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.” 

The Odyssey: “In the hushed hall it smote the suitors and all their faces changed”

Odysseus and Polyphemus, a Cyclops (painting by Arnold Böcklin) 

1/ It is not hard to understand the enduring power and popularity of the Odyssey—even before we talk about themes and technique, it is first of all an exciting story. The poem has a great structure: the first half is about Odysseus’s journey home after 10 years in the Trojan War and another 10 years in the sea; the second half is about Odysseus in Ithake (or Ithaca) figuring out what’s going on in his household in his absence, and taking revenge on the presumptuous and disrespectful suitors of his wife Penelope.

The first half is Odysseus (with some help from Athena) against nymphs and monsters and the wrath of Poseidon. The second half is Odysseus (with some help from Athena) against the suitors who have been courting Penelope, taking advantage of their culture of hospitality, eating away his property, and even plotting the murder of his son Telemakhos (also known as Telemachus or Telemachos). 

The entire poem is about homecoming, but in some sense, the first half is an adventure story; the second half is a revenge story. And in the centre is ingenious, sharp-witted Odysseus. 

2/ In the previous blog post, I wrote that “I can’t help feeling uneasy—perhaps even slightly cheated—that the protagonist doesn’t come up with everything himself…” Well, I have changed my view—or rather, it was great to see Odysseus and Telemakhos do the planning and fighting themselves. The scene about the test of the bow is especially satisfying! 

The quote in the headline comes from Book 21, translated by Robert Fitzgerald. 

I have been switching between the translations by Peter Green (my own copy) and Robert Fitzgerald (from the library); picking the latter for the last 8 books. Green provides better notes and he is clearer—more accurate, according to some classicists I know—but Fitzgerald sounds better. 

3/ I haven’t written about the writing—style, metaphor, imagery—of the Odyssey, have I? There are some striking passages. 

“At this,

Pallas Athena touched off in the suitors

a fit of laughter, uncontrollable.

She drove them into nightmare, till they wheezed

and neighed as though with jaws no longer theirs,

while blood defiled their meat, and blurring tears

flooded their eyes, heart-sore with woe to come.

Then said the visionary, Theoklymenos:

“O lost sad men, what terror is this you suffer?

Night shrouds you to the knees, your heads, your faces;

dry retch of death runs round like fire in sticks;

your cheeks are streaming; these fair walls and pedestals

are dripping crimson blood. And thick with shades

is the entry way, the courtyard thick with shades

passing athirst toward Erebos, into the dark,

the sun is quenched in heaven, foul mist hems us in …”” 

(Book 20) 

Look at this vivid, striking image, after Odysseus has killed the suitors: 

“Think of a catch that fishermen haul in to a halfmoon bay

in a fine-meshed net from the white-caps of the sea:

how all are poured out on the sand, in throes for the salt sea,

twitching their cold lives away in Hêlios’ fiery air:

so lay the suitors heaped on one another.

[…] Telémakhos

led her forward. In the shadowy hall

full of dead men she found his father

spattered and caked with blood like a mountain lion

when he has gorged upon an ox, his kill—

with hot blood glistening over his whole chest,

smeared on his jaws, baleful and terrifying—

even so encrimsoned was Odysseus

up to his thighs and armpits…” 

(Book 22) 

Too violent? Here’s a tender moment, when Penelope listens to Odysseus—in disguise as a beggar—speaking about her husband: 

“… she wept as she sat listening. The skin

of her pale face grew moist the way pure snow

softens and glistens on the mountains, thawed

by Southwind after powdering from the West,

and, as the snow melts, mountain streams run full:

so her white cheeks were wetted by these tears

shed for her lord…” 

(Book 21) 

The Odyssey is full of such interesting images and similes. 

At some point, I should perhaps write about the characters.

Đi & khám phá: Video du lịch York

Lâu lâu viết tiếng Việt trên blog, mặc dù mỳnh chắc có khoảng 2 độc giả người Việt (đặc biệt nhé!). 

Mời bà con xem video mỳnh edit về York, một trong những thành phố trung cổ đẹp nhất ở Vương quốc Anh. Video nói về lịch sử, văn hóa, nét đặc trưng của York, một số điểm nên đến khi ghé thăm York, và một số chỗ ăn uống. Hồi xưa mỳnh ở Leeds, đi York vài lần nhưng không biết, sau này đọc cuốn Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent mới nhận ra bà Judi Dench là dân York, sinh ở Heworth (không phải Haworth), rồi tới khi làm video này mới biết ở York có con đường tên là Dame Judi Dench Walk. 

(Sẵn nói cuốn Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, ai thích Shakespeare và bà Judi Dench nên đọc. Không chỉ kể chuyện sân khấu—cực hài—mà bà Judi Dench còn phân tích các vở và nhân vật của Shakespeare). 

Mà nếu không quan tâm vấn đề văn hóa thì bà con cũng xem video cho vui đi (mỳnh mất công edit, hê hê). 

The Odyssey: “won’t you ever […] abandon your deceptions and the lying tales you adore from the very ground up?”

A Grecian vase depicting Odysseus and the Sirens (why is Odysseus naked though?). 

1/ Here is something interesting Homer does in the Odyssey: we first see Odysseus with Kalypso and know he has been held captive there for 7 years; we see him try to survive in the sea till he gets to the island of Alkinoos (better known as Alcinous) and Nausicaa (Alkinoos’s daughter); Odysseus tells his own story of the journey home over the past 10 years (Books 9-12); after all the hospitalities, the king Alkinoos helps Odysseus go home; upon setting foot on his homeland Ithake (better known as Ithaca), which he doesn’t recognise after being away for 20 years, Odysseus sees a man, who he doesn’t realise is Athene, and makes up a story about himself, only for Athene to reveal herself and tease him. The quote in the headline comes from that scene (translated by Peter Green). 

Note that. Not only does Odysseus make up a story on the spot—who asks?—but it’s richly detailed. 

Does that not make you see the Odyssey in a different light? All the adventures are narrated by Odysseus himself: all the encounters with the Lotus-Eaters and the Kyclopes (Cyclops) and Kirke (Circe) and the spirits and the Sirens and Skylle (Scylla) and Charybdis and the sun god Helios. “Unreliable narrator” may be a modern concept but “liar” is not—perhaps Sophocles and Euripides thought that too as they didn’t seem to like Odysseus (though they also had other sources apart from Homer). I’m not saying that Odysseus makes up everything—this is a world in which gods and nymphs and monsters exist—but surely he embellishes his tales and makes himself look better.

(I should probably read the Iliad before saying much nonsense about Odysseus though). 

2/ Apart from being the greatest works of Western literature, what do the Odyssey, Don Quixote, and the plays of Shakespeare have in common? They all feature some kind of transformation: metamorphosis or disguise or acting. (Almost) every single Shakespeare play has some disguise, some acting or pretending, some version of “I am not what I am”: women dressing up as men, noblemen disguising as commoners, sane men acting mad, women pretending to die, and so on; and of course, some characters play a role without putting on any disguise, like Edmund or Iago. In Don Quixote, a hidalgo named Alonso Quixano decides to become an errant knight and transforms himself into Don Quixote; some other characters wear disguise and make up stories to trick him, or play pranks on him and Sancho. In the Odyssey, Athene assumes different shapes as she guides Odysseus and his son Telemachos on their journeys (I didn’t realise till now that the word “mentor” came from the Odyssey); Odysseus famously disguises himself as a beggar upon his return to Ithake, to figure out what’s going on in his household (which reminds me of Henry V), but before that he already pretends to be someone else a few times, such as in his trickery of the Kyclopes. 

Odysseus is an actor as well as a storyteller. 

It probably adds to the vitality and complexity of these characters that they transform themselves, reinvent themselves. 

3/ Speaking of storytelling, I have never understood readers who complain about things which don’t advance the plot or which don’t have anything to do with the main character. That complaint I have seen many times over the years about many of my favourite novels; now I see it in some reviews of the Odyssey. 

Why such a hurry? Take your time, enjoy the journey, get to know the people you meet on the way. 

Moby Dick is such an exhilarating masterpiece because of those digressions, because of those meditations on whales, because of Ishmael’s quest to understand the whale and understand life. War and Peace feels so rich and full of life because Tolstoy fleshes out all the characters, because he gets us to know even the most insignificant characters. The Odyssey feels so vast because all the characters that Odysseus or Telemachos comes across have their own adventures and their own stories. 

4/ One thing that makes me feel uncomfortable—if that’s the right word—about the Odyssey is how much the gods interfere with human affairs and how much is fated. I know it’s the ancient Greece. I know it’s their belief. But I can’t help feeling uneasy—perhaps even slightly cheated—that the protagonist doesn’t come up with everything himself: it’s Athene who tells Telemachos to set sail in search of his father; it’s Athene who guides him along the way; it’s Athene who later tells Telemachos to come back; it’s Athene who gets Zeus to help Odysseus leave Kalypso; it’s Athene who appears as a little girl and guides Odysseus on the island of Nausicaa; it’s Athene who gives advice and disguises Odysseus as he’s back in Ithake; and so on.

I don’t mind that Kirke advises Odysseus how to survive the Sirens, or how to escape the dangerous path between Skylle and Charybdis—how would Odysseus know otherwise?—and Odysseus and his men still have to do everything they can to fight the monsters and survive in the sea. But it makes me feel uneasy nevertheless about the belief and depiction of human beings as so insignificant, so helpless, unable to escape their fate and unable to fight against the caprices of the gods.  

5/ The poster doesn’t make me particularly hopeful about Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of the Odyssey. The tagline is “Defy the gods.” 

The Odyssey: “Tell us this tale, goddess, child of Zeus; start anywhere in it!”

1/ The Odyssey is one of the foundational works of Western literature, and yet I knew so little about it and still had my surprises. Of course, I knew about the Wooden Horse at Troy (who doesn’t?), about Kirke (better known as Circe) turning Odysseus’s men into pigs, about Kalypso and the promise of immortality, about Penelope and her weaving trick, etc. but I didn’t know about the structure of the Odyssey. It’s natural, is it not, to assume that an epic poem from around the 8th century BC would start at the beginning and tell the story chronologically to the end? So I naively thought. But no, the Odyssey begins in medias res—actually towards the end—and we don’t see Odysseus till Book 5 (out of 24). Odysseus’s adventures are told by different people—by Odysseus himself in Books 9–12. 

I switched back and forth between Peter Green and Robert Fitzgerald before deciding to stick to Green. 

Let’s compare. This is Fitzgerald: 

“When primal Dawn spread on the eastern sky

her fingers of pink light, Odysseus’ true son

stood up, drew on his tunic and his mantle,

slung on a sword-belt and a new-edged sword,

tied his smooth feet into good rawhide sandals,

and left his room, a god’s brilliance upon him.

He found the criers with clarion voices and told them

to muster the unshorn Akhaians in full assembly.

The call sang out, and the men came streaming in;

and when they filled the assembly ground, he entered,

spear in hand, with two quick hounds at heel;

Athena lavished on him a sunlit grace

that held the eye of the multitude. Old men

made way for him as he took his father’s chair.” 

(Book 2) 

The same passage, by Green: 

“When Dawn appeared, early risen and rosy-fingered, 

Odysseus’ dear son got up from the bed he’d slept in, 

put on his clothes, slung a sharp sword from one shoulder, 

tied on a pair of fine sandals under his sleek feet, 

and sallied forth from his chamber, in appearance like a god. 

At once he issued orders to the clear-voiced heralds 

to call to assembly the long-haired Achaians. They made 

the proclamations he ordered, and quickly the people gathered. 

When they were met together in a single body 

Telemachos now joined them, a bronze spear in one hand, 

not alone, but accompanied by a pair of hunting dogs, 

and wondrous the grace that Athene now shed on him, 

so that the whole crowd watched him as he approached: 

he sat in his father’s seat, and the elders made way for him.” 

Fitzgerald: 

“Under the opening fingers of the dawn

Alkínoös, the sacred prince, arose,

and then arose Odysseus, raider of cities.

As the king willed, they went down by the shipways

to the assembly ground of the Phaiákians.

Side by side the two men took their ease there

on smooth stone benches. Meanwhile Pallas Athena

roamed through the byways of the town, contriving

Odysseus’ voyage home…”  

(Book 8) 

Green: 

“When Dawn appeared, early risen and rosy-fingered, 

Alkinoos, princely in power, arose from his slumber, 

and Odysseus, the Zeus-born sacker of cities, rose too. 

Alkinoos, princely in power, now led the way to 

the Phaiakians’ assembly place, built for them near their ships: 

On arrival there they sat down on the polished stones

side by side, while Pallas Athene went through the city 

in the likeness of the herald of sagacious Alkinoos, 

working on the return of great-hearted Odysseus…” 

Fitzgerald sounds better, Green can sometimes be rather dry and stilted, but it seems to me that Green retains better the repetition of Homer’s style. For instance, the image of Dawn, “early risen and rosy-fingered”, is said over and over again throughout the story, not only by the narrator but by different characters. 

Green also provides better notes (especially for an ignoramus like me). 

2/ I have enjoyed the Odyssey from the beginning, but my mistake at the start was comparing it to the Athenian tragedians and Shakespeare, wanting more poetry, finding some parts of the narration mundane and some passages prosaic. Then I realised it’s better to compare it to Don Quixote—to see the Odyssey as gradually leading to Don Quixote (and other novels). In many ways, the Odyssey is a precursor to the picaresque novel: a character travels from place to place and has adventures and meets different groups of people; he may tell strangers his own story or they may tell theirs, creating stories within the story. In this sense, Homer feels closer to Cervantes than to Shakespeare, or even Sophocles.

3/ I’m going backwards, reading the Odyssey after the tragedies of the 5th century BC. It turns out to be a good idea, as Homer tells the myths in snatches and only gives those mythological characters cameos—after all, Homer’s first audience was acquainted with them—but luckily I have seen them in close-up in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (not to mention Seneca). Odysseus’s encounter with Aias (also known as Ajax) in the Underworld and the latter’s cold reaction would have been lost on me if I hadn’t read Sophocles’s play, but I have, and it’s a great scene.

Especially interesting is when I see the tragedies depart from Homer: Homer’s story about Oedipus for instance has quite a different ending from that of Sophocles’s play (I myself prefer Sophocles’s version). 

(On a side note, before getting into ancient Greek literature, I somehow always imagined Homer and the playwrights being around the same time, or not very far apart. The gap between Homer’s epics and Greek tragedy is about the same as between Gulliver’s Travels or Robison Crusoe and now). 

Let’s hope I have some more interesting things to say later on. 

Why read/ watch plays? (P.3): Plays vs films

Before we begin, I’m going to say that I’m talking about plays in the broad sense: not only live performances but also texts and filmed plays and audio recordings (“Let’s hear a play”); I however exclude musicals.

If we compare cinema and theatre (in the sense of live performance), we can all name the advantages of theatre: the nearness of the audience to the actors, the interaction and immediacy, the fact that no two performances are the same. But if we compare cinema and drama (in the broad sense), I’m afraid most people would only talk about the advantages of cinematic language: the language of image, large scenes, visual effects, and above all, editing and the close-up. It is derogatory when a film or TV series is described as “stagey”; what’s the equivalent for the other way around? 

I myself have loved literature and cinema all my life—my interest in drama is relatively new—but I love Shakespeare. That’s why I want to examine these questions: are films actually superior to plays, or is cinematic language superior to the language of drama, as the derogatory use of “stagey” seems to suggest? What do plays do better than films?

Now you may argue that the word “stagey” only suggests that a film should use cinematic language, but let’s look at the word when it’s used for TV. In the past, TV series, especially TV adaptations of classic novels, were modelled after theatre; now they’re modelled after films, meaning that they’re now meant and expected to be cinematic. Look at the 1972 War and Peace or 1977 Anna Karenina for example. Some people disparage them as stagey, and in some ways these TV series are closer to plays—lots of dialogue and minimal camerawork—but this also means that the screenwriters and directors pay more attention to dialogue and let the scenes unfold. Both series are excellent adaptations that take Tolstoy’s novels seriously and convey the complexity of the characters. Now if you look at the 2013 TV adaptation of Anna Karenina, you can see that it’s modelled after cinema and dialogue is devalued. And I can’t help asking, why do they keep moving the camera? Why do they cut every 4 seconds? (I counted) Why do they not let the scene unfold? I couldn’t even watch beyond 5-10 minutes of the 2018 King Lear for the same reasons, despite my admiration for Anthony Hopkins and Florence Pugh as actors. 

I’m not saying that screen adaptations of classic novels should be closer to plays, nor that they shouldn’t employ cinematic language. I’m also not saying that I’m mainly interested in drama driven by dialogue, driven by words (as my friend Himadri would probably say, who loves plays more than films). But dialogue is increasingly devalued in our mainly visual world—the word “stagey” reflects that—and that I find very sad. 

Films and plays do different things and have different strengths—I love both. In a film, the story and conflict are driven by many things, including dialogue (which some filmmakers unfortunately seem to forget). In a play, drama is driven by dialogue: what we say and what we don’t say and how we say it and how we hide or deceive with words. 

Persona or Cries and Whispers for instance has to be a film—it would not work as a novel or a play or an audio performance. Conversely, Rosmersholm has to be a play—you could of course turn it into a film, but its ambiguity and intricacies cannot be communicated by image or cinematic language. 

And when I watch Shakespeare, which I can’t watch live all the time (I’m just a poor girl, from a poor family), the choice would more often be a recording of a live performance, or a filmed play (like the BBC Television Shakespeare from the 1970s-80s), than a film adaptation. Sometimes a Shakespeare film respects the text, such as the 1993 and 2012 Much Ado About Nothing. Very often, Shakespeare’s words are heavily cut. Chimes at Midnight on its own is probably a passable film, but Orson Welles condenses into two hours the two Henry IV plays, with some bits from Richard II, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. The result is a Falstaff—Welles—film with lots of supporting characters: all the others are underdeveloped, but even Falstaff is sentimentalised and simplified. 

Some Shakespeare films also indicate something like a fear of words. The 2015 Macbeth—perhaps I’m being unfair as I didn’t watch all of it—breaks into pieces the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech, mixing in flashbacks and battle scenes and special effects and drowning music. The main actors, Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, also don’t know how to speak the words. 

Even when we look at Kurosawa’s adaptations of Shakespeare, Ran is a masterpiece, a work of art on its own separate from King Lear, but Throne of Blood is shallow compared to Macbeth: stripped of much dialogue, it is an exciting film, but doesn’t have the complexity of Macbeth; the main characters are reduced to a weak man urged on by an evil wife. Now you might say Throne of Blood uses cinematic language and I should judge it as a film, so I would say that it is not a profound, thought-provoking film. 

Now I have seen many film adaptations of plays, it would be interesting to watch play adaptations of films. 

Why read plays? (P.2): Plays vs novels

I know, I wrote that the last blog post was my response once and for all to the mantra “Plays are meant to be seen, not read.” But I want to write about a different aspect: Why read plays? What do plays offer that novels do not? 

(Ibsen staring into your soul). 

Considering the popularity of novels, I think we can all name the advantages of novels. Some might argue that novels dig deeper into characters’ minds and have more psychological depth, but I don’t agree—look at Shakespeare—Hamlet and Macbeth and Brutus and many other characters question themselves, struggle with themselves, and people have analysed them for 400 years. But scope is one advantage: a play cannot have hundreds of characters and a wide range of experiences like War and Peace. Length and span are another: The Winter’s Tale might be an exception in making a jump of 16 years, but it doesn’t cover 16 years; War and Peace spans from 1805 to 1813, then jumps to 1820.

However, plays have their own strengths—I’m not even talking about plays as performance, but as text. Plays show a clash of perspectives. I won’t talk again about the range of views in Shakespeare—I think I’ve been annoying enough about this subject—you all know what I would say. Instead, look at Ibsen. In The Wild Duck, he shows the contrast between a character who thinks human beings need delusion and can’t cope with much of the truth, and a character who tears down a marriage to set it on a new foundation of truth and destroys everything. In An Enemy of the People, he depicts a man of integrity, a man of courage standing up for the truth, but at the same time also lets us see the concerns of the townspeople, and makes us feel uneasy about the heroic man. In Rosmersholm, he depicts three different people—or four if you count Mrs Helseth—grappling with a suicide and questioning, blaming themselves. What actually happened? Who is to blame? 

Occasionally you find a novel with the same quality. Tolstoy for instance enters different characters’ minds and depicts their different—clashing—perspectives. William Faulkner has multiple characters narrating the story, in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. But even when a novelist switches between different perspectives, there is narration—there is someone shaping how you see characters and events—you are always aware of the authorial presence. The closest a novel gets to a play in this aspect is the epistolary form: in Dangerous Liaisons, the finest epistolary novel I’ve read, you see the different perspectives, you see the manipulators set out their plan and see them at work, you read between the lines and imagine the effect on the receiver of each letter. 

Normally, a novel focuses on a single point of view, or has an omniscient or objective point of view. In the former case—when the story is narrated by the protagonist (such as Jane Eyre) or an observer/ another character (such as Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby), or it has a third-person narrator but mainly focuses on a single perspective (such as Jane Austen’s novels)—we see everything through that one perspective. With the third-person narrator who focuses on one character’s point of view, we can see the author: Jane Austen’s use of free indirect discourse for instance creates a double perspective, a dual voice—the narrator’s voice blending in with the character’s voice. But even when a novel has a first-person narrator, you can see the author somewhere between the lines: even though Lolita is seen through the eyes of Humbert Humbert, we can see—even without the framing device—that Nabokov is not Humbert Humbert. 

In the latter case, when the story has an omniscient or objective point of view, there is a narrator guiding the reader, which you don’t get in plays. Take Rosmersholm, for instance. What goes on in Rebecca’s mind when she cries out in joy and then rejects Rosmer’s proposal? And because there is no narrator and we are restricted to what the characters say, Ibsen gets us to see the situation in a certain way in the first two acts then turns everything upside down in Act 3. Even then, we only have fragments and there are things we would never know. What actually happened? What’s the truth about the relationship between Rosmer and Beata? What was on Beata’s mind when she decided to kill herself? 

Himadri (Argumentative Old Git) says: 

“I think Ibsen makes use of the fact that there *is* no narrator - no-one to interpret things, even by implication.

[…] This communicates a sense of mystery - not in the sense that the narrator isn’t giving us answers, but in the sense that there is no answer to give that may be articulated.

I don’t know to what extent this is possible in a novel.

A sense of the mystery of our human lives, of its inscrutability, is difficult to convey in a novel, where you’re aware of the authorial presence, even if the authors do their best to keep themselves in the background.”

Even in An Enemy of the People, a play that seems more straightforward than other Ibsen plays, there is a sense of mystery: what happens in Dr Stockman’s mind between Act 3 and Act 4 that he, when he has the chance to speak to people in town, decides not to speak about his findings about the baths but, instead, to have a rant about “the common man”? And more importantly, as Himadri has put it, why is the truth about the endangerment to public health so important to Dr Stockman, considering his contempt for the public? 

That sense of mystery is one of the fascinating things about Shakespeare. Why does Hamlet not act? What goes on in his mind when he tells Ophelia “Get thee to a nunnery”? Why does Iago hate Othello so much that he sets out to destroy him? Does he actually suspect Othello of having slept with his wife? What does Viola see in Orsino? Where does Leontes’s jealousy come from? 

Let’s have a discussion. 

Why read plays?

It is an unwritten rule on the internet that whenever you speak about reading Shakespeare, someone is to appear and (angrily) say “Plays are meant to be seen, not read.” 

This blog post is me responding to that once and for all. 

Why read plays, especially Shakespeare? 

1. The Preface to the First Folio says “Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe.” 
2. Shakespeare is a dramatic poet—poetry is better savoured when read.
3. It’s also better to think about the meaning of a phrase, a line, a speech when you read the play (especially for a non-native speaker like me). 
4. A play, especially a Shakespeare play, is different from a screenplay. You may not read the screenplay of Citizen Kane (though you can, it’s published) because the greatness and influence of Citizen Kane also lie in mise-en-scène and cinematography and sound and editing and acting and so on; the greatness of Shakespeare lies in his words. 
5. A performance is an interpretation: Ian McKellen’s Iago is different from Bob Hoskins’s Iago is different from Rory Kinnear’s Iago. We form our own interpretation from the text. 
6. Which actor on the stage or the screen can possibly convey the richness and complexity of Hamlet, Cleopatra, or Falstaff on the page?  
7. Whether or not Shakespeare intended his plays to be read, people have read—and loved reading—his plays for centuries. 
8. If you only watch plays, you would never know many major works of Western literature, you would never know all the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Molière, Racine, Calderón, Ibsen, etc. 
9. Even with Shakespeare, the most performed playwright in the world, some of his plays are rarely performed. 
10. Or you may go to the theatre thinking you’re watching a Chekhov play or an Ibsen play, but it’s “a new version” by someone else. 
11. If you want to know Greek tragedy but only want to see it performed, you not only have no choice in which play is performed, you also have no choice in which translation is being used. You might even end up with a hip hop version (like The Bacchae at the National Theatre in London).   
12.  A great performance may be an exhilarating experience and deepen your understanding of the play, but a bad performance, well… 

“Plays are meant to be seen, not read”? Just admit you’re not used to reading plays. 

Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen

1/ In Rosmersholm, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, and—if I remember correctly—The Doll’s House, Ibsen seems closer to the ancient Greeks than to Shakespeare, in the sense that the drama lies not in what the characters are now doing, but in the discovery of, and reaction to, what they did in the past. There are two important differences though: the Greeks wrote about mythical characters, Ibsen wrote about ordinary people; the Greek plays are based on myths known to the audience, Ibsen’s plays have an element of surprise. You may, for example, read Oedipus the King and watch the way Oedipus slowly discovers the painful truth about his sins, which you already know; you may read Electra and watch her reaction to the news of Orestes’s death, which you already know is a trap; but reading Rosmersholm, you must piece together the picture at the same time as some of the characters. It’s captivating, but it’s also disturbing—you think you know someone, but you don’t—your perception of the characters changes, then changes again, then changes again as things unfold. And Ibsen is one of those writers who are utterly terrifying—there’s something harsh and uncompromising and ruthless about him. 

(I read the translation by James MacFarlane). 

2/ Rosmersholm is about Johannes Rosmer (former clergyman and owner of Rosmersholm) and his companion Rebecca West, one year after the suicide of Rosmer’s wife Beata. Like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Beata casts a long shadow after her death, seeming to never go away. The interesting part, I would argue, is that the play is not really a depiction of two people haunted by the past. When the play begins, one year after the suicide, Rosmer may avoid the bridge but he and Rebecca West both seem to live peacefully. The trouble only begins when Kroll, Beata’s brother, visits them again after a long time and, after an argument about Rosmer’s new ideas and apostasy, sows some seeds of doubt and guilt in his mind, breaking Rosmer’s peace of mind and the peace at Rosmersholm. Rosmer and Kroll also force Rebecca to confront the past and confess the truth—you think you know someone, but you don’t—it changes her and Rosmer’s perception of her and their relationship.

The play, I think, is more about the chaos that lies underneath the surface of our lives. A bit of disturbance and everything collapses. 

    

3/ Spoiler alert: those of you who have not read or seen the play are warned that for the rest of the blog post, I may discuss significant plot points. 

Rosmersholm is a complex, multi-layered play. There are lots of things to say. One can focus on the clash of ideas in the play; or the fanaticism and cruelty of the conservative Kroll; or the hypocrisy of the radical Peder Mortensgaard; or the impossibility of knowing the truth and understanding Beata; or the truth about Rosmer’s marriage with Beata (and their sex life); or Rosmer’s dependence and his need for a role model; or the joylessness at Rosmersholm and its influence on Rebecca; or the character of Mrs Helseth, the housekeeper; or the image of White Horses; or the ending; and so on. 

However, a couple of things particularly fascinate me. One is the theme of truth. For some reason, I generally only see people talk about social issues, feminism, etc. when talking about Ibsen, which is a very superficial reading of Ibsen’s plays. As my friend Himadri—the Ibsen expert—has pointed out, Ibsen is obsessed with the truth and its different aspects: the consequence of hiding the truth, the cost of exposing the truth, the importance of truth, the impossibility of knowing the truth… In this play, there are lots of questions. What’s the truth about the marriage at Rosmersholm? Was Beata oversexed or was Rosmer undersexed? Did she hold him back, constrain, limit him? Who actually drove her to suicide? Why did she, before death, reach out to Mortensgaard? What does Rebecca mean about her past? 

Rosmersholm is, I think, about the chaos that lies underneath the surface of daily life—there is peace when Rosmer doesn’t know and Rebecca doesn’t confront the truth—and when she does, everything collapses, his faith in her is destroyed, life is impossible. 

Another fascinating thing is that in Act 3, Ibsen places together two terrifying characters, confronting each other: one is Kroll, ready to do anything for his ideas, regardless of personal relationships; the other is Rebecca, ready to do anything for power over another person, regardless of life and death. In a way, Rebecca West has something of Hedda Gabler, one of the most terrifying female characters in literature (why is Ibsen like this, though?). 

The play also shows the difficulty—if not impossibility—of really knowing another person: you may live in the same house with someone, you may fall in love with them, but they may turn out to be completely different from what you thought. It’s a dreadful thought. 

This is a masterpiece, but I need some time to recover.