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by Patrick Nathan

  It’s certainly poetic to think so.

  As a writer of fiction, you eventually learn there are itches you have to scratch. It’s not as a scholar (ha) or even as an essayist that I approach Cassandra’s presence at Troy, her city’s destruction, or the ossification of myth into language. I have no formal education in the classics, and certainly can’t read or write in Greek or Latin. Instead, I came to this as a novelist—and as someone who loves novels and what novels do.

  Years before reading Wolf’s Cassandra, I’d read and reread David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Markson’s narrator, Kate, can’t or won’t extinguish the events of the Trojan War from her mind, compelled to mention Helen, Paris, Achilles, even Patroclus and “poor Astyanax,” in an ongoing, disintegrating cycle of meditations that also includes painters, physicists, writers, composers, and cats. Through Kate, I saw the human side of what had always felt to me like part of the fantasy tableau: fighting, war, glory, strength—all that Xbox stuff. It was Kate, in her loneliness, who first convinced me to search Google Maps for a small Turkish town: “The name of Troy had been changed too, naturally. Hisarlik, being what it was changed to.” Indeed, Hisarlik is there, deep in the Çanakkale Province, only a short walk from a small lattice of ruins on a hill labeled “Troia.” For me, watching “from the heights of the divine home” (Calasso), Troy stepped out into the light.

  Early in the novel, Kate describes the view of the Dardanelles from the walls of Troy: “I even dreamed, for a while, that the Greek ships were beached there still. Well, it would have been a harmless enough thing to dream.” Suppose my curiosity in searching for Troy had not been rewarded—suppose there were no ruins at all. Walking on the beach outside Hisarlik, does it matter whether or not Achilles’s ashes are beneath the sand? Does it matter, standing at the gates of Mycenae, whether or not there was a Cassandra, a Helen, a Clytemnestra? Or is it more important simply to think so?—a harmless enough thing to dream? If stories are the emotional portals to the past, we should hesitate to discount them. After all, it was only a few years ago that Richard III’s crooked spine was hoisted out from beneath a parking lot in Leicester—a king whose most famous words aren’t his but Shakespeare’s (or the shadow we call Shakespeare).

  What’s crucial to know is that images like these can exist alongside their realities.

  Here are what we consider the realities: Troy was an ancient city located along the waters of the Dardanelles, once known as the Hellespont. A geological layer of broken bones, shards of weapons, and smashed rock indicates a violent battle and mass death circa 1190 B.C. During this time, the citadel at Mycenae was a military stronghold and one of the most important political centers in Greece. Sometime between 1500 and 1100 B.C., there was a great general at Mycenae called Agamemnon. Situated as it is, Troy would have controlled and policed access to the Dardanelles, the only seafaring passage between the Aegean and Black Seas, opening trade access to cities across western Asia. While traveling through Greece and Asia Minor, Wolf posed the question: “Did Homer and the others who handed down the cycle of legends about Troy suspect that in following the myth they were helping to conceal the actual facts? Did they suspect that the Achaean’s struggle against the Trojans—whoever they were—was about sea trade routes?” If what Wolf suggests is true, the greatest tale of heroes ever told is a glorification of a war of commerce, an act of violence committed in the name of greed—which sounds far more realistic than a war to reclaim a stolen woman, regardless of how beautiful the real Helen, if there was such a woman, might have been.

  In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, one of Calasso’s primary obsessions is the moment at which the unity of mythology shatters into literature. Earlier, I mentioned that it was easy, hovering over the plains of Ilium, to picture Helen or Paris making the journey to Mount Ida, depending on which version of the myth we wish to see, at that moment—the way one turns a prism to refract a different sparkle of light. This doubling, Calasso says, is what myth does best: “The repetition of a mythical event, with its play of variations, tells us that something remote is beckoning to us. There is no such thing as the isolated mythical event, just as there is no such thing as the isolated world.” But literature surrenders this open-endedness, this ability to permit multiple versions, and with it that remote sense of unity. It tends to operate under the assumption that there is a definitive account, one true version of each story. “The novel, a narrative deprived of variants, attempts to recover them by making the single text to which it is entrusted more dense, more detailed.” Literature presents its orphans as immutable. As with Saussure’s linguistics, literature isn’t necessarily an advance in storytelling—only a dominant technology asserting itself.

  In committing language to one version of events, Homer is among the first to wield this technology against the polyphony of mythology. It’s with that singular name, Homer, that many poets consolidate their works and become, together, one of the Western world’s first authors. This coincides with another transfer of power, from legendary heroes to ordinary people: “The fullness of the Homeric word,” Calasso writes, “effortlessly bringing into existence whatever it names, is the last heritage of an earth filled and oppressed by the heroes, by their amorous and cruel trampling.” The heroes and their trials are replaced with writing and with literature, while myth ossifies into static language, its metaphors no longer reactive. At the same time, the gods make their final withdrawal from the earth, no longer willing to involve themselves in the lives of humankind. All at once, a mythology of metamorphosing deities, brutal heroes, and shifting stories cements itself into stone and onto papyrus.

  All this, of course, because the Greeks lived to sing about it and later write it down. The Trojans did not develop a literature—or an alphabet—of their own. In the real-world ruins of Troy, on the Turkish peninsula, only one artifact provides any hint of the Trojans’ writing system: a seal from the early thirteenth century B.C. that, in Luwian hieroglyphs, identifies two scribes by name. In the tradition of Sappho, whose work comes to us only in fragments, or Phrynichus, a playwright with no surviving plays, it seems fitting that the entire linguistic history of this lost civilization comes down to one bronze seal with a man and a woman whose only identity is reduced to their profession: writer.

  In the history of writing systems, these hieroglyphs occupy a middle space, composed of both logographic words (as in Mandarin) and syllabic cuneiform denoting individual sounds. Like our contemporary memes, Luwian hieroglyphs are “suspended between.” The Trojans seem to have been reaching toward an alphabet’s creative flexibility, but like so many other languages in earth’s history, theirs met with a different kind of technology altogether, its tablets burned and its speakers slaughtered, and from there went no further.

  That human beings generally don’t regard themselves as enmeshed with technology—that we often believe ourselves natural or organic or in some sense biologically pure, a species apart from our creations—is a belief made possible through technologies we’ve created. This irony (or blasphemy) is at the heart (or core) of Donna Haraway’s playful and deeply serious “Cyborg Manifesto”: “What might be learned from personal and political ‘technological’ pollution?”

  Writing in 1985, Haraway chose the image of the cyborg as a way to actively subvert the consciousness and thought process brought about by “the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism.” The cyborg, a “monster” of science fiction, aims itself at “the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self.” Language is particularly important for Haraway, who saw the plurality of literatures and cultures coalescing into a global commodities market of information: “Communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move—the translation of the world into a problem of coding,
a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange.” This is exacerbated, she adds, by “new communications technologies [which] are fundamental to the eradication of ‘public life’ for everyone,” especially “video games and highly miniaturized televisions,” which “seem crucial to production of modern forms of ‘private life’ . . . High-tech, gendered imaginations are produced here, imaginations that can contemplate destruction of the planet and a sci-fi escape from its consequences.”

  What makes the Borg Star Trek’s most terrifying enemy is not their enmeshment with technology. The Federation is equally tangled and reliant. The Borg are terrifying because they assimilate—they absorb, use, and erase difference. Sci-fi aside, the American species of capitalism isn’t exactly un-Borg-like. Not only is resistance futile, but all difference, all dissent, is immediately assimilated, and—if not erased—made irrelevant.

  “Myth,” Calasso wrote, “like language, gives all of itself in each of its fragments.” In the myth of totalitarian capitalism, we promise our bodies, through technologies we create and market, consequence-free lifestyles and consumption. Via globalized language—especially language of commerce—we promise, as Haraway observes, “ultimate mobility and perfect exchange.” Cyborg politics is “the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly.” This is a metaphorical or mythical framework for reimagining one’s place and one’s possibilities within the world. It is, she writes, “to recognize ‘oneself’ as fully implicated in the world,” and “frees us of the need to root politics in identification, vanguard parties, purity, and mothering.”

  The cyborg comes to us via the cinematic imagination, where the truly American myths are made. For those in the United States, as Veronica Esposito writes, “cinema is where we go to see our collective dreams projected skyscraper-high. No other medium has done as much to shape our morals and change the way we live.”

  In the 1980s, Baudrillard, visiting from France, agreed: “It is not the least of America’s charms that even outside the movie theaters the whole country is cinematic. The desert you pass through is like the set of a Western . . . The American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies.” If the movies have taught Americans to view their country cinematically, they’ve simultaneously taught the country how to make itself seen: It aspires toward the story it’s been assigned. It wants, cravenly, to perform its myth.

  A decade before writing about Cassandra, Solnit published River of Shadows, a long, circuitous essay that links the railroad’s violent westward expansion with the nascence of motion pictures: “The sight of the railroad out the window had prepared viewers for the kinds of vision that cinema would make ordinary . . . At the same time it made the world itself a theater of sorts, a spectacle.” So too did the United States make a spectacle of its own violence and brutality: the “wild Indian” of the West was “tamed” and reintroduced in vaudeville shows and, later, the Hollywood westerns of the twentieth century. It was also, she writes, “the era of rapacious exploitation” as industry stripped the continent of its lumber, minerals, and wildlife: “What was vanishing as ecology was reappearing as imagery.”

  The West—the land itself—was a draw for many of the earliest American photographers, who made their names with lengthy exposures of this “timeless” or “eternal” landscape. Muybridge, Adams, Weston, and many others documented its beauty as it began to become overly familiar, and ambiguously so, as a warning or a memento. Muybridge especially—at the heart of Solnit’s Shadows—seems to have loved capturing mountains near calm rivers or lakes, in which their reflected peaks offer two contradictory Wests in one photograph: one crisper, cooler, and climbing up into the heavens; the other already fading as it drops away into darkness.

  Taking the western wilderness outside of time, these photographers obscured history with an idealized and lost past. In these images, over a century of landscapes, settlements, and human beings could be shuffled into any order and coexist simultaneously, rightly and wrongly. This was the West, the photographs offer, without explanation. In Calasso’s terminology, this is a mythic framework; it threatens to subvert the authority of a unified narrative. There is, in these shuffled images, no single story of manifest destiny and exploitation and genocide. They assemble a language, in some sense, and lie in wait for a speaker—even someone who might, like Cassandra, wish to warn us.

  “The fundamental metaphor” of American culture, Solnit argues, “is one of travel, movement, progress, exploration, discovery, of going somewhere in search of something new, a metaphor that links Columbus in his boats and Fremont on his trails with the Faradays, the Edisons, the Bells, in their laboratories.” If the stillness of the photograph threatened to slow down or freeze American life—if it welcomed contemplation and interpretation—cinema would, to co-opt a phrase of Robert Bresson’s, “defeat the false powers of photography.” Along with the locomotive, it would not only shift the image back toward real time, but speed that time up—it would accelerate a life, and a country, that could not afford to sit still. CF. P89

  While the early photographs of the West allowed for multiple meanings—a polyphony or plurality of myths asserting themselves—American cinema, entangled in the Hollywood oligopoly, authored and promulgated one narrative, the American Myth. Cinema takes the simultaneous, contradictory images of “lost” peoples, the men who had them killed or driven out because they refused to assimilate, and the landscape on which this invasion took place, and sequences them together as a self-serving story of western expansion and opportunistic, glorious capitalism. “The medium at its most influential,” Solnit says, “was to be the fruit of the meeting of huge monopolistic corporations and their fists-ful of dollars with dreamers and self-invented people.” By narrating the stories of these venture capitalists and the men they employed to do their killing, decades of Hollywood westerns portrayed to American audiences

  a drama in which they played a heroic role. They embraced the idea that the West was ancient in natural time . . . But they wanted it to be utterly new in human history, and thus they tended to ignore or disparage the history of those who had come before them, the native people and the Spanish settlers. This newness was a vivid part of American identity, the newness of a people who saw themselves just starting out in a landscape of Edenic freshness and infinite resources, infinite possibility. Nineteenth-century Americans liked to contrast this freshness with what they portrayed as the decayed or decadent age of Europe so that lacking a history became a sign of moral virtue rather than cultural poverty. This encouraged the many kinds of erasure of California and western history: the erasure of the Indians, of the personal past, the destruction of resources, species, records. To come west was more often than not to abandon the past.

  The movie studios—or the greed they fed from—are largely responsible for America’s renewable amnesia, just as literature, in Calasso’s account, is responsible for the erasure of Troy. The studios played (and still play) their part in the United States’ refusal to take responsibility for its past or see as equal, even human, those from whom it steals its resources. American culture, reflected Baudrillard, is “space, speed, cinema, technology . . . In America cinema is true because it is the whole of space, the whole way of life that are cinematic.” CF. P33

  To this day, the Department of Defense exchanges funding and military expertise for final say on a script. In an interview with the DoD’s “liaison” to Hollywood, Phil Strub, journalist Amos Barshad asked “if his office ever uses the word propaganda. Strub blanched. ‘I associate that with something that is not truthful,’ he says. ‘Something that is put together deliberately to mislead, to brainwash people, to twist the real . . . And maybe you’d accuse me of being too pro-military but to me, the movies we work with, they’re morale-improvement.’”

  Writing of
Ronald Reagan’s “illusionist effort to resurrect the American primal scene,” Baudrillard saw a generation of voters “neither fired by ambition nor fueled by the energy of repression, but completely refocused upon themselves, in love with business not so much for profit or prestige as for its being a sort of permanence.” This was the first generation raised in the movie houses of American cinema’s “golden age.” In the 1980s, when Reagan threatened that “the real America is back again,” banished from collective memory was the complexity and dissensus that characterized the postwar childhoods of his voters, creating in its place a utopian moment of American perfection, reinforced by a lifetime of cinema.

  However, Baudrillard adds, “If utopia has already been achieved, then unhappiness does not exist, the poor are no longer credible. If America is resuscitated, then the massacre of the Indians did not happen, Vietnam did not happen . . . The image of America becomes imaginary for Americans themselves.” Historic war films and westerns and contemporary desert op films set in Iraq and Afghanistan, in this way, are memorials—they reduce and aestheticize a complex, interconnected history of politics, colonialism, and international power dynamics to form a good and evil, an us versus them. In the eighties—after the counter-narratives of the sixties and seventies threatened to destabilize America’s silver-screen image of itself—Reagan, a former actor, elevated “his euphoric, cinematic, extraverted, advertising vision of the artificial paradises of the West to all-American dimensions.”