The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus
Written by Margaret Atwood
The internationally acclaimed Myths series brings together some of the finest writers of our time to provide a contemporary take on some of our most enduring stories. Here, the timeless and universal tales that reflect and shape our lives–mirroring our fears and desires, helping us make sense of the world–are revisited, updated, and made new.
Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad is a sharp, brilliant and tender revision of a story at the heart of our culture: the myths about Penelope and Odysseus. In Homer’s familiar version, The Odyssey, Penelope is portrayed as the quintessential faithful wife. Left alone for twenty years when Odysseus goes to fight in the Trojan Wars, she manages to maintain the kingdom of Ithaca, bring up her wayward son and, in the face of scandalous rumours, keep over a hundred suitors at bay. When Odysseus finally comes home after enduring hardships, overcoming monsters and sleeping with goddesses, he kills Penelope’s suitors and–curiously–twelve of her maids.
In Homer the hanging of the maids merits only a fleeting though poignant mention, but Atwood comments in her introduction that she has always been haunted by those deaths. The Penelopiad, she adds, begins with two questions: what led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to? In the book, these subjects are explored by Penelope herself–telling the story from Hades — the Greek afterworld - in wry, sometimes acid tones. But Penelope’s maids also figure as a singing and dancing chorus (and chorus line), commenting on the action in poems, songs, an anthropology lecture and even a videotaped trial.
The Penelopiad does several dazzling things at once. First, it delves into a moment of casual brutality and reveals all that the act contains: a practice of sexual violence and gender prejudice our society has not outgrown. But it is also a daring interrogation of Homer’s poem, and its counter-narratives — which draw on mythic material not used by Homer - cleverly unbalance the original. This is the case throughout, from the unsettling questions that drive Penelope’s tale forward, to more comic doubts about some of The Odyssey’s most famous episodes. (“Odysseus had been in a fight with a giant one-eyed Cyclops, said some; no, it was only a one-eyed tavern keeper, said another, and the fight was over non-payment of the bill.”)
In fact, The Penelopiad weaves and unweaves the texture of The Odyssey in several searching ways. The Odyssey was originally a set of songs, for example; the new version’s ballads and idylls complement and clash with the original. Thinking more about theme, the maids’ voices add a new and unsettling complex of emotions that is missing from Homer. The Penelopiad takes what was marginal and brings it to the centre, where one can see its full complexity.
The same goes for its heroine. Penelope is an important figure in our literary culture, but we have seldom heard her speak for herself. Her sometimes scathing comments in The Penelopiad (about her cousin, Helen of Troy, for example) make us think of Penelope differently – and the way she talks about the twenty-first century, which she observes from Hades, makes us see ourselves anew too.
Margaret Atwood is an astonishing storyteller, and The Penelopiad is, most of all, a haunting and deeply entertaining story. This book plumbs murder and memory, guilt and deceit, in a wise and passionate manner. At time hilarious and at times deeply thought-provoking, it is very much a Myth for our times.
From the Hardcover edition.
NOMINEE 2006 - IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Strong myths never die. Sometimes they die down, but they don't die out. They double back in the dark, they re-embody themselves, they change costumes, they change key, they speak in new languages, they take on other meanings.
Just for example: the Sibyl of Cumae, desired by Apollo, was granted a life as long in years as the grains in a handful of sand, but she forgot to ask for endless youth. Before ending up as a whispering voice in a heap of dust, she acted as the wise, powerful, oracle-uttering, cave-dwelling, and sometimes manic guide to the Underworld, notably in Virgil's Aeneid. But that wasn't the end of her. Back she came again in a different and somewhat snazzier outfit in George MacDonald's Curdie books, and then in Walter Pater's interpretation of the Mona Lisa, and in H. Rider Haggard's late-nineteenth-century romance, She; and then again in Lost Horizons; and then, in a more benevolent form, as Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings. She casts her shadow over the vampire queens of Anne Rice and, most recently, over Stephen King's 1995 Cupid-and-psycho shocker, Rose Madder, in which the beautiful but sinister oldster totes the full bag of tricks, and more — Water of Death, lots of waving hair, nasty tree with suspicious pomegranates, oracular pronouncements, maze with monster, spidery eating habits, and incipient decomposition — all going to show that young Stephen's time in the school library was not wasted. In each of her incarnations, this extremely long-lived and much-experienced lady must eventually fade away or fall apart: otherwise she'd be a goddess. Meanwhile she can be quite scary; but then, so was the original Sibyl.
Constellations such as this — clusters of motifs and personae and stories — have circled the globe. Cinderella and her little fur or glass slipper and her handsome prince and those who mistreat her have been around for a long time. The beloved girl who in her animal form is a swan (or a goose, or a snail); the hero of obscure origin who overcomes monsters, and even death itself; the journey to the land of the dead — how old are they really? How many times have their tales been told and retold, and how many times will they be told again?
Myth precedes literature: the oldest stories were passed from mouth to ear to mouth long before they travelled from hand to page. As Robert Bringhurst has pointed out in his commentary on Haida poetry, A Story as Sharp as a Knife, oral poetry is local, and although myths may resemble other stories like them around the world, each embodiment of such a story is particular, and takes its meaning and flavour from its own specific context. The story of Medea was spun one way in Athens, another way in Corinth. Who's doing the telling and who's doing the listening have a lot to do with the slant the story's given: this is true even of our own history. Was Richard III really an evil child-murdering hunchback? Probably not, but it suited Shakespeare's royal audience to have it so.
Myths cannot really be translated with any accuracy from their native soil — from their own place and time. We will never know exactly what emotional resonances they had for their ancient audiences because we are not those people and can't fully share their assumptions. But myths can be used — as they have been, so frequently — as the foundation stones for new versions, new renderings — renderings that have, in turn, their own contexts, that find their meanings within their own historical moments.
This, or something like it, seems to have been the concept behind The Myths series, which — rumour has it — was cooked up during one of those legendary, superheated Frankfurt Book Fair evenings by Jamie Byng of Canongate in the U.K., with Louise Dennys of Knopf Canada, Morgan Entrekin of Grove Atlantic in the United States, and Arnulf Conradi, then of BerlinVerlag in Germany.
The idea was to ask a number of writers from around the world to retell a myth, any myth, each in his or her own way and in his or her own language, at a length of roughly a hundred pages. The results would be translated by all participating publishers — as many as the original Fearless Four could entice into their Myths series corral. What were their expectations? New lamps for old, as it were. Perhaps a few shining lights. Increased knowledge of myths that might otherwise have languished in the shadows. Some interesting additions to the worldwide story hoard. And, at the very least, a curious batch of manuscripts produced by a bunch of writers who usually did quite other sorts of things. I'm guessing here, but at least some of these desiderata must have been tucked in among the other items in their hope chests.
It would be fun to ascribe a mythological character to each of the original four publishers. Louise Dennys could be grey-eyed Athene, perhaps — sage goddess of intricate weaving, and of knots and their untying, and thus well equipped to be the editress of my book, once I had managed to produce it. Morgan Entrekin could be a suitably North American Coyote, inventor of novelties, gadgets, and schemes, and patron of unusual neckties; Arnulf Conradi might serve as Poseidon, earthshaker, tamer of horses, and encourager of watery flow, that flow we all need when we write; and Jamie Byng is surely Hermes, player of tricks, master of the crossroads, bearer of messages, and shameless devisor of entanglements.
It was in this guise that Mr. Byng waylaid me one morning in Edinburgh, several years ago, at breakfast. Breakfast is my weakest time of day — I have no willpower then — but, as a god, Byng would already have divined that. He picked his moment well.
I knew this designer-stubbled, well-worn-cashmered person by reputation — he was then a rising small publisher who'd had some very bright ideas, The Assassin's Cloak among them. He made his pitch in an artfully ingenuous manner befitting the stealer of Apollo's cattle and the inventor of the lyre and the first practical joke. Needless to say, I was ensnared: in a help- a-young-publisher, unfamiliar-cornflaked, pre-coffeed moment, I promised to give The Myths caper a try.
I did give it a try. I tried it this way and that, with no results. I couldn't seem to get the kite to fly. As every writer knows, a plot is only a plot, and a plot as such is two-dimensional unless it can be made to come alive, and it can only come alive through the characters in it; and in order to make the characters live, there must be some blood in the mix. I won't sadden myself by detailing my failed attempts. Let's just say there were so many of them that I was at the point of giving the thing up altogether. The task was a great deal more difficult than I'd thought, and not being a mythological being myself, I couldn't call on the ants or fishes to come and help me sort out the words.
"Do you think Jamie Byng would mind very much if I just gave back the advance and cancelled the contract?" I asked my British agent, Vivienne Schuster of Curtis Brown. By this time I was embarrassingly behind deadline, and the first page was just as blank as it had always been. True, I had quite a few thirtieth pages, but they were crumpled up in the waste bin.
Vivienne's upper lip is nothing if not stiff — she has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro — but I detected a quavering over the telephone as she said actually she expected that he might in fact mind quite a lot. But that I shouldn't let that influence me one way or the other. And if I couldn't I couldn't, she added staunchly. But Jamie would probably be gutted.
I am susceptible to British slang. I did not want to be responsible for gutting anyone. "Give me a couple of weeks, then," I said. Desperation being the mother of invention, I started writing The Penelopiad. Don't ask me why, because I don't know. A door opens and you go through, or else you don't; sometimes it's the right door. Let's just say that the hanging of the twelve "maids" — slaves, really — at the end of The Odyssey seemed to me unfair at first reading, back when I was in my teens, and it seems so still; and that my brain was addled early in life by Robert Graves' The Greek Myths. The result of my rather feverish period of writing is the book that has now appeared before you.
I wonder if my fellow participants in The Myths series found the recreation of their own chosen myth as hard to do as I initially found mine? I hope not. But I do hope they found it as rewarding. Writing The Penelopiad allowed me not only to revisit an ancient and powerful tale, but also to explore a few dark alleyways in the story that have always intrigued me. I look forward to the other books in the series, and to seeing how the members of what by now has become a large group of writers have handled their chosen material.
And I'll offer up an egg at the crossroads to Hermes, god of articulation and patron of pathways both neural and other. He or somebody like him opened a door for me when all doors seemed closed; and, as protector of travellers, mental travellers included, he helped me make the necessary connections. In addition to that, he has been very good company along the way.
National Bestseller
“The Penelopiad is a brilliant tour de force that takes an aspect of The Odyssey and opens up new vistas. . . . Atwood takes Penelope’s braininess and puts her at the centre. . . . Odysseus’s 20-year absence leaves lots of room for development; this is just the kind of thing that a retelling of a myth should do. . . . [Atwood] turns a gruesome, barbaric episode into an ironic tragedy of double agents.”
–National Post
“Two things are apparent when you begin reading The Penelopiad. First, this is a writer who is confidently at the height of her powers. And, second, she’s having fun.”
–The Vancouver Sun
“Atwood’s putting Penelope in the starring role is a fine and fresh revisioning. . . . Somehow (it is a measure of her genius that one cannot quite say how), she makes us hear the voice of Penelope, reflecting in Hades on her life, as if it were the voice of the most interesting gossip you have ever had coffee with. . . . This is a wonderful book.”
–The Globe and Mail
“Feels like a breath of fresh air blown in from the Mediterranean Sea. . . . The Penelopiad is Atwood in top form. The woman who wrote The Handmaid’s Tale hasn’t lost her acerbic touch.”
–The Gazette (Montreal)
“What . . . emerge[s] is a startling commentary on the responsibility of power, and of how privilege can shade into complicity. The Penelopiad is anything but a woe-is-woman discourse. . . . adds Atwood’s sly, compassionate voice to the myth of Odysseus and Penelope and, in doing so, increases its already great depth.”
–Calgary Herald
“In this exquisitely poised book, Atwood blends intimate humour with a finely tempered outrage at the terrible injustice of the maids, phrasing both in language as potent as a curse.”
–Sunday Times (UK)
“Penelope flies with the help of the sardonic, dead-pan voice Atwood lends her, a tone — half Dorothy Parker, half Desperate housewives.”
–The Independent (UK)
“‘Spry’ is a word that could almost have been invented to describe Margaret Atwood, who beadily and wittily retells the events surrounding The Odyssey through the voice of Penelope. Pragmatic, clever, domestic, mournful, Penelope is a perfect Atwood heroine.”
–The Spectator (UK)
“Alter[s] one’s point of view toward [the story], imbuing it with a modern sensibility yet revealing some eternal truths about men, women, and the issue of power, including the power to shape a narrative. . . . Atwood shows with intelligence and wit just how complicated and unpretty love can be.”
–O, The Oprah Magazine
“Along with her presentation of the hallucinatory maids and Penelope’s straight talk about her husband, her girly laments about the ferocious competition of Helen and her queenly worries about fending off the suitors, Atwood’s brilliance emerges in the skillful way she has woven her own research on the anthropological underpinnings of Homer’s epic into the patterns of her own stylized version of the poem. . . . A fascinating and rather attractive version of this old, old story, a creation tale about the founding of our civilization meant to be heard over and over and over.”
–Chicago Tribune
“Atwood paints a shrewdly insightful picture of what life in those days might actually have been like. . . . By turns slyly funny and fiercely indignant, Ms. Atwood’s imaginative, ingeniously-constructed ‘deconstruction’ of the old tale reveals it in a new–and refreshingly different–light.”
–The Washington Times
“Atwood’s 17th work of fiction is a gem…flaunts an acid wit and a generous dose of lyricism…In Atwood’s imagination, Penelope and her handmaids are remarkably complex: They are simultaneously ancient and modern, lighthearted and grief-stricken, disenfranchised and powerful.”
–Baltimore Sun
From the Hardcover edition.
Visit Margaret Atwood's website.
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939, and grew up in northern Quebec and Ontario, and later in Toronto. She has lived in numerous cities in Canada, the U.S., and Europe.
She is the author of more than forty books — novels, short stories, poetry, literary criticism, social history, and books for children. Atwood’s work is acclaimed internationally and has been published around the world. Her novels include The Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye — both shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Robber Bride, winner of the Trillium Book Award and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award; Alias Grace, winner of the prestigious Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize and a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and Oryx and Crake, a finalist for The Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, the Orange Prize, and the Man Booker Prize. Her most recent books of fiction are The Penelopiad, The Tent, and Moral Disorder. She is the recipient of numerous honours, such as The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in the U.K., the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature in the U.S., Le Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and she was the first winner of the London Literary Prize. She has received honorary degrees from universities across Canada, and one from Oxford University in England.
Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson.
From the Hardcover edition.
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