Something To Do With Dionysus
Cait Corrain got the Pentheus treatment
My plan for this newsletter is to do one weekly post on Tuesdays, along with an occasional shorter Friday piece when something timely is on my mind. And right now, I’m thinking about how the biggest story in book publishing this week has something to do with Dionsysus.1
If you’ve been on the internet this week, you’ve probably heard about the latest Goodreads review-bombing scandal. It’s a really upsetting story, in which a nonbinary author named Cait Corrain whose debut novel was set for 2024 created sockpuppet accounts to give one-star reviews to other 2024 debut authors’ books (targeting mostly BIPOC writers) and tank them before publication, all while pretending to be their friend.
Corrain’s malfeasance was eventually outed by YA author Xiran Jay Zhao – whose book Iron Widow I cannot recommend enough, it’s got giant mechs and Chinese mythology and polyamory and is just generally an incredible read – and Corrain eventually issued an apology, blaming mental illness and addiction but making no mention of the racism in their actions (even though there is plenty of evidence that their targeting of BIPOC authors was malicious and premeditated). They were dropped by their agent and publisher.
I’ve read a bunch of great pieces on Substack by book-industry professionals addressing the problems with Goodreads, how Corrain’s publishing team probably failed them, and how the unique stresses of book publishing can really wreak havoc on anyone with less than perfect mental health and coping mechanisms. But I haven’t seen anything addressing the Classics angle specifically. And, oh yes, there is one.
In August Corrain described their book – whose publishing fate is now extremely up in the air – as “a spicy, snarky, queer duology that married Greek mythology with space opera, reimagining the myth of Ariadne and Dionysus against the shining backdrop of a vibrant galactic empire.” But the part that I can’t stop thinking about is this follow-up tweet in which Corrain writes about the importance of queerness in their book:
Heartbreakingly, another writer, Akure Phénix, later shared that this tweet came just one day after Corrain successfully bullied her off Goodreads. It seems that Corrain specifically targeted not just other debut writers, but specifically ones who included Greek mythology in their books, and especially other retellings with queer versions of Dionysus. Phénix also tweeted, “I love Dionysus especially and I didn’t know Dionysus was only for her 😭😭”.
It’s a head-scratcher, for sure. Corrain’s position seems to be that, in ancient myth, Dionsyus was definitively and undeniably queer… but also that they somehow “owned” (or, maybe, had Columbused) that queerness, and nobody else could write a queer Dionysus but them, somehow?
The first part is true enough. The idea that Dionysus embodies a fluid, non-normative approach to gender, desire, and sexuality is FAR from new. In fact, my first thought was, Wow, a queer Dionysus? I’ll let Miranda Priestly take this one for me:
I’m going to immediately follow that gif up with a quotation from a piece of brilliant scholarship, because that’s the vibe I want to bring to this newsletter in general.
This is from Victoria Wohl’s reading of gendered identification and desire in Euripides’ Bacchae (Wohl 2005, p. 145):
When the male Pentheus gazes with desire on an effeminate Dionysus and imagines him through the eyes of his female followers, is this heterosexual desire (and in which direction —female for male, or male for female?) or homosexual (and in that case, male or female?)? Traditional gender and sex categories – the polarities so central to this play and the scholarship on it – implode and from the confusion emerge new shapes (gunaikomorphos Pentheus), new longings (pothos, 456), perhaps even new sexualities.
Pentheus’s fate is to be tricked by Dionysus and then torn apart by enraged maenads for profaning their rites. There’s something appealing about the idea that Corrain has gotten a bit of the Pentheus treatment themselves – that their possessive jealousy over Dionysus’s queerness was an affront to the god that led to their career being torn apart by righteous and justified Twitter bacchants.
I’m not going to push on that particular mapping too hard, because it would fall apart. It’s not an argument, it’s a feeling. But it feels satisfying, right? There’s an attractive resonant quality to it. And when it comes to myth, that feeling of rightness is crucial to making one variant feel like it fits into the bigger scheme.
Zooming out from the Dionysus aspect specifically, I think there’s a bigger discussion to be had about how Corrain’s nonbinary Dionysus fits into how we think about myth and its reception. If you’ve studied myth at all, you know that myths have endless variants. That means there is rarely a single, neat, canonical, internally consistent story. Instead, there’s a vast network of different versions of related stories told by Homer and Plato and the tragedians and Ovid and Shakespeare and Rick Riordan and hungry, unstable debut authors. Every telling exists in a kind of quantum entanglement with the other versions, and more allusive writers will often wink or nod toward variants they aren’t telling. It feels against the spirit of the whole phenomenon for a writer to be so possessive of one specific mythic variant and their positionality toward that variant.
If you’re thinking that it’s a bit of a bummer that this queer space opera Dionysus and Ariadne story isn’t going to happen, I hear you. Liv Albert, who runs the excellent “Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby!” podcast, is currently doing a call on Twitter for mythic retellings by BIPOC and Greek authors. And in the meantime, watch out for Dionysus, because if you fuck around, he will make sure you find out.
If it seems weird that I reused this phrase, it’s because it’s an extremely niche classicist reference (aka, my whole brand) on the phrase “nothing to do with Dionysus,” an Athenian proverb about drama and also the name of an excellent essay collection on Greek drama from 1990. And now you know.