Inching towards Hercules – while sharing some obstacles, including 'Classics'

In the previous posting, I got the closest so far over this current set of blog posts to Hercules – via “Phil,” one of the sidekicks through whom Owen Suskind would work through issues and communicate with his father, Ron. I’m inching towards putting the focus on Hercules. I’m going to do this inching forward with care.

I said at the end of the previous posting that I’d be turning next to “Hercules in a strange place.” But I’m going to defer getting to the strange place until the next posting now, as I want to spend a bit of time first reflecting on what it entails to pick Hercules as a topic for activities for autistic children. I’ll do this against the backdrop of Ron Suskind’s book and of a problem that runs deep in classics as a discipline whose elitism runs deep.

Where there would be footnotes, I’m going to put details in the text in response to a comment form Adelaide Dupont on how the footnote links aren’t working in my recent postings.

Adelaide has also made several other comments on these postings and I’m currently reflecting on these and thankful for them – and without them I might not have decided on this ‘intermission’ posting.

The good guy?

Firstly, what autistic people sometimes like are not the heroes of a story, or at least not those generally regarded as the heroes, but the outsiders: those on the margins, anti-heroes… villains. What Owen Suskind really liked are sidekicks as reflected, for example in the subtitle of his father’s book about Owen and his journey through childhood and young adulthood: Life Animated: A book about sidekicks, heroes and autism. When I was sharing my project at an event where I consulted with autism specialists in October 2019, one of the participants – an advocate for autistic people’s participation in research into autism – said that what he has always responded to are ‘villains, such as the black-hat wearers of Westerns.

The greatest hero of all?

The hero for children

But Hercules is more a ‘hero’ – in the modern sense of the term – than a sidekick or a bad guy. As one of the best-known of mythological heroes, whose popularity was, and is, beyond that of any other in classical myth, he gets everywhere. There are the stories which centre on Hercules, for instance, notably those concerning the twelve labours – on which there are some really good, recent, materials here, from the Leeds Hercules Project (on which Project, more below). In addition to the twelve labours, there are many other adventures centring on Hercules the hero, along with numerous appearances by Hercules in stories linked with other figures, as where he pops up to rescue someone: Theseus, for instance, or Alcestis. He is among the Argonauts under Jason, at least for a while. He is involved in stories associated with Troy. For an overview of the array of stories where Hercules figures, see for instance the information here on the Perseus website.

Beyond antiquity, stories about Hercules have been, and continue to be, retold and recast more than any other figure from classical myth. As Alastair Blanshard writes in his book exploring various times when Hercules has been received since antiquity:

“The myths about Hercules have exercised a fascination for Western culture ever since the time of the Ancient Greeks…Hercules stands at the boundaries of our imagination” (Hercules: A Heroic Life, London: Granta, 2005, xvii.). 

And, when Emma Stafford wrote the volume on Hercules for the Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World series, which I edit, the book, like all others, had an ‘Afterwards’ section which traces moments in reception after antiquity. (As I write this posting, the publisher’s pages are down, though Emma discusses the book here.)

With Alastair Blanshard during an afternoon sharing Hercules activities
at a showcasing public engagement event, CA/FIEC congress, London, July 2019 

Emma’s ‘Afterlives’ section was necessarily longer than in any book to date in the series, and it’s longer than any other such section will likely ever be. But, still, Emma was able only to scrape at the surface and she began the Leeds Hercules Project after that to explore the phenomenon of Hercules as received since antiquity.

Can there be a place for Hercules in autistic culture? Can there be a place for this hero who is at the heart of so much – as the ‘civiliser,’ and as the epitome of culture who keeps defeating those who challenge it? Can the hero at the centre be relevant to autism?

I am going to make a case for a ‘yes,’ including because it is possible to pull from classical uses, and postclassical uses, of Hercules topics relevant to autism. I’m going to set out, starting soon, that it is possible to use Hercules to explore what it is to experience the world as autistic: to show non-autistic people what it is like to be autistic and to explore ways to negotiate such issues as dealing with difficult choices, helping understand how people behave and helping deal with anxieties and obstacles.

Epitome of ‘Classics’ and ‘Western Civilisation’?

But that still leaves me with another problem: Classics. When, last week, I presented my autism and myth activities to a class of Special and Inclusive Education students, one of them commented on just how elitist classics is. I completely agree. Indeed, I’d add that the figure of Hercules is bound up with what ‘Classics’ is and what ‘Western Civilisation’ is. Hercules, indeed, is a figure who has long been taught to children because his stories are deemed worthy ones, a trend that Lisa Maurice explores in the latest edition of the Journal of Historical Fictions.

When Hercules is received, ‘Classics’ is being received, and ‘Western Civilisation’ is being received. As Alastair Blanshard says in the quotation I included earlier in this posting, Hercules has provided a source of “fascination” since ancient Greece for “Western culture” (emphasis added). As Alastair continues, Hercules “stands at the boundaries of our imagination” - the “we” being the receivers of Western civilisation.

And, so, in designing activities for autistic children, what am I doing? Am I offering classics as some kind of gift to autistic children, to give an access to key aspects of Western culture? This is what Nicola Grove and Keith Park discuss the possibility of doing in the case of another key classical mythological hero, Odysseus, in the activities for people with learning disabilities they present in their Odyssey Now.  And, as they say – as I discuss in a posting from February 2017 - one reason they picked Odysseus was precisely because of that hero’s deep-rooted place in Western culture.

When I pick up again after the easter weekend, I’ll continue to explore why, as the epitome of the hero, Hercules can be relevant to autism, I’ll also look further at Hercules as a figure who forms part of a set of stores – indeed provides the best example of a set of stories that epitomise ‘classics’ and classics for children. One option would be to turn away from anything classical. The route I’m going to adopt is to engage with Hercules to help critique and reflect on the state of the discipline and its role in children’s culture.