house fic: hourglass [house/wilson, pg]

[_starrystarry]

hourglass
house; house, wilson; pg; 1,010 words
house is a man without preamble: "i've never made anything in your life easier, you know," he says. "you're acting like i should have been your personal hero or something, but i've never fixed anything for you." spoilers for "wilson's heart."

Comments

[_starrystarry]

Ahaha, I'm happy to oblige! I can't turn my English major self off just because it's summer!

There are two powerful threads that I think define both the Iliad (and to a lesser extent the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Eumenides, etc.) and House. The first is the surgical level of detail. Homer describes each death like an autopsy report. The sword entered the eyeball here, it emerged from the brain at this angle, his first and third ribs were cracked, his blood was the color of the sea, etc. The death of Hektor (allow me a minute to grieve for Hektor, for I love him so) is a perfect example of this. It's emotional, because you know he has a wife and son and the country he's fighting for is dead with him, but it's also clinical. Achilles cuts this artery, etc. All the scenes in House where they zoom in on surgeries are obviously like this, and help balance the emotional scenes with the families, or Cameron if she's around. (JK, I like Cameron, but she's a touch emotional...)

The second thread that runs through both works is definition of hero. House is obviously the hero of House. Odysseus is obviously the hero of the Odyssey. (The Iliad's a bit trickier because Achilles isn't a typical Homeric hero until he enters the underworld, which we see in the Odyssey anyway.) The definition of a Homeric hero (as opposed to a Virgilian one like Aeneas) is someone who values his humanity over his divine tendencies. Calypso offers to make Odysseus a God, and he turns her down, saying he wants to go home. He doesn't search for kleos (Greek for "that which will be sung of you in death") on the battlefield, but wants to go home, see his family, live a long life, and die without fame but in peace. The real gut-clenching moments of House are when House behaves like this. He chooses humanity over "divinity" so many times. In this last episode, for instance, we see him value Wilson's feelings over the medical details of his case.

I'm not saying that David Shore is reading Homer - the concept of the Homeric hero is one of the most famous in literature. Harry Potter is a Homeric hero. John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, who's supposed to be the quintessential American everyman, is a Homeric hero. And the surgical detail thing kind of goes hand in hand with writing a medical TV show. But these are the sort of parallels that I like to find. Congrats if you've read all of this, because I know it's terribly long and rambly. ;)

[narcoleptic_ll]

Thanks for the congrats, although I have to say that I wouldn't mind reading 100 pages of this. I like to read analysis of things in general, especially when there are parallels to be drawn and yours strikes me as an especially accurate one.

I also have to admit that I'm not very familiar with Greek literature; I remember having to read it at school, but that was a long time ago and I was much more interested in physics and basketball back then, than books. However, from what I do remember, the hero thingy is what gets me the most, because that’s exactly what keeps pulling me back to House, the character and by extension, the show. He keeps choosing humanity over “divinity” even though he tries very hard not to be human; not to feel, not to care; and that in it self is a contradiction, which means that House is his best ally and worst enemy at the same time, and what could possibly be more tragic than that?

Thanks a lot for taking the time and effort to answer me; you’ve made a very happy person out of me =)

[_starrystarry]

You're welcome, but it's my pleasure. If I get my way I'll spend my time analyzing popular culture movements and tying them to the literary past, hopefully this'll involve some writing and some teaching, but since I just finished my first year at university I think that's a way off yet.

You by no means have to be familiar with Greek epics; I'm aware the above comment does make me sound like quite the literary snob and for that I apologize. But I do love how the notion of "hero" gets transformed over the ages. I'm really partial to nineteenth and twentieth century stuff (and Shakespeare. my love for Shakespeare knows no bounds), and it's great, for instance, to see how people like Dostoevsky or Woolf or, hell, how about someone who's alive and people actually read - García Márquez, Jonathan Safran Foer, Helen Fielding who wrote the Bridget Jones books - craft their heroes to meet the expectations of society. I think literature (and television, which I actually think is the best medium to tell a story in our "information age," but that's really a whole other argument) is societal commentary, and we choose to be captivated by and look up to people like House who are caught between this timeless struggle and ultimately make the right decisions. We are all human. We can't make the choices that were offered to Achilles and Aeneas by their literally divine mothers. But there are such obvious parallels of how to balance career glory with family pressures: would you be a stay-at-home mom? If you've seen the West Wing, the President recuses himself using the twenty-fifth amendment when his daughter is kidnapped. Was that the right call? Would George Bush do that? Is it indicative of our society now - how about Andrew Jackson, or whoever'll be president in fifty years?

We're always looking for heroes, and today's TV heroes really are important - there are people who grow up without role models and need to find someone somewhere to look up to. While House has different values from the Doctor on Doctor Who or Hawkeye on MASH or endless other characters of past and present it's interesting to see what aspects of human nature we always value. God this is starting to sound ridiculous and pseudo-intellectual, so I'll stop now. ;)