Margaret Patton Chapman teaches creative writing at Indiana University South Bend and is fiction editor at decomP magazinE. Find links to her work in Diagram, > Kill Author, and more at margaretpattonchapman.com.
Her story "The Plan" appears in Issue Thirty-Nine of The Collagist.
Here, Margaret Chapman chats with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about superhumanity, that con man Odysseus, and bending the story to one's will.
1. What first prompted you to write “The Plan”? Have you always loved (or agonized over) the Iliad/Odyssey?
I originally wrote this piece for the Ray’s Tap Reading Series run by my friend Chris Bower in Chicago. I’ve been reading at this series since (almost) its inception and it is probably the source, in some way or another, of almost all my short fiction. Chris curates the shows around themes, and the particular reading this text comes from required us to use words from an alphabetical list of “feelings”. The last five were “vengeful”, “worried,” “xenophobic” “yearning” and “zealous.” Those, somehow, lead me to Odysseus and his crew – warriors returning home, becalmed at sea, unsure of the future. I’m not really sure why that came to mind. I have to admit, I last read the Odyssey in high school and the Iliad as a college freshman, except for bits and pieces here and there. I do remember being sort of blown away by Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the Iliad. The language was so clean and brutal.
2. Odysseus seems cast afresh as kind of villainous. Lines like “Our friends call him cunning, our enemies call him a liar and a crook. We call him captain. We have for years” carry this vaguely resigned yet loyal tone, suiting this re-casting as smartly as those swipes at dramatic irony (“When we were done we were just glad to be going home…. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Let's just do one thing first.’”). Is there a kind of pleasure or a kind of sadness in re-qualifying “always changeful” Odysseus in this story, and do you see it as a reduction (from legend to man) or a rebuilding (examining keenly the sort of man you’re hesitant to trust but, can’t help it, have to)?
Odysseus is a charmer, isn’t he? Like most charismatic leaders, he is certainly part con-man. That’s why the Greeks loved him so much, and the Romans hated him. The Romans thought he was a cheater. I don’t think the Greeks believed you could cheat at war, or life.
I suppose I am trying to both reduce and rebuild Odysseus. Because of his legend, he holds you at arms length as a character, but he seems very human to me, watching the sea, trying to decide what to do next. He is a King, however, in the ancient sense – royalty as divinity and arbiter of reality. Jeanette Winterson, in her essay “Imagination and Reality” talks about (belief in) royalty as the ultimate act of imagination – that one, as a subject, endows royalty with superhumanity and special destiny outside of average human experience, and in return one gets to be close to a semi-divine being. We do that now outside of the context of hereditary aristocracy – we give that power to celebrities, politicians, religious leaders. The crew, the chorus of this story, knows that they are not as important as their leader, that is why they let themselves be subject to him and his whims, even as they wish that he returned some measure of their devotion. And Odysseus doesn’t need to care about the fates of his men because they don’t matter. They’re the redshirts – needed to tell his story. In the end, it is Odysseus that becomes legend because he can bend the story to his will. He will be the only survivor because he is the only one who needs to. Storytelling is brutal that way.
3. Your closing paragraph is one of the most phenomenal I’ve ever read. Not only the tragedy of conceding to the doom, moving from autonomy/victory (“We all signed up for Greece, for glory”) to depending on the disgrace (“He will plan until when I say we it will only be me”)—but the “we” also starts becoming Odysseus. What does it mean, the oppressor as the collective? What is your intent in these last moments, as you define and redefine what is stable and what is diminishing—a kind of moving-backwards anti-creation? More a moment of forgiveness, this reduction? Is it white-flagging?
Wow, thank you so much! When you retell a well-know story I think you are engaging what it means to tell, and receive, stories, so to me the end is trying to question assumptions about how stories are transmitted and by whom and the relationship between stories and history. I think the final paragraph is a moment of surrender for the chorus – all of their autonomy and identity has gone and their only choice is not only to die and be forgotten but also and to forgive and surrender to this fate. Also, in giving Odysseus the group’s story in the end, even for a half a sentence, I hope to say something about his necessary understanding of, and consumption of, the stories and lives of those around him, because he is the only one who is able to tell this tale as he is the only survivor, not just in the story, but in time as well. I think the very end moves past Odysseus, not backwards but into the future, towards the world of the reader, and perhaps past that as well. In the end, everything is gone, even Odysseus, even us, even stories, but the sea is still there. Something has to be permanent; at least, that is what I choose to believe. Otherwise everything is too sad.
4. What have you been reading this winter? The epic? The tragic?
I’m teaching a course this semester, fittingly enough, on retelling myths and fairy tales, so I’ve been re-reading Karen Armstrong’s really wonderful A Short History of Myth, which came out as part of the Cannongate Myths series, and also Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. I just got Philip Pullman’s Fairy Tales from the Brother’s Grimm, which is somewhere between translations and retellings. And next on my list is Lucy Corin’s short story collection The Entire Predicament because I am totally in love with her story “Eyes of Dogs” in the anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father She Ate Me. That story is available online, too at, Web Conjunctions(http://www.conjunctions.com/webcon/corin08.htm), and if you haven’t read it you really should.
5. What are you working on now?
I’ve been working on a book about ghosts for a while now, and I hope I’m going to finish it soon. I’m also hoping to start putting together a collection of these strange little retellings I do.