#char youre an icon for constantly enabling me in my askbox ily

[transmutationisms]

I’m like a dog running for food when it comes to Greek mythology. It’s just so interesting how the stories mutate, like with Persephone and Hades going from kidnapping to modern retelling deciding to make them in love and Pers a girlboss who pegs. Or Medusa! Went from always a monster to Ovid’s “cursed rape victim” (I’m a little biased though cos I like that more)

literally yeah when it's done well, psychologising a myth or classical tragedy gives you So much room to manoeuvre. like okay full disclosure i made that post because i was re-reading the rilke poem "orpheus. euridike. hermes" for Reasons lmao but like there's a prime example.

in the classical tellings orpheus looking back is generally foreordained, or a commentary on the weakness of the human will, or on the essential disjunction between living and dead (ie, orpheus's 'failure' was that he tried to retrieve eurydice instead of dying to join her). in rilke we get something totally different: this very compassionate exploration of his inner experience. his senses are split (gaze runs ahead, hearing stays behind), he's longing for her, he loves her so much that his music creates an entire "world of mourning" and his lyre becomes one with his hand "like tendrils of a rosebush in an olive bough"

and then too we also get eurydice: dead, already forgotten orpheus's face, "already become root" and hindered by her long grave-clothes as she walks with the messenger-god. so this is achieving a completely different effect than the universal-moral tellings. it's all focussed on their interiority, the buildup of how doomed they are, you as a reader seeing exactly why orpheus can't resist turning around and also seeing exactly why it would be futile even if he had resisted. it's not that rilke was uninterested in universalising the characters (he does much more of it in the orpheus cycle imo, although that's also a treatise on aesthetics) but that, by bringing the psychological domain to the myth, he's able to accomplish something totally different with it

like this sounds hyperbolic but i really don't think Love Stories the way we define them now exist in most classical texts. the love is very different if it's something divinely ordered, or experienced as an external intrusion into the psyche, or used in a moral or ethical discourse (often all three at once lol). it's a signifier of something else, it's rarely dissected on its own experiential terms, even if it's used to provoke catharsis

anyway yeah i love a good re-telling and also this is a succession blog so i can just go ahead and Say that i do think succ does this in the sense that it invokes classical tragedies (sometimes by name, sometimes by theme, frequently by story architecture) but then is totally driven by character psychology and psychoanalysis. oedipus roy is interesting to us precisely because we're forced to experience the internal conflict: i love him, i hate him, i'm gonna outsource it to my therapist (no you're not). it's a whole different modality of storytelling and it gives a totally different type of depth to the characters.