New 100-Volume Myth Series
Canongate is publishing a 100-volume myth series. It will feature a re-telling of the world's famous myths. Sounds great.
But it should be avoided, at risk of nausea:
Canongate launches its series with small, beautiful books by three wise women. Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth provides a critical rationale for the project; she is a renegade nun who spent seven years in a Catholic order, so she expertly demythologises sacred lore. Christ, she says, was a political agitator who owes his mythic status to St Paul. A rumour of his resurrection, which we might call an urban myth, became the miraculous basis of a religious faith and, because Easter coincides with spring, nature was enlisted to prove the truth of the fiction. . .
In The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus, Margaret Atwood plays Armstrong's game with vigour and ingenuity. Her agenda is righteously feminist: reconsidering The Iliad, she wrests authorial control from Odysseus by describing the domestic vigil of his long-suffering wife Penelope. She takes the homecoming husband to task for slaughtering the dozen faithful maids who have served Penelope in his absence. Despite Atwood's grievance, the pleasure of her text lies in its witty desecration of Homer's epic. It reminds me of Offenbach's mythological opera buffas, in which Helen of Troy is a predatory harlot and Orpheus is glad to be relieved of the shrewish, nagging Eurydice, although perhaps the Broadway musical is a better analogy, since Atwood arranges her Greek chorus of doomed maids into a 'chorus line', and gives them saucy rhyming ditties to sing. 'It never hurts to be of semi-divine birth', smirks Atwood's Penelope. Her rivalry with Helen is a tabloid catfight: Penelope calls her 'poison on legs'.
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