something from outside myself ... I nspiration, the muse
experience, is like telepathy. Nowadays ones hardly dares to say
that inexplicable phenomena exist for fear of being kicked in the
balls by the positivists and the behaviourists and the other
hyperscientists. But there is a metatechnics that needs
investigating (Fowles, 1998:6).A particular genre of literature that demonstrates in a unique way the
characteristics of MLC is that of historical fiction, or as some popularly term it,
faction; a fictional story based on factual events, people and places in history. In
this regard I am especially familiar with Mary Renault and her Greek factions, The
Last of the Wine (1956), The King Must Die (1958), The Bull From the Sea (1962),
The Mask of Apollo (1966), Fire From Heaven (1970), The Persian Boy (1972), The
Praise Singer (1979), Funeral Games (1981) and other shorter works, including a
biography The Nature of Alexander (1975). Other outstanding examples are Valerio
Massimo Manfredi’s wonderfully mythopoeic and detailed Alexander trilogy;
Alexander, Child of a Dream (1998), Alexander, The Sands of Amon (1998) and
Alexander, The Ends of the Earth (1998), William Golding’s The Double Tongue
(1995), and Dorothy Porter’s verse novel, Akhenaten (1992). I n this genre there
seems to be an extraordinary coalition of detailed knowledge about the protagonist
(and sometimes too, other identities), the locale and the events but the detail
exceeds the scope of the mythopoeic writer’s knowledge. I ndeed, the specifics of
person, place, event and detail, which is often unknown or lost to history, even to
experts in that field, seems to come unbidden to the mythopoeic writer.
Mary Renault is especially interesting, indeed outstanding as a study in this
regard. Her biographer referred to her psychic vision of life in Ancient Greece, to
explain the rich visual texture, those details of behaviour, dress and locale, which
makes her text so animate and “ ...for which there is no single traceable origin”
(Sweetman, 1994:156).^ Renault’s The Last of the Wine not only describes scenes
and places that she had never visited but also some that no longer existed and
which she imaginatively reconstructed from archaeological evidence. I ndeed, it was
not until her first novel on Greece was completed that she made her first visit to
Greece (Sweetman, 1994:164). I ronically, it was then, while at the Acropolis, as
she stood gazing towards Piraeus, that she realised her one error in that first novel.
She had described the character Alexias staring at the ships in the harbour when, in
fact, such a view was obscured by the curve of the land. More often, she
discovered in her reverie whilst visiting certain places, again unbidden, some new