living. with the harpy.
truepenny:
Because I'm a classics geek, I'd probably start with the harpies in the Odyssey. Just to show what's happening to the basic material of myth when authors decide they can use it.
I looked them up in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, and the bit I was thinking of actually isn't in the Odyssey. It's in Apollonius Rhodius's Argonautica (same story that brings us Medea). But here's what the dictionary has to say:
Supernatural winged beings, apparently winds in origin, who 'snatch,' as the name implies, and carry off various persons and things. They have at the same time some characteristics of ghosts, and, as the ideas of wind and spirit are closely allied (cf. the etymology of the words in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and other tongues), it is perhaps most correct to say they are spirit-winds. Their names are Aello, Ocypete, and Celaeno (Hes[iod] Theog[eny] 267, who says that they and Iris, q.v., are daughters of Thaumas and Electra, daughter of Ocean). They appear in Od[yssey] 20.77 as carrying off the daughters of Pandareus, apparently to the other world, since they are given as servants to the Erinyes (q.v.). Much later (Ap[ollonius] Rhod[ius] 2.188 ff.) they plague Phineas ( q.v.) by carrying off his food and defiling what they leave with their excrement. Whence this detail comes is not known; it is an ingenious suggestion (W. R. Dawson, Bridle of Pegasus, 1930 (1), 27) that Apollonius had heard of the voracious and filthy fruit-eating Indian bat. Virgil (Aen[eid] 3.210 ff.) follows Apollonius in part, but describes them as birds with women's faces.
matociquala interjects (with delight): FRUITBATS!!!!!!!!!
truepenny:
They appear (named) on an Attic vase of about 600 B.C. Here, and in pictures of their pursuit by the Boreads from the sixth century on, they are shown as winged women, not woman-headed birds, the type used for Sirens; though death-spirits in this form have given its modern name to the 'Harpy Tomb' from Xanthos (Brommer, Vasenlisten2, 351).
Apollonius Rhodius and Virgil are the place we get most of what we (modern Western civ, I mean) know about harpies. The Odyssey is actually really interesting, because the harpies are invoked by Penelope when she's praying for intervention to keep her from having to marry someone other than Odysseus. The daughters of Pandareus were orphans, beloved of the goddesses (they have Sleeping Beauty's sort of plethora of gifts: beauty from Hera, skill from Athena, height from Artemis). But the day that Aphrodite went to ask Zeus to grant them happy marriages, the harpies descended and snatched them away to give them to the Furies.
In Apollonius Rhodius, the harpies are punishment--although interestingly, the Ox.Clas.Dict. says there's no consensus on what Phineas's offense was. One version says betrayal of divine secrets; another that Phineas believed the slanders of his second wife against his sons by his first wife and either allowed her to blind them, or did it himself. Or, his first wife blinded them in anger at being cast off.
In the Aeneid, Aeneas and his party land on the Strophades (the Islands of Turning, which is where the Argonauts left off their pursuit of the harpies) and--like Odysseus's stupid men with the cattle of the Sun--butcher the seemingly unattended goats and cattle for their feast. Harpies descend. The Trojans move to a different part of the island and try again. Harpies descend; the Trojans try to drive them off. Celaeno gives them a vindictive prophecy, telling them they won't be able to found Rome until hunger has driven them to eat their tables. (The table-eating thing turns out to be a bit of a dud--their first day in Italy, the Trojans use thin cakes of wheat as platters for their food, and when they're done, they eat the cakes. Whee.)
The harpies are described as having the faces of maidens, but their bellies drip with foul discharge, their hands are claws, and they are always, always hungry. And their wings clang. (*clangoribus*)
So classical Harpies are associated with punishment and with defilement (considering the Greek cultural fear/hatred of women, I wonder if their filthiness isn't linked to menstruation) and with hunger, both their own and the hunger they cause by spoiling food.
matociquala:
I want to talk about the thing that the Witch does--"I'm not good; I'm not nice; I'm just right." and the way she teaches the human members of the cast to do that thing, but they maintain their humanity after the initiatory experience...
...ah, Hell. V is a Wicked Faerie.
truepenny:
Hee. Yes. Yes, he is.
matociquala:
...and that's what I'm doing with Morgan in The Stratford Man, too. Because what she does to Kit is just fucked up. But it's what he learns from her that finally lets him [spoiler].
He has to learn to fight like a girl. Or a guerilla. Or a terrorist.
Which is one of the things you learn from the Witch, isn't it?
truepenny:
You learn that if you fight fair, you lose.
If you play by the rules, you lose.
matociquala:
Because the other guy is bigger than you are. I could probably get to Jack-the-trickster/Jack-the-Giant-Killer from there, but it would be a lot of work and I'm lazy.
truepenny:
And the other guy *won't* fight fair. Because life doesn't.
matociquala:
0.o
truepenny:
LILITH!
Who gets the boot from the Garden of Eden for wanting to be on top. And goes on her merry way to consort with demons.
Lilith is the great grandmother of all Wicked Faeries.
matociquala:
Fuck yes. of course she is. There's a great Iron & Wine song about her, "Evening on the Ground."
hey man
evening on the ground
and there is no one else around
so you will
blame me
blame me for the rocks and baby bones
and broken lock on our
garden
garden wall of eden
full of spiderbites and all your lovers
we were
we were born to fuck each other
one way or another
but i'll only lie
down by the waterside at night
So there's this other thing, which you see both in Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn and in Tim Pratt's "Living with the Harpy" (
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2003/20031027/harpy.shtml
) (A story I love, though I hated it at first--because I took it as prescriptive rather than descriptive, which ties into your thing on reading against protocols when you're pissed, more on which later--and which I think owes some influence to Beagle's harpy.) where in modern fantasy, the Harpy seems to symbolize a certain kind of wild magic.
In Tim's story, on my reading, what's going on symbolically is that the narrator has to choose between a conventional domesticity and being a Witch. She can have the immortality and the invulnerability, or she can have the safety. And I hated that story viscerally when I first read it, because I thought it ws saying "you must choose this one thing," and my inner Witch revolted, the same way it does when the Pevensies get sent home from Narnia. And then, later, I realized no, it's not saying that.
There's that expectation-of-didacticism thing; we're so bloody ingrained to expect a moral that we look for one even when there's none implied.
So Tim's story is exploring a theme that you also see in, oh, Peter Pan, which is also constantly made didactic, but of course the book itself is not about how you must grow up and put away childhood things... but rather about how you can have Peter, or you can have hearth and home.
They are inimical.
truepenny:
Yes. You have to choose. And it's very easy to make that choice into a moral judgment, but the Witch and her sisters would tell you not to.
Because that's playing by the rules again.
matociquala:
Yes. Although then when you look at it, it becomes a bit interesting that the Witch's rule is "you have to choose."
Because if she's about circumventing rules... or knowing the trickier rules... well, hrmity.
truepenny:
Well, you have to learn not to play by the Witch's rules, either. Cf. Evey and Kit.
matociquala:
Oh, yeah. And the Baker and Cinderella in Into the Woods. Because the Wicked Faerie is... wicked, isn't she?
truepenny:
Yes. And you forget that at your peril.
Also, that Le Guin story ... "The Rule of Names," where knowing the dragon's True Name is not as big a help as you might expect.
You can't tame the Witch.
matociquala:
And even the Witch can't tame the Harpy. Ask Mommy Fortuna. She can hold her for a while, though, which is more than anybody else can manage.
You must choose. There is opportunity cost in everything. And one's not better than the other--but we tend to react powerfully to a story that either confirms or questions our choice. Because God, we hate to face the idea that we could have made a different choice, and that would have been valid too.
truepenny:
Yes. We want all choices to be the right choice or the wrong choice.
matociquala:
Yes. That pernicious dichotomy again.
truepenny:
Binaries.
Black and white.
True and false.
Right and wrong.
We always want them, and they're always bad for us.
matociquala:
And there's an irony there of course, because the Witch's Choice wants to be a dichotomy too. Cake or ice cream.
Which brings me to The Last Unicorn. Which takes a similar theme in another direction. Specifically, there's an ongoing thing in Beagle's book where people are trying to cage that magic. Everybody wants to hold onto it, direct it, get their claws into it. Everybody wants to own that magic, in both its bright and dark aspects--the unicorn and the harpy-- (compare the protagonist of Tim's story, who lives with the Harpy but does not own her) --and the thing, of course, is that if you try that, you'll either kill the magic, or it will kill you.
truepenny:
Yes. Everyone wants to own the unicorn, and nobody can.
matociquala:
Well, Haggard can. But it's not helpful to him or the unicorns or the world. He's a miser of magic. And then there's Schmendrick, who becomes a great magician when he learns to... not try to cage the unicorn. Hah ah!
truepenny:
Yes. But when Haggard owns unicorns, he doesn't get ... well, he gets what he *wants*, but he doesn't get what he *needs*.
matociquala:
You can slap the Harpy in a cage. But man, when she gets out... stand back. Because the Harpy is not forgiving.
...there's also a running theme in here where the magic and the mundane brush up against each other, and both are altered. Schmendrick changes, and so does the unicorn.
truepenny:
Yeah. Magic is a catalyst, but it's also acted upon by the things on which it acts.
It's like my thing on my blog about protagonist deriving from a reflexive verb. You do and you are done to. Both at once.
matociquala:
Yes. And we're back to Evey and V again, the movie versions anyway. And, yanno, moving on to your universe, Felix and Mildmay. *g* On a more realistic and less mythic level.
truepenny:
Yes. No myth, but they do change each other.
matociquala:
The unicorn began to walk toward the harpy's cage. Schmendrick the Magician, tiny and pale, kept opening and closing his mouth at her, and she knew what he was shrieking, though she could not hear him. "She will kill you, she will kill you! Run, you fool, while she's still a prisoner! She will kill you if you set her free!"
For an instant the icy wings hung silent in the air, like clouds, and the harpy's old yellow eyes sank into the unicorn's heart and drew her close. "I will kill you if you set me free," the eyes said. "Set me free."
The unicorn lowered her head until her horn touched the lock of the harpy's cage. The door did not swing open, and the iron bars did not thaw into sunlight. But the harpy lifted her wings, and the four sides of the cage fell slowly away and down, like the petals of some great flower waking at night. And out of the wreckage the harpy bloomed, terrible and free, screaming, her hair swinging like a sword. The moon withered and fled.
The unicorn heard herself cry out, not in terror but in wonder, "Oh, you are like me!"...
...what really interests me about this is how the unicorn can face the harpy, who is really far more terrible than the Red Bull, with joy, but the Red Bull she must quail before and flee into captivity. And I think it's because symbolically the Red Bull means something very different than the Harpy does.
truepenny:
The Red Bull *isn't* like the unicorn. He's like Haggard. And Haggard is terrible.
And the Red Bull is terrifying because he doesn't communicate. He's blind. His eyes can't say anything.
matociquala:
He's blind and chained and also himself a chain.
truepenny:
Which is why he doesn't object to being chained. An entrapping system traps the people who benefit by it just as much as those who are oppressed. But those who benefit have no reason to care that the door is locked. Which sounds obvious, but there's something more under it, if I can dig it out. There's safety in a cage. And the Witch, and the Harpy, and ultimately the unicorn, are about not being safe. V is also about not being safe. That's what Evey learns when she learns she'd rather die behind the chemical sheds. That she doesn't need her safety. (Not that she had any, but she had the *illusion*. Tangentially, I thought it was really interesting that in the movie, Evey never wears V's mask. In the book, she's going to be a different version of V, but she's still going to be V, just as Dominic is going to be her Evey. But in the movie, she doesn't need the mask. She rejects the whole thing when she chooses to leave. She can look Finch in the eye as herself.)
... which brings us weirdly round to V again, who has no eyes.
matociquala:
...Justice is blind. The Harpy isn't, though.
truepenny:
No. The Harpy sees you all too clearly.
matociquala:
The Harpy is wildness, and the Red Bull is a chain.
truepenny:
The Harpy will kill you. But the Red Bull will destroy you. He'll take Valerie's last inch.
matociquala:
Yeah. If you let him. He sure will.