An Iliad
Page 14
One learns about the feminine side of the Iliad from that voice, but, once you’ve learned about it, you find it everywhere, shadowy, almost imperceptible, but incredibly tenacious. I see it very strongly in the innumerable places in the Iliad in which the heroes, instead of fighting, talk. There are assemblies that never end, interminable debates, and you stop hating them only when you begin to understand what in fact they are: a way of putting off the battle as long as possible. They are Scheherazade, who saves herself by telling stories.
The word is the weapon with which men freeze the war. Even when they are discussing how to carry on the war, they’re not carrying it on, and this is always a way of saving themselves. They are all condemned to death, but they make the final cigarette last an eternity, and they smoke it with the words. Then, when they do go into battle, they are transformed into blind heroes, forgetful of escape, fanatically devoted to duty. But first: first is a long time, feminine, a time of knowing delays and childish backward looks.
This sort of reluctance of the hero is, rightly, concentrated to the highest and most dazzling degree in Achilles. It is he who takes the longest time, in the Iliad, to go into battle. It is he who, like a woman, is present at the war from a distance, playing a lyre and staying beside those he loves. The very one who is the most ferocious and fanatical, a literally superhuman incarnation of war. The geometry of the Iliad is, in this, of a stunning precision. Where the triumph of warrior culture is strongest, the more tenacious and persistent is the feminine inclination to peace. Finally, what can’t be confessed by the heroes erupts in Achilles, in the unmediated clarity of explicit and definitive speech. What he says to the delegation sent by Agamemnon, in Book 9, is perhaps the most violent and incontrovertible cry for peace that our fathers have handed down to us:
Nothing, for me, is worth life: not the treasures that the prosperous city of Ilium possessed before, in time of peace, before the sons of the Danaans arrived; not the riches that, beyond the stone threshold, the temple of Apollo, lord of arrows, in rocky Pythos, contains; oxen and fat sheep can be stolen, tripods and tawny-maned horses can be bought; but the life of a man does not come back, one cannot steal or buy it, once it has passed the barrier of the teeth.
They are words for Andromache, but in the Iliad Achilles utters them, the high priest of the religion of war, and so they resound with an unmatched authority. In that voice—which, buried under a monument to war, says farewell to war, choosing life—the Iliad lets us glimpse a civilization that the Greeks could not achieve and yet had an intuition of, and knew, and even preserved in a secret and protected corner of their feelings. Bringing to fulfillment that intuition is perhaps what the Iliad offers as our inheritance, and task, and duty.
How to undertake such a task? What must we do to induce the world to follow its own inclination for peace? About this, too, it seems to me, the Iliad has something to teach us. And it does so in its most obvious and shocking aspect: its warrior and masculine aspect. It’s indisputable that the story presents war as an almost natural outlet of civil life. But it doesn’t confine itself to that. It does something much more important and, if you like, intolerable: it sings the beauty of war, and does so with memorable power and passion. There is almost no hero whose splendor, moral and physical, at the moment of combat we do not recall. There is almost no death that is not an altar, richly decorated and adorned with poetry. The fascination with arms and armor is invariable, and admiration for the aesthetic beauty of the movement of armies is constant. The animals in war are beautiful, and nature is solemn when it is called on to frame the slaughter. Even the blows and wounds are celebrated as lofty creations of a paradoxically cruel but accomplished artisan. One would say that everything, from the men to the earth, finds in the experience of war its highest realization, both aesthetic and moral: like the glorious peak of a parabola that only in the atrocity of a mortal clash finds its fulfillment. In this homage to the beauty of war the Iliad forces us to recall something disturbing but inexorably true: for millennia war has been for men the circumstance in which the intensity—the beauty—of life is released in all its power and truth. It was almost the only possibility for changing one’s destiny, for discovering the truth of oneself, for gaining a high ethical knowledge. In contrast to the anemic emotions of life and the mediocre moral stature of the everyday, war sets the world in motion and thrusts individuals outside their accustomed confines into a place of the soul that must seem to them, at last, the harbor of every seeking and every desire. I am not speaking of distant, primitive times: just a few years ago, refined intellectuals like Wittgenstein and Gadda obstinately sought the front line, the front, in an inhuman war, with the conviction that only there would they find themselves. They were not weak individuals, or without means and culture. And yet, as their diaries testify, they lived in the conviction that that peak experience—the atrocious practice of mortal combat—could offer them what daily life was unable to express. This conviction reflects the profile of a civilization that never died and in which war remained the burning fulcrum of human experience, the engine of any becoming. Even today, in a time when for the majority of human beings the hypothesis of going into battle is little more than an absurdity, we continue to feed, with wars fought by proxy with the bodies of professional soldiers, the old brazier of the warrior spirit, betraying our serious incapacity to find a meaning in life that can forgo that moment of truth. The ill-concealed masculine pride that, in the West as in the Islamic world, has accompanied the latest warrior exhibitions lets us recognize an instinct that the shock of the wars of the twentieth century has evidently not put to sleep. The Iliad describes this system of thought and this mode of feeling, concentrating it under a synthetic and perfect sign: beauty. The beauty of war—of each of its details—expresses its centrality in human experience, conveys the idea that there is nothing else, in human experience, that enables one to truly exist.
What the Iliad perhaps suggests is that pacifism, today, must not forget or deny that beauty, as if it had never existed. To say and teach that war is hell and that’s all is a damaging lie. Although it sounds terrible, we must remember that war is hell—but beautiful. Men have always thrown themselves into it, drawn like moths to the fatal light of the flame. There is no fear, or horror of themselves, that has succeeded in keeping them from the flame, because in it they find the only possible recompense for the shadows of life. For this reason, today, the task of a true pacifism should be not to demonize war excessively so much as to understand that only when we are capable of another kind of beauty will we be able to do without what war has always offered us. To construct another kind of beauty is perhaps the only route to true peace. To show ourselves capable of illuminating the shadows of existence without recourse to the flame of war. To give a powerful meaning to things without having to place them in the blinding light of death. To be able to change one’s own destiny without having to take possession of another’s; to mobilize money and wealth without having recourse to violence; to find an ethical dimension, the highest, without having to search for it at the margins of death; to find oneself in the intensity of places and moments that are not a trench; to know emotion, even the most impassioned, without having to resort to the drug of war or the methadone of small daily acts of violence. Another kind of beauty, if you know what I mean.
Today peace is little more than a political convenience. It’s certainly not a truly widespread system of thought and way of feeling. War is considered an evil to avoid, of course, but it is far from being considered an absolute evil. At the first occasion, clothed in beautiful ideas, going into battle quickly becomes a real option again. At times it is even chosen with a certain pride. The moths continue to destruct in the light of the flame. A real, prophetic, and courageous ambition for peace I see only in the patient and secret work of millions of artists who every day work to create another kind of beauty, and the glow of bright lights that do not kill. It’s a utopian undertaking, which assumes an extreme trust in
man. But I wonder if we have ever gone so far on such a path as we have today. And for that reason I think that no one, now, will any longer be able to stop that movement, or change its direction. We will succeed, sooner or later, in taking Achilles away from that fatal war. And it will not be fear or horror that carries him home. It will be a different sort of beauty, more dazzling than his, and infinitely more gentle.
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, AUGUST 2007
Translation copyright © 2006 by Alessandro Baricco
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Italy as Omero, Iliade by Feltrinelli, Milan, in 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano. This translation originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Baricco, Alessandro, [date]
[Omero, Iliade. English]
An Iliad / Alessandro Baricco : translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.
p. cm.
1. Homer. Iliad. II. Goldstein, Ann, 1949-. III. Title.
PQ4862. A6745O4413 2006
853'.914—dc22
2005044681
eISBN: 978-0-307-48618-9
www.vintagebooks.com
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