The Odyssey (11): Books 19 – 20

A washing of feet & a final feast

Some of the things I find myself thinking about in my reading of Books 19 and 20 are remarkable, though I can’t believe original. As old Eurycleia washes the feet of the beggar king, the truth of his person is told in the story of a scar; a mark of the youthful and impulsive Odysseus, before the years had left their mark. And, I imagine the scene of another King, and running in reverse, and he washing the feet of those who serve Him, before supping in their midst for the last time (Maundy Tuesday). In this context, I wonder at the symbolism that could be attached to the ritualistic washing of feet; so integral to hospitality customs as practiced in ancient civilisations – an intimate act of cleansing that respects, reveals and absolves.

**Odysseus and Eurycleia**, by Christian Gottlob Heyne

If there were not enough Kings to speak of; this a much more pop-cultural reference: “The Lion King”. There are, I think, some fairly obvious structural and thematic similarities between the Disney film(s) and aspects of The Odyssey – the father and son relationship, the homecoming, the circular storytelling. Mostly, though, it was the “scar” micro-narrative that moved me to this diversion; in the epic, Odysseus’ scar is a physical reminder of how an intelligent, attentive man learns with time and experience from past mistakes, but in “The Lion King”, the envious brother and uncle is defined, redefines himself (in renaming himself “Scar”), by the bitterness and envy that fester in the wake of his mistakes.

book 19: the queen and the beggar

pp. 424-444

Preparations are afoot for the planned mayhem, but first Odysseus manoeuvres himself in position to talk with Penelope, who easily confides in him of how she had to “spin schemes” to keep the wretched suitors at bay, and how she literally did spin of a day and unweave of a night the promised shroud for Laertes. A pledge that must be abided by before marriage proposals could be considered – thus, at least for some time, she had been able to deceive the suitors; to only then be betrayed (the slave girls are really in trouble now!) And, for his part, Odysseus spins his familiar tale of Crete and Troy and adventures galore, and of the great “Odysseus” and his imminent homecoming; and is convincing enough.

And, then, the aged Eurycleia, as much a reminder of the past as the scar upon his leg, is sworn to secrecy. Penelope conflates dreams with schemes, and resolves, even in her choosing of a new husband, to honour alone the old. Odysseus pride in his “good woman” is barely concealed. What the morrow will bring?

book 20: the Last Banquet

pp. 445-459

Each wake otherwise to the new day. Through the night, enraged by the slave girls cavortings with the suitors, Odysseus is now touched by the weeping sounds of Penelope (and Athena doing her thing!). Telemachus is bothered that Penelope has not accorded the respect due to Odysseus – those fears unwarranted, assures Eurycleia. And the old woman is full of energy and orders her “troops” – this feast day will be like no other.

You are either with me or against me, he might as well have said. Eumaeus clearly is, and now the herdsman, Philoetius, shows respect and where his loyalties lie. For the opportunist, Melanthius, fate will not be so kind I fear.

Omens abound, and the suitors falter – hesitate in fulfilling their intent – and for the moment retreat, to instead revel in the preparing of the feast. One knows, peace will not reign for long; for so is it with the suitors. And, Athena must nudge just a little bit for them to return to their former spite, and only the prophet Theoclymenus sees the shadows fall, the writing on the wall, and makes haste. Telemachus is left to the suitors’ taunts and ever alert to his father’s command, and the beautiful Penelope sits and watches.

More than nostalgia

In these frenetic days, in which so much stuff, and so much more unsavoury stuff, is endlessly being thrown around, The New York Times has resorted to viral videos and the nostalgia of the urban snowball fight of yore. Not exactly today’s weapon of choice on the streets of Lyon or anywhere else I would suggest. So were my first thoughts…

Auguste & Louis Lumière: Snowball Fight (1897)

But, the author of the article, Sam Anderson, manages to retrieve his piece from my harsh verdict; both with some very nice observations and imagined narrative of the content, but more importantly with his reflections on our complicated relationship with the past and our exaggerated sense of the importance and uniqueness of our present.

…On an intellectual level, we all understand that historical people were basically just like us. […]They were anxious and unsure, bored and silly. Nothing that would happen in their lifetimes had happened yet. The ocean of time was crashing fresh waves, nonstop, against the rocks of their days. And like us they stood there, gasping in the cold spray, wondering what people of the past were like.

[…] to watch this snowball fight, to see these people so alive, is a precious gift of perspective. We are them. They are us. We, too, will disappear. […] We are not unique. We move in the historical flow. The current moment will melt away like snow crust on a moustache…
Sam Anderson, in “The New York Times Magazine“, Nov. 5 2020

The original black and white version included in the Lumière catalogue can be found here. On a technical level, the colorisation and a smoothing process makes the participants, indeed, look more like us – which of course they really did. This was something I actually thought about quite a lot a couple of years ago on seeing some excerpts from Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, a documentary film he made in remembrance of the end of the First World War, and in which he took archive footage from the time and, with all the technical wizardry available to him, transformed the subjects from blurred images of long ago to (mostly) young men who one may very well come across today – on the bus, at the pub or football, or most anywhere. I remember thinking, irrespective of the objections raised by purists, the familiar visages that were exposed with such technical finesse do create a powerful bridge between all the years of the century passed. Again – they were just like us! Beyond that of community and comradeship, there is little comparison between the respective fights on the winter streets of Lyon and on the fields and in the trenches of the Somme, but what they do share, are the threads of time that bind each inextricably with our present and all the presents to come.

Segregation by Genre

For a couple of reasons Alex Abramovich’s piece entitled “Even When It’s a Big Fat Lie” (limited access so the link is a bit dicey) in the London Review of Books particularly interested me. Firstly, it is a review of Ken Burns’s eight part PBS documentary “Country Music”, and I had read a flattering piece in The New York Times a couple of months ago, and that Abramovich’s is not; secondly, I saw a grainy rerun of Burns’s lauded by some, and lambasted by others, 1990 series, The Civil War, not so long ago – and thought it a very mediocre work – whereby, I mean in terms of the structure and film-making aesthetic (though to be fair it is thirty years old); the historical shortcomings and omissions, as Abramovich mentions, were debated at the time by those qualified to do so, and the criticism has not abated over the years. (I should say just about everything I know about the Civil War comes from Eric Foner, and he was one of the fiercest critics at the time.)

And it is in terms of Ken Burns’s prior work, that Abramovich launches into his criticism of “Country Music”, because, whether one agreed with their perspective or not, a range of historians did contribute to “The Civil War”, whereas in Burns’s succeeding documentaries the input from historians has dramatically declined over the years, to the point whereby “Country Music” has only one, Bill Malone, and it his interpretation alone that frames Burns’s work. And, one should say, even there it seems Malone had more to offer but could only give that which fulfilled Burns’s vision.

What Alex Abramovich bemoans the most, are the half-stories and half-truths that will never add to a whole. Instead, one is left with a blurred vision of a music genre that has never reconciled its shared roots in the poor white and Black South, and instead rejoices in an (often false) nostalgia. Following is an accompanying conversation with Abramovich, that explores, beyond his written LRB piece and the specifics relating to Burns’s documentary, the wider history of segregation in vernacular music and the defining role played by the recording industry.

Alex Abramovich on the history of segregation in music in the US

Finally, this is not the same thing, but related, I think, in that it is illustrative of how music and recordings track the extreme social shifts of an era, particularly in respect to the African American experience, through the twentieth century and into the present. Recently, I read an extraordinarily interesting article, again in the NYT, that examines music – American folk music this time – beyond a matter of categorisation that tends to segregation and exposes instead blatant racism and hate, and considers the ensuing dilemma of how to deal with historical works, once popular and now despicable.

Magical mystery tour de force

*“Time of the Magicians”, by Wolfram Eilenberger, trans. Shaun Whiteside*

Whilst in the midst of reading Wolfram Eilenberger’s book Zeit der Zauberer (2018) in German, I was interested to see that now a couple of years later an English translation has been published by Penguin Press. Not that many German non-fiction works get that far. And not that many as well reviewed – a very good review indeed by Jennifer Szalai at the NYT that hopefully encourages some good sales and thoughtful reading on that side of the Atlantic.

Certainly, I enjoyed the book immensely, and Eilenberger’s interwoven portrait of four extraordinary men – Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, Ludwig Wittgenstein – formulating their ideas into interconnecting but individual philosophies amidst the ruins, so to speak, of the First World War and the disintegrating Weimar Republic, is told in a very winning and readable way; some German critics found it to be too so. (Enough of the Feuilletonisten here have a tendency I think to want to keep “high” culture just that!) Believe me, an awful lot of German writers struggle with what one may call ‘accessibility’ – that is, not just informing and hoping for the best, but presenting difficult subject matter such that it reads as a narrative thereby capturing the attentive reader. This, then, foremost is an immensely readable book.

Cover “Zeit der Zauberer” by Wolfram Eilenberger

There is no denying that some of the stuff is indeed difficult, or as difficult as one wants to make it; one could go barmy trying to extricate the precise and nuanced meaning, especially in terms of the references to primary sources, and the stringency of formulation and terminology is a hurdle for those without a pertinent academic background (like, guess who!). My reading, then, concentrated on the living in the time, and I conquered my irritations at just how many ways these guys came up with of saying approximately the same thing and all in the interest of justifying their (to be fair, ‘our’) existence. When I was really irritated I would mumble something along the lines of: What hocus-pocus! But they were, after all, magicians of a special sort; all occupied with their own very special brand of magical thinking!

NYT Book Review: Sylvia again!

Not Sylvia again? What more is to be said? Daphne Merkin rhetorically asks of herself. And in her review of Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath is more than pleasantly surprised; in fact, inspired to think again, delve even more into this light that burned so brightly on the literary horizon, only to be extinguished too early and to pass into the dubious category of legend.

RED COMET The Short Life and Blazing Art of SYLVIA PLATH by HEATHER CLARK, Pub. Knopf

As one, from the generation after, who fell captive to that legend others built around Sylvia Plath’s life and death, and equally so fell for the legend that she, herself, created in her only novel The Bell Jar; a work of autofiction (and written before that term existed) some would contend, and that Plath would not live to either affirm or deny. It was because of The Bell Jar and Plath’s life (and her death) that I first read her poetry – at the time I was of the age at which she was when she was writing, and remember wondering at the intellectual and emotional depth, and to this day I gladly read her again. Perhaps some would consider her work too removed from contemporary concerns, too beholden stylistically to the old, now dead, white men who dominated twentieth century poetry, but in her last works she was shedding that influence, and I ask: was the beating heart and yearning soul of a young woman in the 1950s really so different to now?

Merkin’s review convinces me that there is more to know – of Plath’s life; of Aurelia and Otto, and always there the complications of Ted (after more recent revelations and denials, I didn’t think I wanted to go there again either!), and her art and her legacy.

Yes, Sylvia again! Or, still. Another, for my must read.

Amongst the great lives, one very great life

John Maynard Keynes

Most people take the economical way to Keynes! Not so me – rather, beyond name recognition, my introduction to one of the greatest economists of the 20th century came via the Woolfs, in whose lives and amongst the other brilliant players in “Bloomsbury”, Maynard Keynes played a significant role. Love it that the young British playwright, James Graham, should choose him as a “great life” in the BBC Radio 4 “Great Lives” series. I hope he retains his enthusiasm, for what great stuff there is in this life – for theatre or for film!

When new translations sound old

In the LRB Conversations podcast series, Emily Wilson discusses her recent piece in the London Review of Books (8 October 2020) (restricted access) on three (relatively) new translations of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia. One would have to say, mixed reviews; Wilson of the opinion that all fail to adequately reflect newer scholarship in respect to the state of democracy and justice in fifth-century Athens, and how that is reflected in the language of tragedy and specifically that of Aeschylus. She concludes the Oliver Taplin translation to be much the better of the three (though his introduction disappoints), and she recommends also that of Sarah Ruden (in The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, 2017 Modern Library Classics).

Aeschylus’ Ghosts
Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones

Emphasised is the misunderstanding of the breadth of the feted Athenian model of state – a “democracy” that applied in fact only to a very limited constituency and only a handful removed from an oligarchy, and where a majority of the populous had absolutely nothing to say. In this regard, there are through the ages analogies aplenty – countries who adopt “Democratic” to their name and are quite obviously not is one example – but I specifically thought about the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States in which that insinuated by “men” and “people” abounded with obvious exceptions – gender, race – until the last half of the 20th century, and less obviously – through disenfranchisement – still.

My thoughts flying to the young America, are echoed in the turn of conversation to the performative aspects of Greek tragedy, whereupon it is suggested that “Hamilton”, with its use of music and dance (and I would say the “state” folklore it serves) is perhaps the best modern analogue to classical Greek drama. In retrospect, I often wonder whether Athenian statecraft and European puritanism may have always been an imperfect mix upon which to build the foundations of a new nation.

More than once, the difficulty factor of Aeschylus is stipulated to be at the higher end – though in the course of the trilogy it moderates. Should one be deterred or accept the gauntlet handed down?

An interesting afterword: Emily Wilson, referring to her translation of The Odyssey, reveals a little of her criteria for (re-) translation (one of the reasons behind her criticisms of the above): first comes the request (in her case from an editor at Norton, with whom she had previously worked), but then a careful deliberation as to whether it is warranted, and what new stuff, if any, there is to brought to the fore, and her decision being further informed by her experience as a teacher of college students in the US. And, particularly she was convinced of the need for a new translation that returned to the metrical and syntactical rhythm of the ancient text, after years of versions rendered in prose form. Further, she recognised the opportunity to present a work that moved away from a purely Odysseus centred telling and gave the story in many voices, as multi-faceted, if you like, as the hero himself.

And, an after, afterword: Emily Wilson mentions at the very end of the podcast, that her Iliad translation will include Book 10 which, unbeknownst to me (well, who would have thunk it!), has been a matter of controversy over the years; the essence of the argument being that this book was a later addition and to be, therefore, discarded by the purist. The Stephen Mitchell translation, that does just that and to which Wilson refers, was reviewed at The New Yorker in 2011 by Daniel Mendelsohn.

When the next time is now

“The Fire This Time” ed. by Jesmyn Ward (2016)

Recently, I enjoyed very much picking my way through this 2016 selection edited by Jesmyn Ward; someone I have been truly thrilled to discover in recent years. Presumptuous of me perhaps, but I think I have read enough of Ward’s work and garnered enough information about some of the known aspects of her life, to understand her concerns as a writer and how her identity as a Black Southern woman is the beating heart of her creative output.

A project that came out of Jesmyn Ward’s anger and frustration, not just at the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin (to whom amongst many she dedicates the book) but long simmering within from the violent deaths of young black men close, very close, to her. Collected are some of the voices of a generation of Black writers, in the middle of life like herself, who articulate in their own personal and creative way their anger, their fear, their grief, but never without hope. Her introduction expands upon her motivation and intentions, and is a valuable piece in and of itself.

Ward makes a further contribution of her own in an essay called “Cracking the Code”, which is a very interesting appraisal of her personal genealogy and is, in itself, exemplary of the intricacies of race and how it manifests over generations; not just biologically but in the stories told and assumptions made. Now, given her roots in the Mississippi delta, Ward knew enough from family lore to surmise a broad mix – African, Native American, Creole, European – but the results of a 23andMe test gave her pause for thought. Strongly identifying as Black all her life, and that it surely followed that her ancestry must lay predominately on the African continent, Ward was momentarily taken aback when the analysis in fact concluded her to be of thirty odd percent sub-Saharan African ancestry and in fact forty odd percent European. The discrepancy is relatively small, but it bothered her. Who am I?

But it was only a momentary distraction, for Ward then rationalises genetic information to be that which it is, one piece only of the puzzle – just as relevant, or more so, is the familial, societal, cultural history that formed her and which she embraces (and which embraces her back). Nor does she throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak – Heaney, Larkin, Harry Potter amongst others are more than welcome still in Jesmyn’s world. (And, Doctor Who! The Doctor? I ain’t ever met a Doctor fan that I didn’t like – even if my original Doctor is of an earlier regeneration.)

Also, and she doesn’t mention this, but any DNA databank is dependent on input, and is always expanding, and as time goes on that affects the analysis parameters. Should Jesmyn have another test now, some years on, she would almost certainly find that again she is not exactly that whom she thought she was. In some ways, the reading of the code, if not the code itself, is as fluid as the greater identity of any person through a lifetime.