Making myths
In his reworkings of Ovid, Zachary Mason finds sad echoes of ancient tales in the emptiness of modern life, writes Emily Wilson
We are living in an age of great cultural interest in ancient myths, including TV dramas (Troy: Fall of a City), literary retellings (Neil Gaiman’s compelling Norse
Mythology), novels that reinvent myth in a modern context (Kamila Shamsie’s brilliant Home Fire) and novels set in the classical past (Madeline Miller’s moving Circe).
In times of sweeping change, myths provide a way of thinking about big questions like transformation, power, agency and responsibility, and these ancient stories have the great advantage, in a polarised, partisan age, of being ecumenical: they belong to none of us, and to us all.
For Zachary Mason, a computer scientist as well as the author of three works of fiction, ancient myth is an opportunity to explore the emptiness of life and the infinite variety of narrative. His last book, The Lost
Books of the Odyssey, was a sequence of cleverly Borgesian short stories that imagined variations within the framework of the Homeric poem. The title of his new work, Metamorphica, nods to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Ovid bookends the collection. In the first story, Ovid begs to trade “anything, everything” for literary immortality. The final piece returns to Ovid, now in exile on the Black Sea, writing a letter to Emperor Augustus to plead for a repeal of his sentence. The letter gets soiled, slashed, mildewed and translated into multiple languages, until the “false and worthless letters are as numerous as the grains of sand in a desert”. None reach within even a thousand miles of Rome, where, in any case, the emperor would probably not open them. The piece is a fable about bad postal service and the difficulties of communicating before email and video chat. But it also offers one of many variations on Mason’s central theme: where we may expect to find meaning, there is none. The lesson can feel profound or sophomoric, depending on how much patience you have for this kind of thing.
Mason takes the memorable female characters of classical myth – goddesses, prophets, rape victims, noble heroines, killers of family members, witches, Amazons, adulteresses and athletes – and turns them into ciphers. He reduces the number of rapes; Persephone, Daphne and Thetis, for example, are willing participants in their liaisons. But he also reduces female agency to more or less nothing. Helen is a phantom, alienated from her own story. Daphne is not an emblem of poetic inspiration, but “an ordinarily pretty girl,” replicated throughout eternity as an endless sequence of equally ordinary pretty girls. Eurydice, the beloved of Orpheus, is “less a lover than a trope of literature.” Clytemnestra’s triumphant slaughter of her daughter-killing husband “fades into nothing.” Athena, a terrifying military goddess, becomes a needy girl with a crush on Odysseus.
Mason’s male characters live almost equally meaningless lives, although they have a somewhat wider set of interests and exercise their own power through poetry, close male friendships and (always heterosexual) sex. As in Ovid, Zeus is a serial rapist, and Mason provides disturbingly lyrical descriptions of his abusive pleasure (“her will dissolves like a sandbank in the tide.”) But even rape fails to give Zeus’ life meaning. When another version of Athena robs and challenges him, he manages only to substitute one kind of frustration for another.
Mason’s twist on the story of Midas reminds us that money has no fixed meaning or value. Midas becomes the inventor of money, “a necessary myth for our time:” after the loss of his friend, Dionysos, he melts down his family’s treasures into coinage, and in so doing, erases history and memory. In the ancient version of the myth, as in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great retelling, The Golden Touch, there is an insistence that some things – like eating and drinking, and the people we love – might be incommensurate with money. Mason eliminates this thread, along with more or less every element in the body of Greco-roman myth that smacks of ethics, or suggests that anything we do matters.
Death is a common theme, and death is usually not scary but void. When Zeus takes the islands, and Poseidon the seas around them, Death plays the winning card: he claims “the emptiness within them.” Elysium, the place of bliss provided for warriors after death, becomes an infinite series of rock pools in which Menelaus, husband of Helen, can collect and catalog molluscs with only a vague “intuition for an order” that might one day emerge; the work shields him from the pain of death and from his wife, who has “never been kind.” The Greek myths, in Mason’s hands, are like those molluscs: a vast set of items to collect and catalogue, offering glimpses of a pattern, and a bleakly comforting escape from the world of feelings and human beings.
Mason takes the memorable female characters of classical myth and turns them into ciphers