Atreides: They're just like Us!

In "The Serpent and the Eagle," their introductory essay to Fagles' translation of the Oresteia,* Fagles and Stanford write, "The suffering of Atreus and his sons is a very old and yet a very modern matter. They are less removed from us than we might like to think" (16-17).

Now, I can see why one might want to be "removed" from the house of Atreus. To review:

The founder of the line was Tantalus of Lydia... [who] offended the gods by feasting them on his son's flesh, and they condemned him to starve in Hades, 'tantalized' by the drink and luscious fruits just out of reach. But they restored his victim, Pelops, to a new, resplendent life. ... Pelops had two sons, Atreus and Thyestes. When Thyestes seduced his brother's wife and contested his right to the throne, Atreus banished him and then, luring him back for a reconciliation, feasted him on his children's flesh. ... Atreus had two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus.... Agamemnon became the commander-in-chief of the Greek forces that attacked Troy to avenge the seduction of Helen by Paris.... At the outset of the expedition, however, Agamemnon had to sacrifice his and Clytaemnestra's daughter Iphigeneia -- a fact that Homer had omitted, perhaps to exonerate the king for an aristocratic audience -- and so he comes an agent of the curse upon his house. (15)

So, yeah. I wouldn't really want to have a ton in common with the house of Atreus, it's true. But the argument the authors make to support their claims -- one, implicitly, that the reader would prefer not to identify with the characters of the Oresteia; two, explicitly, that these characters' actions and stories relate to the modern reader (and therefore, presumably, offer him insights into his own life or world) -- is never fully fleshed out (sorry, bad pun). The only connection they offer is that

[Atreus and his sons]... are cursed, their lives are an inherited disease, a miasma that threatens the health of their community and forces them, relentlessly, to commit their fathers' crimes. It is as if crime were contagious -- and perhaps it is -- the dead pursued the living for revenge, and revenge could only breed more guilt. For such guilt is more than criminal; it is a psychological guilt that modern men have felt and tried to probe. Every crime in the house of Atreus, whether children kill their parents or parents kill their children and feed upon their flesh, is a crime against the filial bond itself. (17)

So... Atreus and his sons have in common with us... the experience of feeling guilty for crimes we may or may not have committed? (Or perhaps -- less flippantly -- the inevitable feelings of guilt that result from the parent/child relationship.) That's pretty much all I'm getting from that. The argument that they are "less removed from us than we might to think" is not fully explained, let alone proven; it is used, instead, as a segue into a discussion of "the pathology of a culture ridden by its guilt" (17) and from there into ancient Greek religion and ritual, and the possible cultural underpinnings of the Oresteia.

Which is all very well and good. The authors have a lot of ground to cover in this essay, the sole piece of criticism/commentary in this edition. But the line caught my eye because it seems to me that critics of literature are always trying to tell me that the works they study are pertinent to my life, my world. It's as though they're afraid I'll see their arguments as pointless, their life's work as unworthy unless it reaches some particular threshold of relevance.

And that got me to thinking ("I couldn't help but wonder"): Is it a necessary condition of "literature" that it offer some enduringly relevant insight? I can see that scholars of ancient (and modern) works would want to believe that those works offer some sort of timeless wisdom or message to the reader; I know it's a common criticism of academia that it has too little to do with the so-called real world. (The term "ivory tower" is pretty self-explanatory.)

And -- god help me -- is a piece of literature "good" because it offers insight, or does it offer insight because it is good?

The gist of Tolkien's argument in "The Monsters and the Critics" is that Beowulf had been studied more as a historical document than as a work of literature because critics felt that it wasn't good enough to be studied as literature (structural weaknesses, or something; too many monsters). It is, too, good enough, Tolkien argues. It is beautiful poetry, and what's more -- oh, yes -- its themes are timeless. Beowulf, according to Tolkien,

glimpses the cosmic and moves with the thought of all men concerning the fate of human life and efforts; it stands amid but above the petty wars of princes, and surpasses the dates and limits of historical periods, however important. At the beginning, and during its process, and most of all at the end, we look down as if from a visionary height upon the house of man in the valley of the world.

Well, then. Oh, and lest you thought you could be distant from Beowulf the character, if not the broader themes of his story, Tolkien would like you to know that "Beowulf is not... the hero of an heroic lay.... He has no enmeshed loyalties, nor hapless love. He is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy."

I'm not trying to mock Tolkien. Far from it. I'm just thinking about this idea that literary merit is somehow connected to this standard of relevance, this idea that literature is that which teaches us something important, something lasting about people or life or the way of the world.

I won't fall into the trap of attempting to ascertain what exactly counts as literature, let alone how we determine that something is "good" (I was once in a conference class wherein the day's first topic was what constitutes literature; it became the day's only topic when the discussion was hijacked by an indignant ponytailed Classics junior who would not give up her argument that a grocery list could be considered literature. Finally, the professor -- a genial middle-aged Chaucerian who normally gave us very free rein -- cut in and said, "No. No." And that put a stop to that, except class was nearly over by that point anyway).

But it is curious to me to think that literature must have some particular bearing on life. I'm not sure how much I could say that literature has taught me anything about life; trust me, I did plenty of reading throughout childhood and adolescence and I was clueless.

It's a dangerous road, thinking that we should identify with literary characters and/or learn from them. There once came into my possession -- not through any doing of my own, let me assure you -- a book entitled Where There's A Will There's A Way, Or, All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Shakespeare, by one Laurie Maguire (who apparently did not learn it in kindergarten). Now, I did not actually read this unfortunately-named tome -- I sold it to Powell's the first chance I got -- but I gather that it's some sort of self-help book... based on Shakespeare. No. Really. I have to quote from Amazon's product description:

Covering such universal subjects as love and hate, the battle of the sexes, family relationships, and loss and death, Maguire shows how the dilemmas illustrated in Shakespeare's plays can help readers explore their own emotions and judgments. Together, Maguire and Shakespeare offer suggestions, comfort, empathy, and encouragement as they set out a timeless principle for living.

Apparently Shakespeare is "the ultimate self-help guru and life coach." I am not making this up.

This isn't to say that Fagles and Stanford (and Tolkien) share Maguire's absurd conclusion that literature can find you a boyfriend, or whatever. There's a big leap from "this work applies to your life and mine" to "this work will teach you to work through your grief over your father's death." Maguire has gone audaciously, hilariously literal with the idea that fictional characters are like us.

But hey, at least she's attempting to be pragmatic. Really. Will I get less out of the Oresteia if I can't identify with Agamemnon, Clytaemnestra or Orestes? Am I missing something crucial if I can't see how their lives relate to mine, how the trilogy's themes still apply to the world of today?

I find that I am confounded by the question. It seems presumptuous to think that what Aeschylus had to say has anything to do with me (Agamemnon died for my sins!); but it seems insulting to say that his work no longer has relevance.

Thoughts?

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*We are reading the 1977 Penguin Classics edition, translated by Robert Fagles; introduction, notes, and glossary written in collaboration with W.B. Stanford. Stanford was Irish, and his political career looks interesting, too. Have a look.

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ADDENDUM: Fiona worries that I may have conflated "I can identify with the characters" with "the work offers enduring insights." I don't think that I did; I was aware of the difference while writing the post, and I was fairly careful to distinguish between them in what I said. What I did fail to do is to explain how I see the relationship there. So I want to explicate just a little.

The line with which I began was this: "The suffering of Atreus and his sons is a very old and yet a very modern matter. They are less removed from us than we might like to think."

Essentially, this claims that we have something in common with these characters; we are not removed from them, we should on some level be able to identify with them. But also, their suffering is a matter, an issue that is modern, that is, a theme that remains relevant. Their guilt is "a psychological guilt that modern men have felt and tried to probe."

That is to say that the reason, ostensibly, that we should be able to identify with these characters is that their sufferings have something to do with our sufferings. Their stories, therefore, may tell us something about ourselves or our world.

Similarly, Tolkien emphasizes that Beowulf is a man (i.e. a person) like us as opposed to a mythic hero. His tragedy, per Tolkien, is specifically that he is a human being; his story "moves with the thought of all men concerning the fate of human life and efforts...." So the tale of Beowulf, insofar as it is a tale about a human being, offers a message that applies to all human beings.

The fact that we can identify with its characters need not entail that a work tells us something about life; and a work can still offer insight even if we don't particularly identify with its characters (let me tell you, I do not identify with Henry Chinaski, but that doesn't mean that Charles Bukowski has nothing at all to teach me about life -- for one thing, I learned that I hate Charles Bukowski).

But I guess what I am saying is that when I speak here about identifying with characters, I mean it in a relatively broad sense. For example, when I read Troilus and Cressida, I identify with Cressida more than with the other characters because she is a woman in a difficult situation who is harshly judged by people who really don't know her or attempt to understand her. And that's quite specific. But when I read Beowulf, I can't relate to Beowulf as a character in the same way I relate to Cressida. What I can do, at least according to Tolkien, is relate to Beowulf as a human being whose life is finite, whose most spectacular achievements have a limited impact (see Fiona's post on the ends of Beowulf and Hamlet).

It's not like Fagles and Stanford are arguing, say, that we should identify with Agamemnon because hey, remember that time you had to sacrifice your young daughter and it was awful and then your wife was really pissed?

Wow, I actually have a lot more to say about this, and I could keep going for a long time. I hope I've at least clarified this issue rather than confusing it further.

me: i'm trying to make sense of this blog post

which is now a hydra

damn it

Fiona: the blog post is a hydra?

me: yeah

Fiona: I think you have to cauterize the stumps

me: i tried to cut off one of its heads

and it grew more heads

Fiona: I think that is how he did it

me: and i'm out of lighter fluid

"We don't want any adventures here, thank you!"

The time has come (the walrus said) to talk of Tolkien and Beowulf.

Tolkien was a Beowulf scholar, and he delivered a famous lecture ("The Monsters and the Critics") that called for an examination of Beowulf as poetry, as story rather than artifact. After all, its reliability as a historical document has to be questionable. Sure, it didn't survive all those centuries because of any perceived literary merit -- it was just luck -- but to Tolkien, "there is not much poetry in the world like this." And thus he changed Beowulf scholarship forever. Now we approach it as poetry, not solely as a record of the stories told in the eleventh century, or the funeral practices, or the geography of Scandinavia. Yes, we study it because it's all we have. If dozens of Old English epics survived, maybe we'd study "The Lay of Brainless Bartholemew" or something. But that alone doesn't mean Beowulf is worthless as literature.

ANYWAY, so Tolkien was the most influential Beowulf scholar who ever lived. But as a person who grew up inundated with The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (my mother had read both out loud to me and my brother at least twice by the time I was eight), I'm much more interested in what the Titanic did to the iceberg.

After all, reading Beowulf, it's hard not to see the obvious. Beowulf's dragon is awoken when a hapless slave steals a gold-plated cup from his hoard. The dragon, enraged, flies around setting fire to things and generally laying waste and terrorizing the countryside. The Hobbit (of which, unfortunately, I don't have a copy to hand) duplicates this almost exactly ... Bilbo Baggins sneaks up on the dragon Smaug and steals a large gold cup. When Smaug realizes that the cup is gone, he blames the townsfolk who nest at the base of his mountain and starts flaming houses. Of course, Tolkien's dragon is writ larger. In Beowulf, the dragon lives in a "barrow" -- basically a little mound. I like imagining a tiny, cute dragon that belches little smoke puffs. Smaug has an entire mountain, and his stomach is nearly invincible because it is MADE OF TREASURE.

It makes sense that The Hobbit would have smatterings of Beowulf. Tolkien began The Hobbit as a bedtime story for his kids, so why not borrow a little from the Old English poem he was an expert on? It's not like the kids were going to call foul. Then when it gets published it just looks like masterful allusion. Everybody wins. Oh, Tolkien, you crafty man.

In countless other little ways, Beowulf influences Tolkien's sagas of Middle Earth. Even the word 'orc' is derived from 'orc-neas,' a term appearing in Beowulf that Heaney translates as "evil phantoms" (ll. 112). In fact, Old English massively influenced the names and languages Tolkien used in Middle-Earth (my favorite? The characters Eomer and Froda, of Beowulf. Also, did you know that Frodo was originally named Bingo? Heh.)

Is there a point to all this? Um ... Tolkien said he was trying to create a "mythology for England," which puzzled me because England has plenty of mythology, from Arthur to Robin Hood. Problem is, none of these stories is as bad-ass as Beowulf. Even the Round Table doesn't have the same primitive Viking brotherhood vibe that Tolkien so clearly craved and so painstakingly recreated in his own work. Reading Beowulf makes the Lord of the Rings seem almost like fanfiction. The best fanfiction ever written, but still. I bet Tolkien would have participated in Beowulf LARPs if they'd existed at Oxford.

I'm Captain Evil (and I'm General Disarray!)

Aaah! I had intended for this to be a longer and more thought-out entry, but I got caught up doing Actual Work and now it is already midnight. I should really give it up and go to bed, but I just finished this Tolkien paper, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" (of which Wikipedia has a brief but accurate summary) and I wanted to mention a few things it brought to mind. Curse you, Norton Critical Editions, you and your large samplings of interesting and relevant critical material. Whatever. I'll sleep through the musical we're seeing tomorrow. (The plot summary of which reminds me of two different novels I read recently, and oh god, I'm already going off on tangents.)

Anyway. Tolkien. (I'll leave the LOTR angle to Fiona, since it's not my department.)

He discusses Beowulf in the context of its inevitable companions, the Aeneid and the Odyssey (apparently Beowulf used to be known as "the Beowulf"!); he considers the former a more appropriate counterpart, although he demurs on the question of whether Beowulf's author had read Virgil (I don't know if this question has been resolved since 1936, and if so, what the answer is; I'll investigate further):

There is, of course, a likeness in places between these greater and smaller things, the Aeneid and Beowulf, if they are read in conjunction. But the smaller points in which imitation or reminiscence might be perceived are inconclusive, while the real likeness is deeper and due to certain qualities in the authors independent of the question whether the Anglo-Saxon had read Virgil or not.... We have the great pagan on the threshold of the change of the world; and the great (if lesser) Christian just over the threshold of the great change in his time and place.... (p. 120).

In a footnote, Tolkien adds

In fact the real resemblance of the Aeneid and Beowulf lies in the constant presence of a sense of many-storied antiquity, together with its natural accompaniment, stern and noble melancholy. In this they are really akin and together differ from Homer's flatter, if more glittering, surface. (p. 120)

Ooh, burn. Seriously though, I did think of the Aeneid much more frequently than the Iliad (I haven't read the Odyssey yet, ok) while I was reading Beowulf, but I wasn't sure how much of that was because I read the Mandelbaum translation of the Aeneid and the Lattimore translation of the Iliad (mah hexameter, let me show u it). Lattimore's Iliad is very formal, whereas Mandelbaum's Aeneid and Heaney's Beowulf, neither of which attempts rigorously to adhere to the meter of its original, share -- perhaps partly as a result -- an immediacy and intensity that Lattimore's Iliad lacks. Since I have no Greek nor Latin nor Old English, I can't be sure which of all these qualities result from the poems as written and which are a consequence of their various translations. Tolkien's jab at "Homer's flatter, if more glittering, surface" would hint that at least some of this difference is inherent to the originals, but I just don't know.

One aspect of Beowulf that did remind me of Homer was the epithets, but oh, SO MUCH BETTER. If you thought "Hector, breaker of horses" was a pretty sweet moniker, how about Grendel, "captain of evil" (l. 749)? And while we're on the topic of exciting nomenclature, let's not forget the line where Beowulf describes his sword as a "sharp-honed, wave-sheened wonderblade" (l. 1490). (Hey, baby... wanna see my wonderblade?)

Beowulf also contains my new favorite example of serious understatement. When Grendel is fighting Beowulf in Heorot, the hall where he (Grendel) has been murdering people every night for the past twelve years or so, Grendel begins to realize that he is losing: "The latching power/ in his fingers weakened; it was the worst trip/ the terror-monger had taken to Heorot" (ll. 763-65).

Yeah, the worst trip for sure. You know. The one where Beowulf rips off his arm, which injury shortly results in his agonizing death. Look, you guys, it was definitely way worse than those other trips where he just killed and ate a bunch of people and stuffed their remains into his dragon-skin pouch [Per Beowulf: "I had done no wrong, yet the raging demon/ wanted to cram me and many another/ into this bag" (ll. 2089-91)].

Oh dear. I have a lot else to say about Tolkien and Christianity and epithets and kennings (shield-clash! wave-vat! neck-ring! hate-honed! hall-roofing! bone-house!), but somehow I have been writing this post for well over an hour. More soon.