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Jul. 26th, 2004 04:11 pmI just finished The Centaur. I feel that there was a lot that I missed in the book, a lot that went over my head, but I found it very beautiful nonetheless. I have a pretty good general familiarity with Greek and Roman mythology (I ought to, after Ulysses and six years of Latin and all the time I spent reading D'aulaire's Greek Myths as a kid), but I wish I were more familiar with the myth of Chiron. I did not realize as I was reading how thoroughly the mythical correspondences are woven into the book; it was only when I finished and saw the index at the end that I realized that every single character in the book has a mythical referent. I already knew that Caldwell, Peter's father, represents the centaur Chiron, and I have now learned that Chiron gave his life to atone for the sin of the theft of fire by Prometheus, represented by Peter. But there is a whole host of other characters, all of whom play a part in Updike's distorted, modernized retelling of the myth, and although I can get a few of the obvious ones (Zimmerman is Zeus, for instance), I don't know enough to place them all and I wish I did. Just knowing the bit about Prometheus and the theft of fire makes the end of the book much more moving...
It's interesting that both Joyce and Updike wrote books that are essentially about father-son relationships, but that both clouded and complicated their stories with the same sort of heavy referentiality to the same source material. It is perhaps possible to grasp the messages of these books without considering the myths through which the stories are filtered, but your understanding of the relationships described will be much richer if you can make the mythological connections. I don't really know where this I am going with this comparison, but I do think it's interesting.
Mythology aside, The Centaur was sometimes baffling and not particularly gripping (I was capable of putting it down for long stretches at a time without feeling compelled to pick it back up), but it had a strange kind of loveliness to it. The prose was dense and rich, and sometimes it was enough to let the flood of words pour over me, and at other times the simplest words and phrases combined to have a remarkably gorgeous effect. This paragraph near the end, as Peter watches his father leave their snowbound house, is particularly lovely:
I turned my face away and looked through the window. In time my father appeared in this window, an erect figure dark against the snow. His posture made no concession to the pull underfoot; upright he waded out through our yard and past the mailbox and up the hill until he was lost to my sight behind the trees of our orchard. The trees took white on their sun side. The two telephone wires diagonally cut the blank blue of the sky. The stone wall was a scumble of umber; my father's footsteps thumbs of white in white. I knew what this scene was--a patch of Pennsylvania in 1947--and yet I did not know, was in my softly fevered state mindlessly soaked in a rectangle of colored light. I burned to paint it, just like that, in its puzzle of glory; it came upon me that I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
Perhaps you have to have read the whole book leading up to that paragraph in order to get something out of it. I don't know. You could perhaps pinpoint the moment at which Peter/Prometheus steals the life-giving fire to that paragraph, and to me it is moving and luminous.
It's interesting that both Joyce and Updike wrote books that are essentially about father-son relationships, but that both clouded and complicated their stories with the same sort of heavy referentiality to the same source material. It is perhaps possible to grasp the messages of these books without considering the myths through which the stories are filtered, but your understanding of the relationships described will be much richer if you can make the mythological connections. I don't really know where this I am going with this comparison, but I do think it's interesting.
Mythology aside, The Centaur was sometimes baffling and not particularly gripping (I was capable of putting it down for long stretches at a time without feeling compelled to pick it back up), but it had a strange kind of loveliness to it. The prose was dense and rich, and sometimes it was enough to let the flood of words pour over me, and at other times the simplest words and phrases combined to have a remarkably gorgeous effect. This paragraph near the end, as Peter watches his father leave their snowbound house, is particularly lovely:
I turned my face away and looked through the window. In time my father appeared in this window, an erect figure dark against the snow. His posture made no concession to the pull underfoot; upright he waded out through our yard and past the mailbox and up the hill until he was lost to my sight behind the trees of our orchard. The trees took white on their sun side. The two telephone wires diagonally cut the blank blue of the sky. The stone wall was a scumble of umber; my father's footsteps thumbs of white in white. I knew what this scene was--a patch of Pennsylvania in 1947--and yet I did not know, was in my softly fevered state mindlessly soaked in a rectangle of colored light. I burned to paint it, just like that, in its puzzle of glory; it came upon me that I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
Perhaps you have to have read the whole book leading up to that paragraph in order to get something out of it. I don't know. You could perhaps pinpoint the moment at which Peter/Prometheus steals the life-giving fire to that paragraph, and to me it is moving and luminous.
