed to be) the common avid reader’s knowledge—which probably explains Gemmell’s idea to furnish his two ‘Greek’ novels with a list of scientific publications and /sic!/ source texts (vide Xenophon and Arrian’s accounts). Only an extensive background check reveals the scope (as presented above) of the intertextual content of the ‘Greek’ series. Consequently, it might be proposed that David Gemmell has contributed a new, original category of intertextuality to the field of intertextual studies. Quite naturally, Gemmel’s could be called ‘historical intertextuality’. Of course, many a historical-fiction writer has referred to some well-researched period in the history, but David Gemmell deserves praise for two things: putting proper scientific bibliography at the end of either novel in his ‘Greek’ duology and keeping close to historical facts while providing fantastic motivation for his historical protagonists’ actions. The latter resonates well with the earlier mentioned Hayden White’s views on writing down “history”: the historian—or the writer—fills in the gaps between the facts (as given by source texts or revealed by research) with narrative links. Since those links

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are of tropological nature (for historical discourse is based on and governed by language)—as opposed to logical character of sciences (which is based on formulae, definitions, and syllogism)—a book on history has double semantics, i.e. it has got not only information load but a symbolic meaning as well, as has a work of literary fiction (White 2009: 32). Consequently both are prone to interpretation on the part of the reader and the question emerges about the difference between the two. A possible answer to this question might only be of tentative or conventional character: the more facts and the fewer ‘author’s original’ links there are, the closer to a book on history the writing gets—and vice versa. Such convergence of historical and literary writing has implications for the genre classification of David Gemmell’s ‘Greek’ duology.

The Function of Intertextuality and its Effect on Genre Taxonomy Gemmell’s intertextual treatment of the ancient Greek history additionally has implications for the genre classification of his Lion of Macedon and Dark Prince novel duo. Basically, his intertextuality boils down to the use of established historical facts in a work of literary fiction. By conveniently posting a list of scientific references at the end of either novel the author leaves it for the reader to find out how much of the content belongs in the realm of accepted historical knowledge. The diligent reader, having done such background check, finds that the ‘Greek’ duology contains a heavy load of historical data. Not only does Gemmell employ historical figures, armies, and battles, but he sets them in an appropriate context of the time, e.g. following Flavius Arrian’s description of battlefields (topography, deployment of troops) and arms (e.g. sarissa— a long spear held by two warriors, designed and developed by Philip II— his secret weapon) or sticking closely to historians’ descriptions of the then political situation (e.g. getting rid of a Spartan garrison stationed in the Theban fort Kadmea or Demosthenes’s role in the political life of Athens) and some details of social life (garments, food, women’s lib). Then come the earlier-mentioned narrative links. Were they kept to a bare minimum, the two novels would make a learner-friendly read on the growth of the Macedonian empire under Philip II and partly Alexander the Great. Unsurprisingly though, Gemmell remains a fiction writer and, using his writer’s imagination and prowess, provides extensive narrative ‘links’ which nicely counterbalance the weight of sheer history. At this point the result would be a historical novel, telling the story of Parmenion, a maverick general in the service of the two rulers, with true history

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permeating the plot. However, Gemmell (unsurprisingly again) does not stop at this point and introduces a significant amount of fantastic elements into the story—the earlier-mentioned magic and even a whole otherworld. The really intriguing aspect of this combination of the historic and the fantastic is that it is not merely a fashionable mélange meant to attract and flabbergast gullible readers. Instead, the fantastic is held responsible for the motivation behind the protagonists’ actions: they are driven by supernatural forces. Thus, Gemmell’s idea seems to have been to give some interpretation to the known historical facts. For instance, Gemmell ventures to propose that Alexander the Great’s soul harboured a real demon—which might go some way to explaining certain inconsistency in his conduct: spectacular career and military success, involving acts of until-then unknown kindness and generosity towards the defeated armies and conquered cities—interspersed with occasional bursts of barbarity (e.g. the destruction of Thebes). Supernatural motivation seems an obvious choice for the fantasy writer, but at the same time it deserves some serious consideration by the historian—at least as long questions about the past intentions and motivations linger around and the historian is willing to acknowledge the existence of things immaterial. Nota bene, both Alexander the Great and to some extent his father, Philip II, are reported to have been religious types (Hammond 1973: 669; Flavius Arrian 2004: 346). David Gemmell seems to have come up with a three-step method for writing historical fantasy novels. The first step is to delve into history books and come out with a well-researched set of interesting figures and events of a certain period. Step two is to build a story revolving around them, admittedly with plenty of imagination at work—yet analogically, but to a greater extent, to what in Hayden White’s view the historian does with bare facts while writing down ‘history’ (as discussed earlier). Step three is to add the fantastic into the mix, which promotes the skeletal, transitory historical novel to the rank of historical fantasy. The effect is ‘3in-1’: take out the fantastic, and you are left with a historical novel; take out the historical and you are left with a fantasy novel (e.g. portal fantasy of the sword and sorcery kind). Take out both and you are left with a history textbook.

The ‘Greek’ Duology’s Place in Fantasy Fiction Lastly, one can look at how Lion of Macedon and Dark Prince fit in the realm of fantasy fiction, using the available definitions. The ‘Greek’ duo definitely exhibits a number of fantasy-specific features with regard to

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its structure and fictional content. It is a self-coherent narrative, which tells a story about the fantastic and contains not only fantastic creatures and displays of supernatural abilities on the part of some of the characters, but also an otherworld (Clute 1999: 338). In other words, the ‘Greek’ duology contains “mythopoeic archetypes of great antiquity and power”, such as seers and sorcerers, quests, or a haunted forest. Together they form a secondary reality inhabited also by men and women who take all the magic and fantastic beings for granted—as part of their normal life. On the other hand, a certain degree of variation on the theme of fantasy writing can be found. The otherworld, the parallel Greece, is not where all the action takes place, it rather exists side by side with the primary world and is entered by the protagonists, because they are assigned a mission to fulfil there. But the protagonists’ foray into the otherworld is just part of a larger scheme of things: it is the whole of Parmenion’s life as shaped and controlled by seeress Tamis that seems the primary fantastic trait of the ‘Greek’ duology. Additionally, there is this heavy input of historical intertextuality—not commonly found in the broadly understood division of fantasy books, which mostly pretend to have anything to do with established historical facts or use history only as a blurred background for sharp-focus fictional characters and their stories. This essay’s argument—not very adventurous, admittedly—is that David Gemmell’s Lion of Macedon and Dark Prince ‘Greek’ duology does fit in the scope of fantasy literature and—due to its overlaying historical intertextuality—it even occupies a special place there, since it may be viewed as a bench mark for genre-related discussions in the field—or, to use Brian Attebery’s term (Clute 1999: 337), a prescriptive example of an appropriately historical fantasy novel: a well-balanced combination of real history, a realistic story, and the fantastic—the latter providing all the motivation for the former two.

Bibliography Clute, J. and J. Grant 1999, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin Culler, J. 1991 “Presuppositions and Intertextuality”, Modern Language Notes 91/6: 1380-1396 Flawiusz, A. 2004, Wyprawa Aleksandra Wielkiego, transl. Helena Gesztoft-Gasztold, Wrocáaw: Zakáad Narodowy im. OssoliĔskich – Wydawnictwo Gemmel, D. 2005, Lion of Macedon, Dell Rey Mass Market Edition —. 2007, Dark Prince, Dell Rey Mass Market Edition

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Genette, G. 1997, Palimpsests: Literature in Second Degree (Stages), transl. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinski, University of Nebraska Press Hammond, N.G.L. 1973, Dzieje Grecji, transl. Anna ĝwiderkówna, Warszawa: PaĔstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy Pustowaruk, M. 2009, Od Tolkiena do Pratchetta, potencjaá rozwojowy fantasy jako knowencji literackiej, Wrocáaw: Polskie Towarzystwo Ludoznawcze Waggoner, D. 1978 The Hills of Faraway. A Guide to Fantasy, New York: Atheneum White, H. 2009, Proza historyczna, ed. by Ewa DomaĔska, transl. Tomasz Dobrogoszcz et al., Kraków: TAiWPN Universitas http//:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gemmel

URSULA LE GUIN’S EARTHSEA CYCLE: PARALLELING CONTEMPORARY THEORY WITH AN EYE TO THE PAST JESSE HUDSON

In the introduction to his translation of the Daoist classic Dao De Jing, Lin Yutang writes “It is my conviction that the progress of contemporary science is forcing modern thought to develop in the direction of depth, and of a new synthesis of the mechanical and the spiritual, of matter and spirit.” (Wisdom of Laotze xiv). Intimating a fusion of seemingly incompatible opposites, of foremost interest in this quote is Lin’s timing. Written in 1948, the comment squarely addresses the point to which the academic mindset of the time had come: the wave of scientific rationality that began with Descartes and crested with modernism was washing out in the wake of another world war. Lin, along with others, believed the beginnings of a reversion were occurring—a time for the wisdom and ideologies discredited by conventional science to once again occupy a functioning position in the building stratosphere of speculation and research. In the more than half-century that has passed since Lin wrote these words, his prediction has come to ring true. The variety of theories and practices that combine sources having less tangible proofs with more modern, verifiable knowledge are coming to fruition in a quantity unlike humanity has ever witnessed. Syntheses of perennial philosophies, cultural wisdom, and traditional beliefs with the discoveries of modern science appear regularly, all in an attempt to answer the questions or solve the problems modernist science continues to research, albeit from a purely rational standpoint. Granted, a great deal of this combinative theorizing leans hard in the direction of pure speculation and has warranted fair criticism. However, as the promise of an initial idea slowly manifests itself into practical form, a number of these synthesized concepts have attracted academics from a variety of research communities and developed accordingly. Though not exclusive, these modern theories have innately

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strong ties to the historical matters of the “spiritual” and “spirit” raised by Lin, and are the reason for this essay. One such example of a concept which utilizes ideas both modern and historical is David Bohm’s theory of Implicate Order. A physicist, writer and philosopher, Bohm attempts to define the causal structure of reality by combining ideas taken from Greek philosophy with the results of scientific discovery, the results of the most recent century’s research into physics, especially. In particular, foundational elements of Implicate Order parallel Socrates’s Allegory of the Cave, which, as is known, avers that the world we see is but an illusory reality, true reality existing in a World of Forms. Bohm’s theory posits much the same: the world we interact with externally is like unto Socrates’s illusory world inside the cave. Though Bohm terms it the “explicate order,” the idea remains the same; it is the facet of reality whose aspects can be measured, exacted, tested, proved and disproved. Within what he terms the “implicate order,” “space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements.” Thus, deeper than the microscopic level, “a more basic connection of elements is possible.” It is this underlying fundamentalism—its primary causative nature—which defines the implicate order as “a harmoniously organized totality of order and measures” (Wholeness xviii). Such a definition of implicate reality directly parallels Socrates’s World of Forms, which is defined by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as “eternal, changeless, and… paradigmatic for the structure and character of our world.” By relating the intangible aspects of the physical world to the tangible formulations of modern research, Bohm has conceived of a new view of reality that has one foot in the past with the other in the present. Drawing instead upon animism and the relevant aspects thereof, James Lovelock is another modern academic using traditional ideas in support of scientific explanation to define a particularly important aspect of life. Purporting that the earth itself is in fact a living organism, Lovelock names his theory Gaia Theory after Gaia, the primal earth goddess from Greek mythology. Employing a “top-down” instead of a “bottom-up” perspective of life on earth, Lovelock’s Gaia Theory, rather than seeing earth as a collection of parts functioning independently, proposes that the whole of earth, its biosphere, and the systems therein are in fact a large “metaorganism,” (Gaia x). Lovelock defines Gaia Theory as “a complex entity involving the Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet” (Gaia 10). Such a perspective naturally carries direct parallels to animist beliefs

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regarding the spirituality and life-possessing qualities of non-sentient entities, up to and including the heavens and the earth. Numerous belief systems—Native American to Australian Aboriginal, Amazonian Natives to the early Greeks—likewise purport such ideologies. Having the more technical view, Lovelock nonetheless proposes that the interaction of systems we see on earth mimics the behavior of life to the point the earth itself can be deemed alive, thus connecting a modern explanation of the earth and its systems to a principle that has existed since the dawn of humanity. Fully aware of the subtle nature of consciousness and mentality, Ken Wilber, a modern American psychologist and philosopher seeks to transcend both the ancient and modern perceptions of psyche and forge a new path towards understanding of the mind in all of its quantifiable and unquantifiable aspects. In his 2007 The Integral Vision, Wilber surmises “for the first time, the sum total of human knowledge is available to us— the knowledge, experience, wisdom, and reflection of all major human civilizations—premodern, modern, postmodern—are open to study by anyone” (16). From this standpoint, Wilber intertwines the knowledge made available by conventional science, recurrent teachings, the results of psychoanalytics, and the individual’s intuitive experience into one, allencompassing theory of mind, a theory he calls Integral Psychology. By blurring the lines of time with regards to the advent of psychological and philosophical theories, none seem to encapsulate Lin’s idea of synthesizing the past with the present as distinctly as Wilber has. While this essay does not present scope for a more detailed examination of these theories and others averring similar notions, it can be established from the expanse of fields represented—physics, biology, chemistry and psychology—that a movement is afoot in the world of contemporary theory. Fusing profound notions from history with knowledge continually unveiling itself to modern research, a new paradigm is being created which renders Lin’s words prophetic. But it is not only in the world of science that such a model is taking shape. Literature has likewise seen an infiltration of concepts and ideas— beyond contemporary culture—into its texts. Mythology, perennial philosophy, traditional beliefs, as well as a variety of aspects regarding culture and history from seemingly all corners over the globe have begun making appearances in Western literature. One author employing philosophical concepts taken from non-Western historical sources as well as modern developments in the fields of sociology and psychology is Ursula Le Guin, her Earthsea Cycle a particularly pertinent example. Firmly rooted in Daoist teachings (if Le Guin’s own translation of Dao De

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Jing is any indication), Earthsea parallels the Chinese philosophy’s regard for nature, inaction, and the acceptance of mortality. Thus, I would like to treat Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle as a literary example embodying Lin’s idea of synthesizing the historical with the modern. However, prior to delving into Earthsea and unearthing in greater detail the specific manner in which Daoism manifests itself in the texts, it is important to outlay the basics of the Chinese philosophy so that the parallels might be seen with more clarity. Due to its unique position in the precocity of China’s recorded word, the principles of Daoism seem simple on the surface yet remain ambiguous at depth—a paradox seeming to define the mystical nature of the philosophy. Addressing this elusiveness, Lin, in the introduction to his aforementioned translation, defines the philosophy of Daoism as: the rhythm of life, the unity of all word and human phenomena, the importance of keeping the original simplicity of human nature, the danger of over-government and interference with the simple life of the people, the doctrine of ‘wu-wei’ or ‘inaction,’… the pervading influence of the spirit, the lessons of humility, quietude and calm, and the folly of force, of pride, and of self-assertion (4)

Additional concepts Lin identifies as tantamount to the philosophy are: reversion (the futility of escaping the cycle of time), polarization (the relativity of point of view), and monism (the essential unity of all things). Summing these building blocks into a whole, it can be seen that Daosim is universal, profound, and deeply rooted in observations of nature and life itself. Though needing further exposition, this simple clarification of Daoism’s basic principles will be used for the analytical portion to follow (Wisdom of Laotze 6). For the purposes of this essay, I will assume the reader’s familiarity with Earthsea and not summarize the various storylines, characters, or setting of the Cycle. Instead I will move directly into the analysis, beginning with Earthsea and the manner in which Le Guin has woven the threads of Daoism into the fabric of the Cycle. I will start with a discussion of Earthsea’s connection to the Daoist conception of nature, particularly the idea that humanity is but one operative part of a larger whole, that is, rather than an isolated element functioning independently. As such, one of the most prominent presences of nature in the Cycle is the Immanent Grove and the role it plays not only in individual narratives but in the overall story arc. Mysteriously sentient yet silent, the supernatural forest finds itself mentioned in every book of the Cycle and playing a vital part in most. Ged seeks the wisdom of the

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trees before setting out on his journey in The Farthest Shore; the name of the new Archmage is sought there in Tehanu; and it is the final, most sacred place to which Roke initiates are brought as part of their education in A Wizard of Earthsea. The voice of nature, the Master Patterner calls the Grove “the central and sacred place, the heart of peace” (The Other Wind 186), a place whose “roots are the roots of being” (The Farthest Shore 11), and “Where things are what they are” (“Dragonfly” 243). Not a rational entity that is capable of expressing wisdom directly, the Grove works patterns in its interplay of shadow, leaf, and branch that must be interpreted. When describing how to learn from the Immanent Grove, the Patterner states that: “My words are nothing. Hear the leaves” (224). It can thus be concluded that the Grove acts as a spokesperson for the will of nature in Earthsea. Events of the second trilogy, especially “Dragonfly” and The Other Wind, are more deeply informed by the Grove. That these events are transformative for the archipelago as a whole speaks to the Grove’s innate importance to the lives of the people. When asked: “Your leaves and shadows tell you nothing?”, the Master Patterner in “Dragonfly”—the story which immediately precedes The Other Wind—replies: “Change, change… Transformation” (241). So when the Dragon Council learns from the dragon-woman Orm Irian that it is humanity who has upset the balance of the world, they immediately discuss returning to the Immanent Grove to seek its wisdom, hoping greater truths will be revealed that resolve the issues at hand. “[We] need to go there [the Immanent Grove],” Tehanu suggests, “to the center of all things” (131). That the entirety of the council is in agreement with this suggestion lends stresses the degree of trust the wise of Earthsea place in nature. Justifying this trust is the outcome to which the Immanent Grove leads them, particularly the bringing together of two previously hostile cultures: the Hardic and the Kargish, the release of the souls haunting the dreams of those yet alive, as well as the opening of the doors of the school on Roke for all to learn the ways of magic, men and women alike. Therefore, that the archipelago’s most wise defer to the Immanent Grove in making decisions of such portent, it is fair to say that trusting to nature’s voice rather than man’s is an important theme of Earthsea. Another aspect of nature as manifested in Earthsea is the pastoral life—goats, trees, and herbs forever background motifs in the Cycle. That the conclusions of what were and are the “last books of Earthsea,” Tehanu and The Other Wind, are identical would suggest Le Guin is hinting at something. At the end of both books, Ged and Tenar are found resting at their countryside home on Gont, preparing for a bucolic life involving

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farming, homesteading, and walks in the woods—the same life their mentor, Ogion, led. And if any character in Western literature can be said to exemplify the characteristics of the proverbial Daoist Chinese hermit at one with nature, it is Ogion. Living in seclusion, daily communing with woods and waters, and gleaning wisdom from the pastoral, likewise are the characteristics of famous Chinese Daoists Tao Yuanming, Li Bai, and Du Fu. The only aspect Ogion lacks is that of being a master poet, but one can always read into the metaphorical usage of magic spells as such. By leading such a life, Ogion embodies the Daoist principle of trying to live within the rhythm and flow of all of nature as much as is humanly possible. By disconnecting himself from quests for social and political power—Roke and Havnor—Ogion is able to get at the marrow of life and its meaning, nature his guide. That the heroes of the story, Ged and Tenar, step into his shoes at both “ends” of the Cycle indicates the importance Le Guin places on a lifestyle so firmly rooted in rather than apart from nature. The second aspect of Daoist teaching Le Guin employs in Earthsea is the idea of inaction: the non-use of power. She does this at several levels, one of which I will discuss here: magical power. From the first novel onwards, the manner in which characters do or do not take action plays a strong role in the thematic development of the Cycle. In A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged, through youthful hubris, thoughtlessly makes use of his wizardry to the detriment of others. Uncaring as to the corollary of his action, the shadow he releases sets itself upon Earthsea and disturbs the overall balance of the archipelago in the process. Ged did not heed the warning of the school’s Master Hand when he spoke of the wizard’s ability to alter reality: you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow… (48)

However, it takes painful trial and error for Ged to come to the same conclusion: for every action there is a consequence—the responsibility of using power. Ogion, who had tried to teach him the same lesson, is then seen in a new light by Ged, and the mentor’s habit of acting only when necessary becomes something Ged emulates throughout the remainder of the Cycle. The analogy from the novels is as follows: In A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged, throughout the trip to Ogion’s home to begin his apprenticeship, complains about the rain, knowing it is within the wizard’s

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power to divert it. However, Ogion chooses not to, much to Ged’s chagrin. Later in the novel, upon learning the lessons of power and responsibility, Ged sees the wisdom in Ogion’s inaction. Thus, history repeats itself in The Farthest Shore when Ged, on a sailing quest to discover the reason the magic of Earthsea was disappearing, refrains from using his wizard’s wind to power the sailboat, choosing instead to use the world’s wind. Like Ged when he was young, Lebannen questions Ged regarding this but receives the same lesson Ogion once gave to Ged. Even when freeing Lebannen from the slave ship Ged does not take vengeance on the slave masters, freeing all to decide their own fate, slaves alongside slavers. When Lebannen questions why Ged has not punished the slavers, Ged underlines his subjective position within the equilibrium, replying rhetorically: “Who am I—though I have the power to do it—to punish and reward, playing with men’s destinies?” (87). Continuing the discussion, Ged completes the thought in “butterfly-effect” fashion by adding: Don’t you see [Lebannen] how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that’s the end of it. When the rock is lifted the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends… From the hurricane and the great whale’s sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat’s flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole. (87)

By not using the magical power that is at their command at all opportunities, Ged, Ogion, and the other wizards become a channel through which the Daoist notion of inaction manifests itself. The third and final aspect of Daoism as present in Earthsea to be discussed here is reversion, particularly of the cycle of life and its inevitability of death. As was mentioned, Daoism views materialism as futile in the wider scope of life; there is no guarantee of reward and any material gain cannot be taken to the grave. Death is viewed as unavoidable, and what lies beyond, unknowable. By coming to terms with these ideas, the finite nature of life on earth has a different value, than, for example, compared to the Christian worldview which sees mortal life as but one step towards an eternal life in a secondary world. Life and death being among the most important subjects under discussion in Earthsea, there exist numerous relevant instances for discussion throughout the Cycle. While Ged flirts with ideas of death in A Wizard of Earthsea, it is not until The Farthest Shore that a fully realized idea regarding Le Guin’s conception of life and death in the Cycle reveals itself. In this book, Ged

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and Lebannen seek to find the source of magic leaving the world, and in turn discover that people’s pursuit of fear of death and subsequent pursuit of immortality is the cause. Along the way, the duo encounters a variety of characters attempting to come to terms with mortality in different ways. Hare, a former wizard, lives in his own squalor due a dependence on the drug hazia. Disillusioned, Hare believes immortality can be found using hazia, but in fact it only brings him closer to death. Sopli, a former silk dyer, is another person Ged and Lebannen encounter who also has an issue with death. So great is Sopli’s uncertainty regarding mortality and afterlife that he lives in continual confusion. His psychotic bouts likewise infect Lebannen, causing the two to doubt Ged’s leadership. But it is Cob, the main antagonist of The Farthest Shore, who exemplifies fear of death to the greatest extent. His fear of mortality is so great that it pushes him to egocentric action; the evil wizard is able to convince others to give him their souls so that his own life might be prolonged. While Hare and Sopli’s concerns destroy themselves, Cob’s fears extend beyond himself to have a negative effect on society. Contrasting Cob is Ged’s ideology: “Death and life are the same thing—like two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same… They can be neither separated, nor mixed” (97). Ged’s aim in this statement is to underline the preciousness of living life while one is alive, and to accept death as it comes, each inseparable aspects of existence. After Lebannen asks Ged: “Why should I not desire immortality?”, Ged responds with the most telling of rhetoric regarding death in the whole Cycle: There are two, Arren, two that make one: the world and the shadow, the light and the dark. Two poles of the Balance. Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn… In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal?— What is it but death—death without rebirth? (179)

The finality of accepting life as a natural consequence to life is summed up by Ged when he claims: “I know there is only one power that is real and worth having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept” (181). This ideology is put to the test at the climax of The Farthest Shore when Ged and Lebannen, after crossing the wall of stones, face Cob in the land of the dead. What Loy and Goodhew describe as a “Hades-like realm” (Dharma 12), the land of the dead is a dreary place where “those who had died for love pass each other in the streets,” the “potter’s wheel was still, the loom empty, the stove cold,” and “[n]o voice ever sang” (227). Le Guin does not paint a pretty picture of immortality. In keeping

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with this imagery, Cob tries to defend his chosen domain and reason for sucking the life from Earthsea. He attempts: “I have seen death now, and I will not accept it. Let all stupid nature go its stupid course, but I am a man, better than nature, above nature. I will not go that way, I will not cease to be myself!” (234). Ged rebuts Cob’s denial of nature, replying that the price Cob has paid is of no longer having a self. “All that which you sold, that is yourself,” he declares, “You have given everything for nothing. And so now you seek to draw the world to you, all that light and life you lost, to fill up your nothingness. But it cannot be filled” (237). In replying so, Ged is pointing out that by avoiding death Cob has forfeited his life, death being “the price we pay for life” (236). At the conclusion of the novel, Ged’s logic prevails and he sends Cob to die his natural death. He also closes the hole between Earthsea and the dry land that Cob had opened to remove mortality from Earthsea. Symbolic in nature, by closing the hole Ged “make[s] the world whole once more” and thus allows the people of Earthsea to once again fall within the natural cycle of life and death and the whole it subscribes (240). No greater literary image could effect the principles of Daoism than this closing of the circle of life with death. Shifting the discussion away from Daoism, I would now like to place Earthsea in a more modern context by discussing the contemporary relevance of several of its additional themes. The first is a subject that has certainly undergone a vast amount of transition, particularly in the past century. Gender and gender-related issues have come into the vanguard of academic discussion in the fields of sociology, politics, economics, as well as many others. Poignant changes have been implemented not only in the legal and cultural arenas, but in general, a larger shift in perspective can be seen moving toward gender valuation. That Le Guin is a successful female writer is in itself worthy of notice—given that previous centuries did not see such a proliferation of women in the field of literature. Concurrently, if it were not for writers such as Le Guin addressing gender issues in their work, it can be argued progress would not be what it is. Earthsea is one such example of a contributory work to the progress of gender issues in the modern era. Though the setting is certainly medieval, a selection of social values evident in Earthsea are markedly modern, and if not modern, they are values challenged by Le Guin. The second book of the Cycle, Tombs, finds a young Tenar, with the help of Ged, breaking free from the proverbial chains preventing her from discovering her potential as a young woman. As the majority of the novel is set in a female-only, quasireligious institution, Tenar’s behavior is strictly regulated. All contact with

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men forbidden, she lives a litany of routines—ones that have been in existence for so long that none of the other inhabitants of the Tombs knows why they exist but follows along regardless. It seems obvious that setting the story as such, Le Guin creates circumstances wherein the parallels to the society of 1970 (when the book was written) are not that difficult to discern. Thus, Tenar’s transition from conformist to nonconformist is not only easily traced, but provides a direct expression of Le Guin’s beliefs regarding the role women are expected to play in society. It is important to note that Tenar’s rebellion is not for the sake of rebellion; rather, it is pointed. Tenar transitions not only from one place to another, but also to a higher degree of knowledge, particularly of the value of freedom towards choosing a direction in life that is most proper for the individual, that is, rather than doing what is expected without question in a discriminative system. If Tenar’s escape was not enough, then Irian’s direct affront to the male-only Masters of Roke to accept female students at their school in the story “Dragonfly” should drive home the challenge Le Guin issues to Earthsea’s establishment: opportunity should be equal. A second major area of contemporary discussion Le Guin addresses in Earthsea is social systems; the individual’s role, the family’s role, as well the role of leaders in the socio-political arena are all main thematic contributors to the six novels of the Cycle. The first three stated to be “comings of age” by Le Guin herself, the latter three move into discussion on family and socio-political affairs (“Dreams”). While seeming a paradox in the context of the word “social,” the individual is nonetheless the foundational element of a harmonious society according to the ideology outlaid in Earthsea; if individuals are not harmonious within themselves, they cannot go on to join harmoniously with others, either to a family or to society in general. To this point Le Guin devotes the first three books of the Cycle—to developing an individual toward self-understanding. As was mentioned earlier, Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea comes to terms with the manner in which his actions affect others, and in turn affect himself. Tenar in Tombs comes to the understanding of the value of herself as a woman in terms of freedom. Lebannen in The Farthest Shore must face his own death and accept it, which allows him to live a life free of fearing his own mortality. These three comings of age free the respective protagonists to conquer their fears and accept themselves for who and what they are, which in turn readies them for acceptance into family and society. Though Ged and Tenar part ways after The Tombs of Atuan and begin Tehanu, like Therru, in disparate places, these three nonetheless come together over the course of the latter novel to form a group that embodies

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the next level of social system I would like to discuss: family. Defying categorization, of foremost interest is the symbolism inherent in their union, particularly the bringing together of ethnicity, age, gender, and life experience. Ged is a dark-skinned Hardic, Tenar a light skinned Karg, and Tehanu, while assumedly Hardic by race, also has another skin-type, that which bears irreversible scars and exudes the heat of dragons. Regarding age, decades separate the trio: Ged is the oldest, at least ten years older than Tenar, while Tehanu is but a child, at least twenty years younger than the other two. Ged is male and Tenar female, while Tehanu, just a child, can be argued is sexless. And lastly, the three people represent the widest gamut possible of life experiences. Ged, from boy-wizard to Archmage, has had a lifetime’s experience of adventuring and the supernatural, his path having taken him through the entire Archipelago before his joining the family. Tenar, on the other hand, grew up in the sheltered community of the Tombs, and afterwards spent her time in domesticity on the island of Gont prior to joining the relationship. Tehanu, though the youngest of the three, has nonetheless endured a frightening and scarring incident which few can likewise say to have survived, and thus completes the variety of experiences brought to the table by the three. It can be inferred from such a deliberate union of disparate races, sexes, ages and life experiences that Le Guin intended the family unit of Ged, Tenar, and Tehanu to represent the ethnology, culture, demography of Earthsea toward creating a whole within a whole, what Rochelle calls a “tiny community” (58). That in their relationship the three find peace, love, contentedness, and a reason for living only further establishes the importance of their family as an import dynamic in Le Guin’s view of a functioning social system. Rochelle’s comment leads to the third point, that of the socio-political discussion inherent to Earthsea. It is at the end of The Farthest Shore, particularly when Lebanenn becomes king, that readers are first made aware of the burgeoning social revolution to take place in Earthsea’s future. Lenz writes that The Farthest Shore “shifts the drama of restoring wholeness from the inner and interpersonal levels into the larger arena of public life” (59). As a result, the second trilogy is more social and political in nature than the first. Explicated in Tehanu and underlined in Tales From Earthsea and The Other Wind, elements previously outlined by Le Guin come together to effect a drastic change on the archipelago. Firstly, the patriarchal power structures of Roke and the capital Havnor are altered to allow the matriarchal an equal position of influence. Secondly, the souls left trapped in the dry land in favor of Lebannen’s coming of age in The Farthest Shore are released in The Other Wind. Lastly, in what is perhaps the greatest change in the Cycle, at its conclusion peace and harmony once

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again reign as a result of looming social issues put to rest. The Kargish and Hardic, formerly at war, are now bound to mutual aims, the eminent marriage of Lebannen and Seserakh representing the change. Finally, the dragons, having flown west on the “other wind,” simultaneously find their own calling while eliminating a threat to the human populace. Problems undoubtedly still exist, but for the time being they remain domestic rather than “international.” However, none of this would be possible were it not for this third collaboration under discussion: the political roundtable that first meets in Havnor and comes to its full depth when all decide to go to Roke where the “roots of the earth” are. It is at this point that the group bonds with the aim of bettering Earthsea, or, as Cadden avers, to focus on “communication for understanding others and the world” (103). Were it not for this collaboration, dead souls would perhaps haunt the dreams of an increasing number of denizens, the Kargish would remain at odds with the Hardic, and the dragons would remain, causing feelings of ill ease among the islanders. From these negated results, the conclusion can be drawn that larger social collaborations with the aim of benefiting the populace play an important role in Earthsea and thus act as a degree of the whole. In conclusion, Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea is a marvelous vehicle for ideas old and new. These ideas are not treated individually, however, but rather as synthesized notions which utilize history as a means of revisioning the present and future. At the character level, Le Guin casts a positive light on those who are aware of their individual, social, and political power, yet use their capability only when necessary rather than egocentric purposes. Furthermore, Le Guin portrays gender roles which balance traditional modes with the contemporary, and in the process emphasize the family unit as vital for a harmonious society. And lastly, Le Guin shows the positive results of returning our trust to the wisdom of nature. As such, Earthsea can be seen to parallel contemporary theory while retaining a firm belief in the importance of applying knowledge from history.

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Bibliography Bohm, D. 1980, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, New York: Routledge Kraut, R. 2011, “Plato.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato Le Guin, U.K. 1968, A Wizard of Earthsea, New York: Bantam Spectra —. 2001, “Dragonfly,” Tales From Earthsea, New York: Berkeley Publishing Group, 184-248. —. 1979, “Dreams Must Explain Themselves,” The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction New York: Perigree, 47-56 —. 2001, “The Finder,” Tales From Earthsea, New York: Berkeley Publishing Group, 1-99 —. 2001, Tales From Earthsea, New York: Berkeley Publishing Group —. 1990, Tehanu, New York: Aladdin Paperbacks —. 1972, The Farthest Shore, New York: Aladdin Paperbacks —. 2001, The Other Wind, New York: Berkeley Publishing Group —. 1970, The Tombs of Atuan, New York: Aladdin Paperbacks Lenz, M. 2003, “Ursula Le Guin,” Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction: Ursula LeGuin, Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman, and Others, ed. Peter Hunt & Millicent Lenz, New York: Continuum, 42-85. Lin, Y. 2009, The Wisdom of Laotze, Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press Lovelock, J. 2000, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford: Oxford UP Loy, D.R. and L. Goodhew 2004, The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons: Buddhist Themes in Modern Fantasy, Boston: Wisdom Publications Rochelle, W.G. 2001, Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, Liverpool: Liverpool UP Wilber, K. 2007, The Integral Vision: A Very Short Introduction to the Revolutionary Integral Approach to Life, God, and Everything, Boston: Shambhala Publications

“HEALING FICTION?”: MARCIN CISZEWSKI’S ‘MAJOR’ TRILOGY AS A COMPENSATIONAL JOURNEY FROM HISTORY TO HISTORY1 MAREK OZIEWICZ

In his seminal essay “The Role of the Unconscious” (1918) C. G. Jung proposed to complement Freud’s repression theory with his own compensation theory of consciousness. Arguing that “the unconscious is, first and foremost, the world of the past,” Jung posited that the role of the unconscious is to “act compensatorily to the conscious contents of the moment”2. The compensatory function, he claimed, “is the automatic, natural function of the unconscious and is constantly present”3. At the same time, Jung acknowledged that artificial aids such as religion and art are usually needed to “bring the healing forces of the unconscious into play”4. Among these artificial aids a story, told or written, reigns supreme. Developing Jung’s thought, 65 years later the American depth psychologist James Hillman spoke of such psychologically-charged stories as “healing fiction.” Writing about Freud’s psychoanalysis, but also about other psychological approaches—Jungian, Adlerian and his own— Hillman claims that all these purportedly scientific methods of diagnosing, describing and resolving psychological problems are in fact “a new kind of fiction, invented and developed during the twentieth century.” “All these stories, wherever and by whomever they are written,” says Hillman, “have one and the same leitmotif: the main character enters therapy.” Hillman thus calls all “case histories” “therapeutic fictions”5; even though “case histories” seem to recount “factual histories,” the material they are built of is not, at least primarily, “historical facts but psychological fantasies, the subjective stuff that is the proper domain of fiction”6. Although Hillman does not explicitly deny the possibility of history, the telling of it—he suggests—will always be part fiction and part therapy. Hillman grounds his argument in the simple fact that “anything referred to as ‘history’ must be yoked to chronicity, but psychic realities, as both Freud and Jung

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insisted, do not follow the laws of time”7. Hillman’s reflection about psychological practice as a form of storytelling in which therapists use, however ineptly, several generic conventions ends on the following note: “Psychology would do better to turn directly to literature, rather than to use it unawares. Literature has been friendly to us, openly incorporating a good deal from psychoanalysis. Those in literature see psychology in fiction. It’s our turn to see the fiction in psychology”8. Jung’s theories about the compensatory function of the unconscious and Hillman’s recognition of the affinities between literature and psychology offer an interesting framework for examining the genre of alternate history. Even though it seems to me that this double perspective can be applied to most works of alternate history, in this essay I will discuss the alternate history of Poland as represented in Marcin Ciszewski’s ‘Major’ trilogy. As I demonstrated in another study9, Polish alternate histories have often served authors as a way to cope with historical traumas, especially those related to lost wars, lost independence, missed chances, and traumatic, recurrent events such as, for example, betrayals by Western allies. Here, I would like to focus on the healing and compensation aspect of Ciszewski’s trilogy and demonstrate that each of the novels in the series—WWW.1939.COM.PL (2008), WWW.1944.WAW.PL (2009) and Major (2010)—offers restorative journeys from history “done” to history “envisioned,” thus compensating for Poles’ historical defeats in, respectively, the 1939 Polish defensive war against Germany, in the 1944 Warsaw uprising, and in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Each novel can be seen as healing fiction, which invites the reader to vicariously participate in the past in order to transcend, in the present, the trauma of historical defeat. If most literature admits to being fiction but denies being therapeutic, and if most psychology admits to being therapeutic, but—Hillman excepted—denies being fiction, Ciszewski’s alternate history is glaringly both fiction and therapeutic. It is fiction by virtue of being literature— speculative fiction by virtue of its “what if” component—and it is therapeutic in at least three senses. Firstly, it is therapeutic in the Jungian sense of serving as a vehicle for the compensatory work of the unconscious, compensating for traumatic events of the national past; in this case related to WWII. Secondly, Ciszewski’s trilogy is therapeutic in the Eliadean sense of offering an escape from history, from sure knowledge that things happened the way they did. Thirdly, Ciszewski’s trilogy is therapeutic in Hillman’s sense of “soul making”: a “digestive operation” in the course of which outer historical facts—such as WWII in Poland—become inner

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experiences of the author’s and reader’s imagination and are “regarded from the viewpoint of soul”10. Ciszewski’s trilogy offers all three types of healing—compensation for traumatic events, escape from history, and ensouling of events for the sake of insight. Generically, the series is alternate history of the type that Karen Hellekson in her The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time (2001) calls the “nexus story”—“an alternate history that focuses on a crucial point in history, such as a battle or assassination, in which something different happens that changes the outcome”11. More specifically, all three novels qualify as the battle story subset of the nexus category; stories that “center on historically based nexus events during a war … use historical figures as characters and pay great attention to battle strategy, weapons, and warfare methods… [They also] depend on the Great Man theory of history, relying on the importance of certain key players to shape history”12. The nexus events Ciszewski examines in his novels are, respectively, the 1939 Polish defensive war against Germany, the 1944 Warsaw uprising, and the 1943 Ghetto uprising. In his alternate histories of those events, Ciszewski speculates on whether and how a group of Polish soldiers who are accidentally moved back in time to September 1939, would be able to take advantage of their state-of-the-art weapons, a portable nuclear reactor, computers and knowledge of history to mitigate Poland’s loses and motivate Western Allies to make good on their promises. The book that sets the stage is WWW.1939.COM.PL. The story begins in 2007 when the Polish involvement in the War on Terror requires the creation of powerful modular army units, capable of long-term independent operations in Afghanistan. A Combined Arms Battalion of the Polish Army is thus formed. Led by Lieutenant Colonel Jerzy Grobicki, the CAB incorporates a platoon of American Marines guarding a topsecret MDS truck with crew. MDS is an experimental Mobile Defense System that can create a magnetic shield capable of protecting an area within a 250-meter radius from any assault13. Potentially MDS is also a machine for time travel, although nobody realizes it yet. After the shield is put on, something flickers from the central transmitter and everybody loses consciousness. When they wake up, they find themselves in the same place on September 1, 1939. They stand on then-German territory, a few miles behind the Polish-German border of 1939, in the middle of the first day of WWII. Although Grobicki and his officers do not want to get engaged in the conflict, an immediate return to 2007 is impossible. Believing they will soon be discovered and attacked anyway, the CAB joins in the war;

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cooperating with the nearest Polish Army unit, they succeed in disabling the initiative of German Army Group South and slowing down the Nazi blitzkrieg. Having lost MDS and with it the chance of returning home, and having exhausted their combat possibilities, the CAB is eventually disbanded. Some veterans decide to leave Poland, but the majority stays behind, fighting on in the September campaign and ultimately joining the Underground. WWW.1944.COM.PL, set five years later, begins in Texas where the badly wounded Colonel Grobicki and some of his officers had emigrated in 1939. It tells a story of how they return to Poland to recover the MDS emitter. The characters have figured out how to restore the operating system of the time-machine and are hoping to be able to return to 2007. Parachuted to Poland, Grobicki and his team meet other veterans of the battalion, now under the command of Major Janusz WojtyĔski, and eventually wind up in Warsaw where they have no choice but to assist the Polish Underground in the Warsaw uprising. Thanks to WojtyĔski’s forces, their skills and weaponry, the uprising succeeds. Grobicki— although he manages to recover the emitter—finds himself in a moral dilemma. All along WojtyĔski was helping him recover the emitter only because he had previously negotiated with the US government significant military help for the uprising in exchange for the emitter. Grobicki is thus used as an ignorant intermediary in brokering a major political deal. Learning about it, he and his men manage to smuggle out one core component of the emitter that allows them to rebuild it on their own some time later and return to 2012 at the end of the novel. The last book of the trilogy, Major, is an extensive flashback to four days in April 1943. Set in the context of the build-up for and the breaking out of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, the novel recounts some of the underground activities of Lieutenant Janusz WojtyĔski as well as the German attempts to trace and capture the elusive guests from the future. Hunted by the SS, WojtyĔski is engaged in three ongoing ventures. One is the continuing terror-for-terror operation in which WojtyĔski’s commandos —through all kinds of “selective terror” acts such as sabotage, bombing, kidnappings, home calls, intimidation, bribing, spectacular assassinations and the like14—send the Germans a clear message of leave-us-alone. The other key project is the ongoing negotiation between the head of the Polish Underground State and the head of the US Intelligence, concerning the conditions for the return of the emitter. The deal struck then will inform the plot of the second book of the trilogy, set as it is one year later. The third important project that WojtyĔski carries out is Polish aid to Jewish resistance in the Ghetto. Although initially the goal was to buy time

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necessary to evacuate, and thus save, all of the Jewish children from the Ghetto, this initiative saves the adults as well. Jewish fighters and WojtyĔski’s special forces inflict disproportionately large casualties on the Germans and demonstrate “that extermination of the Jews is not an issue between the Jews and the Germans, it is an issue between all of Polish citizens and the Germans”15. German losses in the first two days of the liquidation of the Ghetto are so heavy that the new SS commander calls off the Grossaktion on the third day. The Ghetto is saved. As is clear from this outline, Ciszewski’s novels go some way toward providing positive alternate conclusions to major historical defeats Poles suffered in the course of WWII. The first novel depicts a somewhat successful course of events, as Grobicki’s battalion manages to even out Polish and German strength in the war, although it cannot avert Poland’s eventual defeat. The second novel recounts a largely successful story of the Warsaw uprising—historically one of the bloodiest and most tragic Polish defeats ever, with roughly 200.000 civilians and soldiers dead against fewer than 10.000 German casualties. Allied assistance in return for the emitter enables Poland to emerge from the war as an independent country, albeit only until 1946 when Poland’s democratic government is suppressed by the Soviets and the Communist era begins. The third novel, finally, is a fully successful alternate history scenario in which the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943 is successful thanks to Polish-Jewish cooperation and the Jews are not exterminated. In altering history in hopeful, sometimes even redeeming ways, Ciszewski’s trilogy is centrally preoccupied with the question of how things could have been otherwise and through this extrapolation is a form of healing fiction that offers compensation for traumatic events, escape from history, and ensouling of events for the sake of insight. The trilogy’s Jungian compensation for traumatic events can be found in episodes that reverse the roles of historical winners and losers. Some of these episodes relate to the general national trauma of defeat in the war; others rework specific vignettes of helplessness etched in Polish memory by frequent representations in historical studies and fiction alike. The Jungian compensation addresses failure and helplessness—the suppressed contents of Polish national memory of the war. As recently noticed by cultural historian Irena GrudziĔska-Gross, although Polish historical memory projects gloriously heroic visions of WWII, the war was above all a humiliation. “We must finally understand,” GrudziĔska-Gross argues, “that World War II was for us [Poles] a period of collective national humiliation, even if we optimistically assume that the majority of Poles resisted or fought against the Nazi Occupier. The sad and painful truth

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is that Poland was conquered, and Poles were largely helpless”16. Compensating for these historical facts are episodes in which the Poles are the winning side and the Germans are largely helpless. One of the most recognizable vignettes of Polish helplessness during the war was air raids on the civilian population. From the first days of the September campaign, the Luftwaffe controlled the skies over Poland, and its pilots frequently strafed defenseless civilians. In the first book of the trilogy one such massacre is witnessed by Grobicki and his men, and it is this episode that makes them join the war. Watching from cabins of two helicopters just above treetops, they see a group of villagers mowed down by machine gun fire from four Messerschmitt fighter planes. As Grobicki, the narrator, describes it: People, horses, wagons coiled into one huge, bloody, pulsating skein. The bullets tore everything apart—adult and child bodies, property, animals… The scene was completely mute, we didn’t hear explosions or victims’ cries. But we saw everything all too well. Several human bodies were strewn on the ground... I felt adrenaline rush to my head. It was one thing to read about Luftwaffe exploits [over Poland], and another to see them close with my own eyes. All of us, including Nancy, were frozen with terror. My outrage soon found its outlet. After all, I had the tools to teach these bastards how to behave... “Johnny,” I said through the intercom, “take ’em down.”17

These and similar episodes in which modern Polish soldiers annihilate German troops are often accompanied by lengthy and gloating descriptions of how superior modern military helicopters, tanks and other equipment are to German WWII technology. Whenever contemporary Poles watch these encounters, they are described as doing so with “vengeful satisfaction”18; stories of German torture and Polish suffering harden battalion soldiers not to hold anything back. In another reworked vignette of helplessness—a description of how German soldiers used civilians as a human wall during the Warsaw uprising19—the surviving Germans are given no quarter. “I would never believe,” Grobicki recounts: that you can raise your hands so high and shout “nicht schiessen” so loud. But not today, kameraden. Not today. Today there were kids torn to pieces by bullets and mothers’ hearts torn by despair. Today, our civilization, not for the first and certainly not for the last time, regressed to its roots... I knew that a well-aimed bullet between surprised eyes would say it better than words... Everybody standing on a short section of the road, as well as the tank’s heavy machine gun, opened fire without command, independently. I too joined this execution, emptying the cartridge of my gun... There was no place for compunction. There was only hate.20

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As can be gleaned from these episodes, the Jungian compensation that the trilogy offers is emotionally regressive, almost infantile, yet immensely affective. It operates on the principle of bringing up the most emotionally painful historical situations and resolving them through the reversal of roles between winners and losers. The other type of therapeutic effect Ciszewski’s trilogy achieves is something that can also be found in most alternate histories: an escape from history. In this function, within the limits of freedom of re-imagining things, history—the thing done—becomes malleable; rather than controlling humans, it turns out to be a playground for human intentions and for fantasizing in its purest and most basic form. By offering an escape from sure knowledge that things happened the way they did, Ciszewski’s trilogy is informed by an impulse that Mircea Eliade identified as the primal human desire to abolish history. As he theorizes in The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954), archaic humanity refused to attach value to historical events in themselves and thus refused to acknowledge that history defines and circumscribes human existence. Instead, archaic societies periodically abolished history, devaluated it “by perpetually finding transhistorical models and archetypes for it,” or gave it a metahistorical meaning21. According to Eliade, even though modern humanity declares itself to be consciously and voluntarily historical—participating in the historical process—the archaic conception is still very much present insofar as no historicism provides a satisfying answer to the terror of history. “Justification of a historical event by the simple fact that it is a historical event, … that ‘it happened that way,’ will not go far,” Eliade claims, “toward freeing humanity from the terror that the event inspires”22. The catastrophes and horrors of history, Eliade contends, are intolerable if “beyond them [one] can glimpse no sign, no transhistorical meaning; if they are only a blind play of economic, social, or political forces; or, even worse, only the result of the ‘liberties’ that a minority takes and exercises directly on the stage of universal history …”23. Eliade’s answer is that like our archaic ancestors, modern humanity too seeks to abolish the terror of history by protecting itself through attaching metahistorical meaning to otherwise meaningless historical events or revolting against time. The revolt, he says, usually takes the form of abolishing history “through consciousness of living an eternal present, … by means of a periodically repeated ritual, … or through a single regeneration … in an in illo tempore”24. This illud tempus, the recoverable other time, in Ciszewski’s novels is the past that again becomes the present so that it can be molded by human intentions and actions.

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By sending his contemporary characters to the past, Ciszewski overcomes the terror of linear history by rerunning it in a way to produce a more palatable version of the past. At the same time, he acknowledges the contingency of history, the fact that it always involves a point of view, and that its outcomes result from a complex combination of larger forces, cultural and social processes, individual destinies and accidental events of all sorts. The poignant tragedy of his time travelers is that no matter how they try, they can change history only in some ways, none of which will affect the broad contours of what happened. Thus, for example, although WojtyĔski knows from history that Rowecki will be betrayed and so eliminates the traitors in advance, he is helpless to prevent Rowecki’s death in an accidental exchange of fire25. By the same token, even the deal of assistance made with the US will not be enough to save Poland from 50 years of Communist rule. The third factor that makes Ciszewski’s trilogy therapeutic is the ensouling of certain outer historical events for the sake of insight. As Hillman explains the concept, “outer means simply we are outside looking at it … This and this happened, and then this. Inner means we are taking it in; in is open to insight. Ingestion slows down the happenings for the sake of the chewing”26. When applied to Ciszewski’s trilogy, Hillman’s ensouling for the sake of insight takes the form of a prolonged immersion in the experience of national suffering informed by poignant questions about whether this suffering was unavoidable, and if so—what its meaning was. As Hillman notes, “[e]ach psychotherapeutic analysis contains a question,” one that has to recur a number of times to become graspable, and one to which the answers are never straight-forward. Additionally, the more painful the issue, the more the question will be entangled by what Hillman calls “a reflective hesitancy which keeps one’s assertions about what one really wants from ever finding direct speech”27. And so it is in Ciszewski’s trilogy in which contemporary characters, especially Grobicki and WojtyĔski, are kept acting by that sense of wanting something very important, although this thing is never identifiable with what they believe they want. Throughout the series the characters declare they want to go back to their own time, and they believe that they do not belong in the reality of WWII. Yet, although they never say it, they also seek to understand Polish history—perhaps in order to grasp their own place in it, and perhaps to comprehend the role WWII played in shaping Polish national identity. To understand—ingest—history, however, they must stay in it rather than escape back to their own times. Whatever questions the protagonists ask, all of them can be placed within the larger framework of Polish martyrology which sees Poland as a

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victim of geographical positioning between two expansionist neighbors: Germany and Russia. The image of Poland as a victim is not without historical accuracy; between 1772 and 1989, Poland was invaded, partitioned, occupied or controlled by Germans and Russians for 199 of those 217 years, enjoying only 18 years—1921-1939—of peaceful and independent existence. Yet, these historical facts do not answer the question why it was so. For Ciszewski and most contemporary Poles, the old Romantic answer to prolonged national victimization—one that projected Poland as the Christ of nations, suffering innocently for the sake of some unspecified greater good—is no longer satisfying. The explanation Ciszewski suggests is that Poland was never strong enough to defend itself against Russia or Germany, let alone both at the same time, and that the alliances Poland made were too weak. Indeed, the tragedy of WWII for Poland was not just the losing of the war but the failure of all its hopes placed in Western allies, before, during and after the war. Struggling to increase its chances for independent survival, Poland entered alliances with Western powers. In the Franco-Polish treaty, signed in April 1939, “France agreed to launch, within two weeks of general mobilization, a broad offensive with the ‘bulk of its forces’ against any country that attacked Poland”28. The Anglo-Polish treaty, finalized in August 1939, “formalized Britain’s guarantee of Poland’s independence and… made provisions for the mutual cooperation against… Germany”29. Between March and August, Poles had been repeatedly assured that in the event of a German invasion of Poland, the Royal Air Force would immediately launch an assault against Germany30. As a sign of their trust in the allies, in July the Polish government presented Britain and France with “a gift of incalculable value,” a replica of the German Enigma cipher machine with which “the Poles had been reading German military and political communications for six years”31. Given such commitment and the allies’ declarations, many Poles, perhaps most, seemed genuinely to believe that if the Germans attacked, Poland—with French and British assistance, of course —would defeat them. The Poles were confident that France, believed at the time to possess the world’s most powerful army, and Britain, with its air force and renowned navy, would live up to their treaty obligations. Would Hitler dare to invade in the face of so powerful an alliance? Even many Europeans outside Poland thought not.32

Yet, when the war broke out—although Britain and France did declare war on Germany on September 3—Poland was left unaided against the Nazi and then the Soviet aggression. Although the Poles continued to fight over the next six years, in 1945—despite being “the fourth largest

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contributor to the Allied effort in Europe”33—Poland was sold out to the Soviets. Both events have since functioned in the Polish national memory as acts of supreme betrayal: the 1939 betrayal resulting in six years of murderous occupation and the 1945 betrayal—in the creation of the puppet government and Communist regime for the next 45 years. The cost of those betrayals was immense: Poland was the only member of the antiNazi coalition which was a territorial loser. In fact, it came out of the war with only four fifths of its territory. It suffered the largest casualties among all warring states, losing 17% of its population, compared to the USSR 11,6%, Germany 9,5% and France 1,5%. As if this was not enough, like other countries of the Eastern Bloc, it was forced by Stalin to refuse the benefits of the Marshall Plan and instead suffered four decades of Soviet economic exploitation. According to one estimate, the cost alone of stationing of 300.000 Soviet troops in Poland between 1945 and 1992 was $5.14 billion in 2009 dollars based on the Consumer Price Index34. Aware of this terrible cost for their country, one of the ensouling questions Ciszewki’s characters ask is about the possible circumstances and price of allied help. Already in the first novel, the time travel episode turns out to be a plot engineered by General Lucjan Dreszer, Grobicki’s superior in 2007, who thus hopes to “amend the worst disaster in the history of our nation” and save Poland from losing the war as well as its consequence: “50 years of the Communist yoke”35. In books two and three, although allied inaction is a known fact, Poles continue to hope that their contribution to the war effort will be recognized and their right for independence will not be denied. As the wounded WojtyĔski tells Grobicki in what is chronologically the last book of the series, he “was hoping … we could win something more for Poland”36. Even as he dies, WojtyĔski implores his former superior: “You got to go back to your men and make sure that the emitter is handed over to the American authorities… I realize you want to go back to our future. But the emitter is, how to put it, our Polish trump card… the strongest one we’ve got…” “The trump card?” “Exchange. Emitter in exchange for supplies. And our army from the West.” I nodded… His request wasn’t a surprise to me. Yet it unambiguously ruined our plans of return to the future. But how could I refuse? On the one hand, a private enterprise, important for a handful of people. On the other… “… How much have you been able to bargain?” “… Quite much. The arrival of the First Polish Airborne Brigade, weapons for three infantry divisions, ammunition and supplies for three months of combat action.”37

The ensouling of such historical events as the 1939 Polish defensive war against Germany, the 1944 Warsaw uprising, and the 1943 Warsaw

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Ghetto uprising proposed by Ciszewski produces ambiguous insights. On the one hand, it suggests that some defeats could have been averted and some atrocities forestalled; on the other, it seems to affirm that the sad trajectory of Polish history in the second part of the 20th century was largely unavoidable. In this, Ciszewski’s trilogy sharply differs from a host of other alternate histories of Poland published in the past few years—for example Marcin Wolski’s Alterland (2003) and Wallenrod (2010) or Maciej Parowski’s Storm (2010)—in which Poland is spared defeat in the war and its corollaries. Although much more can be said about Ciszewski’s trilogy and Polish alternate history, the arguments presented above suffice, I hope, to suggest the compensatory potential of the genre. By altering the unalterable, Ciszewski’s novels offer restorative journeys from history “done” to history “envisioned,” changing past events and contemporary attitudes to these events. Examined in the light of Jung’s theories about the compensatory function of the unconscious, Eliade’s theories about the terror of history, and Hillman’s proposal about ensouling historical events for the sake of insight, the novels can be seen as healing fiction on at least three levels. If Hillman is right that “the soul demands something more metaphysically important” than bare events, plain facts, and simple data38, then narratives about alternate national history such as Ciszewski’s trilogy may be seen as psychological realism. Alternate history novels offer healing fictions and open a window on certain aspects of national identity. They also generate counterforces, in the form of empowering narratives, to compulsive repetition of traumatizing national past and, at their best, help put the historical trauma behind.

Notes 1. This paper has been largely developed from “Coping with the Trauma of Allied Betrayal: Alternate Histories of Poland in Konrad T. Lewandowski’s ‘Noteka 2015’ and Marcin Ciszewski’s Major Trilogy” forthcoming in Justyna DeszczTryhubczak and Marek Oziewicz (eds.) Alternate History Issue of Philologia Wratislaviensia. 2. C. G. Jung, “The Role of the Unconscious”, [w:] Civilization in Transition: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 10, transl. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, 1978. 3. Ibidem, p. 18. 4. Ibidem, p. 19. 5. J. Hillman, Healing Fiction, Putnam, Conn., 1983, p. 13, italics in the original. 6. Ibidem, p. 12. 7. Ibidem, p. 12. 8. Ibidem, p. 18. 9. See note 1.

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10.J. Hillman, p. 27. 11.K. Hellekson, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time, Kent, OH, 2001, p. 5. 12.Ibidem, p. 7. 13.M. Ciszewski, WWW.1939.COM.PL, Warszawa, 2008, p. 22. 14.M. Ciszewski, WWW.1944.COM.PL, Warszawa, 2009, p. 231. 15.Ibidem, p. 88. 16.M. Zając, “Wzmacniamy toĪsamoĞü Polaków: wywiad z Ireną GrudziĔskąGross”, Przekrój 12-3430 (22 Mar 2011), p. 46. 17.M. Ciszewski, WWW.1939.COM.PL, p. 101. 18.Ibidem, p. 103. 19.M. Ciszewski, WWW.1944.COM.PL, Warszawa, 2009, p. 261. 20.Ibidem, p. 271. 21.M. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos and History, Princeton, 1991, p. 141. 22.Ibidem, p. 150. 23.Ibidem, p. 151. 24.Ibidem, p. 111-12. 25.M. Ciszewski, WWW.1944.COM.PL, Warszawa, 2009, p. 233. 26.J. Hillman, p. 27. 27.Ibidem, p. 85. 28.L. Olson and S. Cloud, A Question of Honor: The Kosciuszko Squadron, the Forgotten Heroes of World War II, New York, 2004, p. 37. 29.N. Davies, Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory, London, 2006, p. 150. 30.L. Olson and S. Cloud, p. 37-8. 31.Ibidem, p. 38. 32.Ibidem, p. 45. 33.Ibidem, p. 6. 34.M. Henzler, „Drodzy towarzysze. Koszty pobytu Armii Radzieckiej w PRL”, Polityka 1(6).4 (2589), 27.01.2007, p. 18. 35.M. Ciszewski, WWW.1939.COM.PL, p. 280. 36.M. Ciszewski, Major, UstroĔ, 2010, p. 228. 37.Ibidem, p. 311-12. 38.J. Hillman, p. 219.

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Bibliography Ciszewski, M. 2008, WWW.1939.COM.PL, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo SOL —. 2009, WWW.1944.COM.PL, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo SOL —. 2010, Major, UstroĔ: ENDER Davies, N. 2006, Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory, London: Macmillan Eliade, M. 1991, The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos and History, Princeton: Princeton UP Hellekson, K. 2001, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time, Kent, OH: The Kent State UP Henzler, M. 2007, “Drodzy towarzysze. Koszty pobytu Armii Radzieckiej w PRL”, [“Dear Comrades: The Cost of Stationing the Red Army in Communist Poland”], Polityka 1(6).4 (2589), 15-18 Hillman, J. 1983, Healing Fiction, Putnam, Conn.: Spring Publications Jung, C.G. 1978, Civilization in Transition: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 10. Trans. by R. F. C. Hull, Princeton: Princeton UP Olson, L. and S. Cloud 2004, A Question of Honor: The Kosciuszko Squadron, the Forgotten Heroes of World War II, New York: Vintage Books Zając, M. 2011, “Wzmacniamy toĪsamoĞü Polaków: wywiad z Ireną GrudziĔską-Gross”] [“Strengthening Poles’ [National] Identity: an Interview with Irena GrudziĔska-Gross”], Przekrój 12-3430, 44-47

ANDREA HAIRSTON’S REDWOOD & WILDFIRE: CONJURING IMPOSSIBILITY SPECIALISTS MONTY VIERRA

In the call for papers for the Fifth International FANCUD conference, one item in particular caught my attention: “One…element of contemporary life is the experience of helplessness in the face of overwhelming events and processes.” It is precisely at times like this, when we feel overwhelmed, that we need “impossibility specialists”— people who will dare to do the impossible and overcome those events and processes that otherwise crush us down. This is not a new idea, but one that harkens back to the Greek concept of the hero. Today, too often the only image of a hero is someone in a costume and a mask battling some super villain. These Hollywood heroes never tackle the real problems of helplessness that most of us face; those heroes are there for light entertainment. It seems to me that people who can stand up to the super villain of an invisible process or an unnamable event really are experts in overcoming the insurmountable. Impossibility specialist is a term coined by Andrea Hairston and first used in her play Lonely Stardust (1997: 8). She applied it to the unlikeliest of heroes: people on the streets of a poor, run-down, rust-belt city in the United States. In that play, people encounter an alien Traveler from another planet who has come in search of people who can achieve greatness in themselves despite the odds against them. The Traveler calls them “impossibility specialists” (Lonely Stardust 1997: 8). Characters of this kind are not unique to Lonely Stardust. They are rather the hallmark of much if not all of Andrea Hairston’s work for the stage and on the page, work that spans more than 30 years in the theatre as director, producer, and writer, as well as related essays, a short story, and two novels. Unfortunately, she has so far received scant critical attention in the United States, her home, and she is perhaps unknown in Europe.1 Yet, Hairston shares with many people an interest in resurrecting histories that have been lost, forgotten, or put on the margins. Her characters recall and rebuild lost cultural myths as they recover their own

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inner sense of worth; they overcome the ultimate adversity of “events and processes.” I hope through this short article to acquaint readers with the power and importance of Hairston’s work. I will do so by focusing on her newest novel, Redwood and Wildfire (2011), and the major characters that bring it to life.

Frameworks of Speculative History Both the author and the publisher classify this novel as speculative fiction, that rather broad category that embraces a great deal of writing, including but not limited to fantasy and science fiction.2 As with any work with such a wide purview, we may readily read and examine it fruitfully from a number of different perspectives. In this article, my attention will be on the ways in which Redwood and Wildfire addresses questions of personal and cultural history. I will consider how this novel works as alternate, alternative, and transcendent history. I am heavily indebted to Corrine Buckland’s forthcoming essay on The Book Thief for my analysis. This article then is a discussion of what makes Redwood and Wildfire a speculative history that encompasses all three types. In the course of this essay, I will illustrate the ways in which Hairston achieves this integration through her use of images that are grounded in multiple “mythic” sources, from West Africa and traditional Native America to the new myths created by the circumstances of change in the New World.3 It will be helpful to start by considering ways of classifying speculative history. We should not view them as exclusionary categories but as frameworks that help us construct a theoretical approach to the topic. For instance, the terms alternate and alternative history are so closely related that for some scholars they name or “frame” the same thing. Karen Hellekson’s (2001) taxonomy of alternate history is a good place to begin. In The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time, Hellekson rather broadly views alternate history as any kind of “literature that concerns itself with history’s turning out differently than what we know to be true” (1). She acknowledges that others use the term “alternative,” but in her system of classification both terms refer mainly to the same frame in which we can place or view speculative history.

Alternative History Buckland (2011 forthcoming), however, draws a distinction between the two terms and hence sees them in a somewhat different light; they frame or build a different picture of what speculative fiction does. That is,

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she examines speculative fiction in a performative sense. For Buckland, an alternative history retells “actual historical events from non-conventional but credible viewpoints” (2011 forthcoming). Before I move on to consider the difference that Buckland finds between alternative and alternate, I would like to “test” this first definition against Hairston’s newest novel by seeing in what ways the events are told from “nonconventional but credible viewpoints.” To do so, I will briefly highlight the period, the places, and the people animating this novel. First, Redwood and Wildfire sets its readers in a time not often considered in American speculative fiction, the turn of the 20th century. The novel also takes its readers on a journey to places rarely if ever visited in American speculative fiction, the rural South, starting in the swamps of Georgia, and passing north to the “futuristic” city of Chicago, a city of tenements and the first skyscrapers and home to the dazzling Columbian Exposition. The novel also introduces its readers to people not often portrayed in American speculative fiction: people of color, Gullah speakers, migrants from the rural South, and immigrants from the Old World. Redwood Phipps, for instance, is African American; she is a hoodoo woman, a conjurer, using herbs and local knowledge to treat people’s ailments. Redwood is the daughter of Garnett Phipps, also a conjure woman, who is lynched and burned by members of the Ku Klux Klan in the opening chapter. Redwood’s co-protagonist, Aidan Cooper Wildfire, is Seminole Irish. He is a farmer with a single mule to help plow his field. In most mainstream American literature, characters such as these are secondary or background to people of higher social standing, especially white people. Redwood’s and Aidan’s journeys are also not an extraordinary flight in a balloon or rocket ship. Instead, to get to Chicago, Redwood joins a minstrel show with two men, Milton O’Reilly and Eddie Starks (141). Their show combines the entertainment staple of song and dance and jokes and pratfalls, and it takes them on a winding path through the center of the US east of the Mississippi with stops in mining towns and stays in bordellos. Such performers and performances rarely if ever receive top billing in American speculative fiction. On the contrary, characters like these are often shown in derisive ways, as Kevin Wilmott (2004) ably illustrates in his alternate history, CSA: The Confederate States of America. In Hairston’s novel, Redwood, Milton, and Eddie are major players. They work their way across the country, entertaining audiences and eluding conservative sheriffs as they go. When they reach Chicago, all three join the world of vaudeville. Vaudeville is the more formal version, if we can call it that, of the minstrel show.

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Such people took part in such events in such places. Yet, they and their stories are not part of the conventional historical narrative of the period. In short, from these scattered highlights, Redwood and Wildfire fits Buckland’s discussion of alternative histories, which retell “actual historical events from non-conventional but credible viewpoints,” as cited above. Though the people and places are anything but conventional, their viewpoints are credible because they are grounded in the actual experiences of people of the time. And the “actual historical events” of that era range from the first Ferris wheel and the wonder of the Columbian Exposition to lynching, minstrelsy, and block busting in Chicago’s suburbs.

Alternate History We must return now to the other part of this account, the notion of alternate history as something distinct from alternative history. Buckland makes this distinction from reading widely in sources unavailable to me at this point, so I follow her lead. According to Buckland, “Alternate history, [in contrast to alternative history], changes something within known history in order to speculate on the consequences.” This is the “what if?” principle widely used in science fiction and fantasy—in speculative fiction in general—and which Gavriel Rosenfeld (2002) examines in his essay “Why do we ask ‘what if?’” As before, I would like to test this second definition against Hairston’s novel. I will do so by considering what was changed during this era and by these characters—or at least what could have been changed—and what the consequences of the change would have been. I will therefore concentrate on the “what if” quality of the novel. The most obvious “what if” of Redwood and Wildfire is Redwood’s power of conjuring, a power not confined to her, I must add. What if someone could command the weather? What if they could empathically absorb a sick or injured person’s pain and give the body the time and power to heal? Yet, these are powers that Redwood possesses. Such powers, as noted above, speak to the healing and other abilities certain people in traditional societies are said to possess and cross the boundary between real, intuitive, but not scientifically validated knowledge and skill and the “magical” world of fantasy. The problem is finding this boundary, assuming it exists. Redwood clearly does not think so, for she calls out to Aidan, “Folk conjure this world, call it forth out of all the possibilities” (18). Redwood and Wildfire continues Hairston’s project of asserting that our imaginations allow us to devise better worlds for us to live in, and our willingness to strive for them brings them into existence. In this view of this kind of extraordinary power, each of us has the ability to form, or at

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least have the innate capacity to create, our own “nexus event” in our lives. In this second way of viewing history, there is also another “what if” question, that of a specific characteristic of the times or era in which the story is set. Redwood and Wildfire invites us to look at a specific aspect of turn-of-the-20th-century America: the rise of a new technology and industry, the film industry. For it was in New York, New Jersey, and Chicago, not Hollywood, that this industry made its real start and its surprising strides; and the film industry’s early days set the tone for the Hollywood products that audiences have come to either praise or loathe, or both, among which are a kind of “white washing” and oversimplification of history. It is a history of stereotypes. It is precisely here in this place and time where Hairston’s characters work their magic at a crucial moment in the film industry: they open it up to people of color and tell the stories of the migrants and immigrants. In the real world of actual history, this does not happen. Many of the early movies were produced and directed by white men who portrayed people of color as backward and savage (in the case of the Africans [252, 259-261] and Native Americans [310, 314-315, 336-337]) or as “sinister” and evil (in the case of the Chinese and Japanese). White filmmakers do not let them just “be themselves,” as Redwood opines at one point (373). Instead, whites make people of color fit racist stereotypes (e.g. 372). In this novel, Redwood and her friends save their money to write, produce, and direct their own movies, in which people from all parts of society can “be themselves.” This part of the story is what Rosenfeld (2005: 4-5) discusses as works that pose a “variable in the historical record [that] would have changed” history, or a “point of divergence,” a point that Buckland maintains “has the capacity to radically change readers’ understanding.”4 Unlike the works that Rosenfeld examines, there is no single, decisive “nexus event” (Hellekson 2001: 6) with broad or deep repercussions on later history. Redwood and Wildfire offers no one single key event; rather, the novel’s accumulation of small-scale events serves as the engine for change, a ripple rather than a splash in time. We do not get to see the full effects of the change. Instead, the net result is that readers can form a distinctly different image of the New World migrants and the Old World immigrants of this era, undoing the stereotypes that reinforce traditional history. Thus, adopting Buckland’s argument, I believe it is fair to say that in this more subtle way Redwood and Wildfire is also alternate history, not simply alternative history.

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That is why I argue that simply raising the possibility of change will have to serve here. Based on this criterion, Redwood and Wildfire functions as an alternate history of what might have been, what could have been, and what should have been in at least one key part of Americana, the entertainment industry.

Transcendent History and its Underlying Myths I maintain, then, that Redwood and Wildfire functions both as an alternative history and as an alternate history at the same time, based in particular on the distinctions that Buckland has made between these two ways of describing speculative history. I wish to borrow again from Buckland, who presents the concept of “transcendent history,” which she uses to describe The Book Thief. What Buckland (2011) says of that novel applies almost word for word to Redwood and Wildfire. As Buckland remarks, “Because [The Book Thief] is so deeply affecting, because it ennobles human suffering without softening it, and because it finds joy in acts of beauty and goodness that are neither diminished by, nor diminish, the dark, it could rightfully be called a transcendent history” (78). Part of this transcendence resides in The Book Thief’s contribution to what Buckland calls a “restorative journey.” Hairston’s Redwood and Wildfire likewise achieves such a restorative effect, a function it accomplishes in two distinctive ways: it physically and psychologically restores the history of people often left on the sidelines in American storytelling. First, Redwood and Wildfire (2011: 262) resurrects the history of the migration of Southerners—especially people of color—and the immigration of people from the Old World—especially the poor—to bustling Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. In mainstream history, as taught in American schools, these people become mere cogs in the industrial wheel or victims of poverty. They are rarely seen as co-creators of their history. In bringing these diverse people from the sidelines onto center stage, Redwood and Wildfire physically restores history. Second, the novel offers a picture of hope and trust in the ability of anyone to struggle and succeed to achieve their dreams; it thereby psychologically restores an entire class of people to their place in history. In this way, Redwood and Wildfire also performs what Marek Oziewicz (2011) has referred to as an act of ensouling. In all of Hairston’s science fiction, this kind of psychological restoration comes through multiple acts of desire, will, and personal perseverance, combined with the power of the imagination. This power is what Hairston calls “conjuring up” the impossible. Through her main protagonists, Redwood Phipps and Aidan

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Cooper Wildfire, and a host of engaging supporting characters, Hairston introduces us to the powers of conjuring that many people possess, even some powers that they themselves are not aware of. Redwood, of African heritage, and Aidan, of Seminole Irish heritage, draw on their own varied cultural backgrounds and experiences to discover, define, and make us aware of their own conjure powers. Some examples are called for. I mentioned earlier that Redwood, as a healer, used her “hoodoo” power to heal small wounds and treat minor illnesses. As a singer, her voice soothes her listeners. As a comedian, her antics help people unwind. However, Redwood can, if she chooses, bring a tornado or a hurricane into the palm of her hand: “I ain’t never done nothing so grand” before, she calls out to Aidan after just such a storm dissipates “’round a blade of grass in Redwood’s hand” (20). This conjuring power over and through the wind recalls in part a powerful West African “orisha,” or deity, named Oya, “the Yoruba goddess of the whirlwind” (Grayson 2003: 20-21), who controls all the currents of the air. We may wish to give the incident an entirely natural explanation: Redwood happens to be in the right place to “conjure” a storm that is already on its way.5 But Redwood is no ordinary conjure woman. For instance, other West African orisha command animal spirits or at least commune with them (Grayson 2003: 20-21; orisha). When a bear threatens to disrupt a minstrel show (R & W: 16), Redwood stands up to it and says, “Get on away from here now!”—and the bear leaves. A natural explanation would have the bear acting as most bears do: avoiding human contact unless threatened. When later a lion on a movie set threatens to attack its vicious trainer, Redwood saves the trainer and “tangoes” with the lion and talks it down (265-266, 270). If “horse whisperers” and “dog whisperers” exist, why not a “lion whisperer” as well? A natural or rational explanation for all of these behaviors does not diminish them, for who among us would have the presence of mind or fortitude of soul to stand firm in the whirlwind, face down a bear, or sooth a justly enraged lion? Redwood can and does do so because she believes in her conjuring powers; she believes in herself. These are not the only manifestations of otherwise hidden powers or personal alchemy. Throughout the novel, Redwood and Aidan return to family history and the “spirits” of their ancestors for inspiration and guidance, even hearing their voices from time to time. In fact, always hovering over their shoulders is the knowing narrator, not quite the traditional omniscient narrator who keeps a distance from the characters, but a narrator who seems to have almost a personal stake in the story. The narrator not only recounts the highs and lows of each character, but this narrator seems to be

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keeping an eye on another nearby hovering spirit: He is Smiling Death, the “boneyard baron,” a character who lurks in the shadows and waits to collect his victims. When Redwood faces the much abused and angry lioness, the “boneyard baron tip[s] his hat” (265). In short, Redwood and Wildfire offers us a world in which spirits, ancestral and otherwise, play a prominent role in the working out of personal history. Such spirits can be a resource to emulate and draw help from or a stigma to oppose and steer clear of. When I first read Redwood and Wildfire, I was reminded of Toni Morrison’s award-winning novel Beloved (1987), which also resurrects the spirit of the past and presents a “ghost story” of sorts within a realistic setting. Redwood and Wildfire is equally realistic. In fact, it is so realistic that I initially assumed that the “history” of the story had actually happened. After all, I was aware that millions of people from the South had migrated north to the big industrial cities; they were seeking a better life. They were not alone. This was also a time of large-scale immigration from the Old World to the New. Hairston has recreated the conditions so well as to be almost indistinguishable from a standard historical account, even if they are dramatized in Hairston’s version. Where she differs is in bringing to light the contributions of these migrants to the new societies that they created by their work. As I noted above, Hairston takes the stated facts of history usually told in a few brisk sentences and invests them with the people who lived those facts, transcending the routine statements of historians into the history of which myths are made. To bring us back to where I set out in the first part of this article, Redwood and Wildfire performs a physical and psychological restoration of the history of people who often sit on the margins in speculative fiction and in historical accounts. Hairston amplifies this restoration by dramatizing the lives of ordinary people with some extraordinary abilities: the abilities to conjure up, i.e. to imagine, a better world and to try to make it so. In all of these ways, Redwood and Wildfire achieves transcendence not because it goes beyond what is possible but precisely because it invests the possible with the magic of the impossible. As Redwood tells her older brother George, “What we do really does matter…. Even if it don’t change everything. Like you say, we be making the future now” (385). In sum, Andrea Hairston’s science fiction often looks to the past, not just to the long history of disenfranchised people but also to their personal pasts, to find those aspects of their own individual character that allow them to conjure their own futures. Whether they can face down a bear, hold a hurricane in the palm of their hand, or conquer their own fears and

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shame, Andrea Hairston’s protagonists—in her plays, short stories, and novels—are all “impossibility specialists” of the first order. Indeed, they are making the future now.

Notes 1. In March 2011, Andrea Hairston was the guest scholar at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, an honor in recognition of her broad contributions to the field of speculative fiction. 2. Hairston received the Carl Brandon Parallax Award for her first novel, Mindscape, in 2006, and she received the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for Redwood and Wildfire in 2011. 3. For a fuller treatment of Hairston and her other works, see Monty Vierra (2013 forthcoming). 4. In speculative fiction that makes it to the screen, the largely white male producers and directors rarely portray people of color in major roles, and when they do they usually kill off the character, as the doctor in Super 8 (Dr. Woodward, played by Glynn Russell Turman) saving the human race, a “race” which is otherwise represented as white. Will Smith’s success in I, Robot is the exception. For recent discussions of race in cinema and speculative literature, see Andrea Hairston’s “Driving Mr. Lenny” (2004) and “Lord of the Monsters” (2007), as well as Nalo Hopkinson’s “Reluctant Ambassador” (2010). 4. “…alternate histories are essentially defined by an ‘estranging’ rather than a mimetic relationship to historical reality” (Rosenfeld 2005: 5). 5. This representation recalls Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s collection of short stories The Conjure Woman (1898). See Ingrid Thaler (2010) for a brief discussion.

Bibliography Buckland, C. 2011, “Transcendent History, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief”, Philologica Wratislaviensia 5, 71-82 Chesnutt, C.W. 1899, The Conjure Woman, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. Grayson, S.M. 2003, Visions of the Third Millennium, Black Science Fiction Novelists Write the Future, Trenton: Africa World Press Hairston, A. 1997, Lonely Stardust, 1- 64, courtesy of the author —. 2004, “Driving Mr. Lenny, Notes on Race and Gender as a Transport to Another Reality, Another Dimension”, Foundation, The International Review of Science Fiction 33, 5-16 —. 2007, “Lord of the Monsters Minstrelsy Redux, King Kong, Hip Hop, and the Brutal Black Buck”, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 18.2, 187-199 —. 2011, Redwood and Wildfire, Seattle: Aqueduct

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Hellekson, K. 2001, The Alternate History, Refiguring Historical Time, Kent: Kent State University Press Mintz, S. 2006, “The Rise of Hollywood and the Arrival of Sound”, Digital History http,//www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/hollywood_history.cfm #birth “Orisha” 2011, Encyclopedia Britannica, www.britannica.com Oziewicz, M. 2011, “Healing Fiction?”, Marcin Ciszewski’s Major Trilogy as a Compensational Journey from History to HISTORY. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on the Fantastic and the Miraculous FANCUD. 9-10 May. Zielona Gora, Poland Rosenfeld, G.D. 2002, “Why do we ask ‘what if?’ Reflections on the function of alternate history”, History and Theory 41 (4), 90-103. —. 2005, The World Hitler Never Made, Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thaler, I. 2010, Black Atlantic Speculative Fictions, Octavia E. Butler, Jewelle Gomez, and Nalo Hopkinson, New York: Routledge. Vierra, M. 2013, Andrea Hairston’s Fantastic Trajectory, A Multicultural Science Fiction Aesthetic, London: Mellen Press, forthcoming. Wilmott, K. 2004, CSA, The Confederate States of America, DVD. Tartan Video

MYTHIC CYCLE VS. LINEAR HISTORY IN FANTASY: THE LIMITATIONS OF THE ETERNAL RETURN IN GUY GAVRIEL KAY’S FIONAVAR TAPESTRY AND YSABEL .

TERRI DOUGHTY

Guy Gavriel Kay has long demonstrated an interest in the intersections of history, cultural contact/conflict, and identity. In an interview in Solaris magazine, he describes his focus as “the historical and mythical roots of what we have become as cultures” (Trudel 1995). He has become best known for his fantasies patterned on particular historical moments, such as the conflicts and negotiations between Jews, Christians, and Moors in Iberia (The Lions of Al-Rassan) and on those between Celts, Saxons, and Vikings in England (Last Light of the Sun), among others. However, earlier, after working with Christopher Tolkien in the mid-1970s on The Silmarilien, Kay’s first published fantasy, The Fionavar Tapestry (1984, 1986), was high fantasy in the Tolkien mold, like The Lord of the Rings a trilogy meant to be read as a single novel. Kay has stated that his intent was to “throw a gantlet (sic) down to the barbarians in the temple” (Trudel 1995). He was “irritated” by the many commercial imitations of Tolkien in the 1970s and early 1980s and wanted to prove that tropes of high fantasy could still be deeply meaningful. The Fionavar Tapestry is, as well as a high fantasy, a portal fantasy featuring five Canadian University of Toronto students who are transported to Fionavar, the first world, “the prime creation which all the others imperfectly reflect” (Kay 1986, 28). Through these five, Kay explores the ways in which myth is transformative for characters normally bound by linear history, but the various treatments suggest a deep ambivalence about the relationship between myth and identity. When Kay returns to the subject of the mythic eternal return in Ysabel (2007), revisiting the only two characters to return to Toronto through the portal in The Fionavar Tapestry, he switches genre, writing what Farah Mendlesohn would call intrusion fantasy (2008, 115),

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in effect a reversal of the portal fantasy, in which a naive protagonist in the mundane world fights the intrusion of the fantastic and the cycle of the eternal return. Much as we may desire the meaningfulness to be found in myth, or high fantasy, perhaps it demands too much of a giving over of self as it has come to be understood in the contemporary world. Mendlesohn has noted that “[t]he portal fantasy is about entry, transition, and exploration” (2008, 2). In its classic form its plot has much in common with rituals of initiation and maturation: movement from one stable identity through a stage of fluid identity and transformation into a final new fixed identity, with the secondary world functioning as a liminal space for transformation. It is common in portal fantasies to encounter characters who are traumatized or unhappy in the primary world and find healing in the secondary world through the portal, a positive transformation that allows them to return to the primary world stronger and healthier. Kay has described fantasy as “inward-looking and backwards-looking” (Dumoski 1999); it is a genre, particularly the portal fantasy subgenre, which lends itself to the process of exploring personal history within the broader context of mythic history. However, as psychologist Mark Freeman observes: mythical time brings alongside it what might be termed a “sociocentric” conception of personhood: insofar as one views his or her life through the prism of recurrent mythical forms, personhood becomes indissociable from the eternally present nexus of social relations. (1998, 33)

In other words, in mythic time the person is determined by his or her social function. This is at odds with the notion of the self that accompanies historical time, “the self who has wholly transcended the mythicodevelopmental templates of the past” (Freeman 1998, 36). It is the tension between the mythic self and the historical self that underpins both The Fionavar Tapestry and Ysabel. A recurring issue in The Fionavar Tapesty is whether it is possible for the individual to derive a sense of self that is imbued with sacral significance without losing singularity. Although Mendlesohn contends that the portal fantasy treats history as a fixed and inarguable past (2008, 14), Christopher Cobb has noted that the Fionavar Tapestry is built in part around repetitions of the past, repetitions which may be altered and which may lead to change (2005, 89). Kay has stated emphatically that “[f]ree will is a fundamental theme in all of [his] writing” (Thompson 1989). In The Fionavar Tapestry, then, Kay brings his five characters from the modern, rational world through a portal into a fantastic world, and though they find themselves embodying archetypes and repeating ancient patterns,

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through moments of choice experienced by each they are able to approach the sacred, to possibly find healing or resolution to immediate problems, and to determine whether or not to remain a part of the cycle of the eternal return. In this regard, journeying toward self-knowledge, they are closer to what Zygmunt Bauman would call pilgrims than to tourists in fantasy land (1996, 23). Some of them do transcend their roles as archetypes. Mendlesohn classifies Kay as one of a group of writers who stretch the boundaries of the portal-quest genre (2008, 43); his exploration of the interaction between archetypes and identity is a key element of this stretching. Kay does not slavishly adopt the concept of the eternal return popularized by Mircea Éliade in Cosmos and History (1954), the privileging within “archaic” societies of cyclical, mythic time, particularly re-enactment of archetypes, as inherently more meaningful than linear history with no connection to exemplary actions. As Adriana Berger has observed, Éliade’s vision is essentially romantic, believing in the possibility “that modern and desacralized society would return to its paradisaic and pure origins through an escape from civilization” and thereby “rediscover the sacred” (67-68). Éliade’s myth of the eternal return is essentially anti-historical, positing a transcendence of linear history, a kind of meta-history. On the other hand, the trajectory of Kay’s body of work, as he has admitted, reflects a movement “away from the mythic and the fantastical, and towards the human and the historical” (Trudel 1995). Nonetheless, Kay is clearly interested in the narrative possibilities of the eternal return, despite any misgivings about its limitations, as shown in his creation of Fionavar, the one true world and first world, of which all others, including our own, are copies. Throughout Kay’s novels are scattered what he calls “grace notes,” brief references to Fionavar (Johnson 2008), using variant spellings, to elaborate the mythos of Fionavar as the first world. For instance, in Tigana (1990), Brandin tells Dianora of the folk tales of Finavir, the first world and the one where people are reborn in their final incarnation (Kay 1999, 418); as he dies, he says they should have met in Finavir (656). Similarly, in A Song for Arbonne (1992), the troubadour Lisseut sings a song of a better world, Fionvarre (Kay 2005, 599-600). Just as Fionavar is the first world, so the stories being played out in Fionavar must be the first stories. Fionavar is, in a sense, what Éliade might call the centre. Éliade defines the journey to the centre as “a rite of the passage from the profane to the sacred, from the ephemeral and illusory to reality and eternity, from death to life, from man (sic) to the divinity” (1959, 18). Kay presents us with five such journeys through his protagonists; the multiple focalizations allow Kay to represent

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different treatments of the eternal return as his protagonists struggle to reconcile linear history, mythic time, and their own free will. Following a typical element of the portal fantasy, each of the five protagonists is in some way at odds with life in the primary rational world. Kevin Laine, who appears to be successful in all aspects of life, nonetheless combats feelings of sorrow and yearning for something he cannot articulate: “we are the total of our longings” he jots down at one point (Kay 1986, 37). His good friend Paul Schafer is trapped in grief and guilt at the death of his lover, whom he has been unable to mourn properly. He appears not to care if he lives or dies. Jennifer Lowell is somehow separate from her peers; for a reason which becomes apparent later, we know little of her back story save that, despite having a loving father who taught her pride in herself, she has trouble forming relationships, especially with men. Dave Martyniuk, who accompanies the group seemingly by accident, is bitter at not being able to please his father and jealous of his academically successful brother (and of Kevin Laine, who shares characteristics with his brother). Finally, Kim Ford appears to be the least unhappy of the five; we are told at the beginning that she is “a special case” (Kay 1986, 19). Nonetheless, there is a sense that she, as a descendent of a woman with second sight, is somehow not normal in the primary world. Once through the portal into Fionavar, they find themselves enacting versions of the eternal return: Kevin as The Beloved Son, Paul as the Hanged God, Jennifer as the Unfaithful Queen, Dave as the Hunter/Warrior, and Kim as the Seer. Kevin’s story is perhaps the purest example of the eternal return, the ritual cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Kevin is initially frustrated in Fionavar as he appears to have no meaningful purpose there; he thinks to himself, “[a]ll he wanted was to matter” (Kay 1987b, 169). However, the land is suffering an unnaturally extended winter maintained by an evil mage. Upon Midsummer’s Eve, Kevin discovers his purpose. It falls to him to enact the ritual of Liadon, Beloved Son and sacrifice. Leading up to Maidaladan (the traditional midsummer eve, a time associated historically with fertility rituals), Kevin finds himself, unlike all the other men, and despite his reputation as a ladies’ man in the primary world, unaffected by the sexual desire that besets the others. Then, in the hunt on midsummer’s eve day, he is attacked and gored by a boar. These are signifiers that he has been Chosen. However, Kevin also himself chooses: he walks into the cavern of the goddess and pays the price of blood at “the oldest place, the hearth” (Kay 1987b, 196). In his ensuing sexual encounter with the Mother Goddess Dana he experiences transcendence: hearing her “say his name, all his names in all the worlds, he [knows] he [has] come home, to

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the end of journeying” (Kay 1987b, 198). This is, of course, a vegetation myth, with Kevin/Liadon functioning as a Tammuz/Adonis figure. As beloved son and lover, Kevin, through his sacrifice to the goddess, brings life out of death, and spring returns to Fionavar. Kevin is reborn in another sense, as well: Dave sires a child with the Goddess Ceinwen and requests that the child be named Kevin (Kay 1987a, 406). Kevin’s story, though a triumphal one of transcendence and rebirth, reveals what is most difficult for modern humans to accept in the myth of the eternal return: the loss of the individual consciousness. In being Liadon, Kevin Laine ceases to be. He does not return to the primary world of the novel. Paul Schafer also enacts the myth of the eternal return involving ritual sacrifice. Tradition in Fionavar demands that the High King hang on the Summer Tree for three days and three nights, a willing sacrifice. The myth here is akin to the Norse myth of Odin, who hung on the world-tree Ygdrassil for nine days to gain wisdom. Ailell, the aged King, fears the sacrifice, and as a result the land withers. There are elements of the Fisher King myth here in the poor health of the king reflected in the illness of the land, as well as of vegetation myths in the link between the sacrifice of the king and the health of the land. Paul, not caring to live, offers to take the place of the King. Like Kevin, he experiences transcendence, in his case through a connection with the Sky God Mörnir (like Odin, associated with ravens named Thought and Memory). Paul experiences both being a conduit for the power of the god and a kind of oneness with all life: “he felt himself claimed, going, mist boiling through him, ravens rising to fly, the God in the Tree, in him, the moon above the clouds riding in and out, never lost...” (Kay 1986, 200). Instead of dying at this moment of oneness with the sacred, Paul survives, due in part to his own strength, part to the intercession of the Mother Goddess, and part to the will of Mörnir, who accepts the sacrifice; nevertheless, he does experience a rebirth of a sort, as he is transformed into Pwyll the Twice-Born; god-touched he is now himself a kind of god. As such, he, like Kevin, cannot really return to live in the modern, rational world, which has no place for living gods. Instead, Paul/Pwyll remains in Fionavar: his eventual relationship with Jaelle, the Priestess of the Goddess, represents a reunification of the Father God and the Mother Goddess, a return to symmetry in the world. Interestingly, they choose to inhabit the abandoned home of the seer Ysanne, embodying balance in a liminal space “half way between the Temple [of the Goddess] and the Tree [of the God],” and on the margin of the ruling court (Kay, 1987a, 416). Paul’s story seems to represent the possibility of re-enacting the eternal return and living connected to the sacred, though this is not possible in the primary world, which is inextricably bound by chronological

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time and history. Both Paul’s and Kevin’s narratives suggest that it is not possible to live a life of sacral meaning within linear history: Kevin dies, and while Paul may live a seemingly human life with Jael, he will live on the margins of history. In contrast to these two, Jennifer Lowell does not embody a god-like figure. Instead, she is an avatar of Guinevere, doomed eternally it seems to love two men and to destroy them. Both Arthur and Lancelot are reawoken to battle for the forces of good in Fionavar, and Jennifer, who recognizes herself as Guinevere as soon as she sees Arthur, sees no way of not repeating the story: when the girl Leila asks “Must it be repeated?” Jennifer replies, “Over and over,” stating that she has no power to grant release (Kay 1987b, 152). Here Kay seems to be exploring another difficult aspect of the eternal return: its very eternity, the endless repetition of the cycle. Éliade observes that “[e]verything begins over again at its commencement every instant. The past is but a prefiguration of the present” (1959, 89). This limits the individual’s free will. Although meaning may be found in the re-enactment of a ritual cycle, the latter may also be viewed as a trap. The Arthurian subplot involving Jennifer, Arthur, and Lancelot in The Fionavar Tapesty looks at how a cycle may be, if not broken (which is something Kay explores later in Ysabel), then completed without need for re-enactment. Kay’s Arthur has been forced into the eternal return as expiation for his sin of the murder of the innocents, but in the end the pattern of his story is changed by the choice of another character: Prince Diarmuid, similar to Kevin and Paul, decides to sacrifice himself and takes Arthur’s place as champion, demonstrating what Raymond Thompson calls the “possibility of human free will in the person of an anarchic spirit” (Thompson 1989). After Diarmuid’s act, Paul tells Arthur, “We are not slaves to the Loom, not bound forever to our fate. Not even you, my lord” (Kay 1987a, 389). As Guinevere, Jennifer Lowell is permitted to sail away with Arthur and Lancelot to the halls of the creator, the Weaver, to an afterlife free of the cycle of eternal return. The end of the cycle, in effect, then, is still a kind of death for the modern individual. Jennifer, like Kevin and Paul, does not return through the portal to Toronto. The remaining two protagonists do enact the classic portal fantasy plot of returning from the secondary world. Dave Martyniuk’s story is the purest example of a protagonist transformed positively by the journey to a secondary world. Bitter and unhappy in his life in Toronto, he finds himself separated from the other Torontonians in the journey through the portal, only to be adopted into a tribe of the nomadic Dalrei in Fionavar. There, he comes into his own, learning to ride, hunt, and fight with the

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warriors of the plains and forging a new identity: Davor of the Axe. Throughout his story, however, Dave more than any of the other Torontonions remembers his life in the primary world, illustrating how his experiences in Fionavar transform his understanding of his difficulties in the primary world: he gains a fresh perspective on his problematic relationship with his father and learns truly to value himself. Dave, like Kevin and Paul, has an encounter with the sacred: he is goddess-touched, winning the favour of the Huntress, Ceinwen, who gifts him with Owein’s Horn to calls up wild magic, the Wild Hunt. Dave’s gift allows him to play a crucial role in the last great battle, but he also re-enacts two myths: that of the human consort of the goddess and that of the transgressor against the goddess. It is this dual role that determines his fate. He has fathered a child upon Ceinwen, but he has also seen her hunt, and as“[n]o man of Fionavar may see Ceinwen hunt,” so Dave may not be a man of Fionavar and live. Caught up in a mythic cycle, Dave realizes that his fate “had been decided long ago, and that truth had been with him all the time” (Kay 1987a, 405). Although it might seem that Dave has had no free will in the matter, Ceinwen reminds him that she told him of the prohibition the first time they met; by choosing to lie with her, then, on some level he had to have known that he could not stay in Fionavar. Dave will not return to Toronto quite the same person, however. As Kim notes, “Dave ha[s] changed the most” in Fionavar, gaining “calmness” and “assurance” (Kay 1987a, 419); at last he seems truly to know and value himself. The Fionavar Tapestry ends with Dave asking Kim for a date when they return to Toronto, so we do not actually see his return through the portal, though we know from encountering him again in Ysabel that he did so. Dave’s story suggests that one does not have to lose oneself after a transformative and even healing experience in the secondary world through re-enacting myth. One can return from the re-enactment, return to history, with a fresh sense of the meaningfulness of one’s actions, of one’s place in the world. Finally, Kim Ford, who returns to Toronto with Dave, is a special case, as has been noted above. Even in the primary world, she is touched by the supernatural, for she is the descendent of women with the second sight, and it is she whom the visitors from Fionavar have been seeking at the beginning of the novel. She is a bridge between Fionavar and the contemporary world. Kim’s role in Fionavar is to be the Seer, and when she objects to this, the seer Ysanne tells her, “there may be need of a Dreamer in your world, too” (Kay 1986, 136). This is remarkably prescient given Kim’s role in Ysabel. In Fionavar, Kim has transcendent experiences that link her consciousness to the cosmos of Fionavar, which

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is in a sense the mythic history of all the worlds. First, the wild-magic being Eilathen, at Ysanne’s demand, spins the Tapestry for Kim: She saw the shaping of the worlds ... . The gods she saw, and knew their names, and she touched but could not hold, for no mortal can, the purpose and the pattern of the Weaver at the Loom.” (Kay 1986, 97)

Kim also comes to know the Unraveller, Rakoth Maugrim, the one who seeks to destroy all; this knowledge comes with the loss of her innocence. Later, Ysanne commits suicide with a magical dagger while Kim sleeps. This allows her to gift her soul, including all her memories and knowledge, to Kim. When Kim awakes, she is no longer simply Kim Ford: she is the Seer of Brennan, and overnight, in a physical manifestation of her transformation, her hair has turned white. At first overwhelmed and even appalled at the burden of this gift, Kim reassures herself that she still has free will: she can choose to go home, dye her hair, and live the life she intended, but she chooses the burden and takes up her role as Seer (Kay 1986, 177). Kim’s story reveals what happens when enacting an archetypal role goes against one’s essential values. Ysanne has also given Kim the Baelrath, a powerful ring also called the Warstone. In service of Brennan, and in the cosmic battle of the forces of light against the dark of the Unraveller, Kim wields the ring with great reluctance given the suffering she knowingly causes: she must wake Arthur to yet another cycle of his doom and wake the Paraiko (a race of giants) to force them to abandon their pacifism. Although she is playing out a destined role, she still must bear responsibility for her actions: The Baelrath was her power, wild and merciless, but hers was the will and the knowledge, the Seer's wisdom needed to turn the power to work. It might seem as if the stone were compelling her, but she knew that was not truly so. It was responding—to need to war, to the half-glimpsed intuitions of her dreams—but it needed her will to unleash its power.” (Kay 1987a, 70)

Kim bears guilt for her actions, both for using the ring and for not using it. When faced with the Baelrath’s demand that she compel the Crystal Dragon, guardian of the dwarves, to go to war, which would destroy the dwarves, Kim rebels. Her decision is validated in part by the description of her speaking with the “conviction... of both her souls,” implying that Ysanne would make the same choice (Kay 1987a, 291). This choice means, though, that not only does Kim lose the power of the Baelrath, but many others will die in the coming battle. Kim’s narrative suggests that self-knowledge and transformation are indeed to be found in

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the secondary world, in the re-enactment of cosmic stories, but that in addition to gifts given, prices will be exacted. Kay’s representation of the various eternal returns in The Fionavar Tapestry is in the end ambivalent. While all characters gain a sense of their lives and their selves having cosmic significance, the costs to some are great: of five who first cross the portal into Fionavar, only two return; one remains alive in Fionavar and another in the halls of the Weaver, but both are new beings, Pwyll and Guinevere instead of Paul and Jennifer. Kim reflects that “she and Paul and Jennifer seemed to have really just gone further into what they’d already been...and Kevin had remained exactly what he always was” (Kay 1987a, 419). Kevin’s stasis marks him as the one most wholly given over to re-enactment of the archetype. This disappearance of the self into the archetype is fundamentally incompatible with the world of linear history. There will be more Liadons, but not another Kevin. Likewise, Paul and Jennifer inhabit their archetypes too fully, which keeps them as well from returning to Toronto. As noted above, Dave has changed, but although his time as Davor has given him confidence and trust in himself, he remains Dave; he may have fulfilled archetypal roles, but his choices have made him remain human, caught up in linear history. Kim seems to suggest that she is like Paul and Jennifer in inhabiting her archetype fully, but her choice not to fulfil her function as seer and bring the dragon to war indicates that she remains what she has always been, deeply human and humane. Like Dave, Kim makes a choice that disrupts the eternal return, guaranteeing that she, too, will make the return to a linear world. Since we do not see what happens next, however, it is difficult to assess which characters have made the best choices. Perhaps for this reason, Kay revisits Dave and Kim in Ysabel, which focuses on Kim’s teenage nephew, Ned Marriner, who is spending the summer with his photographer father in Aix-en-Provence. This novel is generically a reversal of The Fionavar Tapestry, as it is set throughout in the mundane present, in a modern, rational world. Ned crosses through no portals, rather archetypal figures enter his world to enact their eternal return: the story of Ysabel, the spirit of the place, the beautiful temptress, and her love triangle with the Greek-Roman/stranger, Phelan, and the Celt/native, Cadell, who desire her above all things. It is clear that one of the central issues of the novel is the question of the eternal return, as the reader is immediately focused on this with Kay’s epigraph, a quotation from Robert Graves’s poem “To Juan at the Summer Solstice,” which begins, “There is one story and one story only / That will prove worth your telling / Whether as learned bard or gifted child” (Kay 2007). This reinforces the notion that only narratives that re-enact mythic narratives

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contain value, indeed that all stories are simply iterations of a single urstory, much like Fionavar is first of all worlds. As Éliade states, “any human act whatsoever acquires effectiveness to the extent to which it exactly repeats an act performed at the beginning of time by a god, a hero, or an ancestor” (1959, 22). When we re-encounter Kim and Dave, however, they do not seem prepared to re-enact mythic stories. Dave is a middle-aged lawyer who plays rugby on weekends and has a bad knee. He has continued to be a warrior of sorts, as he has followed and protected Kim’s doctor sister on her medical aid missions to world trouble spots. However, his heroism is undercut by his human frailty: when he enters the narrative, leaping over a gate to defend Ned, he falls to one knee and curses, “Goddamn!...I am way too old to be doing this” (Kay 2007, 275). Later, he acknowledges that Cadell could have killed him. For her part, Kim still has some seer powers, as she has sensed that her nephew is in danger, but she too has been diminished somewhat by time, unable to do much more than advise Ned from the depth of her experiences. At the end of The Fionavar Tapestry Kim says that Dave has been changed most by their journey, but she too has been profoundly changed we now learn, abandoning her ambitious medical career plans to move to Glastonbury, England, and work as a simple family medical practitioner. She explains why she changed her life: “I left because I couldn’t pick up the life I’d lived” (Kay 2007, 291). Her sister asks if Kim and Dave were punished upon their return from Fionavar, to which Kim replies that she did “something important” and that prices sometimes must be paid (Kay 2007, 344). She and Dave are childless, but though Kim connects this to choices she made in Fionavar, she does not agree that this is punishment. Breaking the archetypal pattern may have costs, yet Kim never suggests that she and Dave chose wrongly. The central struggle of Ysabel is to again break an archetypal pattern. While Phelan and Cadell return to fight for Ysabel, the latter requires a living host. Initially she plans to return in Kate, Ned’s new teenage friend, but when the teens call Ned’s father’s assistant Melanie for help, Ysabel possesses Melanie. If one of the two men is the victor in their struggle, Melanie will be lost forever as Ysabel lives out another life with the victor. While this situation may be read as Melanie re-enacting an archetype, she has had no choice in the matter. The transformation or possession is described as unpleasant. Kate is embarrassed to explain how she felt when Ysabel was entering her: “I felt older, and...darker. Stronger” (Kay 2007, 322). The darkness is not evil, but rather sexual. Later, after she has been recovered, Melanie tells Ned that she disappeared while Ysabel inhabited her:

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When...when I started changing, I could feel it happening, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t stop walking. I could see out through her eyes at first and hear things, but it got hard. ...After a while I couldn’t.” (Kay 2007, 405)

There is certainly no benefit to Melanie in re-enacting this archetype. At first, the demands of the archetypal story seem inexorable. When Ned blames himself for Melanie’s situation, Kim tells him that is “[n]ot easy” to say no when one is caught up in this kind of situation (Kay 2007, 222). He asks if she has ever said no, and she admits she has, but she does not tell him about the Baelroth and the dragon. Nonetheless, this is a reminder that one can say no. Melanie, though overwhelmed by Ysabel, is still able to influence her enough to hide from Phelan and Cadell in a place where she hopes Ned will find her, and he does. Ned, too, is part of the story, as he is descended through his mother and aunt from a child Ysabel bore in one of her incarnations. By finding Ysabel first, he disrupts the mythic pattern: Phelan and Cadell, unwilling to harm the descendent of one of them and Ysabel each chooses death, which means also the end of Ysabel and the recovery of Melanie. The story is finished and will not repeat in this world. Both Melanie and Ned are changed by their experiences, though Kay plays it lightly: Melanie is delighted to have grown three inches, but in the end, as Ned observes, it is “entirely her now, his father’s assistant, hyper-organized ringtone warrior” (Kay 2007, 415). Similarly, Ned contemplates the meaning of what has happened: Was it all going to recede? Would what had happened slip and fall and drift like memories did? Become something you thought of at times, and then less often as years went by? A story, your history, as you were carried forward into other stories and other moments that became your life. (Kay 2007, 415)

Ned is interrupted by Kate, and normalcy, but his choice of article here is suggestive: he imagines this becoming a story, one of the many people tell themselves to shape their lives. Mythic narrative gives way to linear history as the archetype is rejected. At the end of Ysabel, Kay appends a quotation from John Berger’s novel G: “Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.” Often quoted, this statement has become a mantra of sorts for postmodernism. However, this does not necessarily imply that Kay rejects the notion of the replaying of stories, only the notion that archetypes must be re-enacted exactly. Ned observes, “Maybe there were places where the past didn’t go away and maybe there were people for whom it stayed” (Kay 2007, 291). This may or may not be a good thing: it appears to

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depend on the person. Although the protagonists of The Fionavar Tapestry make different choices, they all seem satisfied with them: human free will means that there are many stories, not one. Kay himself has made a choice, though: since The Fionavar Tapestry he has not written another high fantasy, not even to revisit characters in Ysabel. The very qualities of high fantasy, particularly portal-quest fantasy, its archetypal characters and plots, ultimately are too confining: there must be room for characters to say no, for stories to change. In The Fionavar Tapestry, Kay stretches the genre as far as he can, but ultimately he turns to other forms of fantasy, historical and contemporary, wherein eternal returns may occur, but no story is told as if it were the only one.

Bibliography Bauman, Z. 1996 “From Pilgrim to Tourist—or a Short History of Identity.” Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall & Paul du Gay, 18-36, London: Sage Berger, A. 1994, “Mircea Éliade: Romanian Fascism and the History of Religions in the United States”, Tainted Greatness: Antisemitism & Cultural Heroes, ed. Nancy Harrowitz, 51-74, Philadelphia: Temple University Press Cobb, C. 2005, “Guy Gavriel Kay and the Psychology of History”, Foundation no. 94: 87-99 Dumoski, S. A. 1999, “Guy Gavriel Kay: The Mythic Heart”, Phantastes, fall, http://www.brightweavings.com/ggkswords/phantastes.htm Éliade, M. 1959, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, transl. Willard R. Trask, New York: Harper Torchbooks Freeman, M. 1998, “Mythical Time, Historical Time, and the Narrative Fabric of the Self”, Narrative Inquiry 8, no. 1: 27-50 Johnson, A. D. 2008, “A Conversation with Guy Gavriel Kay”, Fantasy Magazine, December, http://fantasy-magazine.com/non-fiction/articles/ a-conversation-with-guy-gavriel-kay Kay, G.G. 1986, The Summer Tree, Toronto: HarperCollins —. 1987a, The Darkest Road, Toronto: HarperCollins. —. 1987b, The Wandering Fire, Toronto: HarperCollins —. 1999 Tigana New York: Roc —. 2005, A Song for Arbonne, Toronto: Penguin Canada —. 2007, Ysabel, Toronto: Viking Canada Mendlesohn, F. 2008, Rhetorics of Fantasy, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press

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Thompson, R. 1989 “Interview with Guy Gavriel Kay, Mythcon, Vancouver, B.C.” http://www.brightweavings.com.ggkswords/thompson.htm. Trudel, J-L 1995, “Guy Gavriel Kay [interview]”, Solaris. http://www.brightweavings.com/ggkswords/trudel. htm.

THE LONELINESS OF THE ANCIENT GREEK HERO BOGDAN TROCHA

The motif of the hero in Greek mythology is important, mysterious, and often complicated. Researchers find the etymology of the word ‘hero’ unclear. Apart from its semblance to the name of a goddess, Hera, nothing else can be deduced about it (ZieliĔski, 91). It is absent in Homers’ works, although the cult of the hero existed in Greece in his time and before. As a rule, the hero is somebody midway between an ordinary man and a god. For this reason he made a fine intermediary between people and gods. In Greek beliefs, after death the hero changed both physically, becoming a being of superhuman height and beauty, and spiritually. The latter aspect was especially important for the hero cult. His power was now no longer physical, but many times stronger spiritual and prophetical one. A variant of the prophetical power was the healing power. According to Tadeusz ZieliĔski, “almost all heroes were hero-healers” (94). The hero cult was closely linked to the cult of the dead. Thence, probably, the characteristic dichotomy of the image of the hero. Like the dead who appeared as either guardians or monsters, the heroes could take on parallel forms of “herosaint” or “hero-monster” (96). Since there are a considerable number of heroes in Greek mythology, this article will focus on one of those most famous and mysterious: Heracles. In the popular version of the myth, found chiefly in textbooks, Heracles was Zeus’s son and because of this he was in bad with Hera. She sent two snakes to kill him while he was just a baby, but he strangled them. As an adult he performed the twelve labours. Having had an affair with Deianira, who indirectly contributed to his death, he died on the pyre which he had put up himself, because he could not stand the pain inflicted on him by the centaur’s blood in which jealous Deianira drenched his robes. The mythographic version, secondary to the original myth, is much more complicated. The most outstanding scholars in the field devoted

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much effort and space to Heracles in their studies and monographs. For instance, in his monograph Die Grieschische Heldensage, Carl Robert devoted 227 out of 1532 pages to Heracles. Similarly, Timothy Gantz in his Early Greek Myth. A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources—90 out of 572 pages. Heracles’s popularity seems to stem from the large number of descriptions of episodes from his life which can be found in works of ancient mythographers. Hesiod describes Heracles’s madness and its results, as does Pindar, describing the killing of Megara by Heracles who has gone mad after his return from the underworld. The motif of the mad hero who kills his own wife and children is also present in Eurypides’s work. Later, Sophocles will describe his relationships with Iola and Deianira. Diogenes calls him Kallinikos, i.e. one who claimed glorious victory—here a reference is made to Heracles’s raid on Hades and victory over death. Diodorus of Sicily describes his fight with Giants and is among those few who mention his twin brother, Iphicles. Apollodorus the Mythographer mentions Iolaos, Heracles’s nephew, Heracles’s tutors, and the death of Amphitrion. Even to the ancient mythographers Heracles was a mysterious character—and not only because of his encroachments upon the underworld and fights with Hades-and-death-related beings, but also because of the cost he paid, i.e. his madness, and his deeds—which does not just mean those famous 12 labours, but, rather, the plundering of the temple of Apollo (sacrilege) and killing his guest at table (madness which results in breaking the tradition-honoured laws). In his Mitologia Greków, Karl Kerényi has compiled a great number of records made by ancient mythographers—in order to piece together a more or less complete picture of Heracles’s life, including the looting of Troy, the two fights with Giants, the penitential stint as a captive of Omphale, the Lydian Queen, and his complicated relationships with gods. Finally, there is the mythological account of Heracles according to which he was one of the Dactyls—which determined the events of his life. He fought monsters and thus—as did Perseus and Theseus—he confirmed the people’s rights to the lands they inhabited, at the same time becoming their guardian and showing superhuman powers—only such powers allowed one to defeat mythic monsters. He also fought with Hades, or rather death—this can be seen in his “adventures” related to Lernaean Hydra (a guard at the entrance to the realm of the dead), Ceryneian Hind (whom he caught before she reached the underworld), Cerberus (whom he took by force from Hades, at the same time freeing Theseus and attesting his own divinity), and, finally, Alkestis. According to Kerényi, most of Heracles’s labours are connected with the motif of death. According to Martin L. West, the mythologemes describing Heracles date back to a

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period before both Homer and the Greek culture (594-612). An important element here is the motif of the sacrilege committed by Heracles and his facing up to the gods forbidding him to enter the underworld and protecting their own temples. Significant, too, is the motif of fight, most often with the mythic manifestations of death, and of Heracles’s suffering brought on by the deeds he did in his bouts of madness which, in turn, were a consequence of entering the realm of death. The last important element in Heracles’s mythic biography is the transformation of his body on the pyre, i.e. eumorphos. Recently, Heracles has inspired two Ukrainian authors, Dmitryi Gromov and Oleg Ladyzhensky, better known under their joint artistic pseudonym Henry Lion Oldi, to write an outstandingly interesting duology Heros powinien byü jeden. The authors say their books are “philosophical fables” in which they often draw on mythic motifs. The whole work is characteristically segmented: the chapters have names of the successive acts of the Greek tragedy and this is not just a reference to the mythographic Greek tradition. The beginning and the end of the story take place in Hades, but the chief part of it—on the territory inhabited by Greeks. The Elder (Hades) and the Artful (Hermes) talk about Perseus who has understood that the preternatural Monsters and gods can be killed off for good. He is also the one who by himself gave up the power over all living creatures, including gods, which he had got from the lethal head of Medusa. Even when dead, Perseus strikes fear into the Elder (Hades). He is not—to use a dramatic metaphor—the setting of the action, but its very important back-up. Hades is Heracles’s adversary, both symbolic and real, in mythographic descriptions. In their creation of the secondary world of Heros... the authors use a dense network of ancient references: from the etymologically presented names, usually obscure to the modern reader, to names fixed by tradition, to mythologemes recorded in mythographers and mythologists’ works. Additionally, there is a broad spectrum of references. These are both juxtapositions of mythographic and Biblical citations and also references to the ways the clear-cut mythologemes function in the reality of the secondary world. This is important, because the authors touch upon metaphysical and anthropological issues. When inquiring about the nature of deities, evil, and heroism, they point to the function of art which has already been commonly seen as a medium for carrying tradition throughout the ages. Using mythic motifs, this kind of fantasy looks into the nature of human memory and imagination—with regard to metaphysical reflection on the radical sense of human existence. The concept of suspending disbelief, crucial to the reading of fantasy literature,

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is here supplemented with the concept of hermeneutic “food for thought” in the form of mythic and religious symbolism.

Philological Facet In Heros powinien byü jeden, the use of the character of Heracles is strictly linked to the mythic plots and related intrigues. Ancient sources are treated here in three ways. One consists in quoting mythographers, rather directly, and—on the basis of the citations—building the fictional world, characters, and particular elements of the plot. For instance, there is an exact description of the birth of Heracles. When Amphitrion learns that this is Zeus who has deprived him (and many others) of the pride in being father and husband, he curses the god. Tiresias tells him that “gods are just”, and continues: “I can even imagine a god, who will first take away from you your house, wife, children, and possessions and will plague you with a hundred ailments and he then will give you another house, wife, good health, children, and possessions. Yes—such a god is a just one. But will you say that such a god is a good one?” (Vol. 1, 70) This citation, in which Tiresias defines the future of the child, incorporates the question about the nature of gods by referring to the Book of Job. Such an image is subject not only to aesthetical interpretation—but speculative and cognitive as well. Here, Rudolf Otto’s analyses of the extra-aesthetical dimension of numinosum come to mind. Besides, in Tiresias’s opinion, the hero or rather heroes (he mentions many: Orpheus, Atreus, Tistes, Bellerofont, Perseus, Autolikos, Castor, Amphitrion, Alkides, Iphicles)—are characters that pose the “Why us? Why all of us?” questions. Tiresias speaks directly of a generation of heroes which comprises “warriors, bards, fratricides, sages, madmen, monster-busters, and exterminators of human beings” (Vol. 1, 142). Only in his opinion there is no glory or distinction in being a hero—rather, it is a disease, and heroes are abnormal. A similar case is with Heracles’s teachers and the related motif of his upbringing. The introduction of such a “dense” description of Heracles not only creates a predominantly ancient secondary world but it also affects the popular reception of the very myth of Heracles. Here, mythographic elements are intertwined with literary fiction. Apart from fragment citations, there are mythologemes which are enriched on the literary level—especially the motif of Heracles’s madness, sacrilege, and death. As for the mysterious motif of Heracles’s madness, present already in mythographers’ records and connected—among other things—to the hero’s raid on the kingdom of death, the novel points directly to the source

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of his affliction: not only is Heracles to become an intermediary between people and gods, but also, deprived of will, the liberator of the beings imprisoned in Tartarus. A literary innovation here is putting the Fallen, i.e. the angels described in St. John’s Apocalypse, among Tartarus’s dwellers. There is an interesting and mysterious description of the conspiracy being organised in Tartarus by the Fallen who are seen by gods and titans as strangers. During Titanomachy they fought on the side of Titans and together with them they were sent to Tartarus. They were beautiful and terrifying at the same time—as were the mythic beasts, such as Medusa and Chimera. Heracles’s madness is caused by the human sacrifices which enable the Fallen to try and possess the hero. In the novel, this is all connected with the character of Salmoneus the Mad, who is the founder of the conspiracy (manipulated by the Fallen) to do away with the Olympian gods. In this way the plot takes on features of a mythic narrative. The hero is a superhuman character and the plot describes events of cosmic significance (man’s fight with a god is a fight for the world—the world of human sense), while its effect determines the contemporary status quo. Significantly, the novel clearly goes beyond the mythic plane, characteristic of mythic thinking, and enters the realm of metaphysical and theological speculation, which makes it possible to use mythologemes in ways which are typical of mythopoetical speculation which, in turn, is comprehensible to the modern reader of myth. Similarly broadened are the meanings of the mythologemes connected with Heracles’s education. On one hand, there are typical apocryphal motifs which do not allow for easy identification of Heracles. It can be seen in the scene where after accidentally killing a pup Alkides (Heracles’s original name) succumbs to a bout of such hysteria that his adult guardians cannot manage to hold him, including Iphicles—which provokes the nanny into asking which of the twins is the proper hero. The most interesting novelty in Heracles’s education are the lessons given to him by Hermes, also a Dactyl, with whom in mythogrphic descriptions Heracles is closely connected. These are lessons which teach the difference between the eternal and the finite, monster and deity, and allow one to touch the boundary between the mortal and the immortal (Vol. 1, 188). By gaining knowledge unavailable to people and by going to and coming back from the underworld, Heracles becomes a stranger to his contemporary Greeks. Thence the picture of death: expanded to include descriptions of loneliness among friends, loneliness among gods, and loneliness within himself—who has realised the significance of his deeds. Another type of the use of mythic citations found in the novel are partial retellings. While the previously discussed type comprised the rather

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exact quotations from mythographers’ records, with mythologemes either narrowed down or expanded, the second type comprises attempts at changing the meaning of the mythologeme which, however, will retain its plot-building aspect. There are three such cases. The first concerns Iphicles and Iolaos. In the “snake episode” there is an innovation: the nanny sees two baby right hands holding snakes. Conclusion: the first heroic deed is done by both twins. Therefore, in the novel, Iphicles—who in mythographers’ accounts is practically nonexistent (save for Hesiod who describes him as the one whom Zeus deprived of mind; as a result, Iphicles left home and gave in to Erysteus, voluntarily) (Kerenyi, 365)—becomes a character that both complements the picture of Heracles and furnishes this dualist picture with elements of rationalism, heroism, sacrifice, love, and scepticism. Iphicles allows the authors to use a famous Platonic metaphor, describing human nature: “Without Iphicles, Alkides will be like a team of galloping horses, without a coachman, like an enraged beast (...) destroying everything on its path. (..) From him will blast the rebellious might of the untamed Tartarus, the desire to be free and to take revenge, the unconquerable power of the liberated elements. (...) Only Iphicles will be able to counterbalance this power of destruction with his power of restraint (...), only Iphicles will manage to tell the real Alkides from the mad Alkides, only both of the brothers will be able to keep the scales balanced (Oldi, Vol. 1, 237). As for Iolaos—he is the hero who amazed Greeks by demanding that he be buried in the tomb of his grandfather, Amphitrion. This unintelligible decision finds its justification in the novel. Being Iphicles’s son, Iolaos becomes the subject of a strange deal: the body of Heracles’s young nephew will become a vessel for the spirit of Amphitrion, residing in Hades. In this way the son will be simultaneously the father. Demanding burial in his Grandfather’s tomb reflects his desire to rest after death in his own grave. The second case involves Hermes and his function in the whole mythologeme. According to mythographers, he acts as a guide for Heracles who devotes the first mace to him. In the novel, however, Hermes acts more like a best-friend rather than merely a gods’ messenger. He often squares up to the Olympians in situations when the brothers’ (especially Heracles’s) good is at stake. He also acts as a teacher who discloses to Heracles the knowledge forbidden by gods. Himself, as a god, he often is a source of reflections which cannot be found in mythologies. Take, for instance, his musings on the nature of life and death: “But what do they mean to us, if we call ourselves gods and, while usurping power over the former, we claim we are immune to the latter—and what does it mean to them?! Perhaps we’d better call the mortals the Living, perhaps

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we’re deceiving each other: us—talking about our immortality, them— about their mortality?!” (Vol. 1, 320) The third case concerns the First Centauromachy and Gigantomachy and the related characters of Giants and Salmoneus. In Centauromachy, a change is made regarding the murder of Chiron: he is killed not by Heracles, but by a mad centaur, Tal. This innovation is connected with the critique of the value of the traditional records of the myth of Heracles and appears in a number of places in the novel. In this case, the lack of knowledge of facts gives rise to the accusations against mad Heracles (Vol. 2, 105). The Giants are here the children of people and the Fallen. The human fathers and mothers come from the so-called Salmoneus’s Band (Moliona—Augias’s sister, Nestor—son of Neleus of Pylos, Podarga—son of Laomedon, and others) (Vol. 2, 109). This is a human response to the gods’ fathering of heroes-bastards. Salmoneus, who leads the rebellion against gods, is seen as a genius who knows that gods cannot exist without sacrifices. Yet, the very idea of a rebellion is begotten in a possessed mind, so the Band’s priests are treated as possessed ones. The Giants say they are children of the Possessed and the Fallen. From this may follow that the beasts embodying evil and otherness appear in the world at the Fallen’s will. The aesthetic innovation consists in the negation of a familiar mythologeme, in which the Giants are Gaia and Tartarus’s children. That they themselves can kill gods is not a result of their preternaturalness, but this is because “children are the only mortals who have no gods, so they are potential god slayers. (...) each hero demigod is a child in some way” (Vol. 1, 130). Gigantomachy is a fight between gods and heroes on one side and children-Giants on the other. Heracles kills the monsters—but at the same time he kills the children whom they still are. He, the human hero, saves gods and does not get to see the faces of the gods who will never forgive him that he has become their saviour. The most significant is the burial of the Giants on Phlegraean Fields, performed by both brothers. This retelling of the myth ends with Kronos thanking Heracles for preventing gods from returning to earth. He also shows Heracles the broader aspect of this event: by opposing gods, Heracles contested the gods’ concept of people as useful tools and revealed man’s individuality and independence. Kronos has perceived this singularity. In his opinion it manifests itself, for instance, in the very act of their conversation—it would not be possible to have a conversation with a field or a herd. Kronos states: “you, people, are the third power, new race, deserving to inhabit Gaia. The Family is on Mount Olimp, The Fallen—in Tartarus, but you live and die on earth, so you are its true rulers” (Vol. 2, 212).

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The third type of the use of mythic citations and references comprises instances of introducing new, mainly biblical and philosophical, elements into Greek myths. This is best seen in the dialogue between Amphitrion and Tiresias in which a reference to Job is made in an attempt to substantiate the question about god’s justice. A similar motif is found in one of the lessons given to Heracles by Hermes, who discovers the possibility that a god may share his identity with an object which belongs to his domain, but at the same time he faces the mystery of one god who can say “I’m everything.” In his conversation with Kronos, Heracles mentions his encounter with Attamus, whom he “he had to punch quite a bit before he agreed to substitute a ram for the boy” (Vol. 2, 217). From this it follows that Heracles also met Abraham and successfully opposed god’s demand that Abraham sacrifice his son. Thus, twice subverted is the view that the Olympian gods are omnipotent. First, heroes prove necessary for the victory in Gigantomachy—which is also found in mythology. Second, gods’ actions can, too, be governed by coincidence. This is exemplified by the scene in which Heracles, returning with Hyppolyta’s belt is hit by the stone thrown at him by Chalkodon—which thwarts the plan already approved by Zeus himself. The wounded Heracles will be replaced by Iphicles in the first phase of the battle on Phlegraean Fields and, so, both brothers will again do a heroic deed together. There is also a picture of the Fallen (angels) who are both beautiful and terrifying. The motif of the Fallen introduces the reflection on the nature of evil—both the evil imprisoned in Tartarus, manifesting itself as monsters on earth, and the evil present in human and divine actions. It appears that in this case the Fallen are the source of evil. In this way Gigantomachy takes on a completely different meaning: all the participants seem to be the losers, but in a totally different way than the Fallen who, contrary to all the other participants, were the instigators rather than victims. Gods as victims and gods stripped of their omnipotence, compelled to accept the hero’s help, are thus no longer the gods of mythographers, poets, and theologians. In the novel, human nature is presented in a bit different way than in ancient writings.

Plot and Protagonists In the conversation that takes place in Hades between the Artful and the Elder, many interesting opinions are voiced about people and their heroes. Intriguingly, the Elder calls ordinary people “demi-men”. Only a man supported (he does not say how) by gods is capable of doing great deeds—being a hero, whom he calls a magnificent Sweeper (Vol. 1, 13).

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Demi-man can destroy only those who are like him. Only with gods support can he fight monsters and, in this way, clean up Ancient Greece. Thence the name “sweeper”. However, killing monsters means killing preternatural creatures—and gods are preternatural, too. Therefore, Perseus’s evolution from a divine tool to a hero aware of the significance of his deeds and acquired treasures. The hero asks the Ruler (of the Underworld) a rhetorical question: Would you have sent Thanatos for me, if I still had had Medusa’s head? This statement on the part of the hero is totally different from the most frequently quoted words uttered by the spirit of Achilles to Odysseus in Hades. In gods’ eyes, on one hand, the hero is but a weak demi-man—on the other hand, the hero is capable of deeds that are impossible for gods. Epeisodion One presents also one other, human, way of seeing the hero: a man like god, “cheerful, fearless, merciless” (Vol. 1, 25). Similarly to the beginning, the end of the plot, or rather its summing up from the point of view of gods, takes place in Hades. Heracles’s spirit resides there, but is not deprived of his memory. In mythology this is the case only with Tiresias. This means that Heracles has crossed the bounds of humanity—but in a way which has not freed him from physical death. According to the Elder, the Ruler of the Underworld, Heracles has thus become the other lord of this realm. God does not intervene, because he feels guilty of the hero’s fate (Vol. 2, 311). The adding of parodos and exodos to the plot which takes place in ancient Greece and in the Underworld is in itself meaningful—it is a literary way of describing the hero’s liminality, showing his mythic complexity. The aesthetic function—in this case also a result of myth degradation—is a point of departure for mythopoeic and philosophical speculation. The reduction of Heracles mythologeme and making the events on the Phlegraean Fields the focus of its meaning are linked to the reduction of the importance of the other hero mentioned by mythographers —Dyonisos. Besides, the character of Hermes is manipulated in an interesting way: his various personality traits are shown, mostly those which in particular subplots are connected with the etymology of his names—“Scoundrel, Artful, Soul Guide, Herdsman, Light-footed” (Vol. 1, 181). Hades, Apollo, and Ares get similar treatment: they act in particular situations in ways which make their names fully understandable. In this way the often hermetic mythographers’ accounts take on a fuller (though non-religious) meaning for the contemporary reader. It can be proposed that one of Hermes’s functions is to show his own mythic attributes. With Heracles this is a bit different. Power is the chief motivating factor behind his actions. During one of his encounters with Hermes he is directly seen as Power. He is the future Monster-Buster who, deceived by

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Hermes, appears before him as “Young Power, not hardened yet, brittle until now, and for the first time aware of its might, the Power looked into the eyes of a friend who has become an enemy, looked at the first betrayal it met with, and at the thirst for blood and murder; from this moment on this Power wanted to kill, mercilessly and with no regrets ...” (Vol. 1, 206) Reducing Heracles to Power brings about certain consequences. Ananke strips Heracles of the right to choose. As Power he is to merely destroy monsters and the scum. To accuse a god of betrayal in this case means to strip him of divinity. Heracles no longer perceives Hermes as his friend, nor does he see god in him. A road opens up for him: it will lead him against his will—since this is the way Ananke acts—to a place where he will become a mad hero who will kill everybody, friend or foe, both mortals and Titans, monsters and gods (Vol. 1, 236). This is the way the other motivation for action manifests itself: madness. Yet, when the rage fizzles out, and there only remain the corpses of friends and the mob of hatred-filled plebs who understand nothing, then the suffering takes over. Heracles perceives his labour “without gods’ help and people’s reward” (Vol. 2, 48) as sheer drudgery, but also as a dangerous service and honour. His loneliness and the burden of responsibilities seem to get the better of him and he is no longer cheerful or similar to gods. He now quietly asks Zeus: “Father, I can no longer live like that. Perhaps I’ve had enough of life?” (Vol. 2, 105) Heracles’s last motivation for action is his will, which can be seen in his rebellion against Ares which is, de facto, a rebellion against the inclusion of violence and death in his own actions. It is due to them that the hero was to perform his tasks, spurred on by Ananke’s might. Heracles does not want to be a hero at any cost and he vows not to deliver to Ares the victim he craves. Heracles will break his vow on the day on which the priestess of the Delphic oracle calls him Heracles. This picture of the hero, built along the lines of the poetics of mythic narrative, is complemented by the picture of his twin brother, Iphicles. He is, too, shown as Power, only that, by taking on himself their calls, he battles with the Fallen—who induce madness in his brother’s mind—and thus wins gods’ respect. Iphicles is chiefly motivated by common sense and love. Whenever Heracles acts under the influence of madness, Iphicles is the one who tries to stop him. And when Heracles does not want to act, although intervention is necessary, Iphicles springs into action—however, under the name of Hercules, thus consciously continuing the story of one hero. In terms of the Platonic metaphor, Heracles would be the heart, Iphicles—the brain. In this way the innovatory retelling of the myth paints a full picture of the hero.

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It could be argued that the whole duology is but a literary attempt at showing the hero—with the qualification that the model which thus emerges differs from the ones found in mythographers’ records. There is no heroism in it, but there is the unwanted madness and unsought victims, there is suffering and loneliness, bondage and evil influence, and finally an attempt to free himself. The hero possesses knowledge which allows him to understand the nature of gods and monsters, but also their ways of treating people. By rebelling against Ares, Heracles rebels against the demotion of man to the rank of a useful tool and against treating him as a passive tool. All his labours and escapades to the Underworld do not entail fanfares and splendour but horror and lack of understanding instead. Being the killer of the immortal who threaten gods, Heracles becomes even more powerful than gods. He receives no laurels or rewards, but unfriendliness bordering on hatred on the part of gods. The most conspicuous feature of this model is, however, the quality of being the Other and the attitudes to the Other. Here can be seen the full spectrum of Heracles’s attitudes to the Evil visited upon him by the Fallen who try to possess him, to the gods for whom he is just a tool and a troublesome saviour, to death and its necessity and irrevocability. Here also comes the experience of his own otherness brought about by his madness and rage and also the alienation among the people who see him through the prism of aoids’ songs and their own desires and dreams—but not his real actions. Finally, there is his humiliation at the hands of gods and the rich and the discovery of a new dimension of humanity: lonely but self-reliant. This is a painful discovery—as attested by the scene in which he is imploring Zeus. Moreover, there is his escape from his old-age reality to his memories—as if the fruits of his strife, suffering, mistakes, and choices remained unnoticed or unwanted.

Philosophical Fable—Philosophical Questions The basic question that the duology seems to ask concerns the nature of the hero: what is a hero? The book presents three opinions on the issue. The first is a vision. Or rather people’s visions. To the average inhabitant of ancient Greece the hero is a character from dreams, standing above the laws which govern daily life. This is exemplified, for instance, by the justification of Amphitrion Perseida who murdered his father-inlaw. This far-going idealisation ends with the image of a god-like hero, of a man free from worries and, thus, cheerful and at the same time fearless and showing no mercy when faced by adversities (Vol. 1, 25). This idealisation is connected to a large extent with the rejection—in general

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view—of the hero’s particular features, i.e. those which, in the plebs’ opinion, are not heroic. What is human loses to what is heroic. Amphitrion’s disgrace, a result of his wife and Zeus’s adultery, gives his subjects “hope for the future hero, Exterminator of Monsters, and all those miserable peasants, forgotten by the whole world, offered sacrifices to the child, seeing their future saviour in him. They do not need Amphitrion’s son. They do not need someone like them. What they need is a hero and demigod. They do forget, however, that a demigod is still half-man” (Vol. 1, 123). This idealisation has, therefore, its specific reasons rooted in the daily life of ordinary people. However, not only does it carry with it the reduction of personality traits, but it also builds a picture of a divine being whose human dimension is limited to the plane of coexistence with people. It is necessary for the complete functioning of the hero as a representative of people before distant gods and ever closer monsters. The hero can be seen, prayed to, and expected to perform superhuman (divine) intervention. Yet, people do not pay heroes for their toil and they assess their deeds on the basis of hearsay and later—aoids’ songs, without investigating whether or not and to what extent they really happened. Only the effects of the hero’s deeds are to be real. Another point of view on the nature of the hero can be formulated on gods’ commentaries on him. To them he is mainly the Sweeper, a useful creature, a demigod by definition, using his power to rid the Earth of the creatures which gods do not or cannot deal with. Gods need heroes, but their liminality (being half-man, half-god) is troublesome for them and sometimes even threatening. In Hades, having recovered for a moment consciousness thanks to the blood of a sacrificial cow, Perseus says to the Elder (Lord of the Underworld): "I have no regrets, except one thing ... I should not have given the head of Medusa back to Aiakomena. And since I did, I should have returned it so that they could look into each other’s eyes. They were cousins, after all. Say, would you have dared then send Thanatos to me?” (Vol. 1, 13) Gods’ opinions on heroes are divided. Hermes sees the inhuman effort which they make to fight the madness and monsters of the blacked out mind (Vol. 1, 319). Hermes is aware that the Hero is supposed to sweep Gaia—and then he himself will be swept away. Gods want to hide, to disaccustom people from their presence among them. The whole generation of heroes is to be done away with—only one to remain at first and then none. The existence of heroes is a threat to the existence of gods (Vol. 2, 273-275). That is why gods will stir up conflict with Troy. “Marshal them all in some ten to twenty years’ time near some lousy town, Troy, for instance—those who resist will be forced to—and then cast a die,

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once for all of them, and we shall impale ourselves on the spears of our own accord! The Family will rejoice from above—they will have entertainment for the next ten years or so” (Vol. 2, 274). Hades, for whom the hero is a weapon, knows that this is a double-edged weapon: if the hero can kill a monster, he can kill a god, too. The Giants, who in the novel are a race of mortal monsters, themselves see the Olympian gods as monsters, though they are aware of their own mortality. Heracles’s madness is not only a result of being marked by Hera and possessed by the Fallen, but it also stems from the fact that every man carries in himself the door to Tartarus which opens only one way. Therefore, the most important fight for Heracles is the one with his own liminal nature. Heracles has to accept that madness is him—then “Tartarus will come and go, but Heracles will remain” (Vol. 2, 140). Even when the hero becomes the saviour of gods, as is the case with the battle of the Phlegraean Fields, he remains lonely. Gods will not forgive him for saving them since in this way he has put himself above them. The hero is lonely in two ways. First, he is rejected by gods and people: when we are in need we need you, but when you’ve done your job, go away—you did help us, but don’t you expect any gratitude from us. The hero fights alone, lives alone, and is killed and dies in loneliness. The irony of fate and a sad picture of human nature are brought together. The same fate befell Jason, Dedalus, Orpheus, Akastos, Amphiaros, and Kepheus. The hero who has successfully carried out the task cannot stay with people. The other dimension of loneliness is the mythic loneliness of a man living between Heavens and the Underworld. This is the existential loneliness of a man who takes decisions and bears the consequences in the hope of a better future. This is the loneliness of a man seeking sense, loneliness amidst the silent Cosmos, one which so terrified Pascal. This loneliness is so much more painful as only the hero can face the questions which bring about the numinous or metaphysical terror. It is to do with the crossing of the threshold of daily concerns and entering the realm of the heroic spirit and human nature as found in Marco Aurelius’s writings. Kronos and Hades seem to perceive the nature of the hero in the most interesting way. To Kronos, the Hero makes it possible for people to find their autonomous place between the Upper Otherworld and the Lower Otherworld—without divine intervention. Kronos is at the same time aware of the significance of the hero myth. “It’s warranted by the myth of Heracles, a mortal who killed monsters and Giants, who didn’t bow to gods, without whom the Olympians would have been helpless when confronted by the refugees from Hell. Whether you’re going to ascend Mount Olympus or whether you’re going to die unremarkably, I wish this

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myth long and happy life” (Vol. 2, 217). Hades develops further the motif of the understanding of Heracles’s myth-making function, by including in it—apart from man’s autonomy on Earth—the continuity of tradition, now in narrative dimension, not prophetical one. Perversely, gods will exist due to Heracles, or rather his myth. “He may be our last chance. Heracles. The one who is here. Whose real memory is retained. Which means there is somebody who remembers the real Heracles. And us along with him. Us real. After all, it’s not without reason that they say that Heracles held the sky on his shoulders alongside gods. Oh, Hermes! He is now holding it, too. Having forgiven everybody everything, including his own death” (Vol. 2, 311). The third point of view belongs to the hero himself. There are two types of references here. The first uses the mythologeme in such a way that it magnifies those of the hero’s features which are played down or rejected by people and gods, specifically: the price he pays for his deeds, including those he commits in his madness: murder of his closest relatives, murder of his guest, sacrilege. In the mythologeme, the punishment for those deeds is captivity meant to absolve him from guilt. In the novel, there are additionally descriptions of Heracles’s suffering, who, when his rage has abated, starts to realise what he has done, what role gods played in it, and that he had no control over it. But this does not lessen his pain. Suffering, lacking people’s understanding, and, above all, loneliness are absent in the mythologeme. The literary plane is expanded by the inclusion of the hero’s experience of captivity and the image of crossing boundaries. Heracles is a man who rebelled against gods, vowing not to make sacrifices to Ares, who was the laughingstock of the servants in the temple of Hera, whom the mighty of this world tried to treat instrumentally, who locked Tartarus to the Fallen. At the same time he was the one who got to know gods and monsters’ true nature, who let the slain Giants be buried, thus washing away their stigma of monstrosity (since monsters are not buried as a rule). He had to live knowing all along that he was accused of crimes he had never committed, for instance the deadly wounding of Chiron. In the novel, Heracles crosses three types of boundaries: death (by entering the Underworld and returning), monstrosity (by becoming an instrument in the hands of the forces of chaos), and humanity (while in beastly rage he killed his relatives and guests, while murdering Augias he realised he felt nothing, “neither satisfaction from the revenge, nor hate, merely slight disappointment ... and again one has to kill”) (Vol. 2, 259). This results in an overwhelming feeling of otherness. The otherness of the Olympian gods, the Titans and the Fallen, to whom he was just a Sweeper, the otherness contained not only in the ontological difference, but, first of

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all, moral one. The otherness of people to whom Heracles was only the Saviour Hero. Finally, the painful otherness towards himself as the one who murdered mercilessly. The literary picture of Heracles’s otherness shows the price of the hero’s liminality—so often overlooked in literature, while in myths—reduced to symbols, requiring sophisticated explanation. In the duology, the character of Heracles is constructed in such a way that it poses questions concerning the nature of evil in mythical and metaphysical sense, people—in subjective and social aspect, monsters and gods—with regard to culture and anthropology. The answers emerge from the dispute with tradition.

Challenging Tradition As discussed at the beginning, to construct the plot, the authors of the duology draw on a number of the ancient mythographers’ records. The use of those classical stories depends on the artistic and cognitive goals of the authors. It can be argued that the basic structure of the plot of the mythologeme has been kept. However, this does not seem to be a result of the secondariness of the literary retelling in relation to the mythic model, which was meant to express more fully the innovations in the retelling of the myth. The source of the innovations is likely to be linked to the concerns perplexing the modern man. The first interesting feature of the authors’ retelling of the myth is their negative attitude to mythographers’ records—which is rather striking because they rely on them. Such a catch has a number of aspects. The first is the aesthetic aspect of the colloquial utterance. “ > No, this sounds bad. What about: > now, this is better!” (Vol. 1, 184) It looks as if the utterances in which a Greek addresses gods had to be of a higher aesthetic order. This could be seen as broadening the spectrum of the literary text’s effect. However, this could also be interpreted as a possible reduction of what is innately numinous to the level of added value which does not contribute to the overall meaning. This play with aesthetic attractiveness causes the story of a hero, a mythologeme in itself, to have a number of versions. It may refer to what is important, often cruel and depressing, therefore hardly attractive for the aesthetic aspect of the novel. It may also focus on what is external with regard to the original plane and may introduce aesthetically attractive elements. As a result, it may falsify or, at best, distort the mythologeme. The aesthetic play with myth always results in a play with myth’s spiritual

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message. When the ornamental attractiveness of the external features of mythic events wins, the message gets reduced and, thus, forgotten and altered. Such a story is attractive to crowds, but it ceases to be a true description of mythic events. The trouble is that it is the only description. Making characters more aesthetic, makes them overdone, at the same time losing what is common and normal in heroes’ lives. “While in Tirinsus, relaxing quietly and getting silly out of boredom, Iolaos suddenly realised that he listened rather indifferently to that pompous claptrap sung by wandering rhapsodists at every crossroads. The claptrap about Heracles’s feats. The twins were even amused by that” (Vol. 2, 31). In order to construct an attractive text, authors have resorted to simplifications which often border on distortion. This is the case with, for instance, the motif of Chiron’s deadly wound. In rhapsodists’ songs, “the whole Hellas, out of habit, accuses the mad Heracles” (Vol. 2, 107). The rhapsodist here is not only a depository of the knowledge about the hero’s deeds, but he also makes them up. By becoming the only account of the hero’s life, the rhapsodist’s fiction becomes a true story in general reception. The myth dies along with its functions and a literature is born which plays with the elements of myth, disrespectful of its functions. This is even better exemplified by the subplot in which Augias orders a song about untrue events, implicating Heracles. This is related to the murdering of a guest by Heracles. Both Augias and Neleus treat rhapsodists and their songs instrumentally—to defame Heracles and defeat him ultimately. The building of Heracles’s literary portrait is done using all methods available to the then rich men: paying rhapsodists and organising games for the poor during which the new defamatory songs about Heracles are sung while the organisers, who took (rather negative) part in the events described in the songs, are presented as good and honest people. In this way, in Mesena, the presentation of a literary picture of the hero becomes a celebration of the victory over him. A victory made possible due to literature (Vol. 2, 248-249). Such a way of presenting a hero and stories about him can be read in two ways. First, as experiential-aesthetical reading, which focuses on the aspect of numerical identity (as proposed by Paul Ricoeur). Heracles is seen through his external hero features: he is strong, sometimes unpredictable, beautiful, and mighty. However, the plot is constructed in such a way that it is hardly possible to read the novel this way. Although it is possible, the very narration dictates that Heracles and his deeds—as well as the divine and human milieus—be seen as problematic. Or rather they themselves make problematic not only the hero, but the human condition

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and the condition of human culture. At this point, the narrative Heracles’s autonomous identity appears—alongside Heracles’s symbolic dimension and the related mythologeme or mythologemes, including literary invariants. The former manifests itself as an interestingly altered and attractively broadened theme of Heracles’s adventures, supplemented by the play with the reader (who knows the general, philological description of Heracles’s deeds), consisting in an innovative—with regard to mythographers’ accounts—treatment of the storyline. In the case of the latter, the storyline can be read as a source text, which introduces questions about the nature of evil, gods, cosmos, human freedom, morality, and responsibility. It also introduces issues related to the nature of culture. Everything takes place in the sphere of symbols (such as fall, betrayal, disgrace, redemption, etc.) which are developed further by the narration. The narrative development is both attractive and puzzling cognitively. It is attractive, because it broadens the character of Heracles as known from the classical literature— and it does so by delving into his most disquieting aspects (not only his madness or sacrilege, but also his liminality connected with his fights with monsters and escapades to the Underworld). A symbol developed as narrative shows “in action” many of its hidden meanings—and this is where the problems of cognitive nature appear. Some of those meanings become clear when seen in the context of the classical-Greece thinking; others require hermeneutic approach—or at least leave the reader eager to ask questions. In this way, in this particular case, at the veracity level of interpretation, the Greek myth ceases to be a holy and truthful story (as understood by Mircea Eliade)—which is a result of the specific “work conditions” for rhapsodists—and becomes, in its form, an incentive to seek the truth, hidden behind the myhtologeme’s aesthetic façade. Obviously, all this is just a literary play—but the mechanisms it reveals do make one wonder. To analyse the origins of the hero’s behaviour, it is a good idea to use the metaphor of heart and reason, present in the Greek tradition. It can already be found in Homer’s writings (see A. Krokiewicz MoralnoĞü Homera i etyka Hezjoda, Warszawa 1959). The hero’s dilemma resulting from his autonomous human identity and his hero’s pride can be described using this metaphor. The heart is the source of the hero’s great deeds, but so is, too, his conceit, resulting in his madness. The reason is the source of Heracles’s queries and attitudes, defining his identity. The play with tradition which can be observed in the novel takes place at several planes. In each case, however, it makes use of myth and its literary form. The first plane corresponds to Aristotle’s Poetics, where mythos is just probable. It is not totally fiction, but neither is it truth. The

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plot pattern it describes can happen many times—unlike a historical event. In this respect, mythos has something in common with philosophical narration. It refers the reader to philosophical and anthropological thought. The three planes at which the play with the myth of Heracles takes place are present in the novel Heros powinien byü jeden.

Mythic-time Questions for Modern Times First of all, one must not forget the “mythic mind” as described by anthropologists and theologians. In the novel, however, the mosaic of mythic and biblical references has undergone not only the process of retelling, but also the related partial interpretation. This may mean a literary attempt at modernising mythic symbols and their meanings. But definitely, in this case, the narrative goes beyond the simple reduction of mythic material. First, there are references to evil. In mythic narratives it is found in the mechanisms governing the Living Cosmos. It does have demonic features, but it fits in the holistic model of mythic Reality. Here, due to the introduction of the biblical model, rather than the problem of demonism, the question about Evil or The Evil arises. Thus, it is a question about the nature of evil. Kronos states that everybody needs good and evil as the necessary elements governing the reality. This is rational in the case of cosmic religions. But when the Only God appears, i.e. the god of The Old Testament, evil becomes a troublesome symbol. Where is it from? What is its nature like? Why does it exist? If the Only God is everything— according to Hermes... Besides, there are the unsettling pictures of Job, Abraham, and the Rebellion and Fall of the angels. All these elements of the biblical theology are set in the landscape of meanings of the mythologeme of Heracles. In this way the question about the nature of Greek gods is supplemented by the question about the nature of the monotheistic god, which can be seen in Hermes’s musings. A similar case is with the relation god/gods—man and the origins and nature of evil, which can be seen in Tiresias’s commentaries on Job (including the problem of the uncommitted evil and the sanction of punishment) and on the Olympian gods’ description of the Fallen (where, on the one hand, there is the problem of freedom and pride towards the Only God, while on the other—the rebellion of the Young against the Elder). From these speculations, or rather mosaic juxtapositions, emerges a picture of God who exists outside good and evil. Such a picture is present in philosophical writings by Friedrich Nietzche and Søren Kierkegaard and currently it is being introduced into popular literature. A final issue concerning evil is its

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origin in human relationships. Does evil have its roots in transcendence or in human actions? Is it ingrained in the nature of the world or rather in human nature? These questions are important, since they change the way human responsibility is viewed in its ethical aspect. A separate problem is the cultural facet of religion as part of tradition. In this respect, Greek deities exist only due to human memory—the memory of Heracles’s deeds. Here one encounters a broader, non-literary problem which can be seen, for instance, in Nauka nowa by Giambattista Vico. Myth originated as a human (rhapsodist’s) story of another’s deeds—a hero, but still a human. As such, myth became part of tradition which could produce role models for successive generations. However, the literary model of the origin of the mythologeme of Heracles produces questions rather than models of conduct. The god existing due to human memory becomes a metaphor of fate, destiny, and the unchangeable laws of nature, while man, whose cultural memory retains the picture of the deity, gains the quality of lonely freedom and independence based on reason, consciousness, and the will to act. Man has to follow a different path—as Kronos says in a conversation with Heracles—which is a consequence of Heracles’s deeds (who, as a hero, is becoming part of culture). This new path leads through the world and leaves the underworld to gods. The new man is the one who no longer falls victim to transcendental plots, nor is a priest living for gods and dependent on them. Man now frees himself from his dependence on Transcendence. This motif is also found in contemporary philosophy, for example in Emanuel Levinas’s writings which deal with the motif of “the transcendental plot” (128-132). Kronos’s statement clearly stresses that man and his nature is defined by his deeds. That is why Heracles’s deeds (such as helping gods in their fight with Giants, his fight with monsters, his madness and its cost, his rebellion against gods) are so important. The motif of the fight with monsters and Giants raises the issue of gods’ omnipotence. In the case of the Olympian gods it is negated a number of times. They need his help in their fight with Giants—without it they are helpless. The gods cannot exercise power over fate, which is exemplified by, for instance, the accidental wounding of Heracles just before the battle on the Phlegrean Fields—which thwarted Zeus’s plans. The cause was an accident and not an act of human free will. Omnipotence is also a result of self-restriction—as happens in the case of Hades, who lets Heracles’s spirit be a co-ruler of Hades. Another motif is the figure of the Other which in the novel is juxtaposed with Monstrosity and Evil. These are chiefly monsters, called by gods “Litter” and, therefore, Heracles becomes a Divine Sweeper.

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These are the Fallen who, according to Chiron, are the pure emanation of numinosum—beautiful and at the same time hideous and not omnipotent, either. They are the ones behind the Intrigue which involved Titans, gods, Giants, and people and heroes. Their Intrigue is the cause of the Titanomachy and Gigantomachy (Vol. 1, 137). Their wisdom was supposed to be limitless, thus going beyond gods’ cognitive powers. As those whom the Only God transformed into a flame, thus throwing them out of His world, they became themselves, they “absorbed Myself into Myself and as such they arrived on Gaia (Vol. 1, 248).” Evil (symbolised by the Fallen) has such nature that it engulfs anything it touches; in this way Kronos became a being similar to the Fallen, the Devourer of His Own Children (Vol. 1, 249). Thus, to break free from the influence of Evil is to liberate and save in a radical sense the Being from the Otherness, even the Monstrous one, manifesting itself as the Giants, and in the case of Heracles—to save the Being from the feeling beings entangled in the Intrigue. And since they are entangled, they are not guilty of their monstrosity or their capacity to destroy gods. To kids, as Hermes says, no gods exist. “Children are the only mortals to whom there are no gods. They are potential murderers of gods. And now I believe every demigod hero is in some way a child (Vol. 2, 130).” Heracles’s liminality reveals his unity with the Giants’ monstrosity: both him and them can be god killers. This makes them akin to each other—as does their entanglement in the Intrigue and the instrumental treatment of them. That, perhaps, is why Heracles buries the Giants killed in the battle, showing his respect for them—but also making us see them in a different light. In the novel, the Giants are the children of people and the Fallen. This constitutes a totally innovative treatment of the monstrosity found in myths. Garbage is not to be concealed. Apollo turns out a stranger, too—to Iphitos the Archer. But this is the strangeness of a trickster who, even when he gives and seems charitable, eventually brings destruction. This is the death of Iphitos the Archer and the role that Apollo, Olympian god, played in it that becomes the direct cause of Heracles’s fury, his murdering of his mentor, and the events in Delphi. There is also the problem of madness. It is a result of gods’ actions which remain irrational to people and which, in the novel, are called friendly, though impetuous and unpredictable—and these are the familiar mythologemes: Apollo skinning Marsias, Arthemida murdering Niobe’s children, Athena changing Arachne. Madness is also present in the Fallen’s acts. In this case it is called Possession. Madness manifests itself in the pictures of war and in memories of it. All kinds of manifestations of madness show in a number of ways the departure from the reality. In the

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case of the Fallen, this is a departure with regard to the metaphysical order and the principles governing the world and human behaviour. In the case of gods, this is a departure with regard to the relationship with people. War destroys the rules guarding the human existence, while memory of the traumatic events makes the present painful and often absent. In the novel, madness reveals the realm of otherness (destroying the harmonious picture of the world) which man comes upon in the surrounding universe. That it can have its roots in Transcendence, beyond man, among people, and in man himself adds to the effect of alienation in the world. That is the reason why the new man, the one whom Heracles becomes, is as much tragic as he is heroic. By standing up for autonomy, he stands out against what threatens it. He is neither a sacrifice on the altar nor a priest before gods. He is a human being ready to accept what life brings. However, he faces questions to which there are no answers. If he manages to cross the bounds of death, it is thanks to love and the significance of his deeds—although this crossing is, too, a play with myth. In Hades, it only was Tiresias, who retained consciousness; now the spirit of the dead Heracles has appeared there. Not a deity, but neither a man—a hero whose choices and deeds have transcended humanity. A mosaic of motifs, Henry Lion Oldi’s novel offers not only a well told story set in the vast landscape of classical philology, but it also provokes the reader into a reflection on the popular mythological and theological motifs. The unique approach to the construction of the storyline—through developing symbols and mythologemes—points to several interpretative dominants which are important for discovering the amount of the “truth input” in the novel and, consequently, having a fresh look at the mythical Heracles and at oneself through the prism of those reflections—which confirms the presence of myth in the modern man’s world.

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Otto, R. 1968, ĝwiĊtoĞü, Transl. B. Kupis, Warszawa: KsiąĪka i Wiedza Ricoeur, P. 2003, O sobie samym jako innym, transl. B. Cheástowski, Warszawa: PWN Robert, C. 1920-1923, Die Grieschische Heldensage, Berlin: Weidmann Vico, G. 1966, Nauka nowa, transl. J. Jakubowicz, Warszawa: PWN West, M.L. 2008, Wschodnie oblicze Helikonu. Pierwiastki zachodnioazjatyckie w greckiej poezji i micie, transl. M. Filipczuk, T. PolaĔski, Kraków: Homini ZieliĔski T. 2001, Religia hellenizmu, ToruĔ: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszaáek