Heroism in The Iliad

Ajax carries the body of Achilles

There's a reading group discussion underway on The Guardian web site looking at Homer's Iliad.  Today's topic is considering the heroism or otherwise of Achilles. One of the contributors noted that the literal translation is 'warrior' rather than 'hero' - a modern appellation, which the Greeks of classical times would not have understood as we do today. Here's my two-bob's worth of a response to 'emilyhauserauthor's post.

"the ancient Greek word ἥρως ('heros', usually translated as hero), actually means just a 'warrior'. It doesn't have any of the additional connotations we've come to expect of moral worth, valour, and so on. In a sense, then, expecting 'heroism' of Achilles - to expect him to conform to any of our ideas of what a 'hero' is - is an anachronism." 

This is a persuasive observation / reminder. The modern / romanticised notion of the hero (not just an effective warrior but just, righteous, dare one say almost invariably Christian in English Lit.) simply doesn't fit with either of Homer's works (Odysseus, it seems to me, similarly exhibits none of the attributes of the modern hero when he conspires with Telemachus to ambush the suitors). 

Achilles is a demi-god warrior par excellence who has - like all the invaders around him - been away from home and family for a decade. Three thousand years before the John Wayne caricature of 'the good soldier' fighting 'a just war' stepped on to our screens. What should we expect of such men at such a time in those circumstances? 

As I think someone else suggested too, anyone looking for an Homeric character coming closest to our modern idea of heroic (perhaps I mean courageous) should look to Priam - an old, broken man who at great personal risk sets out to recover his son's body so that the honour and respect due to the rites set out by Gods may be observed and Hector's eternal position secured. 

Is Hector a hero? Reluctant perhaps, possessed of questionable judgement and a problematic war time leader of a doomed nation. One may feel sorrow at his fate and admit his bravery in stepping out to meet Achilles but ... I'm not sure those are either modernity's heroism or the classical warrior.

The novel in the age of the Internet

One of the reasons I've been reading The Guardian for nearly 40 years is that I can read articles like Ewan Morrison's which make me re-consider my own understanding / position. One of the beauties of The Guardian in the age of the Internet is that I can sit here in Sydney reading a response from someone going by the name of BookAvatar that makes me re-consider my re-considering.

Read the article here: Factual fiction: writing in an information age

So, like many in the modern world, I'm not quite sure where the novel form now sits or where it may end up (not that I mean to suggest there is a final destination). There's merit in both cases (by which I don't mean to sit on a fence but to allow the possibility that seemingly contradictory conditions can apply at the same time).

There is one point in BookAvatar's critique I'd want to question or have clarified. BookAvatar wrote:

Nothing has profoundly changed us as human beings which is why the same stories played out in Greek theatres 2500 years ago still ring true to us.

I probably agree but I didn't read into Ewan Morrison's article a contrary assertion. I read him as saying that how (possibly timeless) human stories are told may need to / must change in the post-internet age if the story-telling is to ring true. Good writers (apologies for the un-defined values-laden term there) may succeed in doing so in a way that proves not to become dated, fashionable or merely stylistic. We read Dickens today. No one will read Jeffrey Archer in 20 years time. Both were best-selling sensations in their times (bizarrely in the latter case).

I'm half way through reading Roxana by Daniel Defoe (1724), one of the modern novel form's early practitioners. I know this will sound a bit daft but it brought to mind James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) because of the ways in which it mixes forms and methods of telling (there are several narrators, sometimes on the same page; at one point it adopts the form of a play; past, present and future tenses can exist in just one paragraph; the principal narrator often breaks the 'fourth wall' to speak directly to the reader). It's not too fanciful to imagine both novels imprinted with hypertext links to people, places and background that could, if done well, enhance the reading experience. I know that when I was re-reading Ulysses last year I went to Google maps at one point to retrace the steps taken by Leopold Bloom. I think that added something. I'd also add that Faber's wonderful iPad app for The Wasteland adds to one's reading of the work in a fragmented, imagiste, symboliste manner that is entirely and brilliantly consistent with the poem.

My point? I guess it is that we do indeed read in new ways and that all literary forms simultaneously reflect their origins / traditions but also anticipate new ways of telling stories. Oedipus the king will be told and re-told as long as we're story-telling but it's entirely reasonable and rather exciting to imagine that it can be done via a hypertext link to a youtube video of a re-creation using vegetables as well as in the original by Sophocles. I prefer the latter and get more from it but there's a place for Oedipus the potato.

After China ... finally!

At last, I've finished my re-reading of Brian Castro's novel.  God, it's hard work (which the author intended it should be, apparently).  I mean it's hard work in a less praiseworthy or meritorious way than I imagine BC would have hoped for.  Although I've revised upwards my initial (lack of) regard for After China I'm afraid I remain mostly underwhelmed.

I get that it's metafiction.  I understand the use of metaphor and (maybe) allegory.  I see the Cartesian dualism, the structural antagonisms of Yin and Yang, the dichotomous tensions between the male and female, the Freudian self-reflection and self-deception.  I get the collapse of the building as the collapse of self (as clunky as that metaphor sadly is).  I see Ovid in the text.  I can't avoid the much too frequent, progressively more tedious invocation of Kafka.  I am prepared to go with the 'jump cut' sophistication (which is not a compliment) of fragmentation of time, place and narrative arc.  I'm bouncing along with the multiplicity of narrative voices - who is I, who is you, who is he or who is she? - which may ultimately be the same voice.  I recognise the references to Scheherazade and the storytelling / life-prolonging intention / technique of The One Thousand and One Nights and, of course we know that when the architect has run out of tales to tell the writer must die and drift away on an Chinese wedding cabinet floating in the flooded bowels of the disintegrating hotel.  I was even prepared to follow the novel's anti-hero down into the depths of the plumbing and sewage system, wade through shite with him then witness his release / re-birth as the sewage outlet washed him out to sea.

It's cleverly constructed.  I'll concede it's better written than I first asserted; in parts it's rather beautifully written and lyrical.  Ultimately though, it's simply not rewarding enough; not worth the effort.  It lacks heart and soul and more than once teeters on the edge of narcissistic cliche before collapsing into preposterous and self-serving introspection.  By that, I mean it truly is wanky in places.

Not my favourite read ever.  But I am pleased I've read it twice now.  I know more than I did at the outset and that can't be bad.

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Grounded

So I worked from home again, thanks to the broken motor in my van. Sharon will drive it tomorrow to the Tyson's people to repair or replace it, except it's not Tyson's anymore. They went broke but someone bought the remnants of the business. Let's hope they can fix it.

I've managed to get through a decent amount of work, so that's satisfying enough. When I've been waiting on recalcitrant colleagues to reply to my e.mails I've caught up with my blogging. Does it show?

I've also been reading a good book, which I borrowed from the library yesterday. It's the published version of six lectures in 1993 by Umberto Eco, entitled Six Walks In The Fictional Woods. God, that man is erudite, witty, thought-provoking, terrifically well-read, illuminating, thoughtful, sharp ... bastard! No, seriously, it's a good read; thoroughly accessible and I'm sure it will help me with my studies either now or in the future (if, in the end, I make my mind up to return to undergraduate endeavour).

Eco's little book (barely 150 pages long) comes from the same series as Italo Calvino's Six Memos For The New Millennium. It's a series known as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. I assume this must be the same Norton as the anthologies but I'll check. I had no idea about these lectures / essays until Spike returned from the college library with the Calvino. I'll have too seek oput others because the two I've read so far really do make you think.
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Reading Jane Austen

I have an essay due next Monday on questions of judgement in Pride And Prejudice so I re-read an engrossing article by Tony Tanner in Jane Austen, edited by Harold Bloom. Among other helpful observations, Tony Tanner writes:

For Jane Austen's book is, most importantly, about prejudging and rejudging. It is a drama of recognition - re-cognition, that act by which the mind can look again at a thing and if necessary make revisions and amendments until it sees the thing as it really is. As such it is thematically related to the dramas of recognition which constitute the great traditions of Western tragedy - Oedipus Rex, King Lear, Phedre - albeit the drama has now shifted to the comic mode, as is fitting in a book which is not about the finality of the individual death but the ongoingness of social life.

That link is strong and obvious once you see it but one does need a perceptive analyst like Tony Tanner to show you the way to a clearer reading of a text that's been part of your reading life for more than thirty years.
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A mixed bag of a day

Porridge for breakfast, which is a sign of some significant change in the way I chart my course through life. Porridge? It came with jam ... so I remain a wuss, lest anyone think I'm wholly transformed.

Porridge came with salt when I was a child eating at my grandmother's kitchen table in Rockbank Street, Bridgeton. I loved my grandmother when I was a wee boy. I even suffered her daily dose of cod liver oil with something approaching forebearance but salty porridge is a taste one has never acquired.

After Spike had left to travel to work at the Multicultural Disability Advocacy Association I settled down with a pot of tea to finish reading Angus Calder's 1987 introduction to the work of T S Eliot, which is one of The Harvester Press "New Readings" series. It is a decent introduction, well worth reading although it draws a rather condescending conclusion with this observation:

"I suppose that I have in the past pushed [Eliot's oeuvre's] claims largely because it seemed to rebuke the timerity and insularity of much recent British verse; now that poets neither timid nor insular such as Geoffrey Hill, Norman McCaig and Charles Tomlinson have produced notable post-Modernist oeuvres of their own, Eliot's is no longer so needful for that purpose. He is not yet 'folded into one party' with such adversaries as the Georgians but I no longer feel so inclined to fight on his behalf, in a battle for 'Modernism' against easy-oozy English continmuity."

Frankly my dear Angus, who gives a damn? The end apart, however, it's a decent, even informative read.

After my taking of tea and deconstruction of Thomas, I ventured out into a day of domestic chores; buying stamps at the post office, shopping for milk, fruit juices and tissues at the supermarket, picking-up Spike after work. We took a chance on finding late-night-shopping parking at the Westfield Mall in Parramatta. There, we bought essentials: a new iron, a four-slice toaster and some emergency hosiery. Who could have guessed that all three would be put to use so quickly or so memorably?

I posted a copy of Kaboom to Johnny Geller at Curtis Brown in London. So maybe it was a day of domesticity; maybe a day with a touch of ectasy; maybe a day that the label 'writer' came a little closer. Maybe it was a day including all three, although the latter is still open to question.
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Salman Rushdie on movie adaptations

"What is essential? It's one of the great questions of life, and, as I've suggested, it's a question that crops up in other adaptations than artistic ones. The text is human society and the human self, in isolation or in groups, the essence to be preserved is a human essence, and the result is the pluralist, hybridised, mixed-up world in which we all now live."

Salman Rushdie writes a brilliant essay on movie adaptations of novels in today's Guardian. It contains so much more than the technical and artistic challenges of translating. Well worth a read.

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