Medusa Alive: Pat Barker

Pat Barker, MEDUSA, in the April 15, 2019, New Yorker is a spooky fetish-focused tale.

This inconspicuous woman, in trainers and jeans usually but for this special occasion wearing low heels, not vertiginous ones, low, sensible heels, coming home from bidding good–bye to her metamorphosis series of paintings, is suddenly mired in an awful violence.

• 

Adrenaline and cortisol force hyperactivity and hyperawareness, and our attention too is compelled, becomes urgent, anxious, and also, in myself at least, reluctant. I want to put this story down, but I am compelled … it is what we must read, letting that energy of rage run through us, letting our scalps cool off, letting the weight fall where it should, letting the stones assume their own burden of stoniness.

Pat Barker’s Medusa comes alive at the moment of rage. Barker’s Medusa is the Medusa who Athena just at that moment created, the survivor of Poseidon’s rape who is then brutally punished for that rape, by being turned hideous, and then killed because her looks can kill.

This rage-filled petrifying Medusa, the one Pat Barker’s character inhabits, or, better, who inhabits Pat Barker’s character, is what I call the Athenian heuristic. By this I mean that Athena and her entourage — including the whole cast of Olympian goddesses and gods, including the golden-boy Perseus who severs Medusa’s head from her body and then uses it to save the Ethiopian princess, Andromeda– are entranced, almost hypnotized by this frightful image of Medusa. In Reborn Athena, Medusa’s is freed from this frozen rage.

Pat Barker‘s fiction won the Man Booker Prize in 1995 for The Ghost Road, which is the third book in her Regeneration Trilogy. Her latest book is The Silence of the Girls.

Nothing short of magnificent, The Silence of the Girls tells the story of Briseis, over whom Achilles and Agamemnon fight even as they are fighting the Trojan War.

Elsewhere, Barker wrote, “time’s up, we’re at the end of the patriarchy.”