Since it’s still pretty early in the year, I decided to reflect on my year in reading for 2007 and compile a list of my favorite books of last year. The books I’ve included are my favorites of the books I read in 2007. This is not a list of what I think are the best books of 2007: some had been sitting on my book shelves for a few years waiting to be read, and no doubt some of my favorite books that came out in 2007 will be my favorite reads of 2010 or so. These books are favorites in different ways – some were fun, entertaining reading, others the sorts of books I’ve found myself repeatedly thinking about ever since, some profoundly moving – but they’re all books I’m passionate about in one way or another.
In reflecting on my favorite books of the year, I’m struck by several things:
1. There’s a lot of fiction on my list. The novels and short fiction I enjoy most provide much more than escapism, but there’s no doubt that like many readers, one of the things I enjoy about fiction is the temporary reprieve from whatever I’m stressed or worried about. I suspect so much fiction shows up on my list this year in part because I’ve been stressed and worried about some major things this year, most notably my grandmother’s long battle with throat cancer, and ultimately her death in late November, and a series of episodes of illness and serious pain for my partner, and ultimately his own diagnosis with cancer, surgery, and continuing chemotherapy.
2. Most of my favorite books last year were written by men. I’m not quite sure what’s up with that. It does not fit my long term reading patterns and likes. Certainly, if I think of the ethnographies (as a cultural anthropologist, probably the type of book I’ve read the most of over the course of many years) that have been my favorites or most influenced my thinking (not necessarily the same things), the majority have been by women writers, even if I’m not really sure why that’s the case, either. One conjecture is that I read not just a lot of fiction last year, but a lot of male-written fiction, and I think you could argue (though you could also very easily over-generalize) that male written fiction is often more escapist than female written, and maybe that’s appealed to me over the past year without my quite realizing it. Or maybe it’s just the sort of random pattern that can crop up whenever you’re dealing with small samples. Even though I read considerably more books in any given year than the average person (as I would presume would be true for any academic), the set of books I read in a given year, much less my favorites among them, is too small a sample to make much of in terms of quasi-statistical generalization.
3. There’s not much anthropology on the list. Only three books were written by anthropologists (Asad, Dumont, and Sánchez Piñol), and one of those, Sánchez Piñol’s Cold Skin, was a novel, and only one, Dumont’s Under the Rainbow was an ethnography.
This is not a statement on my part about the state of the discipline. I read several ethnographies that were good, but didn’t quite grab me as favorites. (I’m not going to list them – I at least know better than to piss people off by listing books that I thought were bad, mediocre, or okay but not great.) Most of my reading for pleasure was devoted to fiction this year, as noted above. I also had quite a kick during part of the year reading books that were not strictly speaking anthropological ethnographies, but were in one way or another “writing culture,” and several of those works do show up on my list below.
4. Most of my favorite novels have one or two things in common. I’m not a huge fan of science fiction, although I’ve read a lot of it, and some of my all-time favorite books fit into the genre. For a genre based on the notion of wholesale imagining of alternate realities, I tend to find most science fiction shockingly conventional.
Most of my favorite fiction does tend to share with science fiction the imagining of alternate realities, that things could be significantly different than in my own particular situation. (This is not, at least at this point in my life, because I’m particularly unhappy with my life, but more because I find it intellectually engaging.)
Most of my favorite fiction tends to do this in one of a couple ways, either by having some of the qualities of magical realism or surrealism, where the reality depicted is in many, if not most, ways congruent with our “real” world, but functions, and in a matter of fact way, in significantly different ways in some respect, or by taking the world as we tend to know it and spinning out the ramifications of “what if” questions (What if everyone went blind at once? What if a plague of zombie-ism broke out around the world?).
Without any further adieu, the first half of my favorite books of 2007 (in alphabetical order):
1. Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing, Columbia University Press.
Not exactly a fun read, but a thoughtful rumination on terrorism, suicide bombing, and reasons for a sort of Western preoccupation with suicide bombing.
2. Alessandro Baricco, An Iliad, Knopf.
I’ve discussed Baricco’s version of the Iliad on two occasions on this blog: “Uses of Myth” and “Myth, Mythic Literacy, and Contemporary Culture.” It’s a nicely done telling, not quite a translation, of Homer’s classic.
3. Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Crown.
This is one of the “What if” novels I mentioned above, and I think it’s apparent from the title what the “what if” is. In addition to being an entertaining zombie yarn, this novel is also formally interesting, as it is presented as if an actual oral history collected among survivors of the Great Zombie War.
4. Octavia Butler, Fledgling, Seven Stories.
The only vampire novel on my favorite books of the year list (and yes, I did read other vampire works). Everything I’ve ever read by Butler, including Fledgling, has been smart and what I’d describe as “light” – not light in the sense of fluff or lacking substance, but in the sense of being fleet, with its prose providing for a fluid, quick read. (Although in other ways being extremely different from each other or from Butler, two other favorite writers that have this quality, at least for me, are Ismail Kadare and Imre Kertesz. For all three, I’ve had the experience of surprising myself by reading long, substantive works in quite short periods of time, in contrast to the “heaviness” or density of prose of some other favorite writers. For example, I find myself not so much bogged down [that would imply something unpleasant] but considerably slowed by the prose of Orhan Pamuk or José Saramago.)
5. Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek, and other stories, Vintage.
I can’t put my finger on exactly what I found so engaging about this story collection, but it’s quite good. Not having something more substantive to say, I’ll engage here in non sequitur and note that the title story’s title refers to one of my favorite place names: Woman Hollering Creek near San Antonio, Texas. (Another favorite place name that I tend to associate with it is Hungry Mother State Park in Southern Virginia.)
6. Joan Didion, Salvador, Lester & Orpen Dennys.
Published in 1983, this is a beautiful and extremely unsettling account of an unsettling place in the early 1980s.
7. Jean-Paul Dumont, Under the Rainbow: Nature and Supernature among the Panare Indians, University of Texas Press.
The only ethnography on my list, I had been meaning to read this older work from the 1960s ever since I picked it up in a used book shop in Boston a few years ago. It has one of the coolest chapter titles ever, “Time and Astrosexuality,” has plenty of wonderfully baroque structuralist diagrams, and does what many of my favorite ethnographies do – it vividly characterizes a particular culture that is fascinating in its complexity (and really it is complexity of both the Panare and Dumont’s text that is fascinating).
8. Sesshu Foster, Atomik Aztex, City Lights.
This is the “trippiest” novel I’ve read in a long time. (William S. Burroughs’ The Western Lands, which involves Billy the Kid and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, is perhaps more “trippy,” but I read that probably 15 years ago when I was on a brief Burroughs kick.) The main character is an Aztec warrior in an alternative universe/time line in which Aztec ritual and magic had enabled the survival of that empire, and in which the protagonist aids the Soviets in the defense of Stalingrad against the Germans in WWII, and in which he is destined ultimately to be sacrificed atop a pyramid. At the same time, the main character is in our universe, or at least one very like our own, a Mexican-American slaughter house worker in Southern California.
9. Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, Picador.
I previously wrote of Hatzfeld’s book (“A Typology of Genocide”). This is an important book, both in shedding light on one of history’s worst genocides through the voices of some of the killers themselves and in its analysis of genocide and other ethnic violence.
10. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, Vintage.
Some reviews critiqued and/or dismissed this book as a conservative revision of the Enlightenment. Certainly, Himmelfarb offers a conservative perspective on the Enlightenment, e.g. in her emphasis on the importance of religious writers in the American strain of the Enlightenment, but unlike Fox News, this careful and often insightful book is fair and balanced. For example, it makes equally clear the role of those same religious writers in contributing to the separation of church and state in the U.S., and Himmelfarb’s book makes more clear than anything else I’ve read how liberal Adam Smith could be (in both the sense of classical economic liberalism and the contemporary sense of social liberalism), and how different he could be from contemporary neo-liberals and neo-conservatives who so often invoke him.
Showing posts with label Alessandro Barrico. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alessandro Barrico. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Troy and the Purposes of Art
The blog post I mentioned in my previous entry (by Morrigan on Anthropology Net) on the purposes of art had been part of a thread of discussion on the movie 300. I agree with Morrigan’s point that 300 is not just art and not just entertainment. All movies are both art and entertainment (and often other things besides), though they might be good or bad art, good or bad at being entertaining.
Since I haven’t seen 300, at least not yet, I can’t say much about it. I’d like to shift to another epic movie set in the ancient Mediterranean, Troy. Troy was widely panned (a bit unfairly, I think) when released a few years ago and considered a commercial failure (despite making over $140 million at the U.S. box office, and about half a billion dollars worldwide – I’d like to be a commercial failure, too). Like most art, Troy does several things at once, having several distinct purposes simultaneously.
Art as Entertainment
Art in all forms can provide amusement, diversion, and entertainment. For big budget Hollywood movies, entertainment is the primary function of art. Troy is no exception, all of which is fairly obvious. The main reason to even discuss this is to emphasize that while entertainment may be the primary function of a movie like Troy, it is not the only thing happening.
Art as Aesthetic Object
Troy presents a set of aesthetic ideals – of masculinity, violence, and war especially. In his introduction to his modern adaptation, An Iliad (which faithfully preserves the content, but eliminates much of the repetition in Homer’s text), Alessandro Baricco speaks of the beauty of war in the Iliad. It’s one thing to state that The Iliad or Troy glorify war. They do, but more they present ideals of masculinity, violence, and war as objects of beauty. Baricco’s point is that any discourse on war, including opposition to it, needs to involve not just intellectualization but take into account also the appeal because of the beauty of (representations of) war.
In Troy, this aestheticization of masculinity, violence, and war takes several forms. Brad Pitt’s body, as Achilles, is an aesthetic object – at least since the movie Fight Club, Brad Pitt’s body has been an embodiment of a particular masculine body-aesthetic. In Troy, Orlando Bloom, as Paris, provides an embodiment of an alternate masculine body beauty. But it’s not just about men’s bodies, even if Troy and many other recent movies are very much about men’s bodies. The lines of the Greeks’ ships, the soldiers’ armor, the unity of movement of the Myrmidons, the arc and sweep of swords and spears, and the pacing of the action – imagery slowing and speeding up in an increasingly common Hollywood trick – all contribute to the aestheticization, the creation of a representation of violence and war as beautiful, something which I must admit works to an alarming extent.
Art as Intellectual Object
Art can provide grist for more intellectual contemplation as well (such as this blog post, and the blog post which prompted me to write it). Most of us don’t expect to encounter much food for thought when we go see a big budget action movie like Troy, but occasionally they surprise us. I’ll simply point out two ways in which Troy left me thinking as I left the theater.
Achilles’ Dilemma
Achilles has a dilemma as he goes off to war. He’s been told by his mother, Thetis, a minor goddess no less, that he has a choice. If he stays at home, he’ll live a long, comfortable life, be well-loved, but also be forgotten. If he goes to war, he’ll die at war but achieve a glory that will be remembered for generations. We all know what he chose, but he had to think about it (In The Iliad, he goes on thinking about it right up until Patroclus’ death and his own return to battle). Granted, the filmmakers didn’t come up with this – that would be Homer and whatever earlier oral traditions he was drawing upon – but they present it well, and I was certainly touched by it, left thinking, “What would I choose?” Not being a warrior, I’ve a pretty good idea what I would have chosen, but the equivalent dilemma for any scholar might be: “What would you do and what would you sacrifice in order that your work and ideas continue to be read and discussed not just during your lifetime, but 100 or 500 or 1000 years after your death?”
Patroclus’ Death
Troy is not a movie of The Iliad in the sense that it starts before the start of The Iliad (perhaps defying contemporary expectations – about either Troy or The Iliad – Troy is actually a much more straightforwardly linear text) and ends after the end of The Iliad, addressing material (such as the death of Achilles, the Trojan Horse, and the Fall of Troy) covered in The Odyssey. Still, it draws primarily on the material in The Iliad. It’s interesting then to compare some ways in which the two presentations of events significantly differ. One of these concerns the death of Patroclus, Achilles’ companion.
Through most of The Iliad and much of Troy, Achilles sulks in his tent over an act of Agamemnon, specifically Agamemnon taking away from Achilles a woman that he had claimed as a war prize. In The Iliad, this breach between the two heroes opens the narrative, ten years after the start of the war itself. Without Achilles and his men fighting on their side, the Trojans gain the upper hand. At a critical moment, in The Iliad, Patroclus beseeches Achilles to allow him to put on the armor of Achilles, both to rally the Greeks and to strike fear into the Trojans. By this point, Achilles clearly realizes he’s been petty, but he refuses to break his vow to not enter the battle, and so allows Patroclus to don his armor. Patroclus’ arrival on the scene of battle does rally the Greeks and strike fear into the Trojans, at least for a while, but after a few moments, everyone realizes it’s not actually Achilles. The more critical factor in turning the tide of battle a bit is as much the arrival of Achilles’ men as Achilles’ suit of armor. When Hector rallies some of his own Trojan troops and ends up killing Patroclus (with more than a little help from Apollo, not to mention another Trojan who spears Patroclus before Hector finishes him), he’s well aware of whom he has killed.
The story of Troy regarding this incident is different in important respects. Patroclus doesn’t ask Achilles’ permission to don the armor – he takes it on the sly, so Achilles has no idea that Patroclus has gone to battle, wearing his own armor no less. The appearance of “Achilles” on the battlefield has its intended effect, and no one else is in on the deception. When Hector kills Patroclus (this time without any god’s help), he thinks he has killed Achilles (a fact that Achilles later taunts him about), until the helmet is removed. For Achilles, the shock of Patroclus’ death is heightened, as he didn’t even know Patroclus was in the battle.
On this incident, I find myself far preferring the version of the story told in Troy. The intervention of Apollo to wallop Patroclus in the head in The Iliad hardly seems fitting, and I find Hector’s fate more poignant if he thinks he’s already defeated Achilles in battle before finding out that he’s not even come close to fighting someone of Achilles’ skill in battle. I wondered at the time, though, and still wonder now, whether my preference stems from a modern mindset, or whether, in fact the makers of Troy have one-upped Homer in telling a better story on this point.
Art as a Reflection of its Society
In a number of ways both Troy and The Iliad reflect the societies in which they were produced. Here, I’ll discuss two – one a way in which the two works have much in common, the other one of the main differences between the two works.
War as a way of life
As I said above, both works glorify war and violence. They don’t do this by making an argument that war is good (if they did, they could be more easily countered with opposing arguments) – they take that largely for granted, though both texts also occasionally interject awareness of the sadness and tragedy of war also. Instead, they successfully aestheticize violence and war and make of it an object of beauty.
In doing so, they reflect societies for which making war is a part of the way of life of the culture as a whole. In the case of the United States, the U.S. military has been nearly continuously involved in the application of force around the world for the past several decades, e.g. the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the first Persian Gulf War, enforcement of the no-fly zone between the two Iraq wars, Haiti, Kosovo, peace-keeping in Bosnia, Somalia, military advisors and trainers in Colombia and other spots associated with the “War on Drugs,” Panama, cruise missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan after the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings, etc. Note that the motivations and details of these different missions vary considerably, and also that I’m not making an argument that lumps them all together as good or bad. Rather, I’m simply stating a fact – that the U.S. military has been nearly continuously engaged for decades, albeit at different levels of intensity, and that making war is a regular part of a way of life for the culture as a whole.
A key difference between the United States today and Ancient Greece is that in the U.S. today, the military and war are quite distant from the lived day to day experience of many, if not most, Americans. I live and work in a region of the country, the Southeast, which is the source of a high proportion of military personnel. I also live and work in a community, the Pensacola area, which is dominated by the military. Most businesses in town offer discounts for active duty military personnel; people routinely give thanks and prayer for members of the armed services, especially those actively engaged in combat; I routinely have active duty and military reserve personnel enrolled in my classes. I also realize that this is not typical of most places in the U.S. For many middle-class Americans, the military, military personnel, and war seem like very distant phenomena, while at the same time war is encountered very regularly in its aestheticized form in movies, television, and to a large extent mainstream news.
The Gods
The largest difference between Troy and The Iliad has to do with the role of the gods. In The Iliad, the gods are omnipresent – barely a page goes by (except in sections cataloguing the men present in battle, how many ships and men they brought, their genealogies, etc.) without the gods intervening in some way. In Troy, the gods exist, but they aren’t directly involved in the story. The only one we see is Achilles’ mother, Thetis, a minor goddess, and she interacts by giving him advice – that is, she acts as his mother and not as a goddess. This reflects a basic difference in the cultures. Contemporary American society is not so secular as some (especially religious fundamentalists) think, but it is one profoundly affected by the humanism of the Enlightenment. Which is to say, most Americans don’t expect God to directly intervene in mundane affairs and they find the actions of people more interesting and compelling than the interventions of Greek gods.
Many of the parts of The Iliad I find most unsatisfying involve such interventions, and here my dissatisfaction is very much a result of the ways in which my thinking and preferences reflect modern culture. I’m dissatisfied with the role of Apollo in Patroclus’ death and the role of Athena in Hector’s death – I find the versions of the narrative in Troy more compelling. More importantly, two incidents, which open and close The Iliad, demonstrate key differences in Ancient Greek and modern American worldviews.
At the opening of The Iliad, Achilles isn’t just bitter at Agamemnon. He doesn’t just go to sulk in his tent. He also beseeches his mother to beseech Zeus to turn the tide (at least for a while) of battle against the Greeks. Much of the misfortune of the Greeks through much of the narrative is partly the result of Achilles’ request against his own side. The main closing event of The Iliad is Priam’s visit to Achilles’ tent to recover his son Hector’s body, which Achilles had been abusing for many days. Many of the gods had favored Achilles but had since been angered by his treatment of Hector’s body. Achilles’ mother has warned him to allow Priam to take the body or incur the wrath of the gods. When Priam visits, Achilles is genuinely moved by him, but it’s also clear (through the explicit statements of Achilles) that the only reason Achilles gives up the body is because of the threat of the gods’ wrath.
Troy plays these incidents quite differently. Achilles is angry at Agamemnon, but doesn’t try to bring down intervention of the gods against his own side. Priam visits Achilles, genuinely touches him, and convinces him to give up the body of Hector out of respect and pity for Priam.
I don’t think I’m alone in finding Troy’s versions of these two key events more compelling, even finding The Iliad’s versions a bit strange. In the case of Patroclus’ death, Troy might even simply tell a better story, but in these two instances, the sense of satisfaction or strangeness is shaped by the social context which the work also reflects.
Since I haven’t seen 300, at least not yet, I can’t say much about it. I’d like to shift to another epic movie set in the ancient Mediterranean, Troy. Troy was widely panned (a bit unfairly, I think) when released a few years ago and considered a commercial failure (despite making over $140 million at the U.S. box office, and about half a billion dollars worldwide – I’d like to be a commercial failure, too). Like most art, Troy does several things at once, having several distinct purposes simultaneously.
Art as Entertainment
Art in all forms can provide amusement, diversion, and entertainment. For big budget Hollywood movies, entertainment is the primary function of art. Troy is no exception, all of which is fairly obvious. The main reason to even discuss this is to emphasize that while entertainment may be the primary function of a movie like Troy, it is not the only thing happening.
Art as Aesthetic Object
Troy presents a set of aesthetic ideals – of masculinity, violence, and war especially. In his introduction to his modern adaptation, An Iliad (which faithfully preserves the content, but eliminates much of the repetition in Homer’s text), Alessandro Baricco speaks of the beauty of war in the Iliad. It’s one thing to state that The Iliad or Troy glorify war. They do, but more they present ideals of masculinity, violence, and war as objects of beauty. Baricco’s point is that any discourse on war, including opposition to it, needs to involve not just intellectualization but take into account also the appeal because of the beauty of (representations of) war.
In Troy, this aestheticization of masculinity, violence, and war takes several forms. Brad Pitt’s body, as Achilles, is an aesthetic object – at least since the movie Fight Club, Brad Pitt’s body has been an embodiment of a particular masculine body-aesthetic. In Troy, Orlando Bloom, as Paris, provides an embodiment of an alternate masculine body beauty. But it’s not just about men’s bodies, even if Troy and many other recent movies are very much about men’s bodies. The lines of the Greeks’ ships, the soldiers’ armor, the unity of movement of the Myrmidons, the arc and sweep of swords and spears, and the pacing of the action – imagery slowing and speeding up in an increasingly common Hollywood trick – all contribute to the aestheticization, the creation of a representation of violence and war as beautiful, something which I must admit works to an alarming extent.
Art as Intellectual Object
Art can provide grist for more intellectual contemplation as well (such as this blog post, and the blog post which prompted me to write it). Most of us don’t expect to encounter much food for thought when we go see a big budget action movie like Troy, but occasionally they surprise us. I’ll simply point out two ways in which Troy left me thinking as I left the theater.
Achilles’ Dilemma
Achilles has a dilemma as he goes off to war. He’s been told by his mother, Thetis, a minor goddess no less, that he has a choice. If he stays at home, he’ll live a long, comfortable life, be well-loved, but also be forgotten. If he goes to war, he’ll die at war but achieve a glory that will be remembered for generations. We all know what he chose, but he had to think about it (In The Iliad, he goes on thinking about it right up until Patroclus’ death and his own return to battle). Granted, the filmmakers didn’t come up with this – that would be Homer and whatever earlier oral traditions he was drawing upon – but they present it well, and I was certainly touched by it, left thinking, “What would I choose?” Not being a warrior, I’ve a pretty good idea what I would have chosen, but the equivalent dilemma for any scholar might be: “What would you do and what would you sacrifice in order that your work and ideas continue to be read and discussed not just during your lifetime, but 100 or 500 or 1000 years after your death?”
Patroclus’ Death
Troy is not a movie of The Iliad in the sense that it starts before the start of The Iliad (perhaps defying contemporary expectations – about either Troy or The Iliad – Troy is actually a much more straightforwardly linear text) and ends after the end of The Iliad, addressing material (such as the death of Achilles, the Trojan Horse, and the Fall of Troy) covered in The Odyssey. Still, it draws primarily on the material in The Iliad. It’s interesting then to compare some ways in which the two presentations of events significantly differ. One of these concerns the death of Patroclus, Achilles’ companion.
Through most of The Iliad and much of Troy, Achilles sulks in his tent over an act of Agamemnon, specifically Agamemnon taking away from Achilles a woman that he had claimed as a war prize. In The Iliad, this breach between the two heroes opens the narrative, ten years after the start of the war itself. Without Achilles and his men fighting on their side, the Trojans gain the upper hand. At a critical moment, in The Iliad, Patroclus beseeches Achilles to allow him to put on the armor of Achilles, both to rally the Greeks and to strike fear into the Trojans. By this point, Achilles clearly realizes he’s been petty, but he refuses to break his vow to not enter the battle, and so allows Patroclus to don his armor. Patroclus’ arrival on the scene of battle does rally the Greeks and strike fear into the Trojans, at least for a while, but after a few moments, everyone realizes it’s not actually Achilles. The more critical factor in turning the tide of battle a bit is as much the arrival of Achilles’ men as Achilles’ suit of armor. When Hector rallies some of his own Trojan troops and ends up killing Patroclus (with more than a little help from Apollo, not to mention another Trojan who spears Patroclus before Hector finishes him), he’s well aware of whom he has killed.
The story of Troy regarding this incident is different in important respects. Patroclus doesn’t ask Achilles’ permission to don the armor – he takes it on the sly, so Achilles has no idea that Patroclus has gone to battle, wearing his own armor no less. The appearance of “Achilles” on the battlefield has its intended effect, and no one else is in on the deception. When Hector kills Patroclus (this time without any god’s help), he thinks he has killed Achilles (a fact that Achilles later taunts him about), until the helmet is removed. For Achilles, the shock of Patroclus’ death is heightened, as he didn’t even know Patroclus was in the battle.
On this incident, I find myself far preferring the version of the story told in Troy. The intervention of Apollo to wallop Patroclus in the head in The Iliad hardly seems fitting, and I find Hector’s fate more poignant if he thinks he’s already defeated Achilles in battle before finding out that he’s not even come close to fighting someone of Achilles’ skill in battle. I wondered at the time, though, and still wonder now, whether my preference stems from a modern mindset, or whether, in fact the makers of Troy have one-upped Homer in telling a better story on this point.
Art as a Reflection of its Society
In a number of ways both Troy and The Iliad reflect the societies in which they were produced. Here, I’ll discuss two – one a way in which the two works have much in common, the other one of the main differences between the two works.
War as a way of life
As I said above, both works glorify war and violence. They don’t do this by making an argument that war is good (if they did, they could be more easily countered with opposing arguments) – they take that largely for granted, though both texts also occasionally interject awareness of the sadness and tragedy of war also. Instead, they successfully aestheticize violence and war and make of it an object of beauty.
In doing so, they reflect societies for which making war is a part of the way of life of the culture as a whole. In the case of the United States, the U.S. military has been nearly continuously involved in the application of force around the world for the past several decades, e.g. the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the first Persian Gulf War, enforcement of the no-fly zone between the two Iraq wars, Haiti, Kosovo, peace-keeping in Bosnia, Somalia, military advisors and trainers in Colombia and other spots associated with the “War on Drugs,” Panama, cruise missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan after the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings, etc. Note that the motivations and details of these different missions vary considerably, and also that I’m not making an argument that lumps them all together as good or bad. Rather, I’m simply stating a fact – that the U.S. military has been nearly continuously engaged for decades, albeit at different levels of intensity, and that making war is a regular part of a way of life for the culture as a whole.
A key difference between the United States today and Ancient Greece is that in the U.S. today, the military and war are quite distant from the lived day to day experience of many, if not most, Americans. I live and work in a region of the country, the Southeast, which is the source of a high proportion of military personnel. I also live and work in a community, the Pensacola area, which is dominated by the military. Most businesses in town offer discounts for active duty military personnel; people routinely give thanks and prayer for members of the armed services, especially those actively engaged in combat; I routinely have active duty and military reserve personnel enrolled in my classes. I also realize that this is not typical of most places in the U.S. For many middle-class Americans, the military, military personnel, and war seem like very distant phenomena, while at the same time war is encountered very regularly in its aestheticized form in movies, television, and to a large extent mainstream news.
The Gods
The largest difference between Troy and The Iliad has to do with the role of the gods. In The Iliad, the gods are omnipresent – barely a page goes by (except in sections cataloguing the men present in battle, how many ships and men they brought, their genealogies, etc.) without the gods intervening in some way. In Troy, the gods exist, but they aren’t directly involved in the story. The only one we see is Achilles’ mother, Thetis, a minor goddess, and she interacts by giving him advice – that is, she acts as his mother and not as a goddess. This reflects a basic difference in the cultures. Contemporary American society is not so secular as some (especially religious fundamentalists) think, but it is one profoundly affected by the humanism of the Enlightenment. Which is to say, most Americans don’t expect God to directly intervene in mundane affairs and they find the actions of people more interesting and compelling than the interventions of Greek gods.
Many of the parts of The Iliad I find most unsatisfying involve such interventions, and here my dissatisfaction is very much a result of the ways in which my thinking and preferences reflect modern culture. I’m dissatisfied with the role of Apollo in Patroclus’ death and the role of Athena in Hector’s death – I find the versions of the narrative in Troy more compelling. More importantly, two incidents, which open and close The Iliad, demonstrate key differences in Ancient Greek and modern American worldviews.
At the opening of The Iliad, Achilles isn’t just bitter at Agamemnon. He doesn’t just go to sulk in his tent. He also beseeches his mother to beseech Zeus to turn the tide (at least for a while) of battle against the Greeks. Much of the misfortune of the Greeks through much of the narrative is partly the result of Achilles’ request against his own side. The main closing event of The Iliad is Priam’s visit to Achilles’ tent to recover his son Hector’s body, which Achilles had been abusing for many days. Many of the gods had favored Achilles but had since been angered by his treatment of Hector’s body. Achilles’ mother has warned him to allow Priam to take the body or incur the wrath of the gods. When Priam visits, Achilles is genuinely moved by him, but it’s also clear (through the explicit statements of Achilles) that the only reason Achilles gives up the body is because of the threat of the gods’ wrath.
Troy plays these incidents quite differently. Achilles is angry at Agamemnon, but doesn’t try to bring down intervention of the gods against his own side. Priam visits Achilles, genuinely touches him, and convinces him to give up the body of Hector out of respect and pity for Priam.
I don’t think I’m alone in finding Troy’s versions of these two key events more compelling, even finding The Iliad’s versions a bit strange. In the case of Patroclus’ death, Troy might even simply tell a better story, but in these two instances, the sense of satisfaction or strangeness is shaped by the social context which the work also reflects.
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