Award-winning writer and Applied Communications instructor at the Clearfield County Career and Technology Center Mark Seinfelt of Philipsburg —whose previous works include the nonfiction Final Drafts: Suicides of World-Famous Authors (Readers Subscription Book Club alternate selection; Harvard Book Store recommended title) and the novels Henry Boulanger of Mushannon Town (finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel, 2008; Pinnacle Book Achievement Award- winner in historical fiction, 2010), Symphonie Fantastique (Honorable Mention, Amsterdam International Book Festival, 2016), and Baldr and Beatrice (Honorable Mention, Hollywood Book Festival, 2018) recently published his fifth book, a hybrid work of fiction and nonfiction, A Meal for a Minotaur and Five Companion Essays.
A Meal for a Minotaur is a novel, more precisely a Bildungsroman or novel of education. It deals with the spiritual education of its protagonist the Greek hero Theseus at the hands of his one-time victim Helen of Troy, whom, or so the story goes (Theseus himself can’t remember), Theseus kidnapped and deflowered as a small girl.
The grown, goddess-like Helen—who reverts from time to time into a not-so-very-innocent child—becomes a second Ariadne for the now aged hero. Every bit as much a victim as her predecessor, the Cretan princess, she nonetheless points and directs her erstwhile corruptor’s way through a stupendous new labyrinth, far more twisted and complex than the dreaded maze of Minos which Theseus threaded as a boy with Ariadne’s assistance.
As A Meal for a Minotaur commences, the setting of the novel is initially hazy and unclear, but soon the reader comes to understand that the novel unfolds and takes place in the mystical and numinous space of maternal origins, a locality or “egg” which exists outside of linear time and which is identified with both Plato’s pleroma and Goethe’s subterranean “realm of the Mothers” in “Faust, Part Two”—a womb of possibility and pure consciousness where opposites meet, where knowledge and memory are enhanced and constricted at the same time, where simultaneously all things pass without precise boundaries into one another, and in which all being originates, a sphere the soul returns to again and again between incarnations and where ultimate explanation seems tantalizingly just out of reach.
Theseus’ attitudes and ways of thinking develop and mature, as moving through the pleroma in quest of redemption, he witnesses how a slew of authors down the course of the centuries rework and retell his and Helen’s stories as he strives to avert the terrible fate awaiting the Spartan queen—whom he now considers more a daughter than a future bride—outside of the egg, a destructive destiny that she seems doomed to repeat over and over again for all eternity and for which Theseus seems in part responsible.
Ironically, the great but grievously flawed hero grows more compassionate and more humane as he learns that the inhuman adversary he seeks, a new and more fearsome second Minotaur, is in fact a part of himself, an integral aspect of his own identity, and how we humans all must confront, fight, and conquer the monster within before we can escape hell and gain heaven.
In addition to the novel proper, the volume also includes five companion essays on literature, myth, music and morality which provide further insight into the preceding fiction (together serving as a clew to the labyrinth, as it were), including “Empedocles’ Final Draft” in which the author returns to the subject of suicides of world-famous authors, the topic of his first published work Final Drafts in 1999; “The Birth and Investiture of Skanda,” a modern retelling of the demanding and onerous if also rib-tickling conception of the Hindu God of War, the son of the deities Siva and Parvati; “Mud Church Address,” a speech Seinfelt delivered at the Philipsburg landmark in 2019; and “Operation Crossbroch,” an account of the escape of novelist Hermann Broch from post-Anschluss Austria, whose freedom was not won by commandos brandishing machine pistols but by authors (including Thomas Mann and James Joyce) wielding the lancets of their art (Seinfelt portrays Broch as a sort of modern-day Theseus trapped in Nazi hell and the authors who came to his rescue as a collective Herakles).
The book also showcases cover art from Philipsburg artist Mary Beth (Murphy) Myers and benefited from the contributions of one of Seinfelt’s students at CCCTC, Noah Baker, a graduate of the CCCTC’s Information Technology program whose instructor Jerome Mick is a graduate of South Hills/Philipsburg,) who helped Seinfelt prepare the text for submission to Kindle Direct Publishing, and Shannon Dawson of Philipsburg whom Seinfelt credits as being his creative sounding board for the project and who persuaded him to add a glossary to the volume, which Seinfelt says readers will find helpful and illuminating.
