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The Jason Voyage Q3: Myth and Fiction
Although this book is not a work of fiction itself, it does closely follow one - the mythical travels of Jason and the Argonauts. Did you get a good sense of the story of Jason by following Tim's adventures? What are your key take-aways of the Jason myth? A translation of the myth itself is included at the back of the book - what did you think of it? Would you have preferred a novel format retelling of this story (say, by Mary Renault or along those lines)? Did Tim Severin's 'overlay' of his own voyage add to the story of Jason?
Comments
I think rather the reverse - Jason's story added to that of Severin and company. As I mentioned before, Severin did a fine job of pinning his journey with that of Jason, bringing up what the original argonauts were experiencing to buttress and enhance his own tale.
I had mixed feelings, and still do. On the one hand, I really enjoyed the interplay between the two stories, in which Jason could indicate routes and stopping points to Tim (and conversely, when Tim ignored Jason to take a short-cut it ended up being a poor and frustrating choice), and also Tim's practical observations along the way made sense of some passages in Jason which otherwise seem random - the best example is probably the passage through the Hellespont with the counter-currents meaning that the optimal route constantly switched from the northern to the southern side of the straights, and made sense of Jason's landing points.
However, I have some reservations about a kind of rationalising away of some storytelling elements. The harpies were just seagulls really. The clashing rocks were just a couple of islands, a bit of reef, and some odd sea-currents. And so on. It could easily lead to a kind of reductive approach in which many passages could be kind of trivialised into "those simple ancient folk just didn't understand things so they made up stories of ghosts and demons to explain them".
Storytelling allows you to get into emotional and spiritual perspectives on events rather than just rationalistic ones. So the quest isn't just a compilation of a whole lot of traders swapping goods with Colchis and recording their route in a slightly obscure manner - it's also a way to access states of mind and heart of the crew, possible with coming-of-age or heroic aspects. It helps you as listener / reader to experience the misery of some of it, the frustrated bickering, or the suddenly overwhelming desire just to settle down with some women and forget the whole thing.
I think there are pros and cons of both approaches, and I'm glad that different writers tackle their subjects in such different ways.
This was the "story" of a chunk of experimental archaeology, the historical re-enactment of a possible journey from Greece to Georgia. The Jason story was there as source material to guide that experiment. As such, I think Severin's treatment of the Jason story was correct: he drew out the bits of the story that he was testing, and told us the result of those tests.
The main take-away is that Jason's journey was entirely feasible, as it was replicated in a bad boat with inexperienced sailors. It's a bad boat because there's no longer a living tradition of building these sorts of things; I'm sure that if there were a few hundred built and sailed over a few years, the later galleys would be a lot better than the earlier ones. They're an inexperienced crew because they've not sailed that sort of boat before; it took them three-quarters of the trip to work out how to trim the boat to sail properly. I'd guess that even at the end of the Odyssey recreation, they sail the boat much better.
I got a little fed up with Severin over-egging his contributions to interpretations of the myth. There were a few times where he announced, "X was controversial, but I turned up and saw Y, so therefore this question is settled once and for all." There are some things where this is true: the journey itself was entirely possible. But a lot of those statements are too bald.
As for Richard's point of eliminating the mythic elements: I don't mind that, as the journey and the myth are two separate things. Jason came back from his trip and told the tale; that got exaggerated, as these things do; then later people overlaid myth and meaning on top of it. On one level, the harpies are sea gulls; on another, they're a symbol of eternal torment. I can cope with both being true.
I felt that Severin did a pretty good job of revealing Jason's voyage through his account of his own voyage. At least, when I read the account of Jason's voyage at the end, I don't think there were any surprises - that Severin had covered it all, and in enough detail, that it wasn't really necessary to read the actual Apollonius text in order to get the Jason story.