Frankenstein, Dracula, and some monster films I recently saw [updated]

As it turns out, this year I’ve seen quite a few monster films, mostly based on or inspired by the myths of Frankenstein or Dracula—let’s not get into a debate on whether vampires count as monsters—so I’d better jot down some brief thoughts. 

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922): Pure monster, no eroticism, no romance. The best Nosferatu film, perhaps the best Dracula film. Orlok’s appearance at the door, Orlok on the ship, Orlok’s shadow on the wall, etc.—the film is full of striking, unforgettable images and Max Schreck remains bone-chilling and sinister after over 100 years. More sinister than Klaus Kinski and Bill Skarsgård.  

Nosferatu (2024): The film focuses on sex and shame, or rather, presents the vampire as an embodiment of sexual desire/ shame/ disgust, which perhaps appeals to fans of monster smut. I don’t like the look of Orlok. I don’t think it’s a good film either. Lily-Rose Depp is impressive but the characters are under-developed, there’s little change in tempo and no sense of pacing, the film feels drawn out.

Dracula (1931): This is another classic, but I don’t like it. Lots of overacting, especially Dwight Frye as Renfield; I don’t even like Bela Lugosi as Dracula (unpopular opinion, I guess?). There are some interesting shots, especially at the castle and the abbey. Can see some influence from Nosferatu. 

Daughters of Darkness (1971): Vampire film, no Dracula connection. Silly film, but Delphine Seyrig is so beautiful and elegant. 

Now that I’ve thought about it, I wonder why I have seen so many Dracula films over the years when I don’t care for horror and didn’t like Bram Stoker’s novel all that much. Off the top of my head: part of Hammer’s Dracula (1958); Brides of Dracula (1960); Count Dracula (1977); Coppola’s Dracula (1992); Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979). 

Frankenstein (1931): Quite different from Mary Shelley’s novel, but it’s an excellent film in its own right. Great cinematography, great production design, great makeup, great performance from Boris Karloff. One of the most visually arresting films in black and white. In a way, the film simplified the story, removing some of the complex ideas about upbringing, education, development, civilisation, etc. but then it gave us the most iconic image of Frankenstein’s monster and solidified the myth—my friend Himadri thinks the film has had more impact on public consciousness than the novel has, and he’s probably right.  

Bride of Frankenstein (1935): Another excellent film by James Whale. I must praise Jack Pierce for not only doing the fantastic makeup for Frankenstein’s monster (Boris Karloff), but also creating the iconic hairstyle for the bride (Elsa Lanchester). 

Young Frankenstein (1974): Not much to do with Mary Shelley’s novel, this is an affectionate pastiche of the Frankenstein films starring Boris Karloff. Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman are wonderful together. A perfect film, very funny, extremely quotable: “It is Fronkensteen!”, “It’s pronounced Eye-gore”, “What hump?”, “Walk this way”, etc. Did you know Gene Hackman could be so funny? I didn’t. I laughed like a hyena.  

Son of Frankenstein (1939): This film is a sequel to the films by James Whale, but I watched it after Young Frankenstein. It’s quite all right as a film, featuring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi and Basil Rathbone. However, it suffers in comparison: next to James Whale’s films, Rowland V. Lee’s Son of Frankenstein doesn’t have such striking and iconic images; and I couldn’t watch it without thinking about the jokes and the parody in Young Frankenstein; the inspector in particular is so well-parodied that he seems rather ridiculous in the original. 

Poor Things (2023): Based on a novel by Alasdair Gray, inspired by the Frankenstein myth. As one would expect from Yorgos Lanthimos, it is weird and stylistically interesting, but it’s more disturbing than Frankenstein and the more I’ve thought about it, the more I dislike all the ideas about “feminism” and “female empowerment” in the film. Repugnant, even. 

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931): What was in the air that in 1931, Hollywood produced Frankenstein and Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Stevenson’s novella is my favourite of the three books, but again the film is its own work of art—one of the major changes is the creation of two female characters—and it is a very fine film. Fredric March is very good as Jekyll and Hyde, and I especially like that the film gets right Stevenson’s idea that Jekyll and Hyde are not two sides of the same person—Hyde is the concentration of all the evil and dark impulses in Jekyll. 

Addendum: Adding some more stills so you can see how beautiful the B&W is. 

Frankenstein: 

Bride of Frankenstein: 

Son of Frankenstein: 

The Iliad: “whiter than snow and swift as the seawind”

Illustration by John Michael Rysbrack. 

1/ I’m writing about similes again, as Homer has some of the most vivid and interesting similes I’ve come across. 

Most of the time, the armies are compared to animals—wild animals especially: 

“Now the Lord of the Great Plains, Agamemnon, 

hit one with a spear-cast in the chest 

above the nipple; the other, Antiphos, 

he struck with his long sword beside the ear, 

toppling him from his car. […] 

A lion, discovering a forest bed, 

and picking up in his great fangs the fawns 

of a swift doe, will shake and break their backs 

and rend their tender lives away with ease, 

while she is powerless to help, though near, 

but feels a dreadful trembling come upon her; 

bolting the spot, she leaps through underbrush 

at full stretch, drenched in sweat, before the onset 

of the strong beast of prey. Just so, not one 

among the Trojans could prevent those two 

from being destroyed: the rest, too, turned and ran…” 

(Book 11) 

(translated by Robert Fitzgerald) 

You don’t often see such a long, elaborate simile, do you? 

“At last they reached the West Gate and the oak 

and halted there, awaiting one another, 

as those behind in mid-plain struggled on 

like cows a lion terrifies at dusk 

into a stampede. One cow at a time 

will see breathtaking death: damped on her neck 

with powerful fangs, the lion crunches her 

to make his kill, then gulps her blood and guts.” 

(ibid.) 

Homer’s similes are not just vivid, strongly visual; they’re full of energy.

“At this he led the way, and Aias followed, 

godlike, formidable, and before long 

they found Odysseus: Trojans had closed round him 

as tawny jackals from the hills will ring 

an antlered deer, gone heavy with his wound. 

After the hunter’s arrow strikes, the deer 

goes running clean away: he runs as long 

as warm blood flows and knees can drive him on. 

Then when at last the feathered arrow downs him, 

carrion jackals in a shady grove 

devour him. But now some power brings down 

a ravenous lion, and the shrinking jackals 

go off cowering: he must have their prey.

Just so around Odysseus, man of war 

with versatile wits, the Trojans closed…” 

(ibid.) 

Even more interesting is when Homer compares the troops to something in nature, like fire and wind:  

“As a fire catches 

in parching brushwood without trees, and wind 

this way and that in a whirl carries the blaze 

to burn off crackling thickets to the root, 

so under Agamemnon’s whirling charge 

the routed Trojans fell…” 

(ibid.)

Or: 

“A lashing gale 

out of the west will rift high snowy clouds 

the south wind piled, as big seas rise and roll 

with foam and spindrift from the whistling wind: 

so were Akhaian masses rent by Hektor.” 

(ibid.) 

The quote in the headline comes from Book 10. 

Sometimes Homer’s similes feel ironic, like when he compares the destructive act of war to the productive activity of farming: 

“Imagine at each end of a rich man’s field 

a line of reapers formed, who cut a swath 

in barley or wheat, and spiky clumps of grain 

are brought low by the scything: even so 

those armies moved to cut each other down, 

and neither Trojans nor Akhaians thought 

of ruinous retreat…” 

(Book 11) 

Or when he compares pain in war to the pain of giving birth: 

“Comparable to the throes 

a writhing woman suffers in hard labor 

sent by the goddesses of Travail, Hera’s 

daughters, Twisters, mistresses of pangs, 

the anguish throbbed in Agamemnon now.” 

(ibid.) 

Homer’s similes are dazzling. I think so far the writers I’ve read who have the most striking metaphors/ similes are Shakespeare, Dickens, Flaubert, Proust, Flannery O’Connor, and Homer. Roughly speaking, Shakespeare seems to prefer metaphors and Homer seems to prefer similes. 

On a side note, I can’t help noticing that some parts of the Iliad are packed with similes—all the examples above are from the same chapter (confusingly called book)—but some parts hardly have any. 

2/ I like this simile for Hektor: 

“As from night clouds a baleful summer star 

will blaze into the clear, then fade in cloud, 

so Hektor shone in front or became hidden 

when he harangued the rear ranks—his whole form 

in bronze aflash like lightning of Father Zeus.” 

(ibid.) 

3/ One thing readers may notice about the Iliad is that the deaths are all different. 

Another thing is that the comparisons are also varied: look at all the times Homer compares a warrior to a lion—the lion image appears over and over again throughout the poem—but each simile is different. 

“… A hungry lion 

that falls on heavy game—an antlered deer 

or a wild goat—will rend and feast upon it 

even though hunters and their hounds assail him.” 

(Book 3) 

This is different: 

“… Think of a lion that some shepherd wounds 

but lightly as he leaps into a fold: 

the man who roused his might cannot repel him 

but dives into his shelter, while his flocks, 

abandoned, are all driven wild; in heaps 

huddled they are to lie, torn carcasses, 

before the escaping lion at one bound 

surmounts the palisade. So lion-like, 

Diomedes plunged on Trojans.”

(Book 5)

This is different: 

“Imagine two young lions, reared 

by a mother lioness in undergrowth 

of a deep mountain forest—twins who prey 

on herds and flocks, despoiling farms, till one day 

they too are torn to pieces, both at once, 

by sharp spears in the hands of men.” 

(ibid.) 

The lion similes earlier in this blog post are also different. You get the idea. Except for something like “wine-dark sea”, which becomes a formulaic phrase similar to the epithets (“Odysseus, raider of cities”, “grey-eyed Athena”, “red-haired Menalaos”, etc.), Homer (generally) doesn’t repeat his comparisons. Even when he does repeat an image—comparing the ferocity of an attack to a lion on cattle, for example—he adds detail and makes the simile so elaborate that each one feels fresh and original.  

“But even so, and even now, the Trojans 

led by great Hektor could not yet have breached 

the wall and gate with massive bar, had not 

Lord Zeus impelled Sarpedon, his own son, 

against the Argives like a lion on cattle. 

Circular was the shield he held before him, 

hammered out of pure bronze: aye, the smith 

had hammered it, and riveted the plates 

to thick bull’s hide on golden rods rigged out 

to the full circumference. Now gripping this, 

hefting a pair of spears, he joined the battle, 

formidable as some hill-bred lion, ravenous 

for meat after long abstinence. His valor 

summons him to attempt homesteads and flocks

and though he find herdsmen on hand with dogs 

and spears to guard the sheep, he will not turn 

without a fling at the stockade. One thing 

or the other: a mighty leap and a fresh kill, 

or he will fall at the spearmen’s feet, brought down 

by a javelin thrown hard.” 

(Book 12) 

The Iliad is unrelenting in its depiction of the brutality of war, but it’s not at all a dry or boring read—just look at the similes. 

4/ Another image that recurs often throughout the Iliad is the boar: 

“He stirred them, 

rallying each man’s courage. As a hunter 

would send his hounds against a lion or boar 

so Hektor sent his Trojans headlong in 

against the Akhaians: Hektor, Priam’s son, 

hard as the wargod—now in pride and zeal 

this hunter led his fighters on. He fell 

on the battle line like a high screaming squall 

that blows down on the purple open sea! 

And who were the adversaries that he killed

when Zeus accorded him this rush of glory?” 

(Book 11)

That comes from the Robert Fitzgerald translation that I’m reading. Out of curiosity, I looked at the translation by George Chapman and this is how he translated the same passage: 

“Thus as a dog-giv’n hunter sets upon a brace of boars

His white-tooth’d hounds, puffs, shouts, breathes terms, and on his emprise pours

All his wild art to make them pinch: so Hector urg’d his host

To charge the Greeks, and he himself most bold and active most:

He brake into the heat of fight, as when a tempest raves,

Stoops from the clouds, and all on heaps doth cuff the purple waves.

Who then was first, and last, he kill’d, when Jove did grace his deed?”

As translation, it seems quite loose; as poetry, it sounds good. George Chapman’s Iliad came out in instalments in 1598 and this is the translation Shakespeare would have read—imagine Shakespeare’s excitement when he read Homer! 

The Iliad: “Very like leaves upon this earth are the generations of men”

Painting by Gavin Hamilton. 

1/ Strictly speaking, the Iliad is not quite a realistic depiction of war (I mean, one-on-one combat? with lots of talking? not to mention the gods’ involvement?), but it is true and unrelenting in its representation of the horror and brutality of war. 

“Aias Telamonios, Akhaian 

bastion on defense, attacked and broke 

a Trojan mass, showing his men the way, 

by killing the best man of all the Thracians

Akamas, Eussoros’ brawny son. 

He hit him on the forecrest, and the spearhead 

dove his frontal bone, lodged in his brain, 

filling his eyes with darkness.”

(Book 6) 

(translated by Robert Fitzgerald) 

Homer doesn’t shy away from violence. 

“Seeing him tugging at the corpse, his flank 

exposed beside the shield as he bent over, 

Agenor with his spearshaft shod in bronze 

hit him, and he crumpled. As he died 

a bitter combat raged over his body 

between the Trojan spearmen and Akhaians, 

going for one another like wolves, like wolves 

whirling upon each other, man to man. 

Then Aias Telemonios knocked down

the son of Anthemion, Simoeisios, 

in the full bloom of youth…” 

(Book 4) 

It is gruelling. 

“A west wind rising 

will cast a rippling roughness over water, 

a shivering gloom on the dear sea. Just so 

the seated mass of Trojans and Akhaians 

rippled along the plain.” 

(Book 7) 

The gods may take sides, but Homer depicts the suffering on both sides: 

“Bright Helios 

had just begun to strike across the plowlands, 

rising heavenward out of the deep 

smooth-flowing Ocean stream, when these two groups 

met on the battlefield, with difficulty 

distinguishing the dead men, one by one. 

With pails they washed the bloody filth away, 

then hot tears fell, as into waiting carts 

they lifted up their dead. All cries of mourning 

Priam forbade them; sick at heart therefore 

in silence they piled corpses on the pyre 

and burned it down. Then back they went to Ilion. 

Just so on their side the Akhaians piled 

dead bodies on their pyre, sick at heart, 

and burned it down…” 

(ibid.) 

And he doesn’t shy away from depicting the bloodlust of (some) Akhaians:

“Agamemnon in grim haste came by 

to bar his mercy and cried: 

“What now, soft heart? 

Were you so kindly served at home by Trojans? 

Why give a curse for them? Oh Menelaos,  

once in our hands not one should squirm away 

from death’s hard fall! No fugitive, not even 

the manchild carried in a woman’s belly! 

Let them all without distinction perish, 

every last man of Ilion, 

without a tear, without a trace!””  

(Book 6) 

2/ I know that the same characters from Greek mythology in different works of art are not necessarily the same—Odysseus from Homer’s epics is different from Odysseus in Sophocles’s Aias and Odysseus in Euripides’s Hecabe and Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida—but I suspect that when I reread Aeschylus’s Oresteia, my view of Agamemnon would be coloured by his cruelty in war and unreasonable behaviour towards Akhilleus (better known as Achilles) in the Iliad. He’s not exactly likeable, is he?  

One of the great things about the Iliad is that Homer shows war to not only be about battle, about also about politics. The poem begins with a quarrel between Agamemnon and Akhilleus: Agamemnon, forced to return his war prize Kryseis, decides to take Akhilleus’s Briseis instead and humiliates him before the troops; Akhilleus then refuses to fight. The scene in Book 9, when Odysseus, Phoinix, and Aias come to Akhilleus as emissaries, is one of the greatest scenes in the book: the three men come to offer him gifts and an apology from Agamemnon and try—in three different ways—to persuade him to return and fight the Trojans; but Akhilleus continues to refuse. 

“Why must Argives 

fight the Trojans? Why did he raise an army 

and lead it here? For Helen, was it not? 

Are the Atreidai of all mortal men 

the only ones who love their wives? I think not. 

Every sane decent fellow loves his own 

and cares for her, as in my heart I loved 

Briseis, though I won her by the spear…” 

(Book 9) 

Why should he fight for a commander he doesn’t respect, who has humiliated him in front of everyone else? He goes further: 

“Now I think 

no riches can compare with being alive…” 

(ibid.) 

3/ Like War and Peace, the Iliad is not just one battle scene after another—there are also some domestic scenes. One of the most moving moments in the poem is when Hektor (or Hector) sees his wife Andromakhe (better known as Andromache) and their baby. 

“As he said this, Hektor held out his arms 

to take his baby. But the child squirmed round 

on the nurse’s bosom and began to wail, 

terrified by his father’s great war helm—

the flashing bronze, the crest with horsehair plume 

tossed like a living thing at every nod. 

His father began laughing, and his mother 

laughed as well…” 

(Book 6)

This is such a lovely moment (but heartbreaking when you think about what would later happen to them).

I have seen numerous heroic characters from the Trojan War/ the Iliad turned inside out and upside down in the Greek plays and in Shakespeare’s works and in other places, but never seen Hektor depicted as anything less than noble—even in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s most bitter and unpleasant play, Troilus is idealistic and foolish, Cressida is capricious and unfaithful, Paris and Helen are callous, Ulysses (Odysseus) is sly and cunning, Pandarus is a pimp, Patroclus (Patroklos) is “a masculine whore”, Ajax (Aias) is a fool, Thersites is deeply bitter and cynical, even Achilles is egoistic and despicable, but Hector is noble—the only noble, admirable character in Shakespeare’s play.  

The Iliad: “rising like a dawn mist from the sea into a cloud” [update 2]

1/ The quote in the headline comes from Book 1, about Thesis, mother of Akhilleus (better known as Achilles). 

I like the comparisons and images in the Iliad: 

“From the camp 

the troops were turning out now, thick as bees 

that issue from some crevice in a rock face, 

endlessly pouring forth, to make a cluster 

and swarm on blooms of summer here and there, 

glinting and droning, busy in bright air. 

Like bees innumerable from ships and huts 

down the deep foreshore streamed those regiments 

toward the assembly ground—and Rumor blazed 

among them like a crier sent from Zeus…” 

(Book 2) 

(translated by Robert Fitzgerald) 

Reminds me of the long passage in War and Peace in which Tolstoy compares people in Moscow to bees. 

This is an even more interesting passage, as Homer piles simile upon simile, comparing the troops to different kinds of animals: 

“And as migrating birds, nation by nation, 

wild geese and arrow-throated cranes and swans, 

over Asia’s meadowland and marshes 

around the streams of Kaystrios, with giant 

flight and glorying wings keep beating down 

in tumult on that verdant land 

that echoes to their pinions, even so, 

nation by nation, from the ships and huts, 

this host debouched upon Skamander plain. 

With noise like thunder pent in earth 

under their trampling, under the horses’ hooves, 

they filled the flowering land beside Skamander, 

as countless as the leaves and blades of spring. 

So, too, like clouds of buzzing, fevered flies 

that swarm about a cattle stall in summer 

when pails are splashed with milk: so restlessly 

by thousands moved the fighters of Akhaia 

over the plain, lusting to rend the Trojans. 

But just as herdsmen easily divide 

their goats when herds have mingled in a pasture, 

so these were marshaled by their officers 

to one side and the other, forming companies 

for combat.” 

(ibid.) 

I guess that is what people call a Homeric simile. 

Here the troops are compared to other animals: 

“The Trojans were not silent: like the flocks 

that huddle countless in a rich man’s pens, 

waiting to yield white milk, and bleating loud 

continually as they hear their own lambs cry, 

just so the warcry of the Trojans rose 

through all that army—not as a single note, 

not in a single tongue, but mingled voices 

of men from many countries.” 

(Book 4) 

In the Odyssey, a lot of the comparisons are in a single phrase—“Eteóneus left the long room like an arrow”, “killed him, like an ox felled at the trough”, “her mind turning at bay, like a cornered lion/ in whom fear comes as hunters close the ring”, “the boat careered like a ball of tumbleweed/ blown on the autumn plains, but intact still”, etc—but there are also some extended similes. 

“He pushed aside the bushes, breaking off

with his great hand a single branch of olive,

whose leaves might shield him in his nakedness;

so came out rustling, like a mountain lion,

rain-drenched, wind-buffeted, but in his might at ease,

with burning eyes—who prowls among the herds

or flocks, or after game, his hungry belly

taking him near stout homesteads for his prey.

Odysseus had this look, in his rough skin

advancing on the girls with pretty braids;

and he was driven on by hunger, too…” 

(Book 6) 

(translated by Robert Fitzgerald) 

Or: 

“And Odysseus

let the bright molten tears run down his cheeks, 

weeping the way a wife mourns for her lord

on the lost field where he has gone down fighting

the day of wrath that came upon his children.

At sight of the man panting and dying there,

she slips down to enfold him, crying out;

then feels the spears, prodding her back and shoulders,

and goes bound into slavery and grief.

Piteous weeping wears away her cheeks:

but no more piteous than Odysseus’ tears,

cloaked as they were, now, from the company.” 

(Book 8) 

2/ There is something strange about reading such a foundational, influential literary work like the Iliad for the first time. You’ve known about the Trojan war from pop culture, and now see the fighting in close-up. You’ve encountered Agamemnon, Menalaos, Odysseus, Aias, Hecabe… in Athenian tragedy, and now see them—sometimes quite different—in Homer’s epics. You know Christopher Marlowe’s line “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”, and now not only meet Helen but also get a catalogue of the ships.

(The catalogue of ships reminds me of the long catalogue of armies in Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus). 

What does it say, though, that the first substantial piece of Western literature was a war story? 

3/ The gods don’t just interfere in people’s lives—they take sides in the war. 

“The whipping 

string sang, and the arrow whizzed away, 

needlesharp, vicious, flashing through the crowd. 

But, Menelaos, you were not neglected 

this time by the gods in bliss! Athena, 

Hope of Soldiers, helped you first of all, 

deflecting by an inch the missile’s flight 

so that it grazed your skin—the way a mother 

would keep a fly from settling on a child 

when he is happily asleep. […] 

Then dark blood rippled in a clouding stain 

down from the wound, as when a Mêionian  

or a Karian woman dyes clear ivory 

to be the cheekpiece of a chariot team…” 

(Book 4)

The last bit is a strange—cold—comparison. 

4/ Sometimes Homer compares one thing to multiple things in the same passage, piling simile upon simile. Sometimes he picks a single image and extends it over several lines: 

“… Think of a lion that some shepherd wounds 

but lightly as he leaps into a fold: 

the man who roused his might cannot repel him 

but dives into his shelter, while his flocks, 

abandoned, are all driven wild; in heaps 

huddled they are to lie, torn carcasses, 

before the escaping lion at one bound 

surmounts the palisade. So lion-like, 

Diomedes plunged on Trojans.”

(Book 5) 

A couple of stanzas later: 

“Next two sons 

of Dardan Priam Diomedes killed 

in one war-car: Ekhemmon and Khromios. 

Just as a lion leaps to crunch the neck 

of ox or heifer, grazing near a thicket, 

Diomedes, leaping, dragged them down 

convulsed out of their car, and took their armor, 

sending their horses to the rear.” 

(ibid.) 

The next time we see the lion image, the simile is no longer about Diomedes however, but about a Trojan who has been fighting Diomedes in the same scene: 

“With shield and spear Aineias, now on foot, 

in dread to see the Akhaians drag the dead man, 

came and bestrode him, like a lion at bay.”

(ibid.) 

This is fascinating. 

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

I had a headache that lasted several days. When I mentioned I was reading a book by a living writer, a friend said check if my headache’s a tumour, that’s an abrupt personality change(?). 

1/ Gilead feels like a strange book to read immediately after the Odyssey, not only because it was published in 2004, but also because it’s rather plotless. Actually, let’s avoid that word—I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of defining plot and plotless novels. Gilead is what people call a quiet novel, slow and meditative. It is a journal by John Ames, a 76-year-old and dying preacher, for his 7-year-old son to read years later: telling stories about their family and pondering about the past and the future, about God and the Scripture, about life and death, about meaning and the act of living. 

That doesn’t mean that it’s boring though. The novel is set in the 1950s; John Ames writes about the conflict between his abolitionist grandfather and pacifist father, and between his preacher father and atheist brother; he writes about his first wife Louisa, who died in childbirth together with their baby Rebecca; and the novel becomes more intriguing, if not exciting, with the return of old Broughton’s son, John Ames Broughton (yes, his namesake), usually called Jack. 

The writing and protagonist are both more compelling than in Stoner (a “quiet novel” I didn’t finish that lots of people like, for some reason). 

I like Marilyn Robinson’s prose: 

“That graveyard was about the loneliest place you could imagine. If I were to say it was going back to nature, you might get the idea that there was some sort of vitality about the place. But it was parched and sun-stricken. It was hard to imagine the grass had ever been green. Everywhere you stepped, little grasshoppers would fly up by the score, making that snap they do, like striking a match.” 

This is rather different from the kinds of prose I usually like (Dickens, Melville, R. L. Stevenson, Flannery O’Connor, etc), so I’m not quite sure what I like about it: 

“Boughton was slow getting his growth. Then, after a short childhood, he was taller than me for about forty years. Now he’s so bent over I don’t know how you’d calculate his height. He says his spine has turned into knuckle bones. He says he’s been reduced to a heap of joints, and not one of them works. You’d never know what he once was, looking at him now.” 

I guess what I like is the tone of voice of the narrator: 

“Now, this might seem a trivial thing to mention, considering the gravity of the subject, but I truly don’t feel it is. We were very pious children from pious households in a fairly pious town, and this affected our behavior considerably. Once, we baptized a litter of cats. […] 

Their grim old crooked-tailed mother found us baptizing away by the creek and began carrying her babies off by the napes of their necks, one and then another. We lost track of which was which, but we were fairly sure that some of the creatures had been borne away still in the darkness of paganism, and that worried us a good deal. […] 

I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand. Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing. It stays in the mind. For years we would wonder what, from a cosmic viewpoint, we had done to them. It still seems to me to be a real question. There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time…” 

2/ Now some of you might wonder how such a religious novel could appeal to someone like me. I came across a Goodreads review saying that Gilead would have been a better book if the narrator were not a minister but a farmer, entrepreneur, or labourer. That would have been a different book, and don’t such books already exist? It’s because John Ames is a minister, a man of faith that he ponders about sin and judgement and grace and forgiveness, and tortures himself over his own shortcomings and suspicions. 

Occasionally John Ames’s musings about some particulars of Christianity don’t really hold my interest, but generally speaking, Gilead is not about religion and faith as much as about living and the choices we make. And about characters.

Take the scene where John Ames and his young wife are sitting with the Boughton family, and Jack asks him about the doctrine of predestination. 

“So I said, “That’s a complicated issue.” 

“Let me simplify it,” he said. “Do you think some people are intentionally and irretrievably consigned to perdition?”” 

This leads to a discussion, but the scene is not really about perdition or the doctrines of predestination and salvation in Christianity—even if you don’t care about Christianity and these concepts, it doesn’t matter—the scene is about the characters, about whether they think people can change, about things they say and things they leave unsaid. 

3/ One of the things I like about Gilead is that John Ames—well, Marilynne Robinson—gets us to think about the mysteries of people: 

“I wished I could sit at the feet of that eternal soul and learn. He did then seem to me the angel of himself, brooding over the mysteries his mortal life describes, the deep things of man. And of course that is exactly what he is. “For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?” In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.” 

John Ames is talking about Jack, but that is also true about his grandfather and his father and his brother Edward and his young wife Lila and everyone else in the novel. Nobody is wholly good or wholly evil, nobody is entirely in the right or entirely in the wrong—Robinson gets you to have sympathy for all the characters, as John Ames writes about the conflict between the abolitionist grandfather and pacifist father, between the preacher father and atheist son—and at the heart of Gilead is that sense of mystery, that feeling that you could never truly understand another human being.  

And when the character of Jack Boughton unfolds as he and John Ames speak to each other and come to understand each other, Robinson gives us some very moving scenes. 

I don’t know if Gilead is going to be one of those books I live with, one of those books I revisit multiple times throughout my life, but I can see why it is that way with some readers. It is a very good book. 

The Odyssey and The Tale of Genji: on human nature, customs, and literary tradition

In an earlier blog post, I wrote “I actually had more trouble trying to understand the characters in The Tale of Genji (about 1,000 years old) than the ones in the Odyssey (about 2,700 years old).” My friend Susan asked why that was, so perhaps I’ll write a bit about the subject.

The Odyssey is—if we have to boil it down to one word—about homecoming. The only thing strange about is the concept of xenia—hospitality and guest-friendship—because why does Odysseus’s household have to keep feeding the suitors and allowing them to eat up the estate in his absence? Athena’s involvement is perhaps also a bit strange, but not that strange if you think of her as a character—the gods are like human beings, just with power—and if you’re used to the depiction of the gods’ interferences in Greek tragedy. Everything else is familiar: Odysseus’s urge to go home and his companions’ unthinking recklessness and Poseidon’s anger and Telemakhos’s hatred of the suitors and Odysseus’s caution upon his return and Penelope’s suffering and so on are all familiar.

The Tale of Genji is closer to us in time, but more alien. It requires us to adjust to that world, but many things remain baffling and incomprehensible, if not downright reprehensible: on the one hand, men and women at the Heian court who aren’t married to each other can’t even have a conversation except through servants, and upon further acquaintance, behind screens; but on the other hand, someone like Genji has sex with everyone and nothing seems out of bounds, as he has sex with (or even forces himself on) his first cousin and his best friend’s lover and his own stepmother and other relatives, and he even abducts an eight-year-old and raises her to be his perfect wife.  

Not only so, the characters don’t have names! As the narrator is a lady-in-waiting, like Murasaki Shikibu, she has to refer to them by titles or nicknames or some other ways—we have to keep track of hundreds of characters without names (unless you take the easy way and read another translation instead of Royall Tyler’s). 

That doesn’t mean that The Tale of Genji can’t be appreciated, or even loved, by readers used to Western culture and tradition. It is among my Top 10 novels (or at least was, when I last made the list over a year ago). Once you (manage to) get past the weird stuff in The Tale of Genji, many experiences and feelings are—to use a word lots of readers seem to like—relatable: love and jealousy and heartbreak and suffocation and disappointment and envy and loneliness and fear and grief, etc. Murasaki is especially good at writing about death, grief, women’s suffering, and the impermanence of everything. Her novel simply requires more efforts from the reader. 

But it’s not just that 11th century novel, I also had a hard time when I was exploring 20th century Japanese novels. It’s a different tradition, with different styles and expectations. The only Japanese writer I wholeheartedly embrace is Akutagawa (at least the 18 short stories I’ve read). With all others, there are barriers and the novels often seem blurry to me, as someone interested in characters, details, and metaphors: the characters often seem blurry, without the vividness and complexity of characters in Western novels (except for the main characters in Kokoro and Botchan); descriptions tend to be impressionistic; metaphors are generally rare (Mishima and Abe Kobo excepted); but above all, I’m baffled by the (lack of) sense of pacing and tension, either because it has an odd structure and ends so abruptly (such as Kokoro), or because of its evenness of tone and lack of emphasis (like some novels of Kawabata and Tanizaki). I love Japanese cinema, which I know the best after American and British cinema, but Japanese literature remains for me a challenge. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out I have more difficulty with Japanese plays than with the ancient Greek plays.

It is perhaps for the same reasons—different tradition, different styles and expectations—that I took quite a while to get into Hong lou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber) from 18th century China, even though I’m familiar with Chinese culture, whereas I took to the 17th century Don Quixote immediately. Descriptions in Don Quixote may be crude—to use Nabokov’s word—but descriptions in Hong lou meng are all catalogues, awkwardly listing qualities or different aspects of someone or something like items. More importantly, Cao Xueqin often doesn’t go very far in depicting characters’ thoughts: sometimes he writes down some thoughts and one expects him to go further, but he doesn’t. Reading Hong lou meng, I had to make an effort and readjust my expectations. 

Where am I going with all this? My point is that it’s important to think of works of literature as part of a tradition. This is why I didn’t randomly pick up a single play from ancient Greece and stop, I read Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes. This is why, with my interest in Western literature, I’m now going back to its foundation. This is why I advocate for teaching Shakespeare and the Western canon in school. This is why, when I explore literature outside the West (especially before the 20th century), I keep in mind that it’s a different tradition and try to explore multiple works and multiple writers. 

All that said, isn’t it amazing that the Odyssey is so relatable—to use again a word I don’t particularly like—after something like 2,700 years? 

PS: I recently read Cyclops by Euripides but didn’t blog about it, as I had nothing to say. 

The Odyssey: “interpret me this dream”—Penelope’s early recognition [updated]

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Penelope suspects and recognises Odysseus in disguise long before he reveals himself to her. It not only makes sense, as I reread certain scenes and pay close attention to Penelope’s subtle game, but also enriches the poem. 

You can read this essay, in which John B. Vlahos also argues this case at length (75 pages!). 

Just examine all the action. First, Penelope hears from her son Telemakhos (better known as Telemachus) that Odysseus is alive; and hears from Theoklymenos (the diviner) and Eumanois (the swineherd) that he is near or even already on the island. She would then be alert to any stranger who appears. Then the beggar shows up. 

When the beggar is among the suitors, Penelope decides to show herself. Why? To see the suitors? She hates them. To tell Telemakhos to “shun that crowd”, as she says to a maid? She doesn’t do so. For no reason other than that Athena puts the impulse in her head? I think Homer is just being devious. I would say that Penelope comes out to have a look at the stranger. Does she recognise him then? Maybe. Maybe not. Note that Athena disguises—ages—Odysseus but doesn’t transform him into someone else. Note that Eurykleia (the old nurse) and Philoitios (the cowherd) and even Penelope remark on the resemblance between the beggar and Odysseus. Note that Helen previously tells Telemakhos that she once recognised him in disguise as a slave. Why would Penelope not recognise her own husband under the rags? 

She then speaks to the suitors, and many things she says sound like things she would want Odysseus to hear: about her own loyalty and sorrows, and about the way things currently stand. If we assume that she recognises or at least suspects Odysseus in that scene, her speeches seem to be a kind of double talk, and indeed they are perceived differently by the suitors (who think she plans to remarry) and by Odysseus (who sees that she is wheedling gifts out of the men who have been eating up his estate). 

Now look at the scene in which Penelope questions the beggar. If we bear in mind that she knows there are disloyal servants in the house who may spy on them (as someone has previously revealed her weaving trick), the things she says again appear to be a kind of double talk. 

“Friend, let me ask you first of all:

who are you, where do you come from, of what nation

and parents were you born?”

(Book 19) 

(translated by Robert Fitzgerald) 

In this conversation with a supposed stranger who is said to know about her husband’s return, Penelope doesn’t ask about Odysseus’s whereabouts. Instead, she asks about his history, about that time 20 years ago he supposedly met Odysseus, about what Odysseus was wearing.

There is something John B. Vlahos points out that I wouldn’t have known, reading the Odyssey in translation: a hint from Odysseus. Eva Brann makes the same observation in her essay: 

“And now begins a curious, teasing, allusive conversation (XIX 104 ff). Odysseus asks her not to question him “…lest you fill my heart with many sorrows…” (XIX 117). Now the Greek here for “sorrows” is odynaon, a word which sounds in Odysseus’ own name; so for instance, he sits on Calypso’s isle “sorrowing [Odysseus-like] for his return” (noston odyromenos, V 153). He is audibly naming himself to her.” 

After being questioned, Odysseus has his feet washed by the old nurse and—this is a famous moment—he is recognised by her. Penelope doesn’t notice this moment of recognition as she’s deep in thought. Then she starts speaking, and tells Odysseus about the dream—why would she, if she believes him to be a stranger?—it is a coded message and Penelope is asking Odysseus if he’s going to kill the suitors. He says: 

“My dear, how can you choose to read the dream

differently? Has not Odysseus himself

shown you what is to come? Death to the suitors,

sure death, too. Not one escapes his doom.” 

(Book 19) 

She then tells Odysseus about her plan. In Book 21, Homer confusingly says that Athena puts in Penelope’s mind the idea of the bow, but Penelope has come up with the plan herself in Book 19: in a kind of double talk as though she intends to marry one of the suitors, she hints at what she wants, tells Odysseus what she’s going to do, and lets him know how she’s going to supply him with weapons.

My interpretation not only fits in with everything the characters say and do, but it also makes more sense than the popular interpretation: it might seem odd and inconsistent that Penelope all of a sudden announces the test of the bow and offers herself as the prize, the day after hearing from multiple people that Odysseus is still alive, unless she knows or suspects the beggar to be her husband and has faith in him and contrives a way to place the bow in his hands without provoking suspicions. But Penelope is afraid—there are 108 suitors, Odysseus comes back alone, Telemakhos is young—that’s why she seems shocked and distrustful when hearing the news from Eurykleia. 

Finally, the reunion. The common interpretation is that Penelope only discovers Odysseus’s identity in Book 23 and confirms it with the test of the bed. I think it’s a double test: it’s the final test as she has suspected or recognised Odysseus but couldn’t know for sure that it’s him; at the same time, it’s not only about whether or not he knows about their bridal bed, but also about whether he knows its significance and cherishes it the way she does—she doesn’t only test his identity, she also needs to test his affection.  

Now that I’ve interpreted the Odyssey in this light, I’ve realised that it’s a truly subtle and sophisticated work of art. And I love Penelope. 

The Odyssey: “they denied us life together in our prime and flowering years” [updated]

Painting by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein.

1/ As I picked up the Odyssey, I jokingly said to friends, let’s see what literature was like before the human’s invented (yes, I’m a Harold Bloom hater—why do you ask?).

I doubt anyone could read the Odyssey and think Odysseus is a two-dimensional character or has a flat personality. He’s an ingenious man, but sometimes brings trouble to himself and his men because of curiosity, or because of pride. He cleverly finds a way to escape from the Cyclops, but has to name himself, only to get cursed and wander for 10 years before he can return home. He is a great storyteller and a sharp-witted man, but can sometimes be dishonest. He loves his wife Penelope, but happily stays with the sorceress Kirke (or Circe) for a year. He wants to test Penelope, but gets insulted when she doesn’t immediately trust him. And in revenge he is brutal and savage. 

Most interestingly, Odysseus is the one narrating his own adventures—how much is true and how much is embellished? 

2/ Many people have talked about Homer’s use of epithets—“grey-eyed Athena”, “Odysseus, raider of cities”, “the great tactician”, “clear-headed Telemakhos”, and so on—which help with the metre of the poem and which also aid readers in keeping track of characters. 

I think this is something Tolstoy learnt from Homer when he had to work with hundreds of characters: Tolstoy may not use epithets, but he pins down a physical trait or a detail for each character and repeats it throughout the novel, so you can remember and follow the characters.  

Speaking of Tolstoy, he wrote in his essay on Shakespeare: 

“… However distant Homer is from us, we can, without the slightest effort, transport ourselves into the life he describes, and we can thus transport ourselves because, however alien to us may be the events Homer describes, he believes in what he says and speaks seriously, and therefore he never exaggerates, and the sense of measure never abandons him. This is the reason why, not to speak of the wonderfully distinct, lifelike, and beautiful characters of Achilles, Hector, Priam, Odysseus, and the eternally touching scenes of Hector’s leave-taking, of Priam’s embassy, of Odysseus’s return, and others—the whole of the “Iliad” and still more the “Odyssey” are so humanly near to us that we feel as if we ourselves had lived, and are living, among its gods and heroes. Not so with Shakespeare. From his first words, exaggeration is seen: the exaggeration of events, the exaggeration of emotion, and the exaggeration of effects. One sees at once that he does not believe in what he says, that it is of no necessity to him, that he invents the events he describes, and is indifferent to his characters—that he has conceived them only for the stage and therefore makes them do and say only what may strike his public; and therefore we do not believe either in the events, or in the actions, or in the sufferings of the characters. Nothing demonstrates so clearly the complete absence of esthetic feeling in Shakespeare as comparison between him and Homer.” 

(translated by V. Tchertkoff) 

I don’t think I need to comment on Tolstoy’s remarks on Shakespeare, but it’s fascinating to see that he loves Homer. Homer’s characters are indeed distinct—even the suitors don’t all speak one voice—and lifelike—I actually had more trouble trying to understand the characters in The Tale of Genji (about 1,000 years old) than the ones in the Odyssey (about 2,700 years old). 

Can’t wait to read the Iliad and compare it to War and Peace. 

3/ The Odyssey is in many ways a very masculine/ male-dominated book: it’s not only about Odysseus’s return home and destruction of the suitors, but also about his son’s coming-of-age. 

But Homer gets you to have sympathy for the women. Especially Penelope: 

“She answered:

“Eurýmakhos, my qualities—I know—

my face, my figure, all were lost or blighted

when the Akhaians crossed the sea to Troy,

Odysseus my lord among the rest.

If he returned, if he were here to care for me,

I might be happily renowned!

But grief instead heaven sent me—years of pain.

[…] The years he spoke of are now past; the night

comes when a bitter marriage overtakes me, 

desolate as I am, deprived by Zeus

of all the sweets of life.” 

(Book 18) 

(translated by Robert Fitzgerald) 

Here is a good woman, an intelligent woman, separated from her husband and unable to ward off the unwanted suitors. 

When she and Odysseus final reunite and she has to test him, she says: 

“… Think

what difficulty the gods gave: they denied us

life together in our prime and flowering years,

kept us from crossing into age together.” 

(Book 23) 

Homer may not tell Penelope’s story, but he gets us to think about her, to feel for her desolation and sorrow as her husband gets sent off to war for 10 years and goes missing for another 10 years, without any signs that he’s alive, let alone that he would ever return. How long had they even been married before he left? 

Homer clearly has lots of compassion for Penelope, but she’s not just a virtuous woman—she is intelligent—her cleverness matches Odysseus’s. 

And it’s not just Penelope. Nausikaa, though she appears briefly, seems like an intelligent girl. Kalypso has me interested—I mean, yes, she detains Odysseus against his will, but what after all is wrong with wanting a husband? And the scene of Odysseus meeting the ghost of his mother is one of the most moving scenes in the poem: 

“I bit my lip,

rising perplexed, with longing to embrace her,

and tried three times, putting my arms around her,

but she went sifting through my hands, impalpable

as shadows are, and wavering like a dream.

Now this embittered all the pain I bore,

and I cried in the darkness…”

(Book 11) 

4/ In the Postscript, Robert Fitzgerald argues—and I think makes a good case—that Penelope suspects the beggar and tests him long before he reveals himself to her. She asks him questions. She says things that sound like things she wants Odysseus to hear. 

Fitzgerald says: 

“During the day, before the evening, Penélopê has been told first that her husband is alive, second that he is on the island, and third that he is coming soon. She has been waiting for ten years with no such authentic news and no such startling expectations and had made the suitors wait for nearly four. Are we, the audience, to believe that she wouldn’t wait a few days longer to see if her husband turns up? Is it conceivable that, instead of waiting, the woman so distinguished for tenacity would this very evening give up the waiting game and seriously propose to marry the next day? How could she come to this abrupt decision in the course of her evening scene with Odysseus unless she realized that the stranger before her was indeed her husband?” 

And whilst Odysseus and Telemakhos have no exact plan to take down the suitors, Penelope is the one who comes up with the idea of a contest with the bow*—she is the one who supplies Odysseus with a weapon to kill the suitors. 

5/ Homer also gets us to care about the slaves, especially Eumanois the swineherd, and Odysseus’s old nurse Eurykleia. Does he have to tell us their backstories? No, it doesn’t advance the plot. But he tells their stories and gets us to care about all these characters, and it makes the Odyssey a much vaster, richer world. 

I have now finished reading the Odyssey, after nearly 2 weeks. It is magnificent. 

* Update on 10/9: I’ve now realised, upon rereading some parts of the Odyssey, that I missed and misunderstood a few lines in the poem: the idea of the bow comes entirely from Penelope and she tells him beforehand. I am convinced that Penelope suspects him long before he reveals himself to her. 

This is an interesting essay by Eva Brann, making the same point. I especially like this bit: 

“For the true crux of this last adventure was not the testing of Penelope by Odysseus, but that of Odysseus, so slow to come home, by Penelope, and her question was never: is this Odysseus? but: is it an Odysseus who cherishes live roots deep in the house? But now she comes to him, Homer says, as if she had reached land after a shipwreck (XXIII 239). His wife, by masking her immediate penetration of Odysseus’ factual incognito, has raised the occasion of his return into a test of the wanderer’s truth to his roots; she has assured herself that the “great token” still holds its meaning.”