Tales of Sin & Fury, Part 1 (12 page)

‘You did the introductory bit. You were on to Homer as oral literature. Homer licking his lips. Homer singing for his doughnuts.' She put what was left of the jammy dough into her mouth and wiped it with the back of her hand.

In his sing-song mid-Atlantic accent Morton started to read aloud from his typed sheets:

‘Although they have near-Eastern affinities, Homer's are the earliest stories set clearly within European tradition…'

‘Past that bit,' said Anthea.

‘OK. Bla bla. Have my doughnut too, love. Here goes:

‘In the earliest European tradition, the medium of narrative was the voice…'

‘You did read that bit.'

‘OK, try from here'. Morton took a gulp of coffee then began again:

‘Like his
Odyssey
, Homer's
Iliad
also starts in mid-action. We go straight in on the monumental squabble between King Agamemnon and his warrior Achilles in front of the assembled Greek armies besieging Troy. The background to this epic row is told through flashback, through conversation and allusion. It might seem to be principally Achilles' story but actually the battlefield scenes offer a series of vignettes showing the diverse experiences of various warriors as they meet their doom – or their victim – in the thick of the fighting.'

‘So it's not about Achilles?' Anthea interrupted.

‘What?'

‘You're going to stand up and tell them that the
Iliad
isn't about Achilles?'

‘Not
only
about Achilles. There are a lot of little guys too. Who may have had a local following when the poems were performed.'

‘What have you got against Achilles?'

‘Apart from having a short fuse, he's a great guy. But there are other different stories going on. Western individualism is obsessed with the one important person at the expense of the many.'

‘So you always say. I put it down to you having a Catholic family. Multiple siblings.'

‘Touché,' he turned and smiled at her. ‘Now, if you've quite finished… Where was I?… OK:

‘These combatants have seminal conversations…'

‘How do you mean, seminal?' Anthea asked.

‘When they meet on the battlefield to duel, the warriors tell each other their histories. And they sum up the achievements of their short lives. In each duel the two men are on the cusp of life and death. It sharpens the mind.'

‘OK.'

Morton took a gulp of coffee, rolled his eyes upwards as he recovered from the interruption, and started again:

‘Sometimes the warrior's brief encounter will not be with a mortal but with a goddess or god who has descended from the divine world of Mount Olympus to join the fray.

‘We see here how Homer's text diverges from the norms of the narrative texts we are most used to, i.e. the Western novel – which has been iconic and triumphant since its first flowering in England in the 18
^th
century. It remains a current medium despite predictions of its demise since the advent of film, radio and TV. And the genre has adhered to certain conventions…'

‘Are you going to give an example?' asked Anthea.

Morton stopped in full flow. ‘What?'

‘An example. This last bit is very general with lots of long words. Why not give a concrete example?'

He put his papers down with a sigh. ‘Such as?'

‘Someone on the bus yesterday was reading Thomas Hardy's
Under the Greenwood Tree
. Does that follow the conventions of the novel?'

‘I guess so. One author, a hero, a linear narrative… And it has strong roots in the life of the period where it's set…'

‘It was an imagined past even for Hardy.' Anthea pulled on the duvet and Morton's pile of papers went flying. ‘A vision of rural England decades before Hardy himself lived.'

‘Very bitter-sweet and lyrical.' Morton was writing notes on the page in his hand. ‘But that's not the point. What's relevant is that its world is limited to the confines of the material and social life of that period. That's typical of the novel. It's at its core a human story. Whereas Homer's is set on a cosmic stage. OK, it's a good example, I'll put it in. Shall I go on…?'

He gathered his papers off the duvet, patiently shuffled them back into order and started to read again:

‘In contrast Homer's action takes place on a number of different metaphysical levels. There is the world of mortals, but also that of the Olympian goddesses and gods, who may be prompted by affection or anger to involve themselves in the human plot. Or sometimes we meet other beings, the sentient and animate spirits of the natural world. For example, the River-god Scamander who is both personified and is also the river itself which diverts its course to attack Achilles with its waters. There are also wind-gods, sacred trees and nymphs. There are Furies, Titans and a Gorgon. There are ghosts of the known dead, like the sad visitation of Patroclus, and there are anonymous phantoms like the one which slips in through a bolt-hole in Penelope's bedroom door to visit her in her dreams. Odysseus famously sails to the land of the dead, speaks to ghosts, and returns to tell the tale.'

‘He wasn't the only one,' said Anthea. ‘What about Core? I'm going to a seminar today on visits to the underworld.'

‘I'll stick to the Odysseus example. This is a lecture on Homer. Or perhaps you should be writing it?' He smiled and stroked her cheek with the back of his hand.

‘Sorry, read on…'

‘River-spirits, nymphs and ghosts: all such non-human beings are excluded from the 19
^th
century tradition of “realism” associated with the novel. Although factually untrue, the traditional novel creates its fiction within unspoken but rigidly determined limits of “believable” possibility. The reader will give their imaginative consent to fictitious characters and places as long as they fit within broadly agreed terms of verisimilitude.

‘Those terms generally exclude the divine and the supernatural. The supernatural is reduced to ghostly fingers tapping on the window outside, refused admittance to the action. The novel may show religious characters, but God himself is not an acceptable character. In ancient Greek literature the gods provided a structure to replace the haphazard contingency of human life; but in the Western novel the power to control the fate of the characters rests in the hands of the author. If anyone, the novelist is God.'

Morton stopped and kissed Anthea on her forehead. ‘OK so far? What's going on in that brain inside there?'

‘It's all a bit dense, but it's OK. Go on. I've got that appointment at quarter past ten.' She was finishing the second doughnut.

‘What appointment?'

‘That lady who's going to help me about the nightmares. And the bones.'

‘The shrink.'

‘She's not actually a shrink. She's a counsellor. I think she does massage too. Anyway, I've got time. She's local. Go on.'

Morton cleared his throat. ‘Now, of course, things are changing. E V Rieu's racy prose translation pulled Homer out of the realm of stilted Victoriana and showed its novelistic possibilities; and there have also been changes in what we think of as the novel.

‘Take the issue of authorship. Since Michel Foucault pointed out that authorship is not a universal concept but a historical construct which can have various meanings, the many authors of the Homeric poems no longer seem so anomalous. Perhaps all works of art are more collective creations and less the work of individual “talent” than we imagine, whether the pooling of ideas and experiences is conscious or unconscious. Roland Barthes' “death of the author” kills nothing in Homer.'

Morton stopped reading and looked at Anthea, whose riot of red hair was resting on his shoulder. ‘Asleep?' he asked.

‘No. Even though you're on to French semiologists.' She yawned, ‘Go on.'

‘There will be some of them nodding off in the audience,' he said. ‘There always are. Some old gents come in just to have a nap. Where was I?…

‘Another change is that nowadays people see the novel less as a classic form, an inevitable pinnacle of literary achievement, and more as a composite genre, a historically-shaped hodge-podge. Julia Kristeva has described it as a ragbag woven from other verbal practices such as carnivalesque writing, courtly lyrics, hawkers' cries and scholastic treatises. Such perceptions also allow the composite Homeric poems – stitched together from a medley of shorter elements – to move closer to the novel in form.

‘Again, on “realism,” the storyteller's contract with the reader has changed in recent years. Non-verisimilitude is acceptable. Magical realism has woven the fantastic into the texture of novels which are otherwise traditional in form. Gone, in some works, is the reassuring continuity of consciousness propagated by Victorian novels. Whatever the passions and torments suffered by the characters of such novels, there is something cosy about a genre whose world view is limited to emotions and society: middle-of-theroad, middle-of-the-body, human-centred preoccupations.

‘Recent novels offer a more variegated and irregular vision encompassing dissonance, rupture, the unknown, the absurd, discontinuity, lacunae, tricks of perception.'

Anthea lifted her head. ‘That's what I'm having,' she said.

‘What?'

‘Tricks of perception.'

‘Can you specify?'

Anthea shook her head. ‘It's all unclear. But every time I think about getting on that plane to Greece in February, there's a feeling of dread. Something's going to go wrong.'

Morton snorted quietly, ‘Come on, Ant… Like what? We miss the plane? The taverna's out of moussaka?'

She pretended to smack his hand. ‘Worse than that. Don't laugh. And I keep wanting to look at those bones. I have a feeling they're trying to tell me something.'

‘Come on, honey,' said Morton. ‘You know the bones make you morbid. Keep off the dope and you won't get paranoid. Let the bones rest in peace in their little box. You have to go to Greece to finish your fieldwork.'

‘You're right,' said Anthea, putting the breakfast tray down onto the floor as if disposing of the topic. ‘Perhaps the worst has already happened and I'm remembering it backwards into the future. Take no notice. Read on.'

‘I've got onto the contemporary novel, right?' said Morton. He found his place on the page: ‘We have become aware that the “naturalism” of traditional novels is not an adequate description of human social experience. Any more than Victorian paintings, or 20
^th
century photographs or film, offer an adequate representation of visual experience. All are partial, fictionalized, and illusory. Whether with words or pictures, the attention-focussing device of framing determines everything: it selects the arena of interest, excludes others, and manipulates how we see what it has selected.

‘Homer's poems never set out to provide the regularity and realism, or “naturalism”, that we have expected from the novel. His narrative has a random, wayward quality. It includes discontinuities, monologues, lectures and long set pieces…'

‘Like the shield,' said Anthea.

‘What now?' Morton put his paper down with a touch of weariness.

‘Achilles' shield. The action stops dead and we get a hundred lines of meticulous description of a piece of hardware with the obsession of an antique-collector.'

‘OK…'

‘Or an acid head staring at a seashell…'

‘OK, OK, I get your point.' Morton picked up a pencil, made a note and then started reading again with a drooping smile:

‘His characters also slip through the veil of consensual “reality” to have other-world experiences, meeting a god on the seashore or being prompted by a sudden spirit to unusual behaviour. They do not act against a “filled-in” background as in Western painting, but often hang in limbo. Their world can be meticulously embodied, where we can picture a sea-mew skimming the water; smell the timber cut exactly to size to build a boat; feel the North Wind blowing thistles across the fields. Then it can slip into mirage. Thus these texts, which could in the past be seen as stylized or primitive, now seem curiously resonant with our
zeitgeist
.'

‘Hang on,' said Anthea. ‘Who's going to be at this lecture?'

‘Technically, it's open to the public. But most will be academics of some sort.'

‘So they'll know what a
zeitgeist
is? I'm not too sure myself.'

‘They'll know. If they don't, it doesn't matter. Really doesn't, honey.' He looked longingly at his manuscript. ‘I'll go on, yeah?

‘Suddenly Homer is looking rather up-to-date. Multiauthored, multi-charactered, temporally displaced, set in metaphysically heterogeneous arenas, the Homeric poems weave their yarn in a way strangely fitting for contemporary tastes.'

‘Wait a minute,' said Anthea. She dived under the duvet and came up scratching her calf. ‘I think the dog's got fleas again. Sorry, go on.'

Morton hesitated then pressed on: ‘Homer also includes folk tales, a genre that in contemporary thinking has likewise become less marginalized: Bruno Bettelheim has written about their consolatory and therapeutic role, suggesting that in them children could consciously and unconsciously find messages of hope, strength and encourgement. In his words, “This was probably the first pschoanalytic cure on the couch.”'

‘I think Bettelheim is a bit of a jump,' said Anthea. ‘And speaking of cures and the couch, I've got to go to my session. But I think it's good. Read me the rest later.' She got out of bed, tripped over the tray, and made for the bathroom.

Tuesday 18
^th
December 9.30 am

‘Keep walking, it's cold.' I have my arm through Mandy's as we walk between the bare flower beds in the exercise courtyard. A few small flakes of snow are starting to fall.