Gorgons

Gorgons enter the story through a carved head on the entrance of Dan Gregory’s New York mansion, where myth, architectural ornament, and the painter’s exacting imitation of age meet. The creature’s remembered power to turn onlookers to stone gives the knocker a threatening aspect, while a later exchange about what young people need to know recasts the Gorgon as a question about history, knowledge, and repetition.

The Gorgon at Gregory’s Door

In 1933, Rabo Karabekian arrives at Dan Gregory’s mansion and finds a noble oak door with massive iron hinges. Its knocker is shaped like a Gorgon’s head, with intertwined asps forming the creature’s necklace and hair. The figure is not an isolated flourish: the door and its decoration had appeared on the cover of a Christmas issue of Liberty magazine, bringing Gregory’s published image into the physical setting where Rabo is to begin his apprenticeship.

The object makes Gregory’s command of painterly imitation visible at close range. Rabo notices verdigris in the lines of the Gorgon’s face and among the writhing snakes, and recalls the holly wreath shown around the knocker on the magazine cover, whose leaves had appeared brown-edged or spotted. The wreath is gone by the time he arrives, but its representation, like the rust on the hinges and oak, displays Gregory’s ability to reproduce the marks of age and decay.

Myth and Modern Memory

Rabo recalls the traditional claim that anyone looking directly at a Gorgon would be turned to stone. Years later, he tells this to children around his swimming pool and finds that they have never heard of a Gorgon. His anecdote connects the mansion’s striking ornament to his wider complaint that young people seem to get by with little information, although the recollection also places that complaint within his own retrospective narration.

At supper, Circe Berman answers the complaint with a different measure of what history can teach. She argues that young people cannot change the Vietnam War and may learn more about vanity and sexual power from other sources than from studying Empress Josephine. On the Gorgon itself, she says that all anyone needs to know is that no such creature exists. Her response shifts attention from the myth’s frightening image to the distinction between knowing a cultural story and believing that its monster is real.

A Figure in an Argument About the Past

The Gorgon becomes part of a disagreement about whether ignorance condemns people to repeat history. Paul Slazinger answers Circe by invoking George Santayana’s warning about remembering the past. Circe counters that people are doomed to repeat the past regardless, treating repetition not merely as a failure of study but as a condition of being alive. Against that exchange, the Gorgon’s reputed power remains an old story: vivid enough to be fixed in iron and paint, but not, in Circe’s account, a real creature.

The motif thus joins two kinds of looking back. At Gregory’s door, the Gorgon is a mythic image made convincing through meticulous surface detail; in Rabo’s later recollection, it is a test case in a debate about what the next generation knows and whether knowledge can prevent repetition. The passage sustains the contrast without resolving it: a creature may be unreal, yet its image and the history people attach to it continue to shape what they see and remember.