- 1 In Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (1982), Hans Robert Jauss views literature from the perspective (...)
1The homodiegetic narrators in Daphne du Maurier’s “Ganymede” (1959) and “Not After Midnight” (1971) are self-conscious, middle-aged, middle-class male tourists in search of relaxation, recreation, and pleasure. As they project their bookish knowledge of Venice and Crete, respectively, onto the actual destinations as a tourist’s horizon of expectations,1 these places become riddled with myth, or rather with the myths the narrators bring to them. They develop a disturbing—not to say alarming—quality which is assumed by the narrators to be part of a haunting local context that rubs off on them, as if myth had the power to blind those who foster it. In these two narratives with Gothic overtones and a detective-story structure, myth is thus allowed to spread back from place to character. Once back in England, the protagonists cannot recover their former status. Almost literally infected by myth, they lose their jobs and move towards the societal fringe wherefrom their stories issue, like pathetic pleas framed with irony.
- 2 “The Story of a Panic,” “The Story of the Siren,” “The Road from Colonus,” for instance, all “writt (...)
2In a short story, according to Elizabeth Bowen, locale “must materialize,” it must have “a palpable physical reality in obedience to the same law of relevance as a character description” (qtd. in Shaw 151). It is therefore a useful criterion in the understanding of character, especially when associated with a transitory experience. Moreover, a shifting setting naturally includes otherness and is liable to function as a catalyst for self-revelation, as an “other place” allowing the protagonist to integrate another self (Collinge and Vernadakis). Accordingly, in “Ganymede” and “Not After Midnight,” du Maurier portrays self-revelation through changing places. Both stories hinge upon tourism, a transitory experience whose brief span of time is typically combined in short fiction with highly traceable locales and representative characters. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales constitutes an early example of this combination—and, incidentally, it is the narrator’s bedside book in “Ganymede” (105). Several short stories by E. M. Forster,2 and Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1912), are early twentieth-century illustrations of the same pattern.
- 3 The catabasis or descent-into-hell motif represents, through an oxymoron, the knowledge of the unkn (...)
3In opposition to travel, tourism is often understood in terms of condensed pleasure—doing several enjoyable things in a short period of time and in a place that is not home. According to John K. Walton, by following a “beaten path,” tourists “benefit from established systems of provision, and as befits pleasure-seekers, are generally insulated from difficulty, danger, and embarrassment.” The economy of du Maurier’s short stories is well served by the formatted tightness of the tourist tour, to which she tailors archetypal places, stereotyped characters, and the classical initiation pattern of catabasis, or descent into hell.3 In each story, Italy and Greece make the protagonists stand out in relief against their surroundings, both at home and abroad. Their horizon of expectations, delineated as it is by their middle-class education and their cultural background, turns the two countries into timeless places in which the narrators can experience moments of eternity. Spruced up with mythology, Venice and Crete foster legends that act as catalysts, bringing about pathetic conflicts between the character’s conventional and “other” selves.
- 4 The American Dream is analysed as a myth by several critics. It appears as such in Brunel (53-55).
4Greece and Italy being ancient lands, if the characters who visit them are to change, one expects their evolution to be subject to identifiable Old World myths. This is indeed the case with du Maurier, but for one meaningful detail: in her stories one myth may conceal another, and the myths of the Old World fuel those of the New. The classical myths carried or embodied by the narrators are thus dismantled in favour of a mythicised modernity, as when the American Dream,4 a myth from the New World, directly impacts the protagonists and ironically returns them to England as carriers of viruses imported from America. In that sense, in both stories myth has a blinding quality which makes du Maurier’s antiheroic protagonists vulnerable to the pragmatic dimensions of a darker, contemporary order, lurking in modernity. Consequently, the present contribution will focus on the ways in which these two du Maurier short stories use the stereotyped English tourist against the background of a myth-oriented “other place” for the reader to detect the dangers of a modernity with its own mythical dimension. In the first section, “The Emergence of a New Self,” I discuss the descent-into-hell pattern that frames the narrator’s attraction to Italian boys in “Ganymede.” His sense of a mythical, infernal Venice, although structurally in line with the classical pattern of catabasis or descent into hell, is ironically debunked in favour of an actual and materialist city that harbours American culture. In the next section, “Du Maurier’s Use of Greek Myths,” the protagonist’s “awakening” is then examined through his blindness to reality and a gory alternative scenario of the Ganymede myth, revisited by this materialism. Interestingly, the reader is more sensitive to the story’s horror than the characters are, in particular the narrator’s new self. The emergence of a new self for the English tourist of the second story, discussed in the section entitled “The Fascinating Power of Myth,” is also framed by a descent-into-hell pattern, encapsulated by an antiquities-smuggling context. In it, it is argued that the characters’ interest in ancient myths disfigures them or kills them, while their adherence to modern myths drives them to crime. In the last section, “(Mis)Reading Myths,” I argue that, as du Maurier’s tourists are trained in Old World mythology, they turn into victims of New World myths. The founding myths of American culture, namely the myth of the American Dream and the myth of the Frontier, are wryly employed to illuminate the inherent danger of a materialistic society.
- 5 For instance, in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, one reads: “Why, there was blond Ganymede, whom Zeu (...)
- 6 “Γανυμήδης, the name of the beautiful youth abducted by Zeus and taken to Olympus, . . . is probabl (...)
5The first occurrences of the name Ganymede, the title of the first short story, can be found in Homer’s Iliad (V, 265), in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (202-06), and in a song sung by Orpheus after his return from the underworld in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Ovid X, 155-64).5 All three texts refer to the same character, an engaging Trojan prince whom Zeus abducted in the form of an eagle to grant him immortality and eternal youth on Olympus, where he was the god’s love object as well as the pourer of the Olympians’ nectar. He was eventually placed among the stars as Aquarius, the water bearer (Graves 29c:116). Etymologically, Ganymede6 combines “beauty” and “genitals” in a way that, according to Adrian Room, can be seen “as a compliment to its bearer” (201). Moreover, according to Robert Graves, “Ganymede’s name refers, properly, to the joyful stirring of his own desire at the prospect of marriage, not to that of Zeus when refreshed by nectar from his bedfellow’s hand; but, becoming catamitus in Latin, it has given English the word ‘catamite’, meaning the passive object of male homosexual lust” (Graves 29:4).
6Taking her cue from that tradition, du Maurier creates a first-person ulterior narrative whose narrator, a classical scholar, lives on the banks of a canal, near Paddington Station, in the neighbourhood called “Little Venice,” this detail showing from the outset that the city of canals had a significant impact on him. The telling of the whole analeptic story is triggered by the physical resemblance between the waiter in a nearby Italian restaurant which the Englishman patronises and another waiter he met some time before—a fifteen-year-old Venetian whom he dubbed Ganymede because, in the manner of a British Zeus, he became mesmerised by the youth’s good looks. Although hardly more than a fantasy object, the youth remodelled the narrator’s trips around Venice into a touring of myths—a cruise into hell that resulted in a bloodbath and requires an interpretation informed by mythology on the reader’s part.
- 7 George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824), the leading figure of the Romantic movement in E (...)
- 8 See for instance Paterson-Morgan.
7In Venice, the narrator’s earlier knowledge of the history, culture, and literature of that city—his “horizon of expectations”—confronted him with a mythical, rather than an actual, locale, paving the way for a catabasis. So much so that, when he gets off the train, “in October” and “at dusk” (“Ganymede” 90), he steps into decay and decadence, into a world viewed from the mythical inferno. Thus, he deems that the porter who waits for him at the station looks “like a deceased member of the royal family” (90, my emphasis) and dubs him “Prince Hal,” similar in sound to “Prince Hell,” while also creating a clear parallel between Venice and the underworld by defining its canals as “Styx-like” (101). These details announce a symbolic death which, in line with the symbolic codes of Christian tradition this time, is systematically associated with resurrection or rebirth. The narrator’s other self is to be born at the Hotel Byron, where the porter leads him. Named after Lord Byron, whose reputation recalls not only young boys and Hellenic traditions7 but also the Romantic attraction to the infernal regions,8 the hotel belongs to the same homoerotic paradigm as “Ganymede,” the short story’s title. Hence the figurative language fraught with implicit eroticism when describing a Venice that “lay before [the narrator] in all its glories” (90), an “uncelestial city” (91) apart from Judeo-Christian traditions, in which time is “changeless” (91). Gradually, the old city becomes a source of empowerment, a “new” place for the emergence of the narrator’s other self. Venice looms larger than nature, a living myth, brazen and carnal, which inflames the narrator’s senses, intoxicating him with a series of epiphanic moments that make him feel godlike:
I was aware, surely for the first time in my life, of a sense of abandon, of belonging—certainly not to the present, nor to the future, nor even to the past, but to a period in time that was changeless and was Venetian time, that was outside the rest of Europe and even the world, and existed, magically, for myself alone. . . . I had the sense of immortality. . . . It was as though, intuitively, I had become, at last, myself. . . . Curiously, it was like the first flavour of intoxication. . . . The excitement was intense, almost unbearable. (91-93)
8The fifteen-year-old boy whose looks fascinate the narrator is a waiter in Piazza San Marco. During another epiphany, in his capacity as an immortal, he casts the youth as his own Ganymede, thus discovering the effect that the boy’s alluring physique has on him and an aspect of himself that he had never perceived until then:
The flash of recognition was so swift, so overwhelming, that it was like being jerked into consciousness from a lifetime of sleep. The absolute certainty of who I was and where I was, and the bond between us possessed me just as Paul was possessed on the Damascus road. (95)
9By travelling from London to Venice, not only does the narrator change selves but, like Paul, he also starts to advocate the new condition he is about to embrace—not Christianity, as far as he is concerned, but homophilia, or more accurately pederasty. The Biblical reference is thus highly ironic, and offensive to modern sensibilities as it underlines the problematic grounds of the relationship between Zeus and Ganymede in the sense that, as noted by Helen Morales, “its representations resemble what we would call child abuse more than what we would call homosexuality” (90).
10The so-called Ganymede has an uncle, a rascal who keeps following, indeed haunting, the narrator. His narrative function is that of an antagonist, the stake being the youth himself, coveted as he is by the narrator, but working for the uncle. There are ups and downs in the competition between the two men, woven into the rivalry between Zeus and Poseidon, as a game of hide-and-seek ensues along “the Styx-like canals” of Venice, providing the catabasis with the flavour of a detective story.
11From that point on, the narrator, and along with him the readers, discover a reality which contrasts sharply with a tourist’s expectations. The text digs a deeper gap between the actual and the expected, or hoped for, or fantasised about, between the profit-making realities of the Venetian tourist context and the narrator’s horizon of expectations. To begin with, instead of relying for instance on the stereotypical representation of a slim, smiling, opera-singing Venetian gondolier, the uncle—also a coffee-shop and hotel owner—is portrayed as “a large man in a white raincoat, and a broad-brimmed trilby hat” (“Ganymede” 98), thus offering a caricature of the American-Italian mafioso. Similarly, the narrator is off the mark when he sees Ganymede as “the sole support of a widowed mother and orphan sister” (111) and imagines him accompanying the two women, dressed in black, to Sunday Mass. On being introduced to both by the uncle, not at church but in a boisterous restaurant, he discovers that the mother is a “dyed blonde with enormous ear-rings and reeking of scent” (120), modelled after an iconic Marilyn Monroe, while the little sister turns out to be “a full-bosomed young woman with scarlet fingernails and jangling bangles” (121), modelled after Mae West, another American icon. Ushered as they are by the uncle into such an unexpected world, readers share the narrator’s sense of disturbance, though they cannot help but distance themselves from him too as the gap between his horizon of expectations and “reality” grows ludicrously deeper. The suspense in the story therefore goes hand in hand with a good portion of humour.
12The uncle is the character most distinctly modelled on a mythological pattern. Despite his commitment to modernity and progress, his American accent, his sartorial tastes, and his possession of a high-speed boat—traits which also define him as an epitome of capitalism—he embodies myth. His actions contribute to the detective structure of the plot, but they become portentous as they are anchored in a Gothic framework. The uncle’s first appearance in an all-white mackintosh against a dark and rainy background gives his presence an uncanny, spectral, and diabolical dimension: “As I watched [the youth] slip past the tables towards the café, I saw a large man . . . step out of the shadows beneath the colonnade and tap him on the shoulder. My boy raised his head and smiled. In that brief moment, I experienced evil” (98). Still, it is Poseidon, god of the waters, rather than the devil, that serves as a model for the character’s construction. The uncle is systematically associated with rain, the canals, and the open sea as if he drew his antagonistic power from water. In the mythological framework of the story, it is through a comparison of the uncle to Poseidon that the narrator, who identifies with Zeus, declares himself his rival:
- 9 Seeing that horses in ancient myths are by no means a symbol of corruption—a fact of which a classi (...)
Do you know anything of Greek mythology? I only mention the fact because Poseidon, the brother of Zeus, was also his rival. He was especially associated with the horse; and a horse—unless it is winged—symbolizes corruption.9 The man in the white mackintosh was corrupt. I knew it instinctively. Intuition bade me beware. (98)
13The narrator is determined to challenge Ganymede’s uncle. “I was afraid,” he asserts. “Most definitely I was afraid, but determined to give battle, to prove that I was the stronger” (98). Thus, at one point, as the underlying detective-story structure provides the reader with the authority to make inferences, the text implies something the (unreliable) narrator refuses to admit: that upon their first meeting, he tried to drown his rival by pushing him into a canal. Officially, the unbelievable simply “happened”: “because the narrow path could not hold us two abreast, [the uncle] dropped a pace behind, and, in doing so, slipped” (103), but the narrator makes no effort to help him, and simply runs away.
- 10 According to Hesiod, Aphrodite sprang from the foam of the sea that gathered about the severed geni (...)
14Each time the uncle is in direct contact with water, however, his uncanny control over the actual (and over the narrator) is increased. Far from leading to his drowning, his tumble into a canal becomes a means of empowerment which reinforces his capacity to handle situations. For example, he surreptitiously organises a change of accommodation for the narrator—by having the narrator’s belongings moved to a lavish apartment that the uncle owns—and the next day presents himself to him in his new quarters “with a plaster on his forehead,” and a tray with a “full cup of coffee” (109). The narrator thus systematically associates the uncle with the mastery of liquids while he himself stands out as mastering the realm of fire, his model being Zeus and his emblematic thunder, here conveniently replaced by cigars. When the narrator offensively puffs cigar smoke into his competitor’s face, he sees his “grinning face subside into what seemed to be a trough of sea and foam. And I could even feel the spray” (99). Yet if their confrontation is clearly based on the extended metaphor of the antagonism between Poseidon and Zeus, between water and fire, this spray can also be seen as a threat issued to the narrator by the goddess of love through the uncle’s grin. Indeed, if the trough of sea and foam is part of Poseidon’s liquid realm, it also evokes the birth and name of Aphrodite, “born from the foam of the sea”10 (Room 25). In that sense, Aphrodite’s agency endows the narrative with a form of gender ambiguity by letting the female identity of the love goddess show through the uncle’s face.
- 11 Ganymede’s legend was immensely popular in Roman art and literature under the name of Catamitus (se (...)
15Amorous relationships are, indeed, the central issue of this story. The uncle proves to be tolerant with all kinds of love, especially with homosexual love which, in the late 1950s when the story was written, was widely regarded as unorthodox. However, his interest is commercial. In a rather daring passage, du Maurier uses an intermedial combination of ellipsis, homophony, and cinematographic language (a practice which, incidentally, illustrates the condensing potential of the short story as a genre and du Maurier’s mastery of it) to make the uncle talk about pederasty by implicit reference to catamites.11 Thus, with a decidedly heavy American accent, hated by the narrator, the uncle announces that he once rented out the apartment currently occupied by the narrator to a respectable British gentleman. The insinuation is clearly that the renter was homosexual. The passage that describes his activities on the balcony is introduced by the polysemous verb “lie” which, together with the uncle’s defective American English and his sexually-oriented frame of mind, enhances the ambiguity of the wording: “‘Sir Johnson spend-a the day here,’ he said. ‘All the day he lie on the balcony with his, how-do-you-call-them?’ He raised his hands in the gesture of field-glasses, and swerved from side to side. His gold-filled teeth showed as he smiled” (109, my emphasis). At first sight, the missing word is, of course, “field glasses.” However, “field glasses” is almost homophonic with “filled glasses.” Ganymede, let us remember, became wine-pourer to the gods on Mount Olympus before being placed among the stars as Aquarius, the water-carrier and glass-filler. His occupation is therefore surreptitiously alluded to by the phonetic similarity between “field” and “filled,” the word “filled” being present in the same sentence through the reference to the uncle’s “gold-filled teeth.” Besides, the uncle’s gesture framed by these intermedial combinations may be regarded as licentious, so that for a fleeting moment, it might be erroneously inferred that Sir Johnson lay on the balcony with his catamites, a metonymy for the pourers of wine and a learned term for bedfellows—an error which enriches the reading of the story.
16Bawdy and syncretic, du Maurier’s use of myth in “Ganymede” also engenders gender trouble. Through dreamwork, besides Aphrodite and Poseidon, the narrator also associates the young waiter’s uncle with Hades in the following passage:
I slept badly and had appalling dreams. . . . I saw Poseidon, rising from an angry sea, . . . and then Poseidon himself mounted a bronze horse, the bronze horse of Colleoni, and rode away, with the limp body of Ganymede on the saddle before him. (104)
17Although the episode evokes the abduction of Ganymede by Zeus, it is patterned after the abduction of Persephone by Hades as related in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (15-25), with Poseidon (or Ganymede’s uncle) as Hades, and Ganymede as a re-gendered Persephone—hence the gender trouble, this time in relation to the young waiter rather than his uncle.
18The story ends on an appalling note. On board a high-speed boat with the uncle, the narrator makes a false move while holding the rope by which Ganymede is held on sea skis, causing the propeller to tear the youth into pieces in a blood bath. The way things are later reported to the British Consul adds scandal to horror, but no one mourns the youth. His materialistic and down-to-earth family tries to fleece the narrator, whose only concern is also financial. Although stingy, he agrees to pay for the funeral and indemnify the family. Once back in England, he loses his job because of rumours about his “unsavoury practices,” and he starts renting an apartment in Little Venice. The story then comes full cycle with the narrator going to an Italian restaurant nearby where he has caught sight of a good-looking waiter.
19In “Ganymede,” Venice therefore acts as a place that reveals to the narrator a facet of his self he had not previously been aware of—his homosexuality, perhaps even his attraction to a pederasty that borders on sadomasochism. However amused they may be, readers cannot sympathise with this egocentric, unreliable, and definitely “unsavoury” character. Nor can they be attracted to a Venice inhabited by grotesque swindlers who are ready to sell anything or to immolate anyone in the name of the amenities offered by a boisterous modernity imported from America. Still, Daphne du Maurier’s Venice has the power to make the reader aware of the danger and violence lurking in old myths, echoed by the materialism that pervades their contemporary counterparts.
20The same holds true for Crete in “Not After Midnight,” one of du Maurier’s latest short stories. The title suggests more of a fairy tale than a myth-oriented narrative, perhaps the warning of a considerate fairy godmother to a somewhat undisciplined Cinderella. Here too, du Maurier plays with her readers’ horizon of expectations as the story leads us towards a Bluebeard-style plot and, as with “Ganymede,” takes the line of the detective story to introduce us to the bloody chamber, or labyrinth, of myth in a remote cove on the Cretan coast. The story is set in a seaside hotel complex, haunted by the recent drowning of a resident. The narrator-protagonist, aptly named Timothy Grey, is a rather drab, ungenerous, solitary schoolmaster and amateur painter who goes to Crete in the hope of capturing beautiful seascapes on canvas. Instead, he picks up an affliction: a disfiguring disease, probably dipsomania, which results in cirrhosis. The story relates his process of metamorphosis, one throughout which myth is treated with scepticism, likened to an infecting virus, triggered by the detective plot, and empowered by an idiosyncratic kind of Gothic oddly related to America, just as in “Ganymede.”
21The narrator-protagonist’s other self in this story is announced through a discrete use of the doubling, a common technique in Gothic fiction. Before his metamorphosis, Timothy Grey meets Stoll, an ungainly American who looks like a Silenus. Despite his aversion to him, Grey watches Stoll drinking to excess, next to his silent and apparently deaf wife, and learns from the bartender that he is a connoisseur of the country’s ancient history, before spying on him, pursuing him, and discovering that he makes his own beer—the drinking of which will eventually make Grey look like another Stoll. Grey meets him on his first lunch at the hotel’s restaurant, when he hears with horror a “hoarse American voice, hailing from the deep South” (“Not After Midnight” 68). Although the Southerner is an altogether repellent character, the schoolmaster observes him with a mesmerised fascination manifest in his meticulously detailed description of him:
A square-shouldered man of middle age, whose face was so swollen and blistered by exposure to the sun that he looked as if he had been stung by a million bees. His eyes were sunk into his head, which was bald on the top, with a grizzled thatch on either side and the pink crown had the appearance of being tightly stretched, like the skin of a sausage about to burst. A pair of enormous ears the size of clams gave further distortion to his appearance, while a drooping wisp of moustache did nothing to hide the protruding underlip, thick as blubber and about as moist. I have seldom set eyes on a more unattractive individual. (68)
22Just as in vampire stories whose victims forget to close a small window in the large castle or to put a head of garlic at the feet of their bed, thus unconsciously inviting the vampire to visit them, the narrator’s ambivalent feelings for Stoll lead him to commit a series of actions which pave the way for his own downfall. Stylistically, this is the result of the crossbreeding of the detective genre with the Gothic. Unaware of the recent drowning incident, the narrator stubbornly insists on being installed in the chalet previously occupied by the drowned resident, because the view of the bay offered by its location corresponds to the kind of seascape he wants to capture in his paintings. In that chalet, he discovers a calling card with the name “Charles Gordon” on it, along with the words “Not after midnight” and the figure 38. On the strength of these clues, the narrator behaves both as the potential victim of a haunting infernal power pushing him towards his downfall, and as a detective who wishes to understand the links between the different elements on the card. Though based on the construction of a deductive reasoning reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s “ratiocination,” the plot is also discreetly informed by unsettling and irrational Gothic undertones, this conflation of a detective and a Gothic paradigm promoting a specific perception of myth as potentially harmful. The hotel bartender informs the narrator that Gordon, the individual who occupied his chalet before him, was a Greek mythology specialist who drowned during a night swim. The narrator discovers for himself that 38 is the number of the chalet occupied by the Stolls. However, the words “Not after midnight” remain somewhat obscure. Used as the title for the story and probably written by the drowned mythologist, they are regarded by Grey—and by the readers—as a mysterious message from beyond. They open the way to an implicit plot which might be that Gordon, having understood the illicit actions perpetrated by the Stolls and their Cretan employee (who turns out in the end to be Mrs. Stoll’s lover), attempted to explore the site of the looting, assuming he was alone, and was instead drawn into the depths by one, two or all three of the looters already on site. Incidentally and most ironically, this unwritten episode contributes to making the deaf Mrs. Stoll emerge as an American variety of the femme fatale, with Eve, Pandora, or Helen of Troy as her mythological ancestors. Planning to hand the calling card with the message over to the hotel management or to the police, the narrator puts it in his wallet but, as it turns out, never parts with it in the end.
- 12 Du Maurier may have in mind the following passage from Harrison’s book: “Dionysos was a Northerner, (...)
23That myth is central to this short story is confirmed by the research work visibly done by du Maurier when writing it. Indeed, a detail in the plot, which subsequently turns into a clue, unmistakably echoes Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903). Harrison, the head of the Cambridge Ritualists, saw myth as inherently social because it is intimately associated with ritual. For her, the gods of the Greek pantheon could not be figures illustrating the religious. Rather, she saw them as creations of literature and the arts, reminders of an ancient religion practiced in a remote prehistoric age, of which the classical age preserved only a few traces or fragments (Csapo 156). It may be argued that du Maurier used an extract from Harrison’s Prolegomena to associate Stoll with the cult of Dionysus. In Harrison’s theory, the cult of Dionysus was originally connected with beer rather than wine.12 Accordingly, du Maurier has Grey follow the Stolls to a nearby village where, by adhering to a passage from the eighth chapter in Harrison’s Prolegomena, she makes the Southerner praise the virtues of his homemade beer in the following fashion:
“The beer they sell you here is all piss anyway, and the wine is poison.” He looked over his shoulder to the group at the café and with a conspiratorial wink dragged me down to the wall beside the pool. “I told you all those bastards are Turks, and so they are,” he said. “Wine-drinking, coffee-drinking Turks. They haven’t brewed the right stuff here for over five thousand years. They knew how to do it then.” I remembered what the bartender had told me about the pig-swill in his chalet. “Is that so?” I enquired. He winked again, and then his slit eyes widened, and I noticed that they were naturally bulbous and protuberant, a discoloured muddy brown with the whites red-flecked. “Know something?” he whispered hoarsely. “The scholars have got it all wrong. It was beer the Cretans drank here in the mountains, brewed from spruce and ivy, long before wine. Wine was discovered centuries later by the God-damn Greeks.” He steadied himself, one hand on the wall, the other on my arm. Then he leant forward and was sick into the pool. (“Not After Midnight” 81)
24If the narrator does not immediately connect Gordon and Stoll, the reader may realise that, while Gordon is a myth specialist, Stoll is a character out of myth, one who looks and behaves like a Silenus, the unalluring horse-eared, heavy-drinking companion of Dionysus. In that sense, both Gordon and Stoll embody myth, and both are equally caught up in the mystery invented by du Maurier to scrutinise myth with a (detective’s) magnifying glass. The detective plot also serves the descent-into-hell pattern which frames Grey’s symbolic death before the birth of his new self. As befits a story set in Crete, this descent into hell follows a labyrinthine path on which Grey ends up getting lost. One night, he follows the Stolls to a nearby village, then to a deserted beach where he realises that the couple are smugglers: they have discovered an ancient shipwreck and have been working for three years to strip it bare. Thinking that Grey might be onto their game, they leave him an ancient rhyton—that is, an ornate drinking vessel, decorated with a Silenus face—which Grey finds unsightly, like Stoll’s face. Still, on the last day of his stay in Crete, it is while drinking Stoll’s beer from this rhyton, which he calls a jar, that Grey feels transformed. The first step of his transformation consists in his appreciating the artistic excellence of the figure on the jar:
When I had finished the bottle I examined the jar once again. I don’t know how it was, but somehow the leering face no longer seemed so lewd. It had a certain dignity that had escaped me before. The beard, for instance. The beard was shaped to perfection around the base—whoever had fashioned it was a master of his craft. I wondered whether Socrates had looked thus . . . and his pupils may not have been the young men whom Plato said they were, but of a tenderer age, like my lads at school, like those youngsters of eleven and twelve who had smiled upon me in my dreams last night.
I felt the scalloped ears, the rounded nose, the full soft lips of the tutor Silenos upon the jar, the eyes no longer protruding but questioning, appealing, and even the naked horsemen on the top had grown in grace. It seemed to me now they were not strutting in conceit but dancing with linked hands, filled with a gay abandon, a pleasing, wanton joy. It must have been my fear of the midnight intruder that had made me look upon the jar with such distaste. (106)
25This episode takes place on Grey’s last escapade to the bay where the wreck is located, a few hours before his return to England, and at a time when the Stolls also are supposed to have departed. Wishing to take a last look at the shipwreck, Grey suddenly comes upon Stoll’s body, securely pinned under the anchor, most certainly by his wife and their Cretan employee (Mrs. Stoll’s lover). Grey throws the rhyton into the sea, but he has already contracted “the wretched bug” (58) which is to ruin the rest of his life, so that the emergence of his new identity coincides with the discovery of Stoll’s death.
26Through the agency of place, the anti-heroic narrators-protagonists are drawn to myth like moths to a flame. This, however, happens because of a misreading. Myth and those who embody it in each story only partly and misleadingly correspond to the narrator’s horizons of expectation. A far cry from the idealised models which a cultivated tourist visiting Venice or Crete has in mind, the attractive (but unsubstantial) youth and his unattractive (but determined) uncle in “Ganymede,” in many respects comparable to the Stolls in “Not After Midnight,” are harmful to the protagonists as well as to society at large. In addition, those characters are interconnected by a meaningful feature which, although underscored by farcicality, may go undetected—namely, their link with a global imposition of American “values,” language, and culture. Thus, in “Ganymede,” the narrator first expects his young protégé to read Shakespeare, listen to classical music, go to church with a pious sister and a humble mother. It turns out, however, that the youth never reads but prefers American crooners, while his mother and sister are full-breasted peroxide blondes reminiscent of Hollywood film stars, and his uncle speaks English with an American accent.
27By doing so, du Maurier shows the clash between iconic figures of the past and of the present, Shakespeare and Caruso being replaced by American crooners and Mae West- or Marilyn Monroe-like models with the same power over post-World War II society as myth and myth-invested icons used to have in the past. Similarly, in “Not After Midnight,” the Stolls are American citizens and, after her husband’s murder, Mrs. Stoll presumably takes along with her to the United States the local Greek with whom she has paired. Epitomised by the above characters, myth is ludicrously linked with speed, material progress, consumerism, the desire of European working-class folk to move to America, and the unscrupulous pursuit of profit—with American modernity rather than European tradition. In this respect, myth is harmful not only to the protagonists but also to the whole of society. It is pictured with an American rather than a classical countenance, since those who embody it stem from a model provided by the United States, namely “the American Dream.”
28Although the stories relate “coming out” experiences, the importance of these experiences is deflated. On the one hand, the new identity of the protagonists is disreputable, redolent of such unsavoury businesses as sex tourism, child abuse, etc. Their unheroic and unsympathetic portraiture makes the reader indifferent to their misfortune, which, after all, appear well deserved. The narrator-protagonist of “Ganymede” chooses to get on with his life in Little Venice (my emphasis), a scaled-down version of the dreamed-of other place which can only offer a lesser, second-hand, and second-rate experience of make-believe—an ominous locale for the narrator’s new self to grow in. Similarly, in “Not After Midnight,” the narrator’s dipsomania will certainly make an outcast of him, living in a liminal state of intoxication. Thus, the reader’s interest in the stories does not lie in the wretched protagonists and their fate, but in the stories’ content, perhaps the social issues they raise and the functions of myth today.
29The detective undertones of both stories participate in the decentring of their relevance, marking a shift from character to myth. Since the characters cannot meet the challenges of myth, the Gothic elements serve the mythical qualities of the story rather than the characters themselves. For instance, although the daydream episode in “Ganymede,” in which the puff of smoke blown by the narrator into his antagonist’s face turns into mist, is triggered by the narrator’s jealousy for the young waiter’s uncle, the uncanny changes in the uncle’s face are of no use in terms of characterisation but are revealing in terms of reconfiguring myth or mythical characters, including through re-gendering. As for those readers who like to track clues, they realise that the mystery elements in the two stories may be elucidated if they manage to displace their interest from character and plot to more peripheral structural components. The most arresting and alarming parts of the stories are thrown off centre. The young waiter’s death, in the first story, may not be altogether accidental. It can easily be inferred that a family who make a prostitute of their son, brother or nephew are also able to sacrifice the boy’s life for making money. These inferences are made not merely by the narrator-protagonist (who hardly cares), but also by the reader, who therefore adopts a critical attitude towards the teller of the story, and towards myth itself. In the same vein, “Not After Midnight” displaces the action from the touring of a land of myths to discovering crime. Charles Gordon’s drowning is never explained though, at the end, when it becomes clear that Mrs. Stoll murdered her husband or had him murdered for the sake of money and a younger, less ugly partner, the readers are prompted to deduce that the Stolls may also be responsible for Gordon’s drowning. What remains of the story is the characters’ ugliness, the hideousness of their actions and the viral, vampire-like effect of myth as a tainted legacy transferred from Stoll to Grey. As in the Greek tradition, myths in du Maurier’s fiction create monsters.
- 13 In the seminal 1893 essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History, Frederic Jackson Tu (...)
30As previously mentioned, myth arose out of rituals according to Jane Harrison, connecting it with social rather than with individual issues. Likewise, du Maurier’s reading of Harrison makes her take a social rather than an individualist stand regarding myth. Her approach is iconoclastic in that she looks at it as a nasty present-day virus that has replaced the legacy of the past. Both stories represent myth as a social phenomenon imported neither from Greece nor from Rome, but from the (Far) West. For, indeed, both short stories manage to ironically distort the myth of the American frontier, one of America’s founding myths.13 In du Maurier’s stories the American frontier does not move westward, as might have been expected, thus “distancing” the United States from Europe in the process: it moves eastward and has already annexed Europe—at least on a cultural level. Thus, if the narrators-protagonists misread the characters they come across in Venice or Crete as modern incarnations of mythical figures from the Old World (Ganymede, Poseidon, Persephone, Hades, Dionysus, Silenus, etc.), the reader recognises in them all the perverse agency, or politics, of the American Dream, still another American myth. The Italian characters in “Ganymede,” as well as the Stolls and their Greek employee in “Not After Midnight,” display grotesquely materialistic aspirations and will stop at nothing to live their version of the American Dream. In that sense, the stripping bare of the ancient shipwreck that makes the Stolls rich may be regarded as a critical comment on how new myths feed on old ones.
31Du Maurier’s stories “Ganymede” and “Not After Midnight” offer a new way of understanding myth, one which underscores its ideological dimensions and its potentially pernicious effects on society. Being original interrogations into the meaning of myth, the tours on which du Maurier chooses to send her unheroic holidaymakers cannot be mapped out, but they certainly take those men far enough to lose themselves on the way.
