In and out of the Labyrinth: Myth and Minotaur in MacDonald Harris's Bull Fire and Steven Sherrill's the Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break
2007; Volume: 18; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0897-0521
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoFor at least three millennia, if not more, the western has been intrigued by the legendary King Minos of Crete; his family--a wife, two daughters, and the wife's unusual son; two sons-in-law, one mortal and one divine; the king's architect; and the mysterioNote: Table creeusly labyrinthine nature of building that the king ordered his architect to design. Ovid, Virgil, and Jean Racine are only three of the writers who before the twentieth century established either the entire story or sequences detachable from it: how Minos's wife Pasiphae fell in love with white bull; how her husband's architect, Daedalus, built cowlike contrivance in which Pasiphae crouched to fulfill her desire; how child, half bull and half human, was born to the queen; how Daedalus built the to imprison the bull child, Asterion or the Minotaur, who unlike his father's kind craved meat; how the Minotaur demanded human victims; how Minos's daughter, Ariadne, betrayed her half brother by showing an Athenian prince, Theseus, how to negotiate the Labyrinth and kill the monster; how Theseus abandoned Ariadne; how the god Dionysos (Bacchus) found her and married her; how Daedalus and his son made wings and escaped from the Labyrinth; and how Theseus married Ariadne's sister, Phaedra, who tragically fell in love with Theseus's son by an earlier entanglement. It's quite story. Furthermore, the Labyrinth itself has been from the beginning not only the object of scholarly speculation but also inspiration for even the architects of Christian churches; the most famous maze in the world lies in the nave of Chartres Cathedral in France (Doob passim; Wright passim). Until the twentieth century, even among the ancient Greeks themselves, what we will call the Minoan Story if not dismissed altogether as myth, regarded as irretrievable history become legend; after all, as J. Lesley Fitton reminds us, By the fifth century BC the Classical Greeks had lost all factual knowledge of the period known to us at the Bronze Age (14). The twentieth century, however, began with challenge to earlier assumptions. Inspired by Heinrich Schliemann's archaeological work at Troy and Mycenae, an Englishman named Arthur Evans--later knighted--began excavations in 1900 at Knossos, city site in northern Crete that had long been identified with Minos and his reign (Fitton 115-137). In his The Palace of Minos, which appeared in four volumes from 1921 to 1935, gave not only archaeological support for the historicity of Minos but also a local habitation and name for the Labyrinth itself and perhaps even its famous monster incumbent: the sprawling palace of Knossos with its frescoes of adolescents leaping dangerously if gracefully over the backs of bulls. Indeed, as Joseph Alexander MacGillivray points out, the willful Evans was certain he had entered the Minotaur's domain (189) and never doubted that these scenes [such as those of bull leapers] were to be read literally. It did not seem to have occurred to him that there might be other explanations, less literal, more metaphorical, or even astral (220). Unfortunately, since contributed an entry on his findings to the eleventh edition of the influential Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910-11), his confident historicization of Minotaur and Labyrinth was not only accepted but soon taken for granted by an excited public (MacGillivray 255-256; Irwin 246-249). Many contemporary reader has grown up thinking that the lavish spreads in Time-Life's The Epic of Man (1961) and numerous National Geographic issues showed Knossos as it really once was. Nowadays there is enough evidence that Evans's reconstruction of Knossos as the Labyrinth was, as Fitton puts it, largely the product of his imagination (137); nowadays we know that the artists employed to restore the frescoes of bull leapers and bare-breasted courtiers restored rather more creatively than they should have (MacGillivray 186-187; 204-205). …
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