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.

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.

Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles

The subtitle of Caroline Alexander’s book about the Iliad is “The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War.” A little long-winded that subtitle, but accurate. This is a recounting of the Trojan War as Homer told it and Alexander now interprets it. The key players are the combatants, Achilles and Hector, and their leaders, Agamemnon and Priam.

The Iliad glorifies the heroes, but it does not glorify war. Achilles is not at Troy in fulfillment of a pledge to defend the husband of Helen of Troy (originally of Sparta). He is there for glory, and yet he is reluctant to fight. He quarrels with Agamemnon not just because Agamemnon took the girl Briseis who had been awarded to Achilles, but because in the taking Agamemnon showed himself to be capricious and unjust and out for more than his fair share. The booty awarded to a warrior after a battle or a raid honored  the glory he had won, but it was not the glory itself, as Achilles understood. Agamemnon did not understand, and probably did not care to.

The new reader of the Iliad comes to it, expecting the story of the Trojan War. It is not. It is the story of a few days during the tenth year of that war, days during which Achilles withdraws from the battle, Patroclos is killed, and Achilles returns to the fight and slays Hector. We know the rest of the story — the beauty contest of the three goddesses, the abduction of Helen by Paris, the death of Achilles, the Trojan horse, the sacking of Troy — from other sources. Alexander explains,

The complete story of the war was once told by a series of six other epics, known collectively as the Trojan War poems of the Epic Cycle. Composed  at various dates, all considerably later than the Iliad, they also, like the Iliad, drew on much older common traditions.

In Alexander’s analysis of the Iliad she points out many places where Homer’s poem is at variance from that older tradition. Homer skillfully chose his incidents and characters to make real the meaning of leadership, friendship and death in the lives of the Greek and Trojan warriors. He also shows us the grief of mothers and of aged fathers, as parallels are developed between the suffering of Priam and the sorrows of Achilles’ mother, Thetis.

Thetis is a sea nymph, one of the immortals. Married to a mortal man, she gave birth to the mortal Achilles. She is destined to see him die while she lives on. (This is a disadvantage to immortality I had not considered before.) Alexander develops the idea of the inequality of the relationship between the gods who will live forever and the men who will not.

Of greater interest than the nature of the gods per se is the nature of their relationship with mortal men. The Olympians of the Iliad know everything about the mortals they look down upon…. Rarely indolent, usually zestful and opinionated, the extended family of Zeus aggressively engages with the mortal world. In disguise, the Olympians move, speak, and act freely among men, partaking of the human experience….

By contrast, despite the busy flow of divine activity that drums through their lives, the Homeric heroes and heroines know very little about their gods.

Because they know so little, men must propitiate the gods out of a proper caution for the future. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. One has a sense here of why Homer still speaks and we still listen: the gods know all including the future toward which men must grope blindly.

There is so much in this book that my comments here are just picking threads off the surface. I enjoyed the comparisons with other myths and folktales, the analysis of names and language, the evidence from archaeology. Best of all was the differentiation of character that Alexander perceives in the Iliad and the way Homer’s construction of the story conveys his views of gods and war and men and, especially, Achilles.

Here was a hero with both the nature and the stature to think and speak as an individual, to stand apart and challenge heroic convention. In the hyperstated mortality of Achilles lay the origins of something potentially greater even than epic — and that was tragedy.