Can we fill both Greek teachers and tiktok girls? Madeline Miller, she succeeded. On the Chinese social network, the hashtag
Each time, a very precise knowledge of ancient texts, but “pimped”, as the Americans would say, to resonate romantically with contemporary issues… which are sometimes, it must be remembered, also those of yesterday. If The Song of Achilles speaks well of the angry hero of the Trojan War, it is not him that Madeline Miller chooses to make speak in fact, but his friend Patroclus, whom Antiquity has always presented as the lover of the leader of the Myrmidons, before a chaste and absurd veil was laid down over the ages on this relationship to transform it into a simple camaraderie.
Recounting their youth, their meeting, then their tragic experience in Troy, the quadra native of Boston (1978) will have succeeded in splitting the armor of her heroes to show them in the human nudity of their feelings. To the point that today, she confides to us, many young people use her book to come out as homosexuals.
As for her second novel, Circe, it quickly became a feminist manifesto, with Miller exploring holes in the fabric of myth to give back to the mysterious magician of the Odyssey, who rattles men into pigs, both a clean voice and extremely trendy “witch” news. On the occasion of the publication of Galatea, where she revisits, from the point of view of the statue made alive by Aphrodite, the story of the sculptor Pygmalion who fell in love with her creation, Le Point spoke with the sympathetic, energetic , literate, thanks to which the myths come back to life.
Le Point: Since when have Greek myths been part of your life?
Madeline Miller: Since childhood. My mother read the IIiad and the Odyssey to me when I was little and I continue to love them, to immerse myself in them, to the point of sometimes fighting with them by exploring them from all angles! But the goal is always to share them. I was a teacher, and continuing to pass on those stories that still feel so relevant and meaningful to me today is the best thing I can do today.
Why did you begin, in your romantic enterprise, with the figure of Achilles, the angry warrior?
I’ve always been fascinated by that moment in the Iliad when Patroclus is killed and Achilles completely loses his mind. He explodes, literally, with grief and rage. The Iliad is first and foremost a story about the feeling of loss. We are told that Achilles has retired to his tent, that he is adamant and that nothing, nothing will cause him to fight again for the Greeks. Suddenly, Patroclus dies and this resolve is shattered. I wanted to understand this relationship. Who is Patroclus and why does he mean so much to Achilles?
So yes, of course, I wrote this book because of Achilles, his incredible youth compared to other warriors, and the terrible choice he had to make at such a young age: to live a long and happy life without anyone knowing his name or die young and be famous forever. But it’s Patroclus that I’m talking about because what interested me even more was this relationship between the two men.
When I was at school, we didn’t talk at all about Achilles and Patroclus as lovers. And I have always been frustrated that this interpretation, so common in antiquity, has been erased over the centuries. Do you realize that in Wolfgang Petersen’s film Troy (2004), they are presented as mere cousins! This is changing, and that is very good.
So much so that Achilles can be made an LGBT icon like Circe can be made a feminist heroine and Galatea, to whom you devoted your last book, a victim of patriarchal influence…
Indeed and, when a reader tells me that he gave Les Larmes d’Achille to his parents to come out, it’s me who has tears in my eyes. About Circe, what interested me is that we don’t know, deep down, in the Odyssey why she turns men into pigs. What are his motives ? And why is she not being punished for it? One can also wonder – as for Achilles and Patroclus – why only Circe was retained for her image of a witch who transforms men and not the other aspect of her personality, the one who advises Odysseus in an extremely benevolent way…
It’s worse for Galatea, who has no personality…
It’s true, we know absolutely nothing about her. In some versions we don’t even have his name! So, his point of view… Every time I studied this story with my students, I was furious because of this lack and I kept thinking about this: what does it feel like to wake up in someone who is obsessed with perfection and who is found to have created you to be perfect, and to live as a living doll? What if you weren’t that living doll? What if you were a real person? Obviously there is a lot of feminism in this reading. I’m a feminist and I feel like a lot of people are still trying to turn women into living dolls…
But that is precisely why we must continue to study these myths, which have obvious utility in our time. We must work on them again, and even rewrite them, as the ancient authors, moreover, always did. If we go back to Circe, the version of her story, as told in the Odyssey, is Odysseus’ version. But Ulysses, as we know, is a liar, the text constantly reminds us of this, like a small voice telling us: “You don’t have to listen to him. Never mind, let’s get Circe talking to get her version!
This is what Margaret Atwood did with The Odyssey of Penelope (Robert Laffont), in which it is Ulysses’ wife who gives her version of the story. Interestingly, Atwood makes Penelope lie too!
Yes ! And one of my favorite parts of the book is how it tackles the thorny issue of murdering the handmaidens. More and more scholars and people are talking about it today, but Atwood was one of the first people to really stop at this key passage. When I was working on Circe, it was along the same lines as Atwood: Odysseus had the opportunity to tell his side of the story for three thousand years, so that’s fine!
In my story, he therefore only makes a simple cameo, as they say in the cinema. I like the idea that we can reorient the myth in the direction of our time. The tradition of reinterpreting myths is as old as the myths themselves. The Aeneid is a reimagining of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Each generation must be able to reinterpret the myths through its prism. They are made for this!
I can’t explain it to myself and I think I’m very lucky! My analysis is that the classic texts have long been controlled by people who thought it was a club and that only certain people could join. And so a lot of people felt alienated from this club that didn’t have to be because these stories were written, a very long time ago, for absolutely everyone. And they could have been written today as the themes they address – war, love… – speak to us. This is why I am committed to making them accessible to everyone. Myths can speak to anyone and so they are for everyone.
Not just for white supremacist males, then? Yet this is what we hear on certain American campuses where they would like to prohibit the teaching of certain works of antiquity, and even outright the teaching of Greek and Latin because these are languages in which they were written…
There have been, it is true, in history many negative uses of the texts of antiquity, and I know that some people, and even some teachers, consider that I speak of things that should not be studied. by the new generation because it would be archaic, fascist… Is it because today far-right agitators are using symbols from antiquity and telling us it’s time to live like Spartans? But, on the one hand, these people don’t really know Sparta and, on the other hand, they are only a minority… It is not for them to tell us what Antiquity was. The depth of myths comes from the multiplicity of interpretations they allow.
The first thing to answer is that the best antiquity scholars I know are not afraid to say how incredibly sexist and racist some of these texts can be. But teaching them does not mean advocating to act as in these texts! And then there are so many texts! And who have so much to teach us about the ancient world but also about ourselves… One of my favorite researchers is Emily Wilson, an American who produced a wonderful translation of the Odyssey, and it is so enlightening. We can talk about everything, even post-traumatic stress or racism, with the Odyssey…
… whose canto 6 shows, with Nausicaa, an attitude radically opposed to racism since it is a question of welcoming a stranger royally…
Absolutely. In the same way that we can speak of feminism. I often think of what the nymph Calypso says about the injustice that the gods are forgiven for taking lovers or lovers from among mortals, but not the goddesses for falling in love with them. This “double standard” between men and women is therefore publicly denounced by a woman, already, in a text composed ten centuries ago…
…Which also magnifies the independence of women via the myth of the Amazons… An important point: Greek myths are often very sexually charged and you don’t water down this dimension in your novels. Doesn’t the Puritanism of our time on the matter frighten you?
For what ? I wanted my Circe to have a number of sexual experiences. Some very positive, some deeply traumatic. Life has that kind of complexity, doesn’t it?
I have not read these novels. And, when I work on a book, I only reread the old sources. I reread everything, then I let the little seeds blossom. I’m not going to keep everything, but I let myself be attracted by small details. Circe turning a guy into a woodpecker, even if it’s in Ovid, that didn’t interest me; on the other hand, the story of the spear whose tip is the poisonous sting of a ray tail, and which she gives to her son, that gave me the opportunity to invent the whole episode on the ocean from just one small reference… Some things inspire me, some don’t. It’s a bit like with the muses, I guess…
You laugh ! What mythological figure are you working on for your next book?
Persephone.
Another story of sexual predation!
It’s true. And it’s also, often, the first story that people hear from mythology, because it’s the explanation of the order of the seasons. But, again, the myth can be seen in so many different ways! Some poets have written it from the perspective of the mother-daughter relationship. But you can work the triangular relationship by incorporating Hades. Interestingly, Hades…
Galatea, ivory and black This is the latest of Madeline Miller’s texts. A short novel, or rather a short story in which she revisits, this time, the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. Endowing her with what no goddess had been able to offer her, a voice and a purpose, the American novelist returns to the story of this ivory statue so beautiful that its creator fell in love with her, to the point of ask the Immortals to make her alive. But, far from being satisfied with the beautiful image of a man granted by Olympus, Madeline Miller, by having this woman speak cloistered by an all-powerful husband, gives the myth an astonishing tragic depth.