Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [76]
BM: Using myths in cross-cultural ways came to me quite naturally and organically. In these days of megascale diaspora, when whole peoples are crossing borders because of better job opportunities or wars, cross-cultural applications of myths seem the most appropriate way to go. Myths embody archetypes, which is why they speak to all of us no matter what our ethnicity. I don’t have to be a pagan Greek in order to empathize with Oedipus. You don’t have to be a Hindu Indian to recognize the part that Devi the goddess is asked to play in the struggle between good and evil. As a student of world myths, I see how much in common—in terms of emotional and moral struggles—myths from different cultures have.
Q: Did it feel natural, then, to weave together a Hindu myth and a Greek myth in Leave It to Me?
BM: That presented an unusual challenge. The conflict that I had to resolve in synthesizing a Hindu myth and a Greek myth in Leave It to Me was this: Greek mythology, according to scholars like Edith Hamilton, places humans at the center of the story whereas Hindu mythology places destiny at the center. My solution: Debby is convinced that she is at the center of her universe, but the reader—having started out with the prologue—is always aware of divine providence.
Q: How does Leave It to Me rewrite the Eleetra myth?
BM: Myths are renewed each time we retell them. And depending on who is doing the telling of a myth, to what kind of an audience, and at what moment in history, that myth is interpreted in new ways. Poets like Homer, Aeschylus, and Ovid could take the same story, keep the cast of characters and the plot intact, but suggest very different motivations for what the characters do.
What I took from the Electra myth was the seriously dysfunctional family. The Electra myth comes out of the stories about the House of Atreus. You get endless, vengeful, in-family adultery, cuckolding, betrayal, murder, the dismembering of little children, and even a bit of cannibalism. I know, I know, Greek mythic tales are full of violence! The mother-father-daughter triangle is at the core of the original myth. In my novel, I found myself working with three separate such triangles, because Debby has a biological father, an adoptive father, and, in Ham, a lover who she wishes had married her mother and so had become her natural father.
Q: You recognize the violence in Greek myths. Leave It to Me is just as violent. Why?
BM: As in the original Electra myth, my mother-father-daughter characters are not afraid of committing mayhem. Debby/Devi pulls off a couple of disturbingly violent deeds. For me, the important question is whether Debby/Devi is a callous arsonist and killer or a facilitator of divine justice.
I also wanted the violence to be emblematic of the violence in the real world. Just one small example: These days we can’t board a plane without going through a metal detector. As in real life, some of the violence in the novel is caused by malevolent people. But there’s another kind of violence that intrigues me more. I’m thinking of earthquakes, tornadoes, typhoons, floods, wildfires. Debby is violent in the way that such forces of nature are. The Gray Nuns who rescued her must have guessed this since they named her Faustine after a typhoon.
Q: Leave It to Me explores Devi’s struggle to discover her identity as she crosses cultural boundaries. Has this been a personal struggle for you?
BM: The themes my writing explores are the making of new Americans and the consequent two-way transformation of America. These themes have thrust themselves into my fiction because of my personal daily experiences as a naturalized American citizen.
Q: What were those daily experiences when you first entered the United States?
BM: Shortly after entering the United States, I married Clark Blaise, a fellow graduate student at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, during a lunch break in a lawyer’s office in September 1963. I have a dangerously impulsive streak!