ESeminar January 2008 - Topic 3

Euripides Bound: Hal Duncan 's use of Greek tragedy
Antony Keen, The Open University

In recent years, there has been a considerable amount of attention given to the Canongate Myth series and their retellings of Greek, Roman and other mythological tales.[1] At the same time, in a less lauded section of the literary world, Scottish author Hal Duncan has been retelling Athenian tragedy in a fashion no less remarkable than that of the Canongate authors.[2]

Unlike Canongate authors Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson, both of whom have written science fiction whilst distancing themselves from the genre, [3] Hal Duncan is an unashamed author of science fiction; even though his work drifts across the loosely defined boundary between sf and fantasy, to Duncan it's all science fiction.[4] The Books of All Hours, published in two parts as Vellum (Macmillan, 2005) and Ink (Macmillan, 2007), is a single thousand-page novel. The Vellum is an infinite canvas, in which an infinite variety of worlds can be found. These worlds are run behind-the-scenes by the Unkin, the ‘angels'. The multi-stranded and fractured narrative follows seven characters, who are or become Unkin themselves. They recur in different forms and in different settings throughout the novel. In this respect The Books of All Hours is heavily influenced by the ideas of Michael Moorcock. [5] There are seven characters who we encounter again and again: the ‘action-man' Jack Carter, his lover Thomas Messenger, his sister Anna, the helper Don MacChuill, the ‘brains' Guy Renard, the older man Seamus Finnan, and the anti-hero Joey Pechorin. [6]

This paper is concerned with Volumes Two and Three of the four that make up the whole novel. Both these books are given a large part of their structure through appropriation of Athenian literature. Volume Two features Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, and Volume Three showcases Euripides' Bacchae. Duncan does not simply retell the mythological narratives, or take a ‘tracing-paper' approach, whereby a classical myth is retold against a science fiction background, often using anagrams or incomplete anagrams to name characters. [7] What he does is to embed the structure of a particular telling of a myth into the architecture of his novel. Before he tackles the Greek dramas with which this paper is concerned, he has already done something similar in Book One, where the character Phreedom Rider's (a version of Anna) search for her brother Thomas is intertwined with the Sumerian goddess Inanna's descent to the underworld.

Prometheus [8]

Volume Two of The Book of All Hours begins with an ‘Eclogue' rather than a prologue, which according to the ‘Acknowledgments' at the end of Vellum (p. 527), [9] is based upon Virgil's Eclogues 4 and 7. [10] The first chapter proper is entitled ‘The Hammers of Hephaestos' [sic]. The setting is the trenches of the Western Front in the First World War. Two military policemen, Powers and Slaughter, are dragging a prisoner. Behind them is another man, Smith. The prisoner is revealed to be Seamus Finnan, or at least a version of him, whom the reader has met in the previous volume. He is someone who becomes Unkin. The reader is at first lead to believe that they are seeing events from Finnan's past.

Smith manacles Finnan to a rock, and then fixes him with a bayonet through the chest. All the while he expresses uncertainty about the rightness of his task and disquiet with what he is asked to do. Power engages him in dialogue, arguing that Finnan's fate is deserved. By two or three pages into this narrative, a reader familiar with Greek tragedy should be aware of what is being done. The characters are re-enacting the opening scene of Aeschylus' [11] Prometheus Bound. Smith is Hephaestus. Powers and Slaughter are Cratos and Bia. Prometheus is Finnan himself.

Prometheus is a name with strong resonances in the history of science fiction. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818, revised 1831), identified by Brian Aldiss (1973: 7-39) as the first science fiction novel, is subtitled The Modern Prometheus. The Prometheus Award is given annually by the Libertarian Futurist Society to the best work of libertarian science fiction. It's perhaps therefore somewhat surprising that Duncan 's is one of the most direct confrontations of the myth in sf literature.

The play appeals to Duncan for many reasons. One he has identified is that where many people would begin with the theft of fire and Prometheus' initial defiance of Zeus, Aeschylus begins after.[12] Duncan finds the aftermath to the theft of fire to be more interesting. In particular he identifies humanity's ingratitude for what Prometheus has done for them as being a key point that he wishes to work with.

Duncan layers many nuances upon his retelling. The Aeschylean words Finnan hears Smith and Powers speaking is not what they are actually saying. Finnan finds himself uttering, almost against his will, a version of Prometheus' opening speech from Aeschylus play (lines 88-127). Then the scene shifts to a basement in the early twenty-first century, where Finnan is secured in a similar fashion to in 1916, prior to being interrogated. Then the scene slips again to a recuperation hospital in 1917, and then 1920s Glasgow, where Finnan is a union organizer and activist. (At this point it would be fascinating to know if Duncan has been influenced by Tony Harrison's 1998 film Prometheus, where the Titan is similarly used as a symbol of working-class defiance against capitalism.)

The second chapter introduces a new strand. One version of Jack Carter, who may have been Finnan's commanding officer in the trenches, is part of an archaeological expedition in search of a lost Sumerian city. Eighty years later, his grandson, another Jack Carter, is reading his grandfather's journals, and those of a second expedition in 1942. This narrative is heavily influenced by the works of H.P. Lovecraft (a debt acknowledged by references to Lovecraft's fictional Miskatonic University ). But it also sets up a dialogue with the Prometheus narrative. The chapter is called ‘Prometheus Found', and Carter's expedition it into the Caucasus, where Prometheus was in legend imprisoned ( Prometheus Bound 422). Carter's quest can be likened to the early stages of the Prometheus myth, in that he is engaged upon a search for knowledge that has previously been kept hidden, just as humans knew nothing of fire before Prometheus brought it to them – and there is a sense that this knowledge will be dangerous. Space does not allow further discussion of this thread, or the third thread in Volume Two, that of a terrorist Jack Carter in a futuristic yet imperial 1999 (or of the threads from Volume One that recur in the ‘Errata' sections). However, it should be noted that Duncan feels that the story he wishes to tell is related as much by the gaps between the narrative strands and their interaction as by the texts themselves.

Duncan returns to the Prometheus myth, and follows it through to its conclusion. MacChuill appears to Finnan as one of his soldiers, O'Sheen (i.e. Oceanus). The Oceanus scene elides from Finnan's 1920s memories into the twenty-first century version, revealing that he is part of an attempt to extract information from Finnan, by imposing the Prometheus archetype upon him. Anna, here Finnan's girlfriend from before the war, is placed in the role of Io. As Hermes, the messenger who does not deliver a messenger's speech, we get not Thomas Messenger – the pun would perhaps be too obvious, but another type of angelos, the angel Metatron, one of the senior members of the Unkin (the ‘dukes').

Duncan cites two translations of Prometheus Bound that he used, those of Henry David Thoreau (which he used through Van Anglen 1986) and of Thomson (1932). But neither of these were his first exposure to the play. This came from a television production. As he says:

Years and years back there was a BBC version of Prometheus Bound … where it's a completely simple stage, and you've got Prometheus in this kind of dusty grey greatcoat, bound to what could actually be concrete by the twisting steel girder type things … and the way it was presented, suddenly you realize, this is the Russian Revolution. What they're doing is taking Prometheus as Trotsky …

From this description, it is possible to identify the programme Duncan saw. It was not a production of the Prometheus Bound itself, but of Tom Paulin's Seize the Fire, commissioned by the Open University in 1988 for their course Fifth-Century Athens: Democracy & City-State. [13] Seize the Fire is itself a reception of the Prometheus Bound, attempting to get through the story in under twenty-five minutes, as opposed to the seventy the full text would require. It deliberately employs modern, and often coarse, language, and seeks to find contemporary political relevance. [14] It clearly influences Duncan 's portrayal of the Prometheus figure. [15] Reading Prometheus as a Trotsky figure is a development of the view of Prometheus as Romantic hero, epitomized in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820). [16] It is not clear to me whether Duncan was aware of John Lehmann's Prometheus and the Bolsheviks (1937), or other Soviet attempts to appropriate Prometheus, such as Ivan Kavaleridze's suppressed film Prometheus (1935). [17]

What is clear is that this reading of Prometheus as socialist and Romantic hero leads to Duncan 's final conclusion about the nature of the information that Metatron and his fellow dukes are attempting to extract from Seamus. That information is, in the end, the answer to the prophecy of the child that will be stronger than its father.

So who's the son – the child – that's greater than its father? I'll tell ye who it is, Anna.

Humanity.
(Vellum¸468)

Such an optimistic and positive reading of the Prometheus myth, one imbued with faith in the human spirit, stands in marked contrast to the pessimistic approach of Harrison.

The other way in which Seize the Fire particularly influences Vellum is in the presentation of the Chorus. In Seize the Fire, the Chorus are represented by a single voice, [18] which is disembodied and invisible. In Vellum, the role of the Chorus is taken by bitmites, sentient pieces of nanotechnology that are introduced into Seamus Finnan's body as a means of aiding his assimilation to the Prometheus archetype. The bitmites speak with a single voice, but they too are invisible, being too small to be seen. But where they differ from the Chorus in both Prometheus Bound and Seize the Fire is in their role in driving the action. In Aeschylus, the Chorus are, as they often are in tragedy observers. They are sympathetic to Prometheus' cause, but they can do nothing to aid him, though they choose in the end to share his fate. This disengagement is emphasized in Seize the Fire (which, needing to reduce the length of the piece, minimizes the Chorus as one method of achieving that aim). In Duncan, on the other hand, the bitmites drive the plot along. The cataclysm at the end, the equivalent of Zeus splitting the rock on which Prometheus is bound, is in Vellum the Evenfall, when the bitmites burst out of Prometheus/Finnan and rewrite the Vellum, destroying the order that the dukes have sought to impose.

Bacchae

Twenty years elapse between the end of Vellum and the second part of The Book of All Hours, Ink. The structure of the second part is the same as that of the first – different versions of the characters are seen though various story strands. One of those in Volume Three concerns a travelling troupe of players, performing in the various independent kingdoms that dukes have established across the Vellum. But this troupe has an ulterior motive, which is to destroy these petty dictatorships where possible. There are clearly deliberate echoes here of the Players in Hamlet, though the Players are pawns of Hamlet's schemes, rather than conspirators. [19] And the play Duncan has them perform is based upon Bacchae.

Duncan sees a direct thematic link between Prometheus Bound and Bacchae. He regards both as ‘humanist' plays. As noted above, for Duncan the child that will be stronger than the father is humanity, that will outgrow the need for the gods. His reading of Bacchae is that Pentheus represents divine power, with all its restrictive and repressive elements, whilst Dionysus represents humanity, and the urge to get out and enjoy life through drink and sex. Humanity, on this reading, clearly wins. Such a reading is drawn from the works of noted sf author Philip K. Dick, and in particular his 1978 essay ‘Cosmogony and Cosmology' (to be found in Sutin 1995).

Duncan adds further layers of identification. He makes a connection with the characters of the Commedia dell'Arte. Jack Carter is Dionysus, but he is also Harlequin. Joey is Pentheus is Pierrot – the link is between Pierrot's tear make up and Pentheus named for sorrow ( Bacchae 367). Guy is Teiresias is Scaramouche. The old man Pantaloon becomes Cadmus, and is played by Don. Anna is Columbine is Agave. This links Duncan 's work once again with that of Michael Moorcock. Pierrot, Columbine and Harlequin are recurring motifs in Moorcock's Cornelius Quartet, especially in the final two novels, The English Assassin (1972) and The Condition of Muzak (1977, revised 1979). Thomas, meanwhile, plays the Chorus – ‘kouros, darling koré of our comedies' as Duncan writes ( Ink, 52), punning across the Greek language with serious intent.

The final layer that Duncan brings in is that of the English horror story. The players are using their drama to trap and kill the duke. He is lured into performing Pierrot's role in the final scene. In a sequence similar to Robin Hardy and Anthony Schaffer's film The Wicker Man (1973), the duke takes on the role, and the death of Pentheus/Pierrot is then enacted for real. Duncan may not have had The Wicker Man directly in mind, but he certainly recognizes the similarity – as he says, The Wicker Man and Bacchae are in many ways the same story.

References back to the use of Prometheus in Volume Two are scattered through Volume Three. And as with the Prometheus myth, the story of Bacchae spills over into other threads in the novel. We see Phreedom leading her Maidens across the land of Themes, and another Phreedom bears a child in New York that she then kills. And is the duke really another incarnation of Jack, who is both Anna's child and the lover of her brother? By this point in the novel, Duncan is interested in raising such issues, but not concerned to answer them. This is not a novel where narrative follows a consistent linear path.

Conclusion

I've tried to give a flavour of the ways in which Hal Duncan uses these two tragedies in his novel. As The Book of All Hours is over a thousand pages long in total, it is impossible in an article of this length to give full in-depth coverage, and there are other classical allusions, such as his use of Virgil, that I have barely touched upon. Nevertheless, I hope I have shown that Duncan 's use of Classical mythology is exciting and challenging. Indeed, good though the novels in the Canongate Myth are, I would argue that none of them are as innovative in their use of mythological narrative as Duncan.

Bibliography

Aldiss, Brian W. (1973), Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction ( London : Weidenfield and Nicholson)

Atwood, Margaret (2005), ‘“Aliens have taken the place of angels”', The Guardian, June 17 th 2005, http://arts.guardian.co.uk/fridayreview/story/0,,1507718,00.html [accessed 11/12/07]

Beard, Mary (2005), ‘A new spin on Homer', The Guardian Review, October 29 th 2005, http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1602001,00.html [accessed 3/12/07]

Conrad, Peter (2005), ‘The pull of the Greeks', The Observer Review, October 23 rd 2005, http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/classics/0,,1598412,00.html [accessed 3/12/07]

Dougherty, Carol (2006), Prometheus ( London : Routledge)

Emlyn-Jones, Chris, and Purkis, John (1997 [1989]), A209 Fifth-Century Athens : Democracy & City-State. Block 2: The Greek Theatre in its Dramatic and Social Context ( Milton Keynes : Open University. Bound with Block 1. First published as part of course A294, 1989)

Griffith, Mark (1977), The Authenticity of “Prometheus Bound” ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press)

—— (1983), (ed.) Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983)

Hall, Edith (2002), ‘Tony Harrison's Prometheus : A View from the Left', Arion 10.1 (Spring/Summer 2002), 129-40

Herington, C.J. (1970), The Author of the Prometheus Bound ( Austin : University of Texas Press)

Hubbard, T.K. (1991), ‘Recitative anapaests and the authenticity of Prometheus Bound ', American Journal of Philology 112 (1991), 439-60

Hughes, Bettany (2007), ‘More ancient myths revisited', The Times, November 2 nd 2007, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/fiction/article2792010.ece [accessed 3/12/07]

Le Guin, Ursula K. (2007), ‘Head cases', The Guardian Review, September 22 nd 2007, http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,2174341,00.html [accessed 11/12/07]

Lehmann, John (1937), Prometheus and the Bolsheviks ( London : A.A. Knopf)

Pattoni, Maria Pia (1987), L'autenticità del Prometeo incatenato di Eschilo ( Pisa : Scuola normale superiore)

Reid, Christopher (2007), (ed.) Letters of Ted Hughes ( London : Faber and Faber)

Rieu, E.V. (1949), (tr.) Virgil: The Pastoral Poems (The Eclogues) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, reprinted with Latin text 1954)

Saïd, Suzanne (1985), Sophiste et tyran, ou, le problème du Prométhée enchaîné ( Paris : Klincksieck)

Sommerstein, Alan H. (1996), Aeschylean Tragedy ( Bari : Levante Editori)

Sutin, Lawrence (1995), (ed.) The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings by Philip K. Dick ( New York : First Vintage Books)

Taplin, Oliver (1989 [1977]), The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The dramatic use of exist and entrances in Greek tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, first published 1977, corrected edition 1989)

Thomson, George (1932), (ed.) Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press)

Van Anglen, Kevin P. (1986), (ed) Henry David Thoreau: Translations ( Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press)

West, Martin L. (1990), Studies in Aeschylus ( Stuttgart : Teubner)

Williamson, Neil (2007), ‘Blood for ink: Getting serious with Hal Duncan', Interzone 209 (April 2007), 8-11

Woytak, Richard (1984), ‘The Promethean Movement in Interwar Poland ', East European Quarterly, 18, 273-8

[1] Currently released in the series (all published in Edinburgh by Canongate Books) are: Margaret Attwood, The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus (2005); Jeanette Winterson, Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles (2005); Victor Pelevin, The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur (2006); and Salley Vickers, Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus (2007) (all Greek); David Grossman, Lion's Honey: The Myth of Samson (2006) (Biblical); Alexander McCall Smith, Dream Angus: The Celtic God of Dreams (2006) (Celtic); Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis (2007) (Roman); and Su Tong, Binu and the Great Wall: The Myth of Meng (2007) (Chinese). Further volumes have been announced, by Chinua Achebe, A.S. Byatt, Milton Hatoum, Natsuo Kirino, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Donna Tartt, and Dubravka Ugresic. For media attention, see e.g. Beard 2005; Conrad 2005; Hughes 2007.

[2] I have only read Atwood, Ali Smith and Vickers of the Canongate volumes. My judgement on the others is based upon reviews. I've no wish to belittle the Canongate series, merely to point out that this is not the only place where one can find fresh retellings of classical myths.

[3] Of Atwood's novels, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), The Blind Assassin (2000) and Oryx and Crake (2003) are sf ( The Handmaid's Tale won the 1987 Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel published in the UK). Atwood tends to distance herself from sf by drawing a distinction between science fiction and speculative fiction (see e.g. Atwood 2005), though it's a distinction few sf critics would recognize. Winterson similarly has resisted the sf label for here 2007 novel The Stone Gods (e.g. as quoted in ‘Science in Fiction: Interview with novelist Jeanette Winterson', New Scientist 2618, August 25 th 2007, 49), but clearly is an sf novel (see Le Guin's review, 2007).

[4] Unless otherwise indicated, information on Duncan 's own views comes from an interview I conducted with him in March 2007, which will be published in Vector: The Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association 256 (2008).

[5] For the influence of Moorcock on Duncan, see his own comments in Williamson 2007, 9.

[6] The roles that each plays in the different narrative strands, and the exact characterization of each, varies widely.

[7] I have borrowed the term from an unpublished paper by Nick Lowe, ‘The past is an alien planet: classical literature as science-fiction universe' delivered at the SF and the Canon conference at Anglia Ruskin University, March 24 th 2007. A typical example of this practice would be the 1978 Doctor Who story ‘Underworld', based on the Jason myth.

[8] I became aware of Dougherty 2006 too late to make use of it in this section.

[9] Pagination is taken from the 2005 Macmillan hardback. The 2006 Pan paperback has different pagination.

[10]Duncan uses the titles given to the individual poems by Rieu 1949, ‘The Golden Age Returns' and ‘The Song of Silenus'.

[11] The much-discussed (by classicists) question of whether or not this play was actually by Aeschylus is not relevant here. For the debate see, for Aeschylean authorship: Herington 1970, Saïd 1985, Pattoni 1987, and Hubbard 1991; against: Griffith 1977, Griffith 1983: 32-4, Taplin 1989 [1977]: 477-9; West 1990: 65-72, Sommerstein 1996. A recent contribution that I have not seen is A.J. Podlecki, ‘Echoes of the Prometheia in Euripides' Andromeda ?', delivered at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association, who apparently is also against Aeschylean authorship. My own view is broadly for, on the grounds that it was not questioned in antiquity (Griffith 1977: 226-54, Griffith 1983: 32), and that as we possess less than ten percent of the seventy to ninety plays that Aeschylus wrote (figure from OCD ³ s.v. ‘Aeschylus'), arguments on stylistic grounds cannot be considered conclusive. Duncan shows no signs of being aware that there is an issue, and I suspect it would not concern him anyway.

[12]Duncan follows the generally-accepted view (see, e.g., Thomson 1932: 32-3) that Prometheus Bound was the opening play in the Promethia. I have some sympathy for the notion that it was actually the second; see Griffith 1982: 282.

[13] And subsequently published by Faber and Faber in 1990.

[14] Paulin discusses what he was doing in Seize the Fire in two interviews ‘The making of Seize the Fire ' and ‘ Seize the Fire and Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound ', that were included on Performance Cassette 6 of the Open University course material. In the latter he says that he was ‘trying to get a language which while it wasn't a raised or elevated or polished language, at the same time wasn't absolutely street language, though it's near enough to that.'

[15] Seize the Fire seems to have this effect. After I first saw it, I came to see Aeschylus' play as an allegory of the Athenian treatment of Themistocles, a theory I expounded in a paper entitled ‘Themistokles' liver: the politics behind Aischylos' Prometheus Bound ', delivered to the Midlands and North Ancient History Postgraduate Seminar, on April 27 th 1994. The paper has not been published, and is unlikely to be, as I am no longer convinced by the arguments I put forward.

[16] Such a view of Aeschylus' Prometheus was dismissed by scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but reasserted by Thomson 1932; see 6 and n. 1 for the scholars he rejects. Harrison 's Prometheus is in part an engagement with Shelley's conception, as he states in ‘Fire and poetry', the introduction to the published screenplay. Paulin himself says (in ‘The making of Seize the Fire ') that he was trying to get away from the Romantic view of Prometheus, though he does say that he conceived of Zeus as a Stalin figure.

[17] I owe my knowledge of Lehmann's work to Harrison 's ‘Fire and poetry', and to Hall 2002. Kavaleridze's film I know of thanks to a paper by Pantelis Michelakis, ‘Prometheus in early cinema', delivered at a British Museum/Hellenic Society/Open University dayschool Prometheus on Stage and Screen, 24 th November 2007. At the same time as the Bolsheviks were using Prometheus, he was also being used by Poland to stir up feeling against Soviet domination of eastern Europe; see Woytak 1984.

[18] Discussed by producer Tony Coe in ‘ Seize the Fire and Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound '. A single voice is the standard approach to the Chorus used in the audio recordings of drama in the OU course; experiments with other approaches were found not to work (see Emlyn-Jones in Emlyn-Jones, and Purkis 1996 [1989]: 17).

[19] Duncan is not the first to see a thematic connection between Bacchae and Hamlet ; Ted Hughes saw one (see Reid 2007: 117).