  Though I’ve never actually read either Homer’s The Iliad or The Odyssey, I am familiar with the story, and over the course of this class, it can be said that I am considerably more familiar with the story, as well as the major events and characters that inhabit the supposedly blind, possibly fictional poet’s world of Greek antiquity. Now, obviously, Homer himself never actually wrote the story, he transposed it from oral storytellers, or so the story goes, but in either case, the main viewpoint in either story is always that of Agamemnon, Odysseus, Paris, Hector, Achilles, and the vast numbers of male characters as they assert their masculine prowess against each other, cycloptic sons of gods, sea monsters, waves upon waves of armies, and all sorts of other villains and foes, fodder for the hero’s cunning and machismo.
Behind these tales are the women; Circe, the witch who turns Odysseus’ men into pigs; Helen, whose beauty drives men to lust for war; and Penelope, Odysseus’ doting, forever fateful wife who, even after decades of absence, never turns from her long lost husband. Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, as well as a few of the other books we’ve read this semester, seek to remedy that feminine silence within the stories of classical Greek antiquity by filling out, in the case of this novel, the cage of threatened violence that was ancient life on the Greek peninsula, and in doing so, shines a light on the cage of threatened violence in modern times. Atwood, no stranger to lending a feminist voice that echoes through history is probably most well-known for her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which creates a dystopia in fundamentalist patriarchy. That book, which was released in 1985 was dedicated to a now-infamous accused witch that Atwood believed to be an ancestor of hers. Mary Webster, a resident of Massachusetts faced years of abuse and accusations before she was eventually murdered for apparently “murdering” a prominent member of her community with “witchcraft.” In truth, she was an outspoken woman who was regularly beaten by fellow citizens who claimed she had placed a spell on their animals that forbade them from passing by her house. In the end, although she was found not guilty of witchcraft, she was hanged from a tree, the fact that she didn’t die right away serving as “proof” of her being a witch. Atwood writes in her poem about Webster: “When they came to harvest my corpse / (open your mouth, close your eyes) / cut my body from the rope, / surprise, surprise: / I was still alive. /Tough luck, folks, / I know the law: / you can’t execute me twice / for the same thing. How nice. / I fell to the clover, breathed it in, / and bared my teeth at them / in a filthy grin. / You can imagine how that went over. / Now I only need to look / out at them through my sky‐blue eyes. / They see their own ill will / staring them in the forehead / and turn tail / Before, I was not a witch. / But now I am one.” Webster was a victim of time and circumstance. She lived in a zealously religious Puritan society that was heavily patriarchal. Penelope, the hero of Atwood’s Penelopiad is, likewise, the victim of time and circumstance. Warring forever with the visage of her cousin Helen’s beauty, and with her husband’s nurse Eurycleia, Penelope lives in a world of constant danger, where even her devious and clever husband serves as a threat. Near the end of the story, as Odysseus speaks to her disguised as a beggar she has him interpret a dream in which her beloved geese are killed by an eagle with a crooked beak. Odysseus, unaware that Penelope knows he’s in disguise, interprets the dream as his triumphant return, in which he kills the suitors who’ve taken up residence in his home, ignoring the fact that Penelope refers to the geese as “beloved”, something she certainly doesn’t feel for the suitors who’ve raped her maids, have spoken ill of her behind her back, and even plotted the murder of her son. He also doesn’t recognize that the eagle has a crooked beak, something that suggests an imperfect polish on one of literature’s oldest heroes. “In the event, Odysseus was wrong about the dream,” writes Atwood. “He was indeed the eagle but the geese were not the Suitors. The geese were my twelve maids, as I was soon to learn to my unending sorrow.” Penelope in Atwood’s novel lives in a world wherein even the closest people among her feel like distant islands, fraught with danger, cyclopic images, and sea monsters, and waves upon waves of armies to conquer. Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. "Half-Hanged Mary." Atwood, Margaret. Wild Women. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1997. —. The Penelopiad. New York: Grove Press, 2005. Marshall, Bridget M. "Mary Webster, the Witch of Hadley, Survives a Hanging." New England Historical Society (2003): https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/mary-webster-witch-hadley-survives-hanging/.
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 I feel a bit overwhelmed attempting to write about Circe as a book because there is almost too much that I want to say about it. Madeline Miller’s book tackles themes as far-reaching as the effects and weight of time and ages passing, of the overwhelming terror of parenthood, of love and loss, of madness in lust and love, of the struggle of being a woman in a patriarchal world, of the pressure and isolation within one’s own family, and probably tons of other things that I might’ve even missed. The titular character, over the course of the book’s sprawling but taut nearly 400 pages weaves her way in and out of some of Greek antiquity’s greatest myths in a way that finds proverbial wisdom in each one that often wasn’t there in the story’s original telling. The story begins with Circe coming into her own as a Greek goddess in the wake of war with the new gods of Olympus, and it’s through this that she slowly learns of her power and of the harshness of the world. Perhaps the greatest reminder of both of those lies within the story of the fisherman, Glaucos, whose love interest, Scylla, Circe turns into a sea monster because she loved Glaucos, and in the ensuing punishment handed down from Zeus she is ridiculed by her brother, Aeëtes, who up until this point had been one of the only characters in the novel she truly related to and could confide in. In the end, Circe is forced to live on an island in the Mediterranean alone as punishment for her crime. In the ensuing years, Circe is forced to witness the birth of the Minotaur and the subsequent pain it and her sister has caused, the tragedy of Dedalus’ son Icarus, and she is visited by a series of travelers, who after assaulting her sexually, she proceeds to turn men who come to her island into pigs, until, finally Odysseus from Homer’s The Odyssey arrives and she falls for him, conceiving a child. Through all of these events and tragedies, we see the effect of time, how growth and age, and the coming and going of relationships turn her once green and bright perception of the world into one of guarded misanthropy. Of all of the themes to pull from within the story, I feel, the ones that stuck with me the most and caused a genuine effect on me were the ones about time and parenthood. I am, by no means, a parent, but I do have nephews that are slowly working their way through their teens, and I have friends who have children, and in my job, I work with children on a daily basis, and it was in the scenes with Telegonus that I felt the weight of all of that time breathing a new life into an already emotional story. Because, although Circe intends to keep Telegonus safe, and happy, she knows that’s not possible. She realizes it slowly through the lies she tells about his father, Odysseus, who although she sees as a great man, she views through retrospection as a more complex, more violent, and aggressive person than she originally saw him at the time of their romance. Instead, whenever she speaks the harsh truth about Telegonus’s father, Telegonus insists that she must be mistaken, that his father is honorable. She sees in his urge for clear right and wrongs the same fault in her own view of the world at a young age and how that wounded her again and again as the years go on. This is something that comes up near the end of the novel when Telegonus finally finds out that Circe is sisters with Pasiphae, the mother of the Minotaur, and Telegonus asks about who else she knows, including Scylla. Again and again, throughout the story, old wounds keep digging themselves up to the surface and force Circe to relive the pain of a life that has lasted centuries. In reading this I couldn’t help but think of Nietzche’s theory of Eternal Recurrence, of which he writes, in Aphorism 341 “The Greatest Weight”: "What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' "Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and everything, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?" In the end, Circe chooses a mortal life, and to live out her days with eventual death, something that has never been a part of her life up until this point. Miller writes in the waning moments, “I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands.” I don’t know what to say about those thoughts, both Miller’s and Nietzsche’s and how I feel that they are related, but I completely feel that they are because of what they say about time and the weight of it, the constant digging up of the past, the inescapability of all of the mistakes that’ve led to this point and whether or not they would be worth existing through again. Honestly, I wish I had more time because I feel like there’s plenty more I could write about this book and all it says to me, but I’ll stop here because I’m probably well past what is reasonable for somebody to read in one sitting at this point.   “It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth,” writes Joeseph Campbell, the author who penned A Hero With a Thousand Faces, a book that would gain notoriety in Hollywood after George Lucas cited its influence on his film Star Wars, a perfectly appropriate modern stand-in for Homer’s tales of war and heroes on a distant beach in a distant land, long, long ago (Campbell, 3). Campbell was a professor of literature and comparative mythology at Sarah Lawrence, and his work, penned in 1949 would go on to influence and become the blueprint for storytelling for the better half of the 20th century. But his work delved deeper, sought to expand and make sense of storytelling from the time of Homer, and before, pointing to a centralized architecture in all stories, from Native American folklore, to modern Hollywood blockbusters, to ageless tales of mythology from ancient antiquity written by blind poets. It was called “the monomyth,” a classic set of rules found in all stories, no matter who created them or when. Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey takes this sort of idea, though probably not directly, and retells some of the world’s oldest and most adapted series of stories, surrounding the events of the Trojan War and Odysseus’s odyssey homeward, originally anthologized in Homer’s The Illiad and The Odyssey, respectively. Retelling these tales, so cemented in the lexicon of collective human literature, Mason’s tales recontextualize the stories, subverting expectations and exploring the idea at the forefront of the original stories: what exactly makes a hero? Is a hero brave? Selfish? Do they doubt themselves? Are they cunning? Cruel? Are they a cyclops abandoned in a cave, left to die in darkness; the fate prophesized for them by a cruel man who would be, in other stories, the hero of the tale? Does a hero lie only in the tales he tells and in the tales that are told about him? Is he in truth an old man, relieving the half-truths that haunt his aching bones in a long journey through time? Do they challenge themselves based on the stories of a witch and former lover to be tempted and tied to the mast of their ship, to have sirens sing for them in their bound state? Are all journeys simply about death? Like the death of an ancient king, carried to a series of hills behind his home, laid to rest to the crackling and whispering of fireworks. Is the home our hero seeks always that same home we seek at the end of our own long journeys? Is this why we tell stories in the first place; to explain for ourselves the bumps in the road, the confusions we can’t quite wrap our waking mind around? Do we tell stories so that we might, in some way, understand and accept the world we find ourselves in? Is that why every story is, ultimately, the same? For Mason, the answer for all of the above is multiple choice. For even the hero, who in the book’s final story visits a Troy that is more akin to Disneyland and finds what he thinks is a shield forged by the mighty smith god Hephaistos for Achilles, but is ultimately an imitation, tells himself, in those moments, a story to pacify the weight of time. Works Cited: Capmbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1949. Mason, Zachary. The Lost Books of the Odyssey. New York: Picador, 2007.   How does a nation decide what it is? Is it the laws that govern the people, the people and their culture, is it the nation’s history, the wars it’s fought, the causes it’s bared, or is it something else?
China, a country that has lasted in some form well into prehistory, tells of its formation through a series of wars between three kingdoms, perhaps being some of the bloodiest wars in the entirety of human history (Center). The United States of America gained its statehood through bloody revolution and conflict, colonialism, and though it is often painted over in its national mythos, a genocidal slaughter of an indigenous population. Ancient Rome tells of two brothers raised by wolves, Romulus and Remus, who by the will of the gods were allowed to live and formed the city of Rome. Throughout human history, people have set down on a plot of land to call their own, and as a way of forming a glue between the disparate people upon that land, formed a myth to bind them together; a myth that quite often makes others of those outside said land, and whether it is true or not, they decide that it is theirs. As I read Colm Tóibín’s House of Names, I couldn’t help but think about the land that Tóibín called home: Ireland. James Joyce, perhaps Ireland’s greatest writer once wrote about it, saying: "Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” The short story that was taken from, from Joyce’s collection of short stories The Dubliners, is about a man wrestling with the divided politics of his own country (Joyce 225). And as I read of Orestes’ kidnapping, and the death of his own older sister Iphigenia at the hands of his father in House of Names, I couldn’t help but think of the short story “The Sniper,” by Irish author Liam O’Flaherty; in which two snipers shoot at each other from atop roofs on opposite sides of a street, the winner eventually finding out that he’d shot his own brother (O'Flaherty). In House of Names, the familicide happens beat after beat by people trying their best to do what they feel is right for themselves, their families, and their nation. From Agamemnon’s murder of his daughter to appease the gods and allow for the winds that would set his army on their path to victory, to Electra, Orestes, and Clytemnestra, all trying, all failing in some way or another. To the ancient Greeks, Homer’s stories in The Iliad, The Odyssey, and the other significant early Greek plays these stories were, in many ways, not just a history of their connected states and their symbiotic relationship to each other, but they also served as moral lessons and symbols of Greek culture. They were, in many ways, a sort of nation-building myth, like Paul Revere warning of the British coming, or King Arthur driving back the Anglo-Saxons of early Briton. What Tóibín writes strips the pomp and pageantry away, shreds the poetry of myth, and delivers a story that is, to put it plainly, well, more likely than the myth that’s been told, devoid of intervention from the gods. Much like the reality behind the myth of Thanksgiving, which tells of an unnamed indigenous tribe that shares a meal with the pilgrims, but leaves out the deterioration of this alliance and the ensuing war, King Philips War to be exact, which kickstarted the slow holocaust of North America’s native people, House of Names tells a myth, too far in the past to be accurately depicted, stripped and served as the sad tale it truly was; one that rather than teaching moral lessons, instead teaches lessons on tragedy and short-sightedness in a time of desperation and war. Works Cited -Center, China Education. "History of the Three Kingdoms." University of Nottingham 2004. https://www.chinaeducenter.com/en/whychina/threekingdoms.php. -Joyce, James. The Dubliners. London: Penguin Books, 1914. -O'Flaherty, Liam. "The Sniper." Classic Short Stories (1923). https://www.classicshorts.com/stories/sniper.html.   In 1983, Christa Wolf was 54 years old. She had lived much of her life in East Germany, a Soviet-controlled state that had split her country in two since the end of World War II. When Hitler’s Nazi Party took control in August of 1934, she was five. When the Nazi-controlled German Army invaded Poland in September of 1939 she was ten. In May of 1945, when the Russians had invaded Berlin, she was just 16 years old, a young, seemingly helpless and removed teenager from the greater machinations around. And yet, despite having no say, no voice, and arguably no real opinion on the matter at the time, the events that peppered the setting of her youth would hold a considerable sway over the events of the rest of her life.
It’s hard to imagine it now, what it might’ve been like in Germany at the height of the Cold War, when the world’s two largest superpowers in the history of its existence spent decades holding a proverbial doomsday gun, in the form of atomic energy, at each other, across a thin, barricaded line in a Central European city. In 1961, in August, the Soviets began building a wall made up of 100 miles of barbed wire, 96-miles of concrete, guard towers, machine gun posts, and searchlights in order to keep East Berliners from escaping the Capitalist-held West Berlin. Christ Wolf was 32 (Editors). It would be years later, on a trip to Greece that seemingly was made without any real plan, according to Wolf’s own account, that Wolf would find a way to express these events, this perspective, through the reading of an ancient text of Greek antiquity. The Oresteia. “The following morning, in the empty apartment where no more telephone calls, no more letters strayed by mistake, I began to read Aeschylus’s’ Oresteia,” wrote Wolf in her essay “Travel Report, About the Accidental Surfacing and Gradual fabrication of a Literary Personage.” She continued, “I witnessed how a panic rapture spread through me, how it mounted and reached its pinnacle when a voice began to speak: Aiee! Aieeee! Apollo! Apollo! Cassandra. I saw her at once. She, the captive, took me captive; herself made an object by others, she took possession of me” (Wolf 144). In Cassandra, a character from Greek antiquity, Wolf found not only an understanding but a voice to speak to the continuum of violence at the hands of powerful, short-sighted, and brutish men, who desire above all else power and glory, at the folly of their own hubris. Wolf’s novel uses an eternal return motif, opening the story in her then modern time, staring up at ruin brought on by time “This is where she stood. These stone lions looked at her; not they no longer have heads,” eventually bringing the story back to Cassandra’s time, centuries before, passing a gulf of time, which links the violence and lies, the drumbeat of war and the trauma and consequence, of Cassandra’s own time into the modern age of consequence and war of World War II, the Atomic Age, the police-state like fascistic government of East Germany, and the ever-present and looming drumbeat of the Cold War (Wolf 1) (Ross). Works Cited: -Editors, History.com. "Berlin Divided." History (2009). https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/berlin-is-divided. -Ross, Alex. "Nietzsche’s Eternal Return." The New Yorker (2019). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/14/nietzsches-eternal-return. - Wolf, Christa. Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.  From Gaiman's The Kindly Ones, the finale to his run on The Sandman, a seminal comic book series. In reading the ancient play of Greek antiquity, Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, played out in three parts; Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides, respectively; I am reminded of the finale of Neil Gaiman’s run on Sandman, in which the titular character reluctantly commits familicide, taking the life of his son, at his son’s request, only to be chased and ultimately killed by the literal Furies of Greek mythology (Gaiman). I mention this because, for me, it was my first introduction (outside of reading Oedipus Rex for another literature class) to the idea of the sin of killing one’s family member and how it was viewed in ancient Grecian society. Not to say that familicide is normal or acceptable in modern Western society, but that it held a particular weight for the people of this time and place, as if it were a part of the zeitgeist, much in the way that superhero movies litter the silver screen of our modern age, or how our greatest sin today, culturally speaking, is not having a social media page. Within this Hellenic social sphere, the sin of familicide, especially within the confines of the backdrop of a post-Troy Greek city-state, the main metaphor, for me, seems to be one of the costs of war. The first chapter in this trilogy is littered with poetic verse, waxing philosophical the horrors and honors, as well as the cost of war; in this case, Agamemnon’s literal sacrificing of his daughter, Iphigenia. A sacrifice that ends up winning him the war and costing him his life, in effect, setting into motion the series of events that lead to the deaths of several of his family members and of the guilt of familicide in those remaining. Put another way, the cost for winning the war was, in effect, the death of an entire royal line, at the hands of themselves, a sort of aristocratic cannibalism (Aeschylus). In the end, Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, riddled with guilt at the murdering of his mother is sent to trial, defended by Apollo because it was the god who pushed Orestes to murder his own mother. The Furies, personified versions of a more ancient, older justice based on violence for violence, are ultimately swayed and grow both literally and metaphorically into a new form: The Eumenides, or “The Kindly Ones.” This is done through a process of organic growth, the story’s first two acts showing the errors of an old justice built on the mindset of vengeance begotten more and more vengeance. In other words, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, begets the death of Agamemnon, begets the death of Clytemnestra, showing through the act of continued vengeance that there is no end to the road on such a course (Aeschylus, The Eumenides). Works Cited
 As I read three books about the aftereffects of war, I couldn't help but find modern instances of the aftereffects of war, which have been playing periodically on the news for the past couple of weeks. |
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