In spite of its seamless construction, La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu remains unconvincing, and even efforts such as Harold Pinter’s remarkable 1982 adaptation for the National Theatre in London during the Falklands War lacked dramatic power. Giraudoux had proposed to write a tragedy, ‘the affirmation of a horrible link between humankind and a destiny greater than human destiny itself’.6 In this he failed, perhaps because, as the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar remarked, ‘His characters, rather than myths, are caricatures of myths.’7 Doris Lessing once noted that ‘Myth does not mean something untrue, but a concentration of truth.’8 It may be that in Giraudoux the myths appear too diffuse, too diluted.
In 1990, the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott attempted the opposite procedure. His re-imagined Odyssey in a Caribbean setting is a concentration of endless readings of Homer’s Ulysses. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Walcott denied that his Omeros was an epic in the strict sense of the word, but rather a collection of epic fragments arranged in three-line stanzas that echo Dante’s terza rima in the Commedia.9 Its idiom is a mixture of contemporary English and Creole and, though its characters bear the names of Homer’s heroes, they are also the names that slave-owners commonly gave to the black population of the islands: Philoctete, Helen, Achille, Hector. The Odyssey begins in medias res, when Ulysses is already halfway through his travels; likewise, Omeros begins halfway through the Odyssey, with the first line of Book XI (‘Now down we came to the ship’)10 which becomes, in Walcott’s idiom: ‘This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes.’11 (Already Ezra Pound had chosen the same device: the first of his Cantos starts: ‘And then we went down to the ship…’)12
In Omeros, the visit to the Underworld becomes a dream voyage to Africa, the land of the protagonist’s roots, where a vision of the past shows him his ancestors being captured by the slavers. The visitor is not Ulysses but Achille, victim of sun-stroke, whose rage at witnessing the ancient abduction is like that of his namesake after the death of Patroclus, confused with a hatred towards Patroclus’ murderer. Towards the slavers, he feels ‘the same/mania that, in the arrows of drizzle, he felt for Hector ’,13 and towards the slaves, a terrible grief:
… Warm ashes made his skull white
over eyes sore as embers, over a skin charred as coal,
the core of his toothless mouth, groaning to the firelight,
was like a felled cedar’s whose sorrow surrounds its bole.
One hand clawed the pile of ashes, the other fist thudded on
the drum of his chest, the ribs were like a caved-in canoe
that rots for years under the changing leaves of an almond,
while the boys who played war in it become grown men who
work, marry, and die, until their own sons in turn
rock the rotted hulk, or race in it, pretending to row,
as Achille had done in the manchineel grove as a boy.14
If Walcott’s Achille is a blend of several Homeric heroes, his bard is a blend of several poets: Homer certainly, but also Joyce, incarnated in a blind West Indian veteran who spends his days singing to himself in the shade of a pharmacy near the beach, his khaki dog on a leash:
the blind man sat on his crate after the pirogues
set out, muttering the dark language of the blind,
gnarled hands on his stick, his ears as sharp as the dog’s.
Sometimes he would sing and the scraps blew on the wind
when her beads rubbed their rosary. Old St Omere.
He claimed he’d sailed round the world. ‘Monsieur Seven Seas’
they christened him, from a cod-liver-oil label
with its wriggling swordfish. But his words were not clear.
They were Greek to her. Or old African babble.15
To the Homeric characters in Omeros, Greek is as foreign as the tongues of Africa, and Africa, for Walcott, is an Ithaca to which Ulysses will never return. Read after Joyce’s novel, Homer’s Odyssey is not only a poem of homecoming but also one of everlasting exile.
Of course, the shadow of the homecoming, of the expected and longed-for return, is constantly present in Omeros as it is in Ulysses and in the Odyssey. In fact, the Odyssey can be read as the endless story of a return that can only be achieved through its repeated telling, and which exists in prerequisite form even before the adventures begin. Fifteen years before Omeros was published, Italo Calvino perceptively noted that the Odyssey is a collection of numerous Odysseys fitted one into another like Chinese boxes.16 It begins with Telemachus’ search for a story that does not yet exist, the story that will, at the end of the poem, become the Odyssey. First, in Menelaus’ account to Telemachus, the Old Man of the Sea begins the telling at the very point where Ulysses himself begins it, on Calypso’s island. When he stops, Homer resumes the story and follows his hero until he reaches the court of the Phaeacians. Here the blind bard Demodocus sings to his audience (of which Ulysses, as we have seen, is part) a couple of Ulysses’ adventures: Ulysses weeps and, picking up the narrative, tells how he reached the Underworld and how the ghost of Tiresias revealed to him what would happen next. As Calvino points out, the story of Ulysses’ return is the real story of the Odyssey, a story which, throughout his adventures, Ulysses must not forget.
The Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy, who died in 1933, also understood that Ulysses’ return is the prerequisite of the Odyssey. Cavafy wrote as an inheritor of the Hellenistic tradition, someone who read Homer as if able to discard its innumerable layers of post-Homeric exegeses and reach the source. In Cavafy’s writing, Ulysses and Achilles are neither modern nor fabled or distant figures. When, for example, he says, ‘Our efforts are like those of the Trojans’, he is able to convince the reader that his experience is indeed first-hand and that the Trojan suffering is alive in his presence. The metaphor is clear, and yet it does not read as metaphor.
Yet we’re sure to fail. Up there,
high on the walls, the dirge has already begun.
They’re mourning the memory, the aura of our days.
Priam and Hecuba mourn for us bitterly.17
Ithaca, Cavafy reminds us, is not only the point of arrival but also, we often forget, that of departure: it has created the distance between the exile and the return. The length and intensity of the journey back increase the value of the remote final goal.
Laestrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon – you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
…
Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.18
Ithaca, the city Ulysses cherishes in his memory, has allowed the Odyssey to run its course. Opposed to it is the anonymous port in Cavafy’s poem ‘The City’, a starting-point that was unthinkingly left behind, an Ithaca abandoned because it seemed unsatisfactory, unrewarding, and which therefore offers Ulysses no adventures, no experience, nothing but the difficulties without the journey.
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighbourhoods, turn grey in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.19
Like Ithaca in the Odyssey, Troy in the Iliad is both a city and an emblem for the story of a war whose beginning and end are not chronicled in the poem: less than seven weeks, a mer
e fifty-two days, are accounted for in the seemingly everlasting conflict, providing in its fragmented nature a useful mirror for our own anguished centuries.
The 1981 novel Famous Last Words, by the Canadian writer Timothy Findley, takes place in this eternal battlefield.20 It tells the story of a group of men and women lost in a nightmare place that evokes Cavafy’s nameless city, through which they all obediently move without understanding the purpose or destination of their movements. The setting is the Second World War; the narrator, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, the poet-hero invented by Ezra Pound for his collection of semi-autobiographical poems published in 1920.21 ‘I didn’t know quite how to tell this story,’ Findley confessed, ‘until I realized that if I were Homer, I’d have recognized this wasn’t just the story of men and women – but of men and women and the gods to whom they are obedient – and told best through the evocation of icons. So what I must do is transpose this story, which is history, into another key – which is mythology.’22
Findley’s chosen mythological model is the Iliad. For Findley, every one of our wars (whether between the British and the Germans, democracy and fascism, or between the upper and the lower classes) is also a war between Greeks and Trojans, a symbolic struggle which in the eye of its literate chronicler, Homer-Mauberley, dissolves into particular stories of singular men and women struggling under the whims and passions of a pantheon of mad gods. In this complex roman à clef, Mauberley is Homer, commissioned to turn historical characters from gossip-column subjects into mythological icons. Mrs Simpson is a half-willing Helen, yoked to a dithering Paris (the weakling Edward VII) and fated to be rescued by various brutal or righteous Agamemnons and Menelauses. Hera and Zeus are Churchill and Hitler, Athena is Ezra Pound, the murderous Achilles is the Nazi Harry Reinhardt who, instead of a telltale heel, sports alligator shoes and who (a new twist in the story) will kill his creator by plunging a pickaxe into Mauberley’s eye, rendering him as blind as tradition depicts Homer.
Findley’s Homer is neither conventionally good nor just. He is an admirer of absolute power, someone willing to collaborate in the setting up of a puppet government in which the Duke and the Duchess of Windsor are to play king and queen; willing to take part in a cabal that, under the code name ‘Penelope’, waits for the right moment to unleash their evil plan on the world; willing to forsake his writing for a cheap plot of parodic characters. Mauberley is the iconic transgressor, political, sexual and artistic. He has allied himself with the Fascists, he is sexually ambiguous, his literary ambition ‘to describe the beautiful’ is stubbornly opposed to the current ‘roar of bombast and rhetoric’. Mauberley is a hungry, haunted, burrowing creature at odds with the world and with himself. ‘What power-hungry people do,’ Findley once said, ‘can be embraced very generally by my use of the term “fascist,” because I think that’s what fascism is: all power-hungry people can touch the rest of the people where they are hungry to be powerful too, but no, they can never be powerful without the powerful iconic people doing things for them, and in their name.’23 In other words, the power-hungry heroes of Troy can never be powerful without the gods tugging at their strings.
On the walls of one of the rooms of the Grand Elysium Hotel (the name that, in modern mythology, Greta Garbo’s celebrated film gives to besieged Troy)24 Mauberley writes out the story of his life: ‘All I have written here is true,’ his confession states, ‘except the lies.’ Mauberley’s story (like Homer’s) will be read and judged by others who will come after him, and then will be left to crumble into dust like the walls of the hotel itself. ‘This is the way the world ends,’ Eliot had written in ‘The Hollow Men’, ‘Not with a bang but a whimper’25 – a line that Pound repeated in his ‘Canto 74’26 and then added: ‘To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of stars.’ Dioce was a Medan king who, after being made ruler by the people because of his fair judgements, built a visionary city that was meant to be an earthly paradise. Pound, an admirer of Mussolini, imagined that the Italian dictator would create, like Dioce, an ideal state after the cataclysm of the war. The future world imagined by Findley’s Mauberley is like this Diocean Troy, first destroyed by the Greeks and later resurrected in the Rome of Aeneas, of Augustus, of the Renaissance and finally (according to Fascist ideology) in the Rome of Mussolini whose triumph Pound-Mauberley wished for and whose threat is still present. In Mauberley’s words on the final page of Findley’s novel:
Imagine something mysterious rises to the surface on a summer afternoon – shows itself and is gone before it can be identified… By the end of the afternoon, the shape – whatever it was – can barely be remembered. No one can be made to state it was absolutely thus and so. Nothing can be conjured of its size. In the end the sighting is rejected, becoming something only dimly thought on: dreadful but unreal… Thus, whatever rose towards the light is left to sink unnamed: a shape that passes slowly through a dream. Waking, all we remember is the awesome presence, while a shadow lying dormant in the twilight whispers from the other side of reason: I am here. I wait.27
CHAPTER 21
The Never-ending War
Rumsfeld: I liked what you said earlier, sir. A war on terror. That’s good. That’s vague.
Cheney: It’s good.
Rumsfeld: That way we can do anything.
David Hare, Stuff Happens, 2006
If, as Calvino suggests, there exists a story that is the Odyssey’s implicit prelude, then the Iliad too may contain such a primordial narrative: the tacit story of war, not just the Trojan War. In September 2005, over the course of three evenings, almost 3,000 people filled the largest theatre space in the Rome Auditorium to listen to a dramatized reading of the Iliad which the Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco had published the previous year. Baricco, author of the bestselling novel Silk, lent to the various characters of Homer’s poem a stage and a voice to tell the Siege of Troy. In a postscript to the published text,1 Baricco insisted that these were not ordinary times in which to read the Iliad but times of war, everyday wars of large and small conflicts that bring in their wake the whole warrior array, from murder and torture to proclamations of good intent and acts of heroism. In these times, said Baricco, to read the Iliad in public is a trifle, but not any trifle. ‘To say it clearly, I mean that the Iliad is a story of war, without care and without measure. It was composed in praise of a warring humanity, and it did it in such a memorable way that it should last throughout eternity and reach the last descendant of our last descendants, still singing the solemn beauty and the irredeemable emotion that war once was and always will be. In school, perhaps, the story is told differently. But at its heart lies this: the Iliad is a monument to war.’
Baricco gives several reasons for his definition. First, the compassion with which Homer has transmitted the arguments of the defeated. In a story written from the point of view of the victors, he reminds us that what remains, above all, is the humanity of the Trojans: Priam, Hector, Paris, even minor characters such as Pandarus (killed by Diomedes) and Sarpedon (killed by Patroclus). Many of the voices we hear are not from the soldiers but from the women: Andromache, Helen, Hecuba. Isn’t it astonishing, asks Baricco, that in a male warrior society such as that of the Greeks, Homer decided to preserve so strongly the voice of women and their desire for peace? Baricco points out that the women are Scheherazades: they know that, as long as they continue to speak, war does not take place. Even the men must realize that Achilles delays his entry in the war by staying with the women, and that all the time they are arguing about how to fight, they don’t fight. When Achilles and the other men finally enter into battle, they do so blindly, fanatically devoted to their duty. But before that happens comes the long and slow time of women. ‘Words,’ says Baricco ‘are a weapon with which they manage to freeze the war.’
Reading through the Iliad, Baricco suggests that our infatuation with the beauty of war hasn’t waned: if war is hell, however atrocious this might sound, it is a beautiful hell. War in our time, though cursed and abo
minated, is far from being considered an absolute evil. Our only escape from its malevolent attraction (and this is Baricco’s moving proposal) is to create an alternative beauty that may compete with our longing for war, something built day after day by thousands of artisans. If we do this, says Baricco, we will succeed in keeping Achilles away from the homicidal fighting: not through fear or horror, but by tempting him with a different kind of beauty, more dazzling than the one that attracts him now and infinitely less violent. This, then, is the Iliad’s necessary prelude.
Baricco’s hopeful argument has a long and venerable opposition, dating back almost to the time of Homer himself. For Heraclitus, war was not an undesirable attraction but the combatant energy that held the world together, and he reproached Homer for not lending war sufficient encouragement. ‘Homer should be turned out of the canon and whipped. He was wrong in saying: “Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!” He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe, for, if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away.’2 Furthermore, Heraclitus argued, ‘We must know that war is what is common to all beings, and that it is driven by justice; therefore, everything is born from and made necessary through discord.’3 Dante considered this vigorous notion from a different point of view. Since the goal of law is the common good, Dante reasoned, and this cannot be obtained through injustice, any war undertaken ‘for the common good’ must be just. In Dante’s eyes, Rome’s conquest of the world was just, since it must have been effected ‘not through violence but through law’.4 In our day, those who speak of ‘necessary losses’ and ‘collateral damage’ follow the same argument.
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