At Port-Royal, the adolescent Racine became familiar not only with the classics of Greek literature but with the strict tenets of Jansenism. The doctrine of Jansenism took its name from the theologian Jansenius who, in the early seventeenth century and under the influence of St Augustine, taught the doctrine of predestination, according to which it is not good deeds that can save men from the eternal fire but the ‘gratuitous gift’ of God’s grace alone. Augustine had suggested a similar argument against the Pelagian heretics (who believed that good actions on earth led to salvation in heaven) but had defended the notion of man’s free will in his debate against the Manichaeans. For twenty-two years, Jansenius worked on his thesis which he ambitiously called The Augustine of Cornelius Jansen, Bishop, or On the Doctrines of St Augustine Concerning Human Nature, Health, Grief, and Cure Against the Pelagians, but he died of the plague in 1638, before he was able to deliver it for publication. Two years later, his friends had it published under the abridged title of Augustinus. Outraged by its assurance, Pope Urban VIII declared several of its propositions heretical and the book was condemned by the Inquisition in 1641.8 Blaise Pascal, defending Jansen’s argument, wrote in his Pensées that ‘We understand nothing of the works of God, if we do not start from the principle that He blinds some and enlightens others.’9
At least two of these heretical propositions run through most of Racine’s work. First, that because of the lack of powers granted to us, some of us are unable to obey God’s commands; second, that since we are all victims of Adam’s sin, in order to merit or deserve punishment we need not be free from interior necessity but only from exterior constraint. According to Racine, both these notions are evident in Homer’s depiction of the relationship between mortals and gods; for this reason, Homer (together with Pindar, Euripides and Plutarch) is for Racine the essential inspiration for some of his later great plays, notably Andromache and Iphigenia. Inspiration in the sense of source: Homer’s conclusions are Racine’s starting-points.
In the Iliad, Homer had shown the desperate Andromache clutching her son and bidding her husband Hector not to leave her to fight the Greeks. ‘Andromache,’ he tells her,
‘dear one, why so desperate? Why so much grief for me?
No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate.
And fate? No man alive has ever escaped it,
neither brave man nor coward, I tell you –
it’s born with us the day that we are born.’10
A Jansenist argument if there ever was one, which Racine explores in great depth in Andromache. The play follows the story of Hector’s widow, allotted among the spoils of war to Achilles’ son Neoptolemus (also known as Pyrrhus). Fate has wrought a chain of unrequited loves: that of the Greek envoy Orestes for the Greek Princess Hermione, of Hermione for Pyrrhus, of Pyrrhus for Andromache and of Andromache for her dead husband Hector. Orestes declares his position clearly: ‘I give myself blindly to the fate [destin] that drags me along.’11 But Racine realized that this statement was too simple: something more than the power of fate is at play. The first edition of Andromache was published in 1667. A year later, he revised the line for the 1668 edition. In the new version, Orestes says: ‘I give myself blindly to the rapture [transport] that drags me along.’12 Fate, yes, but in the form of rapture, an obsessive fate that grants each man and woman a peculiar emotional strength, an impulse greater than our realization that it will lead us to misfortune or catastrophe.
This ‘emotional strength’ is not to be confused with human instinct. An example of the dichotomy is made clear in the episode of Ulysses and the Cyclops in Book IX of the Odyssey. While the Cyclops is driven by cannibal appetite which he satisfies through brute force, Ulysses survives through his metis, a Greek word that means ‘clear thinking’, ‘clever reasoning’, ‘cunning’. In the first case, the action and he who performs it are one; in the second, the actor is master of his acts.13 Not that a hero must always override his instincts: on the contrary, they are proof of his humanity, but he must be conscious of them. After Ulysses is forced to watch in horror his companions being devoured by the monster Scylla, ‘screaming out, flinging their arms towards me’,14 he and the survivors go ashore for the night and ‘adeptly’ prepare their supper. They eat, drink and only then do they recall their ‘dear companions’ and weep, and ‘a welcome sleep came on them in their tears’.15 Aldous Huxley, commenting on this passage, remarks that Homer’s description of these men eating and drinking after seeing the slaughter of their friends, rings astonishingly true. ‘Every good book,’ says Huxley, ‘gives us bits of the truth, would not be a good book if it did not. But the whole truth, no. Of the great writers of the past, incredibly few have given us that. Homer – the Homer of the Odyssey – is one of those few.’16
It is this individual God-granted emotional strength, managed through metis, that allows for human fate to be fulfilled in a myriad different ways. According to Racine, Andromache is forced to marry the victorious Pyrrhus, but she succeeds in both following her apparent fate (to incarnate Troy’s victim-hood after Hector’s death) and in overturning Troy’s defeat in the same action (since Pyrrhus effectively abdicates in her favour and that of Hector’s son, by saying: ‘I give you… my crown and my faith:/Andromache, reign over Epirus and me’).17 Giving herself to Pyrrhus, she will become his queen, while her son, a Trojan, will inherit the Greek throne. It is not love that prompts Andromache (who will pay for this metis with her life) but something else which she can neither identify nor ignore. To revise Pascal’s phrase, God has both blinded and enlightened her, forced her to obey her fate and, at the same time, to assume consciously her rapture as well.
Racine’s annotations, scribbled on the margins of his copies of the Odyssey and the Iliad, give us a fair idea of his reading of Homer. Racine was especially interested in the methods by which Homer achieved verisimilitude. He notes, for instance, that Telemachus’ kind reception of Athena in a stranger’s guise (in Book I of the Odyssey) might have been inspired by a similar welcome granted to the wandering Homer on his own travels; he points out that the Iliad’s story takes forty-seven precisely timed days: five of fighting, nine of plague, eleven for Poseidon’s sojourn in Ethiopia, eleven for Hector’s funeral, and eleven for that of Patroclus. Racine’s notes cover the subjects of food, dress, geographical descriptions, appropriate metaphors, the efficacy of certain gestures, the pleasure derived from weeping. In Book V, Ulysses has jumped overboard to escape the wave Poseidon has sent to destroy him. He has spent two days adrift at sea, and on the third day he sees land with ‘the joy that children feel/when they see their father’s life dawn again,/one who’s lain on a sickbed racked with torment’.18 But just as he is about to reach the rocky shore, Poseidon sends another battering wave that would have flayed him alive against the stones had Athena not intervened. Grasping the rocks, the skin of his hands ripped off in strips, striking the reef ‘Like pebbles stuck in the suckers of some octopus/dragged from its lair’,19 Odysseus prays to the River God whose mouth he has reached:
‘Hear me, lord, whoever you are,
I’ve come to you, the answer to all my prayers –
rescue me from the sea, the Sea-lord’s curse!
Even immortal gods will show a man respect,
whatever wanderer seeks their help – like me –
I throw myself on your mercy, on your current now –
I have suffered greatly. Pity me, lord,
your suppliant cries for help!’20
Racine remarks that Seneca, during his painful exile in Corsica, summed up this passage in four words: ‘Res est sacra miser’ (‘Wretchedness is a sacred thing’). And Racine adds: ‘This sentiment is made even more beautiful by the fact that it is engraved in the heart by Nature herself.’21 It is also the sentiment at the heart of the poems of Homer.
Not all the combatants in the century-long querelle were driven by literary, philosophical or aesthetic motives. Some were political. Anne Dacier, daughter of a noted hu
manist and one of the best-known Greek scholars of her time, whose work on the Iliad was to influence Pope’s translation a few years later, sided with the anciens and published in 1714 an ancien handbook, On the Causes of the Corruption of Taste.22 Together with other scholars such as Pierre-Daniel Huet and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, she oversaw a series of Greek and Latin texts trimmed and purged for the use of the Dauphin, the eldest son of the king of France, and ‘ad usum Delphini’ became an expression to denote an expurgated book. Although Dacier’s editions of Homer were famous, the Homer ad usum Delphini timorously excised not only certain scenes that might have been considered ribald (Ulysses naked in front of Nausicaa in Book VI of the Odyssey) but several disrespectful references to kings as well (Achilles’ insulting speech to Agamemnon in Book I of the Iliad). The ancienne Dacier thought that the Dauphin might be affected by a different kind of vulgarity than the one that offended the moderne Perrault.
Some motives were religious. For François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Homer could serve as a source of inspiration to the young, but only if his stories were told in the appropriate pedagogical tone and with a devout Christian purpose. Gifted with a brilliant mind and an easy style of storytelling, Fénelon seemed to be destined to an exalted career as the tutor of the Dauphin. He was elected to the French Academy, appointed Archbishop of Cambrai in 1693, and enjoyed fame as the author of several literary books of instruction. But in 1696 he fell out of favour with Madame de Maintenon, King Louis XIV’s second wife, for having befriended Madame de Guyon, a devout promoter of Quietism among the young. Quietism, a Christian doctrine linked to certain trends of Spanish mysticism, encouraged abandonment to the will of God and favoured silence over prayer.23 Madame de Maintenon, and Fénelon’s own teacher, Bossuet, feared that such passive habits would lead to moral indifference. To justify his position, Fénelon published in 1697 an Explanation of the Maxims of the Saints24 in which he attempted to defend, point by point, the disputed doctrine, but his arguments did nothing to convince his opponents. Less than two years later, Bossuet managed to have the book condemned both by the pope and by the king. To add to the dishonour, at about the same time, Fénelon was discharged of his duties as royal tutor.
Before his fall from grace, Fénelon, in order to provide his royal pupil with a manual of mythology and civic morals, devised in 1699 a pedagogical fable in which he continued the story of Telemachus,25 interrupted in Book IV of the Odyssey. In Homer’s poem, Telemachus and Nestor’s son, Pisistratus, arrive at the palace of Menelaus and Helen, where they hear the story which the Old Man of the Sea had told the king, that Ulysses has been captured by Calypso on a faraway island. In the Odyssey, Telemachus does not appear again until Book XV; Fénelon decided to recount the missing adventures of Ulysses’ son. Accompanied by Athena disguised as the faithful Mentor, Telemachus is shipwrecked on Calypso’s island, falls in love with a nymph, is rescued from the attachment by Mentor and finally reaches the port of Salente. Here Mentor establishes an ideal city-state, in which the good of the people and the independence of the Church take precedence over the pleasures and powers of the king. In the meantime, Telemachus is sent off on various missions (including a descent into the kingdom of Hades) until, at last, they both sail back to Ithaca where Telemachus and Ulysses are rejoined once again. In the climate of suspicion and fear of Versailles, the anonymously published Adventures of Telemachus was seen less as a pastiche of Homer than as a treasonable criticism of Louis XIV’s regime. From his own cathedral pulpit, Fénelon was forced to read out the pope’s ordinance against his Explanation, and lived the rest of his life exiled from the court. Fénelon died in 1715, only eight months before his fractious king.26
Eventually, the dispute between these various readings of Homer acquired an absurd reputation. In 1721, Charles de Secondat, baron of Montesquieu, author of the influential De l’esprit des lois (‘On the Spirit of the Law’) made fun of the French society of his time in an anonymously published epistolary novel that purported to be the gossipy correspondence between Usbek, a Persian traveller, and his friends back home, on subjects that ranged from the traditional and oppressive Oriental order to the silly laissez-faire of France. Remarking that he is shocked by seeing how Parisians waste their talent on puerile things, Usbek gives his friend Rhédi (who is in Venice) a telling example. ‘When I arrived in Paris. I found them becoming heated in a quarrel about the flimsiest matter imaginable: the reputation of an ancient Greek poet, whose homeland for the past two thousand years remains unknown, as well as the time of his death. Both parties admit that he was an excellent poet; the only question was how much or how little merit was to be attributed to him. Each one wished to contribute something of his own; but, among these distributors of reputation, some carried more weight than others. That’s what the quarrel was about!’27
In the end, the querelle was left appropriately unresolved. In 1757, the scholarly baron Frédéric-Melchior Grimm reached this conclusion: ‘We can truthfully say, without wishing to depress the modernes, that nothing has made the sublime singer [Homer] so admirable as the work of his successors, from Virgil to Monsieur de Voltaire.’28
CHAPTER 12
Homer as Poetry
Have I not made blind Homer sing to me?
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 1604
A century earlier, at about the same time that the querelle had begun, Rembrandt van Rijn painted a portrait of a bearded man in a large-brimmed hat, rich sleeves and a gold chain, his right hand on the skull of an ancient bust. Though Rembrandt himself didn’t give the painting a title, it came to be known as ‘Aristotle contemplating a bust of Homer’. Around 1632, Rembrandt had moved from Leyden, his home town, to Amsterdam, where he had set himself up as a portrait painter. His reputation grew and with it his fortune, increased by his marriage to well-to-do Saskia van Uylenborch, who became the model for many of his paintings. But after 1642 his business declined and when, ten years later, the commission for the portrait came, he was only four years away from declaring bankruptcy. Rembrandt accepted with alacrity.
The work had been commissioned by a rich Sicilian merchant, Antonio Ruffo, who, when he received it, imagined from the pile of books in the background that the subject was an intellectual of some sort, and entered the painting in his inventory as ‘a half-length of a philosopher made in Amsterdam by the painter Rembrandt (it appears to be Aristotle or [the doctor of the Church] Albertus Magnus).’1 A third character appears in the composition: a helmeted head on a medallion hanging from a gold chain and recently identified as that of Alexander the Great, Aristotle’s most famous pupil.2 Alexander is the link between the philosopher and the poet: it was Aristotle who, according to Plutarch, prepared the edition of the Iliad that Alexander kept ‘with his dagger under his pillow, declaring that he esteemed it a perfect portable treasure of all military virtue and knowledge’.3 Simon Schama makes a good case for the bearded man being the Greek painter Apelles rather than Aristotle, but what matters is that the contemplated bust is indeed Homer. Rembrandt portrayed Homer on other occasions: in a drawing that shows him reciting his poems and in a preparatory sketch for a canvas (poorly preserved) that shows the bard with his hands on his cane and his eyes in shadow. These portraits, albeit imaginary, depict a flesh-and-blood person, made vividly present in the act of speaking or composing, his eyes convincingly blind while ‘above them’, writes Schama, ‘within the shining skull of the poet, visions are nonetheless forming’.
The bust, however, is a convention, not Rembrandt’s conception of a poet or even of the poet Homer, but the reproduction of a popular icon, a mass-produced trinket, equivalent to the Christ on a Lourdes crucifix, ‘a portraittype,’ notes Schama, ‘commonly, but entirely speculatively, identified as the bard’. An inventory of Rembrandt’s possessions lists precisely such a bust. And yet, because it is not a particular interpretation of Homer, the bust serves in the painting as the symbol for an all-embracing idea of poetry, perhaps of all the literary arts. Aristot
le or Apelles, or whoever the bearded man might be (and he is very much a particular man), is contemplating in Homer’s bust an immemorial flow of emotions and thoughts, born out of the heartening belief that the experience of the world can be distilled and preserved in words and images that will reflect that experience in the eyes of a reader. The man in Rembrandt’s portrait is contemplating, not a bust of Homer, but the creative act itself. In the same way that the art of poetry might have been, for the early bards, symbolically incarnated in a mythical being called Homer, now, more than two thousand years later, the icon of Homer had been turned upon itself and came to mean the art of poetry.
But what was meant by ‘the art of poetry’? For Philip Sidney in the sixteenth century it was the art of imitation, ‘a speaking picture, with this end: to teach and delight’.4 For Francis Bacon, a century later, it was the art of sublimation. ‘Poesy,’ he wrote, ‘was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things.’5 For the eighteenth century it came to mean the art of inventiveness or invention, ‘to be original with the minimum of alteration’ as T. S. Eliot put it, though he also warned: ‘It is dangerous to generalize about the poetry of the eighteenth century as about that of any other age; for it was, like any other age, an age of transition.’6 And it is perhaps in translation that transition is best expressed and clearest seen, since, in a newly translated text, whatever is meant by ‘originality’ can be shown by comparison to previous efforts.
Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey Page 10