Mary Renault

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Mary Renault Long Fiction Analysis

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Mary Renault’s novels celebrate and eulogize people’s potential but transitory glory, a combination difficult for a world that has relinquished its acquaintance with the classics. Critic Peter Wolfe has described Renault’s first five novels as her literary apprenticeship, “1930’s novels” marked by then-fashionable themes of political engagement and sexual liberation. Bernard F. Dick has argued that her early fiction was influenced by the restrictive, pain-filled atmosphere of a World War II surgical hospital. Both are partly correct; Renault’s early work deals with the individual’s freedom from contemporary power structures and stifling social conventions.

Such topical concerns, however appealing to modern readers, are nevertheless peripheral to the core of Renault’s art, the Platonism that she followed to the mythic depths in her later novels. When she began to write, Renault was already familiar with the Theory of Ideas developed in Plato’s dialogues, wherein everything perceptible by human senses is imitative of changeless perfect Ideas beyond time and space. Each Idea corresponds to a class of earthly objects, all of which must inevitably change, leaving the Ideas the only objects of true knowledge in the universe. A transitory earthly object, however, may remind people of the Idea it represents. Plato theorized that before entering the body, the soul had encountered the infinite Ideas, and that, once embodied, the soul might vaguely remember them. Renault often convincingly incorporates Plato’s anamnesis, the doctrine that “learning is recollection,” in her fiction. Plato also believed that human recognition of such natural truths as the mathematically perfect circle could lead people stepwise to the contemplation of Absolute Truth, which he equated with Absolute Goodness and Absolute Beauty. He taught that the immortal human soul may be reborn through metempsychosis, or transmigration, another concept found throughout Renault’s work.

Renault’s novels are also informed by Plato’s theory of love as defined by Socrates in The Symposium (c. 388-368 b.c.e.): Love is the desire for immortality through possession of or union with the Beautiful. Love manifests itself on its lowest levels by human sexuality, proceeds upward through intellectual achievement, and culminates in a mystical union of the soul with the Idea of Beauty. That Renault’s heroes aspire to such union is their glory; that being mortal they must fail is the fate she eulogizes.

Plato, like most classical Greeks, allowed heterosexual love only the lowest rung on his ladder of love, as the necessary element for reproduction. Only the homosexual relationship was considered capable of inspiring the lifelong friendships that offered each partner the ideal of arete. All of Renault’s novels illustrate some aspect of Platonic love; in the first, Promise of Love, she shows Vivian, a nurse, and Mic, who loves her because she resembles her brother Jan, achieving self-knowledge not through sexual passion but by affection, the ultimate stage of Platonic love, which at the close of the novel “recalls the true lover of [Plato’s dialogue] the Phaedrus who is willing to sleep like a servant at the side of his beloved.”

Renault’s other early novels also have strong Platonic elements. Kind Are Her Answers foreshadows her interest in theater as mimetic form, Plato’s first literary love, which she realized more fully in The Mask of Apollo. Her third novel, The Middle Mist, concludes with references to Plato’s Lysis, his dialogue on friendship that claims that erotic satisfaction destroys philia, the more permanent nonphysical union promised by Platonic love, a theme to which Renault returned more successfully in The Last of the Wine. Renault attempted unconvincingly in Return to Night and North Face to state the amor vincit omnia tradition...

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of “women’s fiction” in mythological metaphors, and found that she had to develop a new fictional mode capable of expressing her archetypal themes with Platonic concepts.

The Charioteer

Not published in the United States until 1959 because of its forthright treatment of homosexuality, The Charioteer is the only Renault novel to incorporate a systematic development of Platonic philosophy as the vehicle for commentary on contemporary life. In the Phaedrus (c. 388-368 b.c.e.), Plato depicted reason as a charioteer who must balance the thrust of the white horse of honor against the unruly black horse of passion. The image unifies Renault’s tale of Laurie Odell, wounded at Dunkirk, who must come to terms with his homosexuality. After his friendship with the sexually naïve conscientious objector Andrew Raines dissolves, Laurie finds a lifelong partner in Ralph Lanyon, who brought him back wounded after they had fought at Dunkirk. Laurie attains an equilibrium between the two conflicting halves of his nature in a Platonic denial of sexual excess. As Renault comments in the epilogue, a Greek device she favors, “Now their [the horses’] heads droop side by side till their long manes mingle; and when the charioteer falls silent they are reconciled for a night in sleep.”

In the ideal Platonic pattern, the older man assumes a compassionate responsibility for the honor of the younger, altogether transcending physical attraction and cemented by shared courage in battle. Renault’s efforts at an entirely convincing presentation of such friendship are hindered by the intolerance with which homosexual relationships were usually viewed in the society of her time and the often pathetic insecurity it forced upon them. Despite these handicaps, Renault sympathetically portrays Laurie as “a modern Hephaestus, or maimed artist,” as Wolfe notes, a character who wins admiration through striving to heal his injured life and nature and make of them something lasting and beautiful.

From roots far deeper than Plato’s philosophy, Renault developed the vital impulse of her eight Greek novels, her major literary achievement. Central is the duality of Apollo and Dionysus, names the Greeks gave to the forces of the mind and of the heart, gods whose realms the mythologist Walter F. Otto has described as “sharply opposed” yet “in reality joined together by an eternal bond.” In Greek myth, Zeus’s archer son Apollo, wielder of the two-sided weapon of Truth, endowed people with the heavenly light called Art, by which he admonished humankind to self-knowledge and moderation through his oracle at Delphi. Paradoxically, Apollo shared his temple and the festival year at Delphi with his mysterious brother Dionysus, god of overwhelming ecstasy, born of mortal woman and all-powerful Zeus, torn apart each year to rise again, offering both wine’s solace and its madness to humankind. Thought and emotion were the two faces of the Greek coin of life—in Otto’s words, “the eternal contrast between a restless, whirling life and a still, far-seeing spirit.”

Each of Renault’s Greek novels focuses on a crucial nexus of physical and spiritual existence in Greek history. The age of legendary heroes such as Theseus of Athens, subject of The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea, was followed by the Trojan War, 1200 b.c.e., the stuff of classical epic and tragedy and the harbinger of Greece’s Dark Age, when only Athens stood against the Dorian invasion. By the sixth century b.c.e., the setting of The Praise Singer, Athens, under the benevolent tyrant Pisistratus, had become the model polis of the Greek peninsula, building a democracy that repelled imperial Persia and fostered the world’s greatest tragedies in their Dionysian festivals. The Last of the Wine treats the fall of Athens to Sparta in the Peloponnesian Wars, 404 b.c.e., torn by internal strife and bled by foreign expansion. The restored Athenian democracy of a half-century later is the milieu of The Mask of Apollo. Shortly after Plato’s death, his pupil Aristotle taught a prince in Macedon who dreams of Homeric deeds in Fire from Heaven, accomplishes them in The Persian Boy, and leaves an empire to be shattered by lesser men in Funeral Games—Alexander the Great.

The Last of the Wine

The Last of the Wine, like most of Renault’s Greek fiction, is ostensibly a memoir, a form favored by classical authors. Its fictional narrator, a young and “beautiful” Athenian knight named Alexias, endures the agonizing aftermath of Athens’s ill-fated Sicilian venture under Alkibiades, the magnetic but flawed former student of Sokrates. With Lysis, the historical figure on whom Plato modeled his dialogue on ideal friendship, Alexias begins the idealistic attachment they learned together from Sokrates, but physical passion, handled with sensitivity by Renault, overcomes them, and they ruefully must compromise their ideal. Sacrificing his honor for Lysis during the famine caused by the Spartan siege of Athens, Alexias models for sculptors, at least one lascivious, to feed his wounded friend, and in the battle to restore Athenian democracy, Lysis falls gloriously with Alexias’s name upon his lips.

The novel’s title, an allusion to the Greek custom in which the wine remaining in a cup is tossed to form the initial of a lover’s name, metaphorically represents Athens’s abandonment of the ideals of its Golden Age. Renault poignantly shows Lysis, a gentleman athlete in pursuit of philotimo, the hero’s struggle for outward glory to emulate his ideal, beaten sadistically in the Isthmian Games by a monstrous professional wrestler, just as Athenian democracy is becoming warped by politicians such as the vicious Kritias and the cold-blooded Anytos, who will help condemn Sokrates. Alkibiades’ personal disaster, abandoning Athens for its Spartan enemies, is an exemplary case of a leader who cannot resist abusing his charismatic gifts.

The Greek ideal of democracy learned at Sokrates’ side and based on individual arete, inward pursuit of honor, still allows Lysis a moral victory often overlooked in this splendidly elegiac novel of the death of an era. “Men are not born equal in themselves,” Lysis tells Alexias over wine one evening in Samos. “A man who thinks himself as good as everyone else will be at no pains to grow better.” Lysis fights and dies for “a City where I can find my equals and respect my bettersand where no one can tell me to swallow a lie because it is expedient.” At the end of the novel, as he listens to the distorted minds of bureaucrats, Alexias remembers the lamps of Samos, the wine-cup on a table of polished wood, and Lysis’s voice: “Must we forsake the love of excellence, then, till every citizen feels it alike?”

The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea

Renault analyzes the ideal of kingship in The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea. In the earlier novel, she traces Theseus’s early life from Troezen and Eleusis, where with the bard Orpheus he establishes the Sacred Mysteries, to the labyrinthine palace of Crete, where he destroys the brutal son of King Minos, who oppresses Athens. In the second, she pursues Theseus’s progressive rule in Athens through his abandonment of Ariadne to Dionysus’s bloody cult and his capture of the Amazon Hippolyta to the great tragedy of his life, his fatal curse on their son Hippolytus. Stylistically more evocative of Homer’s mighty simplicity than the Attic cadences of The Last of the Wine, Renault’s Theseus novels treat kingship as a manifestation of the divine inner voice that chooses the moment of willing consent when the monarch sacrifices himself for his people.

Both novels discuss a past so dim that its events have become the raw material of myth. Theseus’s birth meshes the earthly with the supernatural, since it results from the divinely inspired compassion of the Athenian King Aigios for the stricken land of Troezen; the reader is left, as is customary in Renault’s fiction, to decide where history ends and metaphysics begins. Until his son’s death, Theseus practices the lesson learned from his grandfather’s ritual sacrifice of the King Horse, one of the shocking joys hidden in pain that opens much of Renault’s fiction: “The consentingthe readiness is all. It washes heart and mindand leaves them open to the god.”

By closing himself to the speaking god, however, obeying not his reason but his emotional reaction to his wife Phaedra’s false accusations of Hippolytus, Theseus is lost. Only two bright moments remain to him: an anamnetic dream of Marathon where he fights beside the Athenians defending their city, his name their stirring war cry, and a glimpse before he dies of the boy Achilles, “as springy and as brisk as noonday, his arm round a dark-haired friend.” Prescient, Theseus watches tragedy in the making: “The god who sent him that blazing pride should not have added love to be burned upon it,” but—consoled that his own reputation has become Achilles’ “touchstone for a man”—Theseus for the last time consents to the god of the sea.

The Mask of Apollo

By the mid-fourth century b.c.e., late in Plato’s life, sophisticated Athenians had accepted the gods as metaphysical forces within the human personality. In The Mask of Apollo, Renault poses the primal duality of Apollo and Dionysus in Greek culture, the calm, farseeing force of reason and art balanced against the irresistible force of ecstasy. An old mask of Apollo, reputedly from the workshop of the Parthenon’s architect Phidias, accompanies Renault’s narrator Nikeratos through his successful acting career, the fascinating backdrop to the political career of Dion of Syracuse, Plato’s noble friend, who might have become the ideal philosopher-king Plato postulated in The Republic.

Though Dion is a model soldier and a principled statesman, circumstances force him to abandon his philosophical ideals to save Syracuse from devastation. Renault parallels his fall with Nikeratos’s performance in Euripides’ The Bacchae (405 b.c.e.), the enigmatic masterpiece named for the followers of Dionysus. As he meditates before Apollo’s mask, Nikeratos hears his own voice: “With The Bacchae he [Euripides] digs down far below, to some deep rift in the soul where our griefs begin. Take that play anywhere, even to men unborn who worship other gods or none, and it will teach them to know themselves.”

Plato’s tragedy, acted out by Dion, was the “deep rift” that made people unable to follow him with united minds and hearts: “No one would fight for Dion, when he gave, as his own soul saw it, his very life for justice.” By serving Apollo and Dionysus equally, however, Nikeratos the artist earns his gifts, one a Platonic dream of acting in a strange revenge drama, speaking lines beside an open grave to a clean skull in his hand. Through his love for his protégé Thettalos, whom he frees for achievements he knows will be greater than his own, Nikeratos plays Achilles in Aeschylus’s The Myrmidons in a performance viewed by Alexander, a boy for whom men will fight and die, “whether he is right or wrong,” a prince who “will wander through the worldnever knowingthat while he was still a child the thing he seeks slipped from the world, worn out and spent.” Had he encountered Plato’s Ideals, which he instinctively sought, Renault proposes as the curtain falls on The Mask of Apollo, the Alexander of history might have made the philosopher-king Plato’s Dion never could have been; but Nikeratos observes that “no one will ever make a tragedy—and that is well, for one could not bear it—whose grief is that the principals never met.”

Fire from Heaven

Renault’s Alexander grows from boy to king in Fire from Heaven, in which she abandons the memoir form for more objective narration, as though no single point of view could encompass Alexander’s youthful ideals, fired by the blazing Homeric philotimo in Achilles’ honor he learned at the epic-conscious Macedonian court. Modern archaeology supports Renault’s conviction that Alexander deliberately patterned his actions, even his father Philip’s funerary rites, on the Iliad (c. 750b.c.e.; English translation, 1611), which he read as though returning home, recognizing in his mutual love with Hephaistion the tragic bond of Achilles and Patroclus, the basis of the Western world’s first, perhaps greatest, poem.

Arete, which cloaks the heavenly Idea of excellence in earthly beauty, came to Alexander less from Aristotle than through his instinctive attraction to Sokrates through Plato’s works, which he read as a boy in Macedon. After defeating Thebes’s Sacred Band at Cheironeia, where Philip’s Macedonians secured the domination of all of Greece, Alexander stands “with surmise and regret” at Plato’s tomb in Athens, listening to his disciple Xenokrates: “What he [Plato] had to teach could only be learned as fire is kindled, by the touch of the flame itself.”

The Persian Boy

The novel in which Renault most precariously treats the question of homosexuality, The Persian Boy, is narrated by Bagoas, the handsome eunuch once King Darius’s favorite and now the lover of Alexander. Renault’s choice of Bagoas’s point of view reflects her belief that Alexander was not corrupted by Persian luxury and imperial power, as many historians from classical times to the present have asserted, but that he sought to assimilate Eastern ways as a means of uniting his realm in spirit as well as military fact. Just as Alexander’s “passionate capacity for affection” could allow him to accept affection wherever it was sincerely offered from the heart and yet remain wholly true to Bagoas’s “victor now, forever,” Hephaistion (who Renault feels is the most underrated man in history), Alexander felt “Macedon was my father’s country. This is mine”—meaning the empire he had won for himself.

Renault believes that Alexander’s eventual tragedy was that he was humanly unable to achieve equilibrium between his followers’ personal devotion to him and their pragmatic selfish desires. Through Alexander’s complex relationship with his dangerous mother Olympias, herself a devotee of Dionysus, Renault exemplifies the peril of neglecting the god of ecstasy basic to The Bacchae, in which Olympias herself had acted during Alexander’s youth as a shocking challenge to Philip’s authority. Toward the end of Alexander’s own life, Dionysus’s cruelty touches even him. Renault shows his purported deterioration as less his own fault than his men’s when he must hold them by force as well as by love, even violating Macedon’s dearest law, killing before their Assembly had condemned a man to death. The powerful god leads Alexander to excess; Bagoas sees that “his hunger grew by feeding.” The Roman historian Arrian, following the memoir of Alexander’s only faithful general Ptolemy, commented, “If there had been no other competition, he would have competed against himself.”

Bagoas better than any also sees that “great anguish lies in wait for those who long too greatly.” Alexander loses Hephaistion and with him nearly abandons his own senses, emerging only after his friend’s funeral, in which he watches Thettalos, without Nikeratos for the first time, perform The Myrmidons one last time; “’Perhaps,’ Bagoas thought, ’the last of the madness had been seared out of him by so much burning.’”

At the close of The Persian Boy, Renault notes in her afterword, “When his [Alexander’s] faults (those his own times did not account as virtues) have been consideredno other human being has attracted in his lifetime, from so many men, so fervent a devotion. Their reasons are worth examining.” In her two novels of Alexander’s life, Renault not only examines the reasons but also brilliantly probes to the heart of one of the greatest human mysteries: how one person can ask, as did Homer’s Achilles, “Now as things are, when the ministers of death stand by us/ In their thousands, which no man born to die can escape or even evade,/ Let us go”—and how other people, with all their hearts, can answer.

Such “true songs are still in the minds of men,” according to the aged bard Simonides, narrator of The Praise Singer, recalling the “lyric years” when tragedy was being born of song and Athens was becoming the center of the earth. “We die twice when men forget,” the ghosts of heroes seemed to tell him as a boy, and he has spent his life in “the bright and perilous gift of making others shine.” In this novel, where Renault’s heroic epitaph for philotimo and her noble elegy for people’s hope of arete have given place to a gentler, less exalted nostalgia, she recognizes that “praising excellence, one serves the god within it.” Renault also notes in her afterword that “the blanket generalization ’absolute power corrupts absolutely’ is a historical absurdity,” and she demonstrates that the respected rule of Pisistratus, nominally a “tyrant,” formed the solid foundation on which Pericles erected Athenian democracy, even presaging through a discredited seer “a lightning flash from Macedon.”

In Alexander’s time, Renault observed, “the issue was not whether, but how one made [war].” At his death, brought about at least in part by his self-destructive grief for Hephaistion, Alexander’s generals embarked on a cannibalistic power struggle—only Ptolemy, his half brother, emerging with any of the dignity Alexander had worn so easily in conquering his empire. Renault’s Funeral Games is “the ancestral pattern of Macedonian tribal and familial struggles for his throne; except that Alexander had given them a world stage on which to do it.”

Funeral Games

The most violent of Renault’s Greek novels, Funeral Games contains a darkness that is alleviated only by flashes of Alexander reflected through the decency of the few who knew him best—Ptolemy, Bagoas, and Queen Sisygambis, who looked upon Alexander, not Darius, as her son. In them, something of Alexander’s flame lingers a little while, a heavenly light extinguished at last in the wreckage of his empire in human depravity that Alexander could not prevent nor Renault fail to record.

In her eight novels of ancient Greece, Renault far surpasses conventional historical fiction. She achieves a mythic dimension in her balance of Apollonian and Dionysian psychological forces and philosophical precision in her treatment of Platonic doctrines. Her style is adapted to the Greek literature of each period she delineates, Attic elegance for The Last of the Wine and The Mask of Apollo, Hellenic involution counterpoised against Alexander’s Homeric simplicity of speech. Renault links all eight novels with a chain of works of art, a finely crafted touch the classical Greeks would have applauded: The great tragedies, The Myrmidons and The Bacchae, Polykleitos’s sculpture of Hermes modeled on Alexias, and the bronze of the liberator Harmodios in Pisistratos’s day all serve as shaping factors in the portrait of her ultimate hero, Alexander. Mastering time, space, and modern ignorance of the classical world, Renault captures the “sadness at the back of life” Virginia Woolfthat so aptly cited as the essence of Greek literature, the inevitable grieving awareness of people at the impassable gulf between their aspirations and their achievement. In the face of the eternal questions of existence, Renault’s novels offer a direction in which to turn when, in Woolf’s words, “we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”

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Mary Renault World Literature Analysis