Multiple Reading Personalities

Finally reading through Antigone (and Oedipus the King) after the arduous walk through Antigone’s Claim felt really pleasurable — and so much more so for having some context as to the various readings of the play made by the likes of Hegel, Lacan and Luce Irigaray. Some pieces fell into place and some aspects that had not been discussed detached themselves more vividly against the backdrop of the rest of the text (for instance, what is this creonesque* obsession with monetary corruption? And how interesting that it echoes Oedipus’ suspicions about power hunger!). I still cannot pretend to understand everything Butler was trying to show, nor even most of it, but I at least felt like I had a richer experience with Sophocles’ plays.

Most readings of Antigone seem to focus on the opposition between the unwritten laws of family (of which Antigone, a woman, is the champion) and those of the state (defended by her uncle, Creon). I was struck, having read the Oresteia relatively recently, by how close this interpretation is to some of the commentary on Aeschylus’ trilogy (Electra and the – female – Furies would embody the preeminence of revenge and of family rights over official power; the situation is reversed at the end, when the Furies, changed into Eumenides, are sent into a softer, more domestic sphere — and the task of Justice transferred to an assembly headed by the appropriately male Apollo). I can see how that would reflect political preoccupations of the time (the passage to organized cities cannot have been all that simple), but I wonder how much of this also reflects the way critics wanted to read these works. Butler makes compelling points about how the readings categorize things that really are not so neatly distributed (Oedipus’  daughter standing for traditional family is a grand joke, of course, and her opposition to Creon is not all that evident — her speech, the way she makes her stand, even her multiple descriptions, most notably as manly… Their similarities are enough to not oversimplify their relation into a simple opposition).

Probably what I liked the most about the plays was how individual each of the characters are, and how essential to the storyline their personalities are. Everything that happens may happen because of an incredible coincidence or two (Fate, the Gods, whatever you want to call it)… But mostly it happens because Sophocles created characters who are who they are. What drove them to where they are is consistent with the way they act: Antigone is strong, stubborn (and used to leading blind men!); Oedipus is smart, relentless and swift to anger; Creon is principled to the point of self-righteousness, but ultimately smart enough to adapt (even though his timing is uniformly atrocious). These are no cardboard characters acting out the roles designed for them, they are making that destiny. Contrary to our current Sacred Principles of Writing, Sophocles shamelessly has his characters tell their own story, rarely ever bothering to put on a ‘show’ moment. The idiosyncrasy of each individual’s speech however is the show elements; characterization in a way is the story. It’s easier to enjoy of course because the story is known enough that we don’t really care how subtly it is revealed — but that really brings me back to translation and the importance of finding one that works for you to be able to identify the singular voices of the characters. Fagles’ worked for me again, though it was not as breathtakingly visceral as his Iliad. I would guess that’s because the plays are less epic, but how to ever be sure?

* yes, I made that up

 “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.

“So much for human fortune. When all is well/ a mere shadow can turn it upside down/ in the face of calamity, the slightest blow destroys/ like a wet sponge blotting out a drawing./ I do not pity myself, I pity mankind.” (Cassandra, in Agamemnon)

In what is likely to be a common complaint here, writing this entry was terribly difficult, not so much as was the case for Beowulf for all the uncertainties associated (though they are, if anything, more numerous), but because of the fascination I have with all myths, legends, interpretations and characters peripheral to the story. I have spent hours reading through Wikipedia and other sources, have started re-reading modern adaptations (including from Giraudoux), and I just cannot get enough.

The Oresteia is a trilogy relating the final episodes of the malediction on the House of Atreus (which, strangely enough, starts with Tantalus, Atreus’s grand-father). The early episodes of the House’s history are not part of the Oresteia. Child cannibalism and murder run through it (I checked out infantivore, but it doesn’t seem to be a word… yet): Tantalus fed his own son, Pelops, to the Gods, in a sort of deranged test to see if they would notice. They did, and that landed him in Hell, where he was made to endure the aptly-named Torment of Tantalus. The Gods also put Pelops back together, including a piece of ivory to replace the shoulder eaten by a distracted Demeter – and in good ancient Greece logic, proceeded to curse him and his descendants for the sin of his father. Pelops made matters worse by assassinating his future wife’s father: to gain the hand of Hippodamia, he needed to beat her father King Myrtilus in a chariot race. He ensured his victory by having his opponent’s chariot sabotaged, killing Myrtilus in the process.

Pelops’s two sons, in turn, had a troubled relation, which much treason, adultery and stealing the throne from one another repeatedly (with the help of meddling Gods). Suffice to say that, as a result, illegitimate children were fed to their father Thyeste by their uncle Atreus. Aegisthus was then procreated by Thyesthe (through incest, of course), expressly to avenge his father. Atreus meanwhile had two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus, who lived in good intelligence, each reigning over a different city. The brothers married half-sisters Clytemnestra and Helen, daughters of Leda. When the Trojan War started, Agamemnon went to support his brother, sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia to get favorable winds.

The first play of the Oresteia – Agamemnon – starts with the return of the victorious king to his city of Argos. He is triumphant, bearing treasure and a new concubine (Cassandra) as the reward of his toils, but the celebration will be short: Clytemnestra leads him into his house with disproportionate honors, and immediately murders him with all the ritual pomp of a sacrifice to the Gods. Cassandra, who predicted the murder as well as her own death, faces her fate soon after. The play ends with the triumph of Clytemnestra and her lover. He appears decidedly weak and arrogant in the play – letting her commit the act (which makes it more dishonorable to Agamemnon), bragging about his new position when she calls for peace now that her daughter has been avenged. The play ends with the threat of Orestes’s revenge.

The next play, The Libation Bearers, is the story of that revenge. Orestes, back from exile, tricks his mother into granting him an audition with Aegisthus and herself, and kills them both. I read (from a source I can no longer locate) that the tragedy marks a symbolic transition from a world where males and females where equally valued to a dominance of the masculine. This could be confirmed by the fact that Electra, Orestes’s sister, takes up the cause of her brother and father: she is deaf to the appeal of her mother in the name of her sister Iphigenia. The Furies, a remnant of the old order (they equally pursue patricides and matricides) then appear to persecute Orestes.

The third play tells of the resolution of the curse: Orestes flees first to Apollo, who ordered the murder of his mother, but the God cannot convince the Furies to leave his protege alone. He is then sent on to Athena’s temple: she arranges for him to be tried by 12 (male) judges, who are split equally between forgiveness and revenge. She settles the matter by casting her vote in favor of acquittal, making it a principle that pardon should be preferred to revenge when in doubt. She also renames the Furies to the Eumenides (the Kindly Ones), given them the new, much more feminine role of making the fortune of worthy humans. This settlement ushers more changes: the switch to a mortal justice and the abandon of vendetta as the preferred mode of conflict resolution.

The theme of the place of women is always one I am very sensitive to, so it certainly struck me strongly during my reading – especially as I was not expecting it there. Another dimension I was not expecting in tragedy was the surprising humor that permeates the play. Witticisms (“your speech was like my absence, too long“) and sarcasms (Cassandra, on being praised for her courage: “the fortunate never hear praise like that”) are certainly far from laugh-out-loud jokes, but they help a text otherwise impressive by its directness and darkness keep a very theatrical elegance.