Haynes praises and thanks the classicist, Edith Hall – as does
Colm Toibin - in her Afterword to her novel. This is no surprise. Hall is the very greatest of classicists –
someone who has allowed the past into the present as a means of resisting those
who put the present into the past. There is a creativity and radicalism in her
scholarship that enhances and centres the scholarship she exudes whist being
purposive. Hence two very different ways of mythical recreation in Haynes and
Toibin can have a common reassurance of a genuine classic source – however creatively
radical their revision.
Of course Toibin is the greater novelist and what he draws
from the Oresteia is hence the richer and more urgent. However, Haynes knows I
think what she does. Maybe my feeling that this is lesser comes from the
insistence of Haynes on the models of her emulation – which seem to me be the
mid twentieth century flush of female creativity in public - I might have wished
however that that model would have been Beryl Bainbridge rather than Margaret Drabble
and Daphne du Maurier, despite my love of the latter.
Haynes knows, as a well-attested populariser of classical
motifs, that she works from an open field – from a mythical repertoire whose
function it was, from the very beginning to be open to narrative revision – she
herself cites the differences in the story of Jocasta between Homer and
Sophocles, and in the fifth century additions to the myth – the children of
Jocasta –Aeschylus and Sophocles. She does not mention Euripides The Phoenician Women in which Oedipus
outlives his warlike sons (just) and there may be a good reason for a novelist
who cares for her readers to do this.
She makes some bold transpositions between the role of
Eteocles and Polyneices, AND Antigone and Ismene. The boldest transposition is
Tiresias into the role of the sexually motivated housekeeper, Teresa – a character
who owes as much to Mrs Danvers (in Rebecca) as to the Attic dramatists. Into
the latter, she weaves some dark hints gleaned from a lost Theban trilogy of
Laius’ rape of his host’s son, into a fully-fledged but not very ‘out’ gay
character, protected by Teresa.
For those who know the Greek tragedies, this leads to some
moments of frisson. The picture of Antigone ‘wailing at some real or perceived
injustice’ summarises at once the characters as Haynes sees them of that
heroine in Sophocles and Jean Anouilh and is a tremendous moment of literary critical
fun. However, we shall see that it is more than that in its function as a predictor
of a plot twist I refrain from identifying lest I be branded a ‘spoiler’.
However that characterisation also, in its context, also
shows the major revision of style in the novel – into the mode of ‘family
romance’. This is not so much the genre described by Freud but by the ‘women’s
novel’ of the mid-twentieth century (I say this without any intention of making
the latter seem inferior to the former). You only need take some of Jocasta’s
musings or interactions with other women to illustrate this:
She lay half-dozing in the sun,
trying to remember what she needed to do today. But she had little to fret
about. … (p. 176)
OR
She (Teresa) had turned to
Jocasta, expecting the queen to overrule this upstart and tell him that Teresa
was not to be argued with. But Jocasta had done nothing of the kind. Rather,
she had taken her husband’s arm, and told Teresa that things were changing at
the palace, so perhaps it was time for her to move on. … (p. 184)
But it would be unfair to use sentences like these with
their modern idioms and attitudes (‘time to move on’) to characterise the novel
as a whole. One effect of this attempt to make the historically remote
available in this way is to create a sense of crude comfort at the stability of
things – one that makes the denouement of this novel with its blast from an ancient
past in which bodies are extremely at risk from many sources of instability,
even more shocking. In that sense, Haynes uses these transformations of role
expectations, to and from the distant past, to heighten our sense of the immutable
significance of tragic effects (without religion of any kind).
And more than this, Haynes can make links between
contemporary and classical instances of atheism (Jocasta’s doubt of oracles and
even the will of gods in Sophocles) such that Jocasta supports the sensibility
of a modern woman, attempting to optimise her control of self and things in
inclement situations. She does this by focusing on embodied female experience,
to the detriment of the overblown, and (in the end) rather childishly ‘magical and
wishful emotional thinking’ of her male characters. Jocasta can therefore
express even very negative emotion, justified by the fact that it is in part
determined by her circumstances and not seen as theologically immutable (as men’s
emotions are here so often):
After seven months of persistent,
sometimes crippling nausea, Jocasta was desperate to be rid of this parasitic
child which persecuted her from within. … She was terrified of what was to
come. She was barely sixteen years old, slightly built, and afraid her body
would soon be split in two by an infant who cared nothing for damaging her, but
whose determination was only to be born. (pp 82f.)
The almost seamless move from this to Haynes’ Jocasta’s
atheistic thought about the role of oracles is masterful. Prophesy is about the
affairs of ‘men’ (‘not women’ is not said but echoes throughout) and only
because men insist on a meaning that endures rather than changes in and through
bodily experience and circumstances. This philosophy is best expressed by Isy
(Ismene) at the end of the novel where she hopes that in a future when prophecy,
like her father, are blind: ‘people will be carving out their lives, in
whatever circumstances remain for them.’ (p. 324).
This is not a novel for me but it is a good (and highly
readable novel) and it, as surely as ever (and better than The Amber Fury), makes great and classic play-texts relevant and
accessible in a new way.
Natalie Haynes 'The Children of Jocasta' London, Mantle: ‘wailing at some real or perceived injustice’.
Part 1 of a 4-part self-directed project
Haynes praises and thanks the classicist, Edith Hall – as does Colm Toibin - in her Afterword to her novel. This is no surprise. Hall is the very greatest of classicists – someone who has allowed the past into the present as a means of resisting those who put the present into the past. There is a creativity and radicalism in her scholarship that enhances and centres the scholarship she exudes whist being purposive. Hence two very different ways of mythical recreation in Haynes and Toibin can have a common reassurance of a genuine classic source – however creatively radical their revision.
Of course Toibin is the greater novelist and what he draws from the Oresteia is hence the richer and more urgent. However, Haynes knows I think what she does. Maybe my feeling that this is lesser comes from the insistence of Haynes on the models of her emulation – which seem to me be the mid twentieth century flush of female creativity in public - I might have wished however that that model would have been Beryl Bainbridge rather than Margaret Drabble and Daphne du Maurier, despite my love of the latter.
Haynes knows, as a well-attested populariser of classical motifs, that she works from an open field – from a mythical repertoire whose function it was, from the very beginning to be open to narrative revision – she herself cites the differences in the story of Jocasta between Homer and Sophocles, and in the fifth century additions to the myth – the children of Jocasta –Aeschylus and Sophocles. She does not mention Euripides The Phoenician Women in which Oedipus outlives his warlike sons (just) and there may be a good reason for a novelist who cares for her readers to do this.
She makes some bold transpositions between the role of Eteocles and Polyneices, AND Antigone and Ismene. The boldest transposition is Tiresias into the role of the sexually motivated housekeeper, Teresa – a character who owes as much to Mrs Danvers (in Rebecca) as to the Attic dramatists. Into the latter, she weaves some dark hints gleaned from a lost Theban trilogy of Laius’ rape of his host’s son, into a fully-fledged but not very ‘out’ gay character, protected by Teresa.
For those who know the Greek tragedies, this leads to some moments of frisson. The picture of Antigone ‘wailing at some real or perceived injustice’ summarises at once the characters as Haynes sees them of that heroine in Sophocles and Jean Anouilh and is a tremendous moment of literary critical fun. However, we shall see that it is more than that in its function as a predictor of a plot twist I refrain from identifying lest I be branded a ‘spoiler’.
However that characterisation also, in its context, also shows the major revision of style in the novel – into the mode of ‘family romance’. This is not so much the genre described by Freud but by the ‘women’s novel’ of the mid-twentieth century (I say this without any intention of making the latter seem inferior to the former). You only need take some of Jocasta’s musings or interactions with other women to illustrate this:
She lay half-dozing in the sun, trying to remember what she needed to do today. But she had little to fret about. … (p. 176)
OR
She (Teresa) had turned to Jocasta, expecting the queen to overrule this upstart and tell him that Teresa was not to be argued with. But Jocasta had done nothing of the kind. Rather, she had taken her husband’s arm, and told Teresa that things were changing at the palace, so perhaps it was time for her to move on. … (p. 184)
But it would be unfair to use sentences like these with their modern idioms and attitudes (‘time to move on’) to characterise the novel as a whole. One effect of this attempt to make the historically remote available in this way is to create a sense of crude comfort at the stability of things – one that makes the denouement of this novel with its blast from an ancient past in which bodies are extremely at risk from many sources of instability, even more shocking. In that sense, Haynes uses these transformations of role expectations, to and from the distant past, to heighten our sense of the immutable significance of tragic effects (without religion of any kind).
And more than this, Haynes can make links between contemporary and classical instances of atheism (Jocasta’s doubt of oracles and even the will of gods in Sophocles) such that Jocasta supports the sensibility of a modern woman, attempting to optimise her control of self and things in inclement situations. She does this by focusing on embodied female experience, to the detriment of the overblown, and (in the end) rather childishly ‘magical and wishful emotional thinking’ of her male characters. Jocasta can therefore express even very negative emotion, justified by the fact that it is in part determined by her circumstances and not seen as theologically immutable (as men’s emotions are here so often):
After seven months of persistent, sometimes crippling nausea, Jocasta was desperate to be rid of this parasitic child which persecuted her from within. … She was terrified of what was to come. She was barely sixteen years old, slightly built, and afraid her body would soon be split in two by an infant who cared nothing for damaging her, but whose determination was only to be born. (pp 82f.)
The almost seamless move from this to Haynes’ Jocasta’s atheistic thought about the role of oracles is masterful. Prophesy is about the affairs of ‘men’ (‘not women’ is not said but echoes throughout) and only because men insist on a meaning that endures rather than changes in and through bodily experience and circumstances. This philosophy is best expressed by Isy (Ismene) at the end of the novel where she hopes that in a future when prophecy, like her father, are blind: ‘people will be carving out their lives, in whatever circumstances remain for them.’ (p. 324).
This is not a novel for me but it is a good (and highly readable novel) and it, as surely as ever (and better than The Amber Fury), makes great and classic play-texts relevant and accessible in a new way.
All the best
Steve