Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  In 1846 Carlyle and Mazzini spent an evening together in London. Carlyle, who set such store by taciturnity, was himself notoriously garrulous. That night his talk “was a defence of mere force, success the test of right. If people would not behave well, put collars round their necks. Find a hero and let them be his slaves. It was very Titanic and Anticelestial.” Mazzini, listening, “became very sad.” Carlyle is not to be blamed for the political uses to which his valorization of hero worship was to be put, any more than Nietzsche—who disliked Germans and especially disliked German anti-Semitism—can be blamed for the fact that the Nazis approved of him. (It has been plausibly suggested that Hitler never actually read further than the title page of any of Nietzsche’s books.) But that there is a link between hero worship and the kind of political abjection which opens the way to authoritarianism is evident. Even Emerson, who wrote, “Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in great men,” who urged his readers to “serve the great. Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no office thou canst render. Be the limb of their body, the breath of their mouths,” acknowledged that a hero can be “a monopoliser and usurper of other minds,” that his worshipers are “intellectual suicides.” Simone Weil, reading Homer in the 1930s, saw the Iliad through the prism of contemporary events as “the poem of force” and recognized a connection between Achilles (the paramount wielder of the heroic power which gives the strong liberty by annulling the rights of the weak) and the strong rulers then intent on purging their nations of “decadent” weakness. “With every growth of man in greatness and height there is also a growth in depth and dreadfulness,” wrote Nietzsche. “The hero is an affliction and a terror.”

  There are two Homeric epics, two models of heroism. Odysseus is a warrior like Achilles but there are fundamental differences between the two of them. Achilles values prizes only for the honor they represent, but Odysseus wants to get rich: he is a looter and pillager like the Cid, an unprovoked raider of peaceful settlements like Drake, who boasts that he has “been to Hell and back for plunder.” Achilles is a truth teller. He says he hates the man “who says one thing but hides another in his heart” as he hates the Gates of Death, and he means it. Odysseus says the same thing in almost identical words but even as he says it we know that he is lying. He is a trickster, a shape-shifter, a compulsive fabulist. He is not morally better than Achilles—quite the reverse—but he is more humane. Achilles is an avatar of Thanatos. Odysseus serves Eros. Achilles stands superbly alone; Odysseus defines himself within his community and longs to be a part of it once more. At the opening of the Odyssey he is living at ease on a beautiful island, cherished by a loving nymph. He has everything a man could wish for, except that he is isolated. He lacks relationships. He lacks responsibilities. He longs to be husband, father, son, and householder again. He is tired of being a hero, a godlike beast: he wants to be human. His story leads not, like Achilles’, to a splendid tomb but to his wife’s bed.

  After Achilles’ death the war for Troy ground grimly on until Odysseus heard of a prophecy that the city would not fall until the Greeks recovered the miracle-working bow of Heracles. Heracles had given the bow to Philoctetes, a warrior who had been bitten by a snake years before and then abandoned on a desolate rock of an island because his shipmates could stand neither his ceaseless cries of agony nor the disgusting smell emanating from his incurable wound. Sophocles continues the story. Knowing that while Philoctetes has the bow he cannot be overpowered by force and that he will never voluntarily surrender it to those who so cruelly abandoned him, Odysseus goes to the island, taking with him Achilles’ son Neoptolemus, whom Philoctetes has never seen. Once there he explains to the boy that he must conceal his true identity and trick the wounded man into handing over the bow. True son to his father, Neoptolemus is appalled. He asks, “Don’t you believe it wrong to tell a lie, sir?” “No,” replies the devious Odysseus, “if success and safety depend upon it,” and he justifies himself with the simple declaration “I am what I need to be.” Neoptolemus must choose between the way of Achilles, the way of violence and honor, and the Odyssean way of guile and expediency. He vacillates, recoiling from both, and eventually he is spared his impossible decision when Heracles descends from Olympus to resolve the problem. The conclusion Neoptolemus draws from the experience is one in which both the deathly honor of Achilles and the evasiveness of Odysseus are implicitly rejected. “Each one of us must live the life God gives him; it cannot be shirked.”

  To do so is not easy. The song the sirens sing is about “the pains that Achaeans and Trojans once endured / On the spreading plain of Troy.” The temptation they offer is that of evading the hard work of becoming once more a member of civilian society and dwelling forever among the grand simplicities of warfare. It is almost irresistible. Few Homeric heroes make it home. Even for those who escape shipwreck the moment of reentry to civilian life is as perilous and traumatic as anything they have faced in battle. Agamemnon survives ten years of war and returns with his spoils and trophies only to be slaughtered, naked and defenseless in his bath, by his own wife. For Odysseus, Ithaca, his longed-for home, is infested with enemies: before he can reclaim his place in it he has to drench its floors with their blood.

  Nietzsche advocated living dangerously. He exhorted his readers to “build on the slopes of Vesuvius,” to be “robbers and ravagers,” to seek out conflict in order to experience grandeur. But excited as he was by risk and the proximity of death he also wanted desperately to love life, and it seemed to him (troubled, lonely man that he was) that to do so would be the most heroic achievement conceivable. A generation earlier Charles Baudelaire enthused about the peculiar glamour of military men—“a singular mixture of serenity and audacity; a beauty arising from the need to be prepared to die at any moment”—but to Nietzsche it was a preparedness to live that seemed truly courageous, truly sublime.

  Like Achilles, like everyone perhaps, Nietzsche craved immortality. He proclaimed the death of God. He exposed the consoling vision of an afterlife as an illusion. He insisted repeatedly and vehemently that the finite span of consciousness that is corporeal life is all that we can look for. All the same, he elaborated a theory which held out a promise of life everlasting. He called it “eternal recurrence”: “Now I die and decay … and in an instant I shall be nothingness. Souls are as mortal as bodies. But the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur—it will create me again! … I shall return, with this sun, with this earth … not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life.”

  He never made explicit how this “return” would be effected. But he was clear as to how it should be welcomed. To the inferior majority, he assumed, the prospect of living the same life over and over again would be as appalling as it apparently was to him. But “higher men” would embrace it with joy. “Joy wants itself, wants eternity, wants recurrence, wants everything eternally the same.” The superman, the hero, is hungry for all experience, however dreadful. He “wants honey, wants dregs, wants intoxicated midnights, wants graves. … So rich is joy that it thirsts for woe … for the world.” He is capable of an unreserved and absolute acceptance of the human lot, not a soft-hearted love of life because it is lovable but a grand and steely readiness to love it even though it is not. “Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love.” Nietzschean heroism is not a matter of sacrifice and denial and stoic self-repression; it is the ecstatic fortitude of unconditional affirmation, the heroism not of an Achilles who surrenders life, but of an Odysseus who goes to the ends of the earth to get it back.

  Nearly four decades after Nietzsche’s Zarathustra had spoken, James Joyce sent his latter-day Odysseus strolling through Dublin. There was a war on: Joyce was writing the first fragment of Ulysses while D’Annunzio was speaking at Quarto. The novel’s first publication, in serial form, began in 1918. While Joyce was writi
ng, Europe was convulsed and the spirit of Achilles—tragic, ferocious, and brilliant—was abroad. Patrick Shaw Stewart, killed in action in Flanders in 1916, wrote shortly before his death a poem that was also a prayer: “Stand in the trench, Achilles, / Flame capped, and shout for me.”

  It is customary now to look back on the First World War with horror, to remember the landscape transformed into a sea of mud deep enough to drown in, the rats, the wounded hanging screaming on tangles of barbed wire, the blunders of the generals, the appalling numbers of young men dead. But for some of the combatants that atrocious war afforded, however briefly, the same kind of elation as that with which the young Spartan warriors had gone into battle singing, the same the poet had ascribed to the Cid and that Garibaldi had found under the French barrage on the walls of Rome. “It is all the most wonderful fun: better fun than one could ever imagine,” wrote the aristocratic young Englishman Julian Grenfell in a letter from the front. “The fighting-excitement vitalises everything, every sight and word and action.” For all the squalor and pain and stupid slaughter men of a certain temperament found themselves enraptured. Soldiers, wrote the Hungarian Aladar Schöpflin in 1914, “are going into the totality of life.” The painter Max Beckman wrote after a month at the front, “I have in this short time lived more than I have done for years.” Fear was intoxicating and the omnipresent danger of its extinction gave a brilliant intensity to consciousness. “Living through war is living deep,” wrote the British novelist Ernest Raymond. “It’s crowded, glorious living. If I’d never had a shell rush at me I’d never have known the swift thrill of approaching death.” This was the conflict over which Nietzsche—in his more familiar, death-besotted mood—had rhapsodized, the ennobling violence which could transform a dull civilian into a superman. “The war of 1914,” declared the German sociologist Werner Sombart in 1915, “is the war of Nietzsche.” “Nietzsche is our Bible,” confirmed Rupert Brooke.

  While these ecstatic warriors, Achilles’ heirs, fought and—most of them—died in fact, in Joyce’s fiction a new Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, cuckold and advertising salesman, moved his bowels, fried his breakfast-time kidney, and went about his day’s business in a world as yet undisturbed by the conflict through which his creator was living (Joyce set his novel in 1904). “I am a part of all that I have met,” announces Ulysses in Tennyson’s 1833 poem. It was Joyce’s artistic mission to make his hero equally comprehensive, to acknowledge and affirm every aspect of subjectivity, to include the obscene and the trivial along with the grand, the fleeting impression along with the positive action, to exclude or deny nothing, to “drink life to the lees,” as Tennyson had made Ulysses boast that he had done, “for always roaming with a hungry heart.” Joyce knew his Nietzsche. His last great novel, which takes its title from the rhyme “Poor old Michael Finnegan begin again,” is a structure all made of repeated and interlocking cycles of downfalls and resurrections, of leave-takings and homecomings, of eternal recurrence. And Ulysses, too, like Homer’s Odyssey, is the story of one who finds that in his end is his beginning, that the greatest adventure is the one that takes him at last to the very place from which he came.

  Joyce’s Odysseus/Ulysses/Bloom comes stumbling home drunk at three in the morning to pass out lying diagonally across the marital bed, snoring while his wife Molly—carnal, self-indulgent, a wholehearted embracer of what the world has to offer—delivers herself of the soliloquy in which Joyce admits his readers to every part of her imaginary consciousness and in which she surveys her life, past, present, and to come, arriving at last at a kind of rapture of affirmation: “yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes … and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” So Homer’s Odysseus comes home at last, to lie with Penelope in a great bed made from a living tree. He is once more, quite literally, rooted. He has resisted the siren song of martial glory and won his way back to his place in a social world where there are women as well as men, swineherds as well as soldiers, old people and children as well as warriors ready for sacrifice, where living is valued as highly as dying. He has proved himself, like Molly Bloom, a Nietzschean yes-sayer, a superman, a person heroic enough not to die but to live.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In researching this book I have drawn entirely on published sources. It follows that I owe enormous debts to the editors and translators who have made those sources available and to the writers who have interpreted them before me. Many of those writers have been dead for hundreds, in some cases thousands, of years but a number of them are still alive and I am profoundly grateful to them.

  Interested readers will find details of the books on which I have drawn in the Bibliography and References, but there are certain authors to whom I owe especial thanks:

  For Achilles—Robert Fagles for his superb translations and Bernard Knox for his illuminating critical essays: my reading of Homer has been greatly influenced by his.

  For the Cid—I would have been lost without Richard Fletcher’s magisterial book, from which I have drawn far more than simple references can indicate.

  For Drake—John Hampden’s collection of contemporary documents has been invaluable. I have also made extensive use of the biographies by John Sugden, John Cummins, and Harry Kelsey and two excellent books on the Armada, one by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, the other by Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker.

  For Wallenstein—I have depended at every turn on Golo Mann’s encyclopedic and evocative biography. I am also indebted to Geoffrey Parker’s narrative of the war.

  For Garibaldi—I have made copious use of two admirable biographies, by Jasper Ridley and Christopher Hibbert. The former is more comprehensive, the latter more colorful: my debt to each of them is immense.

  In spelling proper names I have chosen, in each case, the variant which I believe to be most familiar to Anglophone readers. To those irritated by the numerous anachronisms and inconsistencies into which that policy has led me I offer my apologies.

  REFERENCES

  PROLOGUE

  “the only person living”: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Rex Warner (Harmondsworth, 1972), 8.53.

  “born in a lucky hour”: Anonymous, The Poem of the Cid, translated by W. S. Merwin (1959).

  an unhappy land: Bertolt Brecht, The Life of Galileo, translated by Desmond Vesey (London, 1960), scene 13.

  “The Argonauts left”: Aristotle, Politics, translated by T. A. Sinclair, revised by Trevor J. Saunders (Harmondsworth, 1986), III, xiii.

  “divine stupidity”: Christopher Hibbert, Garibaldi and His Enemies (Harmondsworth, 1966).

  “heartfelt prostrate admiration”: Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, introduction by Michael Goldberg (Oxford, 1993).

  “Beware of the pursuit”: George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (Harmondsworth, 2000).

  “Life is sweet”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits, Representative Men and Other Essays (London, 1908).

  “indemnification for populations …”: Emerson.

  “no name comes down”: Charles Sprawson, “Et in Arcadia: A Defence of Sparta,” in The London Magazine, October 1987.

  “Alcibiades, leaning”: Plutarch, Makers of Rome, translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmondsworth, 1965).

  “There is no law”: Aristotle, III, xiii.

  “This people has no cities”: Herodotus, IV, 46, 298.

  “a non-co-operator”: Aristotle, I, ii.

  “a fearful tyranny”: R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche (London, 1973).

  “like a star …”: Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated and with an introduction by R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1969).

  “a hero of antiquity”: Jasper Ridley, Garibaldi (London, 1974).

  “It is the finery”: Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker, The Spanish Armada (London, 1988).

  “Go tell the people”: Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (Harmondsworth, 1975)
.

  “defeat in battle”: quoted in Sprawson.

  “What is he”: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 2.3.144–145.

  “thou picture of what”: Ibid., 5.1.6.