Kassandra

After reading The Reader with it's short chapters and neat little sections, Christa Wolf's Kassandra was a heck of a change of pace. I started trying to read it side-by-side with the English translation, before quickly realising that a) stream-of-consciousness writing does not work in side-by-side mode, and b) the German version was far too dense.

So I switched to straight English translation (I tip my hat to the translator, Jan Van Heurck, who managed to take a completely delirious text and make it completely delirious). It's cheating, but I am trying to read other texts in German. Books more at my reading level (around about 8 Jahre alt, at present). Krashen (who likes to cite himself), Day and Bamford, Brown and a few other theorists would tell you it's better to read within my level or a little beyond it if I want to actually gain anything, linguistically. Too far out of my depth and it all becomes noise.

Kassandra came out at the same time as Bradley's Mists of Avalon and clearly shared a lot of the same Zeitgeist. Both took an essentially "masculine" series of myths and legends and plonked a priestess smack in the middle of it all.

In Bradley's book it was the Arthurian cycles, and she used Morgaine as the focal point. For Wolf, it was the Battle of Troy seen through the eyes of Cassandra. There are a lot of interesting cross-overs between those two books, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if someone has already written a thesis about it.

These days, all the stuff about priestesses and goddesses is a bit old hat, but back in the early 80s it would have been very much new shoes (oh, look, I've slipped into The Last Resort again). It's very strange to think that, if I were reading these books back when they were first released, I would be thinking about Feminism* - it would be foremost in my mind, and I would be seeing Feminist messages all over the place throughout both texts.

Having read them in the 2000s, though, I just enjoy the story - I have to be reminded that they are Feminist texts by reading other papers as it simply doesn't occur to me.

I think if I had been given a stronger education in "the classics", I would have found Kassandra terribly clever. I couldn't help shake the feeling that Wolf was using Cassandra's stream-of-consciousness ramblings and her role as an unreliable narrator to weave together various versions of the legends that might not be entirely complementary. However, my knowledge of Troy is sadly lacking. I never read The Iliad (well, who has?), or The Aenid, and I'd only read a little of Euripides. 

Besides that, I had a mild obsession with Greek myths in my childhood that lead me to read a few books about gods and things - but children's books never really go into much detail. So a lot of Kassandra was new and exciting and different... and confusing.

Now feel I need to find other works dealing with Troy in order to figure out what was going on half the time. You know - texts that have a beginning, middle and end.


 *I would also have been three years old, and thus a genius.