Review: Charlotte Higgins, Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths
The word ‘clue’ is a fragment of myth living on undercover in everyday English. It is Middle English, clew, originally, for a ball of thread, and when used in its modern sense used to come as a set phrase: ‘Ariadne’s clew’. Which is to say, the ball of thread that Ariadne gave the hero Theseus so that he could outwit the coils of the Cretan Labyrinth and return alive to its entrance. And from there ‘clue’, as the old literal sense faded into obsolescence, came slowly to be our general word for anything that put us on the right track. So where other Europeans find their way in puzzles and mysteries by rather dull and literal ‘pointers’, ‘traces’, and ‘paths’ (Hinweis, indice, traccia, pista), English-speakers get to be heroes, of a kind. We follow Ariadne’s thread, and it leads us forward, out of confusion, and back, to ancient Greece, ancient Crete, and the myth of the Labyrinth.
‘Clue’ is just one example among thousands — fun particularly because concealed in plain sight — of mythology’s knack of survival. The Greek myths live on in our culture in all manner of ways and for all kinds of reasons (not least of all class systems and social cachet); and for those of a certain bent of mind, following the devious paths that myths maze through history is one of the signal pleasures of art and culture. Charlotte Higgins is very much one of those people, and Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths finds her weaving her way through time and space between the pre-historic Mediterranean and the present day as she follows — with ‘a little slippage between truth and invention, between excavation and creation’ — the traces left by the Labyrinth on our culture and on her own intellectual development.
Myths have a habit of making discussions of them conform to their particular logics, such that many analyses of myth become in some way mythomorphic: myth-shaped. And so it is with Red Thread. This is a book that comes with no prospectus or introduction, follows no set course, and arrives at no set destination. It is a book in which the path taken is, in line with its subject, uncertain. Composed of short vignettes from myth, art history, and — seemingly at least — personal memoir, it simply passes from one thing to another, now via the logic of association, and now through bald parataxis. As Higgins reveals when it is almost finished, one of the driving conceits is the thought that Daedalus’ labyrinth might be ‘a diagram of the brain […] a symbol of the imagination’, and of the way ‘in which humans make associations, one thought following another in a long procession, from the edge to the centre to the end.’
As a result, Red Thread is a book that defies summary, and, to some extent, criticism too. Higgins’ range is admirably, enviably broad, and so, often, is her depth. With a classical education in her back pocket and a long career in arts journalism after it, she flits from Sir Arthur Evans’ excavations and ‘restorations’ at Knossos, to Titian, Velasquez, and Picasso, to Catullus, Vergil and Ovid, Dante and Borges. The divagations are not just in sympathy with the subject, but in part demanded by the circumstances of the material: since the Cretan myths have no overridingly authoritative classical source, the only way forward is a kind of bricolage. Other sideroads are more personal and idiosyncratic. Two of the longest sections, for instance, treat the whorled beard of Michelangelo’s Moses, and the defunct Loop Line that once took trains through the six towns of Stoke-On-Trent.
Much hangs on things being a little like other things that are like labyrinths. This covers not just tangled beards and winding railways, but, in the end, almost everything: as Borges taught us, a library is like a labyrinth, and also ‘like a little world’, and a labyrinth, in turn is ‘like a book’, and ‘Epic poems are like woods,’ which are ‘like the Underworld’, and so on. This, again, is something that myths do, generating likenesses — indeed, their ability to reappear time and time again as near likenesses of themselves is one of the main reasons behind their cockroach survival skills. But the spotting of likeness is, for my money, not much without the discernment of unlikeness. Similes work because, at the end of the day, two things are at least as different as they are the same. If all one can see is similarity, after a while the response to similarity dwindles to a frustrated ‘So what?’
As in real life mazes, there is a fine line here between frustration and enjoyment. When Higgins meets the maze designer Adrian Fisher she notes that his job is ‘to bewilder’ people ‘just enough to create pleasure’, and not so much that you decide ‘you’ve had enough’. Certainly there is no shortage of visual pleasure in Red Thread; flush with illustrations, it is by any measure a handsome book. For the rest, it will depend on the individual reader. I found that despite its manifest good qualities I had had enough some time before Higgins had. I might be less susceptible to the novelties, pleasures and the puzzles of Red Thread than most, however. Having spent much of my twenties writing about the afterlives of the Cretan myths, it may be that I have simply spent too long in the maze already.
