and essential detail to include in her work. For example, during a visit to the
Acropolis, surely a temenos in the view of most people, she sat close to the shrine
of Asklepios and began to draft the scene in which Alexias is ordered by the priest
to run down to the Agora and back to see whether he should compete at Olympia
(Sweetman, 1994:167). This seems to be an example of an archetypal or numinous
potential affecting the perception of the mythopoeic writer and reader, one of either
correcting the perception of place and or character. Mary Renault stated that when
writing The Bull From The Sea she found the story resisting her somehow and two
discrepant images of the character Theseus conflicted in her subconscious
imagination; one was of him as a six foot three warrior and the other was of him as
a slight wiry young acrobat; the latter won (Sweetman, 1994:178).
Mary Renault said, “ ... that the chief pleasure of writing historical novels lies
in the continuing tension between the particular - what is individual to the person,
the society, the time - and what is universal, and the constant interplay of one
through the other” (Sweetman, 1994:186). I n his Philosophy of Conscious Action
Garry Richardson sheds some light on this statement and explains how Mary
Renault achieved such an extraordinarily accurate understanding of the Greek
Classical period and of Alexander’s life. Essentially, he says, because she immersed
herself in that particular era, in her case, for years, and so through literally being
saturated in the milieu of the period, she “ ... can convey something of the
consciousness typical of it, so that the story becomes real instead of being a
transplanted modern one” (Richardson, 1987:27). Of Renault’s novel, The King
Must Die, Richardson says that the consciousness of the Minoans, the inhabitants of
Knossos, was similar to that of the ancient Egyptians and “ ... had something of the
quality of a waking dream being more dreamlike than the consciousness we
experience today” (Richardson, 1987:39). He says that Mary Renault captures
something of the quality of this dreamlike consciousness in the first chapter of her
novel The King Must Die; dreamlike in that it suggests a certain ambience, as of
something seen through a bright mist. Sweetman writes that much of “ ... The King
Must Die was dreamed up as Mary wandered around Knossos”, an interesting point
suggesting that the locale influenced her thinking, “ ... and let her mind journey with
Theseus to Crete and back and that she had experienced that uncanny frisson of
stepping down those gloomy stairs, into the darkened throne-room where Minos
would have sat, terrifying in his bull mask” and that when she returned to Santorini,
Mary “ ... refused to go ashore for fear of breaking the spell” (Sweetman, 1994:169-
ron
(Ron)
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