path: root/bookmarks/ghost writing, orpheus in the guardian.txt

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title: Hilary Mantel on the enduring resonance of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice | Books
date: 2007-07-31T19:33:18Z
source: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2136130,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=10
tags: literature, culture, mythology, fiction, religion

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This is the year of the return of Orpheus. It is 400 years ago that Monteverdi's opera Orfeo was staged in Mantua. It was not quite the first opera, not even the first to tell the story of the demigod musician - but it was the first opera to last. Monteverdi's contemporaries believed that actors in ancient Greece sang their parts, and so the new form was a conscious attempt to recapture what music meant to the ancient world: something that was not merely a skill, a display of virtuosity, but an enchantment, something that spoke to the soul, something deeply and sweetly natural. But when you choose to work with the Orpheus myth, you are even going beyond this: you are searching, in the dark, with your breath and your fingertips, for an art so powerful that, like the art of Orpheus himself, it can suspend or, as it may be, reverse the laws of nature.

The story of Orpheus was old when Ovid told it. In words, in music, in film, successive generations have worked it over, made it their own, every artist or would-be artist finding in it something personal and something new. When Eurydice, the bride of Orpheus, died of snakebite, Orpheus travelled to the underworld and used his skill in music to open the hearts of the gods, who allowed him to take back his beloved. One condition was made: that until they had left the underworld behind, Orpheus must not look at his wife's face. He led her towards the light, then, at the last second, his desire defeated him; he looked back, and with that glimpse Eurydice vanished for ever.

This year's Edinburgh festival features three Orpheus events, and in October Leeds Art Gallery will show a film work, commissioned by Opera North, inspired by Rilke's images of Eurydice. Earlier this year, Opera North's pacy and idiosyncratic anniversary production of Orfeo attracted the wrath of some critics, and boos from a few audience members who sought to establish their credentials by showing that Nottingham can be as churlish as Milan. But what did they want? Authenticity? Monteverdi's cast would have been all-male. Tender and funny by turns, the Opera North staging reminded us what a feat we undertake in suspending disbelief, as the furnishing of the court stood in for shady beeches; shepherds in song, overturning a sofa, suggested that Orfeo repose upon this grassy bank. In the underworld, Charon put down his newspaper - what else would death's boatman read? - to sing to Orfeo that he was unimpressed by his plea.

There was a scene in which the inhabitants of the underworld pinned Eurydice to the wall and fastened her there with duct tape, length upon snarling length of it, at first making nothing worse than a sinister ensnaring web. But as the ripping sound went on, minute after minute, into a theatre totally silent, I remembered the killer Fred West embalming the heads of young girls, wrapping them until they could barely breathe, and the sound of the tape tearing became the essence, the very sound of cruelty; and I thought, the dead girl is made a parcel, she is consigned, she is consigned to oblivion.

The Orpheus myth is a story about the power of art, but it is also a myth we play out in our daily lives. Often, when people have been bereaved, their friends warn them to let a year go by before they listen to music, knowing how it can break down the barrier we carefully erect between ourselves and the recently dead, and unleash a flood of pain and regret. But it is hard now to avoid music. In a way that Monteverdi could never have imagined, it is in the air around us, sometimes degraded into an annoying background jangle, sometimes blanked out and ignored, but always capable of catching us unawares, infiltrating our self-protection, and making the dead walk.

Sometimes miracles happen. Last summer a young girl called Natascha Kampusch, who had disappeared as a child of 10, re-emerged into the light as a young woman of 18. For eight years she had been held captive by a man called Wolfgang Priklopil. Having watched her for some time on her daily walk to school, he had snatched her from the street and kept her in a bunker that had probably been built as a shelter during the cold war, a cellar under an ordinary-looking house that was near a busy road and less than 15 kilometres from her original home in the district of Strasshof, north of Vienna. He had let her out from time to time, and even taken her to the mountains for a day. The neighbours saw her working in the garden, but they were incurious. They assumed she was his girlfriend, they said. You wonder how hard they looked - she was a teenager, he in his mid-40s; they didn't look hard enough to allow any uncomfortable thoughts to arise; they lived in a society defended by a requirement for privacy higher than any garden wall.

Priklopil had convinced Natascha that, if she tried to escape, he would kill her and then kill himself. As he was her only human contact, how could she afford to hate or defy him? When he put her underground, he controlled her light, air, water and food. On the day she escaped, she was cleaning his car and he was momentarily distracted by a phone call. She ran down the street and appealed for help to the first woman she met, but the woman didn't understand her: how would the dead speak? Natascha spoke like a radio announcer, imitating the only female voice she had heard in eight years. She was a waif, weighing less than six and a half stone; the policewoman who was the first official to see her described her as "white as cheese", an unpoetic but no doubt perfectly exact expression of the effects of the underworld. On that day of her escape, Natascha kept running and took shelter in a house, this time making herself understood. A few hours later, Priklopil committed suicide by lying in the path of a train.

Natascha has been reticent about her ordeal. The story that emerges may be different from the version we have now. It may take her years to come fully back to life, and the story of how she does that will be as interesting as the story of her burial. If she spoke from her heart, what would she say to her neighbours? Perhaps that they made the most basic error of all: they misidentified the living as the dead. She walked among them, solid and breathing, but they were unable to see her. No doubt they could not help their error. But if Natascha can come back, what else can come back? During the second world war, 20,000 Hungarian Jews were held in a labour camp in Strasshof. No trace of it remains. It's thought that 200 people, who have been wiped out of the town's memory, died there . There are some ghosts who would not be welcome, even in thought form, and these ghosts include the past selves, the former selves of people who were alive in those years and who are alive today, but who have made great efforts to unremember.

When we talk about ghosts, we are speaking in layers of metaphor. We are not usually speaking about wispy bodies in rotting shrouds, but about family secrets, buried impulses, unsolved mysteries, anything that lingers and clings. We are speaking of the sense of loss that sometimes overtakes us, a nostalgia for something that we can't name. There is a way in which the question "Do you believe in ghosts?" is unnecessary to ask: we all know a few, and they walk at all hours, if only through our memories. Our ancestors are encoded in our genes. Look at your face in the mirror, and one day you will see one of your parents, moving under your own skin; the next day it may be a grandparent who has come to visit. Within you, there are people you have never been able to mourn because you never knew them, people from the distant past; the traces of your animal ancestors still live in your instincts, in your physiology. As products of evolution, we carry all the past inside us; we are walking repositories of the lost.

I have written a memoir called Giving Up the Ghost, which is about my own childhood, but also about my ancestors and children who were never born, and about the ghosts we all have in our lives: the ghosts of possibility, the paths we didn't take, and the choices we didn't make, and expectations, which seemed perfectly valid at the time, but which somehow or other weren't fulfilled. I describe ghosts like this: "They are the rags and tags of everyday life, information you acquire that you don't know what to do with, knowledge that you can't process; they're cards thrown out of your card index, blots on the page."

As a historical novelist, I'm a great user of card indexes. I like to write about people who really lived, and try to wake them up from their long trance, and make them walk on the page. When you stand on the verge of a new narrative, when you have picked your character, you stretch out your hand in the dark and you don't know who or what will take it. You become profoundly involved in this effort to clothe old bones. The work of mourning is real work, like shovelling corpses, like sifting ashes for diamonds. When someone dies, we exist for years on a thin line, a wire, stretched tight between remembering and forgetting. When something touches that wire and makes it vibrate, that's a ghost. It's a disturbance in our consciousness, in that deep place where we carry the dead, like the unborn, sealed up inside us. You need not believe in life after death to believe in ghosts. The dead exist only because the living let them. They are what we make them.

Nothing illustrates this better than the afterlife of Diana. As the 10th anniversary of her death approaches, she keeps popping back to check on her own publicity campaign. When Diana Spencer married, she instinctively grasped that, even at the close of the 20th century, a princess was not an ordinary person. Unformed, her early flesh soft and undefined, the princess nicknamed "Squidgy" moved on an archetypal plane: walking beside the virgin bride was the blurred outline of a shadow bride, a shadow princess, someone archaic, someone mythical. Her fabulous clothes and jewels elevated her into a great beauty, the most photographed, the most observed woman in the world, and because she was not an intellectual or analytical woman, she was able to present us with a blank slate and present fate with a blank cheque. To the public she was entirely a figure of fantasy, and she became a fantasy to herself, representing herself in the last years of her short life as someone with healing powers, like a medieval monarch - someone more royal than the family she had married into. If we think on some level that "they killed her", perhaps this is why. Like a traitor, she tried to out-royal them; like a trainee goddess, elevated on her high heels, she teetered towards the abyss. She said to the whole world, look at the royal bride; then she found herself running, before the cold rapist's eye of a thousand cameras, trying to evade them by driving into the dark.

When Diana went into the underpass, she went there to be reborn. She came out with angel's wings. We should have been less surprised than we were by the public mass mourning. It is a commonplace that, in our society, we deal with death very badly. The Victorians knew how to do it. The black horses and plumes, the black-edged stationery, the jewellery made of jet, the black clothes of full mourning, the lilacs and greys of half-mourning - all these permitted you to give a public signal that you were bereaved, so that people around you treated you with consideration, with respect. But now it's a 20-minute slot at the crematorium, a half-day off work, a funeral sparsely attended by gormless people standing around in anoraks, shuffling their feet in embarrassment and singing "My Way". There is a desire to steer away from what is called "morbid", a dull sense of yearning towards the routine of a normal day: no sense of defiance in the face of death, no swelling organ chords and no hymn to ask, "Where is death's sting? Where, grave, thy victory?" Death demands ceremony; at Diana's death, all the nation's bottled sorrow overflowed, all the omitted personal mourning translated into the transpersonal.

We mourned her in the only way we knew how, with teddy bears and doggerel verse and flowers rotting in cellophane - we mourned her with the crude, shared, generic language of the heart. And implicit in the way we have mourned her is the possibility that, like Orpheus, we could defy the laws of nature, that we could reverse time, we could stop it happening. No matter how little you care about royalty, it's impossible not to be agitated by those grainy CCTV images of Diana leaving the Ritz: so real, so close, so present, that you feel you could reach back, take her seat belt, pull it across her body, snap it shut, and rewrite the history of her final hour.

When I began to write, it was my first ambition to write a good historical novel and my second to write a good ghost story, and I didn't then see that these ambitions were allied. Technically, it's possible that the ghost story is the more difficult. If the author leaves events unexplained, the reader feels cheated. But if you explain too much, you explain away. A ghost story always exists on the brink between sense and nonsense, between order and chaos, between the rules of existence we know and the ones we don't know yet. When I was a child, I lived in a haunted house. I was brought up in a family that not only lived among ghosts but also manufactured its own. When I was 10, I lost my father. He didn't die, but went away, and very little but music remained of him. Forty years later, music helped bring him back.

First of all I used prose. I dusted down a fictional version, in which the narrator says:

"We lived at the top of the village, in a house which I considered to be haunted. My father had disappeared. Perhaps it was his presence, long and pallid, which slid behind the door in sweeps of draught and raised the hackles on the terrier's neck. He had been a clerk; crosswords were his hobby and a little angling: simple card-games and a cigarette card collection. He left at 10 o'clock one blustery March morning, taking his albums and his tweed overcoat, and leaving all his underwear, which my mother washed and gave to a jumble sale. We didn't miss him much, only the little tunes which he used to play on the piano: over and over, Pineapple Rag."

In real life it didn't happen quite so tidily. When I was about seven, my mother took up with an old lover of hers, and my father faded away, still living in the house but just flitting through, silent as a shadow except for increasingly rare hours when he sat down at the piano. The summer I was 11, I went with my mother and my brothers and my stepfather to another town, and my name got changed, and I never saw my father again. In the years that followed I learned that any mention of him would cause more trouble than I was equipped to handle.

As I grew older I was haunted by the thought that, if I passed him in the street, I probably wouldn't recognise him. Also, if he died, I thought my mother would get to hear, but I knew she wouldn't tell me. Perhaps it was after I knew that I wasn't going to have children myself that I thought more about him, but he always lived in some place I couldn't imagine; he inhabited in my mind a halfway house, neither living nor dead, and certainly lost to me. My memoir, published in 2003, was like a message in a bottle. It seemed a long shot that it would find him, but I hoped it might.

Soon after publication I wrote some short plays for Radio 4, for Woman's Hour, based on my story collection Learning to Talk: about someone like me, with a disappearing father like mine. I tried hard to get the music right. We couldn't use "Pineapple Rag" - music so easily evokes a whole era that we were afraid that it would take the listener back to the 1920s, not to the 1950s where we wanted them to be. Instead we opted for jazz and blues from the 50s and 60s, and the producer arranged for a piano in the studio - a suitably battered instrument - and for an actor who would be my father for three days of recording.

Some time later, I had a letter from a stranger, which brought me news. It appeared that my father had married again; he never had any more children of his own, but became stepfather to a family of six, four of whom were daughters. It was the eldest daughter, a woman of my own age, who now wrote to me. He had died, I learned, in 1997. My new stepsister emailed me a photograph of him. A face not seen for 40 years came swimming out of the darkness of the screen. I could see how he had altered, how he had aged, and how features of my brothers' faces, as they had aged, were mixed up in his. Later, when my new stepsister looked out for me the very few things he had left behind, she forwarded to me his army papers, and I saw how my personality was mixed up in his. She gave me a cassette tape, old and scratchy, which she said was a recording of some of his favourite music. It was labelled in the neat sloping capitals that I remember him using to fill in the crossword every evening in the Manchester Evening News. There were the song titles, full of loss and regret: "Canal Street Blues", "How Long Blues", "I Don't Know Why", "Walking Out My Door", and a song named "Calling 'Em Home".

I had called him home, I felt: not through telephone directories and tracing agencies, not by any rational means, but through the exercise of as much art as I had at my disposal. I'd used indirection to bring back the dead. For some years I lived in Africa, in Botswana, and people there used to say that to see ghosts you need to look out of the corners of your eyes. If you turn on them a direct gaze, then, like Eurydice, they vanish.

The whole process of creativity is like that. The writer often doesn't know, consciously, what gods she invokes or what myths she's retelling. Orpheus is a figure of all artists, and Eurydice is his inspiration. She is what he goes into the dark to seek. He is the conscious mind, with its mastery of skill and craft, its faculty of ordering, selecting, making rational and persuasive; she is the subconscious mind, driven by disorder, fuelled by obscure desires, brimming with promises that perhaps she won't keep, with promises of revelation, fantasies of empowerment and knowledge. What she offers is fleeting, tenuous, hard to hold. She makes us stand on the brink of the unknown with our hand stretched out into the dark. Mostly, we just touch her fingertips and she vanishes. She is the dream that seems charged with meaning, that vanishes as soon as we try to describe it. She is the unsayable thing we are always trying to say. She is the memory that slips away as you try to grasp it. Just when you've got it, you haven't got it. She won't bear the light of day. She gets to the threshold and she falters. You want her too much, and by wanting her you destroy her. As a writer, as an artist, your effects constantly elude you. You have a glimpse, an inspiration, you write a paragraph and you think it's there, but when you read back, it's not there. Every picture painted, every opera composed, every book that is written, is the ghost of the possibilities that were in the artist's head. Art brings back the dead, but it also makes perpetual mourners of us all. Nothing lasts: that's what Apollo, the father of Orpheus, sings to him in Monteverdi's opera. In Opera North's staging, the god took a handkerchief from his pocket, licked it, and tenderly cleaned his child's tear-stained face.

Though the climate of modern rationalism has a certain bracing and defiant appeal, we banish these old gods at our peril. In times of great happiness or great sorrow, in triumph or catastrophe, we are not governed by rationality, and it is honest to admit it. The gods' nature is curled up within our own, and if we deny them they come out to torment us, with self-doubt and malignant sadness, and their breath is in the chilly wind we feel blowing out of the darkness. We see their bright faces in our love for our family and friends and country, and their dark faces in war and tribulation, in racism and hate crime. These gods are no role model for living. They have all the faults of the irrational. They are capricious, sometimes stupid, but if we deny and repress them it offers us no advantage; it's better to know their faces than not, and hope that, like Orpheus, we can move fate to pity. It is almost the definition of being human to want what is impossible. We want the child of 22 weeks' gestation to live and thrive. We want to live for ever, without infirmity and without the evidence of the destructive march of the years. We want to play games with time. We want to undo death; we love the idea of the soul, but we are incurably addicted to the body, and we want the dead back, or at least we want a ghost to walk.

But perhaps a ghost is not something dead, but something not yet born: not something hidden, but something that we hope is about to be seen. We want to go to the underworld, back into the darkness of our own nature, to bring back some object of impossible beauty: we know it probably won't work, but what matters is that we keep trying. The consolation lies in the attempt itself, the mercy that's granted to the hand that dares to stretch out into the dark: well, we say, I am only human, I've gone to the brink, I have done all that I can. As the last lines of the opera tell us: "Those who sow in sorrow shall reap the harvest of grace."

**·** L'Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi is at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre on August 11, 13 and 14. Orpheus by Igor Stravinksy is at the Usher Hall on August 23. Orpheus X is performed by the American Repertory Theatre at the Royal Lyceum Theatre from August 25 to 29. Edinburgh International Festival box office: 0131 473 2000 or go to [www.eif.co.uk][1]

[1]: http://www.eif.co.uk