In antiquity the Medea myth was both pervasive and pliable. 30 Wolf ’s variations, both on the myth and its textual forms, off er signifi cant illumination of the development of her insights and strategies from Cassandra to Medea: Stimmen . What Wolf does and does not pick up from the Euripides text, and what she picks up but changes, also provokes examination of how Euripides’ treatment of the myth relates to other examples from antiquity. In his Introduction and Commentary to his scholarly edition of Euripides’ text, Donald Mastronarde starts with observation that ‘In terms of story- pattern, Eur.’s Medea may be analysed as a revenge play’. 31 Pointing to the extensive scholarship on this aspect, he adds that ‘A revenge play commonly features such elements as grievance, overcoming of obstacles, deception, murder, and celebration of success, and these may easily be identifi ed in Eur.’s play’. At fi rst reading, Wolf appears not to present her rewriting of the myth as a revenge play, or at least not in terms of the internal structure and tonality of the work. However, when placed in its fuller context, Medea: Stimmen can still be read as a variation on the model of the revenge story and I shall return to that aspect in the concluding section of this chapter.
Th e fi rst level of analysis of comparison between Euripides and Wolf reveals that Wolf has peeled back Euripides’ presentation of Medea’s emotional behaviour, ‘otherness’ and violence, a triangulation that shapes the association with infanticide that was so eagerly seized on by subsequent artists and commentators. 32 Margaret Atwood, who herself later produced a novella retelling
the story of the Odyssey from the perspective of Penelope and the maids in her 2005 Penelopiad , commented that, ‘Her [sc.Wolf ’s] attack is head- on and original.
Christa Wolf ’s Medea fl atly denies that she committed any of these crimes at all’
(i.e. fratricide, infanticide, murder of Glauce by means of the toxic frock), and went on to assert that ‘Th is tale is about Medea but also about us’. According to Atwood, Wolf ’s Medea: Stimmen stirs up uneasy questions about the decisions we would make when confronted with the imperatives of saving one’s own skin and staying close to the sources of power that might bring this about. 33 Th ese are examples of ‘affi liation’, of dilemmas that are recognizable in most times and places. Wolf herself recognized the potential of myth in retrieving and exploring such issues:
Myth provides a model that’s open enough to incorporate our own present experiences while giving us a distance from our subject that usually only time can make possible. In this sense – as a kind of model – myth seems to me a useful tool for any fi ction written today. 34
Wolf ’s exposure to myth also involved refl ection on its eff ects on her sensibility:
Myth presents you with a character and a framework to which you must adhere, but within that framework, if you only let yourself go deep enough, undreamt of vistas open before you, and you’re free to select, to interpret, to look at the ancient story with a contemporary eye, to let yourself be stared at and touched by fi gures from the depths of the past . . . My methods – fantasy and imagination – were literary rather than scientifi c. 35
Nevertheless, Wolf also commented that her writing was informed by as much knowledge as she could gain: ‘many people believe that the less you know, the
“freer” you are to invent – not so.’ 36 She specifi cally said that she ‘found the multitude of sources in this prehistoric fi eld especially stimulating, even exciting, instructive, delightful’, especially when they revealed ‘the multitudes of a story’s possible variants’.
What, then, did Wolf discover and what did she do with the multiple possibilities? 37 Th e ancient evidence about the variations on the myth reveals that plot- makers (then and subsequently) had a wide choice. Th e outlines of the myths associated with Medea were well known, both in antiquity and subsequently, and this gives extra point to the variations that are introduced, especially when they problematize alternative strategies that are smoothed out in the summary versions. 38 For example, Euripides is thought to have introduced the infanticide; in other versions the children were killed by the Corinthians in
revenge for the killing of their princess or of Creon, or Medea killed them by accident. 39 Scholiasts suggest that the children were honoured by a cult. 40 In antiquity the themes of Medea’s relationship with Corinth and the killing of the children were opaque and Wolf exploited this pliability, as did Euripides.
Euripides’ play begins with the Nurse and the Tutor expressing their concerns about Medea’s state of mind (1–95) and there is emphasis throughout the play on her roots in Colchis and her ‘otherness’. Wolf refi nes this to present Medea as alienated in every respect, including from Colchis. She also disrupts Euripides’
sequential narrative to present a polyphonic tapestry of accounts by diff erent characters from diff erent perspectives.
Wolf structured her work in eleven sections, each presented by a distinctive voice – Medea (1, 4, 8 and 11); Jason (2 and 9); Agmeda (3), a Colchian former pupil of Medea (his testimony is not to be equated with ‘truth’; he recognizes that he is not an objective witness but ‘playing a part’ (61)); Akamas (5), a Corinthian, Creon’s First Astronomer. He comments on the eff ects of ‘internal discord’ (94) and how ‘normal people don’t risk their lives for a phantom’ (99). Th ere is also Leukon (7 and 10), another Corinthian, Creon’s Second Astronomer and an observer, rather like the watchman in Aeschylus Agamemnon , whom he echoes in referring to ‘the roof terrace of my tower’ (125) and in his capacity to ‘see through everything and to be able to do nothing as though I had no hands’. He also uses the ancient and modern vocabulary of physical crises and civic plague, resonating across the centuries between Th ucydides and Camus (136–8). Glauce (6), Creon’s daughter, is there too, and poses the agonizing question as to what
‘known’ means (120); and there are seventeen other characters. Each Voice is prefaced by an epigraph quoting an ancient or modern writer (Seneca, Plato, Euripides, Cato, Bachmann, Girard, Kamper, Cavarero). Medea’s fi nal sequence (11) brings the Corinthians’ actions and the death of the children together with the historic eff ects:
‘ Dead. Th ey murdered them. Stoned them, Arinna says. And I had thought their vindictiveness would pass if I went away. I didn’t know them . . . Where can I go?
It is impossible to imagine a world, a time, where I would have a place.’ 41
Th is pessimistic ending raises questions about the extent to which Wolf ’s treatment of the Medea myth can be read as a comment on her own situation. In a speech ‘Th oughts about September 1st 1939’ delivered at the Academy of Arts, West Berlin on 31 August 1989, Wolf refl ected on the diffi culties of addressing the recent past and the problems of fi nding a new German identity that neither denied the Nazi past nor imported it into present patterns of thinking. 42 In this
and other speeches shaped by the events of 1989, dominant themes emerge: the diffi culty of working out new structures of feeling and thinking; the role of literature in fi lling these ‘vague empty spaces’ and in investigating the ‘blind spots in our own past’; the language associated with turning points; the unpalatable truth that ‘it hurts to know’ ( Wolf 1998 , 319). Th ese serve as a sub- text to the revelation in 1993 that Wolf had been an informant to the Stasi (the secret police in the German Democratic Republic, the Soviet- dominated East Germany that emerged in the aft ermath of the Second World War). Widespread disgust and accusations of hypocrisy ensued. 43 For the topic of this chapter, the most interesting point to emerge is that Wolf said that she had simply forgotten the details of the episode (which covered the years 1959–1962). She recalled meetings with the Stasi but not the details of the information she had passed to them. She claimed to have repressed the memories. 44 Whatever the facts of the matter, it provides an additional and compelling lens through which to read Medea: Stimmen , not just for the urgency that it adds to the perspectives of the various Voices on how to live with the fears of insecurity under a repressive regime, 45 but also to the whole work’s concern with the process of constructing history and the reputations of the individuals who live it.
Coda
Much has been said about how temporal and cultural translation and transposition are practised by Mda and Wolf. It is a truism of classical reception studies that distance aff ords critique, but less frequently recognized that distance also permits repression. Both writers in diff erent ways demonstrate awareness of this aspect and develop an aesthetic that tackles it. However, in Wolf ’s case the problematics of repression involve the personal as well as the socio- political. Is Wolf ’s Medea an apologia pro vita sua as well as an aesthetic exploration of the agency of contradictory voices in changing the trajectory and status of testimony in transitional literature? I hope that this chapter has shown that diff ering interpretations of her creative practice can be kept on the same agenda. It is less a question of either/or than of both/and, and the respective balances between the alternatives depend not just on the contexts of reading and interpretation but also on keeping tabs on the whole sweep of evidence in the debate. Th e ‘hot spots’ in the intersections between myth and fi ction enable us to get a feel for the layering and shift ing of the myths and of the writing practices that communicate them.
A second key question is: what do these two examples of very diff erent kinds of relationship between modern fi ction and Greek myth add to our understanding of transition literature? Here I would argue that both add to understanding of the relationship between the ‘umbrella’ concept of transition literature and the associated areas of crisis literature and trauma studies. Th ere are, too, wider questions about the contribution of both writer’s work to the burgeoning fi elds of memory studies and of cultural and political amnesia and repression. Both writers are, in diff erent ways, editors: they discover and interrogate oral and literary sources and cultural practices associated with confl ict and death. Th ey both look behind the ‘given’ evidence and experiences. In the case of Medea:
Stimmen , this includes the multiple manifestations of the myth. Th e tasks of the reader and the scholar are to be alert to what the author/editor is doing with the material and how he or she achieves the eff ects that seep into the readers’
consciousness. Wolf ’s self- refl exive engagement with the intersection between the mythical narratives and the modern fi ction that she creates challenges the histories of the myth’s reception and the judgements made by her critics as well as her self- perception as human being and as author.
Th e ‘distancing’ characteristics of classical myth provide a fi eld for contests but also for avoidance. Although it does not follow the same narrative trajectory of Euripides’ play nor of any one of the many versions of the myth, Wolf ’s Medea:
Stimmen nevertheless includes the raw material of a revenge tragedy. 46 However, while constituent elements such as grievance, deception, killing and celebration of success occur in the Medea myth and in Euripides’ reworking of it, in Wolf these elements are re- articulated in a meta- narrative. Wolf ’s narrative is distanced from the ‘events’ in the myth and is structured through her adaptation of form, especially in the creation of multiple perspectives. So a better way of characterizing her work might be to think of Medea: Stimmen not as a ‘revenge’ story but as ‘writing back’
– ‘writing back’ on behalf of the Medea of myth but shaped by Wolf to embrace the additional dimension of ‘writing back’ to her own society, her experiences and to her inner self. 47 Th is is not ‘writing back’ in the postcolonial sense but on a number of cultural and political planes: the histories involved include personal life story;
the narratives associated with the GDR (both at its time of power and when perspectives on that power were revised); and the transhistorical and transcultural recreations of the story of Medea. Th e result is a work that not only refi ctionalizes the myth but also extends its metaphorical range to embrace allusion to twentieth- century events and Wolf ’s own life- experiences.
Seamus Heaney, in Th e Redress of Poetry (1995), discussed how the struggle of an individual consciousness towards affi rmation merges with a collective
straining for self- defi nition. Th is may be true of Heaney but Wolf ’s personal and political- historical struggle is less easily resolved by ‘merging’; the jagged edges persist, the defi nitions resist closure. Th e plasticity of the Medea story and its associated discomforts have been actualized through the interplay of the ancient myth and the aesthetic of modern fi ction. Paradoxically, although the temporal and cultural ‘distance’ provided by the exploitation of ancient myth does facilitate sharper sensibilities and critique of the modern contexts, that distance also preserves the possibility of denial and avoidance of unwelcome aspects of the present. Th ese can simply be shift ed away from their contemporary grounding to the ‘safer’ realms of the more abstract ‘transhistorical’ plane. Both Mda and Wolf in their diff erent ways provide variations on the question posed by Jacqueline Rose: Why is it so hard for nations and people to remember what they have done? 48 Myth in fi ction recalls raw material but also enables the diffi cult questions surrounding its shattering and re- assembly to resist certainty; it leaves the possibility of a succession of open- ended readings and especially underlies the claim of Mohammad Shaheen that ‘Th e redeeming feature of any new translation is that it forms an open invitation for a further diff erent translation advanced to the reader’. 49
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Japan may seem to off er an evident example of great cultural distance from ancient Greece. But when Japan, in the second half of the nineteenth century – and aft er more than two centuries of almost complete isolation – opened up to foreigners, the Greek world, hitherto virtually unknown, began quickly to be seen as a model of civilization, one almost as infl uential as the contemporary cultures of England, Germany, France and other western countries.
Right at the dawn of the Japanese process of modernization (and of the absorption of western models) called Bunmei kaika (‘civilization and enlightenment’), we fi nd an example of such admiration in the novel Keikoku bidan ( Inspiring Instances of Good Statesmanship , 1883–1834) by Yano Ryūkei, 1 also known as Yano Fumio (1850–1931). Written at the height of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement and set in fourth- century Th ebes, the novel was published more or less in the same years when Gilbert and Sullivan were creating and staging their comic opera Th e Mikado (1885), which was set in a picturesque and fi ctional Japan. 2 Both works, seen through our modern disenchanted eyes, appear quite amusing as examples of irredeemable kitsch, but the intentions of their authors were entirely diff erent. Keikoku bidan is a genuine, albeit naïf, idealization of the Greek world, whereas Th e Mikado is really a satire of British institutions. Its authors, under the infl uence of the Japanese vogue very much in fashion at the time, chose an exotic setting without any notion of respect for the country portrayed. Th e opera was actually a rather fantastic representation of an Asian country, and devoid of any realistic pretence. 3
Keikoku bidan belonged to the genre of the so- called ‘political novel’, then very popular in Japan. Yano Ryūkei was a bureaucrat, a politician – he was one of