The Martyrdom of Patroclus?

Dear, Dear Ian,

How lovely it was for me to hear from you and to read your thoughts about Achilles and Patroclus. I know it sounds counter-intuitive but one of my intentions in reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad and writing out my notes as I went was to subject the narrative to a naïve reading in order to ascertain whether or not the text could reveal itself to an unacademic or, indeed, an uninformed reading. Why? I wanted to encourage readers who might be daunted by the prospect of reading such a venerated text to believe that they could do so as themselves without feeling inadequate to the task. I was also very keen to see what I would make of The Iliad myself. Actually, I’ve got those last two sentences in reverse order. I started out just wanting to take notes for myself. The project then grew out of that.

The stumbling point for me is Achilles. Hero? Psychopath? Admirable or repulsive? Despite his absence from so much of the narrative, I see him at the centre of so much of its brutality, violence and suffering. Not only is his withdrawal from the war against Troy petulant and egotistical, it probably contributes to an unnecessary prolongation of the struggle and, therefore, to the deaths of so many of his comrades. (In a sense, its similar impact on the Trojan forces is irrelevant because the declared intention of the Greeks/Argives is not only to win but to kill every remaining enemy combatant at the end of the hostilities.) I see his petulant behaviour and his arrogance as leading directly to the death of his most beloved friend, Patroclus. You see beauty in Patroclus’ death, a kind of martyrdom. I see terror, betrayal and confusion. Apollo first disarms him:

“… Phoebus Apollo came to meet Patroclus.

The human failed to see the eerie god,

cloaked in thick mist. Apollo stood behind

Patroclus, and with one flat palm he patted

his back and sturdy shoulders, so his eyes

swivelled. Apollo nudged his helmet off…

The big, long, thick, and sturdy spear Patroclus

held in his hands was shattered all to pieces.

His fine-fringed shield and sword-belt slipped and fell.

Apollo, son of Zeus, unclipped his breastplate.

Confusion seized his mind. His splendid body

undone, he stood stock-still, in bafflement.”

Patroclus is then speared from behind by Euphorbus, an enemy soldier who arrived at Troy that day, before being killed by Hector:

“He muscled through the crowd, got near Patroclus

and speared him underneath the ribs, and drove

the bronze point through his body. With a thud

he fell. The army of the Greeks lamented.

Just as a lion bests a tireless boar,

when on the mountainside they fight together,

both spirited, majestic warriors,

because both want to drink from a small stream –

the boar pants hard, defeated by the lion –

so Hector, son of Priam, standing close,

stabbed with his spear and took away the life

of brave Patroclus, who had killed so many…” (Emily Wilson translation)

Homer’s nature imagery, I grant you, is beautiful, as it so often is. However, in relation to Patroclus’ immediate situation, possibly also ironic. The Patroclus killed by Hector does not go to his death as a “spirited, majestic warrior”, but as a naked, defenceless, disarmed puppet of the gods (as are we all). Despite the miracle of Guido Reni’s painting of the martyrdom of St Sebastian (which I was introduced to by Yukio Mishima and which I saw in my youth at the Palazzo Rosso in Genova) I find nothing of beauty in the deaths of martyrs be they early Christian martyrs canonised by the church or contemporary self-declared Islamist martyrs.

Anyhow, my struggle with Achilles led me to think a lot about the two other men who wear his armour in The Iliad: Patroclus and Hector, one Argive, one Trojan, both of whom are capable of exactly the same kind of violence as Achilles but who are thought of very differently by their respective comrades and peoples. Achilles is a renowned runner and athlete and a consummate killer. In different circumstances, both Patroclus and Hector reveal themselves as characters who could be capable of being men of peace.

For now, Dear Friend, I close this letter and send you these patchy and incomplete thoughts,

Adrian.

Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Stella Maris’ and ‘The Passenger’

The Cormac McCarthy Stella Maris and The Passenger double-hander is a lumpy and uneven affair. The idea of a matching pair of sibling novels, one the sister, the other the brother, children of some major players in the Manhattan Project under Oppenheimer, both of them as gifted as their parents in mathematics and physics, is brilliant. Of particular note is the way in which Stella Maris explores the tensions between cosmic indifference and religious faith, the arts and sciences, language and mathematics, illusion and reality. However, I cannot help but wonder how much better this pairing of novels would have worked if The Passenger had been allowed to remain solely Bobby Western’s narrative as Stella Maris was allowed to remain solely Alicia Western’s. It certainly would have allowed McCarthy to pursue a free indirect style of character development and narration for Bobby in The Passenger which, unhindered, could have become as compelling as Alicia’s monologue-to-dialogue contributions in Stella Maris.

The writing of Alicia’s schizophrenia has been realised far more convincingly in her dialogues with Dr Cohen in Stella Maris than it has been in the third-person narration of her interactions with her visitants in The Passenger. Through her spoken words, the Thalidomide Kid and his circus ring of fellow tormentors take on lives of their own. There is something utterly convincing in the way Alicia describes and defends the absolute reality of her experience of mental illness in Stella Maris which does not translate across when McCarthy writes these episodes as third person chapters of her life in The Passenger.

Dr Cohen’s contribution to the dialogue in Stella Maris – his compassion and scepticism, his frustration and concern for his patient’s declining condition – acts as a very satisfactory counterweight to Alicia’s shifts between confession and caginess, whereas the alternating sibling chapters in The Passenger neither balance nor contradict nor interleave effectively. Unfortunately, the exquisitely crafted Stella Maris which on its own stands as a remarkable achievement of sustained mastery is now forever tied to the unnecessarily bifurcated The Passenger in which the interlinear writing simply does not work.

Sadly, Bobby’s story is weighed down by the weight of a passenger it does not need while Alicia’s novel could have weighed even more in the quality and purpose of its writing if McCarthy had rendered all of Alicia’s story in her own words. Similarly, giving almost all of the interiority of the pair to Alicia and almost all of the physicality of the external world to Bobby, deprives Bobby of his own interiority which is something to be missed in this latest iteration of Hemingway’s masculine despair. This unevenness also gets in the way of the novels’ most intriguing and challenging speculation that the likely destination of mathematical theory and the tracking of the tiniest particles in physics is what Bobby calls, “The indeterminacy of reality itself.” The shock of instability at the centre of everything that drives Bobby out of physics and Alicia out of her mind.

The first chapter of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Stella Maris’

The first chapter of Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris (Picador, 2022) is written as an exquisitely crafted dialogue consisting primarily of a series of existential cries that have been fashioned into a prose poem. It is all at once poetry, prose, dialogue and drama. Anguish and elevation. Interiority and exploration.

Ponder the following: “As long as you are breathing you can always be more scared… Ultimately you will accept your life whether you understand it or not… You finally figure out that the world does not have you in mind… The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy… I think your experience of the world is largely a shoring up against the unpleasant truth that the world doesnt know you’re here…The alternative to being here is not being here… How many people if they could snap their fingers and vanish would do so?… There must be some epiphany that makes it possible for even the dullest and most deluded of us to accept not only what is unacceptable but unimaginable… What is here that we don’t know about we don’t know about…”

‘Perfect Days’ by Wim Wenders

How grateful I am to be alive in 2024 and find myself viewing Perfect Days (2023), a late masterpiece by director Wim Wenders. Memories or rather sense-impressions of Paris, Texas (1984 – Remember the Harry Dean Stanton ‘I knew these people’ monologue?), Wings of Desire (1987 – Do angels die when they rejoin the human race?) and Until the End of the World (1992 – a prescient vision of people addicted to their portable devices) come flooding back.

Each of these films focuses on the central problem of communication and the theme of individual liberty. In Perfect Days Hirayama (played sublimely by Koji Yakusho) has paid an unimaginable price to attain his freedom and exercised supreme courage to define that freedom on his own terms in equilibrium with the world as he finds it and as he wishes to live within it. He is sustained by menial labour and by the patterns and continuities of daily and weekly life and he is fulfilled by reading literature and listening to music. Stripped to the bare essentials, Wenders uses his protagonist’s life to challenge the materialism and solipsism dominating so many of our lives. Once again, this great director invites the viewer to wake up to themselves and to truly encounter the world around them.

Hirayama has turned his back on the wealth and privilege of his family background, choosing to live an austere life and work as a toilet cleaner in a series of boutique public facilities. He carries a mobile phone which is not a ‘smart’ device and which he only uses in response to the most urgent work-related and personal matters. He does not own a computer and he does not access the internet. His instincts, then, belong to the pre-digital age that most of us either abandoned or were expelled from just a few decades ago. When his work van runs out of petrol, he steps out, looking to the horizon, to the road grid beneath his feet, and back in the direction he was driving from rather than searching on a screen. He does not watch television and the radio in his cassette deck is never switched on. He listens to music on cassette tapes, allowing Wenders to assemble a wonderful selection of songs from the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Lou Reed and Nina Simone which resonate with and communicate to the viewer Hirayama’s various states of mind.

Whilst the Tokyo street scenes are often dominated by the Skytree radio and television broadcasting tower, Hirayama spends precious moments during his lunch break photographing the effects of light filtering through the vast canopy of leaves beneath his favourite temple compound tree. He uses one roll of black and white analogue film each week to capture these ephemera identified in the final credit as ‘komorebi’. He is, for all intents and purposes, Wenders’ last man alive, astute in the realisation that a human life is lived most richly from within rather than on the surface or at the interface. The final Feeling Good drive will move you to smile and to cry with Hirayama as he embarks on another day which will be both entirely the same as and completely different from the day before and the day after.

Cixin Liu’s ‘The Three-Body Problem’

The release of the Netflix series based on Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem prompted me to go back and give the novel a quick re-read which is not one of my usual reading habits. When I first read it around about a year ago, I found myself enjoying it but I came away from it and its sequel, The Dark Forest, convinced that they didn’t add up to anything more than the sum of their parts. I was deeply impressed by the commencement of the first novel during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the impact those events had on the decision-making of Ye Wenjie, the first human being to make contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation. I appreciated the gloomy atmosphere of earthly and interstellar paranoia and Cixin’s significant primary hypothesis that we seek to communicate with distant aliens at our peril in a universe where, as Ye Wenjie explains, “Civilisation continuously grows and expands, but the total matter of the universe remains constant.” An environment where inviting communication and interaction with others unknown to us can only encourage competition for resources and the risk of annihilation, as most eloquently explained by Luo Ji to Shi Qiang in The Dark Forest analogy: “The universe is a dark forest. Every civilisation is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life – another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod – there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilisation. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.” As someone who has never played a video game, I found many of the chapters devoted to the Three Body game in both volumes both very entertaining and rewarding. Cixin’s use of them to advance the player’s and the reader’s knowledge of Trisolaris is very clever indeed. But I did feel that there was a lot of writing and reading that wasn’t providing me with anything more than just more reading and writing.

However, I’m both surprised and pleased to report that The Three-Body Problem does in fact stand up very well to a second reading. I found myself more absorbed by the story of Ye Wenjie’s development as a character, of her suffering through the Cultural Revolution, her forced labour at a Mongolian logging camp, her gradual mastery of the interstellar communications facility called Red Coast, her protracted path to rehabilitation and her misguided attempt to redeem the human race by betraying her species to the Trisolarans. I also realised how clever Cixin’s interweaving of the different narratives is, so that we have Ye Wenjie’s story interwoven with Wang Miao’s immersion in the Three Body game and Da Shi’s investigation of a string of scientist suicides as well as a quasi-religious scientific cult apparently devoted to the service of an alien civilisation. The quick reread allowed the kind of clip that the first read didn’t which, in turn, allowed these juxtapositions and interlinear narratives to rub up against each other much more vigorously and with much more reward for the effort of reading. As a non-scientist, I also found myself more willing to give the author not only the benefit of my doubt but the suspension of my disbelief when it came to the copious amounts of scientific knowledge and discussion shared between the characters.

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And the Netflix television series? I’ve already noted on Twitter how disappointed I am that the story has been so radically de-Sinofied. Yes, the opening sequence of the Cultural Revolution is in situ as are the Red Coast scenes of Ye Wenjie’s transmission and reception of the interstellar communication, but – in my opinion – the decision to place the contemporary narratives in the UK and provide them with a gloss of US political correctness is actually the opposite of what the show’s defenders are describing as ‘diversity’. What an extraordinary achievement it would have been and what a brave choice to have preserved the vast bulk of the language content in Mandarin.

With the remarkably impressive exception of Jess Hong as physicist Jin Cheng, the casting of most of the modern scientists is risible as is the representation of science on the screen. In his postscript to the novel Cixin expresses his deep reverence both for science as a noble pursuit and for science fiction as a literary form. The largely lamentable portrayal of the Oxford scholars in the television series is a disappointment to both.

Having said all that, the game console headsets were amazing and the videogame sequences were both very impressive and true to their original conception in the novels. Alongside Jess Hong, Benedict Wong does a great job as Da Shi who is now an almost wholly deculturated special agent of Asian descent from Manchester.

3 Body Problem is in many respects a failed adaptation but as a piece of entertainment which might actually lure some viewers back to the books it has its merits too.