Gawain and a Winter's Wage

Only a relatively brief post on a rather haunting passage from the 14th Century poem, Gawain and the Green Knight. I've given the Middle English below, and then a translation of my own which doesn't attempt to recapture either the organisational alliteration, nor the rhyme in the shorter 'bob':

Bot þen hyȝes heruest, and hardenes hym sone,

Warnez hym for þe wynter to wax ful rype;

He dryues wyth droȝt þe dust for to ryse,

Fro þe face of þe folde to flyȝe ful hyȝe;

Wroþe wynde of þe welkyn wrastelez with þe sunne,

Þe leuez lancen fro þe lynde and lyȝten on þe grounde,

And al grayes þe gres þat grene watz ere;

Þenne al rypez and rotez þat ros vpon fyrst,

And þus ȝirnez þe ȝere in ȝisterdayez mony,

And wynter wyndez aȝayn, as þe worlde askez,

no fage,

Til Meȝelmas mone

Watz cumen wyth wynter wage;

Þen þenkkez Gawan ful sone

Of his anious uyage.

(ll.521-35)

But then the harvest comes and hardens them swiftly,

Warns them to wax ripely before the winter,

It drives up the rising dust with drought,

From the face of the earth to fly so high,

The fierce winds of the sky wrestle with the sun,

The leaves fall from the linden-trees and lie on the ground,

And the grass is all grey that was green before;

Then all over-ripens and rots that once rose up,

And thus passes the year in yesterdays many,

And winter returns again, as the world demands,

No lie,

Until the Michaelmas moon

Was come with winter's pledge,

Then Gawain thought, full soon,

Of his anxious journey.

As an illustration of how any work of translation must do a certain violence to meaning, I'd like to highlight two words in particular. The first is 'ȝirnez' - runs, or passes. Looking at the excellent Middle English dictionary at UMich, it's interesting that we are at risk of losing the full sense of the word as an emblem of transience even with a relatively innocent translation like 'passes'.

One set of meanings concerns cosmic temporality - the stars and the sun run across the sky - but the same word is also used to describe something that flows: water, for instance, or more resonantly blood, wine and tears (e.g. 'mid ierniende teares'). Another set concerns the elapsing of human life ('Kyng Priamus..is hoor and y-ronne in age'), but this too sits side-by-side with senses that include the upswelling of emotion ('No likerous lust was thurgh hir herte yronne') and even outstanding payment ('As touchyng the remenent that es yren of your anuyte'). It takes little imagination to see how these significations and connotations (blood, tears, mortality, surging emotion, outstanding payment) all help to compose the foreboding horror of the passage given the context of the poem's plot. Gawain, who has promised to meet the Green Knight on a certain date, seemingly faces certain death. His blood may well be the payment of his 'anuyte' (annuity); as he watches the passage of the seasons, he must discipline the movement of his passions. For whilst the coming of autumn mirrors the spectre of Gawain's own mortality, unlike the grain and the linden-tree, humanity has - as the Romantic poet Charlotte Smith puts it - "no second spring" (Elegiac Sonnets, II.14).

The second word is that wonderful phrase 'winter's wage'. It sounds as if it was slightly proverbial - the foretaste or promise of winter, the subtle chill in the post-harvest air. Yet, as its modern, familiar meaning suggests, it also has the sense of a payment. In addition to this, it is a pledge or a surety - winter and its metonymies (death, barrenness, suffering) will, as the passage emphasises, never withdraw themselves from human experience: 'no fage', that's no lie. It is no accident that 'holden in wage' is 'to hold hostage'. Finally, a wage is also a pledge to meet in battle: a challenge, like that made by the Green Knight a year earlier. Indeed, the word is used by the Green Knight himself in l.396, when he makes Gawain promise that he will return to receive 'such wages' as he deserves. It echoes across the text, I believe, once again stratifying the natural or metaphysical transience of 'winter's wage' with the private, agonising wait faced by Gawain.

Only a medieval reader could tell us how many of these connotations would spark into life on reading the text of the Gawain-poet, but it's worth remembering that the subtle, infinitely complex field of linguistic, semantic and cultural force that surrounds any signifier is disrupted and damaged when we find ourselves reading a translation. On the other hand, translation is absolutely necessary: denying ourselves the works of other traditions (French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Indian, Chinese) and even the alienated parts of our own tradition is a worse violence.

New York Notes 3: Sculpture, Flesh, Art

This is Louis-Claude Vassé's eighteenth-century sculpture The Nymph of Dampierre. I've never really spent much time looking at sculpture, so it was good to see a wealth of white marble and dark bronze at the Met's sculpture court. This one caught my eye because I think it represents a kind of internal limit to very possibility of sculpture. As the photograph shows, so much of the sinuousity of the whole sculpture (the serpents and shells on the fountain pedestal, the elegant arch of the body) finds a concentrated emblem in the hair that she holds and washes.

At least when seen in three-dimensions with the fall of the light and the shade (see the following series of rather nice photographs), this really does express very well the struggle of sculpture to hew life and animation out of the coldness of raw, stony matter. There is something eerie about the way that such a fleeting and transient moment of embodied experience - the water running through the lissome coils of hair, the touch and dexterity of her fingers, the left hand just barely lifting a heavy set of strands - is preserved into the eternity of marble.

It's perhaps Keats's gorgeous work of ekphrasis, 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', that best captures the uncanny nature of this, what he terms a cold pastoral: 'Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time' (ll.1-2). But I think the compelling nature of Vassé's piece runs even deeper than merely a temporal issue, insofar as the nymph washing her hair exemplifies the clash of the aesthetic and the corporeal, marble and flesh.

I wonder if Jean-Luc Marion's notion of saturated phenomena might be useful in understanding the specificity of sculpture as an art form, and sculpture of the human body in particular. For Marion, a saturated phenomenon is an experience that shatters our horizons and proves nearly impossible to fully comprehend or intuit. Two of his examples are flesh and the idol, and I think much of sculpture's unique hold on us comes from evoking both together in a complex, stunning and sometimes troubling relationship.

Flesh is considered a 'saturated' phenomena because it is not something I can see, feel, or experience in a simple way, but rather it is the unique complex of 'subject' and 'object' which enables me to see, feel and experience the world. Put simply, I am my body, and the experience of my flesh is uniquely private and my own:

flesh only ever refers back to itself, in the indissoluble unity of the felt and the feeling. Flesh is referred to itself as it auto-affects itself. In consequence, it eludes all relation - my pain, my pleasure, remain unique, incommunicable, unable to be substituted - in an absoluteness without compromise...[flesh accomplishes] what it alone can accomplish - to render me to myself, to assign me to myself

(Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess, p.100)

This, in turn, gives a special philosophical privilege to touch ('the strangely intimate exteriority of flesh and...the depth/superficiality of skin', p.103) as the medium of intersubjectivity, the way we try to come to touch (in all its resonances) others, to feel what they feel. Flesh is uniquely one's own, and yet it is also that which enables contact with others, it is offered/given to others to touch, to strike, to wound, to hold. Flesh alone has this enigmatic ontology.

The idol, or painting, is considered a saturated phenomena in a rather more simple way: it is a certain element of the visible that exists at an unparalleled intensity. An artwork arrests our gaze, absorbs our gaze, exceeds our gaze. Marion contends that the 'phenomenality' of the artwork can never be reduced to that of an object or 'objectivity' because, quite simply, every time we return to a great painting, we are - in a very real sense - looking at a different painting. In the same way that a novel or poem always holds something in reserve, and demands the pleasures of re-reading that always uncover something new and different (sometimes radically and revolutionarily so), a painting does the same in the field of the visual:

The intensity it deploys would demand an almost indefinite succession of looks...on each occasion it is appropriate that a new, irrepeatable and unsubstitutable meeting takes place. The computation of my visits to the same museum for years or months sketches less my own physical history than the temporal deployment of the paintings that on each occasion I put in a new light. My own look, always different on each visit...makes the painting differ from itself...it will never be a closed object, exhaustively seen

(In Excess, p.71)

In short, a painting will never be exhaustively 'seen', just as we will never 'finish' reading works of literature (as individuals, or even as a culture). There's always something more to be given, hence art's ability to live on and on, and continue to exert its relevance: as if Shakespeare, or Caravaggio, or Vassé are not only our contemporaries, but still ahead of us.

I muse that the magic of sculpture (cf. the recurrent trope of a sculpture that comes to life, as with Ovid's myth of Pygmalion, or The Winter's Tale's Hermione) comes from the crossing over of the saturated phenomenon of flesh with that of the idol. Vassé's superbly poised nymph, captured in the transience of intimacy for two hundred and fifty years, evokes the ungraspable enigma of the flesh (what does she feel?) Yet of course she does not feel, and cannot be felt, cannot be 'touched' (inside). By contrast, and perhaps by way of some compensation, she is granted the privilege of the idol, of the artwork: she is, as Marion puts it, a'consecrated' (p.59) visibility. Like the beloved of any sonnet, she will live forever with an ungraspable, irreducible radiance. She will demand and invite re-lookings that will never come to terms with her, and we will never fully 'see' her, however naked or otherwise she may.

I've tried to show that this is not just about the old conflict between art's immortality and human frailty, but about two types of phenomenality that are at the limits of our experience. The radiance of the idol and the privilege of the artwork is her glory, but the beautiful evocation (and yet necessary absence and denial) of the warm, living flesh is her uncanniness.

The final word, perhaps, can go to Shakespeare, and a little bit of magic:

PAULINA

Music, awake her; strike!

Music

'Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach;
Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come,
I'll fill your grave up: stir, nay, come away,
Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him
Dear life redeems you. You perceive she stirs:

HERMIONE comes down

Start not; her actions shall be holy as
You hear my spell is lawful: do not shun her
Until you see her die again; for then
You kill her double. Nay, present your hand:
When she was young you woo'd her; now in age
Is she become the suitor?

LEONTES

O, she's warm!
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.

(The Winter's Tale, III.2)

New York Notes 2: Romantic Infinities/Romantic Infinitesimals

One of the plenary papers at the epic Romanticism conference (the ICR) I just attended in New York was given by Marjorie Levinson. Levinson wrote two massively important books - one on Wordsworth and one on the Romantic fragment - during the 1980s, so it was a pleasure to see one of American Romantic studies' biggest names in person. It was an enthralling, often incredibly complex, and deliberately provocative reading of Wordsworth's famous 'Daffodils' poem. If my understanding (and notes) are not too treacherous to her intentions, her main aim was to reorientate our understanding of the 'host of golden Daffodils...fluttering and dancing in the breeze' (ll.4,6) towards a Spinozan ontology. What?! You might cry... (It probably won't help to add it's a very Deleuzian Spinoza in question.)

What this involves, in this context, is arguing that under the various forms of nature appropriated and identified by the poet's 'inward eye' (21), is a much more radical formlessness: a mobile, plastic, indeterminate ecological field. In such a reading, an impassioned nature is not pathetic fallacy: in a very real sense, nature is moved and moving. It is, in fact, constantly moving: none of its forms are permanent, none of its forms are independent of the others (nature is 'as continuous as the stars that shine' (l.7, my emphasis)). We have to imagine each point of nature as intimately connected with every other: as if nature was as seamless as a wave-function. Moreover, the human shares in this field of continuous motion, energy and transformation: the being of the human is rooted, entangled, in nature itself. Wordsworth's is moved, yes, but he is moved - joyously - because nature moves and he is part of nature: 'A Poet could not but be gay / In such a jocund company' (ll.15-6).

One of Levinson's points was to flag up the following lines:

They stretched in a never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay

(ll.8-9)

How can something that is never-ending exist within a margin? Her answer involved Georg Cantor, and is not something I have any desire to reproduce in detail here. However, basically, once one is thinking of a formless, continuous field (instead of a series of discrete forms or objects), it is possible to have an infinity within an apparently finite space. In fact, it is entirely possible: if one thinks about it, there are as many numbers between one and two (1.01, 1.011, 1.0111, 1.01111 etc. etc.) as there are numbers between one and infinity (1,2,3...) (In fact, Cantor proved there were more numbers!!!)

This got me thinking: how would Romanticism look if we abandoned the Romantic infinite (i.e. 'the sublime') for the Romantic infinitesimal? By which I mean -

Infinitesimal 2. a. (Chiefly Math.) As a fraction or fractional quantity. The inverse or reciprocal of an infinite quantity; an infinitely small fraction or part of anything (obs.). Hence b. (Math.) An infinitely small quantity or amount, a quantity less than any assignable quantity. (Oxford English Dictionary)

I think this was part of what Levinson was doing. Something like Blake's famous

To see a world in a grain of sand

And heaven in a wild flower

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour

('Auguries of Innocence')

might spring immediately to mind, but I wonder if this is too theological. There is a sense of microcosm/macrocosm here, a sort of holy synecdoche, where the infinite is instantly recuperated through the infinitesimal.

I would argue that a less metaphysical text, such as Coleridge's 'This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison', might be more appropriate. This poem turns, after a first half which culminates in the sublime, to smaller and smaller perceptions:

Pale beneath the blaze

Hung the transparent foliage ; and I watch'd
Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov'd to see
The shadow of the leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine ! And that walnut-tree
Was richly ting'd, and a deep radiance lay
Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps
Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass
Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight : and though now the bat
Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,
Yet still the solitary humble-bee
Sings in the bean flower! Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty!

There is a sense of a series of vanishing points here: from leaf to shadow to dappled half-image; from walnut to ivy leaf to the sketching of branches against the dusk; from swallow to bat to bee. There is indeed 'no plot so narrow' or 'waste so vacant' that does not evoke an aesthetic point - even vanishing ones - on which sensation can constitute itself. The last image - a rook's flight across the sinking sun - suggests an ecology criss-crossed with telling, fragile, almost imperceptible lines of force. In short, a Romantic infinitesimal:

when the last rook

Beat its straight path across the dusky air

Homewards, I blest it! deeming its black wing

(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)

Had cross'd the might Orb's dilated glory.

New York Notes 1: Kandinsky

I book-ended my recent jaunt to New York - in faithful intellectual fashion - not by swanning around aimlessly and shopping (honestly), but by visiting two galleries: soaking up the Metropolitan's European collection on my first day and visiting the current Kandinsky exhibition at the Guggenheim to cap off my last.

I found the latter strangely puzzling. I've always thought I've quite liked Kandinsky's dynamic visual spaces: the palimpsest of stark organising lines, blocks of adventurous colour and repeated geometric forms tumbling across the canvas. And yet, as I struggled up the Guggenheim's disturbingly Dantean rotuna, which cuts an ever-ascending spiral in gleaming white, I realised that I clearly didn't.

More enigmatically still, I found Kandinsky's images rather unmoving when viewed at the standard distance (i.e. 5ft or so), but got more interested when I moved in closer, or looked back at the paintings I had just seen from a distance. After much brow-furrowing reflection, I think I know why. Kandinsky tends to work with an incredibly flat or narrow perspectival plane. This is particularly obvious in his later, ultra-geometric work such as Composition IX from 1936:

Yet it is also apparent in something like 1914's Improvisation: Gorge:

This is a chaotic, splintered, apocalyptic painting (is that some visual citing of Jacob's ladder in the centre?), but it crushes things into an oddly depth-less arrangement. There's a clear horizon slicing across the top right corner, and a jutting foreground of sorts at the bottom of the frame, but the deconstructed spaces of the centre seem - t0 me at least - to be organised primarily around a violent, cyclical figure which is basically flat.

I think, therefore, that when I was engaged more by the close or the distant, it was because I was seeking depth. I was seeking to break up the interminable sovereignty of flatness that seemed to be organising my visual field. From a foot or less away, I could see the rough texture of the canvas, the physicality and thickness of the brushstroke, and the way that the light gleamed on the paint. Particularly with the more precise, geometric compositions, this irreducible materiality unworks the ethereal, mathematical, almost sterile spaces that Kandinsky created (at least for me, and I should re-emphasise the subjective at every turn here). Similarly, looking at the paintings from a distance, so that one could see the gallery walls and canvases either side, established a kind of series, it invoked a multiplicity or history of images: both in the sense of Kandinsky's career as reconstructed by the curator and in the personal trajectory one makes through the gallery. This 'narrative' plane, constituted at a distance, once again breaks into the strangely claustrophobic mono-dimensionalism of each individual Kandinsky.

Perhaps I've being overly critical. Or overly subjective. Certainly, there were paintings that were simply brilliant. Improvisation 26 (1912), for instance, was the first in the exhibition that really arrested my gaze:

Perhaps tellingly, it has a striking sense of depth created by the searing black lines, and the diaphanous use of colour and delicate calligraphic tropes lend it a sense of texture. Which is probably why I like it.

I still don't know if my idiosyncratic reaction has any deeper meaning. The best I've come up with is the following. Late in his career, Kandinsky turned increasingly to biomorphic forms. Something like Dominant Curve from 1936 has what the Guggenheim curators correctly identify as a visual vocabulary of amoeba, larvae and microscopic organisms:

I must admit these were my least favourite images of all: their membranes, their organic lines, their cellular mitosis were all a bit, well, biological. I found them rather ugly. I could frame my reaction, in fact, in terms of abjection - in the technical sense of that word as something that one wants to expel or repel, especially when concerning the messy sub-levels of the biological. Although I know not all would agree with me, I found their explicitly scientific palette to be rather inhuman or unhuman.

What's interesting to me is that perhaps the same could apply to a hypothetical or tentative 'inhumanity' of geometrical abstraction found elsewhere in Kandinsky. He sought to provide in painting the non-representational elegance of music. He certainly sought to link painting to spiritual values. And yet...and yet...Particularly in what one might call the messier abstract paintings, one is looking at an immense network of forms, relays, forces, transits, convergences. To me, that isn't a bad schematism or allegory for 20th century capitalism itself insofar as it dehumanises and turns all into a flat plane of quantitative relations. I know it would be reading Kandinsky somewhat against the grain but could there be, thus I muse, a geometric abject?

Ovidian Nature

Having read Ovid's Metamorphoses immediately after Homer's Odyssey, I find myself reflecting on the juxtaposition, particularly in terms of the dichotomy between 'nature' and 'culture' in the two texts.

I'm not sure of my ground with Homer, but I sense that nature is represented as a potentially dangerous set of forces which nonetheless are subjected to order. When Odysseus is washed up on whatever strange shore, his first meditation is often something along the lines of

Ah me, what are the people whose land I have come to this time,

and are they violent and savage, and without justice,

or hospitable to strangers

(vi.119-21)

I would argue that what is at stake here is, alongside the virtues of feasting, gift-giving and philotes (hospitality), the taming of the land and sea: the ordering of nature. The island of the cyclops - the very antithesis of hospitality - is characterised by its lack of cultivation ('never plowed up and never planted' (ix.123)). By contrast, sunny Ithaca is marked by its roads and harbours (cf.xiii.195) and its fertile, agricultural economy.

Nature in Homer, therefore, is the substrate of culture in a very particular way: it is the raw material to be ordered and utilised. However, if The Odyssey sees culture as a structure raised imperially upon an ultimately pliant nature (this also probably has something to do with the sovereignty of the gods over its different parts), in Ovid things are different. Culture, I would contend, is a fragile screen, barely concealing and containing a much more powerful nature. Perhaps the best example of this is the tale of Myrrah, whose ethics are swept aside through a deeper impulse of incest:

Is it criminal?

Is it unnatural?

For all the creatures it is natural -

When the bull mounts the heifer, his daughter,

Neither feels shame.

...

How lucky they are, those innocents,

Living within such liberties.

Man has distorted that licence -

Man has made new laws from his jealousy

To deprive nature of its nature

(Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid, p.115)

Simmering under the order of culture, for Ovid, seems to be chaos itself, as confirmed in his rendering of the creation myth: 'the total arsenal of entropy / Already at war within it' (p.3). Not just a raw material, as in Homer, but a set of immense forces always threatening to burst out: a principle of dynamic, kinetic lawlessness, constant Heraclitean change.

I think that where Homer paints the triumph of order over disorder (culture over nature, philotes over discord, institutions such as the family or state over anarchy or violence), Ovid's lesson is the reverse: disorder's profound logical, historical and metaphysical priority over order. The Metamorphoses is, at least on one reading, a work attesting to the irreducibly chaotic nature of existence. The will of the gods is potentially arbitrary. Power reverts repeatedly to tyranny. The firmest oaths (words of 'culture') unleash monstrous terrors with cruel, unforeseen irony. The Ovidian world is a violent one, de-structured, where one's perceptions of something are quite often about to reveal things have been the precise opposite all along.

Fate - that great, looming presence for the non-monotheistic culture of Greece and Rome - thus threatens to void itself into its opposite. For underneath it all, under the thin veneer of laws, customs and institutions, is a raging, anarchic permanent principle of revolution: Ovidian nature.

Reading the Communist Manifesto

One of the most important sentences in Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto comes in the second chapter:

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only be the united action of many members...can it be set in motion. Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.

This proposition is close to the very heart of the Marxist critique of capitalism. In the above quotation, Marx and Engels are responding to the accusation that they want to do away with the right to property, the right to wealth: that they are sacrificing the personal and the individual on the altar of communism. Their defence cuts right to the heart of the self-representation of liberal modernity. They deny that the 'individual' is truly individual, positing it instead as a social, political and economic product of the capitalist era.

Even if one brackets out a broader, philosophical debate about whether one can posit an individual identity outside of a social context (see my post below), I think that the argument is tenable in historical terms. Our political discourse is dominated by a certain individualism (human rights affix to individuals primarily, rather than groups, and our all-important notion of freedom is essentially 'liberal' insofar as it posits freedom more or less exclusively as the right of the individual to do what he/she wants as long as he/she doesn't conflict with other individuals). However, this individualism arose in parallel with capitalism, which is no surprise given the individual as consumer or worker is the basic unit of capitalism.

For example, the gradual shift towards universal suffrage (i.e. the inherent right of the individual to have a vote) began in Britain in 1832, when it became clear the old justifications (landowners get the vote, because they own land, which represents a physical 'stake' in the nation) no longer mirrored the economic system.

This is one valuable thing, I feel, we can still take from Marxism i.e. to understand our notion of the individual as a function of a broader, social system. Behind the individual and its acts lies relationships of power, property and ideological identity. The concept of the individual, if you like, has its own history.

There is also, of course, the ethical and political issue that Marx and Engels raise around the individual and its place in capitalism. They demand we see the acts of individuals in capitalism as tied into a vast system and structure. There is no truly individual act, one might argue: every act is a social act, with effects that reverberate through the whole system. If that system has failed, in any way or sense, then individuals - regardless of whether they have an individual 'right' to do what they are doing - bear some form of responsibility for their acts insofar as they are drawing on, reproducing and affecting the system of capitalism as a whole. This is, of course, highly contentious ground.

Classical economics has two concepts called 'public benefits' and 'public disbenefits'. This is where the production and consumption of some good or service (e.g. cigarettes) may exist at a level determined by the market which is nevertheless not the optimal level for everybody (e.g. individuals may want to consume cigarettes, and firms are willing to supply them, but the level of this does not take into account passive smoking). What Marxism would ask is whether capitalism itself may create one systematic public dis-benefit.

I don't think that anyone would deny that some people suffer under capitalism: the question is, whether this is because capitalism isn't working efficiently enough, or because of the nature of capitalism itself - and, moreover, whether there is any conceivable alternative in our historical horizon.

The Odyssey as Post-War Epic

A man lands on a slightly magical island. After a bit of flirting, he makes his way to a magnificent palace. A lot of indulgent set-piece descriptions of feasting and hospitality ensue. Discuses (disci?) get thrown. Then he tells a story about slaying a one-eyed monster... Thus runs books 6-9 of Homer's The Odyssey. Well, more or less.

Sometimes, I must admit, I struggle to understand how the intellectual and artistic life of Europe was held in such a unparalleled grip by classical culture. Surely, some fetishisation of origins is going on here, I muse! Someone like Dickens was anatomizing, with eerie and evocative precision, the very heart of the nineteenth-century world itself (i.e. London) and yet Victorian gentleman still seemed bewitched by a rather crazy story about hiding on the underside of sheep.

Is Homer relevant to us? There are many ways to answer this question in the affirmative, but the one I'm always struck by is its status as a post-war epic. It's a narrative about what happens after a conflict, and the wasting of Odysseus's body through trials of attrition - weather, sorrow, homecoming - could be emblematic for the way that the hero's body is no longer that glorious and almost sacramental object on the battlefield. The death of Achilles is an experienced shared by an army: by contrast Odysseus, conceivably, could have died alone and unwitnessed. Moreover, some of the greatest moments of the epic come in registering the trauma of the Trojan war. For me, the supreme example of Homer's skill comes at the end of book 8, when Odysseus is listening to a court singer recite a poem about Troy itself:

So the famous singer sang his tale, but Odysseus

melted, and from under his eyes the tears ran down, drenching

his cheeks. As a woman weeps, lying over the body

of her dear husband, who fell fighting for her city and people

as he tried to beat off the pitiless day from city and children;

she sees him dying and gasping for breath, and winding her body

about him she cries high and shrill

...

Such were the pitiful tears Odysseus shed from under

his brows, but they went unnoticed by all the others,

but Alkinoos alone understood what he did and noticed

(viii.521-7, 531-4)

The drama of having Odysseus weeping secretly as his own history is recounted, and the pathos that Alkinoos 'alone understood' (a trick Homer has anticipated at the beginning of the book, see viii.93-5) mark Odysseus out as a hero facing a new kind of experience. Homer works a stunning simile where Odysseus the great warrior is suddenly the wife grieving over the death of a great warrior: a simile that not only inverts gender, evoking a more sensitive 'feminine' role for the post-war hero, but also figures a moment of feeling for those lost which is as intense, intimate and heart-rending as love itself. One of the imperatives in Greece at this point in time is simply to mourn.

The Trojan war will cast a dark and inescapable shadow over Greek history. When Achilles says that he would rather follow the plough than stay in the underworld, even with all his fame and glory (xi.488-91), it is a moving comment on mortality. Yet, as he strides away across the meadows of asphodel, reassured that his son had gained glory, he is like a figure from an age that has just passed away. The voice that is perhaps even more important in the underworld sequence is that of Agamemnon, an authentic post-war voice: his homecoming from Troy broken by treachery and murder, his house and nation fractured. Indeed, the story of Agamemnon haunts The Odyssey throughout as its tragic counterpoint: the kind of irreparable ruin that could have occurred in Ithaca did this narrative not have a more happy resolution.

In short, a new order comes to pass in the wake of the Trojan war, an order that seems to mean tremendous political and social instability for many of the Greek city states, as well as a psychological burden for those who survived. Equally, sons such as Odysseus's own (Telemachus) are coming of age, and must take on responsibilities in this new post-war age, again in the shadow of their heroic fathers. It is this, I think, which makes The Odyssey relevant even now. We are certainly in a historical position which is acutely aware of the trauma of war, and the continued scars in post-war societies. We do not hold so easily to the hypermasculine notions of heroism which would have been ready cultural argot in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. And The Odyssey - as an epic which revises what the heroic is, which considers the post-war hero, and which may even inscribe a certain passing away of the possibility of the heroic - is thus a text which has much to say to us.

Although, I still think the sheep thing is a bit silly.