Waiting for the Barbarians (26 page)

Wilde’s reaction to Symonds’s text reveals the same astringent rigor that characterized his attack on Jebb. He begins with an impatient scholarly complaint, criticizing Symonds’s failure to include all the relevant texts in his discussion of Helen (not least, the speech by the classical sophist Isocrates known as the “Encomium of Helen”). What makes Wilde’s essay really fascinating, though, are the flashes of his own distinctively sharp and original interpretative acumen.

In his discussion of Helen, Symonds had argued that a lost trilogy about her by Sophocles would have presented her as “a woman whose character deserved the most profound analysis”—an assumption wholly in keeping with the contemporary assessment of that playwright as the master of character. To this Wilde retorts, startlingly but with some justice, that “profound analysis” is not necessarily to be expected of the great Athenian dramatist, at least in the case of
Antigone
: “I hardly think that the drawing of Antigone in the play of that name justifies the expression ‘profound analysis.’ ” And he is right: the Theban princess, while a powerful figure, is not a subtle one.
The Women of Homer
offers a number of such bracing zingers.

By far the most arresting observation that Wilde makes in his response to Symonds’s catalog of Homeric women is one concerning Penelope, the character about whom Symonds shows himself to be the least perceptive. Wilde remarks on what he calls an “extremely
subtle psychological point” that Homer makes about her personality, one that “shows that Homer had accurately studied the nature of women.” Rather than being the placid homebody that Symonds insists she is, Penelope, Wilde understands, is in fact strangely liberated by her famous dilemma: the interminable courtship of her by the suitors during Odysseus’ absence awakens and sharpens in her the very qualities that make her an ideal mate for her husband. (Symonds simply finds her acts of cunning irritating: “provocative of anger.”) Those twenty years without Odysseus may have been lonely, but by the same token they place Penelope squarely at center stage. “Though his return was the consummation,” Wilde writes, with a psychological insight that would be remarkable in someone much older and more experienced than an undergraduate in his early twenties, “yet it was in some way the breaking up of her life; for her occupation was gone.”

Homer, if not Symonds, clearly recognizes this, giving Penelope a number of scenes that show that she is in many ways ambivalent about the suitors—whose attentions, the poet hints, she unconsciously enjoys. In Book 19, for instance, Odysseus’ queen famously takes the mysterious beggar—actually Odysseus in disguise—into her confidence, telling him about a dream she has had in which a mountain eagle attacks twenty tame geese she has lovingly kept: there is no question that the geese are meant to represent the suitors, and the eagle, Odysseus. With a testiness that reminds you of his notoriously sharp-tongued contemporary, A. E. Housman—another extraordinarily talented, young, homosexual classicist, one who, in contrast to Wilde, pursued scholarship instead of notoriety—Wilde bewails the failure of Symonds and so many other contemporary critics to recognize this conflicted aspect of Penelope’s character:

Wilde’s ability to discern, beneath the attitudes imposed on women by society, the sharp and surprising contours of unexpected emotions is what would make
The Importance of Being Earnest
the most original and most artistically successful of his works.

“Entirely misunderstood … by all other writers I have read.” The breathtaking self-assurance of this pronouncement suggests why Wilde’s long-forgotten text is intriguing, for reasons other than the glimpse it gives us of the road not taken by a significant cultural figure. The confrontation between Wilde and Symonds is, in the end, a confrontation between two eras. In Wilde’s dismissal of Symonds and the rest, you can already hear not only the voice of the mature writer, blithely dismissing the intellectual and social conventions of his age, but the voice of an as yet unborn criticism, one particularly willing to question prevailing assumptions about style, canons, and gender. Like the best of his mature work, this juvenile piece seems to leapfrog forward from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century.

Not the least of the twentieth-century phenomena that Wilde so uncannily anticipated was the cult of celebrity; and indeed, soon after deciding against a career as a classicist, he was making his first serious effort at courting international fame. During his 1882 tour of America, he was already showing a shrewd understanding of the uses to which that most Greek of literary forms, the epigram, might be put in the age of the telegram and the newspaper. (“His sayings are
telegraphed all over the world,” the
Pall Mall Gazette
bemusedly reported of Wilde’s American visit.) If he invoked the Greeks at all in his American interviews—as we now know he occasionally did, thanks to
Oscar Wilde in America: The Interviews
, a recent compilation of the interviews that Wilde gave to newspapers and magazines during his year in America—it was to compliment a local poet:

But as we know, it was in Wilde himself more than anyone that the Greek spirit resided. If no one today seriously wishes that Wilde had become an Oxford classics don, it’s at least in part because his own “Greekness”—the deep understanding of the rhetorical uses of style, the taste for piquant syllogism, the ever-evolving aversion to sentimentality (which reached its apogee in
Earnest
), and, in the end, the tragic understanding of the meaning of suffering—made itself felt so strongly in the work he produced as a poet, writer, and dramatist.

There is, however, one unwritten text that we might legitimately covet. Reading
The Women of Homer
, it’s almost impossible not to wish that we might instead possess a review of the chapter in
Studies of the Greek Poets
that was likely to have had greater personal meaning for him than did Symonds’s musings on Homer’s women. I refer of course to the scandalous final chapter, with Symonds’s coded defense of illicit desire and rejection of conventional morality—the very subjects and positions that Wilde himself would take up so sensationally, to his credit and to his cost. But then, you could say that the
whole of Oscar Wilde’s life and work soon after he laid aside the unfinished essay—everything he did after abandoning Oxford for London, philology for fame—was a commentary on that unmentioned and unmentionable chapter of Symonds.

—The New York Review of Books
, November 11, 2010

TOWARD THE END
of John Banville’s new novel,
The Infinities
, a more or less contemporary tale over which the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes rather startlingly preside, a snooty character to whom someone is describing an “updated” production of a play about the parents of Hercules declares that he “does not approve of the classics being tampered with”: the Greeks, he says, “knew what they were doing, after all.” The joke is that the pretentious young man doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The play in question,
Amphitryon
—whose themes, of adultery, confused identities, and improbable Olympian interventions, are threaded through Banville’s novel—isn’t Greek at all. Rather, it’s an early-nineteenth-century German reworking of late-seventeenth-century French and English rewritings of a second-century-BC tragicomedy written in Latin. And that was just then. In the twentieth century alone, the Amphitryon myth has been adapted by a French novelist, two German playwrights, an opera composer, an anti-Nazi filmmaker, and Cole Porter. Have we ever done anything
but
tamper with the classics?

No one, as it happens, tampered more than the Greeks themselves. Shaped as we are by printed literature, we tend to think about myths the way we think about novels—as narratives whose plots and characters and incidents are fixed, as stories whose shape is as immutable as that of, say,
Anna Karenina
. In the same way that, when we hear someone mention Anna Karenina, we think of the woman whose unhappiness leads her to the underside of a railway carriage, when we hear the Oedipus myth mentioned we think of a particular story about the unlucky man who unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother, and about the awful aftermath of the revelation of incest and parricide—how he blinds and then exiles himself, how she hangs herself over her grotesque marriage bed. If the name Helen of Troy comes up, we think of the adulterous Greek wife whose passion for a handsome houseguest started a world war.

But for the Greeks—whose culture was, even in classical times, still a largely oral one—myth was a great deal more fluid. Not twenty years after Sophocles put on his
Oedipus Tyrannus
—whose huge popularity from ancient times on has crystallized the self-blinding-exile-hanging version of the story—Euripides presented his tragedy
Phoenician Women
, in which Oedipus and Jocasta are still shuffling around the palace long after the revelation of incest and adultery. In the same dramatist’s lost
Oedipus
, of which only fragments remain, the Theban king’s blindness is not self-inflicted at the climax of the play but the result of an injury inflicted during that initial, fatal encounter with his father. As for Helen of Troy, some people may be startled to learn that she might not have run away with Paris at all—and that, therefore, the decade-long Trojan War, like certain other wars, was based on a fatal hoax. In his play
Helen
, Euripides dramatized a tale that had been in circulation since not long after Homer: in it, the woman whom Paris takes home is just a phantom spun from clouds, while the real Helen, virtuous and loyal, is spirited away to
Egypt. There she weeps for her sullied reputation and mourns her husband, Menelaus, who eventually turns up and rescues her.

To us, brought up on
D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths
, all this may seem odd. It’s as if Tolstoy’s novel were only one of many possible
Anna Karenina
s, and there was a version in which the heroine acts on her final, panicked moment of hesitation, climbs back from underneath the train in the nick of time, and goes home to squabble with Karenin. But the Greeks had no
Book of Greek Myths
; they just kept tampering. They knew what they were doing, after all.

As it happens, Banville’s book is one of three recent novels that, to varying degrees, not only “do” the Greeks—his features Greek gods as main characters, while David Malouf’s
Ransom
is based on a climactic episode of the
Iliad
and Zack Mason’s
The Lost Books of the Odyssey
invents forty-four new chapters for that epic—but, far more interestingly, do the Greek thing: play with the texts of the past in order to create, with varying degrees of success, a literature that is thoroughly of the present.

By far the most profound and successful of these is Malouf’s. The novel is a riff on the twenty-fourth (and final) book of the
Iliad
—the book whose climax is the tense and poignant meeting between the Greek hero Achilles and the aged Trojan king Priam, who comes to the Greek camp in order to ransom the body of his fallen son, Hector.

Like Euripides, Malouf has scrutinized the vast fabric of Homer’s story, looking for open spaces in the weave to insert his own design; he has found one in the last lines of the epic. Here, during the already extraordinary encounter between the Greek and the Trojan—the two sides have, after all, been killing each other all through the previous twenty-three books—a remarkable thing happens: one of the characters tries to imagine an alternative to the foreordained plot of the
poem, to step outside, as it were, his own narrative. Priam and Achilles have been sketching the details of a truce that will give the Trojans time to mourn and bury Hector, and decide that eleven days is sufficient. “On the twelfth,” Homer’s Priam says, “we’ll fight again … if fight we must.” That “if we must”—pregnant with the tantalizing, wishful possibility that the two sides might not have to fight anymore, that we can break out of character and create a new history—is the subject of Malouf’s subtle and extremely moving novel.

Ransom
taps the enormous emotional energies unleashed at the end of Homer’s poem, which, in its final book, enacts a great drama of restitution and resolution. At the beginning of the
Iliad
, the Greek commander Agamemnon steals a captured princess, part of the spoils of war, from Achilles. The affront provokes the great warrior to sit out the fighting—until his beloved friend, Patroclus, is killed by Hector. Returning to the field, he kills Hector in single combat and, in an outrageous violation of religious propriety and a severe affront to divine sensibilities, refuses to give back the body for proper burial; instead, he lashes it to his chariot and drags it back and forth before the walls of Troy as the dead man’s anguished family and people look on. Offended, the gods intervene, ordering Achilles to relent and Priam to go to the Greek camp and offer Achilles a huge treasure as ransom for the body of his son. It is at this point that Malouf picks up the story.