ARTS
Tales for our time
Simon Reade believes a reworking of Ovid has re-ignited our desire to know the truth Those chilling euphemisms of the 1990s — 'ethnic cleansing' and 'collateral dam- age' — are lies pedalled as truth. They stop us feeling what we ought to feel: about the systematic and murderous hounding out of one race from its home by another; about innocent bystanders murdered without much care while terrorising planes try to hit an inanimate target. Without articulat- ing the truth, we can't truly feel, which is why we must cling on to the language of feeling and always question the context in which truth is disseminated. I would argue that there's a collection of contemporary poems — a reworking of 2,000-year-old Latin verse — which has re-ignited our desire to know the truth because it has revitalised our appetite for visceral, truth- ful language in a world of otherwise desen- sitised, dehumanising words: Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid (published by Faber & Faber in 1997). From Ovid's free-forming, 15-book Meta- morphoses, Hughes has refashioned just 24 passages to encompass all human experi- ence: the irrationally jealous squabbles of Juno and Jupiter, the devastating unrequit- ed love story of Echo and Narcissus, the vision of the blinded Tiresias, the greedy folly of King Midas and so on. One of the many reasons Tales from Ovid has made such an impact is because of the raw vigour of the gut-wrenched language. Here is a poetic sensibility for our time, drawn from all time, taking ancient myths and convic- tions and putting them into our world, into our own words.
It's what the director Tim Supple, recent- ly re-rehearsing the current revival of the Royal Shakespeare Company's stage adap- tation at the Young Vic Theatre, called the `epic meat' of the language. He encouraged the acting ensemble to bite into it, chew it, relish it. Procne — in the tale of 'Tereus and Philomela' that inspired Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus — is faced with the horror of her husband's rape and mutilation of her sister. The fact is appalling. The language with which Hughes renders the machina- tions of her mind bears witness to it, demands our awe: ... Tears were pushed aside
By the devouring single idea of revenge.
Revenge Had swallowed her whole being. She had plunged Into a labyrinth of plotting . . .
`Devouring', 'swallowed', 'plunged', 'a labyrinth of plotting' — these are words to which we have to make as full a commit- ment in speaking them as Procne has to in acting upon them. Hughes's great achievement in Tales from Ovid — to take the distant epics of gods and myth and make them immediate, intimate and human by embracing the ter- ror and the ecstasy of life in extremis — is mirrored by his parallel collection, Birthday Letters, published a year after Tales from Ovid, the year of Hughes's death. In these poems, written across four decades, Hugh- es charts his tempestuous relationship with Sylvia Plath and the consequences of her suicide, when their children were very young, as she was reaching a creative cli- max with her Ariel poems. In Birthday Let- ters Hughes has taken the most personal pain, the most minute details of his life, elevating and projecting them onto an epic, universal plane of passion and violence. In a poem called 'The Rabbit Catcher', Hugh- es recalls Plath's 'dybbuk fury, babies/ Hurled into the car' as they drove to the Cornish coast. There they found a rabbit snare that, to Hughes's shock, Plath tore up and threw into the trees:
. . . Faithful To my country gods — I saw The sanctity of a trapline desecrated.
You saw blunt fingers, blood in the cuticles, Clamped round a blue mug. I saw Country poverty raising a penny, Filling a Sunday stewpot. You saw baby-eyed Strangled innocents, I saw sacred Ancient custom . . .
and so on. 'That day belonged to the furies' — Furies which have already appeared in Tales from Ovid, 'the snake-haired, dread- ful sisters/Who climb from the hell of con- science/Whirling their torches'.
Together, Tales from Ovid and Birthday Letters can be seen as defining works of the end of the 20th century, much as James Joyce's Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's The Waste- land heralded Modernism at its start. Hughes gives us back the language to feel for ourselves, and to engage with the world around us. To have a conscience is a living hell, whether examining our personal integrity or scrutinising our public responsi- bility.
It will always take a kind of poetry to make us recognise something so devastat- ing. The richer the cultural landscape, the richer our lives — for better, for worse. When Peter Kosminsky's astonishing two- part television production of Leigh Jack- son's Warriors was screened, we all appreciated, probably for the first time, the true horrors of the Bosnian operation in which British forces were impotent observers under the United Nations rules of lack of engagement with so-called 'eth- nic cleansing'. When I worked with Paul Greengrass as his script editor on his film for Granada Television The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, we were both aware that such a dramatisation would have a pro- found effect on those who might feel them- selves to be otherwise unaffected by that racist murder and the institutionalised racism of the police force its blundered investigation exposed. Drama can be a more potent document than documentary. It seems a paradox, but fiction can speak our language more than fact, far more than the politician bleating 'the fact of the mat- ter' or, I would argue, most journalistic reporting.
The warp and weft of Hughes's versions of the Metamorphoses has oxygenated the very marrow and lifeblood of a language that was showing signs of anaemia in many areas of British cultural and political life. Hughes's achievement with his benchmark poetic diction in Tales from Ovid and Birth- day Letters is to give each one of us the imaginative tools with which to engage with our own lives, in all their grisly glory, and, thereby, the wonders and wrack of the world at large.
Simon Reade is literary manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the co-adaptor and dramaturg of Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid, at the Young Vic Theatre until 22 July.
Previous page
