Myths of Meaning: Rachel Cusk on Kay Cicellis’s The Way To Colonos
Photograph by Roger Pic. Bibliothèque nationale de France, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
By Rachel Cusk
Originally published in The Paris Review on Oct 24, 2025
This savage little book is a recasting of three Sophoclean tragedies into the modern era. It unfolds for its reader certain human situations that are familiar enough, with an absence of sentimentality that renders them entirely shocking and strange. Its themes are the pain of youth and the disillusionment that comes with observing the less-than-faithful relationship between authority figures and the truth, but its originality resides in its broaching of the force of tragedy in ordinary human relationships. This is not to say that existence is presented as merely nihilistic or absurd: on the contrary, the characters here are beset by almost ungovernable emotion. What is tragic is the infallibility with which their natural love of justice and truth is taken from the hands of these young protagonists and bruised or broken by the people on whom they rely—rely not just for survival but for the explanation of life and the example of how to live it that their elders are meant to provide.
Born to Greek parents in Marseille in 1926, Kay Cicellis was educated in English and only began to learn Greek at the age of thirteen, upon the family’s return to Athens. English remained her language for writing, and at the age of twenty-two she produced a collection of stories that appears to have been widely reviewed in the Anglophone world. The Easy Way is a fascinating document as well as a text of great literary merit. It is almost impossible to credit it as the work of a very young woman writing in a language not her own. It isn’t only, as Vita Sackville-West observed in her introduction to the first edition, that despite never having even been to England “she writes English as though she were English born … in all [her] stories I have never detected one single phrase which in its syntax or its parenthetical composition could not have come from a born-English pen.” The stories have the muscularity and dark-bloodedness of D. H. Lawrence’s short fiction, their absence of unconscious constraint by social class and conditioning. Lawrence gave voice to a new sound in fiction: his sentences felt different in the ear, because he didn’t come from somewhere his readers recognized. Kay Cicellis likewise was unidentifiable by any of the means through which writers generally betray themselves. The stories in The Easy Way are set in—mostly rural—Greece, but there is no knowing how or why their narrator is there. The cool, clear, granite-like objectivity of this young writer’s voice is like a flooding of daylight into the stuffy chambers of descriptive prose. Reading it, two questions arise: Is it the case that literature’s besetting weaknesses generally arise from the involuntary subjectivity of a cultural identity? And might it be true—because Kay Cicellis did not attain with her subsequent novels the success and renown this startling beginning seemed to promise—that a writer’s fate is nonetheless bound to the life that comes to her, to the time and place in which she finds herself and by which—talent notwithstanding—her oeuvre stands or falls? Kay Cicellis created, in the very midst of this contradiction, an outstanding writer with the wrong material in her hands. Mid-century Greece, peripheral, poor and backward-looking, was an inadequate canvas for the expansion of her gifts. Unlike Natalia Ginzburg’s, her life did not seem to offer her the intersection of the personal with the political that could provide a foothold for her voice.
The Way to Colonos is a magnificent resolution of this problem, written in an ageless prose that instantly strikes the reader as the work of a master. The Greece that is its setting is here abstracted into simple forms—island, city, suburb, boat—while its human characters are enlarged into all their involuntary violence and torment. These three tales use myth as a means not of aggrandizing but of clarifying and sharpening situations that otherwise would be muddied and burdened by explanation. Cicellis’s Antigone is a young woman hardened by disgust at her parents’ dreadful marriage who finds more truth in lying and in sex than in her father’s pathetic and hypocritical morality. Electra is also paralyzed by disgust at the conduct of adults and their limitless capacity for self-justification, yet in her case it is her starved and suffocated love for her mother—her need to love her, unworthy as she is—that torments her. In the final story, Sophocles’s less-known play Philoctetes is transformed into another instance of youthful disappointment when a young man trying to assume the mantle of masculinity is deeply disillusioned by the conduct of older men he viewed as heroes. Their sculpted brevity—each could easily have been a novel—makes newly shocking the recognizability of these situations; indeed, reading them, the usual long arc of contemporary prose narrative comes to seem more and more like a morally questionable scheme of habituation, a process by which readers acquire tolerance for what ought to arouse the strongest passions and responses.
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This book, written when Cicellis was in her mid-thirties, is especially striking for what it shares with her earliest work: a wholly convincing belief in the power and moral authority of youth. In her first stories it was the precocious Cicellis herself who demonstrated this power; in The Way to Colonos she retains a burning understanding of a period of life fraught with growth and blight, in which the burgeoning human spirit is met by continuous attempts to deform and constrain it. The earlier work sought to trace the social and environmental factors driving this loss of innocence; these later stories, with their deep foundation of myth, can ascribe more significance to fate. It is as though, with hindsight, Cicellis can suddenly see how much of the dynamic agony and joy of being young comes from the unknowability of the future. Faced with the great blank of what is to come, what is appears infinitely negotiable and escapable. It is this—this elemental trust in the concept of freedom and free will—that constitutes the force of tragedy in human development. With a subtle intelligence, what Cicellis grasps in these stories is that her young protagonists claim as a freedom the right to hate or disapprove of the adults who hold so-called authority over them, when the forces of tragedy and fate have already decreed that no such freedom exists. Their struggle with these figures, which they mistake for a threshold into a realm of election, is in fact a struggle against predestiny itself, for what the mothers and fathers in all their disappointing reality represent is the inalienable fixity of the world we are born into and of mortality itself.
The contradiction of myth lies in its eternal submersion of knowledge in the face of experience: it is the proof from which we never learn, the touchstone we only recognize afterwards, when we have already lost our way. By applying this tragic formulation to the ordinariness of the parent-child relationship, Cicellis extracts something of greater boldness and truth from the fictional situation. There can, in other words, be no happy resolution, such as fiction is always tempted to offer; the question of how parents and parent-figures gain and retain their power, and what becomes of the child’s illusion of freedom, is already foretold. In “The Return,” the figures of Electra and Clytemnestra are a mother and daughter locked in a vicious dependency: their mutual loathing is not a springboard to separation but the cyclical expression of a need for love of a kind neither can offer the other. Cicellis’s Antigone, in the title story, has become a jaded liar as the consequence of parental control: “having lived under oppression all her life, deception was in the nature of things. … The contractions of appearances had ceased to puzzle her. Misunderstanding had become a definite, but unimportant, necessity; she had found it need no longer exclude reality.”
Both stories offer shocking insight into the secret lives of young women as they writhe beneath parental scrutiny, learning instinctively how to deceive and dissimulate while remaining heartbreakingly in need of nurture and love. Despite their grounding in myth, these are recognizably modern situations in which the powerful carapace of family unity has already cracked—the parental unit, that twosome that blocks the exit and lays down the lifelong foundations for existence being experienced as a form of narrative, has been sundered. These young people have already been stripped of a different kind of myth, the myth of meaning and order that the family structure imposes on new minds. Through the cracks they see the hypocrisy and selfishness and self-justifying weakness of the adults among whom nonetheless they remain trapped. In ‘The Exile” the same disillusionment arises, this time in the matrix of military life, when a young recruit is brought to question the courage and honor he naturally ascribes to his superiors. The myth on which it is based is Philoctetes, “one of the few ancient plays,” as Cicellis writes in her foreword, “in which there is no hero.” In the play, Philoctetes is a key player in the Trojan war who has been abandoned by his army on a deserted island after a snake bite to his foot renders him disabled. Ten years later the army—in the person of Odysseus and the young Neoptolemus—is forced to come and find him after it has become clear that the war cannot be won without him. Philoctetes is the possessor of Heracles’s bow, the vital weapon for victory, and the innocent Neoptolemus comes to realize that Odysseus intends not to rescue Philoctetes but merely to steal the bow and leave him in his agonizing exile.
It is perhaps Sophocles’s most intriguing work, for its themes of suffering and injustice are so specifically and tangibly human and its characters so ambivalent and lifelike. Pain and unfairness have made Philoctetes depressed and incapable of forgiveness; ambition has made Odysseus immoral. Between them, the child Neoptolemus ponders the nature of justice and right, where the communal need to win the war is weighed against the personal betrayal and theft of Philoctetes. With the idealism of his youth, Cicellis’s Neoptolemus instinctively sides with—and attempts to idolize—the injured man, only to discover what suffering and injustice do to the human spirit. Philoctetes here is broken and deadened by loneliness and pain—he can no longer love or hope. “You offered me a role,” he later tells the young man. “I took it … I jumped at it. It didn’t last long. But nothing so good had come my way for a long time. You gave me something to do. You gave me something to be. What did you expect?” At this bald admission from an adult, the young man “shuddered a little, half pride, half horror. He had given birth, unknowingly; it was the first time; and the child was a monster.”
Today’s reader of Kay Cicellis will find in her voice another missing piece of the female literary puzzle, a woman before her time in her scrutiny of intimate relationships and her effortless shrugging off of the conventions that adhere both to the living and to the representation of them. She is a writer who has lacked a category, and it is to be hoped that her writing will now find itself beyond categorization, free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority who wish to see the world through sharp, fresh eyes.
From Rachel Cusk’s introduction to The Way to Colonos: Sophocles Retold by Kay Cicellis, to be published by McNally Editions in December.
Rachel Cusk’s books include Saving Agnes, which received a Whitbread First Novel Award, and Parade, which won a Goldsmiths Prize.