The writing program in which I teach has decided to adopt a “foundational” literature curriculum, sort of a Great Books Lite, served up with multicultural condiments–a smattering of Koran, tidbits of Japanese poetry. Most of the stuff is by deceased Caucasian males, but there’s a touch of Frederick Douglass and Zora N. H. A unit on “The Family” is all dick lit, fetching up with Portnoy’s Complaint in the modern period. Yet, charmingly, “Eros” has been completely queered: Sappho, Dickinson, Whitman, Allen Ginsberg.

The thing is, this romp through the Museum of High Culture is on such a strict deadline that it doesn’t permit the indulgence of duration, the retro experience of continuity. No nineteenth century novels (too long, alas!). The epic appears as fragment, the syllabus including excerpts from The Iliad.

Hey, I read that book in Hum. 101, at Reed College in 1967, while another kind of fragging went on a world away and we clamored for “relevance.” We had a whole year of lectures and never left the West. I’m not sure if we even got up to the Renaissance.

I always thought the medium was the message: miss the longue durée and you’ve bloody well missed the boat.

I decided to re-read “the poem of force” (Simone Weil’s term) and see for myself. Which I’ve been doing over the last couple of weeks, in Robert Fitzgerald’s stunning translation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, new paperback edition, 2004). I’m being blown away by beauty, weirdness, boredom. All the strangeness that was wasted on my naive female mind, half-baked as it was at the age of 17.

The total weirdness, for example (along with the narrative utility) of imagining the gods as participant observers, beings who “like to watch” and love to meddle, and play for lower stakes than the bleeding mortals.

But it’s the “world of warcraft” aspect that most transfixes me. The almost obsessive, predictable variety of Homer’s similes comparing the warriors to various predators (lion, mountain boar), the technical problem of varying the ways in which Akhaians and Trojans get whacked:

the bronze lancehead
spilt his guts like water (Fitzgerald, 309)

or

In one great shock both men attacked at once,
axhead on helmet ridged below the crest
came hewing down, but the sword stroke
above the nose on the oncoming brow
went home: it cracked the bone, and both his eyes
were spilt in blood into the dust at his feet…. (Fitzgerald, 312)

Well-a-day. At times one feels the specific descriptions could form the basis of a butcher’s chart, graphic, practical–here’s how you carve up a man:

and in one leap he slashed
the vein that running up the back comes out
along the neck; he sheared it from the body,
so that the man fell backward in the dust
with arms out to his friends. (Fitzgerald, 310)

I’m sure someone has made the point before, but: why is blood-and-guts never deemed monotonous? Why is a brawl to the death, by definition, entertaining? Rising tension (rage, threats) climax (bashing heads) resolution (peace of exhaustion, landscape with carrion).

The men circle each other. Fall to. Lock horns.

Knock heads. Rip guts.

Bash each other’s brain’s to sushi.

Wow! Look at that elegant narrative arc!

“Man-wasting war,” Fitzgerald has Homer put it.

Millennia pass. Plot never palls.

My conclusion:

 

Poetics in Time of War

So simple

Just rip
the guts
out of language