by
Jeanette Winterson
rating: 5 of 5 stars
Much has been said about the labors of Heracles, but not often is his mental state addressed in the tales. Winterson comically yet seriously addresses the buzzing “thought-wasp” that Heracles very seldom engages, being more inclined to smack himself upside the head until the buzzing ceases, couching this tale within her larger exploration of the internal life of Atlas, he who bears the burden of the world’s (and we discover, his own) weight.
As part of Heracles’ twelve labors, in exchange for his help, Heracles assumes the burden of the world while Atlas fetches three golden fruit from the garden of the Hesperides which, in Winterson’s telling, was Atlas’ own, tended by his daughters, but now gone to seed, save the tree he stewarded for Hera. After Atlas, being of the race of Titans who warred with and lost to the Olympians, was punished by yoking his strength to carry the Earth upon his back, his only other mention is of this encounter with Heracles, played out as if he refuses to resume his burden, but tricked by Heracles into doing so. Passing mention turns Atlas into a fixture, but not a character in the classic tales.
Winterson takes this silent Titan and gives him a glorious internal imagining, exploring her stated themes of boundaries and isolation and freedom and responsibility within the character she develops of Atlas. His punishment becomes a space of rumination; he can hear what happens upon the world, he learns over the long years to differentiate the buzz of a bee from the low of cattle, the strains of song from the vilifying attack. He dwells in isolation, supporting life but never able to cross the boundary and interact.
Enabled by Heracles to be free, Winterson complicates the scenario by engaging Atlas’ deep sense of responsibility – he has carried the Earth for an unfathomable time and not merely let it drop, leading one to wonder why if not for this sense of duty, emphasized perhaps in his pre-punishment devotion to his garden – and while there is an element of trickery involved in Heracles getting Atlas to reshoulder the Earth’s weight, it is left arguable that Atlas was complicit in this. Heracles may be portrayed as crafty, but Atlas has the wisdom of long meditation; he knew what he was about. A silent isolation for Atlas commences after this time, bounded by the disappearance of his familial gods, leaving him to ossify and calcify under the weight of the Earth, his mind kept contained within the duty his body performs.
“Then the dog came.” With this seemingly benign yet heraldic utterance Winterson brings us to 1957 and a little dog named Laika shot into space by Russia. Atlas frees Laika from her little pod, saving her from the needle that would end her life, and she in turn saves Atlas from hardening into nothingness – a state he has previously longed for, yet which can never be regained. And then he has the thought that took milennia to come to him: why not put the Earth down?
Within this mythic retelling, this central question constantly buzzes in the background; why not just put it down? Why not release the boundaries? By what are we really bounded? Or whom? Winterson revitalizes this tale of Atlas and Heracles, contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of both, pulling from a little space-born pod a reason to dwell upon how we ourselves invoke our own limits.
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