Grim Echoes

 

They have a haunting quality, those spectral images of gods and mortals on Roman wall paintings. Lifelike illusions modelled with light and shadow, floating about in a timeless world. Their shimmering presence is so different from the crisply delineated figures on Greek vases, although telling the same grim tales.

Despite my shuddering fascination and aesthetic appreciation of the visual representation of Greek and Roman myths, I never really wanted to deepen my fleeting acquaintance with them. All those tales of arbitrary cruelty and bloodthirst, of hapless humans at the mercy of fickle gods, of violent heroes bent on revenge.  Stories, though, with a very long life  -  admittedly proof of an inconvenient truth about human nature?  But still, the way they were told, always seemed to celebrate violence and cunning wickedness,  without any redeeming human justice or sympathy for the victims.

I did like to read Daniel Mendelson’s Odyssey; but then in his books the cruel tales were always kept at a remove, told through an apollonian lens of scholarship and aesthetics, and furthermore wrapped into a contemporary story about a father and son relationship.  The soothing and cathartic power of the aesthetics of formal classicism keeps the gory details at bay .  

When E. gave me her copy of Stephen Fry’s retelling of the Odyssey, I was reluctant at first to start reading. But with the holiday season I had time on my hands and so I read this tale of a cunning rake wandering about, sleeping around, outwitting callous & fickle gods, losing companions at an alarming rate (with only a brief spell of melancholy compunction at their deaths when traipsing about in Hades). I was almost laughing when I got to the blood-spattered finale, when together with his son Odysseus kills all of his wife’s suitors (his wife mercifully slept through this carnage).  An edifying tale of a faithful husband courageously making his way back home  to his beloved wife - really?  One can only helplessly echo this observation : “La violence occupe une telle place dans l’histoire et dans l’imaginaire qu’il peut paraître incongru de s’en étonner” (Philippe Heuzé) .

But anyway, now I was motivated to go on reading, picking up a book that had been lying around for quite some time on a shelf: Pat Barker’s re-imagining of the Iliad,  from the standpoint of the captured and enslaved Trojan women, who have quite a "different tale to tell" …. Barker gives a voice to Briseis, an abducted Trojan queen , who has been given to the Greek hero Achilles as  prize for his  merciless fighting and killing. Yes, Briseis has a "different tale to tell" – one which alas still unbearably resonates even in our times.  “And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do” (One remembers what happened in the Yugoslavian civil wars, in the Syrian caliphate – what still happens elsewhere   – kill the men, enslave the women and girls) . 

“The silence of the girls” – no more silence, at last an eloquent answer to that age-old , mute appeal for recognition.

There’s a wall painting in Pompeï, showing the moment at which Achilles has to give away his slave Briseis to a rival Greek king (she is “a pawn in a menacing game between bored and frustrated warriors” ).  The focus of the painting is, unsurprisingly, on Achilles’ smouldering rage, his keen sense of being offended – expressed in ‘cette fulgurence dans un regard’.  The painting also lavishly shows  off the muscled torsos of both Achilles and his brother in arms Patroclus. In the background we see helmets with proudly waving feathers. This is a men’s world. Briseis herself is but a faint, slight figure in the painting, but what is amazing, eternally unsettling is her gaze – her wide-open intent looking out of the painting. She is looking at us directly – taking us as witness of her cruel fate.   It is a  silent, mute appeal – but intense and unforgettable. I like to think that Pat Barker’s reimagined tale is a worthy answer.

 

Previous Reading:

• Daniel Mendelsohn – An Odyssey
• Stephen Fry – Odyssey
• Pat Barker – The Silence of the Girls
• Philippe Heuzé – Pompei ou le bonheur de peindre – Briséis enlevée à Achille