Waiting for the Barbarians

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  It certainly tells you more than the ham-handed treatment of the subject in the new Julian Fellowes miniseries. In his hugely popular Downton Abbey, and in the script for the 2001 Robert Altman film Gosford Park, Fellowes showed a subtle feel for the ironies of class, but his Titanic sinks under the weight of its ideological baggage: the sneering condescension of the first-class passengers is so caricatured that it ends up having no traction. (“We are a political family,” a snooty countess observes. “You, I think, have always been in trade.”) There’s even a fugitive Russian anarchist aboard to give free lessons in politics: “Europe was wrong for me.” Worse, the production looks cheap: the first-class dining room has the ad hoc fanciness of a high school cafeteria on prom night. This is a Titanic drama in which the class outrage feels synthetic and there’s no compensatory luxe.

  If the underlying theme of all Titanic dramatizations has been class, the engine driving the plot has nearly always been romance. Apart from A Night to Remember, movies and television have tended to ignore the Carpathia-Californian drama, preferring to use the Titanic as a lavish backdrop for tragic passions and eleventh-hour lessons about the redemptive value of love. Fellowes takes this to new heights, or perhaps depths: whereas previous adapters of the story have made their star-crossed lovers fictional, he foists an invented upper-class suffragette on an actual first-class passenger, Harry Widener, to whose death Harvard students owe their university library, built as a memorial by Harry’s mother. If I were a Widener, I’d sue.

  The yoking of romance to the disaster narrative began with Saved from the Titanic, the 1912 movie with the weirdly prescient “reality” angle—it’s the one that starred an actual survivor. In it, the heroine must overcome her fear of the sea so that her naval officer fiancé can fulfill his duty. The sinking haunts a 1929 British talkie, Atlantic, which sets an adulterous affair on a Titanic-like liner, and a bizarre 1937 tragicomedy called History Is Made at Night, in which Jean Arthur plays a wealthy American who falls for a famous headwaiter (!) played by Charles Boyer, and travels to Europe with him on a liner that hits an iceberg on its maiden voyage.

  The actual Titanic makes an important appearance in Noël Coward’s Cavalcade, a big hit on both stage and screen in the early 1930s. But it took another twenty years for Hollywood to inject romantic melodrama into the real-life story. In Jean Negulesco’s Titanic (1953), Barbara Stanwyck plays Julia Sturges, a midwestern woman unhappily married to a wealthy man (Clifton Webb) from whom she’s become estranged while living an empty life of the beau monde—“the same silly calendar year after year … jumping from party to party, from title to title, all the rest of your life,” as she says, when explaining why she has absconded with their two children, a marriageable girl and a boy on the verge of adolescence. The arc of the drama traces the husband’s evolution from a superficial cad to a self-sacrificing hero; more important, it outlines the couple’s trajectory from estrangement to an inevitable last-minute reconciliation that makes them both realize what’s really valuable—not money but love.

  If the Titanic is a vehicle for working out our cultural anxieties, the 1953 film makes it clear that one of those, during the first years of the Cold War, was the question of who the good guys were. “We’re Americans and we belong in America,” Julia declares. Middle-class Americans, too. You learn that Julia had started out as a “girl who bought her hats out of a Sears, Roebuck catalog”; on board the Titanic, her prissy, Europeanized daughter is being wooed by a handsome American undergraduate who pointedly remarks that the “P” on his letter shirt stands for Purdue, not Princeton. Steven Biel’s Down with the Old Canoe makes a further argument: that the film represents Cold War–era nostalgia for a more manageable kind of apocalypse—not the blinding thermonuclear flash but the slow freeze that left you time to write your own ending.

  With its focus on feminine suffering and self-sacrifice, and, especially, in its presentation of an ill-fated romance between the unpretentious young man and the class-bound society girl, the 1953 Titanic, which won an Oscar for Best Story and Screenplay, anticipated Cameron’s 1997 movie, which won Oscars for just about everything. A lot of the dialogue that Cameron put in the mouth of his frustrated debutante, Rose DeWitt Bukater (Winslet), reminds you of Barbara Stanwyck’s lines: “I saw my whole life as if I’d already lived it,” Rose recalls, explaining her attraction to a carefree young artist named Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio). “An endless parade of parties, cotillions … the same mindless chatter.” But Cameron gave his film a feminist rather than a patriotic spin. Rose, of a “good” but impoverished Main Line family, is being married off to the loathsome Cal Hockley, who seals their engagement with the gift of a blue diamond that had belonged to Louis XVI. (“We are royalty,” he smugly tells her as he drapes the giant rock around her neck.) “It’s so unfair,” she sighs during a conversation with her odiously snobbish mother, who, in the same scene, is lacing Rose tightly into a corset. “Of course it’s unfair,” the mother retorts. “We’re women.” Small wonder that nearly half the female viewers under twenty-five who saw the movie went to see it a second time within two months of its release, and that three quarters of those said that they’d see it again.

  Rose isn’t the only troubled girl who’s being manhandled. Like all ships, the Titanic was a “she,” and Cameron went to some lengths to push the identification between the ship and the young woman. Both are, to all appearances, “maidens” who are en route to losing their virginity; both are presented as the beautiful objects of men’s possessive adoration, intended for the gratification of male egos. “She’s the largest moving object ever made by the hand of man in all of history,” a smug Ismay boasts to some appreciative tablemates at lunch. Later, as Rose goes in to dinner, one of Cal’s fat-cat friends commends him on his fiancée as if she, too, were a prized object: “Congratulations, Hockley—she’s splendid!”

  Cameron underscored the parallels between the young woman and the liner in other ways. The scene in which Jack holds Rose by the waist as she stands at the prow, arms outstretched, heading into what will be the Titanic’s last sunset, has become an iconic moment in American cinema. (And indeed in life: a couple was married in a submersible parked near that very spot.) But far more haunting is the way the image of the speeding prow in this scene morphs, seconds afterward, into a by now equally famous image from real life—the same prow as it looks today, half buried in Atlantic mud under two and a half miles of seawater, drained of color, purpose, and life. In this movie, there’s only one other beautiful “she” that is transformed in this way: we see the flushed face of Kate Winslet, as the young Rose on the night she poses nude for Jack, suddenly wither into the wrinkled visage of Gloria Stuart, the actress whom Cameron cannily chose to play Rose in the modern-day sequences of the narrative. Stuart, a star of the 1930s, was less than a generation younger than Dorothy Gibson, the lead in the 1912 film.

  When you compare Cameron’s movie to its 1953 predecessor, the evolution in attitudes is striking. The emotional climax of the earlier film is marked by Julia Sturges’s agonized realization that she belongs with her husband after all; the disaster brings this shattered family back together again. Cameron’s picture is about breaking the bonds of family, a point made by means of a clever contrast between its two leading ladies—Rose and the Titanic. At the start of the movie, the ship speeds confidently forward while Rose is described as being “trapped” and unable to “break free” (that corset, that mother); by the end, the ship is immobilized, while the girl strikes off on her own, literally and figuratively. After the sinking, she has to abandon the piece of paneling she’s climbed onto—and tearfully let go of Jack (now a frozen corpse), which she’d promised never to do—in order to swim for help.

  Rose, in other words, saves herself; in the end the Titanic is the sacrifice, the price that must be paid for Rose’s rebirth as a girl who acts by and for herself. Or, rather, a woman: she memorably makes love to Jack during her journey, and gets to New York (there’s
a beautiful little scene in which we see her huddled form on the Carpathia’s deck as it glides under the Statue of Liberty), while the ship remains a maiden forever. This is another reason we can’t get the story out of our heads. If the Titanic had sunk on her twenty-seventh voyage, it wouldn’t haunt us in the same way. It’s the incompleteness that never stops tantalizing us, tempting us to fill in the blanks with more narrative.

  Toward the end of A Night to Remember, Walter Lord briefly nodded to “the element of fate” in the story, which teases its audience with a sense at once of inevitability and of how easily things might have turned out differently. It is, he says, like “classic Greek tragedy.”

  He was right. All the energy spent pondering the class injustices and the romance, the dissertating about the ship’s design, size, and luxury, the panegyrics of the heroics, or the denunciations of the cowardice, of the passengers and crew, the tortured debates over the captain’s or Ismay’s guilt, the hypothetical pirouetting about what the Californian might or might not have done, the endless computations of just how many people perished (still never resolved), have distracted from what may, in the end, be the most obvious thing about the Titanic’s story: it uncannily replicates the structure and the themes of our most fundamental myths and oldest tragedies. Cameron intuited this, when he made the ship itself both the double and the opposite of his teenaged heroine. Like Iphigenia, the Titanic is a beautiful “maiden” sacrificed to the agendas of greedy men eager to set sail; the 46,000-ton liner is just the latest in a long line of lovely girl victims, an archetype of vulnerable femininity that stands at the core of the Western literary tradition.

  But the Titanic embodies another strain of tragedy. This is the drama of a flawed and self-destructive hero, a protagonist of great achievements and overweening presumption. The ship starts out like Oedipus: admired, idolized, hailed as different, special, exalted. Sophocles’ play derives its horrible excitement from a relentless exposition of its protagonist’s fall from grace—and from the fact that his confidence and his talents are what prevented him from seeing the looming disaster. Cameron understood this, too. The enormous resources at his disposal enabled him to give us that other hero: the ship itself, re-created in overwhelming detail. The scene in which the liner puts out to sea, the stokers filling the boilers, the steam gauges rising, the chunk-chunk of the engines gathering speed as the pistons thrust up and down—culminating in an underwater shot of the triple propellers starting to churn the water—sets up what you could call “the mechanical tragedy.” The director knew what the Greeks knew: that there is a profound theatrical pleasure, not totally free of Schadenfreude, in watching something beautiful fall apart.

  Either mythic strand, the virgin sacrifice or the grandiose self-destruction, would be enough to rivet our attention: as a culture, we’re hard-wired to respond to these narratives. To have them conflated into one story is overpowering. The reason we keep watching Cameron’s movie is the same reason we can’t stop thinking about the Titanic itself: it irresistibly conflates two of the oldest archetypes in literature.

  So much about the story, when you think about it, enhances the feeling of being more like an artistic composition than a real-life event. The ship’s mythic name—the Titans were a race of superbeings who fought the gods and lost—points up the greatest of all classical tragic themes: hubris punished. (“God himself could not sink this ship.”) Steven Biel reproduces the lyrics of a song sung by South Carolina cotton-mill workers who clearly grasped this: “This great ship was built by man / That is why she could not stand / She could not sink was the cry from one and all / But an iceberg ripped her side / And He cut down all her pride.” In real life, too, people seem to have understood the disaster in this ancient way. A rumor that started circulating at the time of the disaster maintained that her sister ship, the Britannic, was supposed to have been called the Gigantic but was given a less fate-tempting name.

  The structure of the Titanic’s story has the elegant symmetry of literature, too: in it, you get a doomed hero caught between an energetic savior (the Carpathia) and an obtuse villain (the Californian). And there’s something else that suggests a quality of having been designed as a dramatic spectacle. One big difference between the Titanic and other wrecks—the Lusitania, say—is the way her story unfolded in real time. Torpedoed by a U-boat in May 1915, the Cunard liner sank in eighteen minutes—too short an interval, in other words, to generate stories. The Titanic took two hours and forty minutes to founder after hitting the berg; which is to say, about the time it takes for a big blockbuster to tell a story.

  Greek tragic protagonists, classical themes, perfect structure, flawless timing: if you’d made the Titanic up, it couldn’t get any better. But then, someone did make it up. Perhaps the most unsettling item in the immense inventory of Titanic trivia is a novel called Futility, by an American writer named Morgan Robertson. It begins with a great ocean liner of innovative triple-screw design, “the largest craft afloat and the greatest of the works of men.… Unsinkable—indestructible.” Speeding along in dangerous conditions, the ship first hits something on its starboard side (“A slight jar shook the forward end”); later on, there is a terrifying cry of “Ice ahead,” and the vessel collides with an iceberg and goes down.

  As the title suggests, the themes of this work of fiction are the old ones: the vanity of human striving, divine punishment for overweening confidence in our technological achievement, the futility of human effort in a world ruled by indifferent nature. But the writing comes to life only when Robertson focuses on the mechanical details, as in the scene of the aftermath of the collision:

  Seventy-five thousand tons—dead-weight—rushing through the fog at the rate of fifty feet per second, had hurled itself at an iceberg.… She rose out of the sea, higher and higher—until the propellers in the stern were half exposed.… The holding-down bolts of twelve boilers and three triple-expansion engines, unintended to hold such weights from a perpendicular flooring, snapped, and down through a maze of ladders, gratings and fore-and-after bulkheads came these giant masses of steel and iron, puncturing the sides of the ship … the roar of escaping steam, and the bee-like buzzing of nearly three thousand human voices, raised in agonized screams and callings.… A solid, pyramid-like hummock of ice, left to starboard.

  Down to the most idiosyncratic detail, all this is familiar: the bee-like buzzing seems like a nod to Jack Thayer’s comparison of the sounds of the dying to locusts on a summer night. And yet it couldn’t be. Robertson—who gave his fictional ship the name Titan—published his book in 1898, fourteen years before the real liner sailed. If the Titanic continues to haunt our imagination, it’s because we were dreaming her long before the fresh spring afternoon when she turned her bows westward and, for the first time, headed toward the open sea.

  II. CLASSICA

  BATTLE LINES

  FOR SHEER WEIRDNESS, it would be hard to find a passage in the Western canon that can compete with the tenth book of Homer’s Iliad—the one classicists call the Doloneia, “the bit about Dolon.” Not the least of the book’s oddities is that it’s named after a nobody: Dolon is a character whom the poet conjures up merely so that he can kill him off, a few hundred lines later, in literature’s nastiest episode of trick-or-treating. There’s a nighttime outing, some creepy interrogation, even outlandish costumes.

  By this point in the action, we’re in the tenth year of the Trojan War, and things are going badly for the invading Greeks. Achilles, the greatest of the allied warriors, has angrily withdrawn from the fighting after being insulted by his loutish commander in chief, Agamemnon; without his help, the fortunes of the coalition forces are at an all-time low—the Greeks are pressed back against the sea, frantically defending their beached ships. A desperate appeal to the sulky Achilles has failed to persuade him to reenter the fray. At their wits’ end, the sleepless Greek leaders call a late-night conference and send two able warriors, the ferocious Diomedes and the crafty Odysseus, to spy on the T
rojan positions.

  After donning some rather unconventional gear (Odysseus, we are told, is wearing a cap decorated with rows of boars’ teeth), the two pick their eerie way through piles of corpses left over from the day’s battle. Presently they come across Dolon, who happens to be coming from the opposite direction to spy on the Greeks; as if to underscore the savage, animalistic nature of the encounter, Homer gives him a wolf’s pelt and a marten-skin hat. The Greeks capture this rather pathetic Trojan—his teeth chatter audibly after he falls into their hands—and tease him for a while, reassuring him that he will come to no harm even as they smoothly extract the information they want. Then, as Dolon begs for his life, Diomedes cuts off his head, which still gibbers away as it rolls in the dust. The pair then make for the camp of some allies of the Trojans, where they kill a handful of sleeping men and steal some fabulous horses.

  When I was first studying the Iliad, as an undergraduate classics major thirty years ago, the standard interpretation of this episode was that its very grotesqueness was the point. Everything about it—nocturnal violence instead of glittering, daylit contests of arms; stealth instead of open confrontation; animal pelts instead of gleaming bronze armor—inverts the norms of Homeric warfare, as if to suggest just how complete the Greeks’ reversal of fortune is: militarily, ethically, morally.