Multiple Reading Personalities

 “That is nothing, nothing beside your agony”

I started this first reading of the Iliad assuming I knew ”the story”. As it turns out, I didn’t, at least not exactly: the narrow scope of the tale (really just a few weeks, with a few days of combat making up the bulk of the text) surprised me. Most notably, I expected the death of Achilles, the ruse of the horse and the fall of Troy to be told, and was proven wrong.

At any rate, I am intrigued by the choice made here, and by its effect on the perception of the war. That a poem over 15,000 lines would only cover a few days in a ten-year span makes my head spin with the enormity of the war. This is reinforced by the bloodiness of Homer’s account, which I have mentioned in earlier posts: if that happened in just a few weeks, how can the full extent of the war even be envisioned? There’s something dizziyingly modern about handling such a major conflict by an extreme close-up on a turning point.

These few weeks Homer (I’m going to assume a Homer) focusses on are of course extremely significant: they begin with a fight between Achilles (the Acheans’ star warrior) and Agamemnon (their leader). Achilles knows that to win glory under the walls of Troy is to accept death in this foreign country; he has chosen honor, and goes ballistic when he feels that Agamemnon is humiliating him by taking away his captive Briseis. What is the point of his sacrifice if his statute is not safe? Through this incident, Achilles and Agamemnon both come across as violent, haughty, selfish and spiteful; it crossed my mind that maybe the nine years of siege and the constant immersion into a testoterone-fuelled environment were getting on their nerves… But the gods also prove quite worthy of these unflattering adjectives, the blood-thirsty gods of Homer, barely self-aware, driven by their instincts and emotions, modeled by their culture of honor.

Achilles avenge himself by praying to the gods to turn against his allies, that they might feel how great their need for him is; and the gods (especially Zeus, who loves him) consent. The tides of war turn in favor of the Trojans, at least until Achilles’ friend Patroclus is killed by Hector. Achilles’ fury explodes in awful massacres, culminating in the slaughter of Hector and the outrages inflicted to his body. The Iliad finally concludes with two burials, first that of Patroclus and then, after the gods have taken pity on Priam and commanded Achilles to give him Hector’s body back, that of the Trojan prince. The symetry of pain on both sides is prolonged by the now-unavoidable events the reader know must happen: because Hector is dead, Achille’s fate is to perish; because Hector is dead, because its most worthy defender has failed, Troy must fall.

After reading the Iliad over the course of a full month, there are two things that really stand out for me: one is the fury of battle, the halting rythm of the text then… yet all fights blend together, all names lie in a common grave. The other is a duo of quieter scenes that gave much of its emotional power to the epic.

The first of these two scenes is that of Hector’s last visit to his family in Troy, the tenderness and love he shows for his country and family, the sense of doom that is hanging over his head, and his choice to die trying to defend what he loves. Hector in battle is no more sensitive than any other man, driven by blood-fury and a burning desire for victory; but Hector in his hour of peace is the reason to feel that what is happening is a tragedy, not the Greek equivalent of a slasher movie with the gods in the role of the chainsaw. This scene is the reason I cried when Hector finally died.

The other scene is that of the dialogue between Priam and Achilles, when Priam leaves Troy to meet Achilles and ransom Hector’s body. The father and the killer of his son spend the night in close proximity, each brooding over their own loss, each responsible for the other’s, yet united in pain and perhaps in a sense of fate. Fear and anger will return, but this night is a truce, a lull in the violence of war, with both accepting the humanity of the ennemy at their side. I can’t quite articulate what moved me so much in this scene, but I visualized it more vividly than anything that preceded, without so much as trying, and it made me envision Achilles as a human being (instead of as a force of nature) for a few minutes. I don’t think this is indicative of his true nature, but it gave me a way to relate to him a little, and that’s quite a prowess.

I am under the charm of Homer, and I have to admit I didn’t expect the pleasure. I was dubious whether I would enjoy reading the Iliad for two reasons. The first and most minor one was the question of suspense. Of course (I thought - and have been proven at least partly wrong) I know what happens in the Iliad. Knowing where a story is going is generally not a huge deal for me, but it certainly doesn’t help if the writing is not sufficiently interesting to take me in.

And that leads me to main my worry: the Iliad is poetry, and I am reading it in an English translation (that of Robert Fagles). I started reading poetry in English only relatively recently (Dickinson first, a hideously frustrating experience, followed by Keats and then a translation of the Russian poet Akhmatova), and so far it’s been… I think the right word is sad. In my native French, the first book I really, really loved (after my Black stallion era, that is) was a collection of Verlaine poems plucked from my parents’ bookshelves. Other poets (Beaudelaire of course, but also Mallarmé or Eluard among others) captivated me at other times. I was also always fond of reading rhymed theatre, the perfectly balanced verses of Beaumarchais, Rostand or Corneille giving me immense pleasure. But in English? Almost nothing. A few tingles with Keats, but none of the overwhelming physical well-being that I associate with poetry. None of the intensity of feeling that the specific rythms of a tense or luscious poem will instill. Until now.

Homer is much more brutal than I expected; he is downright gory at times. Eyes burst open, brain matter splatters inside helmets, entrails cascade on the ground – repeatedly. He is also very visual, constantly weaving striking similes into his tale. Finally, the verse itself, at least as translated, is halting, rushed, constantly driving forward. Sentences are long (not many places to stop), but with constant breaks in their rythm paralleling the back and fro of the action. I think these three elements are helping me feel the epic more than decypher it.

I can’t help but hope that this will prove the “breakthrough book” that will help me learn to enjoy poetry in English. Wouldn’t I better enjoy it for what it is? I am trying to keep my hopes in check, but my mind is racing back to that volume of Keats and wants to go and try again… Try again…

“For his friend Enkidu Gilgamesh
did bitterly weep as he wandered the wild:
‘I shall die, and shall I not be then as Enkidu?
Sorrow has entered my heart!”

Mask of the demon Humbaba (British Museum)

I first heard of Gilgamesh last March from a literature student I met when volunteering for a PEN Festival event. She mentioned it as the oldest known work of fiction, and I was a little miffed never to have heard of it. I was therefore happy to see it pop up on my reading list when I decided to adopt a more chronological approach to it.

But before I could discover the Epic, I had another lesson to learn, one about public-domain works. I have a Kindle, I thought, and if this is really the oldest piece of fiction known to men, I should be able to download it for free, right?

Right and wrong, of course. It’s pretty ironic that someone who’s been thinking about translation as much as I have been recently would need a refresher course on a reality as basic as this one: when you’re talking about a foreign-language work, you’d better think twice about translation quality before you commit your time to it. Turns out that Gilgamesh is still pretty much a work in progress; the versions I at first downloaded for free were frankly not the most readable. I lost two weeks trying to find my way around the Epic. I finally went with the well-regarded Andrew George’s translation (and yes, I paid for it), which rewarded me by being quite accessible. I concentrated most of my reading on the Assyrian version circa 1200 B.C. (the “standard version”), though I also dabbled in the “Old Babylonian” version – the Pennsylvania and Yale tablets – to fill lacunae in the text. Well, mostly the translator did that for me, but my erratic initial readings also helped.

With this long introduction made – the Epic, unified by the character of Gilgamesh, really seems to be constituted of two main stories. The first is that of Gilgamesh and Enkidu; Gods meddle in it with a heavy hand. The second is concerned with Gilgamesh alone on a quest, and divinities seem to have much less direct influence on the plot. The two sections are unified by the question of mortality.

At the start of the Epic, Gilgamesh is a somewhat paradoxical figure – a son of Gods endowed with all manners of perfection, yet a tyrant resented by his people. The Gods send Enkidu to counterbalance his power. Raised by wild animals, found by a hunter, tamed by a courtesan and brought to town once civilized, Enkidu is so shocked by Gilgamesh’s enthusiastic exercise of his ‘ius primae noctis’ that he decides to fight him. He is bested, but the two become friends and decide to gain glory by going to the Forest of Cedar and defeating its protector Humbaba, a creature who could be a dragon, a demon or a volcano… It’s not very clear that the Gods approve of the adventure, but the two pull it off and return triumphant to Uruk. There, Ishtar tries to seduce Gilgamesh, but he rejects her; furious, she borrows the Bull of Heaven from her father Anu, and sends it to rampage in the city. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the bull – an outrage which, added to their little Humbaba excursion, the God decide to punish. Gilgamesh being their favorite, Enkidu is the one they strike: he dies.

His heart broken, jolted into awareness of his own mortality, Gilgamesh decides to go on a quest for Uta-Napishti, the man who survived the Deluge and has been given eternal life thereafter. It takes him years wandering, but Gilgamesh finally reaches his goal, only to fail the first test given him: to go a week without sleep. As a consolation prize, he gets a rejuvenating plant, but even that gets stolen from him by a serpent on the way back to Uruk. Gilgamesh is left to accept that his legacy, the walls of Uruk, will be his only form of immortality.

While there are some traits of older epics that I do not love (such as heavy repetition), I found the Epic to be surprisingly readable. A lot of the motives (the Deluge, the snake stealing eternal life, the crossing of the river to the Golden Land where Uta-Napishti lives…) recall other mythologies and would be worth exploring further, but I was mainly interested by the relation by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The balance of power between the two seems very original and not totally explained by the current transcription – Enkidu has more importance than the friend who often accompanies the hero in the Greek tradition, but he is as summarily dismissed. He was the character I had most interest in, and his background story (notably, but not only, his relation with the prostitute and his anger at Gilgamesh’s behavior towards virgins) gave him some depths of personality beyond other characters. It was a shame he was the one who had to die.

“After many trials, he was destined to face the end of his days in this mortal world; as was the dragon, for all his long leasehold on the treasure.”

Starting a note on Beowulf, even in this remote corner of the web, is a daunting endeavor – even though the poem itself was a captivating read, far from the dusty and obscure epic I was dreading. It certainly helped that I had encountered the story before, even in such inaccurate forms as in The Thirteenth Warrior and Zemeckis’s eponymous animated film.

The poem itself is not the culprit for my feeling intimidated: I cannot judge the merits of Seamus Heaney’s translation except for one thing – its ability to make the story feel close to the reader, lively and still pulsing with a sense of both excitement and loss. I am very aware, however, that I barely even scratched the surface of the work.

Set in Scandinavia (Denmark and Sweden) in the late 5th to mid-6th century, Beowulf tells the story of a Geat (Southern Sweden) warrior, a slayer of monsters: Beowulf. A man of extraordinary strength, courage, loyalty and generosity, Beowulf is the perfect embodiment of the Germanic code of honor. Searching for occasions of valor, he comes to the rescue of Hrothgar, a Danish king whose Great Hall is plagued by repeated incursions from Grendel, a monster jealous of men. Beowulf ambushes him and fights him without weapons, tearing a limb from the monster who flees to die in his lair. This first victory is greatly celebrated, but Grendel’s mother soon comes to avenge her son. This strikes me as in keeping with the blood-feud the men themselves wage (perhaps a condemnation of the primitive, unforgiving vendettas?), though it is not a comment I have come across elsewhere.

Beowulf does not shy from this new enemy, but increases his fame by pursuing her to her cave at the bottom of a monster-infested lake. He kills her in combat, and is greatly rewarded in honor and in gold. Returning to the Geats, he loyally passes on the gold to his king Hygelac, who rewards him in land and rings. The thane remains faithful when his king dies, refusing to take the throne as long as a legitimate heir lives. He will finally access it, and reign as a great ruler for many years, protecting his people from its enemies. His own end will come in the form a dragon (a wyrm!) awaken from his sleep and devastating the land. Beowulf will fight it and win with the help of Wiglaf, a young warrior, but victory is bitter: Beowulf dies from his wounds and most of his thanes deserted him in his hour of need, their cowardice hinting at a defenseless country who soon must fall.

Of course, the battles with fantastical creatures are no more factual than they need to be, but I imagine them to carry a great deal of symbolic truth: the age of men, meaning in this interpretation the age of Christianity, is coming. The old myths are dispatched by men still mostly pagans (and perhaps it is why their kingdoms must fall…). Additionally, much of the historical dimension of the poem (human wars, alliances and family trees) is supported by other findings (cultural, archeological, etc.).

Transition from one order to another, then? This is the interpretation I choose to favor, for in the poem I feel a mourning for the old world as well as a resignation to its unavoidable disappearance. Some scholars have argued that Beowulf is closer to an “ethnographic” rendition of Germanic mores for an English readership. I cannot judge the merits of these ideas, so I am going to go with my instincts here!

Another transition I am extrapolating from the raging debate on the origins of the epic (dated from the 8th to the 11th century, depending on whom you choose to trust) is that from the oral to the written: Beowulf is written in old English alliterative verses and contains traces of a wide variety of dialects, not to mention clear signs of having been (re?)-transcribed and edited by two different scribes. It has been argued to be anything from a mere transcription of oral tradition to an original, singular-author work, with  multiple intermediate interpretations (two authors, three authors and two scribes, etc.).  I could not pronounce myself on this, but the strong structure of the work (three battles interlaced with poet songs and reminiscences, two locations separated by a sea and many years, etc.) seem to speak to some level of intention.

I, for one, felt a strong cohesion in the work, with deep echoes from one part to the next, from one aging, falling king to the other. And I have to admit it moved me.