Hi all! A couple of things to share: I recently had a post on John Scalzi’s Big Idea series about the history behind The Tapestry of Time. You can also find some book club questions for the novel here.
I’ve been reflecting lately on a particular set of qualities in retellings — a category that includes my novels The Valkyrie, The Swordmaster and Mercutio to some degree. I thought I’d share those reflections with you.
Forty years ago this summer, Italo Calvino was preparing a series of lectures he was scheduled to give at Harvard throughout the next academic year. He died that September, 1985, before he could deliver them. They were published after his death as Six Memos For the Next Millennium (even though he only completed five.)
Each of the lectures is about a quality or value in literature. The first is on lightness. I've listened to the audio version1 of this lecture dozens of times, and I always find something new in it. By lightness, Calvino means a style of writing that subtracts as much as possible from language, from structure, and even from the images and characters within a story. Lightness tends to move from the concrete to the abstract, to atomize and dissolve.
Calvino suggests lightness and weight have been two opposing forces in literature for a long time. He doesn't think lightness is superior to weight, but says he is more equipped to make a case for it. He doesn't directly address how lightness applies to retellings of old stories, but thinking about retellings in this way helped me realize that unlike Calvino, I'm a writer who's usually trying to add weight.
of the tales of Sigurd and Brynhild.
Several years ago, I sat over beers with a (wonderful) editor I admire, and he asked me what I was thinking of writing next. I told him it was a retelling of the group of legends about valkyries, magic swords, and dragons that have come down to us now through Tolkien and Wagner.
"The versions we have were written down in the Viking era, but the stories were actually set long before that, during the late Roman Empire," I explained. "Odin and Attila the Hun are both characters in the same sagas, which are fundamentally about communities being uprooted in central Europe. But my kid thinks it's a mistake to set it during the Roman Empire, because people expect Viking stories to have Vikings in them, or just be purely mythological."
The editor smiled and said my kid was probably right, at least from a commercial perspective. I did what I felt the book needed, of course, but I've always known that my novel The Valkyrie has that extra hurdle for many readers. Its vibes are muddled. We live in a vibes-focused age when it comes to book marketing, at least in the genres I write in (historical fiction and fantasy). You can write a Roman Empire book. You can write a Norse retelling. Those look different; they have different covers, even different target readerships. Combining them is (I would argue) an "authentic" choice, since that digs right to the roots of the story, but it did confuse or deter some readers who found it "inauthentic" in the sense that it didn't resonate with the Norse Tales (or even Marvel Cinematic Universe) vibes they expected.
There’s been a boom in mythological retellings over the last five or six years. Most of the ones I've read are interested in drawing the aesthetics, themes, characters or emotional truths out of older contexts. Sometimes that means putting them in a later setting, or in a fantastic, "world of the gods" setting unmoored from human history, or a stage-like sort of setting only lightly tethered to real history.
For the record, I adore this when it's done well. I love anachronism; I love playfulness. The sadly Netflix-cancelled series KAOS was amazing and I want more like that.
This is not new, either, and it's not confined to "commercial" fiction. I would put Margaret Atwood's 2006 Penelopiad in this "lightness" category when it comes to interpretation of the Homeric stories:
Now that I’m dead I know everything. This is what I wished would happen, but like so many of my wishes it failed to come true. I know only a few factoids that I didn’t know before. It’s much too high a price to pay for the satisfaction of curiosity, needless to say.
Since being dead — since achieving this state of bonelessness, liplessness, breastlessness — I’ve learned some things I would rather not know, as one does when listening at windows or opening other people’s letters. You think you’d like to read minds? Think again.
A lightness of approach, plucking stories as if they were flowers, can create incredibly moving and rich retellings. "Light" here does not mean unserious, does not mean the opposite of dark. Flowers can be made into wreaths, into chains, pinned onto suits or laid on graves.
As much as I love that approach as a reader, as a writer I tend to want to add weight to stories, to re-connect them to their origins, to ground them. (At least, this is true for novels. Some of my short fiction is very light.) I want my novels heavy with clay and blood; I want them to feel like something you carry around in the pit of your stomach, or find in the bottom of an old trunk. I often use archaeological metaphors: I'm digging, getting down in the mud, scraping off the layers that have accrued over the centuries, as if the story is made of stone.
It has struck me that reviewers, or writers who are kind enough to endorse my work, sometimes point out that weight. I was thrilled to get this for The Valkyrie from Natalia Theodoridou: "Kate Heartfield is one of those rare writers who always make me feel as if what they’re writing, no matter how fantastical, is true." Or from Vajra Chandrasekera, another of my favourite writers: "The Valkyrie sings, like the epic it is, without ever letting go of its groundedness, its bloodiedness. A secret history of the sagas, a story from behind the stories of old‒a war story, a love story that, once you see it emerge gleaming and gory from those bardic silences, seems like it was always there."
Real, grounded, bloodied, hidden – that tends to be what I'm going for. Making the fantastical real, making the metaphorical concrete. Weight, in other words. In Italo Calvino's words, actually, but it wasn't until I read his lecture that I started thinking of it that way.
It was a little surprising for me to learn this about my writing style. I was trained as a journalist, so I appreciate an efficient sentence. And my natural tendency is to write skeletal novel drafts; every revision requires adding material. So it's not as if writing with weight comes easily or naturally to me. It just appeals to me as a goal. I haven't really articulated why it appeals to me, yet; it has something to do with making connections with human experiences through time, something to do with the magic that attaches to real things, like the weight of a baby in your arms, something about the corporeal, embodied experiences of the women who get turned into stories … I'll have to think more about it, and maybe I'll write more about it at some point.
Calvino holds up Shakespeare's character Mercutio as the epitome of lightness. "I would like Mercutio’s dancing gait to come along with us across the threshold of the new millennium." He mentions Dante Alighieri as a writer who had a gift for weight, for making the abstract concrete.
I happened to listen to this lecture for the first time when I was partway through the first draft of my novel Mercutio, in which Dante is a major character. I had already started to notice and try to capture the lightness of Mercutio, and it was the lecture that made me realize how, as a writer, I try to add weight.
My feeling is that it’s helpful to be able to play with both, lightness and weight, as a tool in the toolbox, although we writers might tend toward one side or another. I did think about the lightness in Mercutio’s character, but I told his story grounded in real history, the history that might have spawned a person who inspired the stories that inspired Shakespeare (there's my archaeology again).
Calvino was also a writer of retellings, such as his Italian Folktales. In his Invisible Cities, the characters of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan are their historic selves, but they also exist slightly outside of time and place, and they talk about dirigibles and staircases to nowhere, almost literally building castles in the air.
You could do something like that with Mercutio; you could dissolve his historical context, instead of building it up. You could make his Queen Mab more abstract, instead of more concrete. Both approaches are good, as long as they're done with style and wit and thoughtfulness.
I'll end with a couple of examples that show light and heavy approaches to retelling the same story. (At least, they do according to me.)
First, there's Grendel by John Gardner, a writer who's been a huge influence on me. Praising Dante, Calvino says his heaviness lies "in extracting all the possibilities of sound and emotion and feeling from the language, in capturing the world in verse at all its various levels, in all its forms and attributes." I think Gardner's prose in this novel does that too. Here's a bit from the first chapter:
But the ram stays; the season is upon us. And so begins the twelfth year of my idiotic war.
"Ah, well," I sigh, and shrug, trudge back to the trees.
Do not think my brains are squeezed shut, like the ram's, by the roots of horns. Flanks atremble, eyes like stones, he stares at as much of the world as he can see and feels it surging in him, filling his chest as the melting snow fills dried-out creek beds, tickling his gross, lopsided balls and charging his brains with the same unrest that made him suffer last year at this time, and the year before, and the year before that. (He's forgotten them all.) His hindparts shiver with the usual joyful, mindless ache to mount whatever happens near–the storm piling up black towers to the west, some rotting, docile stump, some spraddle-legged ewe. I cannot bear to look. "Why can't these creatures discover a little dignity?" I ask the sky. The sky says nothing, predictably. I make a face, uplift a defiant middle finger, and give an obscene little kick. The sky ignores me, forever unimpressed. Him too I hate, the same as I hate these brainless budding trees, these brattling birds.
And here's another Beowulf retelling, The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley. Here, Grendel is in a new context. Instead of the repetitive piling of burdens and years in Gardner's opening, we get a glimpse of the world in intangible, ephemeral things, in childhood passing, of things too light to catch before they get away from us. Instead of characters sending defiant gestures upward at an oppressive sky, they send music upward.
“Listen!” my son says. “Someone’s singing!”
Gren’s been playing with the skin of a red squirrel, some pebbles, and a tin can, digging a hole in the ground and burying his rattling rag doll.
“What’s that voice?” he says again.
It’s not a voice. It’s a piano. The player below us continues the alphabet, the scales rising, jarring, false notes. They sound like things I’ll never be able to get for Gren.
“Listen,” he whispers, his hands spread to catch the noise, like it’s something he can keep and eat, like it’s a bird or a frog. Like a song can feed him.
This is how the war begins: a piano lesson echoing up the mountain. This is how I start to lose him.
Two books about a war and a monster and a mother's love, retelling the same old tales.
I can’t say whether I’ve interpreted Calvino correctly, but I like this way of looking at retellings, using the concepts of lightness and weight.
Translated by Geoffrey Brock and narrated by Edoardo Ballerini. ↩