TRAGIC HERO
Emerson, Donald
Tragic Hero The Bull from the Sea, by Mary Renault. Pantheon. $4.95. Reviewed by Donald Emerson Mary Renault again breathes life into the legendary Theseus in this sequel to The King Must Die,...
...Theseus, who is as central to the novel as Hamlet to the play, is Miss Renault's triumph, and he colors everything with the vitality she has given him...
...Nothing in the novel equals the prolonged account of the visit to the old Kentaur who for generations has reared the sons of kings...
...The hunt for the Kalydonian boar and most of the piratical adventures thus become mere paragraphs of summary...
...The conquest of Hippolyta is no simple adventure of winning a spirited woman, but a tense struggle to awaken love on terms that make it worth keeping...
...But the wonder of life is not rationalized away, nor are all the mysteries unveiled...
...Another is the loss of their son Hip-polytos through the treachery of Phaedra, with whom Theseus makes a political marriage...
...Returned to Athens, the hero finds himself king...
...The great espisodes are those in which Theseus, touched deeply, grows in self-knowledge...
...Most often, there is the joy of movement and struggle, part of the whole sensuous life that is as much a part of his experience as are his hours ol reflection...
...Reviewed by Donald Emerson Mary Renault again breathes life into the legendary Theseus in this sequel to The King Must Die, which chronicled his adventures up to the voyage home from Crete...
...The death of Oedipus in the grove at Kolonos is a powerful scene in which Theseus learns what it means to be priest as well as king...
...Miss Renault understands this so well that she makes ritual the acceptable expression of insight, and messages of the gods the promptings of intuition...
...The most impressive quality of the novel is the sense of actuality which it creates for the reader...
...After Hippolyta's death in battle, he is berserk and utterly mindless until the lack of foes shocks him back to sell-awareness...
...When the subject is taken from the mythology, old pieties must be squared with new psychology which these days makes the gods symbolize man's multiform nature...
...There are tense scenes of action as well...
...Plates become real, persons alive...
...The ritual of the Earth goddess to which Theseus' mother conducts him is an awesome experience, and the sense of a sustaining presence repeatedly touches him in the grove of Asklepios...
...But she has endowed him, too, with the Greek feeling for life entangled in the web of Fate and Necessity, so that below joy and bereavement alike is Theseus' tragic realization that he sought what was appointed...
...He is vigorous, masculine, and thoughtful, capable of great love and friendship, and aware of his shortcomings...
...His most precious loot, the Amazon Hippolyta, becomes the great love of his otherwise promiscuous life, and her death one of its tragedies...
...The overgrowth of legends is pruned away to show Theseus with more reasonably human capacities...
...Or so the author conceives him...
...Whenever life goes flat, however, the just ruler slips off to play pirate...
...In the Greek sense, Theseus is a tragic hero whose nature prepares his fate...
...A drowsy sensuality and feeling of mystery pervade the scene...
...He begins with few qualifications save courage, yet he learns kingship and conceives an ideal of stable government for Attica...
...Although historical fiction attempts to recover a sense of the past, it does so on modern terms...
...He grows in wisdom, and he gropes toward insights into final things...
...And since Theseus is the narrator, the weight given events becomes an index to his character...
...Miss Renault has made the better choice of giving depth to his character and significance to his career...
...The mythology warrants Andre Gide's picture of Theseus the egotist, and would also have justified a chronicle of adventure such as Robert Graves composed around the quest of the Golden Fleece...
...The hero forgets himself amidst dangers, when only strength and skill at arms can aid him...
...The tragedy of Hippolytos' death is not alone the loss of a son, but the discovery of how Theseus' very nature has conspired with Phaedra's lust to destroy him...
Vol. 26 • April 1962 • No. 4
