Релігійно-міфологічний дискурс у романі мері рено «The king must die»

Abstract

The paper is the first attempt to analyse the religious and mythological discourses in the novel “The King Must Die” by British author Mary Renault in Ukrainian Literary studies. It seeks to determine the place of a religious ritual and uncover the strategies for historicizing the myth about Theseus and the Minotaur in the novel. The research on the given subject has led to the conclusion that Mary Renault’s text is not a historical novel but a historized myth aimed at the reconstruction of the culture and religion of the ancient Greeks and Minoans. Though the novel is based on now highly criticized materials such as Arthur Evan’s reconstruction of the Minoan culture, the author succeeded creating a believable world full of life and energy. Yet Renault is not retelling the myth as it is but attempts to render the mythological events as true historical ones. By presuming Theseus was a real historical figure, the writer rationalized all the magical and mythological elements while still maintaining a high level of ambiguity in certain topics (such as predictions and omens) to achieve the effect of the ancient mythological consciousness. The story of Theseus is rationalized through explaining all the mythological elements using Renault’s extensive knowledge of the ancient history and culture. She transforms the myth we already know into a memoir of a king of Athens, who retells us his story. The reader gets to know about the story through Theseus’s perspective which helps Renault to deliver the messages she is concerned about such as sexuality, accepting your body, and finding the strength in the wisdom. The majority of the mythological elements is explained rationally: the Minotaur is a title, the way the Cretans call the heir of the throne; the Labyrinth is the palace of Knossos; and the bull-man is a symbol of the Cretewearing Minos’s “crown” which is originally a bull mask Dedalus made for Minos. The religious element of the text is realized partially through reconstruction of the ritual of the King’s death which is based on Frazer’s concept of the kings killed at the end of a fixed term. That idea is fully developed in the ritual of Eleusis where the king is killed every year to assure fertility and cleanse the people from the past year’s misfortunes. Another religious element of the text is the construction of the matriarchal religion of Eleusis and Crete, based on Evans’s excavation on Crete and Graves’s ideas of the White Goddess. Renault transforms their concepts and attempts to recreate what could be a cult of the ancient Goddess, the personification of Mother-Earth and Moon. It has been established that Renault’s transformation of the classic myth in the novel “The King Must Die” leads to its rationalization, while the attempt to reconstruct the matriarchal religion of the ancient people and the ritual of the King’s sacrifice helps to deconstruct the mythological material and perceive it as historical material.