From all the manifold images traditionally marshaled, none so dreadfully resembles the Gorgon head as the face of human death. —Caroline Anderson
By any honest reckoning, Tanith Lee was one of the most versatile and influential writers of fantasy, horror, and science fiction in the English language during the last 100 years. Yet today, much of her work is out of print, and most of what remains in print does so thanks to the efforts of dedicated editors and small press publishers. From the late 1990s to her death in 2015, she struggled to get her new books published by any but small presses, saying in a 2012 interview, “No one, it seems, among the ‘Big’ houses, wants me to do anything at all for them, or remembers me, even when I remind them.” Though she was nominated for and won various awards, including lifetime achievement awards, she won surprisingly few awards given the amount and quality of her work — she only had 2 Nebula nominations (the most recent in 1980) and was never even nominated for a Hugo. If you want evidence for the utter poverty of awards culture, just look to the career of Tanith Lee.
“The Gorgon” is one of the two Tanith Lee stories that won the World Fantasy Award (the other being 1983’s “Elle Est Trois, (La Mort)”). It was first published in 1982 in Charles L. Grant’s anthology Shadows 5 and, happily, it is available to read online via Nightmare magazine.
I first read “The Gorgon” some years ago in the marvelous Arkham House selection of Lee’s early short stories, Dreams of Dark and Light, but had not revisited it for a long time. Recently, inspired by the efforts to create Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology, I have been reading a lot of Lee, much of it for the first time, because though I had been reading Lee ever since I first encountered her in the Summer 1988 issue of Weird Tales, where Stephen Fabian’s astonishing artwork for “The Kingdoms of the Air” immediately captured my young imagination, I have read only a very small percentage of her vast body of work.
At some point, “The Gorgon” got confused in my mind with Robert Aickman’s “The Wine-Dark Sea” — I first read them probably within a year or two of each other, and both involve men visiting mysterious women on little islands near larger Greek islands, but there is a distinct difference between them: Aickman’s strange allegory never denies the supernatural, but “The Gorgon” — to quite extraordinary effect — does.
In some ways, it is surprising that “The Gorgon” won the World Fantasy Award, because it is not strictly a fantasy story. The island is imaginary, the situation of the Medusa on it unlikely, but there is nothing absolutely impossible in it. The movement of the story is to strip away fantasy, to undermine myth. It’s entirely appropriate that it won the World Fantasy Award, though, not only because it is beautifully (and cunningly) written and structured, but because its central concern is the uses and implications of fantasy, in pretty much every sense of the word.
(The only way to discuss the story productively is to discuss its ending, so if you have not read the story and do not like knowing the endings of stories you have not read, then you should stop reading these words now.)
From early in “The Gorgon”, we know the narrator is a writer. The extent to which he is successful is difficult to judge — a local calls him “a big writer”, which he then says is “equally inappropriate in the sense of height, girth, or fame”, but either he has another job or he’s successful enough to jaunt off to Greek islands and later unhesitatingly consider paying for surgery for the unnamed woman he meets. He has certainly been successful at writing, regardless of how much money this success has brought, because he notes that his whole reason for coming to this island is that the “year before, I had accomplished so much [writing] in a month of similar islands”. But not this time. This time, his muse has abandoned him. “In all of fourteen days I must have squeezed out two thousand words, and most of those dreary enough that the only covers they would ever get between would be those of the trash can.” He convinces himself that the reason his imagination and talent have seemingly abandoned him is that he needs the inspiration available on the mysterious, forbidden little island nearby. He feels called to it, as if it is an island of siren-muses.
And yet he does not find inspiration there. He finds a woman in a mask — a woman he is drawn to, fascinated by, certainly, but not a woman of any mythic majesty. Rather, her mystery has mundane explanation: a terrible deformity. The effect on the narrator is significant, it stops his ability to write anything other than this account, which he says will be his last.
He can never understand his experience outside the realm of myth, and feels impelled to cast the mysterious woman in a role that makes him important to her identity:
I can neither excuse nor quite understand myself, seen in the distance there with her on her island. Hartley tells us that the past is another country. Perhaps we also were other people—strangers—yesterday. But when I think of this, I remember, too, the sense of drawing I had had, of being magnetized to that shore, those trees, the nostalgia for a place I had never been to. For she, it may be true to say, was a figment of that nostalgia, as if I had known her and come back to her. Some enchantment, then. Not Medusa’s Island, but Circe’s.
Circe?! Really? This lonely, afflicted woman, who had never had any contact with him before, is in his mind a temptress deity.
(The reference to L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between is worth noting. Ali Smith described that novel well as “a fine disquisition on appearance versus naked truth”. Though often, sadly, both the novel and the excellent film made from it are forgotten these days, it pops up now and then, as in Todd Hayne’s recent movie May December. Hartley was also a serious and excellent writer of macabre stories.)
Eventually, the narrator bullies the woman into removing her mask, he sees her deformed face, hears her story, pities her, but also feels that she holds him in contempt for his relative good looks, wealth, and freedom. This is what destroys him. Not any sort of magic, but rather a woman not seeing his struggle and ambition, a woman not caring about him at all:
She despised me. She despised all of us who live without her odds, who struggle with our small struggles, incomparable to hers. “Your Greek is very good,” she said to me with the patronage of one who is multilingual. And in that same disdain she says over and over to me: “That you live is very good.” Compared to her life, her existence, her multilingual endurance, what are my life or my ambitions worth? Or anything.
She did nothing to him but show him hospitality and generosity. He was a stranger to her, a mediocre man washing up on her shore, and now she is, in his mind, to blame for the poverty of his imagination, the lack of meaning in his life. She has become a convenient scapegoat for whatever he needs to excuse about himself.
Despite his narcissism, the narrator is not wrong about everything in the story. This is part of what makes it such a rich reading experience — the narrator is not some caricatured badguy whose self-love and lack of self-awareness doom him to utter stupidity and make him an easy villain. Though surely no hero, he’s almost tragic in his fall: undone by the errors of his personality, the flaws of his choices, the narrowness of his vision. But he learns something about myth and about desire and about stories. This is why he can’t write, not because the woman on the island is a siren or a temptress or a gorgon, but because his sense of the world required a certain type of myth. He needed to be able to order the world into a particular type of narrative (one where, I expect, men like himself hold power) and what he learned — first with Pitos, who refuses to take him to the island, despite whatever the narrator offers — is that he has no great power, no control of others, no dominance. He sought a muse who would either dominate him or whom he would dominate, but he found something different: a woman indifferent to his existence. He simply did not matter to her, and so his world lost meaning. In his interpretation, “she was to me such a lesson in the futility of things, the waiting fist of chance, the random despair we name the World.”
Certainly, the woman’s fate was not a happy one. Certainly, she was a victim of cruel chance. But the only way the narrator can extrapolate her existence into a philosophy to replace the myth of sirens, temptresses, and gorgons is to make it all about himself — but when he does that, without the screen of myth, he is left with nothing. Because he cannot conceive of a philosophy in which he is not the protagonist. Once he stops telling his own self-centered story, he has nothing left to say.
“The Gorgon” is, then, a story about the end of a certain kind of heterosexual white male fantasy. It is about the poisonous power of male-centered stories, the desiccating force of patriarchal vision. Caroline Anderson has connected the idea of the gorgon to heads severed on battlefields. War is as macho and patriarchal an activity as there is. The movement of the idea of the gorgon into a gendered realm — the female Medusa — is a kind of transference similar to that made by the narrator in Tanith Lee’s story. The more horrific the world becomes, the more men want to move the horror’s source to women. The horror in the story is not that the man is a man, it’s that he can’t dream beyond his narcissistic maleness. The world doesn’t have to be random and meaningless; he interprets it to be so because he cannot imagine a world in which his needs and desires are not central to everyone else’s stories, a world in which other people’s stories matter at least as much as his own. The woman on the island is not mysterious to herself, nor is she particularly horrifying to herself — she is mysterious and horrifying only to the men who seek to wrap her in their own myth-making. Perhaps that is what traps her on the island. Traps her, literally, in her father’s house.
The woman knows the man will leave in the morning, because she knows he must attend to his self-love, which is his ruin. He has nothing to offer her, no balm, no liberation, no salvation. They both know that. For him, it is the end of any possibility of storytelling. For her, it is just another day.
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images: Roman wall painting fragment with Gorgon mask via the Metropolitan Museum of Art; original cover by Victoria Poyser for The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales; Souda Bay from the of the Venetian fortress at Souda Island by Robin & Bazylek via Wikimedia Commons.
