Thursday
As my faculty reading group was discussing Book V of The Iliad yesterday, I suddenly gained a clarifying insight into my father that I wish I could have shared with him (he died 10 years ago). It involves Hector’s scene with his wife Andromache on the battlements of Troy.
Hector has taken momentary respite from the battle to instruct the women of the city to offer sacrifices to the goddess Athena, whose anger is one of the reasons why Troy is under siege. In talking with Andromache, Homer appears to depict an inconsistency so pronounced as to induce whiplash in the reader. At one moment, Hector is fatalistically predicting a tragic end for himself, his wife and all of Troy. At the next, he is dreaming of a heroic future for his son.
Here he is foreseeing how he, his father, and his brothers will all be killed and how Andromache will be enslaved:
For I know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it:
there will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish,
and Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear.
But it is not so much the pain to come of the Trojans
that troubles me, not even of Priam the king nor Hekabe [his wife],
not the thought of my brothers who in their numbers and valor
shall drop in the dust under the hands of men who hate them,
as troubles me the thought of you, when some bronze-armored
Achaian leads you off, taking away your day of liberty,
in tears; and in Argos you must work at the loom of another,
and carry water from the spring Messeis or Hypereia,
all unwilling, but strong will be the necessity upon you…
[M]ay I be dead and the piled earth hide me under before i
hear you crying and know by this that they drag you captive.
This grim prediction, however, then gives way to one more benign once the helmeted Hector takes his baby son in his arms. The child is child frightened by “the bronze and and the crest with its horse-hair, nodding dreadfully” so Hector “lifted from his head the helmet and laid it in all its shining upon the ground.” After tossing the boy about in his arms and kissing him, Hector then prays to the gods:
Zeus, and you other immortals, grant that this boy, who is my son,
may be as I am, pre-eminent among the Trojans,
great in strength, as am I, and rule strongly over Ilion;
and some day let them say of him: “He is better by far than his father,”
as he comes in from the fighting; and let him kill his enemy
and bring home the blooded spoils, and delight the heart of his mother.
If Hector’s family and all of Troy are to perish, the Asyanax will not live to become greater by far than his father. But, at least for a moment, Hector has banished that thought from his mind.
My professor father was a self-described determinist who said he didn’t believe in free will. And he was a pessimistic determinist at that, believing that the world was inexorably moving toward a climate and overconsumption apocalypse, regardless of what individuals did in trying to prevent it.
Yet, at the same time, he behaved as though he could have some impact on the future. He was a passionate advocate for social justice and worked closely with the local NAACP and with Highland Folk School to desegregate Franklin County schools. Early on he angered various Sewanee administrators as he fought to desegregate the University of the South. He advocated hard for enrolling women students (Sewanee used to be a men’s college) and for protecting LGBTQ rights. An ardent environmentalist, he also made sure that the college would be a wise steward of the 10,000 acres that comprise its domain. His advocacy in these areas sometimes took the form of committee work, sometimes of marching, sometimes of writing advocacy poetry.
I used to point out the contradiction while, at the same time, noting that it was impossible to argue with a determinist. After all, every bad thing that happens confirms that view of the world. Riffing off a Borges line, I said that the philosophy of determinism is irrefutable and therefore unconvincing. How, I would ask my father, can you believe one way and act another?
One could ask the same thing of Hector, who drops his rational assessment of the situation when he is holding his son in his arms. At that point, he has to believe in a future. The heart wars with the brain and, for a moment, the heart wins.
Rather than critiquing my father for his inconsistency, I wish I had instead examined the reasons for it. As I think about it, my father’s fatalistic determinism probably arose out of his experiences in World War II. A graduate professor once told me that, if you want to understand an author—or anyone, for that matter—look at what was going on in the world when he/she was 21, and at 21 and 22 my father was witnessing some of the horrors of World War II. For instance, he arrived in Munich shortly after the Allies freed the Dachau concentration camp, and one of his jobs would be taking Germans on tours of the camp to show them what their country had done (and to prove to them that it wasn’t American propaganda).
He received another shock when America dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My father’s idealism took a hit along with Japan as the Germans in his tours began telling him, “So you’re as bad as we are.” He took the criticism to heart.
So you can see where my father got his fatalism. Having been a close-up witness to some of the world’s great horrors, he must have believed the world is in the grip of an implacable disaster machine.
But if we’re going to hell in a handbasket, then that also gives us a certain amount of freedom. If, in the long run, it doesn’t matter what you do, then you might as well do things you believe in. Why not fight for peace and justice? At least you’ll be able to live with yourself. I think my father used his fatalism to hold the horrors at a distance–it was a version of Kurt Vonnegut’s “So it goes” in Slaughterhouse Five–while doing what he could in his own small way
Likewise, I believe Hector could not go on if he succumbed to fatalism. He is ready to fight for his son’s future, even if it’s not clear his son has one. My father, despite being a fatalist, was certainly fighting for ours.