David Vann’s writing is much more difficult to place in a
distinct English language tradition than either Toibin or Haynes. He writes
that the genesis of this novel was in a university course that studied Euripides’
Medea and then a ‘feminist thought
workshop’. His love of dirt, death and decay in all of his novels from The Legend of a Suicide onwards is
psychoanalytic in origin. Indeed were I to lay a bet I would suggest that this
novel owes as much to Julia Kristeva’s Black
Sun as to Attic tragedy, since such a ‘black sun’ is described early in the
novel (4). Its enemy a male force that threatens: ‘her father a threat from the very beginning, an enemy before she was
born’ (39).
The key image is the dismemberment of patriarchal law or its
chances of reproduction – Medea’s ritual magic revels in a trickery in which
self-oppressed princesses are made to tear off the king’s, their father’s, ‘balls’
(191) as a means of ‘renewing’ him: ‘Segmented
king, faceless and neutered, returning to some earlier form.’ Later these
kings are ‘runt kings’ (125).
The association of woman with that that is deep and dark and
buried underneath the world ruled by the Name-of-the-Father. Sub-rational, it
is thus beyond or before all words that name or structure that order: a
de-centred ‘center’ associated with fluid mutable formlessness (86) at war with
the world of men: ‘A king always at the center,
never without reference’ (10). However fathers who assert priority over
daughters do so themselves under threat from chthonic forces that assert an
even greater priority in a world before the establishment of patriarchal order –
in this novel a descending layer of primal goddesses from Hekate to ‘Nute, blue god of the Egyptians’ (4).
Hence Medea ends as she begins as a symbol of the resistance
of the familial roles that serve the interests of the symbolic, biological or
symbolic father. She lies in the bloody dismembered body parts of her brother,
using these to distract her pursuing father and his wrath and to ‘unman’ Jason
in by mining out his inner being by drawing him into orgasmic admixture with
that bloody mass (5).
Medea’s power lies most in her ability to knowingly become a
prototype of woman who is and always will be hated because always ‘true’ to a
feminine principle that distrusts male order, ready to be known forever as she
who killed her male children (13). Medea seems to embrace evil because she
knows she will always ever be represented as it but Vann does see her as a good
mother (249f.) I think, although I think the argument to show why this is so
too complex for me at this moment or this place but it inheres in the fact that
her as yet ungendered boys are at threat from the hard wold of men more than
she, ‘faces carved by helmets into slats and mouths bare and animal’.
Medea, after all, does not hate ‘men’. She prefers them in
sexual love with each other than as warriors whose meaning is the establishment
of masculine power in mutual bloodshed and lust for imperial wealth: ‘Some lie with each other reversed and
swallowing, others mount, and all are swaying.
… A vision Medea would never have imagined, would never have been
allowed to see. The most beautiful forms in firelight.’ (32).
This is a wonderful novel, although it lacks (quite unlike
Toibin) anything like a redemptive vision or potential – indeed you look for
that in vain in Vann (try Goat Mountain).
Of course the Greek texts themselves facilitate more potential in Orestes than
in Jason, as Euripides presents him.
If I prefer Toibin, it may be because he places the darkness
of Clytemnestra (in some senses able to make ‘bright air black’) in the context of a world where male rule is not
really ever challenged. Strong women in both other novels (Electra and
Antigone) become men in order to rule and serve patriarchy. But Orestes gives
me hope for men. Medea is more the stuff of Kristeva and radical philosophy.
Her aim is deconstructive as well as destructive, the utopian vision denied
representation and therefore saved from the compromises involved in its naming in
language compromised by patriarchy and instead part of the repressed structure
beneath the world’s and the sea’s surface – ‘liquid and changeable’.
Medea the one who
would end a god and all his descendants and the day-lit world. She would do
this. She knows this is true, that whatever binds other people to each other
has no hold on her. She is bound only by elements …..
David Vann (2017) Bright Air Black London, Heinemann: ‘at the center (sic.) of what makes all liquid and changeable’.
David Vann (2017) Bright Air Black London, Heinemann: ‘at the center (sic.) of what makes all liquid and changeable’.
Part 2 of a 4 part self-directed project
David Vann’s writing is much more difficult to place in a distinct English language tradition than either Toibin or Haynes. He writes that the genesis of this novel was in a university course that studied Euripides’ Medea and then a ‘feminist thought workshop’. His love of dirt, death and decay in all of his novels from The Legend of a Suicide onwards is psychoanalytic in origin. Indeed were I to lay a bet I would suggest that this novel owes as much to Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun as to Attic tragedy, since such a ‘black sun’ is described early in the novel (4). Its enemy a male force that threatens: ‘her father a threat from the very beginning, an enemy before she was born’ (39).
The key image is the dismemberment of patriarchal law or its chances of reproduction – Medea’s ritual magic revels in a trickery in which self-oppressed princesses are made to tear off the king’s, their father’s, ‘balls’ (191) as a means of ‘renewing’ him: ‘Segmented king, faceless and neutered, returning to some earlier form.’ Later these kings are ‘runt kings’ (125).
The association of woman with that that is deep and dark and buried underneath the world ruled by the Name-of-the-Father. Sub-rational, it is thus beyond or before all words that name or structure that order: a de-centred ‘center’ associated with fluid mutable formlessness (86) at war with the world of men: ‘A king always at the center, never without reference’ (10). However fathers who assert priority over daughters do so themselves under threat from chthonic forces that assert an even greater priority in a world before the establishment of patriarchal order – in this novel a descending layer of primal goddesses from Hekate to ‘Nute, blue god of the Egyptians’ (4).
Hence Medea ends as she begins as a symbol of the resistance of the familial roles that serve the interests of the symbolic, biological or symbolic father. She lies in the bloody dismembered body parts of her brother, using these to distract her pursuing father and his wrath and to ‘unman’ Jason in by mining out his inner being by drawing him into orgasmic admixture with that bloody mass (5).
Medea’s power lies most in her ability to knowingly become a prototype of woman who is and always will be hated because always ‘true’ to a feminine principle that distrusts male order, ready to be known forever as she who killed her male children (13). Medea seems to embrace evil because she knows she will always ever be represented as it but Vann does see her as a good mother (249f.) I think, although I think the argument to show why this is so too complex for me at this moment or this place but it inheres in the fact that her as yet ungendered boys are at threat from the hard wold of men more than she, ‘faces carved by helmets into slats and mouths bare and animal’.
Medea, after all, does not hate ‘men’. She prefers them in sexual love with each other than as warriors whose meaning is the establishment of masculine power in mutual bloodshed and lust for imperial wealth: ‘Some lie with each other reversed and swallowing, others mount, and all are swaying. … A vision Medea would never have imagined, would never have been allowed to see. The most beautiful forms in firelight.’ (32).
This is a wonderful novel, although it lacks (quite unlike Toibin) anything like a redemptive vision or potential – indeed you look for that in vain in Vann (try Goat Mountain). Of course the Greek texts themselves facilitate more potential in Orestes than in Jason, as Euripides presents him.
If I prefer Toibin, it may be because he places the darkness of Clytemnestra (in some senses able to make ‘bright air black’) in the context of a world where male rule is not really ever challenged. Strong women in both other novels (Electra and Antigone) become men in order to rule and serve patriarchy. But Orestes gives me hope for men. Medea is more the stuff of Kristeva and radical philosophy. Her aim is deconstructive as well as destructive, the utopian vision denied representation and therefore saved from the compromises involved in its naming in language compromised by patriarchy and instead part of the repressed structure beneath the world’s and the sea’s surface – ‘liquid and changeable’.
Medea the one who would end a god and all his descendants and the day-lit world. She would do this. She knows this is true, that whatever binds other people to each other has no hold on her. She is bound only by elements …..
All the best
Steve