Two Cassandras

A few days ago I attended a Metropolitan Opera HD performance of Hector Berlioz’ Les Troyens. About the production of the opera which is based on Virgil’s Aeneid, one can only say wow! Imagine a chorus of 110 singers. Sometimes they are Trojans; sometimes, Greeks; at other times, Carthaginians. the costume changes must keep everybody busy. The first two acts are set in Troy at the time of the Trojan horse and the sacking of the city by the Greeks. Cassandra, King Priam’s priestess daughter who can foretell the future, is the leading female figure. The drama is intense, and at the end of Act Two we could have all gone home, thinking it has been quite enough. Then came three more acts, set in Carthage with Dido and Aeneas. Cassandra was nowhere to be seen.

Cassandra does not go to Carthage – or to Greece either – because she dies at the end of Act Two. Cassandra had warned them about the horse, but of course nobody listened. Now the Trojan women gather to await their fate, presumably as slaves of the victorious Greeks. Cassandra proclaims that they must not allow the Greeks such a mastery. Some of the women protest that they do not want to die, and they leave. The remainder sing a defiant farewell and, led by Cassandra, commit mass suicide.

This not how Homer told it, or Aeschylus or Euripides. In The Trojan Women, Cassandra suffers not from not knowing her fate, but from knowing it too well. She will go to Argos as Agamemnon’s concubine, there to be slain by Clytemnestra, his wife.

 And blessed am I about to be matched
With a king in Argos, yes, Hymen, you nuptial god,
While you my mother do nothing but moan and weep
for my dead father and dearest fatherland.

Hecuba sees this knowledge as part of Cassandra’s recognized madness.

 Give me that light.
In your hectic gyrations you cannot hold it straight.
Our sufferings have not made you sensible:
You are the same as you always were.

As you always were? Cassandra’s curse is to prophesy truly but not to be believed. Her despair is seen as madness. The passages quoted above are from the Paul Roche translation. Richmond Lattimore renders Hecuba’s comment as

Let me take the light; crazed, passionate, you cannot carry
It straight enough, poor child. Your fate is intemperate
As you are, always. There is no relief for you.

What Cassandra prophesies is more than the delusion of a marriage.

I will be a far more lethal bride
Than famous Agamemnon king of the Greeks
Ever bargained for.

She goes on to compare the fates of the Greeks and the Trojans and to foresee her own role in “the annihilation of the house of Atreus.”

Cassandra accepts her fate, knowing she has no choice. This is the magic of Euripides: his understanding of women. Cassandra is a perfect metaphor for the position of a Greek woman, any woman. To the extent that she tells the truth, she is not taken seriously. Although, she knows her future, she can take no actions to control it. This is contrast to the operatic Cassandra who is a strong actor in her own behalf. Perhaps for Berlioz, a true heroine defies the will of the gods, rather than submitting to what should have been her fate. As the Greeks saw it, this was just not possible.

Lady Hamilton as Cassandra, by Romney

What I Read in September 2011

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return. I was moved and impressed by these graphic novels about growing up during the Iranian revolution.

Anna Maclean, Louisa and the Missing Heiress. A rather lightweight mystery story set in 1850s Boston in which Louisa May Alcott is the detective.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life. A woman is not a man. Sounds obvious, but when a woman achieves something a man might have achieved — written a novel, for example — it must be because she is less than a “woman”.

Homer, The Iliad. We experience War, with its heroism and cruelty, and the interference of the gods. I have posted on The Iliad: How They Die and The Iliad: Fate.

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone. This is an excellent medical novel with wonderful characters, but not for the squeamish. I finished it the night before the moving cataclysm and could not find it for several days. Here is a scan of its somewhat battered cover.

September has been an unusually lean reading month, although any month in which one completes The Iliad is memorable for that. We have been engaged in moving out of our house, in which we have lived happily but somewhat messily for 32 years. As a non materialistic person, how did I accumulate so much stuff! After days of packing and unpacking boxes we are not through yet.

The Iliad: Fate

That’s Zeus. Feel his power. Some say this bronze statue, recovered from the sea, is Poseidon. It is not. It is Zeus because he is about to hurl his thunderbolt, and even earthshaker Poseidon must yield to that.

With all his power over gods and men, Zeus must not change fate.

Then the bright-eyed goddess Athene said to him: ‘Father, master of the bright lightning and the dark clouds, what is this you are saying? Do you intend to take a man who is mortal and long ago doomed by fate, and release him from grim death? Do it then — but we other gods will not all approve you.’

Fate is for men, and all men have the same fate: to die, whether heroically or not. So Patroklus “met the day of his fate” but, intentionally or not, he chose the day.

…this was a fatal error, poor fool — if he had kept to the instruction of the son of Peleus, he would have escaped the vile doom of back death. But Zeus’ mind is always stronger than the mind of men…. And it was Zeus then who put the urge in Patroklos’ heart.

So Homer provides us with a confused accountability. Your fate is determined, yet you can make the decision about when to meet it — and Zeus can influence that decision. So why can’t he change the fate itself? Fate is for men, not gods.

Then lord Apollo the far-worker said to him: ‘Earthshaker, you would not say I was in my right mind if I do battle with you for the sake of wretched mortals, who are like leaves — for a time they flourish in a blaze of glory, and feed on the yield of the earth, and then again they fade lifeless. No, let us withdraw from battle immediately, and leave the mortals to fight for themselves.’

You may wish for immortality, but it has drawbacks, Thetis, the goddess mother of Achilles, lives forever while her mortal husband ages and she know that Achilles must die and she cannot prevent or postpone it. A man may live on in his achievements and, if he is a warrior, his greatest achievement is to kill. The greater the man killed, the greater the glory. Thus, Hektor,

And people will say, even men of generations not yet born, as they sail by over the sparkling sea in their many-benched ships: “This is the mound of a man who died long ago. He was the greatest of men, and glorious Hektor killed him.” That is what they will say: and my glory will never die.

And the gods? They live forever and do not care about us. As Hera says, “Let them die or live as fortune has it….”

The Iliad: How They Die

The Greeks and Trojans fought man to man. It was personal. You saw your opponent fall.

He fell to the ground in the dust, like a poplar….

He crashed down on his face, and his armour clattered about him.

Life and strength collapsed where he lay.

Death was darkness.

…darkness covered his eyes, and he crashed, like a tower….

…and black night covered over his eyes.

…he crashed from the chariot, and the hateful darkness took him.

It was the same experience for both sides. No remote weaponry separated winners and losers.

So he fell, and the bronze of his crafted armour rang over him

…..many of the Trojans and Achaians lay stretched side by side, face down in the dust.

They lay dead on the ground, a sight now to gladden the vultures, not their wives.

It was the fate of the warrior to die.

…over his eyes came the surge of death, and strong fate took him.

…filled the measure of their fate at the hands of king Agamemnon, and sank down into Hades.

Hades is below the earth and from Hades you do not return. Earth could sustain life, but it does no more.

…all these, one after another, he brought down to the nourishing earth.

…he crashed in the dust and his hand clawed earth.

…the life left his bones.

I am rereading The Iliad after many years. During my previous reading I was disgusted by the fighting and maiming and dying and those warriors who gloried in it. But it is not glorious to claw the earth, and surely that is the point.

New Page: Glimpses of Greece – Ancient Arts

There he is, Zeus in all his naked glory. I have just posted a new addition to the Pages section of my blog. Entitled “Glimpses of Greece: Ancient Arts,” it contains links to the PowerPoint presentations and on-line videos I use in the course I give in the spring of 2011 at Lifetime Learners Institute.

The course offers a quick tour of four of the arts of classical Greece:

• Storytelling – myth and legend
• Painted Pots – Greek vase painting
• Classical Sculpture – Hold that pose!
• Greek Theater – then and now

Click here to take a look.

What I Read in November, 2010

Bess Streeter Aldrich, The Rim of the Prairie.
This 1925 novel celebrates their progress of the pioneers who broke the sod in Nebraska. At the same time, it reminded me that we have lost the magic of the landscape and an earlier way of life.

Franz Kafka, The Trial. Josef K must be guilty of something, since he has been arrested and is on trial. As I interpret The Trial, it could happen to anyone.

Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth. More short stories from the author of The Namesake. Lahiri does the immigrant experience with an Indian twist.

David Malouf, Ransom. King Priam of Troy visits the Greek hero Achilles to ransom the body of his son Hector, whom Achilles has slain. That is all and that is everything.

I also read the following books on which I have not posted:

Mark D. Fullerton, Greek Art. This was a re-read for the presentation about Greek Sculpture which I am currently preparing. With no expertise in this area — but a lot of appreciation — I have to crib from the experts. Although more concerned than I am about disputes in the field of stylistic dating, Fullerton is readable and very helpful in interpreting the meaning of classic statues and reliefs. Meaning matters. Why else would you spend vast amounts on public sculpture?

Anne Tyler, Noah’s Compass. I enjoy Anne Tyler’s books and have read most of them. This one is rather slight. Man retires, man has little purpose in life both before and after retirement, man considers love affair, man backs out, life goes on. Tyler seems to specialize in the disappointed. The ones here are less compelling that the characters of Saint Maybe or Digging to America. The ending was flat. Sometimes you read a book and think the author is trying too hard. In this one, I think Tyler should have tried a little harder.

Ngaio Marsh, Photo Finish. Another of the Inspector Alleyn series, this time with an interesting New Zealand setting (Marsh’s native turf). A real puzzler this one, very like an Agatha Christie, with everyone a suspect and everyone not quite able to have done it and a masterful Alleyn explaining it all to the assembled suspects in the final pages. )See my post about Final Curtain.)

David Malouf, Ransom

Homer’s Iliad tells of Achilles’ rage; it is also the story of Priam’s grief over the death of his son, the noble Hector, at the hands of Achilles. We know of this rage and that grief, but at the remove of centuries. David Malouf, in Ransom, brings us into the experience.

This novel is also a meditation of the meaning of our roles in life: Achilles’ role as a warrior, Priam’s role as king.

My role was to hold myself apart in ceremonial stillness and let others be my arm, my fist–my breath too when talk was needed, because … I have always had a herald at my side, our good Idaeus, to find words for me. To be seen as a man like other men–human as we are, all of us–would have suggested that I was impermanent and weak. Better to stand still and keep silent, so that when old age came upon me, as it has at last, this world would not see how shaky my grip has become, and how cracked and thin my voice. Only that I am still here. Fixed and permanent.

Priam’s permanence as a king has cost him humanity and the power to express his own human needs. He has also lost — or never had — the daily experiences that most men share of work and occasional hardships and doing without. Priam sets out on a journey to ransom his son, accompanied only by a workingman, a carter, and his two mules. He is allowed to be hot, to be hungry, to speak for himself, and to enjoy the talk that is not ceremonial.

Priam was himself ransomed when, as a boy, he was redeemed from a life of slavery by his sister. Priam’s name means “the price”, the price that was paid for his freedom. It is also, ironically, the price he has paid for many years for his kingship, his sons, and now this war. Malouf brings us back to to Homer again because Homer contains it all: a young man’s rage and and old man’s grief.

What I Read in July 2010

No individual posts on the following books:

Alexander McCall Smith, Tea Time for the Traditionally Built – a good vacation read. This is one of the Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency series.

Ann B.  Ross, Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind – a southern widow, Miss Julia, emerges from 40 years of suppression by her know-it-all husband. The plot strained credulity, especially Miss Julia’s naive reactions to male machinations, but it was a welcome vacation read. I loved the scene where the black maid, Miss Lillian, breaks into a televangelist program by waving $100 bills supplied by Miss Julia.

Sue Grafton, U Is for Undertow. I have enjoyed this series with private investigator Kinsey Milhone, who lives and works in Santa Theresa/Barbara, California. The plotting in this one had more appeal than the last two, with one unsettling discrepancy at the end.

See my posts for more about the following books:

Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness

Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah’s Key

Richard Russo, Nobody’s Fool

Harry Blamires, The Bloomsday Book – I read this along with Ulysses.

James Joyce, Ulysses – finished at last, free at last! I have posted on my approach to reading the book and on the Circe section. Expect one more comment.

Circe, by Homer, by Joyce

When Odysseus landed on the Aeaean Island he was unsure how dangerous the inhabitants would be. He sent half the crew to check it out, and they were turned by the goddess Circe into swine – with the exception of one man who escaped and returned to tell Odysseus. Circe is attractive:

…But still
they paused at her doors, the nymph with lovely braids

Circe—and deep inside they heard her singing, lifting
her spellbinding voice as she glided back and forth
at her great immortal loom, her enchanting web
a shimmering glory only goddesses can weave.

The Odyssey, Book 10, Robert Fagles Translation

With the help of the god Hermes, Odysseus resists Circe’s drugged wine and gets her to free his crew from their animal forms. Then there is bathing and feasting and going to bed and the goal of Ithaca is forgotten for a year. When Circe sends him on his way, she instructs him to visit Hades to consult the seer Tiresias.

I am reading/struggling through James Joyce’s Ulysses and wonder what the long Circe section there has to do with Homer’s Circe. Joyce has written in dramatic form, with indicated speakers and with stage directions, so the externals of who is saying this or doing that are clearer than in some of the preceding sections. Yet it reads like an extended dream sequence in which all the themes take their turn on the stage.

I am looking for Circe and find an assortment of prostitutes, as well as references to all the women previously encountered. My candidate is Bella/Bello who does indeed work changes in form, both on herself and on Leopold Bloom. Bella becomes Bello and assumes the masculine pronoun. Bloom remains Bloom but is now a female, doing Bello’s bidding. Blamires’ comment:

Thus, before the powerful figure of Bella, the latent femininity and submissiveness of Bloom emerge…. Bloom, with dulling eyes and thickening nose, becomes a humble infatuated creature, while Bella fully takes over the masculine role, becomes ‘Bello’, and orders Bloom down on all fours.

Joyce performs a switch on Homer’s story. Ulysses here, rather than avoiding enchantment and taking control of the situation, is overwhelmed and transformed in ways (feminine) that Joyce perceives as negative. Is that what powerful women do? They make you into the female they no longer are, submissive, groveling, animal like.

More, the entire Circe section is one transformation after another as characters ranging from Milly Bloom to King Edward come and go in Bloom’s disordered mind. What I do not find here is the gift of the Odyssey — the knowledge that enchantment has pleasures but also dangers. Joyce’s Ulysses experiences the dangers, but where is the joy?

Getting into James Joyce’s Ulysses

By one measure I am halfway through, having read 9 of the 18 sections of Joyce’s novel about a day in Dublin. By another measure, I have a long way to go, as I am now on page 218 of the 704 pages of this edition. So why am I plodding on if I have to count pages to encourage myself?

To prepare myself. Dr. Mark Schenker of Yale gives lectures in various Fairfield County libraries and senior centers. It was because of his series on the literature of war that I recently read All Quiet on the Western Front and The Things They Carried. In November he is going to speak on James Joyce’s Ulysses, a literary classic I have avoided until now. I am somewhat prepared, having read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the past and, more recently Homer’s Odyssey, on which Ulysses is based.

I have a guide as I follow Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom through Dublin’s busy streets in 1904. The Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires provides an explanation of people, places and allusions. After I read each section in Blamires, I read the corresponding episode in Ulysses, with much less bewilderment than I would otherwise have. Yet something just is not clicking for me. Joyce is a clever writer and this is a clever book. I enjoy the wordplay, the weaving of past and present in the minds of Stephen and Leopold. I see them, I hear them, but I just don’t care about them much.

I want to care. I didn’t expect to care about the fate of Homer’s Odysseus, that self-confident ruler of Ithaca who left his wife to deal with things for 20 years, but I was enchanted with the Odyssey. Odysseus dodged and fought and lied his way around the Mediterranean and a great time was had by all, including this reader. The travels of Dedalus and Bloom about Dublin are much less compelling. Maybe they will avoid Scylla and Charybdis and maybe not; if not, too bad.

Maybe my shift in attitude reflects a shift in expectation. We expect Odysseus to be a sexist warrior but hope for something better from 20th century Dubliners. Joyce  is, if anything, more sexist than Homer. Homer brings us Penelope and Nausicaa with delight in their beauty and dignity and also some sense of their feelings. Joyce trivializes women with slighting names: Molly, Milly, Dilly, Boody. Stephen knows he is arrogantly entitled to his own education and opinions, but when his sister buys a book,

He took the coverless book from her hand. Chardenal’s French primer.

- What did you buy that for? he asked. To learn French?

She nodded, reddening and closing tight her lips.

Show no surprise. Quite natural.

But he is surprised by this evidence of female intellectual aspirations.

Better incidents surely like ahead, but at this half-way point I want to record an honest reaction to Ulysses: it is clever but irritating at times.