Priam gets to sample his newfound freedom during his journey across the plain to the Greek camp, in a simple cart and with only one humble companion: an episode that is brief enough in Homer, but here opens out into a mini-Odyssey, in which the king, for the first and last time in his life, experiences the pleasures of an existence that didn’t become the focus of serious literature until the rise of the novel, more than two millennia after Homer: the life of ordinary people. Accompanied, in this version, not by his royal herald Idreus, as in Homer, but by a talkative carter named Somax (an appropriately concrete name: soma is the Greek word for body), Priam wiggles his hot toes in cold water, learns how pancakes are made (“The lightness comes from the way the cook flips them over. Very neat and quick you have to be,” Somax advises the king of Troy), and sees that the world “of ceremony, of high play” to which he has always belonged is merely “representational … and had nothing to do with the actual and immediate.” Only during his fateful, novelty-filled and novel journey does he realize that “out here,” in the real world—which is to say, in the new narrative space that Malouf’s novel invents—“everything was just itself.”
The pathos of Malouf’s novel, as in that one half-line of Homer’s Iliad, is that the possibility of a different ending, of a life filled with simple pleasures, is and must always be a fleeting one: the end of Ransom includes a terrifying flash-forward to the grotesque murder of the aged Priam at the hands of Achilles’ young son, Neoptolemus, during the sack of Troy. But for the duration of this book Malouf’s Priam, like his creator, has done something truly novel. “He has stepped into a space that till now was uninhabited and found a way to fill it,” he thinks as he drives his son’s body home. “Look, he wants to shout, I am still here, but the I is different.” So is your sense of the possibilities of Homer’s story, once you’ve read Malouf. This is tampering at its very best.
The coda of Ransom informs you that Somax, long after the Trojan War is over, goes on telling the tale of Priam’s remarkable journey to anyone who will listen—becoming, that is, the first of many bards in a long line that leads to Homer. This preoccupation with how history becomes myth, how stories become epics, is a very Greek one, and lies at the heart of the other Homeric epic, which furnishes the material for Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey.
The first adjective in the first line of the 12,109 that make up the Odyssey is polytropos, which means, in the context, “clever”—literally, “of many turns.” Both are apt modifiers for the poem’s hero, who is subject to many detours and is also notorious for his intellectual and verbal twistiness—he’s the preeminent talker, fibber, and plotter of Greek myth, the man who dreamed up the Trojan Horse and survived his decade-long journey home from Troy by employing an impressive and sometimes disturbing array of lies, disguises, traps, and tricks. If the Iliad, set during a war, keeps showing us men’s bodies, either in frenzied action or stilled by death, and anxiously wrestles with the values that compel those men to act and to die, the Odyssey, set in war’s aftermath, can be described as a poem about the mind—a celebration of the intellectual and verbal qualities that we might need to survive in a world uneasily settling back into the forgotten habits of peacetime.
One quality of mind that the Odyssey admires extravagantly is the ability to tell a good story. (Whether the story is true or false is a question that preoccupies this poem, which in different ways keeps worrying about what is, in the end, a philosophical question: just how you can know whether something is true—the tale told by a total stranger, the protests of a wife who claims to be faithful.) It’s sometimes easy to forget that nearly all the famous adventures we associate with Odysseus—the encounters with the Cyclops, the witch Calypso, Scylla and Charybdis, the Lotus-Eaters—are narrated not by the poem’s invisible narrator, the “I” who invokes the Muse in the first line, but by Odysseus himself, about himself. At a certain point in his voyage, he finds himself on an island inhabited by refined, pleasure-loving natives called the Phaeacians, and, one night over dinner, he tells them the story of his homecoming thus far. This takes up four entire books of Homer’s poem.
Another way of saying this is that much of the Odyssey is a kind of epic performance within the epic, a long flashback in which the poet and the hero are one and the same person. (It is no coincidence that both bards and archers—Odysseus is a renowned bowman, too—need a stringed instrument to perform.) This self-conscious interest in narrative gamesmanship and in the nature of storytelling gives Mason the modishly postmodern theme of his book, the preface of which tells us that the chapters that follow are translations of newly discovered sections of the Odysseus cycle: “forty-four concise variations on Odysseus’ story … where the familiar characters are arranged in new tableaux.”
So, for example, the first such tableau (“A Sad Revelation”) consists of a three-page-long variation on the epic’s famous ending: here Odysseus returns home to a Penelope who waited only twelve years, instead of the canonical twenty, before marrying a man who has been courting her. The moment the hero understands what has happened, he tells himself that “this is not Penelope … this is not Ithaca—what he sees before him is a vengeful illusion.” Odysseus turns and “flees the tormenting shadows,” presumably en route to further wandering. Many of these tiny chapters riff Tennyson’s famous idea that Odysseus’ long-awaited homecoming and, afterward, life back home end up boring the hero; many, if not most, have the gnomic, abbreviated feel of this one. If Homer’s Odyssey is expansive, Mason’s odysseys are studies in compression, but brevity brings many of them close to triviality: too often the sections end with inconclusive teases (“Also not recorded is whether Odysseus had poisoned the ring or whether he had found the word and it sufficed”) or with riddles to which, you suspect, the author himself doesn’t have an answer.
Some chapters, however, are extremely inventive and suggestive—“clever” in a good way. “Record of a Game” imagines that the Iliad is a text that began as a chess primer:
The purity of the primer eroded over time—formulaic descriptions were added as aides-mémoire (pieces were called swift-moving, versatile, valuable in the middle game, and so forth).… By the eighth century BC the instructional character of the primer had largely atrophied and the recitation of the by then baroquely ornamented text had become an end in itself.
A terrific little chapter called “The Book of Winter” similarly thinks both inside and outside the Odyssey’s narrative: here, an amnesiac living in a hut at the frozen edges of the world realizes, after reading a book that turns out to be the Odyssey (“I wonder what the book was meant to tell me. The allegorical possibilities are many …”), that he is Odysseus—an Odysseus who has managed to pull off his greatest trick yet. For in order to escape the wrath of Poseidon (whose harassment is the reason for Odysseus’ long wanderings), he has forgotten who he is and become “no one.” As readers of the Odyssey know, No One is the false name Odysseus assumes in order to trick the Cyclops: when the Cyclops’s neighbors come to help after Odysseus has blinded him, he keeps saying “No One has attacked me,” at which point they go away. One way of saying “no one” in classical Greek—outis—sounds enough like “Odysseus” to constitute a kind of pun; another way, mê tis, is a precise homophone of mêtis, the word for intellectual resourcefulness. During his long anonymous homecoming Odysseus has indeed been “no one”—just as he has also always been “the resourceful one.”
But these sustained, really ingenious variations on Homeric themes are too few and far between; for the most part, The Lost Books of the Odyssey leaves you unsatisfied, like a meal of hors d’oeuvres. As you go through the book, it occurs to you that Mason thinks he’s doing what Malouf has managed to do—opening a space in the original epic and finding something new to say. The newness that interests him has to do with what academics call “narrativity.” One chapter, entitled “Fragment,” consists of a single paragraph:
Odysseus, finding that his reputation for trickery
preceded him, started inventing histories for himself and disseminating them wherever he went. This had the intended effect of clouding perception and distorting expectation, making it easier for him to work as he was wont, and the unexpected effect that one of his lies became, with minor variations, the Odyssey of Homer.
The author’s suggestion that the Odyssey itself is just one reflecting surface in a giant literary hall of mirrors has won the book extravagant praise; it feels like such a contemporary conceit, something out of Borges or Calvino.
The problem is that the narrative conjuring tricks that Mason attempts pale, in both scale and complexity, beside the ones that Homer mastered three millennia ago. The Odyssey constantly toys with the possibility that it is just one of a number of alternative epics: at one point, a bard at a feast starts singing a kind of parallel Iliad, in which Achilles quarrels not with Agamemnon but with Odysseus. (Some scholars, moreover, have wondered whether the song the Sirens sing is not, in fact, the Iliad.) Even more dizzyingly—and troublingly—Homer’s poem makes you wonder whether there’s any more reason for us to “believe” the stories that Odysseus tells his Phaeacian audience (about the Cyclops, the Lotus-Eaters, and so on) than there is to believe certain other long yarns that he spins. Once he’s back in Ithaca, for instance, he poses as a Cretan and tells three notoriously elaborate autobiographical stories, all of which contain elements from what we think of as his “real” life. It’s at this point that you start to wonder what words like “real” and “true” mean in a work that is itself a fiction.
Yet playful as the Odyssey is, it is always serious. At the heart of its narrative Russian dolls and suggestive punning is a profound, ongoing exploration of identity: What does it mean, after all, if your cleverness, the trick that at once defines you and that you need to stay alive, reduces you to being “no one”? At the end of the Odyssey, you get the answers to questions that start forming in the first line, the first word of which is andra, “man”: to be a man, a human being, wildly inventive and creative but inevitably subject to dreadful forces beyond our control—which is to say, death—is to be something wonderful and, at the same time, nothing. The clever games that the Odyssey plays are, in the end, games worth playing. Mason’s book is merely jokey—too clever by half.
Both the Iliad and the Odyssey wrestle with paradoxes of life and death, mortality and immortality. Achilles is willing to die young if it means winning undying renown; Odysseus will do almost anything to survive his journey, but when he’s offered immortality by the amorous nymph Calypso, he rejects her in favor of returning home to the aging Penelope—surely the greatest and most moving tribute that any marriage has ever received in literature. The allure of immortality and the competing rewards of a humble human life are the themes that animate John Banville’s The Infinities, which, like the novels by Malouf and Mason, has things to tell us about the act of adaptation.
The myth that Banville adapts is that of the Theban king Amphitryon (a story that the author already engaged with a decade ago, when he produced an adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist’s Amphitryon). In the story, Amphitryon goes off to war and, while he’s away, Zeus assumes his form and seduces his unsuspecting wife, Alcmena. The confusion of identities leads to often hilarious theatrical and philosophical complications and, ultimately, to the birth of twin children, one of whom is Hercules. The novel, like its model, not only toys with genres—it starts out as a deathbed drama and ends with a surprising deus ex machina—but also wrestles with deeper questions. Chief among these is the paradox that human creativity (and procreativity) seeks to attain a kind of immortality—“infinity”; and yet mortality, the knowledge that we are finite, is what gives beauty and meaning to life. The existence of the Greek gods, “immortal and ageless,” might, you suspect, be pretty boring, in the end.
The title The Infinities refers to a revolutionary theory promulgated by the novel’s main character, an eminent mathematician with the heavily symbolic name Adam Godley, whose work has somehow unlocked the key to infinity and made it possible “to write equations across the many worlds, incorporating their infinities … and therefore all those other dimensions.” Not the least of these dimensions is, it seems, death itself: when the book begins, Godley has suffered a colossal stroke, and the plot follows his family during what seems likely to be his last day on earth. There’s his much younger, hard-drinking wife, Ursula; his son, also called Adam; his daughter-in-law, Helen, an actress, who, like the mythical Alcmena, is unwittingly carrying on an affair with Zeus; and Godley’s tormented daughter, Petra, whose boyfriend is the pretentious know-it-all who doesn’t recognize the plot of Amphitryon even when he’s in it.
The infinities that Banville unleashes have startling and provocative implications. Among other things, you come to realize that the world of the novel is not our own world but one of the parallel possible worlds to which Godley’s discovery has provided the key. Here Mary, Queen of Scots triumphed against Elizabeth I, Scandinavia is a Middle East–like political mess plagued by endless wars, and energy is derived from saltwater. And, of course, the Greek gods are real—a nice thought since, as the narrator, who happens to be Hermes, reminds us, “we offer you no salvation of the soul, but no damnation, either.” These gods envy humans and yearn for mortality, which they attempt to taste by means of “intercourse” both literal and figurative. Such premises give Banville a useful vehicle for his themes of mortality, creativity, and the possibility of making something truly new in a world that seems increasingly exhausted morally, politically, and spiritually.
And yet the book lacks a certain urgency. As often with this author—not least in his highly overwrought The Sea, which won the Man Booker Prize—the conceits, the symbolic names, and the ostentatiously “lyrical” diction are striking, but too often you feel that the author is simply amusing himself, swatting, like a cat at tinsel, at notions that have caught his eye. Somehow, it doesn’t add up. (The shocking dramatic climax of The Sea—a book in which Banville, or at least the excessively gloomy narrator who has “a fair knowledge of the Greek myths,” is already thinking of “the possibility of the gods”—is almost totally inorganic, constructed.) By the end, it’s hard not to think that Banville himself has fallen into an error that his fictional Hermes observes in Adam Godley: “the peril of confusing the expression of something with the something itself.”
About one thing The Infinities is not in the least confused: lurking within it is the sly acknowledgment of a fact that has been clear to authors, if not to mathematicians, since that day, three millennia ago, when a blind itinerant singer tampered with some old heroic lays and turned them into the Iliad. Literature, like the universe that Godley reveals, has always been a series of endless tamperings, “an infinity of infinities … all crossing and breaking into each other, all here and invisible, a complex of worlds.” However flawed or successful Banville’s novel and its fellows may be, the mere existence of these proliferating adaptations points, once again, to the inexhaustible, indeed seemingly infinite potential of the classics themselves.
—The New Yorker, April 4, 2010
III. CREATIVE WRITING
AFTER WATERLOO
WHAT NOVEL COULD be so essential that even the dead feel compelled to know what it’s about? At the beginning of Jean Giraudoux’s Bella (1926), the narrator, attending a memorial service for schoolmates who fell in the trenches of World War I, begins to hear the voices of his dead comrades. For the most part, they talk about mundane, soldierly things: the discomforts of war, annoying commanding officers. But the last voice the narrator hears is different—it’s the voice of a young man tormented by the thought that he’d never had a chance to read a certain seventy-five-year-old novel. What the dead youth wants is for the narrator to summarize the book “in a word.” In a word, because “with the dead, there are no sentences.”
The book in question is Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma, an epic and yet intimate tale of political intrigue and erotic frustration, set in th
e (largely fictionalized) princely court of Parma during the author’s own time. Almost since the moment it appeared, in 1839, Stendhal’s last completed work of fiction has been considered a masterpiece. Barely a year after the book was published, Balzac praised it in a lengthy review that immediately established the novel’s reputation. “One sees perfection in everything” was just one of the laurels Balzac heaped on Charterhouse, in what was surely one of the world’s great acts of literary generosity. Sixty years after Balzac, André Gide ranked Charterhouse among the greatest of all French novels, and one of only two French works that could be counted among the top ten of world literature. (The other was Les Liaisons Dangereuses.) The encomia weren’t restricted to France—or, for that matter, to Europe. In an 1874 article for The Nation, Henry James found Charterhouse to be “among the dozen finest novels we possess.”
At first glance, the bare bones of Stendhal’s story suggest not so much a literary masterpiece as a historical soap opera. The novel recounts the headstrong young Italian aristocrat Fabrice del Dongo’s attempt to make a coherent life for himself, first as a soldier in Napoleon’s army and then, more cynically, as a prelate in the Roman Catholic Church; the attempts of his beautiful aunt Gina, Duchess of Sanseverina, and her lover, the wily (and married) prime minister, Count Mosca, to help establish Fabrice at court, even as Gina tries to fend off the advances of the repellent (and repellently named) Prince Ranuce-Erneste IV; Fabrice’s imprisonment in the dreaded Farnese Tower for the murder of a girlfriend’s protector, and his subsequent escape with the help of a very long rope; and his star-crossed but ultimately redemptive love affair with his jailer’s beautiful (and, it must be said, rather dull) daughter, Clelia.
So what, exactly, makes all this so indispensible to Giraudoux’s soldier? Why, in the words of one contemporary Stendhal scholar, does Charterhouse exhale “some incomparable air of which every human being needs absolutely to have taken at least one breath before they die”?
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