The Iliad is the world of brusque, precipitous passages from one state to the other. Its consummate expression is Achilles. Achilles weeps with Priam, his enemy’s father, then looks at him with admiration, then, just a few moments later, has to stop himself from killing him. The intensity is extreme in each phase. And each phase lives by and for itself, nor is it concerned with what came before or will come after. Why should things be consequent upon one another? Is a motionless, bleeding body consequent upon a body tense in the chase? These states follow each other like stretches of a giant wall, reduced to stumps. Marooned in the powerful isolation of each separate block, we must always try to remember that those walls form a single line. When Thetis visits her son, Achilles, wallowing in grief for Patroclus, she doesn’t try to lead him slowly out of his suffering, step by step. Thetis looks at him and reminds him of the existence of bread and bed. Then adds: “It is a good thing to unite with a woman in love.”
When the Christians built churches on the sites of pagan sanctuaries, incorporating the old capitals and columns in their naves, they were behaving as Heracles had with the Nemean lion, or Athena with Gorgon. In the hero’s relationship with the monster, what matters is this: that the monster possesses, or protects, or even is the treasure. To kill the monster means to incorporate it in oneself, to take its place. The hero becomes the new monster, clothed in the skin of the old and decorated with some metonymic trophy. Thus Heracles will no longer show his face, except through the motionless jaws of the lion he has killed.
The monster is the most precious of enemies: therefore it is the enemy one goes and looks for. Other enemies might simply attack us: the Giants, for example, or the Titans, representatives of an order in the process of being replaced, or looking for revenge for having already been replaced. The monster is quite different. The monster waits near the well-spring. The monster is the spring. He doesn’t need the hero. It is the hero who needs him for his very existence, because his power will be protected by and indeed must be snatched from the monster. When the hero confronts the monster, he has as yet neither power nor knowledge. The monster is his secret father, who will invest him with a power and knowledge that can belong to one man only, and that only the monster can give him.
In the beginning the monster was in the center, the center of the earth and the heavens, where the waters rise. When the monster was killed by the hero, his dismembered body migrated to recompose itself at the four corners of the earth. Then it embraced the world in a circle of scales and water. It was the composite margin of all there was. It was the frame. That the frame is the home of the monster, the artisans of the Baroque knew only too well, and the frames they made were far more intricate, far denser, far more archaic than all the idylls they enclosed—and perhaps would one day suffocate. Then came the moment when people didn’t want frames anymore. The museums hung pictures without frames, which looked as though they’d been stripped bare. The frame is not the antiquated, but the remote. With the frame gone, the monster loses his last home. And returns to wander where he will.
The Greeks were drawn to enigmas. But what is an enigma? A mysterious formulation, you could say. Yet that wouldn’t be enough to define an enigma. The other thing you have to say is that the answer to an enigma is likewise mysterious. This is what distinguishes the enigma from the problem, although at the beginning of Greek civilization the two categories were confused. When a problem is resolved, both question and answer dissolve, are absorbed into a mechanical formula. Climbing a wall is a problem, until you lean a ladder against it. Afterward, you have neither problem nor solution, just a wall and a ladder. This is not so for the enigma. Take the most famous one of all, the Sphinx’s: “What is the being that has but one voice and yet sometimes has two feet, sometimes three, sometimes four, and is progressively weaker the more feet it has?” Oedipus answers: “Man.” But if we think about that answer, we realize that precisely the fact that “man” is the solution to such an enigma suggests the enigmatic nature of man. What is this incongruous being that goes from the animal condition of the quadruped through to the prosthesis (the old man’s stick), all the time preserving a single voice? The solution to the enigma is thus itself an enigma, and a more difficult one.
Resolving an enigma means shifting it to a higher level, as the first drops away. The Sphinx hints at the indecipherable nature of man, this elusive, multiform being whose definition cannot be otherwise than elusive and multiform. Oedipus was drawn to the Sphinx, and he resolved the Sphinx’s enigma, but only to become an enigma himself. Thus anthropologists were drawn to Oedipus, and are still there measuring themselves against him, wondering about him.
Oedipus was the unhappiest of the heroes and the most vulnerable, but he was also the one who took a step beyond the other heroes. The hero’s relationship with the monster is one of contact, skin against skin. Oedipus is the first not to touch the monster. Instead he looks at it and speaks to it. Oedipus kills with words; he tosses mortal words into the air as Medea hurled her magic spells at Talos. After Oedipus’s answer, the Sphinx fell into a chasm. Oedipus didn’t climb down there to skin it, to get those colorful scales that allured travelers like the rich clothes of some Oriental courtesan. Oedipus is the first to feel he can do without contact with the monster. Of all his crimes, the most serious is the one no one reproaches him with: his not having touched the monster. Oedipus goes blind and becomes a beggar because he doesn’t have a Gorgon on his chest to defend him, doesn’t have the skin of a wild beast over his shoulders, doesn’t have a talisman to clutch in his hand. Words grant him a victory that is too clean, that leaves no spoils. And it is precisely in the spoils that power resides. The word may win where every other weapon fails. But it remains naked and solitary after its victory.
With Oedipus, monster slaying splits in two: on the one hand, we have a perfectly conscious slaying, that of the words that destroy the Sphinx; on the other, a perfectly unconscious slaying, when Oedipus kills Laius in a brawl between travelers. From then on the lucidity we associate with consciousness is turned inside out in a way that can only bode ill. This is the monster’s revenge. The monster can pardon the hero who has killed him. But he will never pardon the hero who would not deign to touch him.
XI
(photo credit 11.1)
THE LONG CHAIN OF THOSE STORIES THAT predate history, and of which the Iliad and the Odyssey form a number of links, opened with the copulation of Uranus and Ge and closed with the death of Odysseus. The circle opened with the mingling of earth and sky and closed with a paltry brawl, a fatal accident, as, in a foreign land, the young Telegonus unknowingly kills his father, the old Odysseus, with the sting of a devilfish. After Odysseus, our life without heroes begins; stories are no longer exemplary but are repeated and recounted. What happens is mere history.
Partly because he is so near the boundary, so near the point where the circle closes, Odysseus is the hero who most often tells stories. The circle began with the majestic and suffocating obscurity of the world’s origins, commanding silence; it ends with this warrior disguised as a Phoenician merchant, who some suspected of being a Phoenician merchant disguised as a warrior. Odysseus invited irreverence, insinuation. Certainly he inspired less respect than any other hero. There were even rumors that he had been Homer’s lover. That was why, detractors said, the poet treated him so well, concealing many of his worst traits and even removing the figure of Palamedes from the Iliad, so as to leave no clue that might point us to his treacherous murder, set up by Odysseus. That was why he said that Odysseus had defeated the Sirens, whereas in fact—some sneeringly maintained—it was the Sirens who disdained this sailor, with his “squashed nose,” as being “past it, erotically speaking.” When, at the end of the Odyssey, Zeus has a temporary harmony descend upon Ithaca to wind up the poem, it does seem that the curtain is being hurriedly lowered before too many questions can be asked. But in the centuries after Homer, people would go on wondering about Odysseus, and question and answer would pas
s from mouth to mouth, as if in a long stubble fire.
It is part of the essence of Odysseus that he be the last of the heroes, the one who closes the cycle. Being the last, Odysseus is the closest to the life that will follow, a life never more to close in any cycle. His foot treads the boundary line. Thus it was not the Iliad, that erratic rock abandoned on the plain, that bequeathed us the multiform novel but the sinuous Odyssey: “a private not a public affair,” as Telemachus says of his search for his father. And yet, last among the heroes to return, Odysseus is also the one who right up to the end maintains his contact—and what an intimate contact it was—with the primordial powers who appeared in the first phases of the cycle. His wanderings were partly a compendium, a roll call, of all those beings and places that were already growing confused in many a memory, already being removed to the realm of the fabulous. With Odysseus they are present, powerful and whole for one last time, and in Odysseus they salute the last traveler able to see them with his own eyes and bear witness.
While Odysseus was still sailing laboriously back to his island, in the halls of the palace of Ithaca the bard Phemius was already celebrating the deeds of the warriors he had fought with beneath the walls of Troy. Almost everything was already words. Only one blank remained to be filled: the deeds of Odysseus himself, the buckle that would close the cycle. Odysseus, master of the word, was the last to have us believe that not all was words, for as long, that is, as his own sparkling haul of stories was still missing. After his return to Ithaca, after the Odyssey, man’s approach to primordial beings and places could only take place through literature.
Alone among the Achaean leaders, Odysseus keeps his eyes down. But not out of fear. While his gaze is lowered, Odysseus concentrates his mind, isolates it from all around in a way his companions are not used to doing, weaves a plot, gives shape to a mēchan. He is the opposite of the man who is continually caught between the forces, machines, and mēchanaí of nature and of the gods. To their invisible tangle, Odysseus adds new mēchanaí, ones that he has elaborated himself. Now he has the secret, he need not merely submit to it. Thus he adds to the confusion of elements at play, then takes advantage of that confusion to elude the various traps. The frontal approach of the hero holds no attraction for him. Odysseus takes one step back toward the tortuous mind of Kronos, to get the run-up he needs to leap beyond the heroes. When the heroes are dead, or obsolete, Odysseus will still be looking out to the sea he expects will be the death of him, still dreaming of setting sail again, perhaps toward that land where men know nothing of the sea.
Odysseus and Oedipus, the most intelligent of the heroes, killed and were killed by mistake. Odysseus was killed by his son Telegonus, who didn’t recognize him; Oedipus killed his father, Laius, without recognizing him. In both cases the deaths were the result of a pointless brawl: over who should go first at a crossroads, over a squabble between the Ithacan palace guards and a stranger. The lucidity of Odysseus and Oedipus releases a murky, murderous smoke round about them.
Socrates was not the first just man among the Greeks to be killed because he was just. During the Trojan War the same fate befell Palamedes, although he was not yet a just man but a wise one. Those ten years beneath the walls of Troy were only occasionally taken up in skirmishes and the dust and clash of conflict. More than fear, the warriors’ most constant companion was boredom. Having set up their huts on a dull Asiatic plain, they watched the horizon. There were no women, and even passions between men could grow wearisome. As year followed year, they had just one precious resort: a man like themselves, a warrior, Palamedes, had taught them how to play with dice, checkers, astragals. Staring at those small rolling objects, at their checkered boards, they managed to forget time. It was said that Palamedes invented other things too: some of the letters of the alphabet, the length of the months, beacons. But for the common soldier he was the inventor of the game, of a motionless, endless spell. Apart from which, Palamedes was a prince like any other. His only distinguishing feature was that he didn’t have a beard. And yet there was someone powerful who hated him: Odysseus.
One day, in Ithaca, when he was pretending to be crazy so as not to go to Troy, Odysseus saw Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Palamedes heading toward him across the fields. He went on plowing. He tossed handfuls of salt in the furrows, and he had yoked together an ox and an ass. He tossed the sea, which knows no harvest, into the hollow of the fertile earth; he who one day, after seeing the whole world, would take his salty skin to a place where people knew nothing of the sea. But it was too early for Odysseus to appreciate that he was representing his own life in this gesture. On his head, to add insolence to pretense, he wore a pointed hat, the kind Cabirian initiates wore. Only another initiate would be able to understand his game. Palamedes watched him. Then, quite suddenly, he snatched the baby Telemachus from Penelope’s arms and threw him down on the ground in front of the plow. At which Odysseus stopped. He was beaten. Palamedes had forced him up against the limits of simulation. There was nothing Odysseus loathed more, even if he knew that this wasn’t quite how it was, for simulation must know no limits for him. That was his secret, that was what separated him from the vigorous simplemindedness of all the Ajaxes. Simulation meant gliding down from high above, commanding everything with one’s eye, without ever being commanded by another eye even higher up. Palamedes was that other eye.
Odysseus said nothing and followed him. Locked away in his heart, he nursed a hatred no enemy would ever rouse. They were to fight side by side for years. Compared with Odysseus, Palamedes was “mentally quicker, but not so good at helping himself.” His inventions enchanted the soldiers but didn’t achieve anything. They obeyed the power of abstraction and at the same time mimicked the course of nature. Palamedes knew that. He dedicated the dice he had invented to Tyche, in her sanctuary in Argos. Tyche was not a popular divinity at the time. But one day everybody would recognize her as the image that most closely resembles nature. When life strips off all her finery, what remains is fortune. Everything that happens is a constant collision of tossed dice. One day this image became fixed in people’s minds, never to be replaced. But Palamedes was the only one of those beneath the walls of Troy who saw this truth in all its starkness. That was why Odysseus hated him, that was why he felt that this man was too close to himself for comfort. His own intelligence needed solitude and distance from others. He could not accept a complicity he hadn’t sought.
When the Achaeans needed to find Achilles to take him to Troy, Odysseus immediately thought of the trick Palamedes had used to unmask him. He went to Scyros disguised as a merchant and got himself taken to the women’s quarters. He had brought a crate of precious goods, and now he laid them out on the floor. Immediately, girlish hands were fingering the fabrics, searching among the jewelry. But there was a shield and spear in the heap too. And a redhead grabbed them at once, as if she’d spent her whole life slinging such things over her shoulder. It was Achilles. Odysseus knew then that he had won the war, using Palamedes’ trick. With Achilles on their side, Troy had already fallen. Now all he had to do was take his revenge on Palamedes.
He mulled over it for years. And in the end he chose the trick that was at once the most cowardly, the most sure to work, and the most philosophical. In unmasking Odysseus’s fake madness, Palamedes had demonstrated the existence of a truth behind the simulation. A truth of gesture. Odysseus responded by demonstrating the opposite: that the truest of gestures could be judged a perfect pretense. He took a Trojan prisoner and gave him a forged letter, ostensibly from Priam, to take to Palamedes. The letter spoke of gold in return for an understanding between them. Then he killed the Trojan prisoner and contrived to have the letter discovered as if by chance. In the meantime he had hidden some gold under Palamedes’ bed. When the letter was discovered and Palamedes declared himself innocent, Odysseus suggested people look under his bed. Upon which Palamedes was unanimously condemned by his companions, and they stoned him. Every one of the dice players threw a stone at him
, and likewise the Achaean leaders, and Odysseus, and Agamemnon. The only thing Palamedes said before dying was that he mourned the passing of the truth, which had died before him. Those words were his answer to Odysseus. Palamedes’ enemy had shown that a total agreement between the world and the mind could be falseness itself. All had been sincerely indignant in their condemnation of Palamedes. All had seen the gold under his bed. The lie was more consistent than the truth. Odysseus could feel alone again at last, in the rapturous gliding of his intelligence.
The ranks of the dead appeared to Odysseus in Hades as a throng of women. Their queen, Persephone, spurred them on. But how did she spur them on? What goad did she use to rouse them from their cold thickets, to assemble them before the black blood and before that man with the sword hanging from his powerful thigh? Those women had been the daughters and bedmates of the heroes. Some of them, of gods. They all wanted to drink the blood and talk at the same time. That throng of women is memory in its natural state: all alike, all particles of the same cloud. The mind is terrified by this cloud, which is always with it. And the strength of the mind lies in the cleverness with which it manages to separate those particles from one another and then question them one by one.
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony Page 34
