Not as promised
So I meant to continue along my previous strand, relating back to my colleagues posts, but at the moment I have an epiphany to sketch out, inspired by...House. Yes, I've found a pocket of House episodes hidden on the web and have been trying to catch up (you'd be surprised what a help reading some kanji can be on the internets), and yes, I got the inspiration for the following rant from an analysis of his character, leading me to a comparison with...
It has never occurred to be before to consider Odysseus as an anti-hero. He is, after all, the stereotype of the hero to modern minds. But, my dear Friends, we must always remember that the modern mind is faithfully, eternally, stupid. The Odyssey is not my forte, since, though I've read it at least three or four times, I've never really taken a graduate-level course on it, and have little insightful material to go on. Mostly, I've been happy with a basic understanding of structure and the seeds of Romanticism planted therein. However, I do have a rather good working knowledge of the Iliad, thanks to my sit-in of Silver's Tragedy class. In the Iliad, the Odysseus-type is already in play. In fact, it seems to me that the Greek 'canon' essentially consists of a steady destruction or deconstruction of myth, which means "Hero."
The Greeks are terrified of gods, and that means they are terrified of those men who come closest to approaching godhood: there is nothing more terrible than greatness. We say with great power comes great responsibility, but the Greek picture is much bleaker. Great men are those capable of the greatest good and the greatest harm: upon them we depend, yet always with the knowledge that they will be our destruction as well. The tension exists already in myth: it is most evident in the ultimate hero, Heracles, who is capable of a thousand amazing deeds, yet finally slaughters his family in a fit of madness and dies a Tragic death. In Homer's Iliad we see a war that makes WWII look tame. The Greek world seems determined to wipe every hero from the face of the planet, and in a since, Homer seems to tell us, they succeeded. In those times, he constantly reminds us, men could hurl boulders at the enemy that three men now could not lift. Yet for all their power, they are still human, and the same squabbles that between farmers might, at worst, end in a small feud, a few bodies, between these kings of men causes the launching of a thousand ships and tears apart the greatest city in the ancient world. Achilles is slighted, and he lets the army of the Greeks face devestation to show how valuable he is, ultimately sacrificing his beloved to the enemy.
Yet there is another man in the Iliad who is as valuable as Achilles: the man we know will build the Trojan horse and ultimately defeat the Trojans after Achilles has done away with Hector. Odysseus plays one disturbing role in Homer's Iliad. Don't trust my memory to be perfect on this, but the story, as I remember it, is that Odysseus sneaks into the enemy camp with another Greek, captures a guard, and offers to trade his life for some information about the Trojan camp. The guard tells them all they ask, the Greeks have what they need, and Odysseus proceeds to cut the man's throat in the silent dark. They then creep into the camp and kill the enemy while they sleep. Odysseus is Homer's replacement for the old hero: he is cunning, effective, and utterly immoral (when need be, of course). To the ancient mind, he is a strange new alternative, and not a terribly comforting one.
Odysseus does not use brute, god-like strength to defeat the enemy. The stories told of him do not include the kind of fierce fights with great monsters that are the bread and butter of Perseus and Heracles. Instead, he is the prototype for an inhuman intelligence (the great-grandfather of modern day Hannibal Lector, Frankenstein's Monster, and, of course, Gregory House). We have to wonder how Odysseus is an improvement over the old guard of heroes: he commits impious acts against hospitality, ultimately loses all his men in his attempt to return home, and slaughters the hardy youths of Greece with Telemachus while they are unsuspecting, drunk, and unarmed, like shooting those proverbial fish foolishly hiding in barrels (and let's not forget those young suitors were wooing a woman who had seemingly been a widow for ten years, and faithful Penelope was in effect holding out on the basis of no objective evidence--she just happened to be as crafty and stubborn as her husband, and probably enjoyed being a widow). My great revelation, then, was that Homer does not like Odysseus. He is not a likable kind of guy.
But for all that, antihero is a bit strong, perhaps. It would not be such a difficult realization to come to if Odysseus did not garner sympathy: and in fact, that's all he gets from (the aforementioned stupid) modern reader. We gloss over (in the Odyssey) the dangerous and cunning sociopathy of our hero, because he is, after all, the hero, and he is a survivor. That in itself is enough to pull us along; his craftiness is compelling, he opens up possibilities that the mind-numbing repetition of slaughter in the Iliad cannot imagine, and his emotions, while excessive and dangerous, are recognizably human. In other words, he is if anything a more engaging and comprehensible character than his counterpart Achilles. And for all that his rather backhanded and devious manner of winning leaves us with a bad feeling in our collective stomach, he not only wins, but survives, gets everything he wants: and thus is Un-tragedy born. Achilles and Heracles cannot boast such happy endings; they are ultimately self-destructing, unable to adapt to the necessities of tuche, the external forces which buffet us this way and that. They are not survivor types. Count no man happy till he dies, goes the old Greek proverb, and it applies well to the old heroes. Homer is driven by the same practical necessity that Nussbaum tells us compels Plato to create the Socratic Overman (I throw in the reference to Nietzsche to suggest that it is Plato's seed that is meant to bear fruit in the "completion of metaphysics" that is Nietzsche). Greek literature, tragedy in particular, is a long explication on the impossibility of the old model of Man holding up against a world as inhumane as ours. The solution, outlined by Homer and continued by Euripedes and Plato, is to create Man in the image of Nature: we need an Inhuman Man.
The practical necessity of the solution cannot be stressed enough; it is not a solution that anyone undertakes willingly. (Compare the Golden Path Herbert explores in the Dune series, which is basically a meditation on historical causality and whether inhumanity can be justified to save humanity.) Homer does not like Odysseus, even if there are two Homers (reference to an irrelevant academic question of history), but he realizes the world needs him. The Heroic world is ultimately suicidal, and will drag all of humanity down with it (imagine Achilles at the head of the Americans instead of Roosevelt and think about what would have happened). In both the Iliad and the Odyssey, Odysseus is portrayed in the same light, as a kind of necessary evil. He gets things done, and for that we should thank him and stay the f*** out of his way. And if you want to sleep at night, you should probably not ask too many questions about how he gets things done. Plato's monster is even more complicated, perhaps less plausible, but basically the same--Plato sees a need for a fundamental restructuring of human nature for survival, even though it means giving up what he loves most, Homer himself and the whole host of poets that "lie" about the world by explicating a kind of humanity Plato needs to eradicate.
Yet Plato himself eventually abandons Socrates: the later dialogues slowly push Socrates into the background, replacing him with more and more abstract and insightful metaphysical explorations. I'm not quite sure what he was looking for--maybe I will finish the Laws and realize that he never found what he was looking for himself. But there is a definite shift, in my opinion, in the repentant Socrates of the Phaedrus, and Plato lets the Socrates of the Symposium get refuted by the disturbing, Odysseus-like, and very human, Alcibiades. Finally, he is completely overturned by Parmenides, leading to his ultimate demise and replacement by the Visitors in his last dialogues. Plato has gone too far, and is trying to find a way to regain his lost humanity--but how? I'm not sure he finds that answer. Homer's Odysseus still is recognizably human, though only just, in the same way that Harris's Lector manages to balance on the knife-edge (pun regrettably intended) of humanity and divinity, the sympathetic monster, like Shelley's, which is capable of the most profound expressions of the human spirit, while indulging in god-like carnage that shatters crude and heavy-handed moral concepts like "evil," reminding us of nothing more than Sophocles' Athena (the Ajax), wherein the goddess torments the noble (old-guard) Ajax with madness, toying with him like a child pulling the wings off a fly (while our old friend, the cause and aim of Ajax's homicidal intentions, watches on with stoic sociopathic distance).
Homer gives us a choice which has been handed down to this day: take the noble route, choose your inviolable principles and die by them, or else travel the tangled forest of morality in shades of grey, using principles as tools for survival, making cunning an art and an art of truth, and whatever you do--don't look back. What greater expression of the Will to Power is there than this? What can be more human that such exquisite inhumanity? More importantly, what is more dangerous than a conceptual polarity? Is there any way to survive without going to such extremes, is the middle wholly excluded? Or is the other solution perhaps the democratic one, the solution that our present culture is working so hard to enact--the eradication of greatness altogether?
It has never occurred to be before to consider Odysseus as an anti-hero. He is, after all, the stereotype of the hero to modern minds. But, my dear Friends, we must always remember that the modern mind is faithfully, eternally, stupid. The Odyssey is not my forte, since, though I've read it at least three or four times, I've never really taken a graduate-level course on it, and have little insightful material to go on. Mostly, I've been happy with a basic understanding of structure and the seeds of Romanticism planted therein. However, I do have a rather good working knowledge of the Iliad, thanks to my sit-in of Silver's Tragedy class. In the Iliad, the Odysseus-type is already in play. In fact, it seems to me that the Greek 'canon' essentially consists of a steady destruction or deconstruction of myth, which means "Hero."
The Greeks are terrified of gods, and that means they are terrified of those men who come closest to approaching godhood: there is nothing more terrible than greatness. We say with great power comes great responsibility, but the Greek picture is much bleaker. Great men are those capable of the greatest good and the greatest harm: upon them we depend, yet always with the knowledge that they will be our destruction as well. The tension exists already in myth: it is most evident in the ultimate hero, Heracles, who is capable of a thousand amazing deeds, yet finally slaughters his family in a fit of madness and dies a Tragic death. In Homer's Iliad we see a war that makes WWII look tame. The Greek world seems determined to wipe every hero from the face of the planet, and in a since, Homer seems to tell us, they succeeded. In those times, he constantly reminds us, men could hurl boulders at the enemy that three men now could not lift. Yet for all their power, they are still human, and the same squabbles that between farmers might, at worst, end in a small feud, a few bodies, between these kings of men causes the launching of a thousand ships and tears apart the greatest city in the ancient world. Achilles is slighted, and he lets the army of the Greeks face devestation to show how valuable he is, ultimately sacrificing his beloved to the enemy.
Yet there is another man in the Iliad who is as valuable as Achilles: the man we know will build the Trojan horse and ultimately defeat the Trojans after Achilles has done away with Hector. Odysseus plays one disturbing role in Homer's Iliad. Don't trust my memory to be perfect on this, but the story, as I remember it, is that Odysseus sneaks into the enemy camp with another Greek, captures a guard, and offers to trade his life for some information about the Trojan camp. The guard tells them all they ask, the Greeks have what they need, and Odysseus proceeds to cut the man's throat in the silent dark. They then creep into the camp and kill the enemy while they sleep. Odysseus is Homer's replacement for the old hero: he is cunning, effective, and utterly immoral (when need be, of course). To the ancient mind, he is a strange new alternative, and not a terribly comforting one.
Odysseus does not use brute, god-like strength to defeat the enemy. The stories told of him do not include the kind of fierce fights with great monsters that are the bread and butter of Perseus and Heracles. Instead, he is the prototype for an inhuman intelligence (the great-grandfather of modern day Hannibal Lector, Frankenstein's Monster, and, of course, Gregory House). We have to wonder how Odysseus is an improvement over the old guard of heroes: he commits impious acts against hospitality, ultimately loses all his men in his attempt to return home, and slaughters the hardy youths of Greece with Telemachus while they are unsuspecting, drunk, and unarmed, like shooting those proverbial fish foolishly hiding in barrels (and let's not forget those young suitors were wooing a woman who had seemingly been a widow for ten years, and faithful Penelope was in effect holding out on the basis of no objective evidence--she just happened to be as crafty and stubborn as her husband, and probably enjoyed being a widow). My great revelation, then, was that Homer does not like Odysseus. He is not a likable kind of guy.
But for all that, antihero is a bit strong, perhaps. It would not be such a difficult realization to come to if Odysseus did not garner sympathy: and in fact, that's all he gets from (the aforementioned stupid) modern reader. We gloss over (in the Odyssey) the dangerous and cunning sociopathy of our hero, because he is, after all, the hero, and he is a survivor. That in itself is enough to pull us along; his craftiness is compelling, he opens up possibilities that the mind-numbing repetition of slaughter in the Iliad cannot imagine, and his emotions, while excessive and dangerous, are recognizably human. In other words, he is if anything a more engaging and comprehensible character than his counterpart Achilles. And for all that his rather backhanded and devious manner of winning leaves us with a bad feeling in our collective stomach, he not only wins, but survives, gets everything he wants: and thus is Un-tragedy born. Achilles and Heracles cannot boast such happy endings; they are ultimately self-destructing, unable to adapt to the necessities of tuche, the external forces which buffet us this way and that. They are not survivor types. Count no man happy till he dies, goes the old Greek proverb, and it applies well to the old heroes. Homer is driven by the same practical necessity that Nussbaum tells us compels Plato to create the Socratic Overman (I throw in the reference to Nietzsche to suggest that it is Plato's seed that is meant to bear fruit in the "completion of metaphysics" that is Nietzsche). Greek literature, tragedy in particular, is a long explication on the impossibility of the old model of Man holding up against a world as inhumane as ours. The solution, outlined by Homer and continued by Euripedes and Plato, is to create Man in the image of Nature: we need an Inhuman Man.
The practical necessity of the solution cannot be stressed enough; it is not a solution that anyone undertakes willingly. (Compare the Golden Path Herbert explores in the Dune series, which is basically a meditation on historical causality and whether inhumanity can be justified to save humanity.) Homer does not like Odysseus, even if there are two Homers (reference to an irrelevant academic question of history), but he realizes the world needs him. The Heroic world is ultimately suicidal, and will drag all of humanity down with it (imagine Achilles at the head of the Americans instead of Roosevelt and think about what would have happened). In both the Iliad and the Odyssey, Odysseus is portrayed in the same light, as a kind of necessary evil. He gets things done, and for that we should thank him and stay the f*** out of his way. And if you want to sleep at night, you should probably not ask too many questions about how he gets things done. Plato's monster is even more complicated, perhaps less plausible, but basically the same--Plato sees a need for a fundamental restructuring of human nature for survival, even though it means giving up what he loves most, Homer himself and the whole host of poets that "lie" about the world by explicating a kind of humanity Plato needs to eradicate.
Yet Plato himself eventually abandons Socrates: the later dialogues slowly push Socrates into the background, replacing him with more and more abstract and insightful metaphysical explorations. I'm not quite sure what he was looking for--maybe I will finish the Laws and realize that he never found what he was looking for himself. But there is a definite shift, in my opinion, in the repentant Socrates of the Phaedrus, and Plato lets the Socrates of the Symposium get refuted by the disturbing, Odysseus-like, and very human, Alcibiades. Finally, he is completely overturned by Parmenides, leading to his ultimate demise and replacement by the Visitors in his last dialogues. Plato has gone too far, and is trying to find a way to regain his lost humanity--but how? I'm not sure he finds that answer. Homer's Odysseus still is recognizably human, though only just, in the same way that Harris's Lector manages to balance on the knife-edge (pun regrettably intended) of humanity and divinity, the sympathetic monster, like Shelley's, which is capable of the most profound expressions of the human spirit, while indulging in god-like carnage that shatters crude and heavy-handed moral concepts like "evil," reminding us of nothing more than Sophocles' Athena (the Ajax), wherein the goddess torments the noble (old-guard) Ajax with madness, toying with him like a child pulling the wings off a fly (while our old friend, the cause and aim of Ajax's homicidal intentions, watches on with stoic sociopathic distance).
Homer gives us a choice which has been handed down to this day: take the noble route, choose your inviolable principles and die by them, or else travel the tangled forest of morality in shades of grey, using principles as tools for survival, making cunning an art and an art of truth, and whatever you do--don't look back. What greater expression of the Will to Power is there than this? What can be more human that such exquisite inhumanity? More importantly, what is more dangerous than a conceptual polarity? Is there any way to survive without going to such extremes, is the middle wholly excluded? Or is the other solution perhaps the democratic one, the solution that our present culture is working so hard to enact--the eradication of greatness altogether?