“A God Buys Us Cheeseburgers”: Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Series and America’s Culture Wars

In his Percy Jackson and the Olympians series (2005–9), Rick Riordan offers children Greek myth in a contemporary American setting. The series posits that the gods perennially migrate to whatever society serves its era as “the great power of the West” (Lightning 73), so that Olympus is currently moored somewhere over the Empire State Building and its denizens may appear garbed as beachcombers (Poseidon) or bikers (Ares). Moreover, because they retain their ancient practice of, as the 2010 film adaptation of the first volume puts it, “hooking up” with attractive mortals, they continue to spawn an ever-growing race of demigods. The latter group includes the eponymous protagonist, whose status as son of one of the “Big Three” positions him as the central figure in a multiquest effort to save the world from a resurgent Kronos’s effort to overturn the gods’ successful revolution against him. That the über-villain is a primordial patriarch and both gods and teenage demigods resent their parents’ absenteeism, covet their power, and seek to prove themselves by opposing their elders emphasizes that while the old is immortal, potent, and relevant, its coexistence with the new is at best uneasy.

The series often provides highly arcane mythological information; consumers of these books are enabled to speak knowledgeably about telkhines and empousae, for example. At the same time, however, Riordan is clearly offering not a retelling of traditional myths in modern language but an effort to continue within today’s world the tradition represented by the ancient tales. Sheila Murnaghan notes of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the originator of the children’s myth book, that his “decision to make children the audience of the classics leads him to a redefinition of the classics as a form of popular culture and to a brief for the superior value of the popular over the canonical. . . . [As] he points out, ancient writers had the same freedom to remake myths that he is claiming for himself” (343). Riordan’s series similarly asserts the value of metamorphosis as a means of adapting to a changing world. Kronos and some of his allies are known for stopping time and freezing action, whereas the gods’ chief virtue is their continued ability to fit into modern ways; such flexibility, metatextually embodied in the series’ desire to create anew rather than merely to recapitulate the old, is represented as crucial to the saving of Western society.

In this regard, the series is situated athwart a larger debate about culture that took its present shape approximately a century ago. The central question in this debate has been that of the extent to which high culture and the classical tradition (embracing not only the ancient world but also, say, Old Master paintings and classical music) may successfully be transmitted to the masses. Granting, as most participants in the debate historically have, that the tradition must be adapted in order to be so transmitted, some have argued for the importance of limiting the amount of adaptation that is to be tolerated, contending that too much makes the effort counterproductive. If, like Riordan, we determine that catering to a mass audience means indicating that satyrs eat Cheetos, some readers will consider that the process of metamorphosis has extended so far as to become antithetical to the very tradition that it seeks to continue, much as Theodor Adorno suggested that when offered to the masses via a popularizer’s arrangement, “The minuet from Mozart’s E Flat Major Symphony, played without the other movements, loses its symphonic cohesion and is turned by the performance into an artisan-type genre piece that has more to do with the ‘Stephanie Gavotte’ [a piece of popular salon music composed in 1880 by the military bandmaster Alphons Czibulka] than with the sort of classicism it is supposed to advertise” (299). Yet for others, Riordan’s success in communicating Greek mythology to contemporary tweens as a living narrative pleasure entirely justifies his deviation from classical purity.

The placing of classics on the contemporary and popular plane is complicated further by...