How do you update Oedipus? There have been modern adaptations, but Oedipus’s tragedy, more than most, is bound up in an ancient world that believed powerfully in Fate—in a cosmic order and intention that even the gods couldn’t subvert. In a modern, secular setting, prophecy sits awkwardly. And yet: if Fate is so old-fashioned, why do we keep reading, staging, and reworking our best story of fighting it?
Daisy Johnson, via Eve White Literary Agency
Daisy Johnson’s Oedipus retelling, Everything Under, roots around for modern inevitabilities that still have that fatalistic feeling, even in contemporary Britain. As in her début story collection, Fen, Johnson dredges the uncanny from her watery, liminal landscapes—in Fen, the East Anglia marshes; here, the Oxford canals—not so much blurring the modern and the folkloric as stewing them together, into one shadowy, sinking, wonderful mud.
Mud, strong currents, domineering mothers, the marshy grind of poverty—these all capture something of what Fate must have felt like to the ancient Greeks, and they populate the river communities that hug the junked canals where Everything Under plays out. In the present, Gretel looks after her ailing mother, Sarah, who raised her half-feral on the canals, then abandoned her. In the near past, Gretel searches for Sarah by following the trail of Marcus, a teenage runaway who stayed on their houseboat during their last winter together. In the far past, Marcus limps along the docks and banks, haunted by a mysterious presence in the water known as the canal thief, which seems to embody everything in Marcus’s past and future that he is fleeing.
Sarah, in particular, is a magnificent force, a whirlwind of will driving all three plots, who mythologizes herself into something inexorable to Gretel: “She can breathe underwater,” Gretel, as a child, explains to Marcus, “she knows every single word in the world, she’s an archaeologist and a surgeon and very famous to everyone. She can dig from one side of the world to the other and has done many times, she doesn’t need to sleep, she can eat animals whole.” Sarah is the source of Gretel’s fatalistic idea “that we are determined by our landscape, that our lives are decided by the hills and the rivers and the trees.”
To this landscape determinism, Gretel adds language, riffing off the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: “If – in any sense – language determined how we thought then I could never have been any other way than I am.” In their marginal isolation, Gretel and Sarah invented a strange private language: “So I was always going to be isolated, lonely, uncomfortable in the presence of others.” In this sense, Gretel’s job as an adult—a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries—feels like a prisoner studying the bars of her cage. Her hero’s journey isn’t to defy Fate (she isn’t our Oedipus), but to understand those forces that have trapped her.
These two forces, landscape and language, take on their deterministic weight in Johnson’s prose. Swift and insistent as a current, Johnson’s language ruthlessly sweeps the reader into sharp rocks of feeling; it’s clear on the surface, but murky at depth, full of mucky words that seem invented for river squalor: weir, mire, scummy, scudding, chugging. “The water tasted of mud and oil, of yeast.” Johnson’s writing is smart and willful as Fate, and makes the landscape, too, feel heavy with inescapability.
Amphora with Heracles wrestling the Lernaean Hydra. (Fantastic Creatures of Fear and Myth Exhibition, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome, 2014.)
In contrast to so much mud, Sarah’s and Gretel’s language, invented out of Gretel’s toddler talk, can seem disconcertingly light, even silly—with one exception—“Bonak: what we are afraid of.” The Bonak takes on form as Marcus’s canal thief, a river monster that invisibly stalks the canal community, stealing rabbits, moorhens, and small children. To the Bonak, Johnson gives an inspired, estranging effect on the language, turning simple, transparent phrases sinister: “It lives in the water but walks on the land.” The change in register, that sudden clarity, is similar to the sound of birds in a forest falling quiet. Here is our first sight of the Bonak, from Marcus (at that point, Margot), hiding flat on the river bank to avoid a man following her:
The man was gone, but there was something else. The last of the day was coming through the bank of trees and made a shadow out of the trunks and the slight slope and the animal. She could smell the resin from the bark. The ground itched with woodlice, millipedes, a moth crawled along her arm. The animal was longer than a human on all fours.
I’ll admit, I like my Gothic prose wordy, but I haven’t read a creepier monster line than “The animal was longer than a human on all fours.”
The Bonak, though in many ways another stand-in for Fate, is also the figure that defies the determinism of language best, resisting clear description and warping the language applied to it into gray possibilities. It is, in many ways, a force of freedom, even anarchy. In Margot/Marcus’s gender fluidity, too, we have a glimpse of how an individual can resist something society views as unchangeable. This is one of the best promises of speculative fiction: because we can imagine and can put into language different ways to be, against the current order, maybe that order isn’t actually so cosmic and inescapable.
Conrad Gesner’s “Indian Serpent,” reproduced in John Ashton’s Curious Creatures in Zoology (1890)
Everything Under’s original story, of Gretel searching for her wild mother, of Marcus’s flight on the river, is beautiful, haunting, and propulsive. And the Oedipus strand introduces a playful, referential pleasure, similar to finding Easter eggs in a Marvel movie: there are riddles, there is blindness, the Tiresias figure is a trans woman.
But that dang prophecy. Without the ancient Greeks’ preoccupation with Fate, and without a fervent, cultural investment in natural order, I don’t see how the Oedipus prophecy can work. If there’s no divine order punishing Oedipus for his hubris, what happens to him lands as brutal and sad. There’s a kind of nihilism to modern tragedy—a premise that there’s no larger justice at work, just absurdity and death—that will feel right to many, but feels too easy to me.
Except—except Johnson teases out a brilliant update of the oedipal paradox, that Oedipus brings about the prophecy precisely by trying to avoid it. In this paradox, Johnson finds the most convincing modern version of Fate: the fear that our future is set by older choices we blindly made, without knowing their importance, as if “all of our choices are remnants of all the choices we made before. As if decisions were shards from the bombs of our previous actions.”
I think this is the closest we can get, today, to Oedipus’s realization that he is not a free actor, but Fate’s instrument. We are our Fate, it’s just us, and because of our limits we do a rough job of it. Somehow our lives slipped out of our hands, because our choices were never as smart as the world is large. We are the Bonak: figures of freedom and fatalism at once. What we’re afraid of.
Already out in the UK, Everything Under has been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and it’s a well-deserved honor for an exciting young voice in literary dark fiction. Pick up your copy from Graywolf Press on October 23, 2018.
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A watery, Gothic update of Greek myth by an exciting new voice in dark fiction.