Reimagining the Gods
A few weeks ago, I wrote a review of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. The other day I stumbled onto an episode called “Reimagining the Gods” on Eric Molinsky’s podcast Imaginary Worlds. It features an interview with Miller, in which she speaks a bit about her career and her two novels, the most recent of which is Circe.
Aside from Neil Gaiman, with his books American Gods and Anansi Boys, Miller is probably the best known writer of mythic fiction at the moment. What’s interesting are the distinctions between the type of mythic fiction written by Miller and Gaiman.
Miller is a classics scholar who has managed to cross that difficult-to-traverse bridge between fantasy and literary fiction. She doesn’t set her books in the present, as do many writers of urban or paranormal fantasy. That fact, along with elegance of her prose, allows readers whom seldom stray from the path of literary fiction to justify their embrace of Miller’s books.
Gaiman is, by contrast, viewed as less of a literary writer and more of a “straight fantasy” author. Just as Miller draws from Greek myth, Gaiman’s American Gods draws from Norse myth, but he extends those myths into the contemporary era, which means his novels tend to be classified as contemporary or urban fantasy.
This tension seems inherent in the genre of mythic fiction. Is it literature or fantasy, art or entertainment, creative or derivative? This tension is nicely captured in a comment by a former boyfriend of Miller who teased that she was writing “Homeric fan fiction.”
In the podcast, she says he has since apologized, but I actually like the term. In a sense, all mythic fiction is a kind of fan fiction. Sure, the tales and storytellers are potentially thousands of years old, but there’s the same urge to carry a beloved tale forward.
And why not? This is how myth worked in the first place. These stories do not, and probably never did, belong to one person. They belonged to a society of people, and then they belonged to humanity itself.
Miller states that she was terrified that other classicists would see her work as somehow blasphemous, daring to rewrite Homer. However, she found that they were, in fact, supportive. “What I kind of realized,” she said, “which is what I should have realized earlier if I’d been thinking about it, is that these stories have been retold from the very first.”
And we’re still adding to these myths today. No just Miller and Gaiman, but all the writers and artists who work on myth-referencing comic books, movies, games, statues, tapestries and more. They are all a kind of fan fiction, some of it good and some awful, that grows and flourishes like corals building their homes on the skeletons of their long-lead and yet ever-present forebears.
Myths shape, extend and entwine, filling one artistic niche after another, becoming an immense conceptual sculpture that extends throughout human space-time, one that none of us simple, short-lived creatures will ever grasp in its entirety. Which is fine, as long as we can appreciate the dazzling bits available to us and maybe, just maybe, add our own motes of color and shape now and again.
Image: Dionysus with satyrs. Interior of a cup painted by the Brygos Painter, Cabinet des Médailles
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