OrpheusEurydice2.0032_Hoban

OrpheusEurydice2.0032_Hoban

OGCMA, s.v. "Orpheus and Eurydice"
Head of Orpheus website

Russell Hoban, The Medusa Frequency (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), novel.

This very writerly novel articulates the steps of writing the third novel by Herman Orff, a fictional writer whose career turns upon learning from the head of Orpheus the steps of artistic creation and loss. Hoban engaged the Orphic element in his earlier Kleinzeit (1974). In neither novel is the writer strictly confined to precise details of the Orpheus Myth — Eurydice here leaves Orpheus for Aristaeus after Orpheus’ infidelity. But the overt systematization of the classical narrative provides a helpful interpretive road map through the narrative of Herman Orff's failed love affair with Luise.

Book cover for "The Medusa Frequency" by Russell Hoban, featuring a reproduction of "Girl with a Pearl Earring

The disembodied Head of Orpheus speaks to Herman on the bank of the Thames: "I am the first of your line. I am the first singer, the one who invented the lyre, the one to whom Hermes brought Eurydice and perpetual guilt. I am your progenitor, I am the endlessly voyaging sorrow that is always in you, I am that astonishment from which you write in those brief moments when you can write. ... In the stories they always say I turned around to look at her too soon but that isn't how it was: I turned away too soon, turned away before I'd ever looked long enough, before I'd ever fully perceived her." Orff recalls, "With those words there came into my mind Luise. Once when we were living together..." (Hoban, Medusa Frequency, 33)

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University.
The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300 - 1990's, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.