Cow-Headed Man, or Man-Bodied Cow?

Steven Sherrill – The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

Theseus serenely beats the Minotaur while the over-muscled body of his victim visibly strains – despite this, the Minotaur’s facial expression seems strangely passive, as if the man in him struggles for his very life while the animal merely submissively awaits slaughter.

MELANCHOLY is the word that seems to crop up in reviews time and again for this book. I must admit I picked this up on the strength of the title alone without reading the Guardian extract on the frontispiece which proclaims it to be “wry” and “melancholy”. The image, surely, that we are presented with in the book is one that seems as though it should conjure bathos rather than pathos. The protagonist, of course the Minotaur, living in a trailer in the grand American tradition, and working as a line-chef in a popular, but definitely not classy restaurant.

Very quickly we realise Sherrill’s reason for choosing such a bizarre focus for his novel, it is not the absurdity we are supposed to be looking at: it is the alien, utterly-other, nature of the Minotaur that’s key. Our Minotaur is not the villainous monster for Theseus to slay here. He is a complex being driven by a desire to connect with others, yet at the same time, not wanting to make any permanent connections.  We can see that Sherill’s M. is a creature that we are supposed to empathise with, to feel for his loneliness.

The writer goes to great lengths to tease the reader with hints at M.’s brutal nature – that at one point he might easily tear a woman apart and eat her, that his horns are in fact capable of causing serious harm – in short, that he is basically built as an immortal killing machine. However, by the end, when a violent dispute erupts between M. and some of his co-workers, we realise that now the Minotaur is utterly unwilling to perform any violent actions, simply because he is capable of it. The Minotaur is transformed into a being passive, perhaps, to a fault. One of the passages which sticks in my mind most concerns the Minotaur going into a pharmacist where a small boy sees him:

Just before he turns to leave the boy speaks again. “What’s wrong with him papa?”             “Don’t be rude, Henry.” The man smiles again, gives an apologetic shrug, then gathers his merchandise and leads his son up the aisle.             …             “Why is he like that, then?”             “For lots of reasons,” the man says after a pause. “Tell you what, when we get home, we’ll look him up in the encyclopaedia and see what we can find.”             …             … It has been a long time since his life had any relevance outside his immediate circumstances, and as time passes fewer and fewer people seem to know or care who he is, so he feels cloaked in a tenuous veil of complicated anonymity. Granted, a creature half man and half bull doesn’t go unnoticed doing his laundry, buying groceries or going about he business of living. But there seem to be degrees of difference in the world. If most people knew the truth about his life and the things he has done – no matter that he didn’t have a choice – his life in the here and now would be much more difficult. Thankfully most people don’t know… A steady diet of blood and human flesh in the dry black corridors of the labyrinth so long ago thickened his skin. Too, the minotaur himself is blessed with poor memory. - The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, Chapter 22

               

For me this crystallises the whole psychology of the Minotaur and what he represents here. There is the darkness of the past, and then there is the Minotaur here and now – the disconnect washed away deliberately unconvincingly by memory. There is the otherness of the Minotaur, who is treated by the boy and his father with that kind of egg-shell-walking care that one treats a person with a disability. We get a sense that, for M., his here and now doesn’t concern people like these whom he meets in the street, but rather the people he works with and lives near – and even most of those in a quite distant way. There are M.’s constant communication problems – that he seems to have trouble articulating even the most simple sounds – not to mention his apparent social ineptness, both of which seem to cause problems only when he tries too hard to humanise himself in order to fit more with his colleagues. None of the secondary characters in the story, as per above, refer to the Theseus myth in a significant way though at one point – significantly – the “love interest” of the novel says reassuringly to M. “My father was black.”

It seems that, thinking about it, there are two main agenda at work here – and I would definitely call this novel one with an agenda to push. The main one, perhaps the most immediately relevant, is to identify in the otherness of the Minotaur common nodes of human anxiety and alienation – the Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break is thus, a minority text, most certainly along the racial vein. At this, the novel certainly succeeds, it at no time reduces the Minotaur to an object of ridicule and allows the Minotaur to be a stand in for any non-white minority while at the same time allowing a white reader to place himself in this position. The title, and I keep repeating it because it is quite inspire, stands out to that special kind of reader, I should hope, interested in mythology and history – furthering its aim, I’m sure. Another nice little touch, which would have occurred to that reader who knows his Greek stuff is that the Minotaur doesn’t have a gender preference – in the novel he chooses a male partner first it appears, though it doesn’t quite seem to go anywhere. The other agenda at work would be the idea of every man’s repressed bestial nature – and the novel turns that on its head.

In the passive and well-meaning nature of the Minotaur, we would like to see ourselves – the human side. But the novel is full of intolerance, hatred and anger – though in cruel, deeply engrained little dabs rather than swathes – and this comes from the other people in the novel.