Unpopular Opinions: The Book Thread

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81

In a proper tragedy, you’re supposed to like the tragic figure even more than in a comedy. That’s the point; you can’t have catharsis if you don’t give a damn about the character.

I agree with a comment by Maturin in one of O’Brian’s novels: I think the Iliad is really about the come-uppance of adultery more than than anything else. It wasn’t Paris’ fault he got roped into the original apple competition, but his behavior afterwards was despicable.

Anyhow, getting back to the other Greek “heroes”, I couldn’t care less about pompous self-enamored Achilles, and Agamemnon’s virtues are mixed, to say the least. On the whole Greek side, only Diomedes seems to be a stand-up guy. Both Ajaxes are scumbags, Menelaus is a fool, Agamemnon isn’t that bad I guess, but he’s not very kingly and he later gets properly killed off, and in the Iliad Odysseus, while at least not an idiot, is way too sly to be heroic. He’s literally a backstabber according to some stories, too. In comparison, Hector, who could be a decent villain if he was facing more virtuous heroes, seems much more sympathetic, as do most of the other Trojans. Of course Paris is the worst of all the characters, but that depiction was intentional.

82

Many people are really quite bad at reading poetry aloud, but it is really how it should be done. Similarly, would you rather read Macbeth, or see it performed?

83

And here I thought that people calling these ‘unpopular opinion’ threads troll threads were being a little harsh. Now I see that they were being kind!

84

You’re supposed to like Achilles going into the story – Homer is assuming you already know about the Troy stories before hearing this version. He’s focusing on a time when Achilles acts like a total jerk and gets his comeuppance, which is losing his best friend. The opening lines tell you that Achilles is going to act badly (“Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses…”)

Agamemnon is a great example of a lousy king. You’re not really supposed to respect him (again, Homer assumes you know other stories about him, and they’re mostly pretty unflattering).

The catharsis comes as Achilles realizes how badly he’s acted, and the lets Priam take home Hector’s body, because Priam is a grieving father, just like Achilles’s own father will soon be grieving for Achilles.

I think Odysseus actually comes off pretty well in the Iliad. He tends to be the voice of reason, telling Agamemnon to offer gifts to Achilles, editing Agamemnon’s offering speech, telling Achilles that the Greeks need to rest, and so on.

I also don’t think Menelaus is a fool, so much as a not-terribly-effective nice guy.

Lastly, I don’t think Hector is a villain. He’s a pretty good guy with his own glory-hound issues, trying to defend his city, who gets stuck on the wrong side of the machinations of the gods. I’d say that, if you must have a villain in the Iliad, it’d probably be Agamemnon, but the poet also pins the blame pretty squarely on Achilles.

I agree with a comment by Maturin in one of O’Brian’s novels: I think the Iliad is really about the come-uppance of adultery more than than anything else. It wasn’t Paris’ fault he got roped into the original apple competition, but his behavior afterwards was despicable.

I totally disagree with this. You can see the Trojan War as a whole that way, but in the Iliad it doesn’t really matter any more why the war started (IMO). It’s just the backdrop against which Achilles’s story is played out.

85

He’s certainly one of the wisest of the Greeks, but he’s also sly. The whole Trojan Horse thing is obviously profoundly dishonorable, but the theft of the Palladion is even worse, and his travails in the Odyssey are supposedly punishment for this, are they not? According to some non-Homer source Odysseus was about to backstab Diomedes on their way into Troy at one point to claim the credit for the Palladion entirely for himself, but Athena tipped Diomedes off just in time.

Certainly cleverness is not always the same as dishonorable scheming, and in the Odyssey I guess he’s really more honorable than not, with a few exceptions; and of course the suitors deserve what they get. But still, I don’t much like the Odysseus of the Iliad.

86

Pssst, the Trojan Horse thing doesn’t show up in the Iliad.

87

Achilles having ‘blame’ for the fight is a misreading from a modern perspective. Agamemnon was a basileus, which is translated as “king” but doesn’t really have the modern meaning. The warriors who travelled with him weren’t under his command, but were following his orders only out of respect. The argument with Achilles that leads off the story is Agamemnon treating Achilles with disrespect, which is an insult to his timé – hybris, in other words. Achilles subsequent behavior isn’t just a snit, but is the proper response to hybris. Agamemnon is treating him like an underling. Well, then he can bloody well fight without him.

In other words, an ancient Greek reader of the Iliad would absolutely agree that it is more important for Achilles to defend his honor against a hybristic insult than it is to win the war against the Troy.

(For some discussion of this, see J.E. Lyndon’s Song of Wrath)

88

Yeah, for the reader (or really listener) that this was meant for, Achilles is the wronged party because Agamemnon unfairly took his share of the war spoils and therefore it’s pretty much karma that they’re losing in the beginning. It’s really all about the lack of respect paid all around–from both men and gods to each other. Well, the gods aren’t really expect to pay respect to the men, but they sure do disrespect each other all the damn time.

89

Not necessarily. Achilles won’t relent, even when Agamemnon offers to restore the goods, even when Phoenix and Nestor tell him that she should (and Nestor’s advice is always right). Actually, I think that Nestor and Odysseus in general tell us which way our sympathies should run – at first, they tell Agamemnon that he’s wronged Achilles, but later they tell Achilles that he’s carrying on too long. That’s the point of Phoenix’s long story about that king who changes his mind too late.

In addition, I don’t think you can get away from the opening lines that tell us that the cause of all the sorrow is Achilles’s cursed wrath (interestingly, “wrath” is the first word in the first line, and “cursed” is the first word in the second line, which is a very emphatic position). The word used for wrath in the first line (menin) is normally reserved for the gods, and it’s a sort of hubris for him to stay angry when the provocation is gone; only the gods are allowed to do that. In the end, he loses Patroclos because he’s too proud to relent and join in the fighting.

I’m drawing some of this from the commentaries I’ve been reading (mostly G.S. Kirk, who goes into more depth than anyone could possibly want), although some of it is my own interpretation.

90

If you haven’t already you should take a look at Greg Nagy’s stuff on the Greek Hero. There’s even some free lectures offered online of the class he’s given–I can PM you the link if you want. He usually covers the Iliad in that class.

Edited to add: Looks like he does the Iliad and some of the Odyssey, all free online!

91

I don’t think of it as romantic, and I would agree with Nabokov’s own analysis that erotic interpretations of the work are projections of the reader’s own ideas moreso than his. It’s not my favorite of his, but I would argue that you are doing it a grave injustice judging it according to a presumption of a lowest common denominator readership. It’s just not titillating.

92

Nabokov denied any allegory in the book, so I guess he falls into your 99% of readers who don’t get the book.

I doubt most people find the book titillating; the writing is too self-consciously literary.

93

When we read the book in high school English class my teacher was dead set that it totally was about America even though in the back of the edition we read Nabokov had written an essay about how English teachers everywhere love to read into things and it really wasn’t about America, guys.

When we questioned her about it she replied, “Well, are you going to believe him?”

We were pretty much like, “Yes.”

She didn’t like our class.

94

I think we had the same teacher. Though we didn’t real Lolita, my 11th English teacher was similarly crazy.

My Unpopular Book Opinion: Tragedies are dumb. Okay, not dumb, but I find books where the hero wins, but at what cost to be incredibly unlikable. My current example of this is the first few Dresden Files books, where Jim Butcher takes extreme pleasure in making sure that Harry is suffering horribly before he rips away the only thing that is good in his life. Does it get better in later books? I don’t know, but I don’t like reading the ones now and seeing that. I’m not saying the hero has to win flawlessly each time, but there’s struggling and then there’s sadism, and I think I’ve read too many books that fall on the far side of that line.

Contrast this with Butcher’s Codex Alera series, which I like a great deal minus the first boring-as-hell book. MILDSPOILERSBEWARE Tavi has to overcome serious odds and there are some character deaths and huge obstacles, but he’s always got his friends to fall back on, like Kitai and Max, and then it’s less “Main character suffers” and more “Main character will get by with a little help from his friends.” I like that far more. Though I haven’t read Book Six so if everyone dies I’m going to write very angry posts about it and seethe. ENDSPOILERS

So if an author treats his main character like Job, he sucks and I hate him.

95

There’s something John Gardner (in a book on writing whose title I forget) calls the “error of soul”, where an author fails to respect the humanity of a character by abusing the character for the sake of the abuse, not because the plot demands it or because other characters reasonably want to abuse the character.

There is an opposite error I don’t think he mentioned in which a character is so well loved by the author that the books devolve into a sort of self-fanfic thing, and there is no suspense or even entertainment value in following the immortal invincible character’s inconsequential victories.

96

China Mieville is the most overrated fantasy author working today. I haven’t read every thing he’s written, but from what I’ve read Kraken is the only thing he’s done that approaches readable. At least that puts him on an upward trajectory.

97

I didn’t say the allegory theory was for people who “got it,” but it’s at least more of a literary analysis than just assuming that Humbert Humbert was the most romantic of tragic heroes ever.

The fact is that the definition of “Lolita” would not have come to mean “A sexually precocious young girl” if people were able to read the story and understand that Humbert is a lying shithead.

ETA: From the “ur doing it wrong” files of picking up chicks, I remember reading a blogger who recounts while reading Lolita on the subway, a guy sidled up to her and whispered “just call me Humbert Humbert” in her ear.

98

I don’t know where these opinions fall on the popular/unpopular scale, but I would have happily read another 26 Aubrey/Maturin books had O’Brian been able to write them.

99

They are both facile approaches to the work from what you’ve presented of them so far, and you crafting a false dichotomy around them is not making for much of a criticism of the book.

The fact is that the definition of “Lolita” would not have come to mean “A sexually precocious young girl” if people were able to read the story and understand that Humbert is a lying shithead.

Machiavellian is a term used in common parlance all of the time that completely mischaracterizes the man and his works. It’s primarily used by people who have never read him, are pretending to have read him, or in a relatively tiny proportion by people that know the real deal but accept its common usage as an opportunity for pedantry/teachable moments on the subject.

I would submit to you that at most, the popular version of “Lolita” as a term is a product of the films if its usage has any connection to the actual work at all for most people. The second layer to that is composed entirely of people talking about what they think they know about the book fifth hand from some half-remembered reference they read somewhere. The films are interesting in their own right but have only the most tenuous connection to what the book offers because the substance of it is a profoundly literary and self-reflective journey through an unreliable narrator’s mind as well as the vast world of connections that Nabokov brings to the table as a natural product of his hypererudition.

The book has far more in common with a Notes from the Underground type of tradition than anything to do with sex as a primary theme in the story. The sex is there as an important part of the honest dishonesty and is purposeful, but it’s not the main idea by most reasonable understandings of the text I’ve seen. I’m not sure what or who gave rise to your ire, but so far it’s not unpopular so much as apparently a product of misdirected puritanical impulses.

100

So the fact that I don’t like the book can only be a result of “misdirected puritanical impulses” but the droves and droves of guys who go on at length about how it’s the best book ever written can’t be that they’re reading titillation into a tome that was not intended to be titillating?

I read the book. It was ok, and it’s not a bad read for people who are interested in the craft of writing and taking a critical approach to the author’s relationship to the protagonist and the reader’s relationship to the protagonist. But having gone to a liberal arts school and gotten a liberal arts degree, I couldn’t square the book’s popularity with its content. It simply wasn’t that great a book. And yet, when talking to guys about what their favorite books are, that book appeared a little too often for my comfort. I just didn’t find the prose that stunning or the characters that compelling. It just got really creepy after a while.