Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

Kazuo Ishiguro – Never Let Me Go

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There are times I wish I knew a lot more about sociology or psychology, when I wish I knew more about what we’ve discovered in terms of human emotional and behavioral development, for example, or how our psycho-social needs shape our transformation into functional members of society. I have some basic assumptions about social conditioning but nothing in depth. Nothing I’m definite about or feel confident in adopting as a theory. 

However, this seems to be what Kazuo Ishiguro is exploring in his novel Never Let Me Go. What is the emotional or intellectual essence of being human? The fictional construct he’s come up with to explore this idea is a good one – at least it struck me as well-suited to his purpose. I don’t want to give too much away, however, because I think the experience of reading this particular novel is a lot more interesting if you know nothing about the story at all. A lot of the tension for me came about through my labored understanding of what exactly was going on.  

In the most basic terms, the novel concerns a trio of individuals who have grown up together. The story centers on their coming-of-age, as it were, and their understanding of their role in a larger society. That sounds all rather ordinary, doesn’t it? But it’s not at all. I’ll recycle a line from my other post on Never Let Me Go, in an attempt to explain without giving too much away – the society they’re meant to live in, because of certain scientific discoveries, requires a strict and terrifying kind of social segregation. And our trio is on the wrong side. 

What comes out of Ishiguro’s construct is an attempt to locate the soul. Maybe that seems rather lofty, but I do think that’s what he’s getting at. Do we have a soul because all human beings necessarily have a soul, or do we learn what having a soul means and therefore have one? And what if, finally, it actually doesn’t matter whether we have a soul? Of all the novel’s questions, this one struck me as the most frightening. 

I wrote above that a lot of the novel’s tension comes through the reader’s slow understanding of the details of Ishiguro’s fictional world – we keep imagining the worst and waiting for some kind of confirmation or denial. But there’s something else in terms of reader-narrator tension: as the story progresses, the narrator entertains similar questions about the soul and free will as the reader does and the reader keeps waiting for the moment when the narrator might hazard a realization. But it slowly becomes apparent that everything about the narrator’s life precludes her from being able to form the questions in the same way as the reader. To me, that fundamental difference is Ishiguro’s attempt at answering his own question. 

I’ll definitely be adding more Ishiguro to my mountain of books to be read someday. Several years ago I read An Artist of the Floating World and if I remember correctly it has a similar aesthetic – disturbing but quiet. Thoughtful but mildly strange.  

I’m switching gears somewhat for the weekend and finishing up Rosy Thornton’s intricate Hearts and Minds. And I hope to settle down and read Nadine Gordimer’s fourth (and very short) novel The Late Bourgeois World. Other than that I will see what leaps off the shelf! 

Also, before I forget – Victoria from Eve’s Alexandria has put together an informative and witty post about the Orange Prize long list. Some of these look really interesting.  

Nadine Gordimer – Occasion for Loving

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I love it when you’re reading a book and you’re just enjoying the scenes, the ideas and the prose and then suddenly you come across a few passages that change everything. That put the entire novel into perspective. That transform the story into something much greater than thoughtful fiction. 

Nadine Gordimer’s Occasion for Loving kind of sneaks up on you like that. I was reading this book and although I was enjoying it, I was also kind of thinking it might turn out to be one I’d leave on the shelf after finishing and not think much about again. Instead, the book packs kind of a surprising wallop.  

The basic story centers on a family, The Stilwells, and their relationship with another couple, Boaz and Ann Davis. The Stilwells, as represented mostly by the mother Jessie, do not agree with South African apartheid and live their life as much as possible as though the color barrier did not exist. In some ways they convince themselves they exist outside the system – their home is open to anyone, they travel freely to the townships and work within the political parties that are actively fighting against the apartheid system – and this is their way of believing they have kept their own integrity intact. 

But of course this isn’t possible. Their attempt at living as though apartheid doesn’t affect them gets called into question when Ann begins an affair with one of the Stilwell’s black friends. Everything about this affair serves to highlight what it means to have your life defined through the color of your skin. There is one line, taken from somewhere smack in the middle of the book, that I felt encapsulated this very idea: 

Every contact with whites was touched with intimacy; for even the most casual belonged by definition to the conspiracy against keeping apart. 

Ann and her lover Gideon are engaged in an act of political transgression. In a situation like theirs, this will always be more important than anything else between them. So how is it possible for anyone to consider the affair without first considering that Ann has power and freedom and choice and Gideon has none? Even Ann’s husband, who should be allowed to honestly experience all the emotions involved in a betrayal cannot forget for one moment that the relationship will always be more complicated than that. 

Another thing that struck me the more I got into the story was how Gordimer skillfully reveals just how difficult it is for someone in a privileged class, no matter their sympathies for the oppressed, to really understand what’s it like to live without any freedom. Jessie comes close, toward the end in a conversation with Gideon but even then she can only frame her understanding from her own perspective: 

She smiled, looking at him from a distance. “We’re not talking about the same thing. It’s a question of freedom.”

“Freedom?” He was astonished, derisive.

“There’s more than one kind, you know.”

“Well, one kind would do for me.”

“Yes, perhaps it would, because you haven’t got it. Perhaps you’ll never have to ask yourself why you live. A political struggle like yours makes everything very simple.” 

The book also contains a tangential story about Jessie and her son from a first marriage. It offers a nice parallel, a side-route exploration about freedom and responsibility, about natural ties to family members and whether those are created or grow up all on their own.  

Occasion for Loving surprised me. Early on I thought I had figured out what the book was going to be about, thought I knew what the experience of reading it would feel like. But I was wrong. What appears to be a calm and careful story is actually destabilized with a tremendously angry undercurrent. The novel nurses a veiled rage about the injustice of social segregation based on skin color.

Reading Writer – writers as mirrors

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I attended a workshop a few months ago conducted by the playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah. Kwei-Armah is an unabashedly political writer with a social agenda and he spent a considerable amount of time discussing the idea that writers are the mirrors of society. I like this idea and agree with it. But I also think that if its true, it makes writing a very difficult exercise indeed.

I like the idea because so much of what I enjoy in fiction is having the world thrown back at me in a way I wouldn’t have formulated myself. I love it when a piece of fiction shows me something about the world that I instantly recognize as “true” but that I hadn’t managed to discover on my own, or understand in exactly the same way. Good fiction reveals. Good writers capture the play between the light and darkness of reflection.

It’s this tension that makes writing so difficult. How do we create something unique out of something that is essentially a revelation of things as they actually are? In this sense, good fiction creates something that is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I don’t mean we have to recognize ourselves in each character we read, but often, it is only through a recognition of our shared humanity with a character that a story becomes meaningful.

From Birds of America, “People Like That Are the Only People Here”, Lorrie Moore: What words can be uttered? You turn just slightly and there it is: the death of your child. It is part symbol, part devil, and in your blind spot all along, until, if you are unlucky, it is upon you. Then it is a fierce little country abducting you; it holds you squarely inside itself like a cellar room – the best boundaries of you are the boundaries of it. Are there windows? Sometimes aren’t there windows?

From That Night, Alice McDermott: For after this, after the cars and the sudden spinning onto her lawn, the boys with their chains and the fight and the chilling sound of her boyfriend’s cry, after this, no small scenes could satisfy us, no muffled arguments, no dinner-at-eight celebrations, no sweet, damaged child, could make us believe we were living a vibrant life, that we had ever known anything about love.

From The Echo Maker, Richard Powers: What did it feel like to be Mark Schluter? To live in this town, work in a slaughterhouse, then have the world fracture from one moment to the next. The raw chaos, the absolute bewilderment of the Capgras state twisted Weber’s gut. To see the person closest to you in this world, and feel nothing. But that was the astonishment: nothing inside Mark felt changed. Improvising consciousness saw to that. Mark still felt familiar; only the world had gone strange. He needed his delusions, in order to close that gap. The self’s whole end was self-continuation.

From Occasion for Loving, Nadine Gordimer: He stretched himself out on the sofa, and when Tom finished his work he saw that he was asleep. His head was flung back on a raised arm behind his head. The fingers of the hand moved like tendrils in an effort against cramp that did not break through to consciousness; on the blank face of sleep traces of bewilderment and disgust were not quite erased round the mouth. Tom looked at him for a moment with the curiosity that is always aroused by the opportunity to contemplate suffering without having to respond to the sufferer, and then decided to leave him there, and turned out the light.

The narrators of each of these passages exposes something recognizable about the human condition. I’ve never had any first hand experience with Capgras syndrome yet Powers’s description of the splicing of the psyche after trauma feels horribly familiar, I’ve never experienced anything having to do with pediatric cancer but the desire for denial that Moore presents speaks to me because that is something that humans do – we deny, we rant and rave, we even tell jokes in the dark moments. These passages are all so affecting because they show us who we are, they reflect something particular and it becomes something shared.

These novels are constructed out of a web of these moments, groups of sentences put together by the narrator and wedged in between the dialogue and the action to ensure the novel functions on two levels at all times – The Echo Maker isn’t just about Mark Schluter’s car accident and his sister’s attempt to rehabilitate him, it is also a novel about us and how fragile our minds and identity really are. Nadine Gordimer isn’t just writing about a woman’s love affair with a black man in apartheid South Africa, she is also revealing how we negotiate social inequality in its myriad forms.

Marie Vieux-Chauvet

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I started studying Haitian and Caribbean literature as a graduate student looking at diaspora fiction. This was one of the ways I snuck in as much literature in French while getting a degree based on English. So my ends were selfish but along the way I discovered some truly amazing work, in particular, a Haitian author who quickly became one of my favorites. 

Marie Vieux-Chauvet is one of those sadly overlooked writers whose work deserves to be taught, studied, translated, published and republished again. Her literature is politically and socially engaged and she addresses the important issues of oppression, racism, and sexism – all through her particular Haitian lens. She wrote five novels and two plays. Most of which are quite difficult to find outside of a library. None of them are currently available in English. 

The story of her most well-known novel, Amour, Colère et Folie is fascinating. Vieux-Chauvet wrote the book in 1968, and although the novel is set in a slightly earlier period of Haitian history (ca. 1939) it was a direct criticism of the Duvalier government. Vieux-Chauvet actually sent the manuscript to Simone de Beauvoir who helped get it published by Gallimard in France. Sadly, worried that her family in Haiti might be affected if the book gained too much success, she actually bought the remaining stock of the book and destroyed them. Luckily, a small publisher in France re-issued this novel along with one other Vieux-Chauvet in 2005.  

Amour, Colère et Folie (Love, Anger and Madness) is an incredible novel. Actually a series of three thematically connected novellas, the book examines Haiti’s special form of segregation “shadism” and the devastation it wrought on that country’s society. The first section – Love, is the story of Claire (ironically named, as she is the darkest of her two sisters) and her internal rebellion and transformation. It’s a dark and powerful story. Beautifully written. 

I’m hard put to decide which of Vieux-Chauvet’s novels I prefer. It’s a toss up between Amour, Colère et Folie and her first novel Fille d’Haiti, which follows the coming-of-age of a Port-au-Prince prostitute’s daughter named Lotus. This novel also explores Haiti’s powerful religious traditions and paints a fascinating portrait of a young woman struggling to understand who she is when faced with a series of contradictory social mirrors. 

I just recently found out that The Modern Library is publishing a translation of Amour, Colère et Folie scheduled for 2009 by a translator duo of Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokur. I’m ecstatic. I’ll be one of the first people to buy it. I’d been nearly convinced this would never happen.

And for those of you who do read in French, I would recommend her other novels if you can find them: 

  • Fille d’Haïti. Paris: Fasquelle, 1954.
  • La Danse sur le volcan. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose / Emina Soleil, 2004
  • Fonds des Nègres. Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1960
  • Amour, colère et folie. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose / Emina Soleil, 2005.
  • Les Rapaces. Port-au-Prince: Deschamps, 1986.  

Reading Writer – everything as a writer?

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The Amateur Reader asked a question the other day that got me thinking. His question was: Doesn’t a writer read everything from a writer’s perspective?

I suppose the quick answer is, “yes, of course”. But it’s a bit trickier than that.

Reading is the method I’ve chosen to study fiction, how it works, what it says, how it functions as a piece of art, as a product, or an object. In that sense then, yes, I read everything from a writer’s perspective. My eyes start moving over the words and my inner-writer kicks in and starts cataloging narrative point of view, metaphor, the flow of the sentences, shifts in voice, structural qualities and abnormalities and on and on until I’ve dissected the book and found something in it to emulate or avoid.

But I was a reader long before I decided to see whether I could write, and there is still that developing bookworm in me. That part of me who changes and will continue to change over time. My reading tastes have definitely evolved and shifted, something which, of course informs my writing, but I still think there is a part of me that likes to just sit back and let a book take me on a journey.

I ended up reading about 400 pages of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead the night before last. I was completely engaged, so much so I couldn’t turn off and get to sleep. Yet, this is not a book I have any desire to start slicing and analyzing with the writer half of my brain. Thematically, it is a fascinating piece of literature and I already know I can’t wait to discuss it once I’ve finished. Sure, there are writerly things to get into – her shifts in perspective, the way she handles dialogue, even the structure. But I don’t think I really want to get into that level of things with this particular book. The story and Rand’s philosophical project are more than enough to focus on.

One of the things I’ve tried to be strict about since I started writing my own fiction is to make sure I have enough books on the nightstand that inform craft. These aren’t necessarily always contemporary fiction, but I’d say 90% fall in that category. It’s so important to read at the level I want to be writing, to see what other writers are doing with story and technique. Those books are the ones I read once, then twice, often three times and more, just to see how the words are fitting together, how the pieces of the story move against and complement one another.

I hope the reader and the writer in me continue to work together, but side by side. I really wouldn’t want one focus to take over completely. Which I guess reveals how much I think the two actions relate to one another but should not necessarily be merged.

I’m wondering if anyone else feels this way – Any thoughts?

Reading Writer – Julia Glass, Three Junes

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One of the articles in the most recent issue of The Writer’s Chronicle asserts that contemporary fiction has lost its appreciation of the omniscient narrator. The idea got me thinking about whether or not this was true. I won’t go into a critique of the article but I think the author actually ended up contradicting herself a little – at first saying the omniscient was lost, no longer taught in writing programs and then intimating that most readers actually confuse the omniscient with a 3rd person limited. She then went on to give examples of numerous contemporary novels which use an omniscient point of view to great success. So, I think we can safely say that an appreciation of the omniscient point-of-view isn’t lost at all. We might not be pegging it correctly each time, but it is still being explored in contemporary fiction.

Nevertheless, I think the author was right to bring our attention to what a skillful use of the omniscient narrator can achieve. One of my favorite examples of this point-of-view in action comes from Part I – Collies – of Julia Glass’s 2002 novel, Three Junes.

“Collies” is actually a novella, the first installment of the triptych that forms Three Junes and it is one of those unique pieces of fiction that manages to get many things right – an interesting POV, careful use of metaphor, no cop outs on exploring difficult emotional situations. It’s a story about the contradictory emotions of anger and relief, freedom and regret inherent in the process of grieving for a loved one. It is a softly-told story, recounted by a discerning narrator with an immense amount of compassion for the novel’s characters.

Structurally, it is also interesting, as the forward action is limited to a short holiday trip in Greece, a week in the life of a grieving widower, while the past tense back story covers nearly a lifetime. It’s very neatly done and worth looking at for anyone struggling with how to appropriately place back story. Glass plays the two time periods off one another quite expertly, giving just enough of the past to make the present meaningful and vice versa. Writers can get so caught up in the pasts of their characters, inventing scenes and events for the pure delight of discovery. Knowing how to trim that to the essentials takes hard work and a merciless finger on the delete button.

But I wanted to talk about the omniscient POV. At first glance, it seems that “Collies” is written in the 3rd person limited – we are allowed access into the consciousness of our grieving widower, Paul – which is true, and we do get frequent and in-depth access. But actually, the front story taking place in Greece has an omniscient narrator which dips into other people’s minds from time to time as well as moves far enough back to grant the reader a nicely broad view of the scene and its animated trimmings.

This is a completely different tactic from what I talked about in my last post in regards to Don Delillo’s The Body Artist (also a book about grieving). With the front story of “Collies” the reader is given a lot of space, freedom to watch and wait and see what Paul will do with himself, to get to know him slowly, as it were. That isn’t to say the novel doesn’t get the reader involved with Paul and his grieving. It’s just a very different process. In many respects, Glass’s omniscient narrator presents the story of Paul’s grief through a prism – with each insight adding another layer of depth to our understanding of his sorrow. The Body Artist gives us one intensely concentrated perspective and holds us fast.

The back story of “Collies”, however, is written with a close 3rd person limited. This slight narrative shift between the present story and the back story does a marvelous job of rendering the past scenes with a greater degree of intensity than the front story scenes. Which I think mirrors Paul’s state of mind quite nicely. He’s in Greece to sort through his grief, part of that sorting is a sifting of his memories and they don’t belong to anyone else. The difference between the two narrative perspectives is so subtle, so smooth that without careful reading you don’t really see it. And that’s good. The reader shouldn’t really notice it – they should only feel the difference in the impact of the story.

Reading Writer – The Body Artist cont.

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I mentioned in my recent reading review of The Body Artist that reading this novel was a bit awkward and felt like attending a performance piece. I want to talk more about where I think the reader’s self-consciousness comes from.

In the novel, Delillo positions the narrator within the main character Lauren’s head – third person limited. There is the smallest sliver of distance in the odd formulation of “she thought”, but most of the narration comes unhampered by any tags. In this way, the narrator is fused to her movements and thoughts. In essence, Lauren is the narrator, even if technically the point of view is third person. This free indirect technique creates a sort of tunnel vision that in less expert hands would lead to a lot of confusion. (This is something that beginning writers often do without realizing it (yep, been there, done that) and it can create a real problem for the reader). There isn’t any place for the reader to move back and look at the larger scene. The largest “visual” we ever get that isn’t filtered by Lauren’s eyes is something like, “They sat reading…” with anything that follows unfolding through Lauren’s perception and thoughts.

What this near-fusion of main character into narrator accomplishes in The Body Artist is to turn the reader into a voyeur. Delillo doesn’t let Lauren tell us her story in her own voice, something which would be a more traditional experience for the reader and wouldn’t feel so intrusive, instead he traps us inside her experience at the same time as he reminds us that we’re only watching:

She tried to work past the details to the bird itself, nest thief and skilled mimic, to the fixed interest in those eyes, a kind of inquisitive chill that felt a little like a challenge.
When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see. Think. What a shedding of every knowable surface and process. She wanted to believe the bird was seeing her, a woman with a teacup in her hand, and never mind the folding back of day and night, the apparition of a space set off from time. She looked and took a careful breath. She was alert to the clarity of the moment but knew it was ending already. She felt it in the blue jay. Or maybe not. She was making it happen herself because she could not look any longer. This must be what it means to see if you’ve been near blind all your life. She said something to Rey, who lifted his head slightly, chasing the jay but leaving the sparrows unstarted.

It’s a technique with very definite aesthetic repercussions. It creates a restriction for the reader, turning the character’s mood and psychic state into a filter for the story. Both these things can be quite meaningful when executed skillfully. I think the benefit of using this for The Body Artist is that the technique marries so nicely with the novel’s thematic preoccupation. Grief is a dictatorial emotion – it weighs on us, makes us hyper-aware and uncomfortable or unreasonable. Grief becomes a filter for everyday experience and so forcing the reader into that experience is a meaningful narrative experiment.

Don Delillo – The Body Artist

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The more I read Don Delillo, the more I enjoy the dark aesthetic of his fiction. I sat down last night with the short and brutal The Body Artist and read it in one sitting. I re-read it this afternoon and decided that might be the best way to enjoy this particular novel – in repeated samplings.  

The Body Artist is an uncomfortable and uneasy read. Both for its narrative peculiarities and for the alarming substance of its story. On the surface, the story couldn’t be simpler -man and woman together, man kills himself, woman grieves. But that triptych has a much more intriguing focus in its investigation of emotional expression through our physical being.  

Lauren is a body artist. Someone who creates an exploration of an idea with her movements, corporal presence and acting. We meet her first in a moment of comfort – a morning with her husband. Delillo presents even the smallest detail of their interplays of exchange. Lauren exists in a hyper-deliberate state, moving from gesture to gesture and thought to thought. We have to savor their interactions slowly to catch the hints of discord. They are extremely subtle, but they are there.  

The next chapter relates the details of her husband’s death. Within two pages we are back with Lauren, and by this point we’re so tightly merged with her it is difficult to come up for air. She discovers a young man stashed away in the house. He cannot speak properly on his own but begins to repeat verbatim entire conversations that occurred between Lauren and her now dead husband. In her grief, Lauren begins to believe he’s some manifestation of her husband and instead of calling the police or a hospital, tries to take care of him. She just wants him to keep speaking to her. 

The experience of reading The Body Artist is similar to attending an intense play or observing a performance piece. It’s disturbing to see our main character humiliate and endanger herself. This kind of reader-character fusion doesn’t occur often. Usually, there is more distance. But the narrative perspective of The Body Artist doesn’t allow for any detachment. We follow Lauren like a voyeur, listen to her thoughts and watch even her most mundane movements. Time runs too slowly. It’s suffocating and frustrating. But each time she snaps out of her trance, we’re brought up short and offered a glimpse of the heartache and disbelief that inform her most routine actions.  

Of the three Delillo novels I’ve now read, this was the most experimental but also, I felt, the most powerful. In the past, I’ve criticized him for holding me at an arm’s length from his characters. The Body Artist did the exact opposite. It was a visceral experience, both severe and wearisome (I mean those to be taken as positives, or at least for their intensity). I think a longer book would have been far too exhausting so I approve of his restraint. Definitely a novel I will go back to again.

Reading Writer – Coetzee's Disgrace cont.

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The dialogue in Disgrace churns along with a quiet energy. Especially after David has arrived at his daughter Lucy’s farm, their conversations perfect and polish the novel’s thematic preoccupations.

During their extended greeting when she’s showing him about the property, Lucy asks David about his work and he replies that he’s working on an operatic play about Lord Byron. She expresses her surprise:

“I didn’t know you still had ambitions in that direction.”
“I thought I would indulge myself. But there is more to it than that. One wants to leave something behind. Or at least a man wants to leave something behind. It’s easier for a woman.”
“Why is it easier for a woman?”
“Easier, I mean, to produce something with a life of its own.”
“Doesn’t being a father count?”
“Being a father…I can’t help feeling that, by comparison with being a mother, being a father is a rather abstract business. But let us wait and see what comes.”

This back and forth settles so naturally into the action of the scene, and they move from this more important exchange to another mundane one with the turn of the next sentence. But these particular lines tell the reader so much about David Lurie and the kind of man we’re dealing with. They also show us Lucy’s subtle challenge and disapproval. It feels so natural – the uneasy dynamics of this father and daughter.

Coetzee accomplishes this kind of subtle revelation on nearly every page. Just after this conversation ends, Petrus walks in – to both the novel and the scene. Petrus shares the farm with Lucy. He’s a black African. And the tension between Petrus and David upon their first encounter is so strong:

He is left with Petrus. “You look after the dogs,” he says to break the silence.
“I look after the dogs and I work in the garden. Yes.” Petrus gives a broad smile. “I am the gardener and the dog-man.” He reflects for a moment. “The dog-man,” he repeats, savouring the phrase.
“I have just travelled up from Cape Town. There are times when I feel anxious about my daughter all alone here. It is very isolated.”
“Yes,” says Petrus “it is dangerous.” He pauses. “Everything is dangerous today. But here it is all right, I think.” And he gives another smile.

David thinks he’s being nice, engaging with Petrus like an equal but he’s nearly shouting his suspicion in the man’s face. And of course there is Petrus’s first big smile. It is a slightly exaggerated gesture so we know right away to pay attention. He’s either nervous or being just as arrogant. It’s so well done. Coetzee keeps things very subtle.

This is something particularly difficult for a developing writer to learn – how to keep things to the minimum and feel confident we’ve made the emotional tension clear. In a general sense, less tends to be more. But we often have to fight our instincts about how to go about doing this – especially in today’s world of TV series and daytime drama. We’ve become quite accustomed to kitsch emotional displays, so much so they start to feel natural.

But Coetzee manages to get his characters to carry out intense, difficult discussions about uncomfortable subjects. I think this works because of how clearly Coetzee has created David. There isn’t a moment in Disgrace when we doubt that David Lurie would say what he says. From the moment the narrator introduces him to us, we can hear his voice in our heads. He’s cynical but careful. A confident intellectual but less confident in emotional territory. He wants people to listen to what he says and so he speaks slowly, precisely, intelligently but yet everything is tinted with his particular prejudices. Part of his development is to move from a place of emotional dishonesty to truthfulness, and this process is reflected quite expertly in what he says. His dialogue is also supported by a lot of internal dialogue, but not too much. Too much would bog us down instead of informing the choices he makes between what he says out loud and what he thinks.

Continuing with The Iliad

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The concept of fate in The Iliad is pretty intense. In Chapter Fourteen and Fifteen Hera is upset that the Trojans seem to be winning the war, so she tricks Zeus to sleep so she can help bolster the Achaeans. Zeus wakes up eventually, just after Hector is wounded, and we learn that no matter what she does, Zeus has already planned how the war will end:  

And let Apollo drive Prince Hector back to battle, / breathe power back in his lungs, make him forget / the pains that rack his heart. Let him whip the Achaeans / in a headlong panic rout and roll them back once more, / tumbling back on the oar-swept ships of Peleus’ son Achilles. / And he, he will launch his comrade Patroclus into action / and glorious Hector will cut him down with a spear / in front of Troy, once Patroclus has slaughtered / whole battalions of strong young fighting men / and among them all, my shining son Sarpedon. / But then, enraged for Patroclus / brilliant Achilles will bring Prince Hector down. / And then, from that day on, I’ll turn the tide of war.  

He goes on to remind us that he’s promised Thetis, Achilles’s mother, to give Achilles great glory in exchange for his short life.  What I find interesting in all this is the messiness of it all. The gods seem just as unwilling to accept fate as the humans. They connive and take sides. Or interfere as much as they can for their own gratification. Yet, what Zeus has decreed is exactly what will come to pass. And there doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do about that.  

It seems rather frightening to me to rely on a series of gods who have their own interests at heart. I’m not religious in the conventional sense but I was raised within the Judeo-Christian paradigm and am probably more comfortable with the idea that whatever our conception of God is, he/she/it tends to be looking out for us. Not so with the Greek Gods. The legends and stories about the Greek pantheon are powerful cautionary tales but they don’t come right out with a “here are the rules” philosophy. And the gods certainly don’t seem like role models.  

Yet, in this worldview, gods and humans seem a bit more bound together in the untidiness of life. Everyone is in the same boat, making mistakes and suffering for their transgressions or unfulfilled desires. It’s oddly encouraging to think Zeus is willing to sacrifice one of his sons to satisfy a promise. He could just wave a hand and end the war right then and there. Get the whole thing over with. Spare some lives in the process. But no, he’s got to let the whole story play out. That’s more important than anything else.