Poor Dante. Poor, poor Dante

h/t Mark Shea

First the Inferno video game, now this.

Dan Brown has turned his gaze upon the Inferno.

What is the point of being a screamin' genius, just to have some hack come along and do this to you?

The play that shall not be named.

(Part of my extremely intermittent musings on literature, which is actually my field of competence.)

The play of Shakespeare that I love most is the Voldemort of the group, the one that shall not be named, The Scottish Play. You know, that one.

Macbeth.

Why that one, you may well ask?  There are a lot of reasons why.  One is its brevity.  It is the shortest of Shakespeare's plays.  The lines spoken by Hamlet alone are nearly longer than the whole of Macbeth. That brevity gives it a kind of concentration and focus that is not to be seen anywhere else in Shakespeare's canon.  He uses his words in this play like a sniper uses bullets: every one must count.  Take for instance, the opening scene.  To compare Macbeth again with Hamlet, we see that in Hamlet's opening scene, there are themes of reversal of order, a world upside down, of threats to the nation, and supernatural forces plying their way into the world of men.  The exact same themes are in Macbeth's opening scene, but with one difference:  The opening scene in Hamlet is (depending on the version- more of that another time) 178 lines long.  The opening scene in Macbeth is a mere 12 lines.  It's so short, I can quote it in its entirety here.

ACT I

SCENE I. A desert place.

Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches

First Witch

When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

Second Witch

When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.

Third Witch

That will be ere the set of sun.

First Witch

Where the place?

Second Witch

Upon the heath.

Third Witch

There to meet with Macbeth.

First Witch

I come, Graymalkin!

Second Witch

Paddock calls.

Third Witch

Anon.

ALL

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
Exeunt

As far as teasers go, this is the masterpiece.  The opening line of the whole play tells us that the meeting of the three witches is already over:  The play begins with an ending.  To put it another way, we are thrown into the middle of something that is already occurring.  They tell us a little more:  there is a battle going on, which they know will be settled be by sundown, and they will meet with someone called Macbeth. They are called away by their familiars, and they leave with the another reversal: Fair is foul, and foul is fair.  In twelve lines, there is war, plotting, supernatural powers, and evil is afoot.  Welcome to the play.

And the briliance only begins there. Shakespeare's genius is to be found throughout the play.  The very existence of the play itself is a stroke of genius.  At the time when this play was written, James the VI Scotland had recently ascended the throne of England,  and was now also James I of England.  He also became the patron of the Shakespeare's acting company.  So Shakespeare writes a Scottish play for his new Scottish king, which features ancestors of James in the characters of Banquo and Fleance.  Unlike the sources of the play, in which Banquo was clearly a co-conspirator with Macbeth, in this play he is Macbeth's friend but ignorant of Macbeth's plans to murder Duncan, and he is ultimately killed because Macbeth is jealous that the witches gave Banquo a more glorious destiny than his own.  Shakespeare really plays up on this in the scene where Macbeth visits the witches, and is shown an endless line of kingly descendents in the line of James.  The witches are also a tip of the hat to James, as James was obsessed with the idea, considered himself and expert on the subject, and even wrote a book on the subject, called the Daemonologie.

The witches in the play are witches in the old sense:  They are evil, and one listens to them at one's peril.  Macbeth hears what they have to say, and is destroyed.  Even Banquo, given a more benign fate than Macbeth, is destroyed because he asks the witches to tell him his fate, and Macbeth learns that Banquo will one day be a rival. The witches are a perversion of nature, women who are deformed.  In the drama of the time, they would have been played by men in dresses.  Shakespeare mixes both the perversion of nature and the men in drag with Banquo's nudge-nudge line: "you should be women,/And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/That you are so."

But this play is far more than a piece of flattery for his new boss, or a ply about his obsession.   In some ways, it follows the pattern of Several of Shakespeare's other tragedies: The main character does something Very Bad around the middle of the play, and then faces the consequences and fall out for the remainder.  Romeo and Juliet get married behind their parents back, and the rest of this play is about how this act of disobedience pulls down both families.  Richard the Third murders and schemes his way to the throne, and finds no security, only a thousand tongues branding him a murderer.  Brutus murders Caesar, and is ultimately destroyed for it.  The Renaissance authors use this pattern because their plays hold a didactic function:  they show the audience how the Wages of Sin is Death.

But in Macbeth, Shakespeare does something very different, right before Macbeth murders the king.  Most other villains- Richard III, Brutus, Titus, Aaron, Edmund, to name a few- have speeches wherein they explain why they are going to do what they do, and embrace being a villain- even if for a good reason.  Macbeth does something far different and far more powerful:  He doesn't tell you why he does what he does.  He tells you instead why he almost doesn't do it.

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'ld jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips.

Here Macbeth is considering the idea:  If this one act would be all there is to it, then Maybe.  But he knows that more will come from this.  He then considers why he should not do it.
                     

                        He's here in double trust;
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.

Macbeth is aware o the horror of this deed.  And why would he do such a thing?

                                           I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on the other.

And here he is aware that disaster may come of this.  When his wife enters at the end of this speech, he tells her that they will proceed no further in this affair, but she presses him on, and he relents.  This leads to one of the most powerful scenes in Shakespeare: Macbeth slowly ascending to Duncan's bedroom to murder, fully aware and fully repulsed by what he is about to do.

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There's no such thing:
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworld
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace.
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

A bell rings

 

I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

  And thus Macbeth goes to murder Duncan.  He is going to do evil, and he knows he has no good reason, and he cannot turn away.

With these few scenes, the stage is set for Macbeth's downfall, and it is the most powerful in Shakespeare.  Shakespeare wrote other plays about the temptation of power and the destruction it brings, but none so bleak.  Macbeth begins a a good man who goes bad.  He gets the crown, but never enjoys it, loses his wife, his sleep, his sanity.  His last advisor and attendant is Seyton, and he dies alone, abandoned, and his head is placed upon a spike to the cheers of his foes, and through it all he knew he shouldn't.  The bell that summoned Macbeth was not merely a knell for Duncan, it was one for Macbeth himself, and it did not summon him to heaven.


Click here for more of my musings on The Bard.

Ghosts of University Past

A while ago, when reading a post on John C. Wright's journal, I came across this video, and while I don't agree with it in its entirety, I must say some of it took me unwillingly down memory lane..  First, here's the video.



As I said, I do not agree with it in its entirety, but what did strike a chord is the idea of narrative, and, in particular, its relation to critical theory,

During my time in university, the old forms of criticism were pretty much abandoned.  We no longer appreciated books, or read them for pleasure, but rather, we encountered "texts" which were neither good nor bad, and which inherently said nothing.  We were told that it was impossible to ever understand a text perfectly, so, any reading was in part a misreading. While there was nothing new about this notion- no critic ever claimed a perfect understanding of any book, to the best of my knowledge- the critical theorists turned this idea that a valid reading of a book would also be a misreading, at least in part, on its head and then claimed that a misreading was a valid reading.  a book could not mean whatever the interpreter wanted it to.  Then this got married to the notion of narrative, and all texts told the story the interpret wished them to tell, and usually bad stories at that- sexism, racism, classism, all the evil isms were represented in what were once considered the great works of Western Art, the bedrock of our society.  If the old great works once embodied the ideals of our culture, critical theory stripped the ideals away from us, and instead gave us nothing.  The most common brand of Critical Theory practiced at my university was called "Deconstruction", which, as the name implies, builds nothing, only tears down the work of others.

For instance, I once gave a seminar that ended up giving me no end of headaches for quite some time.  I was going to present on Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella.  My troubles began because another student, who was considered to be a rising star at the time, presented on the same work before me.

In her interpretation, she consulted her feminist theory to see what was to be seen in the poems.  It told her that the poems were sexist, about the subjection of the object woman (Stella) to the dominant gaze of the male observer/poet, Astrophil.  Astrophil dominates Stella through his poetic practices, forcing her in his poetry to be the woman he desires to be, as his poetry represented her and dissected her for consumption.  So dependent upon her feminist critical theory for this reading, she quoted frequently and often feminist critical theorists, but she did not once quote the work she was interpreting. The work was going to fit her narrative, the only thing she believed was to be seen.  What the work actually said was less important that what the critics had already decided it had to say.

To be honest to that student, and I was to note in my presentation, her interpretation would have been accurate had it been applied to virtually any other sonnet sequence extant today- but not to this one.  This one was quite different.

I had prepared myself in a different way.  My presentation was based on, first and foremost, the poems themselves, and also another work by Sir Philip Sidney entitled "A Defense of Poesie" in which he outlines what he believes to be the nature and job of poetry.  It seemed to me to be a no brainer at the time to take  the man's ideas of what poetry should be and do, and apply it to his own poems, but that was not apparent to my colleagues. 

The guts of my presentation went like this:  Sir Phillip Sidney says in his Defence that the purpose of poetry is to move and delight the reader.  Poetry is, in short, an art of persuasion. Astrophil and Stella is a series of sonnets in which the poet fails to persuade and move the main target of his poetry, namely, Stella. In the whole work, Stella speaks only once, and that is to tell Astrophil "no".  Astrophil cannot persuade Stella and therefore, according to Sidney's own ideas about poetry, he is a failure as a poet.  But more than this, Sidney also says in his Defense that poetry shows the rewards given to the good, and the punishments given to the wicked, as it shows behaviours that are to be emulated and those which are to be shunned.  Astrophil and Stella, therefore, is a warning to the reader in general not to behave like this. 

The other student was livid with me that I had shot down her presentation, for denying her narrative, for failing to affirm that her narrative was correct.  She became yet another rising star in the department whom I had alienated, because I still had this quaint and outdated notion of looking for what was to be be seen, rather than simply seeing what the theories and narratives told me was to be seen.  I had committed the secular heresy of denying the narrative, and denying the nihilism of modern scholarship and saying that there was, in fact, meaning in a text.  I used to tell my students, a book may be able to support any number of interpretations, but that does not mean it will support just any interpretation.  One narrative does not fit all.

I love this quotation

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
 
Ayn Rand's followers call themselves objectivists.  That someone who declared that all of history is a conflict between the individual and the collective would have followers who organize themselves into a group with a self identifying name is rather ironic, although the irony is lost upon them.  I have had many run ins with objectivists.  I cannot say there is no such thing as a good objectivist. I can only say I have never met one.

Somebody's Inferno.

A while back I mentioned that a company was developing a video game based on Dante's Inferno.  Now they've come out with a Superbowl ad.



I wasn't going to embed it, but it has Bill Withers' singing "Ain't no Sunshine", and that makes it worthwhile.

I knew they would be tweaking the poem to make a game, but this is getting somewhat out of hand.  Beatrice was supposed to be beautiful.  They've made her a smokin' babe.  If Dante mentioned a pair of breasts like that in his poem, I missed it.  In the earlier ads I had seen for the game, I thought Dante was wearing a surcoat with the cross on it.  Here I can see that he's actually bare chested with a red cross tatooed or something onto his chest.  I'm trying to think of something witty and flippant to say about that.  Nothing's coming to mind.  I believe the word is "speechless".

The best moment in the ad comes around 16 seconds or so, when tiny, barely visible writing appears to say
"Images not representative of actual gameplay."  Slick.  The ad may as well say:  "On February 9th, you can buy a game that is really nothing like this!" 
The story line isn't really anything like that of the Divine Comedy, although I will admit they've done some work with the setting.  The story is more along the lines of Orpheus and Eurydice, except Orpheus goes to the netherworld armed only with his lyre.  I really can't wait until students start handing in essays on the Inferno based on what the remember from playing the game.

It does raise some interesting questions, though.  My main question, and I won't even pretend to have an answer on this one, is: at what point can we say a work (be it a movie, a play, a game, and so on) based on a work of literature, no longer has anything to do with the original work?  Let me use a few examples from Shakespeare.

My personal favourite adaptation of Shakespeare onto the screen is Akira Kurosawa's Ran.  Based on the King Lear story, it resets it in samurai Japan, and tells the story of a feudal Lord and his three sons.  Although not a single word in the movie was written by Shakespeare, it remains in my opinion the best of the movies I have seen.

I compare this to some of the stage versions of Hamlet I have seen.  Some years ago, some director decided to update the setting of the play, and therefore made Hamlet a drug addict, (he actually delivered the 'to be or not to be' speech while shooting up), Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern were Siamese twins (no, really) one of whom was a woman (again, really), and whole lot of other weirdness went on.  The Ghost of Hamlet's father appeared to Hamlet on Hamlet's computer screen, which I actually thought was cool. 

Mind, this was high art compared to a Hamlet put on by the Graduate Theatre Department at my university.  That one really had to be seen to be believed, and I would rather not inflict seeing that play on anyone.  Despite having only eight actors in the entire cast, a decision was made to cast three of them as Hamlet (no, really), each one representing a different aspect of the Dane's  personality (again, really), and one of whom was a woman to represent Hamlet's feminine side (I'd say really again, but I imagine you readers saw that one coming.)  The fact that these were supposed to be the best and brightest of our theatre department made me despair the future of theatre.  They couldn't act.   I once had a few drinks with a theatre prof, and he told me these words:  "On stage, there are two ways you can make the audience pay close attention.  You can lower your voice, or you can lower your pants."  The graduate students were incredibly loud.  That was their way of emoting: volume.  So, being incapable of lowering their voices, you can guess how they tried to get our attentions.  That's right: naked Hamlets.  I went home quickly to bleach my eyeballs.

The point of this is that although these two plays both used Shakespeare's words throughout, neither of them had anything to do with Shakespeare.  The director may as well have come up with new plays in both cases, except he didn't. because no one would have come to see their plays, but they would come to see Hamlet.  Except they didn't, because in no way was that Hamlet.

One of the ideas that used to get bandied about during my time at the university was the notion of infinite interpretations, or the possibility of plenitude in interpreting a text.  I believe this to be true, but with a caveat, which I used to tell my students:  Saying a text can have any number of interpretations does not mean that they can have just any interpretation.  Sometimes the interpretations break completely from the text, leaving only a title and a slandered name.

Now back to the Bill Withers' song:  "Ain't no sushine when she's gone.  Ain't no warmth when she's gone away."

To Autumn

I just saw that Father Z. printed one of my favourite, if not my favourite, poem. I'll now reprint it here.

Ode to Autumn

by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.


I believe by the time he wrote this Keats knew he was going to die from tuberculosis. I believe it is for this reason that the poem has both an immense calmness and deep sadness, as the poem moves from a longing for the brash and bold glory of spring to recognizing the close of the year possesses a beauty of its own.

The First Word in Western Literature...

...is "menis," which means wrath or rage. It comes to us from one of the two oldest books, save the Bible, continuously in print, The Iliad. The Iliad, often thought of as the story of the Trojan War, is really a story, or a series of stories, connected to this one theme: The wrath of Achilles. In English, the opening goes thusly (Lattimore translation):


Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pain thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.


This is the story of how Achilles rage nearly destroys the Greeks and brings an end to their war at Troy. With Achilles at Troy are a host of the Greek heroes: Agammemnon, the lord of men and the son of Atreus mentioned in the opening. There is also the lethal Diomedes and tricky Odysseus, and the two Ajaxes, and the cuckold Menelaus. There is the old man Nestor, who reminisces about the days when he was young and could have beaten any of the whippersnappers around him. Opposite them stand the heroes of Troy, Aeneas, Paris who started the war with his adultery with Helen, and the doomed Hector, breaker of horses. There is their father Priam and wife Hecuba, and Cassandra, he cursed prophetess who sees the future but will never be believed. Beyond the humans stand the gods who are whimsical and capricious, yet at the same time implacable and remorseless. Beyond the gods are the fates which bind even the gods. It is appropriate that the word 'fate' is the root word of 'fatal', for the fates are deadly.


These were the heroes of the Greek imagination. To the modern mind they often seem more like spoiled children than heroes. The story begins with an argument between Agamemnon and Achilles in which each acts petulantly. Chryses, a priest of Apollo came to the Greek camp and asked for the return of his daughter Chryseis of the fair cheeks, who had been given to Agamemnon as a war prize. He offers Agamemnon a rich ransom for the return of his daughter. Agamemnon refuses, and Chryses prays to Apollo to turn his wrath against the Greeks for this dishonour. Every night afterwards Apollo, he who shoots from afar, descends on the Greek camp and slays the Greeks with his arrows. Achilles calls for a meeting in the camp and asks Agamemnon to send Chryseis to her father with offerings to placate the wrath of Apollo, but Agamemnon is upset that he of all the Greeks should be asked to surrender his war prize, and demands that Achilles surrender his prize, the girl Briseis, to replace the daughter of Chryses as Agamemnon's war prize. Achilles is enraged at this dishonour, and refuses to join the Greeks in their battle against Troy. He is enraged, for he came to Troy under a prophecy. He had been given a choice: go to Troy and have a short life, but everlasting fame, or stay at home and have a long life as a non-entity. He chose the short life and fame, but now it seems he is to be denied his fame and therefore prepares to return home with his people and let the Greeks battle for Troy without him.


The majority of the book is taken up with the problems Achilles absence causes the Greeks, and with Zeus' plan to bring Achilles honour. He does this by handing the Greeks into the power of Hector. He gives Hector victory on the battlefield, and for two days makes him unbeatable. For these days Hector rages across the field and drives the Greeks before him: no Greek can stand against him. The Greeks beg Achilles, their greatest fighter, to return to the battle and defend them against Hector, but to no avail. In the end, Hector slays Achilles best friend Patroclus and the grief over that loss brings Achilles back into the battle and he now goes on a rampage and annihilates every Trojan who stands in his way, until he meets Hector before the gates of Troy and destroys him there. In this way his wrath is brought to a close, and everlasting fame is his.


The heroes are subject to rage and crying, to the point that Plato would have censored the Iliad for teaching warriors to be unmanly. The gods capriciously pick one hero and support them over all the others. Athena gives strength to Diomedes. Zeus and Apollo give strength to Hector. Many gods support Achilles- Hephaistos gives him magic armour that cannot be pierced, Zeus lends him strength. When he screams his war cry Athena screams with him. So favoured is he of the gods that Aeneas, himself no stranger to divine favour, complains that no one can meet him on an equal footing.


If for the ancient Greeks the great hero was Achilles, the modern reader tends to be more sympathetic to Hector, the man who was not motivated by rage, but by a desire to save his people, a man who was given glory only to make Achilles more glorious. Their meeting is foreordained and Hector's doom is certain. Everything in the Iliad tells you this, even the adjectives. Hector is big, Achilles is huge. Hector is strong, Achilles is stronger. Hector is angry, Achilles is enraged, and his wrath is all encompassing. Hector meets Achilles on the field, doomed but brave, ready to go down fighting. They speak before they fight, and Hector asks Achilles for a bargain: Whoever falls, the other will grant the body back to their people for proper burial. Achilles refuses all such bargains. Hector, who earlier in the book said how he hated war but since war has come to his home he has learned to be brave, tells Achilles


(you will not) make me afraid and forget my valour and war strength.
You will not stick your spear in my back as I run away from you
but drive it into my chest as I storm straight in against you;
if the god gives you that;


Doomed, but determined to go down fighting, Hector is fatally wounded by Achilles, and has one last chance to speak. He begs Achilles to return his body to his family. Achilles refuses, and answers Hector in his typical hyperbole:


No more entreating of me, you dog, by knees or by parents.
I wish only that my spirit and fury would drive me
to hack your meat away and eat it raw for the things that
you have done to me


And he promises to feed Hector to the dogs. Hector, dying, speaks a prophecy:


Be careful now; for I might be made into a gods' curse
upon you, on that day when Paris and Phoibos Apollo
destroy you in the Skaian gates, for all your valour.

Achilles embraces his own destruction if it means he may have his vengeance upon Hector, and takes Hector's glory for his own.

For myself, the character I tend to sympathise with is the greater Ajax, who Homer always claims is the greatest fighter in the Greek camp but for Achilles. Less glorious in battle than the other heroes, is great moment is during the rampage of Hector, when Hector drives all the Greeks from the field and sends them reeling to their camp and back to their hollow ships. All the other heroes are wounded or pushed from the field. Ajax alone stands firm and keeps the retreat from turning into a rout. He organizes the defense on the field. When he is driven to the camp he stands on the walls and holds the Trojans off as long as he can. From there he is driven back to the ships, and when he is last seen, just before Patroclus rides to the rescue, he is one the deck of a burning ship, weeping that the war should end this way, but still fighting, and never giving up.


There is a sense of pessimism about this book. Very few of the heroes make good ends. Also, the heroes are raised up in stature through comparisons to the people of the day, and the contemporary people are on the losing end. They are the lesser sons of greater sires. The heroes walked in a world slightly less fallen than that of the contemporary Greeks. We are told that Hector picks up a rock, a rock so huge that twelve men such as they are today could not have lifted it, but Hector heaved it easily and hurled it at the Greeks. Such comparisons happen throughout the story, driving home the fact that contemporary men were no match for the heroes of old, the men of the bronze age. The Greek mythic view of history was that time was getting worse. Men descended from a distant golden age to a silver age, from thence to the bronze age of these heroes, and thence to the age of Iron. Their heroes were a little less fallen than themselves, and for the Greeks time would only get worse.


The last chapters of the Iliad are taken up with the funeral games the Greeks hold in honour of Patroclus. Achilles slaughters prisoners, and drags the body of Hector around the pyre, but his wrath is now cooled. Hector's death has brought him fame, but it has not brought him back his friend. In the end, he goes back on his word and accepts Priam's ransom for the body of Hector, and tells Priam to have a proper funeral for his son while Achilles will keep the Greeks from attacking Troy while all observances are made for Hector. Hector's funeral ends the story.


This, then is the first work of Western literature, or as much as I wish to say about it in a short post. There were other works which came before it, now lost. If they have any influence it is because of the influence they had on this work. The influence of this work and its companion, the Odyssey, cannot be overstated, with one caveat which I shall get to in a few posts. While Plato would have banned these works from his ideal republic, Aristotle considered them to be the perfect works of art, and believed that all epic poetry should be modeled after them. Aristotle's student, Alexander the Great, carried the Iliad in a golden chest with him on his conquest of all the known world. He is even rumoured to have slept with scrolls of the Iliad under his pillow as inspiration, and is also said to have wept that he lacked a poet like Homer to tell of his deeds, and he envied Achilles his scribe. The poetry of the piece is breathtaking in its beauty. The hollow ships riding the wine dark seas. Heroes who spill the black blood, whose knees are unstrung in their turn.


Yet Plato did have a point. The heroes weep and behave childishly and petulantly. The gods live for lust and whims, and are bound by an unbreakable fate. Epicurus famously said it would be more pious to believe there were no gods than to believe in such gods as these. The heroes' virtues are vanity, wrath, greed, envy and vengeance. When I continue, if I continue, with this subject at some future date, I will continue with the Odyssey, the story of a man who is vain, boastful, lying, lustful and homicidal, and I can hardly refrain from adding "and those are his good points."


The author John C Wright wrote that the Iliad and the Odyssey are the origins of all Western literature, and the rest of our literature constitutes a footnote to these two great works. Overstatement, perhaps, but not by much. Western literature begins with these works. Thankfully, it did not end here.

On Great Books

Hopefully I will soon be writing about the current literary bent to my thoughts. At least, I hope to soon write a bit about a few of the most important books for the literature of the West, other than the Bible. But before I do, I wanted to briefly discuss the idea of "great books".

In my own time, the idea of "great books" was never brought up in any class, except to deride it as an outmoded, outdated concept. Unless, of course, there was some new work the professor particularly enjoyed, and then that work would be declared great, and woe to anyone who thought otherwise.

I came up in the university around the height of what was called the "canon wars". This was a debate over the nature of the list of great books, and it grew to be incredibly heated at times. It also gave rise to many tedious papers and presentations given predictably punning names such as "firing the canon". Since no one ever bothered to discuss the concept of 'canon' to me except to mock it, I had a rather skewed idea of what the canon was. To me, the canon was the books taught at a university. To my mind, changing it should have been a simple thing. But only in my mind. To everyone else, this was a hotly debated point.

Like many ideas that get out of control, the canon debate started with a simple observation: Why is it that all the great books of Western Literature were written by Dead White European Males (DWEMs for short)? Were there non by women? or any of the other races? or even by the living? Simple, but rapidly it got out of control.

To my mind, there were three possible answers. The first was No. The Canon is what the Canon is. These are the greatest books, the ones that have survived the test of time and their status does not change. That they are written by DWEMs should come as no surprise, because for most of our history the only people in the West who could write were white men. Case closed.

The second answer, which was the one I favoured, goes a little like this: There is something to that. Perhaps there are more kinds of greatness than we know, the greatness of the DWEMs. Perhaps there are greatnesses out there in ways unfamiliar to us, which we should seek out an understand, and as we need to expand our ideas of greatness, and allow the canon to expand with it.

The third answer was basically another question: What is a great book anyway? When the very idea of greatness was questioned, the idea itself tended to vanish away. There obviously is no such thing as greatness. That is a judgement, an opinion. When a professor says "this is a great book" what he is really saying is "In my opinion this is a great book" which is not the same things as greatness at all. In this sense, greatness has no objective existence, because to the practitioner's of such thought nothing at all exists in reality, nothing is ever definitive, nothing is ever certain, and there's no two ways about that.

For the most part, it was answer three that won out. Pity, that. Also rather insulting. Were I a minority, or a women, I would feel vaguely insulted that it is only after the idea of greatness is abolished that we may now study the works of these people. We now, for instance, study an ever expanding number of women writers, but not one of them will ever be recognized as great, because nothing is great. Their works can not be recognized as great. They have not been lifted up among the great. Rather, everything has been pulled down to their own mean level, down to nothing, and this was called progress. Congratulations.

So when I speak of greatness I am talking about an old idea, one that goes back into time, lasted for thousands of years, and was only recently dismantled. When someone spoke of a 'great book' years ago, they believed they were stating a fact, and not an opinion. Objects and works of art were commonly held to have an innate and objective nature that could be discerned through proper training, and in fact, a large part of classical education was teaching the student to react properly, and to give the various works of art the respect they deserve. Thus a student would be expected to understand why Milton was a major poet but Marvell a minor one, or why Paradise Lost was a greater work than Paradise Regained. It is, as I said an old idea. It is also a difficult one. There were many, many books written on aesthetics, and beauty, and the sublime, and ultimately they all say that the qualities they discuss are ultimately indefinable. To say there is a greatness and prove it, is very hard. It is far easier to say there is no greatness, and then talk about other matters.

So I will be speaking about great books, and not books that I think are great. Why would I talk about books that are great solely in my own opinion, when I could speak of works that Aristotle and all who followed him called great? Why be in line with the bright lights of the last forty years, when I can follow three thousand years of the greatest thinkers who ever lived? And yet, for all this, I am still a creature of my time. I was never trained to think in terms of the great, but of other matters. So I cannot define the great, other than to say it is beyond definition. Much of what I say will be about more mundane concerns, such as influence and transmission.

So I will begin in a little while at the beginning and start my little piece by discussing the ramifications of the first word in all of Western literature.

The basics of Western Literature

Years ago, when I had just begun work on my Masters degree, I sat in a class listening to a PhD candidate descant on one of his favourite topics: Homoeroticism in the Renaissance. It was a hot topic at the time, and he was extremely well read and very, very good in expounding upon the subject. I had the misfortune to be stuck repeatedly in giving my presentations after him in class, and I was painfully aware of how much better informed, how much a better writer, just how much better he was in general than I. Everything he wrote was publishable, and he was encouraged to publish as much as possible. No one would rate my work so highly.

On that day he was giving a presentation on Spenser, and I was once again to follow him. He went through the poem, explaining how each part fit into his theory, except for one brief stanza, where he struggled and made his point in a very clumsy fashion. I was intrigued, because the evidence he needed was right in front of him, in a reference Spenser made to one of Ovid's myths, and he just missed it. So I asked him at the end of his presentation why he made the point the way he did when he could have made use of Spenser's reference to Ovid and made his point much more elegantly. His response was an indifferent shrug. "I wouldn't know," he said. "I never read Ovid."

I could never look at him the same way again. He knew everything about modern theorists and their theories, but he was totally uninformed about the Roman and Greek literature and he did not care. He thought he was not missing anything. He could not have been more wrong. The writers of the past read the writers who came before them, and filled their works with references to the earlier works. Shakespeare and his contemporaries filled their works with references to Vergil, Ovid, Plutarch, Livy, Cicero, Seneca, Homer, the Bible. Writers commonly did this up until our own century. Without a basic knowledge of the early writers, the modern readers is missing a huge chunk of the meaning and power of these writers.

My own education in the classics was accidental. In my undergraduate years I had repeatedly been among the last to sign up for courses, which meant the courses had wanted to take were all full and I was stuck taking what was left. I never got to take the hot subjects, and I was left with the stuff no one else wanted, which included repeated courses in the classics. I was disgruntled at the time, and became both elated and disgruntled as my education wore on. Being grounded in the classics at that time was like having eyes when all others were blind. Unlike this genius and others of his ilk, I could see the references and the subtexts. A knowledge of the classics also helped me to see through much of the modern 'theories' and to understand them for the nonsense they were.

I also could see the lie of the 'newness' of modern literary movements. Take one of the popular forms of writing from the 80's: meta-theatre and meta-fiction. In both cases, both the fiction and the theatre draw attention to their status as fiction or theatre. Say, for example, a play about putting on a play, or a movie in which a character explains that they are doing what they do because that's how it they were written. That sort of thing. New and cutting edge, right? Wrong. It was done before and better. Take The Knight of the Burning Pestle, for instance, written by Beaumont and Fletcher, the two men who took over writing for the King's men after Shakespeare retired. In this play two characters in the audience insist on changing the scenes to suit their fancy. Or Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, a work which one wag described as "A post modern classic written three hundred years before there was any modernism to be post over."

The downside was that I appeared to be the only one who knew these things. To my peers, I was the blind one.

These books give the reader something the modern theorists cannot and never shall: perspective. To the modern theorist the only value which they seem to admire is the value of the 'new', and that is not a value that endures. By sending your mind across the centuries a reader can gain a far greater perspective and see beyond the value of that which is new, and perhaps begin to grasp the values that are eternal.