Shades of Orpheus & Eurydice in Eunice Hong's "Memento Mori"

By Leah Rachel von Essen on August 23, 2024

Orpheus descended into the Underworld to bring his love, Eurydice, back to life. He sang to Hades and Persephone on her behalf, got permission to lead her out from the underworld and back out into the sunlight.

But did anyone ask her if she wanted to leave?

In Memento Mori, Eunice Hong retells and explores the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice by laying it out next to a story of survival, grief, and death. Our unnamed protagonist, a Korean woman, tells a version of the Orpheus tale to her younger brother, who throws in his own quips, making the story a call and response between ancient and contemporary, classic and retelling.

In our protagonist's version, Eurydice never speaks. She is a shade in the underworld, who has been searching for her family among the souls. Dead just before her wedding night, she is a shade, translucent, spirit. Her memory fades in and out.

Eurydice, our narrator tells her brother, "had never feared death, and indeed, had thought it a gift…But she had not realized that she would endure the eternity of death alone." She searches for her family's souls, hoping to reunite with their spirits.

And when Orpheus comes, the Queen of the underworld tells Eurydice that she can either drink from the golden pool and join her family—but be committed to death and eventual resurrection—or drink from the River Styx (forgetting the underworld) and leave with Orpheus. When the Queen and King of the Underworld let Orpheus go, they tell him that Eurydice might follow.

The story goes as expected. Orpheus leaves, he turns around too early, and she isn't there. But was she ever? We never find out which path Eurydice chose: forgetfulness and life, or remembrance and death.

From an early age, our protagonist spends sleepless nights in an anxiety-driven panic, terrified of death and what does (or doesn't) come after. She returns to the same stories again and again, from Revelation to the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, trying to find comfort. Even as she fears death, she craves nothingness—suicidal ideation follows her from childhood into adulthood, haunting her every move.

The reader follows with concern as our narrator's story unfolds as if in a haze of memories surfacing then fading, pushing to the front and being shoved away. Our narrator is a shade herself in so many ways, hovering always on the edge of death, experiencing a near-death-by-suicide, and struggling under the weight of two sexual assaults that give her vivid PTSD. Her depression leaves her feeling empty, her anxiety keeps her from clawing her way out of her own head.

At one point, sent to live in Korea to heal after her first encounter with trauma, she descends along a stream and through a tunnel, mirroring a descent into the underworld. "I am a shade, a glimmer in the fog, a trick of light," she says. There is only haze—there is no sun. "I can barely remember it, and how can I miss something I do not remember?"

In the second half of the novel, our narrator incurs a horrible and unexpected loss. Suddenly, she is confronted with all the questions she herself once posed telling the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. Death pulls at her, but so does life. She is a shade once again, in-between life and death.

"Did she want to come back? Did he ask?" her brother once asked her about Eurydice. She wonders about that as she deals with family members on the brink of death, as she begs the doctors to try anything to force them back to life, as she tries to force her halmoni to eat. And she wonders it too as she wishes her loved one was alive again, with her. Her grief is palpable, and the reader can feel the whirl of emotion, confused pain, the waves of trauma, in the short chapters and recurring moments of the text.

In our narrator's mind, the lesson of Orpheus and Eurydice is, "Don't look back." She even frames Orpheus' loss as a punishment from the gods, granted because he was too much of a coward to die to join his love. As someone with suicidal thoughts who refers more than once to not-dying as the choice of a "coward," she looks into the afterlife and wonders if she is a coward to go on living while those she misses and mourns could be waiting for her somewhere beyond.

The past haunts our narrator, as do her memories. Eurydice had the option to wash herself clean of her memory and choose to return to the world of the living; our narrator wishes she did too. Her friend K. claims that memory "degrades every time you access it" and that the "best way to preserve a memory is to not think about it at all."

But our narrator finds plenty of gaps in that theory. Her halmoni has memories that are utterly not real. She remembers seeing the accident that broke her halmoni's skull when she was four, even though she was not there. And then, of course, there is her trauma, the sexual assaults that haunt her.

"I, the namer of things, took years to name what happened to me," she says. Trying to evaluate if her reactions were warranted, if her emotions were too excessive. And yet, "The memory of my degradation does not degrade no matter how many times I access it." If memories degrade, why is it her assault that refuses to leave even though she thinks about it constantly?

She has always known that she can't stop looking back, "like the man with the lyre, like the story of the pillar of salt." Lot's wife also looked back. "That was the only condition for salvation. But even as she ran away, she could not resist." Eurydice needed to forget in order to live again, to wash herself clean of memory before following Orpheus. Our narrator isn't ready to die, but she also can't stop looking back.

Our narrator's story is painful and heart-breaking, a story of all we wish we could forget, a story of continuing to live even when you feel you don't deserve it. The interpretations of Orpheus and Eurydice aren't strict or firm—at times, her story mirrors that of someone who would descend, at others, she herself is the shade, the one deciding whether it's worth it to reemerge into life.

The story is twisting, but in a way that's tremendously satisfying. At one point in the novel, her friend K. describes the concept of emergence. "Like this song playing in this video," he says. "The song itself is nice, but nothing special. The images that play are ordinary. But you put them together and they combine to make something totally different and new."

That's precisely what Hong has done in this novel. She brings together the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the experience of her depression and trauma, the stories of her family, and her later struggle of grief. She lets them sit beside each other, the vignettes of conversations, memories, past and present. Separate, they are nice. But together, in the reader's mind, they become something totally different and new—something bold, and sad, and special.