“Human beings have always been mythmakers,” says Karen Armstrong, in A Short History of Myth , introducing a Canongate series by writers such as Margaret Atwood to reimagine an ancient myth for modern times. Armstrong argued that we need myths to “help us realise the importance of compassion… We need myths that help us to venerate the Earth as sacred once again…”
Two years ago, the Hogarth Press, the publishing company founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1917, launched a series of Shakespeare-inspired novels to be written by bestselling and acclaimed writers like Atwood who has retold The Tempest , Jeanette Winterson ( A Winter’s Tale ), Tracy Chevalier ( Othello ) to introduce the plays to new readers and show how relevant they still are.
The Greek plays, particularly the tragedies, have always found their way into literature. Some book or play or opera is reinventing the dark tales all the time.
This year, at least two writers are retelling the Greek tragedies through their fiction. With darkness at the heart of the Greek plays of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, it perhaps resonates with the dark times we live in. Colm Toibin’s House of Names is inspired by the story of Clytemnestra. The tale was told, among others, by Euripides, who wrote a play from Clytemnestra’s point of view, Sophocles ( Electra ) and Aeschylus The Oresteia , a trilogy).
A powerful king, Agamemnon, sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to the gods; his wife, Clytemnestra, feels betrayed and murders him; their outraged children Orestes and Electra commit matricide. Toibin taps into this spiral of violence in the house of Atreus, trying to understand how one murder leads to another, one atrocity in retaliation to an event in the past. With one terror attack following another in the world today, it’s not difficult for Toibin to hold up a mirror to the present through the past. His Orestes is not pursued by Furies like in the Greek myths, but is the quiet one capable of doing much harm without making it apparent. How many times have we read about the perpetrator of a terror attack being an ordinary person seemingly incapable of carrying out such acts?
Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie is retelling the myth of Sophocles’ Antigone in Home Fire , to be released this September. After a bloody civil war, two brothers leading two sides into battle are killed. The new king of Thebes, Creon, decides that one brother will be honoured and the other left on the battlefield. The story is about their sister Antigone who promises to defy Creon and bury her brother; it’s primarily a story of love and loyalties.
In Shamsie’s reinvention, it is reported to be still a story about love and loyalties but told through the colliding strands of two Muslim families, one trying to live down the legacy of a missing jihadist father, and the other living a privileged life in politics. What sacrifices will be made in the name of love?
